A realistic normative and positive political theory of democracy should do at least two things: First, it should explain how, despite the advantages autocrats enjoy in command and control, democratic states have historically done comparatively well in providing security and welfare. Next, it should highlight the kind of laws, norms, and habitual behavior to which democratic citizens ought to aspire if they are best to promote their own joint and several flourishing. The prominence of liberal values in contemporary political theory, and of liberal institutions in modern constitutional systems, has concentrated the attention of theorists on the contribution of liberalism to democracy's success and to its aspirations. The goal of this book has been to isolate and illuminate the contribution of collective and limited self-government by citizens in the realization of those ends.
8.1 Theory and Practice
Basic democracy, as illustrated by the thought experiment of Demopolis, is a solution to the puzzle of how, within a competitive ecology of states, a large and diverse body of people might create a stable political order that is at once secure, prosperous, and nonautocratic. The solution is a set of rules facilitating collective and limited self-governance by well-motivated and capable citizens – individuals with reasons to cooperate in political action and the skills to make their actions count. Both in theory and in historical practice, as illustrated by the history of classical Athens, democracy can, under the right conditions, meet what I called “Hobbes's challenge,” the claim that any secure and prosperous state requires a third-party enforcer in the guise of a lawless sovereign.
Basic democracy solves the collective action problem that lies at the heart of Hobbes's challenge by providing individual citizens, who share a preference for nontyranny and have a common interest in security and prosperity, with good reasons to believe that participation costs are shared by their fellow citizens. Because those costs are also construed as benefits, and because democracy can offer high honors to the ambitious, while restraining disruptive forms of self-aggrandizement, democracy addresses problems of psychological motivation that Hobbes raised in Leviathan but failed fully to resolve. It provides citizens with the tools, in the form of procedural mechanisms and behavioral habits, that enable them to respond effectively, as individuals and as a demos, to the challenging and mutable world in which they live.
Because citizens who are able and ready to coordinate against violators are mutually protected against exploitation by the arrogant and powerful, they rationally invest in human capital and share what they know when it may be of value in the pursuit of their common interests. Gains in the stock of knowledge and its effective uses counterbalance the relatively high operating costs of collective self-governance. Epistemic depth and diversity create a comparative advantage relative to autocratic states. The upshot is a regime of limited self-government that provides internal and external security and adequate levels of welfare for an extensive and socially diverse population within a bounded territory. That regime places substantial but not onerous responsibilities of political participation upon citizens. Basic democracy creates adaptive institutions and promotes commitment to political liberty, political equality, and civic dignity, sustaining conditions that in turn enable and preserve the secure, prosperous, and nontyrannical regime.
Basic democracy reliably provides citizens with the democratic good of freely exercising their constitutive human capacities of employing reason and communication to the most significant social ends. They do so through deliberating and making decisions about important matters relevant to their joint and several well-being. Because a basic democracy recognizes political participation as a both a responsibility and a good in itself, it pushes in the direction of civic inclusivity. It requires justification for exclusion of long-term residents of the state territory from the status of citizen. At the same time it requires that citizens be adequately educated in the ends for which the democratic state exists, and in the public means necessary to secure those ends. Because all long-term residents are presumptively potential citizens, the state must educate all of its residents.
A basic democracy may delegate authority for day-to-day government to representatives. It must devise mechanisms that enable the citizens to avail themselves of expertise. But the demos must also remain vigilant against the threat of elite capture of the state. The citizens themselves must be capable of governing in case representatives violate the trust placed in them by the demos. In order to fulfill his or her participatory role in the democratic system, each citizen must have access to education and adequate welfare. Although basic democracy does not, in and of itself, generate a justice-based distributive principle (comparable to, for example, the difference principle of Rawls Reference Rawls1971), it must provide a baseline of welfare and education for citizens and for potential citizens.
Basic democracy sustains the conditions of political liberty, political equality, and civic dignity. It does so reliably, whether or not these conditions are valued by the citizens as ends in themselves, because democracy functionally requires these conditions if it is to sustain nontyranny while producing benefits of social cooperation sufficiently abundant to address existential threats. In the place of autocratic social coordination based on hierarchy, centralized command and control, and ideological mystification, basic democracy substitutes coordinated collective action of highly motivated and rationally self-interested citizens. It does so by employing well-publicized rules (laws and norms) as focal points for the mobilization of citizens in defense of the civic dignity that is the precondition of each citizen having the secure high standing essential for full participation. Dignity in turn helps to moderate competing distributive justice demands arising from freedom and equality, and thus preserves a self-reinforcing social equilibrium.
