James Miller: Can Democracy Work? A Short History of a Radical Idea, from Ancient Athens to Our World. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.

 

From his early writings on Rousseau and on America’s ‘New Left’ of the 1960s to his brilliant study of Michel Foucault [1], James Miller’s scholarship has had two characteristic features. One is ‘methodological.’  He seeks to understand political thinkers by combining textual exegesis with biographical research, titling his first book (for example) Rousseau, Dreamer of Democracy, not Rousseau’s Political Philosophy. He never reduces the thinker to the work or the work to the thinker, but presents both in one coherent picture. In this, he resembles Diogenes Laertius, whose Lives of the Eminent Philosophers he has indeed brought out in a beautiful new edition, complete with extensive notes and illustrations. Second, in terms of the substance or guiding principle of his work, he displays a commitment to justice understood ‘democratically,’ as equality. This centers his thought on democracy—both as a regime (as it has been understood by most writers) and as a social condition existing in the confines of the modern state. Democracy has remained ‘his’ theme, throughout his life in thought.

But can democracy work? And what exactly is it? Something called democracy has proven persistent, if only “as an article of faith or a figment of modern ideology.” Indeed, “virtually every existing political regime today claims to embody some form of democracy”—from Putin’s Russia to Kim’s North Korea to our United States of America, whose current chief executive rode to victory on a wave of sentiment often described as populist.

Given this wild diversity of opinions and definitions, Miller proceeds with a sort of Socratic combination of caution and daring, gathering the several most influential definitions of democracy and bringing them into dialectical confrontation with one another. Not for him are the illusions of historical dialectic, which bring scholars to imagine a gradual worldwide evolution of humanity toward democracy. To think of democracy that way is to succumb to moral complacency and intellectual laziness, expecting ‘history’ to do the work for you.

With Aristotle, Miller identifies the underlying principle of democracy as equality, which may or may not associate itself with liberty. This begs the question of what equality is, or what kind of equality ‘democrats’ want. The natural equality of all human beings to certain unalienable rights? The economic equality of a communal life animated by the principle, ‘From each according to his ability to each according to his need? The social equality of a community in which there is no ‘ruling class’? The political equality of one citizen, one vote on public policies? Some combination of these? Consistent with his question concerning the practicability of democracy, Miller answers these questions not by theorizing but by consulting the historical practices of those who have called themselves democrats. “Democracy before the French Revolution was generally held to be a fool’s paradise, or worse.” It was the Jacobins, borrowing their theories from Rousseau, who implemented the first modern democracy in the form of “direct democracy in local assemblies, now and then augmented through armed insurrections.” The movement then split into what would turn out to be the two characteristic, rival variations on the democratic theme: representative democracy, roughly modeled on examples in the American states; and democratic dictatorship—purportedly temporary—intended “to preserve the possibility of building a more enduring form of representative democracy once the revolution was complete and law and order were restored.”

Tocqueville famously registered this schism in the democratic movement in arguing that democracy—which he defined not as a regime so much as a social condition of equality (by which he meant a society without a ruling class)—could have one of two regimes—republicanism or despotism. Tocqueville saw American democracy as a political regime only in the small setting of the New England town meeting, within a large modern state but never its ruling form. This divergence between society and state, civil-social ‘regime’ and political regime, is the source of Miller’s question, Can democracy work, “especially in complex modern societies?” Today, although what’s been called ‘liberalism’ finds many challengers in and outside the commercial republics, “democracy as furious dissent flourishes as rarely before, in vivid and vehement outbursts of anger at remote elites and shadowy enemies.” Just about everyone this side of the Iranian mullahs “now claim to represent the will of a sovereign people” as the morally legitimizing principle of their claim to political authority.

Miller very sensibly distinguishes democracy from liberalism, observing that “democracy, when it first appeared in Greece, had nothing to do, either in theory or in practice, with any such modern conception as liberalism.” Athenian democracy killed Socrates—the sort of thing liberalism was formulated to prevent. In addition to decriminalizing philosophy, modern liberalism inclined to locate the final moral-political authority in natural law and natural right; a liberal wants a political regime that secures the natural right to liberty, among other natural rights. But modern democracy pointed instead either to “Rousseau’s concept of the general will,” which “has no necessary connection to liberalism,” or, earlier, to sixteenth-century Protestant notions of popular sovereignty, based squarely on doctrines of right religion, not on religious toleration. “A majority of voters in a modern representative democracy may very well support policies that are explicitly illiberal, as some Americans fear had happened after the election in 2016 of Donald J. Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States—and, it might be added, as some Americans fear when university administrators quail before the demands of the Leftist agitators who call Trump and his supporters fascists, a rhetorical move not unknown to both the Old and the New Left.

