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Sartori Theory of Democracy

Modern democracy vs Ancient demoracy

The word democracy has naturally acquired diverse meanings according to

very different historical settings as well as different ideals. Todays concept of
democracy has only a very slight resemblance to the concept developed in
the 5th century BC.

Ancient democracy was conceived in a symbiotic relation with the polis,

which was not a city-state (state is a modern word) but a city-community,
a koinonia. Thucydides said it is the men that are the polis. Politeia meant
at the same time citizenship and the structure of the polis.

State comes from the Latin status, which as such simply means a condition
or state of being. Machiavelli reified state as an impersonal entity in its
modern understanding, however he mainly referred to regnum (kingdom) or
civitas (when republican). Hobbes favored the word commonwealth while
Bodin used sovereignty from the medieval imperium. As state gained
currency, it became less and less coextensive with res publica (the politically
organized society as a whole) and more narrowly identified with the
structures of command.

Thus, had the Greeks conceived the state as we do, the notion of
democratic state would have seemed to them a contradiction. The
democracy of the ancients was stateless and it thus cannot teach us
anything about conducting a democratic system.

It is also a difference of ends and values between ancient and modern. After
the Western civilization has experienced Christianity, humanism, the
Reformation, natural rights and liberalism, the idea of democracy has
changed in more than 2000 years. Moreover, all modern democracies are
indirect while the democracy of antiquity was undoubtedly the closest
possible approximation to a literal democracy.

In present democracies, there are those who govern and those who are
governed; there is the state, on one side and the citizens on the other; there
are those who deal with politics professionally and those who forget about it,
except at rare intervals. In ancient democracies, instead, these
differentiations had very little meaning.
History attests that the Greek democracies and the medieval communes that
somehow replicated them had a turbulent as well as ephemeral existence.
Aristotle called democracy the government of the poor who governed in
their own interest.

Real self-government, as the Greeks practiced it, required the citizens

devoting himself completely to the public service. It affected other functions
of social life. Political hypertrophy brought about economic atrophy: the more
perfect their democracy became, the poorer the citizens became. A vicious
circle of seeking a political solution to economic need followed, ancient
democracy being destroyed by class struggle. The Greek experience
generated a total citizen that overreached himself.

Indirect systems of government have advantages that we are too inclined to

underrate.

1. A multi-stage and multi-filtered process of political decision making

contains, by virtue of its indirectness, precautions and restraints that
directness cannot obtain
2. Direct democracy entails zero-sum politics, whereas indirect
democracy allows for positive-sum politics
3. In ancient democracy the war between rich and poor was inevitable,
growing out of a functional imbalance of the system, whereas modern
systems do not contain such imbalances.

Real self-government cannot be presumed; it requires the actual presence

and participation of the people concerned. It is impossible to have direct
democracy at a distance and meaningful self-government among absentees.
The gist is that the greater the number of people involved, the less effective
is their participation and this to a vanishing point. With entire nations and
vast territories, direct democracy becomes unusable. An electronic
referendum democracy, while technically feasible, would be disastrous
and, in all likelihood, suicidal.

Direct democracy can function only under certain conditions and it is by no

means an alternative to representative democracy. Participation in the
exercise of power does not imply individual liberty. My liberty vis--vis state
power cannot be derived from the infinitesimal portion of power by means of
which I concur in the creation of the rules to which I shall be subject. Thus,
the limitation and control of power that our liberal democracies provide is not
a lesser achievement vis--vis Greek democracy as we have provided a
secure freedom for every individual.

Individualism and Freedom : Old and New

The debate in this field was opened in 1819 by Benjamin Constant, followed
by Tocqueville and Laboulaye. In essence, men of antiquity were not free
(related to their polity) according to the modern notion of individual freedom.
Individual liberty was unknown to the Greeks.

The distinction between public and private spheres was unknown and
unintelligible. For the Greeks, man and citizen meant the exactly same thing.
Participating in the life of the polis meant to live. In ancient times the
individual was not conceived as a person, not to mention a private self.
This only came with Christianity and the Renaissance, Reform and the
modern school of natural law. Ancient democracy did not respect the
individual, it tended to suspect him.

Greek democracy is the system of government (city) in which decisions were

made collectively, therefore no margin of independence and no sphere of
protection to the single individual. The polis is sovereign in the sense that
the individuals that compose it are completely subject to it.

Therefore, the basic difference between the ancient and modern conception
of freedom lies precisely in that we believe that a man is more than a citizen
of a state.

Idea and Ideal

When a wicked regime is carried out by the many, it is called democracy.
Westerners spoke of republic, not the same as democracy. Republic had
become the very antithesis of democracy.

Even Kant considered democracy as necessarily a despotism, an accepted

notion of the time. Madison always said representative republic and never
democracy, which he understood as the antique direct democracy.

Only Robespierre used the word democracy, only at the end, ensuring its bad
reputation.

The contribution of the Puritans to the process of creating a liberal-

democratic Weltanschauung was overemphasized, as they were despicable.
Until the 17th century diversity was considered a source of discord and
disorder causing the downfall of states, and unanimity was regarded as the
necessary foundation of any polity. From then on, the opposite attitude
gradually took hold, and it was unanimity that came to be viewed with
suspicion.

Liberal democracy is based on dissent and diversity. We have discovered how

to build a political system on dissenting consensus (Concordia discors). In
ancient democracies, the crowd made the law with no limits on their power.

In the city-communitites of antiquity, liberty was not expressed through

opposition to state power, for there was no state, but through participation in
the collective exercise of power. But once we have a state that is distinct
from society, the problem is reversed and a power of the people can only be
a power taken from the state.