Basic democracy is legitimate in that it can justify to citizens and potential citizens, through civic education, why they ought to obey democratically enacted rules and why the participatory costs of citizenship ought to be paid by each citizen. Democracy can develop institutional mechanisms and associated behavioral habits that make possible the identification, aggregation, and mobilization of expertise while keeping the threat of elite capture at bay. This enables citizens to judge reasonably well among a variety of policy options relevant to common interests. Authority delegated to representatives remains conditional and revocable, which in turn provides representatives with incentives not to violate their trust. Democracy can, in theory, reliably provide the ends of security, prosperity, and nontyranny for which the state exists, and can provide the first two ends at least as well as can a well-functioning autocracy.
Democracy is not easily realized in practice. A political regime that conformed (within the historically contingent frame) to the ideal type of basic democracy as illustrated by Demopolis was sustained for some six human generations in classical Athens (Ober Reference Ober2008a, Reference Ober2012). Athens provides the best-documented example of a long-lasting and high-performing democracy unaffected by early-modern or contemporary liberalism. Although the Athenians imposed constitutional limits on their own legislative authority, theirs was a direct democracy, without need of elected representatives. Athens was, however, by the standards of modernity, a very small state. For basic democracy to be possible under the conditions of modernity, it must be scalable. Representative institutions address the problem of scale, but create new opportunities for elite capture of government.
The difficulty of implementing democracy is compounded by value pluralism: Hobbes was not being tendentious, even though he was wrong, when he asserted that limited self-government by citizens (along with other forms of limited government) would be incapable of sustaining prosperity and security. It is not surprising that democracy, despite its deep history as the normal form of small-scale human social organization before the development of agriculture and the rise of large states, has been only rarely achieved in the recorded history of complex societies. Although democracy is today a near-universal aspiration, there is also a near-universal sense that it is inadequately realized. Various failed experiments with democratization in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries demonstrate that it is no simple matter to implement citizen self-government.
The intertwined history of republicanism and liberalism in Europe and America (Kalyvas and Katznelson Reference Kalyvas and Katznelson2008), a history which was, by the nineteenth century, further enmeshed with self-consciously democratic theory and practice, makes it more difficult to identify basic democracy in modernity. No modern regime fully exemplifies the ideal type. But at least some modern regimes may reasonably be characterized as collective and limited self-government by citizens, through their accountable representatives. Candidate examples include (but certainly are not limited to) the US in the Jacksonian era of in the early nineteenth century and in the civil rights era of the mid twentieth century; British parliamentary democracy of the later nineteenth century; European social democracies of the mid twentieth century; and the highly pluralistic democracy of modern India.
What of basic democracy today? In contemporary liberal-democratic states, the resort to popular referenda and citizen-sponsored legislative initiatives in both local and national jurisdictions is often associated with pushback by citizens against what is perceived as overreaching by agents of an unaccountable government. The role of independent agencies and representatives can be justified in contemporary liberalism, and is consistent with the idea that the democratic authority of the people is readily and appropriately separated from government. But among the concerns that drive populist politics and/or the resort to directly democratic mechanisms in modern states is a widespread conviction that government is illegitimately dominated by elites and technocrats, who rule in their own interest and against the interests of ordinary people.
Legislative referenda and citizen initiatives seem symptomatic of the antityrannical impulse that creates reverse dominance hierarchy in face-to-face foraging communities and gave rise to democratic government in ancient Athens. In imaginary Demopolis the citizens are capable of governing, and so the occasional resort to direct democracy does not degrade state performance. But the stunted civic education offered by real modern states may be unequal to the task of producing a capable demos. In the absence of adequate civic education, citizens lack the motivation and the skills necessary to govern themselves. In that case, the antityrannical impulse facilitates populism and/or facilitates elite capture, as demogogues and moneyed interests frame the political debate. It fosters unstable perversions of democracy, as opportunistic politicians channel antityrannical sentiment into paranoia and warped nostalgia for a mythic age of national unity and civic virtue. In a worst-case scenario the incoherent interventions of an incapable demos could end in a Hobbesian state of nature. The fear of undesirable outcomes like these has contributed to the rejection of citizen self-government by liberal theorists and political scientists. This book defends democracy by showing how a demos could become capable of governing: how citizens could rule themselves as a collectivity under demanding yet realistically achievable conditions.
8.2 So What?
Sir Moses Finley, an influential twentieth-century Cambridge historian of Greek and Roman antiquity, reputedly used to insist that authors of complex arguments about arcane topics explain the significance of their work with questions that that could be summed up in two words: “So what?”Footnote 1 I imagine this laconic query as encapsulating a more extended challenge in this form:
Suppose we, as critical but potentially sympathetic readers with a sincere interest in the topic of your book, are willing to stipulate that everything you have claimed so far is true. Why should the result be of interest to us? What have we learned? How do your conclusions change the way we ought to be thinking about some matter of genuine importance?
