If history is, as Henry Ford inelegantly put it, one damn’ thing after another, was the history of thinking about politics merely one damn’ thinker or one damn’ idea after another? Was it even, as Macbeth more elegantly but more despairingly might have feared, a tale full of sound and fury signifying nothing, a chronicle of verbal fisticuffs at the end of which we were no wiser than at the beginning?
The essence of a modern state is centralized authority, bureaucratic management, the efficient delivery of the public services that only a state can provide; Persia provided fewer services than a modern state and “outsourced” much of the work to officials in semiautonomous political dependencies, but the principle was there. As to the early modern states to which our own political systems are the heirs, Louis XIV may have said, “L’état, c’est moi,” but he knew what a state was: a legal person rather than a physical one. It was the state’s all-encompassing authority that he embodied in his own majestic person. It was on the state’s behalf that he was obsessed with the need to know whatever could be known about the resources of his kingdom and the lives of his subjects so that he could better manage their lives and resources for their own welfare.
Much of the time, the question goes unasked in prosperous liberal democracies like Britain or the United States, because most of us see political equality as exhausted by “one person, one vote” and dig no deeper; we know that one person, one vote coexists with the better-off and better-organized buying influence through lobbying, campaign contributions, and use of the mass media, but we find ourselves puzzled to balance a belief that everyone has the right to use his or her resources to influence government—which is certainly one form of political equality—with our sense that excessive inequality of political resources undermines democracy.
The discrepancy in political effectiveness in modern industrial societies is between the unorganized and the organized; money is the life blood of organization, but not money alone. Can democracies protect the public at large—unorganized individuals—against well-organized special interests? The question plagues all modern democracies. Neither intellectually nor institutionally have we advanced very far beyond Rousseau’s identification of the problem two and a half centuries ago in the Social Contract.
given the right arrangements, the uncorrupted ordinary people could check the tendency of the rich to subvert republican institutions. That was a commonplace of antiaristocratic republican thinking in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe; it is a standing theme of American populism. Many writers on the left have taken a simpler view of the need for popular participation. It is an old thought that unless the less well-off use their numerical strength to offset the advantages of the better-off, they will lose out in the distribution of the economic benefits that a modern industrial society can provide. It is the most obvious of the instrumental arguments for universal suffrage; unless the worse-off have an adequate say in the rules that regulate the economy in which they earn their living, they will find themselves exploited.
Many writers, across the whole political spectrum, have thought that it is morally better to be an active citizen than a mere consumer of whatever benefits accrue in virtue of being an ordinary, economically productive member of one’s society.
For the past two centuries, the argument has focused on the political roles of elites and masses. “The masses” is a relatively modern term, whether applied optimistically, in looking to the awakened proletarian masses to make the revolution that ushers in the socialist millennium, contemptuously in belittling the low tastes of the uncultivated masses, good-naturedly when we welcome the huddled masses yearning to be free, or merely descriptively, as meaning simply a lot of people. The term emerged during the industrial revolution at a time of rapid population growth and rapid urbanization; but the contrast between the elite and the rank and file is ancient.
If we are persuaded that in all societies only a small number of people will actually play a role in governing the society, it makes all the difference just how the elite secures and retains the allegiance of the many. A totalitarian elite employs the secret police; a democratic elite employs pollsters and advertising agencies. Totalitarian elites, military juntas, and the like intend to hold power for life; democratic elites allow themselves to be thrown out by the electorate. They may do their very best to cajole, persuade, or even bamboozle the voter, but they do not corrupt the courts, politicize the army, or send the secret police to the polling booth. Unillusioned commentators on modern democracies describe democracy as rule by competing elites. The competition produces better government than elite rule without competition and better government than rule by mass meeting, or whatever direct democracy might involve. We are destined to be ruled by elites, but “the circulation of elites” will ensure that incompetent elites are replaced by more-competent elites.
Nonetheless, just who gets to be a member of the political elite, or elites, and how that person gets there remains a contentious issue; even in Western liberal democracies there might be a fierce competition between politicians, but a restrictive system of recruitment to the ranks of the competitors. The American system of primary elections was established to counter just that problem; its success has been only partial.
Modern freedom in contrast was essentially private; it was the ability to pursue our private economic, literary, or religious concerns without having to answer to anyone else. It was freedom from the political sphere rather than freedom in the political sphere.
Skeptics about participation will insist that what matters is accountability rather than mass participation; voting for any particular party or candidate matters less than the ability to vote against them.
otiose.
