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of World History
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Democracy;s Place in World History
STEVEN MUHLBERGER
Nipissing University
PHIL PAINE
Toronto, Ontario
Inoverthetherecent
world. Almostpast, demands
no one for
expected this. It isdemocracy
an interesting have come from all
and important reflection on those events that historical scholar
ship has little to say about democracy that contributes, intellectu
ally or practically, to an understanding of them.
Democracy once had a prominent place in historical thought.
Dramatic changes in nineteenth-century European and North
American society produced a liberal historiography to put those
changes into context by identifying the history of Europe with
that of personal liberty.1 It held that Europe had evolved a unique
notion of liberty out of a combination of classical and Christian
ideas. This ideal had driven the political development of Europe
and its more advanced colonies and set them apart from the rest
of the world. It was taken for granted that the history of govern
ment (once any society had emerged from the historyless "state of
nature") began with monarchy, and that non-European peoples,
23
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24 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, SPRING 1993
2 Samuel Eliot, History of Liberty, Part I: The Ancient Romans, 2 vols. (Boston,
1853), 1:5. Compare Aristotle, Politics 3.15, and Polybius, History 6.3-9.
3 With reference, of course, to McNeill's Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed
Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (Chicago, 1982); McNeill himself cannot be
accused of indifference to politics and political techniques. The general dismissal
of democracy as an important subject is well illustrated by its treatment in the fif
teenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The 1984 version devoted only one
sixth of a page to discussing the history of democracy, in the quick-reference
Micropedia ("Democracy," Micropedia, 5:576); the articles on government in the
Macropedia added very little. The same version included a full page on the history
of demography ("Demography," Macropedia, 3:484-96). The reorganized 1990 ver
sion of the fifteenth edition makes it easier to find material on the history of
democracy.
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Muhlberger and Paine: Democracy's Place in World History 25
democracy. They want not only prosperity, not only national sov
ereignty, but also elections by universal suffrage, among compet
ing parties, under conditions that allow voters an informed and
free choice. Calls for effective guarantees for human rights have
been equally widespread. It is obvious, in the light of these move
ments, that historians will have to reformulate their ideas of
world political development.
At the end of a century when antidemocratic theories have
dominated theoretical discussion of history and politics, attempts
to understand the development of democracy will have to over
come several stumbling blocks. In this article, we address one of
them.
It is commonly thought that most people in the world have no
democratic experience, and that the democratic idea is fundamen
tally alien to most human cultures. This is what lies behind the
catchphrase, "the western concept of democracy." On this basis,
many scholars have concluded that efforts to establish demo
cratic institutions outside of a few favored regions are doomed to
failure. The belief is found almost equally among friends and ene
mies of the democratic idea. Aristocratic and authoritarian think
ers have argued that democratic ideas are merely a local quirk of
western European tradition; those sympathetic to democracy
have feared that they were right. Both groups, as they consider
the non-European world, have seen only a mass of churlish and
intractable peasants, too dumb to understand voting or the princi
ple of human equality, now or ever.
Recent events have put the lie to this, or should have. Room for
confusion remains. The inevitable setbacks of new democratic
regimes will soon be seized upon by unsympathetic or hyper-criti
cal commentators as proof that this people or that are not yet
ready for democracy, and probably never will be.4 Now is the time
to point out that doubts about the viability of democracy in vari
ous non-European cultures are an outdated relic of nineteenth
century liberal theories.
In the past, historians have supported the idea that Europeans
have a special fitness for democracy (one more aspect of Euro
pean uniqueness) by emphasizing every quasi-democratic insti
tution or movement in European history while dismissing or
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26 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, SPRING I993
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Muhlberger and Paine: Democracy's Place in World History 27
Yet the vast majority of all political events are local. It is on the
local level that most collective action is taken, most of the con
structive work of the world has been and still is done, and most
conflicts of interest take place. By adjusting one's perspective to
that local level, studied more often by anthropologists than histo
rians, one often finds a style of decision making quite different
from lordship or bureaucratic autocracy. Most human govern
ment has been a matter of councils and assemblies, which often
incorporate a large proportion of the community and use a sur
prising degree of democratic procedure. In other words, human
ity possesses a long history of government by discussion, in which
groups of people sharing common interests make decisions that
affect their lives through debate and consultation, and often
enough by voting. By broadening the view of politics to include
not simply geographic communities but also religious and volun
tary self-help organizations?as De Tocqueville did when evaluat
ing democracy in the early American republic6?one finds a world
full of quasi-democratic institutions.