A “so what challenge” to the theory of democracy before liberalism might be motivated by the fact that the practice of democracy was re-established only in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in conjunction with what might be called the “liberal suite” of institutional design principles – including representation, balance of governmental powers, federalism, and the conception of the sovereignty of the people as separate from any given agency of government. Those design principles were developed within a framework of liberal ideas and values, and they arguably have been crucial to the development and persistence of democratic regimes in large, modern societies. So why bother with a theory that seemingly strips from democracy the conditions of its modern possibility and leans on a small-scale ancient example as proof of its feasibility?
I claimed in the first chapter that distinguishing democracy as such from liberal democracy makes sense both analytically (insofar as democracy and liberalism are different things) and historically (insofar as democracy antedates liberalism). But clearing the bar of making sense does not answer the so what question. The remainder of this concluding chapter asks what practical value a theory of democracy before liberalism might have for the implementation and design of contemporary liberal and nonliberal political regimes. Along the way it compares the theory of democracy I have developed in the previous chapters with other contemporary political theories of democracy.
8.3 Too Illiberal or Too Liberal?
As I sought to show in the previous chapters, basic democracy – in the foundational sense of a set of rules for sustaining security, prosperity, and nontyranny – is a genuine political phenomenon. But basic democracy is not readily observed in the contemporary world. This is because regimes come with a superstructure of rules concerned with values; in liberal-democratic regimes, the relevant values typically include commitments to personal autonomy, universal human rights, distributive justice, and state-level religious neutrality. The superstructure may be the point of the regime, just as the above-ground superstructure is the point of a building. But, so I have argued, without a secure political foundation, the regime, like a building, will not stand.
In response to the so what challenge, I propose that basic democracy will be a candidate for a theory of substantial interest if it has the potential to provide a foundation on which either liberal or nonliberal superstructures of rules and norms may be constructed. Moreover, that foundation ought, potentially, to allow for the superstructure to be substantially revised, or even torn down and built anew. It ought to enable that sort of change to occur without destroying the political basis of the state's persistence, under a system of government that reliably preserves the basic ends for which the state exists and on which the citizens can agree. This political robustness at the base allows for high levels of value pluralism among the state's residents, for ongoing disagreement, and for frank and open contestation regarding the moral ends that ought and ought not to be pursued by the state. But it also allows for a baseline of agreement, enabling coordination among citizens.
If it is to support either liberal or nonliberal institutions and norms, the democratic foundation must not be, itself, inherently liberal or illiberal. This means that I must be able to refute two sets of objections, neither of which is, on the face of it, implausible. We may think of these objections as the Scylla of “too illiberal to sustain liberalism” and the Charybdis of “too liberal to sustain nonliberal norms.” The passage between whirlpool and shoals may seem dauntingly narrow.
The first objection is that in the absence of liberalism democracy is inherently illiberal. A political regime is, I suppose, inherently illiberal if in order to exist it requires illiberal conditions – institutions, norms, and behavioral habits. Illiberal conditions may, for our purposes, be defined as those conditions that would be regarded as ethically impermissible by a contemporary liberal or would be legally forbidden in a contemporary liberal constitutional regime. Of course, there is range of views within contemporary liberalism about what is ethically permissible and what ought to be legally forbidden. But presumably any regime must be regarded as illiberal if it depends for its existence on slavery, on a discriminatory state religion, or on political institutions that violate ordinary conceptions of human rights.
Ancient Athens, along with other Greek states, supported slavery, had a state religion, and practiced ostracism. Athens was, in these relevant ways, an illiberal society. The question remains whether Athenian democracy, as a political regime, depended on these (or other) illiberal conditions for its existence. It is often supposed that the answer must be yes. Some liberal political theorists have responded to their nonliberal (or less liberal) interlocutors by accusing them of “polis nostalgia” and by characterizing ancient democracy as inherently illiberal.Footnote 2
There is no doubt that ancient Greek democracies were in fact not liberal in various relevant ways, even if we stay within the ambit of the community of citizens. In addition to the obvious facts of slavery and denial of political participation rights to women and most long-term foreign residents, to which we return below, Athens had a law forbidding impiety. Citizens could be, and were (infamously, in the case of Socrates) tried and punished for failing to meet community standards of piety. Moreover, the Athenian institution of ostracism meant that a citizen could be expelled from the community without a trial, indeed without being formally accused of legally actionable wrong-doing, simply because a plurality of his fellow citizens were troubled by his presence.