Given these broils, Miller remarks, “I probably feel more proud of the American accomplishment in this context than I did as a young man” because “I have lived long enough to appreciate the fragility of political institutions that are responsible to citizens, however limited that responsiveness may currently be.” Representative or republican government instead of direct democracy; organized political parties; “the polyglot expansion of our citizenry as a whole”: All these features of the American regime make the United States “the world’s most striking ongoing experiment in cosmopolitan self-government.” There is something to the claim of ‘American exceptionalism,’ yet. Miller will not cede that claim to the ‘Right.’

He devotes his next three chapters to three case studies, as it were, in democratic politics: ancient Athens, modern France, and the United States. Ruling a small place about the size of Rhode Island with a resident population of about 300,000, of which ten percent were citizens sharing rule (the politeuma, as Aristotle would say), ancient Athenian democracy saw direct and active participation on rule. Adult male citizens held forty Assembly meetings annually and all political offices were held by those citizens, selected not by voting but by lot—the most democratic means of election. What is more, the regime lasted for about a century, with one important interruption by the Thirty Tyrants; not internal faction (admittedly serious) but foreign conquest by Macedonia put the ax to it, and even then the name if not the practice of democracy survived well into the Hellenistic period. Miller suggests that it wasn’t democracy itself that weakened Athens sufficiently to leave it vulnerable to the Macedonians but a narrowing of the criteria for citizenship, which stoked factionalism.

What were the features of this regime? Its founder, Cleisthenes, opened membership in the Ekklesia or Assembly to all “free-born males over the age of twenty-one, with a native Athenian father, no matter how poor.” Cleisthenes also took advantage of the modest size of Athens. He centralized political authority, weakened the “few wealthy families who worshiped a divine ancestor and controlled the relevant priestly offices,” and designed a set of ten civic units he called tribes. He gave each tribe a new divine hero to worship and drew the members of each tribe from the several geographical regions of Attica. Infantry troops were also organized according to these newly formed tribes, and all freeborn Athenian men were required to serve before they could take their place in the Assembly. As a check on popular-majoritarian passions, Cleisthenes instituted the Council of 500, in which all tribes were equally represented, which prepared the Assembly’s agenda and audited all city officials, awarded contracts for public works, and supervised Athenian finances, military forces, welfare system, coinage, weights and measures, capital criminal cases (tried by citizen-jurors unencumbered by debt), and foreign policy. Yet it too was elected by lot, and so remained democratic. “By the time that Pericles emerged as the city’s undisputed leader [in the mid-fifth century BC], Athens had amassed the eastern Mediterranean’s most feared military machine, an armada of battleships backed up by a large infantry.”

This was anything but a regime dedicated to the protection of individual liberty. Miller quotes the noted historian M. I. Finley: “Freedom meant the rule of law and participation in the decision-making process, not the possession of inalienable rights.” Such critics as Plato and Thucydides charged that democracy in Athens consisted of “a collective tyranny of the majority”—a majority, moreover, swayed by flattering demagogues and swaggering military chieftains who captured the imagination and fired the indignation of the citizenry. Although “the rise of democracy in Athens coincided with the birth of philosophy as a distinctive way of life,” that same democracy threatened philosophers with exile or death if they offended the politeuma. With its carefully managed civil religion and resultant homonomia or like-mindedness, ‘the many’ were entirely capable of moving against such an odd fellow as Socrates. The gods of the city were not to be mocked, and neither were the gods’ human devotees. “Aristotle’s famous assertion that man is a political animal certainly applied to the citizens of fourth-century Athens.”

As a member of the Students for Democratic Society in the 1960s, Miller found in “this active and direct form of democracy” an inspiring alternative to American representative government, especially as then weighed down by bureaucracies military and civil. “A wish for a more perfect democracy was part of what first inspired my interest in both radical activism and political philosophy.” He continues to esteem the importance of citizen participation in government as a means of “forg[ing] a shared civic culture,” but he also now recognizes that such a culture in no way precludes stasis—conflicts yielding”faction, sedition, even civil war.” A politeuma consisting of ex-soldiers may result in “a certain fear of non-conformity” and in foreign war and imperial ambition. There’s a thing or two to be said in favor of James Madison and the republican regime he helped to design.