Few if any of these groups could meet twentieth-century stan
dards of democratic practice. Most have excluded all women and
many men. Their decision-making procedures have often been
loose and susceptible to manipulation by an inner circle of the
elders or the wealthy. We argue that the existence and practices of
such groups are nonetheless relevant to the story of democracy.
Any group willing to submit to decisions arrived at by discussion
and voting (formal or informal), or to abide by the judgment of
elected representatives, is in some sense democratic, for it has
devised methods to share political authority among its members.
Who those members should be is a separate question, although a
very important one.7 If one insists on perfect democracy in a com
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28 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, SPRING 1993
ity; thus the definition of the key term citizen could not be taken for granted. The
same difficulties exist today. Modern states restrict citizenship and the franchise
in a variety of ways (e.g., in the cases of resident aliens, prisoners, or convicted
felons; in the recent past many states denied the vote to those receiving public
assistance). Such restrictions may or may not be justifiable, but are usually taken
entirely for granted.
8 Again the case of Aristotle is relevant. Aristotle knew that all nonmonarchical
constitutions existing in his own day mixed oligarchical and democratic features,
but he had no difficulty in distinguishing which elements in them were demo
cratic, that is, promoted inclusivity. See especially Politics 4.14.
9 The first date marks the nationwide enfranchisement of women on the same
basis as men; the second is significant because before 1965, large numbers of black
citizens of the United States were prevented from voting by a variety of state laws.
Adult suffrage of a sort we now expect from any country claiming to be a democ
racy is rare and a nineteenth- or twentieth-century phenomenon. The country with
the longest continuous history of adult suffrage is Finland (since 1919). A franchise
made up of all or most male householders is, however, not rare in the further past.
10 To use such awkward phrases as "quasi-democracy," "quasi-democratic
practices," or "quasi-democratic institutions" throughout this discussion would
lend only a specious precision, while obscuring an important element to our argu
ment. Such terminology has been rightly rejected by students of classical Greek
and Roman politics. We make no claim that we have discovered a multitude of true
or perfect democracies in the non-European past. If the reader can agree that
some or all of our examples are roughly as democratic as those cities considered
democratic by Aristotle, we are satisfied. See note 7 above.
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Muhlberger and Paine: Democracy's Place in World History 29
11 Y. K. Liang and L. K. Tao, Village and Town Life in China (London, 1915),
PP- 3-6
12 Ibid., p. 28. Liang and Tao generalize very broadly, taking little note of
regional variation. A more detailed account of the clan or zu can be found in Hsien
Chin-Hu, The Common Descent Group in China and Its Functions (New York, 1948),
which unfortunately does not discuss the decision-making process at any length.
This is a common problem in finding information about grass-roots organizations.
But Hu does give (app. 53, pp. 169-80) a riveting account of one intraclan contro
versy.
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3? JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, SPRING I993
13 Liang and Tao, Village and Town Life in China, pp. 32-41, especially 22-31.
Compare Gary Seaman, Temple Organization in a Chinese Village (Taipei, 1978), pp.
63-70, 146, a case where the elections are rigged, but the informal log-rolling
behind all practical projects is real and effective.
14 Arthur H. Smith, Village Life in China (1899; rpt. Boston, 1970); Martin C.
Yang, A Chinese Village: Taitou, Shantung Province (New York, 1945). Yang provides
an example of a voluntary organization in the main school of his home village. It
had been founded by the Pan clan but was attended by children of all clans and run
by a school council of all parents. "The council was a village-wide organization"
(P-144)
15 Ibid., pp. 173-81.
16 Ibid., pp. 181-86; compare Smith, Village Life in China, pp. 170-76.
17 For a similar pattern in a Muslim community in southeast Asia, see Thomas
M. Fraser, Jr., Fishermen of South Thailand: The Malay Villagers (New York, 1966),
pp. 40-52.
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Muhlberger and Paine: Democracy's Place in World History 31
18 Smith, Village Life in China, pp. 98-124; C. K. Yang, Religion in Chinese Soci
ety: A Study of Contemporary Social Functions of Religion and Some of Their His
torical Factors (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1961), pp. 60-61,98-99.