If Demopolis, as a model of a basic democracy that can be imagined as existing in modernity, must be committed to those sorts of rules (or to slavery, or monopoly of participation rights by native males) in the sense that such rules are necessary conditions of its existence, then it is, in fact, fundamentally illiberal in the incompatibility sense, rather than being merely nonliberal in the sense of lacking liberal features. If that is the case, it fails one important “so what” test. There is not much reason to think that a necessarily illiberal political regime is likely to be of great interest to people now and around here, when “around here” is defined as the developed western world. In any event, if I cannot answer the “necessarily illiberal” version of the “so what” question, I will not have advanced much beyond earlier, strictly historical, work on democracy before liberalism.
The second objection that, if sustained, would render my project relatively uninteresting, is that, under the large-state conditions of modernity, liberal conditions (institutions, norms, behaviors) are necessary for democracy. That is to say that now and around here – with “around here” in this case being the whole world – there can be no democracy without liberalism. If that is right, then, if it is not simply a category error, nonliberal democracy, whether or not it is illiberal (in the sense noted above), is one of two things, neither of which is of great interest to political theory: Either it is a historical curiosity, the irreproducible product of conditions uniquely typical of a bygone age. Or it is a fantasy, the product of wishful projection on the part of nonliberal theorists.
If nonliberal democracy is impossible under the conditions of modernity, then any modern population unwilling or unable to embrace liberalism is ipso facto denied the chance of living under its own democratic regime. In order to pass the second, “necessarily liberal,” so what test, a basic democracy (one that is not sustained by the special circumstances of Greek antiquity) must be able to accommodate a nonliberal regime, meaning that I must be able so show that (outside antiquity) democracy is not inherently liberal.Footnote 3
If basic democracy were, in fact, necessarily liberal, the Demopolis thought experiment (supposing it is regarded as plausible) would, at best, have produced a thin theory of liberal democracy. In light of the range of rich, deep, and sophisticated theories of liberal democracy currently on offer, a thin new variant is not likely to be of much interest to people now and around here, when “around here” is the developed west. Moreover, it is not likely to be of any interest to people now and not “around here.” By that, I mean the many people in other parts of the world who are strongly attracted to the idea of a government predicated on nontyranny but are not attracted to liberalism (Section 8.5). Some of those people might, under the right conditions, be willing to pay the costs of participatory citizenship. But ex hypothesi they reject value neutrality and/or some other essential piece of the contemporary liberal package.
The practice of ancient democracy was, per above, not liberal in various ways. But might ancient democracy also have been in salient ways liberal? Certain institutional features of democracy in classical Athens do bear a family resemblance to some aspects of liberalism.Footnote 4 While civic dignity is not predicated on universal human rights, it can, so I have argued elsewhere, be understood as a set of “quasi-rights” (Ober Reference Ober2000 = Reference Ober2005a: Chapter 5). Political liberty and political equality, which, as I have claimed, were indispensable for Athenian democracy, are familiar cornerstones of liberal political theory. The development in the direction of a stronger version of rule of law, the background Athenian commitment to impartiality in respect to judicial judgment, and the openness of certain Athenian institutions, in the sense of granting access to citizens and noncitizens alike, are consistent with conceiving of the government of ancient Athens as manifesting features consistent with liberal values.
Basic democracy will not be of much interest to a group seeking a form of nonliberal and nontyrannical order if these seemingly liberal features of Athenian democracy point to a necessary commitment on the part of a basic democracy to value neutrality. If basic democracy turns out to require (in Rawls's terms) that comprehensive commitments to a particular version of the human good are excluded from the realm of public reason, if basic democracy forbids the establishment of a state religion, then it will certainly be too liberal for the purposes of some traditionally religious societies whose residents might seek a nontyrannical political order.
By reformulating the two objections as questions, I suppose that it is possible to move basic democracy beyond candidacy for the status of a political theory of substantial interest. Basic democracy can legitimately claim to be an interesting theory, and thereby answer the “so what” challenge, if it can offer a satisfactory answer to a query on the part of each of the two imagined groups of people alluded to above: The first group says, “We seek to build a secure and prosperous liberal society; how do we go about providing it with a stable foundation?” The second group says, “We seek to build a secure, prosperous, nontyrannical, society that is consistent with our shared traditional religious convictions; to what institutions and behavioral habits must we commit ourselves in order to achieve that goal?”
If the theory has good enough answers for the people in each of those groups, the “so what” question is answered, first, because the people posing those questions are not at all difficult to imagine in the world in which we find ourselves, here and now. That is, there really are people in the real world seeking to stabilize liberal societies and there are other people seeking to create nontyrannical, nonliberal societies.