Democracy as a political regime can survive and even thrive for a fairly long time in a small political community, a polis or ‘city-state.’ There, centralization of political authority need not lead to a substantial bureaucracy, an oligarchy claiming to rule on the basis of its status as a sort of aristocracy or ‘meritocracy.’ In the much larger modern state, centralization exerts pressure to bureaucratize authority, and thus to compromise democracy. And of course a truly democratic (as distinct from republican/representative) ‘national’ assembly becomes physically impossible in a large place; even today, a ‘virtual’ assembly, constructed on the Internet, might raise many reasonable suspicions, and in any case could hardly capture the personal, ‘face-to-face’ ethos of democracy in Athens, where even philosophers were known by name, for better or for worse. Here the French experience proves (as any child of the American ‘Sixties might say) relevant.

In politics, spontaneity is a scarce commodity, and democratic politics are no exception. ‘Flash mobs’ don’t happen in a flash. Despite the claim of the marvelous Romantic Jules Michelet in his buoyant mid-nineteenth-century History of the French Revolution, the Paris insurrection of August 1792 was openly and indeed carefully prepared. A network of self-organized neighborhood assemblies, verbally whipped into action by militants invoking the very reasonable fear of an invasion by Prussian troops commanded by the Holy Roman Emperor, in collusion with Louis XVI himself. The newly-redesigned constitutional monarchy—really a republic with an elected Legislative Assembly “represent[ing] the people as a whole”—had been structured to limit democratic neighborhood assemblies to control of municipal affairs, only. Those assemblies fit Aristotle’s precise definition of democracy as rule by the many who are poor. To the radical democrats, the national regime was republican, all-too-republican, and therefore insufficiently democratic—especially given its monarchic executive. The Communards, as the municipal rulers were called, insisted that “Popular sovereignty was ‘an indefeasible right, an inalienable right, a right that cannot be delegated'” to king or even to representatives. “Out of this explosive melee of political passions and interests there appeared a critical mass of people fiercely devoted to forging a radically egalitarian new form of self-government,” for “the first time since ancient Athens.” No ‘mixed regime’ could satisfy the democrats of Paris; They took their bearings not from Aristotle or Cicero, not from Machiavelli or even the American Founders, but from Rousseau, who had “redefined sovereignty in terms of democracy” in the form of the “general will,” defined as only those “wants and interests that all individuals in a group happen to share.” According to Rousseau, the general will, if enacted, maximizes liberty and equality at the same time. Rousseau’s fellow-citizens in republican Geneva considered such a notion “destructive of society and of all government, and very dangerous for our Constitution.” The Parisian democrats, however, proclaimed them as rights of men (human beings as such) and citizens (members of this particular civil society). Calling themselves the Jacobins, after the Jacobin monastery where they met, the biggest of the democratic political clubs organized affiliates throughout the country. “The views of the club’s dominant members grew fiercer and its national appeal narrowed, even as its political power in Paris slowly expanded.” That proved sufficient to topple the regime because France, as a centralized modern state, could be revolutionized and ruled by anyone who controlled the capital city. That is, a modern state can be democratized, after a fashion, if democrats rule its central nervous system, although those same democrats might amount to a rather small minority of the national citizenry.

The impassioned fears and ambitions in this face-to-face regime turned toward phantasmagoria. “The most radically democratic phase of the French Revolution began with a carnival of atrocities.” Indeed, “the threat of violence gave ordinary citizens an unfamiliar, and therefore intoxicating, power to challenge constituted authority”; it’s a mistake to assume that “the ardent desire of ordinary people for public freedom can be separated, in fact, from their willingness to use force in its pursuit.” Democracy not fails to offer any guarantees against fanaticism but may well gin it up. Although Robespierre wanted to rid France of the Legislative Assembly altogether, most Jacobins preferred to call a constitutional convention “tasked with creating a new, truly democratic constitution, to replace the mixed, but still monarchic, constitution of 1791.” Such a constitution of course “would have to square a circle, somehow reconciling the demands of the sectional assemblies for a direct expression of popular sovereignty with the needs of governing a large nation”—that is, a modern state—”that consisted of citizens holding diverse—and even divergent—views about what a good society should look like.” How could a large modern state, with a population consisting mostly of more or less pious Roman Catholic peasants, rule itself as if it were a giant Paris commune? The Convention’s drafting committee made a brave try.

