Politea

A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.

Thomas Jefferson

I’ve seen plenty of posters identifying our American system with the Athenian’s democracy. When defining democracy, or what type of government we have, people tend to get a little confused.

For example, people think that voting makes a country a democracy, when in fact voting was considered undemocratic in the ancient world, as it is considered “mob rule,” or ochlocracy, which is the opposite of democracy. Rather, voting is characteristic of a republic.

In Athens, rather than elections, every eligable candidate put his name in an urn, from which one was selected. It was the Romans who had elections for important public offices, and theirs were notoriously stacked. Elections there were held once a year, so that people from the countryside, large estates mostly owned by the senatus turned nobilitas , and manned by slaves, or farmers who rarely came in, even though their vote comprised the largest percentage of the comitia. Citizens of the city, although numbering about one million, had less representative votes. The 51 states are divided unevenly in the senate, like the comitia. Contrary to popular belief the United States was not founded to be a democracy, but a republic.

An Athenian urn

“In ancient democracy, as now, wealth made a difference to elections; people without money or family connections almost never won elective office in Athens. Because the Athenians wanted to curb the power of wealth, they severely restricted the powers of those who held elected office. So the representative bodies in Athens were filled not by elections, but by a lottery that drew from a large panel of citizens who had met certain conditions, and were drawn equally from the ten tribes (Paul Woodruff. First Democracy: The Challenge of an Ancient Idea. Oxford UP: New York, 2005.).”

In their “Cycle of Governmental Decay,” Polybius, like his amicus, the great republican statesman Cicero, defines a republic as a mixed constitutional system. Composed of three parts, each part left to itself would decay into its opposite. Kingship into tyranny, oligarchy into aristocracy, and democracy into mob rule. Anarchy, or a power vacuuum, just leads to another king, and so the cycle continues…unless, at some fortuitious moment, it is formed into a republic.

In addition to as Plato, both men considered the republic to be the most evolved and ideal form of government – not democracy. Our government demonstrates the same agreement between the three branches of government as did the Magna Carta and our own constitution. Even in Athens, which we consider a top example of a democratic city (besides Rousseau’s mountaintop villages) a number of notable Greeks, including philosophers like Socrates, who disagreed with the Athenian system, proponed a republic as the more ideal system.

However, a republic has many enemies. Foremost, corruption. It is like decay, the anti-republic. Caused by money, corruption can be encouraged by ignorance in the voting populace. In a mixed-constitutional system, where the republic is for the people, by the people, ignorance among the people allows corruption into the republic, encouraging avarice into the senate, and can cause the republic to fall.

Even as our collective consciousness continues to evolve, we have hardly begun to comprehend our own systems.

“It is her spirit, customs and constitution that we are bound first to learn, both because she is the motherland of all of us, and because we must needs hold that wisdom as perfect went to the Establishment of her laws as to the acquisition of the vast might of her empire.” -Cicero, De Oratore, I. xliv. 196

Originally posted 2007-05-16 12:18:19. Republished by Old Post Promoter