The “so what” question is answered, next, because democratic theory does not currently have satisfactory answers for the people in either imagined group: Contemporary liberal political theory tends to say to the liberals seeking a stable order: “Get your liberal values right, you will find that stable democratic institutions follow.” If the argument I have made in the previous chapters, to the effect that democracy does, and liberalism does not, have an equilibrium solution in a realistic, large, and socially diverse population of self-interested individuals, that answer is not satisfactory. To the nonliberals seeking nontyranny, the answer of current liberal theory is, “Get the right democratic institutions. Those institutions do bring with them a commitment to certain liberal values, but that ought not to trouble you.” But if that commitment does deeply trouble them, then contemporary liberal-democratic theory has nothing to say to those unwilling to adapt their existing core values to the fundamental premises of liberalism.
Contemporary nonliberal political theory, for example agonistic pluralism, addresses questions that are elided or ignored in liberal theory. But agonistic democratic theory is not aimed at addressing the issues of stability and institution-building that are at the center of the questions posed by the people in my two imagined groups.Footnote 5
Finally, the “so what” challenge is answered if it can be shown that understanding democracy before liberalism has real-world policy implications. A good deal of human misery has attended twenty-first-century policies of “democracy promotion,” notably in the Middle East. Those policies were arguably based on a muddled set of ideas about democracy. American and allied policy makers engaged in democracy promotion, however good (or bad) their intentions toward the people in foreign countries may have been, appear to have had little sense of a distinction between democracy and liberalism, or of the conditions necessary for sustaining citizen self-governance, or of the demands that democracy makes on citizens.Footnote 6
If we think that democratic theory ought to have, but does not yet have, answers for the questions posed by people seeking a secure foundation for a liberal regime, and for people seeking a nonliberal and nontyrannical regime, and for policy makers who must decide how to respond to people holding those sorts of hopes and ambitions, then the theory of basic democracy ought to be of substantial interest even if it can offer only preliminary answers. In the final two sections of this chapter I address certain concerns that I suppose would be raised by people in each of the groups imagined above, if and when they were told, “basic democracy can help you to solve your problem.”
First, the liberals who have been told that they can build a sustainable liberal regime on the foundation of a basic democracy will be worried that a basic democracy's rules will build fundamentally illiberal conditions into the constitutional framework, both at the level of the society as a whole, and at the level of the community of citizens. If this is the case, basic democracy cannot provide a preliberal foundation for a liberal state.
Next, the traditionalists seeking a nonliberal and nontyrannical regime, are worried that collective self-governance by citizens will require accepting the liberal idea that the regime must be committed to neutrality in respect to religion. If those worries can be allayed, for liberals and nonliberals alike, then I suppose the “so what” question has been laid to rest – even though filling out the theory of democracy, in ways that might address other possible concerns of both liberals and nonliberals, remains incomplete.Footnote 7
8.4 A Foundation for a Liberal Regime?
We may test basic democracy as a potential foundation for a liberal regime, addressing the worry about whether limited government is possible outside of a preexisting liberal framework, by asking two questions: First, in the realm of theory: Is there anything in the democratic constitution designed by the imagined Founders of Demopolis that would render it unsuitable as a foundation on which a liberal constitutional superstructure could be erected? Next, in the realm of history: Were the illiberal features of the Athenian political regime essential to fulfilling the ends of nontyranny, prosperity, and security?
In response to the first question, it is certainly not the case that Demopolis's constitutional order will support every variant of liberalism represented in contemporary mainstream political and ethical theory. Given its concern for secure borders and relatively stringent requirements (sketched in the previous chapters in terms of civic education) for the exercise of participatory citizenship, Demopolis is a state, in what I take to be the conventional sense of the term.Footnote 8 It is not a suitable foundation for any version of cosmopolitan liberal order that regards state-based restrictions on immigration and rights of citizenship as inherently illegitimate. Some liberal-democratic theorists have argued for a strongly cosmopolitan world order, and against the legitimacy of national border controls or restrictions on grants of citizenship.Footnote 9 Moreover, given that prosperity is among the ends for which Demopolis exists, it will not answer the demands of global justice theorists who require “down-leveling” wealth transfers from affluent to impoverished countries, such that all persons of the world end up at roughly the same, relatively low (by the current standards of developed countries), state of material existence.Footnote 10
Cosmopolitan and global justice arguments have, however, been answered, within liberal-democratic theory, by political theorists who have made a case for the legitimacy of the state with at least some authority to control access to its territory and membership, and that ranks local welfare above global welfare. These “liberal statist” arguments are explicitly liberal in that they do not rest on claims about special rights arising from nationalism or a historically shared culture. Insofar as the arguments offered by the liberal statists have purchase, it is not, therefore, obvious on the face of it that Demopolis's restrictions on immigration and citizenship, or greater concern for local than for universal prosperity, render it, ipso facto, fundamentally illiberal.Footnote 11
Demopolis will not be a suitable basis for any variant of liberalism that conceives of the demands of within-country distributive justice in terms of the strongest forms of either social equality or personal freedom (Section 6.8). The regulating function of civic dignity requires a substantial level of social services for citizens and thus requires a level of taxation sufficient to support those services. Those requirements are likely to conflict with the justice demands of variants of liberalism that merge with market libertarianism. But civic dignity also limits Demopolis's level of material goods redistribution in ways that will fail to satisfy the requirements of versions of liberalism that merge with state socialism.