19 Yang, A Chinese Village, pp. 240-41. Staving off disaster in a peasant commu
nity is no small thing, but Yang was a rural reconstruction officer and had greater
ambitions. Compare Yang's criticism of peasant conservatism to Sir Henry
Maine's criticism of democracy (1884). It was undesirable because in such places as
Switzerland, it had proved itself unprogressive: "The progress of mankind has
hitherto been effected by the rise and fall of aristocracies" (Popular Government,
p. 42). Kung-Chuan Hsiao, in Rural China: Imperial Control in the Nineteenth Cen
tury (Seattle, i960), pp. 261-63, sums up the arguments of scholars who have consid
ered democratic elements in village life as insignificant in comparison to the
power of various elites. Compare Wittfogel's position, note 53 below.
20 Smith, Village Life in China, p. 102. Smith's testimony is the more interesting
in light of the fact that, coming from a missionary background, he was inclined to
view the Chinese way of life as deeply corrupt. Martin Yang himself admitted (A
Chinese Village, p. 241) that by denying the democracy of Chinese local government,
he was disagreeing with many other observers.
21 Nor was democratic practice restricted to villages. John H. Fincher's Chi
nese Democracy: The Self-Government Movement in Local, Provincial and National
Politics, 1?05-1?14 (London, 1981) documents the role of big-city democratic reform
movements in influencing the large-scale but largely forgotten experiments with
parliamentary democracy in the late Qing period. Chinese democratic reformers
appealed not just to foreign ideals but to Chinese theoreticians who had argued
that administrators should be responsible to deliberative councils (p. 68). See also
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32 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, SPRING 1993
who have ever lived have been citizens of small agricultural vil
lages. They have focused their loyalties on those villages and have
experienced government in that context. Most of these millions of
agricultural communities, past and present, have employed some
democratic techniques of government: decisions made and lead
ers chosen by unanimous consent or majority vote, after extensive
discussions in a public assembly. Almost all villages, everywhere,
have had a village council. These have many names: the ancient
tings of Scandinavia, the kampong assemblies of Malaysia, the
famous council fires of the Amerindian confederacies, the com
munes of the vill of medieval England, the gumlao of the Kachin
in Burma, the Landesgemeinde of central Europe, the Maori
hapus, the kokwet of the east African Sebei, the panchayats of
India, and countless others. Voluntary self-help groups have also
been commonplace, and decision making within them has neces
sarily been by discussion and general agreement.
Africa is often portrayed as a continent dominated by kingship
and authoritarian rule. Although specialists know better, the
presence of kings in precolonial times is often cited as an explana
tion of the postcolonial plague of dictatorships. Nobody applies
the same reasoning to Europe, although it has had no shortage of
kings and emperors. The existence of kings in the past does not
make for a destiny of kings.
Africa, in fact, has not been particularly fertile ground for
kingship in past ages. Its monarchies and empires have been
ephemeral by European standards. At least half of the "tradi
tional" monarchies of the present were installed by the colonial
powers a hundred years ago. Other precolonial kings were no
more than oligarchs and war chiefs of limited power. Precolonial
Africa was a latticework of decentralized farming villages and
autonomous towns only occasionally subjected to genuine monar
chical states. The chiefs that existed varied greatly in power, but
most would fit Albert Doutreloux's description of Yombe chief
dom, as summarized by Wayne MacGaffrey: "Whatever the extent
of a chief's power, chief ship is inevitably associated with a collec
tion of people who surround the chief at least as much to control
him as to assist him."22
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Muhlberger and Paine: Democracy's Place in World History 33
Quite often, the village councils were left to run things without
an overlord to help or hinder them. Among the Sebei of Uganda,
all villagers could attend the governing kokwet, and all circum
cised males could speak there. Opinion was most easily swayed by
kirwokik (judges), men with a reputation for eloquence, irrespec
tive of wealth or station. "Judgeship," says a Sebei proverb, "is
bought by the ear, not with cattle."23 Similar assemblies have been
described for dozens of other peoples. Commonly village polities
have combined in alliances?alliances organized through a series
of nesting councils and assemblies. For instance, the Aguinyi
"clan" among the Ibo of Nigeria is an acephalous confederation of
seven autonomous towns. Although the confederation has no
institutional expression, each of the towns is run by a council of
delegates elected from the villages that make up the towns. Each
village has an assembly in which everyone may speak, and which
is responsible for roads, scholarship schemes, revolving loan
funds, and (even in modern conditions) basic law and order. Below
the village level, both wards and extended families deal with com
mon business on much the same basis as the villages themselves.