The proposed constitution eliminated the monarchy and established a unicameral legislature consisting of ‘instructed’ delegates—persons entitled only to vote for policies approved in advance by their constituents. Thus they could be said to embody the General Will, somewhat redefined by mathematics-mad drafting committee member Nicolas de Condorcet as what’s left over when you remove contradictory opinions from the sum of all opinions. Meanwhile, the decidedly contradictory head of Louis XVI was subtracted from his body in January 1793.

The efforts of Condorcet and his colleagues went for nothing, as the radical democrats from Paris saw the proposed constitution as an attempt to bridle the power of the Paris communes. The Convention itself now became “the scene of a pitched power struggle between rival factions,” with “the constitution itself [as] a bone of contention.” Robespierre’s rhetoric eventually carried the day. Arguing from his central claim, that “the interest of the office holder” always remains private but “the interest of the people is the public good,” Robespierre sought to overcome the basic institutional dilemma, that a modern state is much bigger than an ancient polis, by declaiming his way out of it. “While it was obviously impossible for the people of France to assemble as a whole, as the people of Athens had assemble, Robespierre proposed, as an approximation to the ideal, that the republic build ‘a vast and majestic edifice, open to twelve thousand spectators,” who in this way would monitor meetings of the National Assembly.” No corruption, intrigue or perfidy would “dare show itself,” he claimed, and “the general will alone shall be consulted, the voice of reason and the public interests shall alone be heard.”

All of this turned out not to matter, as the Jacobin constitution, though ratified, was “set aside indefinitely on October 10, 1793, when a ‘Revolutionary Government,’ endowed with extraordinary powers to repress ‘counterrevolutionaries,’ was declared, thus beginning the Reign of Terror. France had become “a kind of dictatorship.” The consequent bloodshed sobered even Citizen Robespierre, who came to see the virtue of representative government, albeit atop of a democratic electorate, a national government not dominated by Parisian activists. For his heresy he was executed. “The French Revolution had produced a new understanding of democracy—and a hecatomb on a grand scale.”

By contrast, the Americans chose representative government from the start. Miller quotes Benjamin Rush: “All power is derived from the people,” but “they possess it only on the days of their elections. After this, it is the property of their rulers, nor can [the people] exercise or resume it, unless it is abused.” Government by consent of the governed in this sense “didn’t exist in the classical world” because it didn’t need to; the democratic poleis were not big enough to have a state-civil society dichotomy. As in those poleis, the rule of the many didn’t mean the rule of the majority; as in Athens, women and slaves could not vote. This notwithstanding, the American republic had established ruling institutions that induced ambitious men to reach out to “ordinary people to settle disputes among rival elite factions”—with the elites themselves, it might be added, hardly qualifying as elites at all in the eyes of the dynasts and aristocrats of Europe. To Europeans, all Americans were commoners.

Out of such a motley crew, new oligarchs might arise, particularly in the financial sector of the American economy. In the next generation, Andrew Jackson took due advantage of such men, riling democratic sentiments against the Monster Bank and swamping his opponents at the polls. Greatly aided by his ally, the organizational genius Martin Van Buren, Jackson organized the first recognizably ‘modern’ political party in America and found his own way to bridge the state-civil society divide by appointing his key party organizers to positions in his administration. Tocqueville identified the ideational limit on this kind of popular sovereignty: the principles of the Declaration of Independence, which he heard recited at a Fourth of July celebration in Albany in 1831, entwined with a “Christianity that [as Tocqueville wrote] can best be described as democratic and republican.” “According to Tocqueville, democracy denoted not merely a form of government but, in addition, and more important still, a new kind of society, in which the principle of equality was pushed to its limits”—those limits being demarcated by the laws of nature and of nature’s God, in principle, but also by the aberrant phenomenon of slavery, in practice, as well as by property qualifications that disqualified the landless poor from voting. Dorr’s Rebellion in Rhode Island in 1842 aimed at expanding the suffrage, but balked at any restriction of the Atlantic slave trade, and also at the possibility of extending the franchise to black men. The rebellion failed after its leader, Thomas Dorr, led a “botched assault” on the Rhode Island state armory. He triumphed post mortem; as decades passed, the franchise was indeed extended, not only in Rhode Island but throughout the country.