These restrictions on the range of liberalism that can readily be supported by basic democracy leave available, however, a very substantial set of liberal social arrangements. These range, I suppose, from the sort of virtue-centered civism advocated by Michael Sandel (Reference Sandel1998), to the democratic republicanism of the recent work of Philip Pettit (Reference Pettit2013), to the utilitarian representative democracy preferred by J. S. Mill (Reference Mill1861), to the experimental pragmatism of John Dewey (Reference Dewey1917), to the anti-elitist “Machiavellian democracy” of John McCormick (Reference McCormick2011), to the decent regime of Rawls's Law of Peoples (Reference Rawls1999), to the overlapping consensus of Rawls's Political Liberalism (Reference Rawls1996), to the deontological justice-centered regime chosen behind the veil of ignorance in Rawls's Theory of Justice (Reference Rawls1971).Footnote 12 If none of these regimes looks, on the face of it, much like Demopolis, it is because what I have called the value-based superstructure has profoundly altered the regime's appearance, and obscures the basic democratic infrastructure.
The civic education that makes it possible for citizens in Demopolis to carry out the responsibilities of citizenship in a capable manner is unsuited to variants of liberalism predicated on a very strong conception of individual autonomy and therefore on strict state neutrality among the ends individuals might choose to pursue. Demopolis's civic education promotes a political preference for nontyranny. It may urge the value of exercising human capacities for sociability, reason, and communication at the highest levels of decision making. It seeks to create a certain character – insofar as character is defined as certain habitual behaviors (notably, defense of those threatened with indignity) based on commonly held beliefs (the badness of inflicted humiliation and infantilization).
On the other hand, Demopolis's civic education is nonideological in the sense of being reality based (grounded in the evidence of history and natural and social science) and revisable in light of new scientific findings. Although it cannot accommodate religious convictions forbidding political participation, it does not otherwise promote any particular attitude toward a divine order. Finally, civic education is nonmandatory, in that there are (albeit costly) opt-out options, both in terms of choosing to be a resident noncitizen (with whatever disabilities that may entail) or to exit the community. Prominent liberal theorists, committed to the general principle of personal autonomy, have defended the right and responsibility of a liberal state to enforce mandatory standards in public education, when necessary overriding the religious convictions of parents. It seems plausible to suppose that a range of variants of liberalism would be accommodated within the scope of the kind of civic education required of citizens by a basic democracy.Footnote 13
Meanwhile, a liberal may be reassured by basic democracy's reliance on the conditions of political liberty, political equality, and civic dignity. While these are thinner conceptions of liberty, equality, and dignity than the liberal will want, they are securely entrenched as necessary conditions, and are available as first steps toward thicker value-laden conceptions. While neither value neutrality (other than specified above) nor human rights are demanded by basic democracy, neither are they blocked by it.