Life among the Aguinyi thus embraces a variety of democratic
experience.24
The Aguinyi and other Ibo peoples also provide an example of
an individualist democratic ethic that appears to have grown
entirely from indigenous roots. The Aguinyi often speak of the vir
tues of common effort and unanimity, but they also acknowledge
the power of chi. Chi originally meant a pagan deity or personal
god and now stands for an individual's fate or destiny, as well as
the combination of characteristics that makes someone "person
ally responsible and calculative in his life and actions." Chi is the
strength that enables individuals to stand up for their own views
when they disagree with the rest of the community. Obstruc
tionism is not popular among the Aguinyi, yet the concept of chi,
which makes the "individual. . . the last irreducible unit of re
sponsibility who must [guard] against all undue imitation and
23 Walter Goldschmidt, Sebei Law (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967), pp. 163-67;
Goldschmidt, Culture and Behavior of the Sebei: A Study in Continuity and Adapta
tion (Berkeley, 1976), pp. 55-85. The phrase "bought by the ear" meant that a judge
had learned the traditional law by diligent listening to the rulings of elder states
men. In Sebei Law, p. 164 and n. 2, Goldschmidt points out that women were
involved in council discussions involving what were regarded as "women's mat
ters"; when Goldschmidt consulted male experts in Sebei law, they suggested to
him that women should participate in the discussions.
24 Lambert U. Ejiofor, Dynamics of Igbo Democracy: A Behavioural Analysis of
Igbo Politics in Aguinyi Clan (Ibadan, 1981), especially pp. 34-85.
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34 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, SPRING I993
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Muhlberger and Paine: Democracy's Place in World History 35
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36 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, SPRING 1993
34 Agrawala, India as Known to Panini, p. 432. This can be compared to the situ
ation in Italy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; see J. K. Hyde, Society and
Politics in Medieval Italy: The Evolution of the Civil Life, 1000-1350 (London, 1973),
PP- 56-57
35 Agrawala, India as Known to Panini, pp. 433-35.
36 An introduction to the Pali Canon may be found in R. C. Majumdar, The His
tory and Culture of the Indian People, Vol. 2: The Age of Imperial Unity (Bombay,
1951), PP- 396-411.
37 Maha-paranibbana-sutta 1.1; a translation may be found in Buddhist Suttas,
trans. T. W. Rhys Davids, vol. 11 of Sacred Books of the East, ed. F. Max M?ller
(Oxford, 1881), pp. 6-7. (This series is hereafter cited as SBE.) The other virtues
were: (2) meeting, rising, and carrying out their undertakings in concord; (3) acting
in accord with the ancient institutions; (4) honoring the elders; (5) ensuring that
none of their women or girls are detained among them by force; (6) performing the
customary rituals; (7) supporting and protecting holy men among them.
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Muhlberger and Paine: Democracy's Place in World History 37
38 Mahavagga 1.28, in Vinaya Texts, pt. 1, trans. T. W. Rhys Davids, vol. 13 of SBE
(Oxford, 1881), pp. 169-70; and Kullavagga 4.9-14, in Vinaya Texts, pt. 3, trans. T. W.
Rhys Davids and Hermann Oldenburg, vol. 20 of SBE (Oxford, 1885), pp. 24-65. The
latter section deals with the most contentious issues possible within the sangha,
those which concerned interpretation of the monastic rule itself. Such a dispute
could be referred to a jury or committee specially elected by the sangha, or settled
by majority vote. The Kullavagga shows a recognition that a democratic vote was
seen as the legitimate way to settle such disputes as well as a desire to "direct"
votes when they might threaten the unity of the sangha. The vote taker (himself an
elected official) could disallow votes if the winners' opinions went against his
interpretation of the law (4.10; pp. 26-27). The provision makes no sense unless the
belief in majority rule was strong in the order.
39 Altekar, State and Government, p. 136; compare Benoychandra Sen, Studies
in the Buddhist Jatakas: Tradition and Polity (Calcutta, 1974), pp. 60-64.
40 Among these treatises is the Santi Parva section of the Mahabharata, which
justifies absolute monarchy as a guarantee of order and caste distinctions; inter
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38 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, SPRING 1993
estingly, chapter 107 provides advice to a raja who is not yet an absolute monarch,
who is told how to manipulate his gana by setting the "leaders" against the igno
rant membership. The treatise attributed to Manu (Manu-Smrti, The Laws of
Manu) is the earliest of a series of Dharmasastras, or systematic treatments of
divine law in which caste is a key concept.