As a noted historian of rock-and-roll, Miller doesn’t neglect the effects of democratic civil society on what we have come to call, democratically enough, ‘popular culture.’ Ralph Waldo Emerson “became the architect of a popular philosophy for the new nation by lecturing on the Lyceum circuit of organizations that sponsored public events meant to promote ‘the universal diffusion of knowledge’ to the general public.” The content of this ‘philosophy’ was the notion of self-reliance, which Miller rightly considers a forerunner of Nietzscheism. (Nietzsche himself sighed, “In Emerson, we lost a philosopher,” meaning that Emerson might have attained Nietzsche’s own intellectual heights had he only undergone a really rigorous education at a European university). Also rightly, Miller remarks that such “a quasi-religious sanction for the American cult of individualism” tended more to civil disobedience (as in Emerson’s friend, Thoreau) than to serious political construction or reconstruction. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s coruscantly popular novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, inspired ardent sentiments against slavery, but little in the way of suggestions as to what American might do to re-found the regimes of Southern states, were slavery to be abolished. In music, Stephen Foster became “the first popular musician to achieve global fame, through the international sale of sheet music”—it was a commercial as well as a democratic republic, after all—and the minstrel shows for which he wrote eventually produced the musical foundation “for almost all subsequent forms of African American musical entertainment, from ragtime to blues to jazz.” Miller points out that the earliest minstrel shows consisted of white performers in blackface, acting out an American form of bohemianism last exemplified by Al Jolson; at the same time, black entertainers did their own minstrel shows, transforming the music from sweet, nostalgic Foster tunes to the harder-edged ‘urban’ sounds and lyrics of the twentieth century. One might conclude that democracy meets with its greatest success on the civil-social level of the modern state—that is, on the most democratic level of that state.

Oddly, Miller misses the point of Tocqueville’s famous critique of democracy gone wrong in the second volume of Democracy in America. Tocqueville’s dystopian vision of a no-longer-civil society consisting of “an innumerable multitude of men, alike and equal, circling around in pursuit of the petty and banal pleasures with which they glut their souls” in “orderly, gentle, peaceful slavery,” does not indicate that he regarded American culture as likely to “prove more significant than its political institutions for determining the future of democracy in America.” Tocqueville rather fears that a democratic society might readily come to accept a bureaucratic elite which keeps it safe and stupefied at the cost of popular withdrawal from the sterner tasks of self-government. This would be one way in which a democracy (that is, an egalitarian civil society) might succumb not only to a Napoleonic or czarist despotism but to oligarchy, even as it might also succumb to an oligarchy founded on industrial capitalism. That is, Tocqueville foresaw both the bugbear of twentieth-century Left and the bugbear of the twentieth-century Right in America. Very often, each faction ignores the oligarchy that’s on its side, but Tocqueville worked under no such partisan illusions.

Miller next discusses four democratizing movements in Europe during the century following the American and French revolutions: Chartism, Marxist socialism, Mazzini’s republicanism, and the Paris Commune. In England, the Chartists sought to accelerate the widening of the franchise initiated by the Reform Act of 1832. Hoping for improved wages and working conditions, urban factory workers organized the General Convention of the Industrious Classes at the end of the decade, aiming not only at the enfranchisement of all male adults but at a secret ballot (to prevent employers from intimidating voters) and at coupling elimination of property qualifications for those who served in Parliament  with salaries for MPs, which would allow citizens of low income to take seats there. Perhaps unfortunately, Chartists “treat[ed] the Jacobin constitution of 1793 as sacred scripture” and “idolized Robespierre”; this could only make their fellow-Brits a bit nervous. Sure enough, the Chartists split over the question of using physical force to advance their cause, “promis[ing] a restoration of harmonious social relations” while “simultaneously rais[ing] the prospect of a civil war.”

By the 1840s, London provided a home for radicals exiled from several continental countries. Among these, Karl Marx would have the most lasting effect on European and indeed world politics. Miller provides an excellent, succinct summary of Marx’s theory, observing that he took Hegel’s historicist doctrine of dialectical struggle among persons, ideas, and nations and pared it down to a materialist dialectic centered on struggle between socioeconomic classes. Far from peaceful, this struggle had been and would continue to be violent: “Marx represented the laboring class as a historical agent seething with violence,” spoiling for battle against the bourgeoisie and its capitalist system. A final “collective act” of what Marx himself called “overthrow and dissolution” would wipe out the bourgeois state and clear the way, first for a socialist state and then (in Lenin’s famous phrase), the withering away of that state, as well, leaving only peaceful, egalitarian, and communal civil societies, worldwide.