When we move to the realm of history, we see that, while citizenship was a clearly defined status within Athenian society, Athens did not create caste-like conditions in which the lives of all noncitizens were sharply separated from and systematically inferior to the lives of citizens. Recent scholarship on Athenian social history has emphasized the many ways in which lives of citizens and noncitizens were interdependent and interwoven in practice. While citizenship did provide privileged access to certain property rights (notably the right to own land), as well as unique access to voting and officeholding, citizens and noncitizens participated on essentially equal footing in many aspects of commercial, religious, and associational life. Athenian civil law protected noncitizens in various ways. On the whole, access to public institutions tended to become more open over the course of Athenian democratic history.Footnote 14
There is no reason to think that extending citizenship rights to most long-term free residents of Athenian territory would have compromised the security or prosperity of the ancient Athenian polis. As we have seen (Section 2.1), Athens extended citizenship to all those who fell within the limits of the ancient Greek imaginative frame, but the Greek cultural imagination concerning who could be a citizen limited full participation rights to native males and some privileged foreigners. It would be peculiar to think that Athenian security or prosperity depended upon the restriction of citizenship to adult males. Quite to the contrary, there are reasons to think that, had the Athenians been able to think outside the box of their cultural imagination of citizenship, the performance of the state would have been enhanced by extending political participation rights to native women and to those resident foreigners eager and willing to take on the responsibilities of participatory citizenship. The causal arrow from epistemic diversity within the citizenry to effective policy, posited in Section 7.4, suggests that such inclusion would have promoted Athens's state capacity.Footnote 15
The economic contribution of ancient slavery to Greek society is, on the other hand, a vexed issue. Would a counterfactual Athens that had abolished slavery and enfranchised former slaves after the Peloponnesian War (for example), have been more or less secure and prosperous than real-world Athens over the next 80 years?Footnote 16 The argument that the leisure necessary for civic participation was made possible entirely, or even primarily, by exploitation of slaves is weak.Footnote 17 The labor inputs of slaves were of obvious value to the state, but it does not seem beyond the realm of possibility that Athens could have attracted an adequate supply of free laborers without the expedient of purchasing slaves. Given that the wages of at least some slaves were equal to wages of free citizens and resident aliens who were engaged in similar occupations, it is not obvious that slavery in and of itself (as opposed to the labor inputs of noncitizen residents, free and slave) added massively to the overall material prosperity of the community.Footnote 18 Public slaves, serving as expert secretaries, provided some forms of bureaucratic expertise that were very valuable to the state. But it is possible to imagine that free persons (whether citizens – some of whom did serve as secretaries to offices, or resident aliens) could have provided similarly valuable expertise.Footnote 19
It is, nonetheless, possible to argue that these free labor alternatives would not have provided adequate labor inputs and so, without resort to the expedient of unfree labor, Athens would have failed to provide the three ends of security, prosperity, and nontyranny within the competitive environment of the Greek states.Footnote 20 But in this instance, at least, history is not dispositive: Now and around here, in the developed parts of the modern world, machines are our slaves – in that they do much of the productive and burdensome work that would otherwise have to be done by humans, and they do it at a lower cost. Nonfree, slave or slave-like human labor remains prevalent (if officially illegal) in many modern societies, including modern liberal democracies. But under the technological conditions of modernity, it is implausible to say that any sort of democratic regime, liberal or nonliberal, requires slavery for its continued security and prosperity.
Turning to conditions within the community of citizens: There is no reason to suppose that laws mandating religious piety, or allowing for institutions like ostracism, are essential to the functioning of a basic democracy. In the case of Athens, the law forbidding impiety did not, in fact, define piety, leaving it to the majority vote of the citizen jury in each specific case to choose between the accounts of piety offered by defendant and prosecutor. I have argued elsewhere (Ober Reference Ober, Meierhenrich and Pendas2016) that personal responsibility for the public effects of one's own public speech was a central aspect of the Athenian conception of free speech. The conviction of Socrates in 399 BCE is at least in part explained by the belief among his fellow citizens that Socrates was criminally unwilling to take responsibility for the likely (if unintended) effects his own speech. While “assuming personal and legal responsibility for the effects of public speech” does not figure among the central commitments of liberalism, neither is it, on the face of it, illiberal.Footnote 21 The ostracism law remained on the books through the democratic era, but no ostracism was held after ca. 415 BCE. Since Athenian democracy lasted long after ostracism was actually employed, ostracism was clearly not a necessary condition of Athens's democracy.Footnote 22
As I have argued in more detail elsewhere, although Athens never became a liberal state, certain rules established by citizens extended (at least in principle) significant “rights-like” legal immunities to Athens-resident noncitizens: to women, foreigners, and even to slaves. Moreover, as a historical trend, especially in the generations after the Peloponnesian War, the state tended increasingly to publicly recognize and promote the religious interests of non-Athenian and non-Greek minority populations (through grants of public land for religious sanctuaries), and to extend more opportunities for access to legal dispute resolution (at least in certain spheres) to noncitizens.Footnote 23
8.5 A Nonliberal, Nontyrannical Regime?
The second question, above, was posed by a hypothetical group of religious traditionalists. They seek a prosperous and secure form of nontyranny, but reject state-level value neutrality in respect to religion, and perhaps other core tenets of liberalism. Basic democracy is obviously unsuited to any community whose comprehensive beliefs require autocratic political authority. A religious community will not be able to make use of basic democracy as a form of government if their shared views entail granting a politically unaccountable individual or group final decision authority over centrally important matters of public policy (e.g., veto power over decisions made in a democratic assembly, or unaccountable legislative authority), on the basis of those persons’ (putative) special relationship to a divine order. On the other hand, a religious community lacking the requirement that an individual or small group must hold ultimate and unaccountable authority over government could in principle choose to implement a basic democracy. Such a community might establish and entrench a state religion. It might be intolerant of other forms of religious expression. Citizenship might require religious conformity. Such a community would not be liberal, but it would not, ipso facto, be blocked from adopting a regime of basic democracy.