To call this “social democracy” invites confusion, because the Marxist and post-Marxist socialist parties of western Europe called, and still call, themselves Social Democrats, and democracy in the sense described in this paragraph is very much at home with capitalism and free markets: if the claims of race, birth, and gender are rejected, what is left are the claims based on the contribution we make to the welfare of other individuals or society at large. Those contributions may range very widely, from simple manual labor to whatever it is that celebrities add to our lives, and the obvious way to discover what our contributions are worth is to see how they fare in the marketplace. Of course, all actual societies realize such values only very imperfectly, and markets are notoriously imperfect, too.
That raises the question whether I am committed to the view that there is nothing new under the sun, or more guardedly to the view of Thucydides and Machiavelli, among many others, that since human nature is the same at all times and in all places, we can draw morals about what is likely to happen to us from what our predecessors have thought and done. The answer is “not exactly.” The last fifth of this book takes very seriously the thought that over the past two and a half centuries several revolutions dramatically changed the world that politics tries to master. In no particular order, and without assigning priority to one aspect of an interconnected process, the industrial revolution, the demographic revolution, the literacy and communications revolution, and the political revolutions of the late eighteenth century and more recently have created a world that is in innumerable ways quite unlike the ancient, medieval, and early modern worlds. The most important of these ways reflect our greatly enhanced technological capacities. To put it brutally, we can keep vastly more people alive than ever before, and we can kill vastly more people than ever before.
the tasks that modern governments must grapple with not only are more numerous and more complex than our predecessors could have imagined but threaten evils on a larger scale than they could have imagined. So I end with some anxious reflections on the politics of an interconnected and increasingly crowded planet. Demography may not be destiny, but managing the problems of a planet of more than seven billion people is a very different enterprise from ensuring that a city-state of two or three hundred thousand could feed itself, protect itself from its enemies, and cultivate the rich civic life that even now we contemplate with envy.
There is no way to do this without running the risk of foisting our own views on the unresisting dead. It is the obvious danger of attempting to have a conversation with great, but absent, thinkers who cannot tell us we are talking nonsense. I am a great admirer of Isaiah Berlin, whose essays in the history of ideas provide one model for what I do here; nonetheless, there are moments in his work that make the reader wonder whether it is Montesquieu speaking or Berlin, or whether Machiavelli would have recognized the causes for which Berlin recruited him. The early twentieth-century philosopher and historian R. G. Colling-wood claimed that historical explanation was a matter of rethinking past thoughts, and that thought was reflected in Berlin’s work as it is in what follows. As to not foisting my ideas on the unresisting dead, I can only say that I have tried to keep the critical voices of my colleagues in my head as I wrote. One further element that gives Berlin’s writings their extraordinary vividness is an almost uncanny ability to engage with the temperament of the thinkers he wrote about. The difficulties that beset the attempt to know just what someone thought equally beset the attempt to know just what it would have been like to meet him or her in the flesh, perhaps even more so. Nonetheless, if we are to see our predecessors in the round we must take the risk.
the fact that a book such as Allan Bloom’s lugubrious essay called The Closing of the American Mind could become a best seller suggests that the American mind was much less closed than he thought, and although I did not greatly admire Francis Fukuyama’s book The End of History and the Last Man, its success demonstrated that there were public intellectuals in the marketplace, and a substantial audience for their ideas. History and biography have always had a wide popular appeal, and we are all richer for the work of Simon Schama or Gordon Wood, to name just two. But some accounts of the history of philosophy have secured an enviably wide audience. Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, which I read avidly at the age of fifteen, was one. Together with Mill’s On Liberty, it changed my life, but reading it again years later was a salutary experience; questions of inaccuracy aside, it was spectacularly prejudiced—though very funny. I have taken Russell’s lucidity as a benchmark, though the ability to write so transparently and easily, which rightly earned him a Nobel Prize in Literature, is a gift I can only envy. As to his prejudices, I share some of them, but have done my best to leave them out.
On the other hand, it may be a mistake to operate new institutions under old labels, arousing impossible expectations and causing needless disappointment. It may have worse effects, perhaps enabling a plutocracy to exploit a political system for its own benefit, with “bread and circuses” pacifying the worse-off, who are flattered and cajoled but exploited nonetheless. We may be less deceived than self-deceived, knowing in our hearts that we are subjects, not citizens, that the world is divided between the givers of orders and the takers of orders, and that we are among the latter, but pretending to ourselves that we might make it all the way from the log cabin to the White House.