One might have hoped that the December 2023 Reith Lectures on BBC Radio 4 by Ben Ansell – Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions at Oxford University – would have produced some in-depth analysis of our political system.
Sadly, however, this was not the case. It did not start well when he blithely used the term ‘liberal democracy’ without any attempt to define what he meant by this.
Did he mean social or political liberalism? If the latter then he excluded communitarians who believe that the fundamental political unit is not the individual but the collective from which the individual may emerge in a facilitating society.
There was no mention of the tension between the representative republic that the founding fathers of the American constitution thought they were creating and democracy as it was practiced by the ancient Athenians (the exclusion of slaves and women notwithstanding) or how that tension has been papered over.
James Madison, one of the main characters in the Constitutional Convention, is quoted in John Dunn’s Democracy: A history (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005, pp 74-75) that the republican system he sought entailed the ‘total exclusion of the people, in their collective capacity, from any share in the American government’ (emphasis in the original).
But the fact that there is a tension at all between ‘representative’ and ‘democratic’ government has been virtually forgotten – an amnesia not helped by Prof Ansell’s lectures.
What is ‘Representative Democracy’?
In Political Actors: Representative Bodies & Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2002), Paul Friedland writes of post-revolutionary France:
“Representative democracy…was from its inception a contradiction in terms, for the basic reason that a true democracy precluded representation.” (p11)
Some argue that it was Maximilien Robespierre who in 1790 invented the term ‘representative democracy’ when he stated that the Revolution should aim to establish ‘a democratic or republican government; these two words are synonyms’. (cited in William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989, p272). (These references appear in an article by Katlyn Marie Carter, the reference for which cannot be found).
In Systemic Corruption Camila Vergara quotes Hannah Arendt as writing that:
“The combination of representative institutions and individual rights, conceived as restraints on the power of government, yielded a framework in which politics was reserved for the few while the many enjoyed freedom from politics.”
(On Revolution, p272, cited in Systemic Corruption: Camila Vergara, Princeton University Press, 2020, p205).
Vergara adds:
“Representation is for Arendt what distinguishes modern republics from democracies. In a constitution based on representative government, individual citizens may wield – mainly through the vote – only negative powers, which ‘claim not a share in government but a safeguard against government’ (ibid, p206).
Indeed, both Arendt and Vergara see: ‘representative government not as deficient form of popular government, but as a form of oligarchy’. (ibid, p207).
In his book The Next Revolution (Verso, 2015) the anarchist turned communalist Murray Bookchin drew a distinction between statecraft and politics.
“Indeed, the Left has repeatedly mistaken statecraft for politics by its persistent failure to understand that the two are not only radical different but exist in radical tension – in fact opposition – to each other.
“As I have written elsewhere, historically, politics did not emerge from the state –an apparatus whose professional machinery is designed to dominate and facilitate the exploitation of the citizenry in the interests of the professional class. Rather, politics, almost by definition, is the active engagement of free citizens in the handling of their municipal affairs and in their defense of its freedom.” (p11)
Bookchin argues for a reversal in the power structure in which human potential occurs in the ‘fully democratic municipality, the municipality based on face-to-face democratic assembly composed of free citizens, for whom the word politics means direct popular control over the community’s public affairs by means of democratic institutions’.
And to avoid undue parochialism, the municipalities would send deputies to a ‘vigorous confederation of municipalities’.
Vergara herself draws on the mistakes of Lenin in aggregating power into the hands of the vanguard party, which then failed to lead to the emancipation of the many in the grinding authoritarianism of Stalinism.
She writes:
“Plebeian institutions allowing for the direct participation of all adult residents in deliberation and public judgement are foundational to free government; equal liberty for all residents cannot be guaranteed without them.”
However, given the almost universal belief that what we have got is democracy without remainder, it seems to be an almost impossible aspiration. And Vergara acknowledges this but concludes:
“Even if a constituent process from below, without the support of virtuous leadership and legal power of the executive branch to institutionalize plebeian assemblies, would be extremely difficult to pull off, self-constitution and plebeian new beginnings are certainly not impossible.”
What do Prof Ansell’s lectures add to this body of work?
The problem with Prof Ansell’s lectures is that he assumes throughout that what we have is ‘democracy’ rather than, as argued in this article, a different kind of government that should be called ‘representative government’, not democracy. In his first lecture he identifies apathy, polarisation, and the misuse of technology as the three main threats to the current system.
And he spends three paragraphs promoting the idea of ‘citizens’ assemblies’. But, again, he does so assuming that they are an improvement on our ‘liberal democracy’ rather than the introduction of democracy proper into representative government. He also promotes proportional representation, which is a valid move, but without any understanding that this is simply an extension of an already flawed system.
The next three lectures investigate ‘security’, ‘solidarity’ and ‘prosperity’ during which he makes valid arguments for promoting and protecting them all – but they are all founded on the flawed assumption that we are protecting democracy. Our form of government is much preferable to out-and-out dictatorships but, as argued in this article, its link to democracy proper is problematic and Prof Ansell did nothing to resolve this tension.
How does this play out in practice?
As usual the gulf between academic aspirations of thinkers like Vergara and activist realities is huge. In Salisbury the Salisbury Democracy Alliance has been trying to establish just one citizens’ jury in the city, but so far without success. However, a start would be to constantly remind people of the tensions that exist in our current system – and it would help if mainstream academics like Prof Ansell at least attempted some analysis of the situation.
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