This is indeed a democratic telos, but, as Miller tellingly observes, “Fraternity was hard to sustain among the revolutionary sects vying for preeminence in the late 1840s” and, as he knows, would continue to be hard to establish, much less sustain, at any subsequent time or in any other place. Marxian socialism has never quite worked its way out of the ‘dialectical’ phase of ‘History.’ The Communist Manifesto “predicted an end to all social divisions but clinched the argument with a barrage of insults aimed at rival groups,” a habit that has persisted ever since. Part of the problem may be the underlying notion of historical progress itself. If ‘History’ proceeds dialectically toward the telos, communism, then claims to rule made by men and women before the ‘end time’ will derive from their self-asserted position on the ‘cutting edge’ of that historical progress. ‘Top-down’ elitism may disappear, at least in theory, only to be replaced by a ‘horizontal’ elitism; ‘statesmanship’ may go away, swapped out for ‘leadership.’ And of course the would-be leaders will fight among themselves. Marx and his followers assumed that all this would sort itself out in the end, but that’s all they had: a wishful thought wrapped in a rhetoric of scientism.

A Christian democrat from Genoa, Giuseppe Mazzini presents a more appealing face for egalitarianism than Marx ever did. Animated by “a redemptive new social gospel,” in 1831 he founded “Young Italy,” a secret society dedicated to the founding of a unified, democratic nation-state. He returned to Italy from his London exile in the annus-not-quite-mirabilis 1848, exhilarated by the newly-formed, but also short-lived, Roman republic. It soon became “clear that most people didn’t yearn for democracy, as Mazzini did, as a sacred end in itself,” and that, even more disappointingly, Italian democracy found no favor with God, at least in terms of some such earthly reward as longevity. Providence as interpreted by Mazzini proved no more reliable than History as interpreted by Marx. (It might be recalled that the God of the Bible acts on His own timetable, not ours.) “Mazzini, in defeat more famous than ever, returned to London,” where he exchanged rhetorical barbs with the Marxists over questions of idealism versus realism, Christianity versus atheism, nationalism versus internationalism, the modern state versus communism.

The Paris Commune of 1871 renewed democratic hopes once more, and ended in similar disappointment. Once again, the city’s democrats manned the barricades, attempting “simultaneously to form a new municipal government, draft new policies to regulate the economy and society, and raise an armed force able to wage and win a civil war with a hostile but duly elected provisional government,” which had taken hold after Emperor Napoleon III had proven himself less-than-imperial in his war with Prussia. The Commune ended quickly and violently, but not without winning the accolades of Marx, who saw in it a “working class government,” the “political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labor”—a brief glimpse, if a failed experiment, in the egalitarian communalism the iron laws of History were sure to deliver, someday. Rosa Luxemburg put the very best face on things when she asked, rhetorically, “Where would we be today without those ‘defeats,’ from which we draw historical experience, understanding, power and idealism?” ‘Another day older and deeper in debt,’ a less enthusiastic observer might reply, but Marxian socialists soldiered on, millennial hopes undimmed. Miller astringently remarks, “Such a veneration was jarringly at odds with the realism and other tough-minded radical democrats championed in other contexts,” and indeed, such “quixotic myth-mongering also encouraged zealots to use self-defeating tactics in quest of unworkable goals, and this would become a defining feature of many modern experiments in radical democracy.”

What such uprisings did accomplish was to strike a sort of salutary fear into monarchist and aristocratic elements, who began to cooperate with middle-class reformers to extend the franchise to workers (if not yet to women) and to tolerate “a new kind of political pluralism in Europe”—an ideological version of the religious pluralism liberalism had established. Europeans began to imitate none other than Andrew Jackson, at least respecting his interest in establishing popularly based political parties, competing more or less peacefully for votes registering the consent of the governed. This modus vivendi remained uneasy, however, with Marxists themselves splitting into the parliament-oriented Social Democrats and the harsher elements who insisted on retaining the option of bullets as well as ballots. In Russia, the latter form of soi-disant democracy prevailed, with consequences that would remain bloody long after the revolution itself was over.