41 Kautilya, Arthasastra 11.1, p. 416.
42 A similar situation can be seen in the Greek polis communities in the Hel
lenistic and Roman periods and in the Italian city-states of the high Middle Ages
and Renaissance. See Simon Price, "The History of the Hellenistic Period," in John
Boardman, Jaspar Griffin, and Oswyn Murray, eds., The Oxford History of the
Classical World (Oxford, 1986), pp. 330-36; Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination:
City-States in Renaissance Italy (Baltimore, 1988), especially pp. 130-61,191-217; and
Giovanni Tabacco, The Struggle for Power in Medieval Italy (Cambridge, 1989). The
dynamics of such periods are among the most interesting problems facing histo
rians of democracy.
43 The classic study is R. C. Majumdar, Corporate Life in Ancient India, 3d. ed.
(Calcutta, 1969); another treatment is A. S. Altekar, A History of Village Communi
ties in Western India, University of Bombay Economic Series 5 (Bombay, 1927), who
was skeptical of claims that all Indian villages were alike, or could be treated as
small republics. His work documents how, in the Bombay area, a long series of
imperial governments slowly eroded village self-government, until British policies
almost destroyed it entirely.
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Muhlberger and Paine: Democracy's Place in World History 39
44 Sir Henry Maine, Village-Communities in the East and the West (1889; rpt.
New York, 1974), especially pp. 122-24; Carl C. Taylor et al., India's Roots of Democ
racy: A Sociological Analysis of Rural India's Experience in Planned Development
since Independence (New Delhi, 1965), pp. 29-43.
45 Henry Maddick, Panchayati Raj: A Study of Rural Local Government (Lon
don, 1970), a report from one reformer actively involved in the imposition of the
new (post-1958) panchayat system, depicts it as inspired by the old village com
munities but as having no direct historic link. Compare N. R. Inamdar, Function
ing of Village Panchayats (Bombay, 1970), who looked at four village panchayats in
the period 1960-62; the two more successful ones were precisely those where local
initiative predated government decree.
46 Frederica M. Bunge, ed., Thailand: A Country Study, 5th ed. (Washington,
1981), pp. 81-84; Charles F. Keyes, Thailand: Buddhist Kingdom as Modern Nation
State (Boulder and London, 1987), pp. 36,137-38,140; Manning Nash et al., Anthropo
logical Studies in Theravada Buddhism, Cultural Report Series 13, Yale University
Southeast Asia Studies (New Haven, 1966).
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4o JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, SPRING 1993
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Muhlberger and Paine: Democracy's Place in World History 41
51 Dale Van Every, The Disinherited: The Lost Birthright of the American
Indian (New York, 1967), pp. 73-87.
52 Some other examples may be worth listing. The Berber communities of the
High Atlas are relatively well known, thanks to Ernest Gellner, Saints of the Atlas
(London, 1969). Gellner's hesitation about classifying these communities as demo
cracies (pp. 28-29) is an explicit expression of a typical attitude. See also James A.
Miller, Imlil: A Moroccan Mountain Community in Change (Boulder and London,
1984), pp. 71-72, for a more recent report on the same area. William Robert Geddes,
Migrants of the Mountains: The Cultural Ecology of the Blue Miao (Hmong Njua) of
Thailand (Oxford, 1976), pp. 94-96, discusses how the migratory habits of the Miao
preserve a quasi-democratic method of decision making. Pedro Carrasco, Land
and Polity in Tibet (Seattle, 1959), pp. 57-61, documents conciliar government
among the Bhotias of Sikkim in the early twentieth century. It is worth noting that
this same area in the nineteenth century had a village headman who was suppos
edly the seventh of a hereditary line. Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities
in Western Europe 900-1300 (Oxford, 1984), surveys medieval European manifesta
tions of what she calls "collective judgement." She emphasizes, as do many histori
ans of such phenomena, that collective judgment coexisted with deference to rank
and wealth. That is undoubtedly true, but in our view it does not exclude medieval
quasi-democracies from the history of democratic practice.
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42 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, SPRING I993
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Muhlberger and Paine: Democracy's Place in World History 43
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44 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, SPRING 1993
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Muhlberger and Paine: Democracy's Place in World History 45
62 In the second century, the emperor Trajan justified his prohibition of a col
lege or guild of firefighters in Nicomedia in these terms: "It is to be remembered
that this sort of societies have greatly disturbed the peace of your province.. ..
Whatever title we give them, and whatever our object in giving it, men who are
bonded together for a common end will all the same become a political organiza
tion before long." Pliny, Letters 10.34, trans. William Melmoth (Cambridge, Mass.,
1963), 2:319-21.
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