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
Your point that the US is a republic more on the model of Rome than a democracy more on the model of Athens is well taken. But this was not the case at the inception of the revolution in 1775 nor at the promulgation of independence a year later. The original United States was more liken to Greece than to Rome. The diverse communities that fought the revolution had formed a confederation in order to foster a cohesive struggle against the Crown. It was not, I believe, their original intention to submerge their sovereignty under a unitary authority to replace the Crown, though it was undoubtedly the intention of some of the citizenry.
The long war against the British ended in 1781; a treaty of peace was signed in 1783; The constitution was not ratified until 1787; the government operating under that constitution, did not sit until 1789 and the last of the original colonies did not ratify it until more than a year later. George Washington, who was not the first president of the United States but was first president of the American republic, did not take office until 1789, 13 years after independence was declared.
For well over a decade, the country had been governed under the Articles of Confederation, a plan of governance that gave more power to the states than to a central authority. The struggle between the federalists, who supported a strong central government, and the anti-federalists, who supported strong local governments can be looked at as a struggle between those who wanted a Roman model and those who wanted a Greek one.
The Roman model won out. The upper branch of the new legislature was called the senate. Senators under the original constitution were not elected by the citizenry but appointed; a system that stayed in place until the early twentieth century. The official seal of the US Senate bears a pair of crossed fasces lictoriae, symbols of Roman Imperium. Those are indications that it was the Roman Republic and not Athenian democracy that the formers of the new government saw as their historical antecedent.
I believe that with the advent of the US Constitution, the US became a republic and any talk of democracy entered the realm of platitude to be rolled out like its gaudy national banner at pompous patriotic events. Thomas Paine, theoretician of the American revolution whose inflammatory pamphlet, Common Sense sold 120,000 copies in the colonies, said of George Washington, “I do not know whether you have lost your principles or that you never had any” when he realized that the American revolution had been hijacked by an elite.
Parallels between Rome and the US are not new. From early days through nineteenth century territorial expansion into the current time, I believe you will find more academic discussion about a Rome-like republic devolving into an empire than you will about the US as an Athenian-like democracy. And those discussions often seem to revolve about the romanticization of New England town meetings.
And even more ominous for the future, with the rise of the christian right, the US may be doomed to follow the Roman model even further. As it dissolved from an empire into the roman catholic church, will the US become a theocracy spreading its gospel by the sword as it attempts to subjugate the heretics?