Such discouraging results may have led the sociologist Robert Michels to formulate what he called “the iron law of oligarchy,” holding that “a tiny minority of business and political leaders wield power regardless of a state’s ostensibly democratic political practices.” What Tocqueville saw at its beginning Michels and his contemporary Max Weber saw in its better-elaborated form, some seventy years later. The two scholars disagreed only on Michels’s residual Rousseauian longings, which Weber dismissed as utopian. Democracy remained for Michels “not a fiction but an inviolable matter of faith, precisely in Martin Luther’s sense (‘Here I stand, I can do no other.’)” Weber conceded to democracy only the possibility of a kind of benign demagoguery, which might “harness productively the otherwise dangerous passions of unruly and uninformed citizens” while the oligarchs ruled quietly behind their backs.

Michels enjoyed no such luck. He lived long enough to see the rise of Mussolini, whom he mistook as the charismatic ‘leader’ Weber had described. He hoped (again remaining more utopian than his friend) that “a charismatic leader like Il Duce could help counteract the bureaucratic inertia of normal politics.” And moreover, Michels imagined, Mussolini could overcome that inertia in a democratic direction, as averred by the ‘philosopher of Fascism’ Giovanni Gentile, who proclaimed the Fascist State “a people’s state, and, as such, the democratic state par excellence,” a state in which the relation between state and citizen becomes “so intimate that the State exists only as, and in so far as, the citizen causes it to exist.” Under Gentile’s spell, one expects a modern state to mimic an ancient polis—somehow. To his credit, Michels remained a bit more sober, concluding that democracy and oligarchy will struggle to the end of time, and that ‘History’ goes nowhere, except in circles.

A similar dynamic may be seen in the major ‘Left’ alternatives to fascism: progressivism and communism. Woodrow Wilson advanced the ‘leadership principle,’ making him seem to Miller closer to John Adams’s “natural aristocracy” than to Jackson’s “plebeian democracy.” However, it should be noted, Wilson’s aristoi think not in terms of natural virtues and talents but in terms of historical consciousness. This enabled Wilson to make his leadership principle consistent with his early work on the administrative state; no feature of progressivist historicism seeks to fulfill human nature so much as to master it, to conquer nature in the name of freedom. To Wilson, democracy inheres in a people made progressively more equal among themselves, not a people untutored by leaders and administrators. It is, as Miller observes reminiscent of Weber’s Führerdemokratie.

Lenin took historicist Führerdemokratie in a more violent and tyrannical direction, undertaking to “smash” (as he put it) not only the bureaucratic-military machine of Czarism but also the bourgeois class, worldwide. ‘The few,’ strictly subordinate to ‘the one,’ both intending to level the social and economic conditions of ‘the many,’ formed a party that seized control of the existing state, transforming it after its own image under the slogan of “democratic centralism.” Where Wilson relied upon administrators, Lenin relied upon party militants. It might be added that Wilson also depended upon elections, assumed generally to register the ever-advancing leadership of ‘progressives,’ whereas Lenin felt no need for such things.

Miller accordingly examines Walter Lippmann’s work on public opinion with some care, inasmuch as the progressive Lippmann came to doubt “the capacity not just of ordinary citizens but also of their elected leaders to meet the challenges of governing a complex society.” As a journalist, Lippmann knew already what men like Donald Trump thunder about: the citizenry have come to need news media to provide information about such a society, to organize the information, to highlight what’s important, what deserves citizens’ attention. Yet the minds of journalists think as wishfully and fearfully as everyone else’s minds do. ‘Fake news’ may be deliberately crafted, but it also can be the result of ordinary moral failings leading to intellectual failings, to failings of both perception and of judgment. To this, the people add their own passions, stereotypes, and misconceptions. Whereas “a simple, self-contained community”—a polis—might be understandable to its citizenry, more often than not, a modern state is too big and complicated for such comprehension, especially given its situation among many other modern states, equally complex and working at cross-purposes. Lippmann concluded that the common interests of democratic citizens must be, as he put it “managed” by a “specialized class” consisting of well-trained administrators and wise-man commentators such as himself. A few decades later, the Washington Post journalist and ‘insider’ Douglas Cater would publish a book describing elite journalists as “the fourth branch of government.” [2]

In this sense, today “democracy as a form of government in most actually existing regimes is more or less a sham”—a fake regime in which fake news has taken its rightful place, so to speak. Yet paradoxically, in the twenty-first century “very few regimes, unlike most of those that existed in the early eighteenth century”—that is, before the American and French revolutions—”can rule over a subject population with impunity.” Rulers still need to account for the passions of voters, and indeed for the passions of non-voters in the more oppressive regimes. The many may not rule, but they set limits on the rule of the few.