Freedom of political speech and association, along with political equality for citizens, remain essential conditions in a nonliberal basic democracy. Citizens must be free to imagine and advocate new institutional forms, and their collective judgment (as expressed, for example, in voting, whether for representatives or directly on legislation) must determine the community's policy on important matters of common interest. But the political forms of freedom and equality that are essential to basic democracy do not necessarily extend to robust forms of “freedom of conscience,” or to toleration of religious beliefs believed by the community to be false. Autonomy, as it is understood in liberal moral theory, may be quite foreign to the value system of the religious community in question.
Likewise, the form of religion entrenched by a nonliberal-democratic state might be hierarchical, according special social status to some individuals and doing so on the basis of features (e.g., ancestry or “calling”) that are extraneous to civic dignity. So long as the religious hierarchy accords citizens equal high standing in their public role as citizens, so long as they are not subjected to humiliation or infantilization in the course of participating in public action relevant to the collective self-governance of their community, social hierarchy need not be an impediment to the development of democracy. The civic dignity essential to basic democracy is what one experiences in one's life as a citizen; it protects against arbitrary acts by government officials and powerful individuals, but it does not guarantee equal standing within a community of faith.
Citizenship itself might be constitutionally restricted on the basis of conditions that would be regarded as extraneous to political participation by a liberal regime, e.g., gender or birthright. While basic democracy benefits from an epistemically diverse citizen body, it does not require diversity across all parameters that are taken as essential bases of equality in contemporary liberal societies. On the other hand, as we have seen, the political stability, and thus the security requirement of basic democracy, requires that all people who are culturally imagined as potential citizens have the opportunity to seek citizenship via undertaking the requisite civic education. In modernity, it is increasingly difficult for any society to claim that native, adult women cannot be locally unimagined as citizens. Likewise, the restriction of citizenship to those who can claim it as their birthright is increasingly difficult for democratic states to justify. Without a plausible justification, statutory restriction will tend to destabilize the society, thus threatening the end of security.
Basic democracy necessarily guarantees quite an extensive set of civic rights for citizens. It may, also for prudential reasons, guarantee certain civil rights to noncitizens – in the first instance to those whose lives are interdependently bound up with the lives of citizens. In the historical case of Athens, the practice of democracy, the experience of civic dignity by the citizens, the inherent danger to social order posed by arrogant expressions of superiority by the strong, and the recognition of the benefits (economic and otherwise) reaped by the community from the presence in the community of nonnatives, led to the extension of important legal immunities and protections to persons outside the citizenry. But a society adopting basic democracy may elect not to legislate the promotion, or even the active protection, of universal human rights. A nonliberal democracy may, therefore, reject the premise that rights are inherent in all persons on account of some prepolitical feature of the world – whether it is nature, reason, or divine dispensation.Footnote 24
Basic democracy is, therefore, available as a theoretical option for a hypothetical community of persons in search of a nontyrannical and yet nonliberal form of social order. It remains an open question whether it is a practical option for any contemporary real-world religious community. The required conditions of civic participation, political liberty, political equality, and civic dignity place limits on the scope of religious authority. Moreover, the tendency of democracy to generate institutional innovation in response to the challenges presented by a mutable environment may prove threatening to established religion.
Finally, a contemporary basic democracy that restricted citizenship to, say, native-born male believers, would need to compete, not only against well-ordered autocratic states, but against democratic states with more diverse citizen bodies. I suggested in Section 7.4 that the aggregation of useful knowledge (expert and otherwise) dispersed across an epistemically diverse citizenship offers democracy a competitive advantage against nondemocratic states. Any democracy that chose to restrict citizenship along the lines suggested above would forgo a substantial part of the potentially useful knowledge possessed by the wider community, and thereby surrender one part of the democratic advantage.
Looking down the game tree, considering the historical record of classical Athens, and confronting the consequences of adopting a basic democracy, the hypothetical group seeking a nontyrannical and nonliberal form of social order might decide that the costs were too high. Or, having attempted to create democratic institutions that would simultaneously sustain prosperity, security, and a nonliberal social order, they might find that the design problem was insoluble. The point of this section has not been to suggest that it would be easy to implement a nonliberal basic democracy under the conditions of modernity, only that the option is not blocked ex ante as a conceptual possibility.
The goal of this book has been to define a basic form of democracy, to specify the conditions necessary for its existence, and to list the goods that it provides, in theory and historical practice. I have tried to show that it is possible to do so before introducing the normative and institutional apparatus of liberalism – or of any other moralized system of value. Basic democracy will not provide all of the things that most people ask of a modern government. But it answers a central question posed by political philosophy, before and after liberalism: How might we, whoever we are, better live our lives, together?