Miller concludes with a discussion of democratic prospects. Citing the later works of Samuel P. Huntington– particularly his The Clash of Civilizations (1996) and Who Are We? (2004)—he appreciates the sobriety of a thinker who puts the basic issue of social and political order—”Does anyone govern?”—prior to the question of the regime itself. “For the many peoples around the world in the last century who have had to endure massacres and famines in failed states, these are not academic questions”; while it is true that the worst tyrannical regimes have massacred and starved millions (causing even more deaths than wars, themselves often initiated by such regimes), even despots and imperialists sometimes prevent inter-communal slaughter.

Miller also acknowledges Huntington’s recommendation to accept the diversity in a multicivilizational world: “A multicultural world is unavoidable because global empire is impossible.” Expectations of inevitable historical progress towards ‘one world’ have been greatly exaggerated, although they’ve not necessarily abated, however, as both Chinese and Islamist ambitieux will tell you.

If so, Americans will continue to need to define themselves clearly. Huntington posits “four main components of American identity”: race, and specifically white supremacy (“the first and most important”); ethnicity (Anglo-Saxons as distinguished from other ‘whites’); religiosity, particularly Protestantism; and “ideology” (the “American Creed” expressed in the Declaration of Independence). There are some serious problems with this formulation. By putting race, ethnicity, and religiosity before the “Creed,” Huntington centers his analysis on conflict. But given the endurance of the American political union for nearly 250 years, this makes little sense. Something must be holding the country together; if Huntington means to say that our social bonds have consisted of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant domination, one must be at a loss to explain the Declaration of Independence itself, the United States Constitution, and the Union victory in the Civil War. The conflicts in all of those instances involved white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants struggling with other white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants over the questions concerning not only the regime, not only the conditions of civil peace, but the definition of what it means to be human, and not only over what it means to be ‘white,’ Anglo-American, or Christian. Huntington’s formula additionally fails to register a principal (and principled) conflict of the past century or so: the challenge American Progressives mounted to the moral foundation of the ‘old’ republic. To locate right in ‘History’ is to break radically with a regime that had located right in the laws of nature and of nature’s God. If right is said to change in the course of time, then no right can be unalienable. Rulers are no longer adjured to secure rights but to invent them. Government powers no longer need to be limited by and enumerated in a written constitution; they need to be expanded, elaborated, on no foundation in nature but on a purportedly progressive economic, social, and political evolution defined by the ‘leaders’ and administrators who run the new and far more ‘statist’ regime. Miller’s sensible question—”Why should Americans assume that their version of democratic idealism would prove any more resilient” than the regime of the late and unlamented Soviet Union “if put to the test by white nativism?”—becomes harder to answer if one defines America in Huntington’s ‘cultural’ terms, or the Progressives’ historicist ones.

Looking back on his own instructive political experience, Miller sees in the recent “Occupy Wall Street” movement an echo of “my own experiments in radical democracy,” which also “quickly fell apart.” Both efforts collided with two problems: “the incompatibility of rule by consensus with accountable, responsible, government in a large organization” and with factions within small groups of person “with divergent interests and a limited patience for endless meetings.” Max Weber, meet Oscar Wilde. At the same time, Miller insists that “the search for a democracy of individual participation” lastingly changes one’s “sense of what politics can mean.” Yes: recovering some sense of the experience of the ancient polis—however attenuated that experience will be, given ‘modern’ (and indeed supposedly ‘postmodern’) assumptions and habits—cannot but give a thoughtful participant in such a recovery a more lucid perspective on political life itself.

Miller thus looks with strengthened appreciation at the achievement of the American Founders, who combined democracy understood as popular sovereignty with the regime of republicanism and a federal state. This may be the best practical answer to those who wonder how some vestiges of small-scale local self-government can survive in the modern world of large, centralized states—states designed to crush small city-states and loosely-organized feudal states. Among his contemporaries, he admires Václav Havel, who carried many of these institutional structures into his Czechoslovakia, newly liberated from oligarchy and empire. To appreciate the achievement of the Americans and the Czechs can initiate consideration of the moral foundations of their regimes, neither of which make sense as ‘ideologies’ animated by the valorization of historical change for the sake of some imagined paradise-on-earth.

 

Notes

1. James Miller: The Passion of Michel Foucault. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
2. Douglass Cater: The Fourth Branch of Government. New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959.