Limits to democracy.

As its Greek name suggests, democracy is an ancient idea. But it is only a recent ideal. Greek writers either warned against democracy, or regarded it as simply one among many forms of political order, and not intrinsically preferable to its competitors. True, the Athenian democracy was a source of wonder and admiration--at least to Pericles and his faction. But it was a system of government far removed from anything that would be called democracy today, and not only because women, slaves, and metics--who between them constituted some 80 percent of the population--were disenfranchised. The Athenian democracy was confined to the narrow territory of a city-state; every citizen was known personally or by reputation to every other, and the issues put to the vote included many--such as ostracism--which would nowadays be ruled out as an invasion of individual rights. It was not until the Enlightenment that philosophers began to consider democracy as an ideal, and to criticize existing regimes for falling short of it. Even so, there was no agreement as to what the ideal consisted in. The hot air that fanned the French Revolution was full of the word "democracy" almost always used as though synonymous with equality. But serious reflection on the conditions of popular sovereignty was almost entirely lacking, as anybody who studies the puerile speeches of Saint-Just, Robespierre, and Sieyes, or the rhetoric of their fellow-traveler Tom Paine, will soon discover.

Unlike the French Revolution, the American Revolution led to a constitution designed both to permit democratic government and to restrain it in the interests of freedom. This constitution was based on a realistic view of human nature, a detailed study of institutions, and a wise assessment of the lessons of European history. It arose from an act of rebellion, but it was a gesture of obedience: to law, to custom, and to God. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was not an act of obedience but an act of defiance. The Declaration did nothing to define the offices of state or to make their incumbents accountable. It issued from the same hot air machine that produced Robespierre's "despotism of liberty" and poured abundant rights on the citizens while doing nothing that would enable them to claim, still less to enforce, them. Its effect was to delegitimize government in all its existing forms and to glamorize rebellion as the natural condition of mankind.

The Founding Fathers had absorbed the lesson taught by Hobbes and Hume, which is that freedom is not the opposite of government but a particular form of it. In a state of nature we are not free but frightened, and only in the shelter of legal order can we make plans for the future and choose freely between them. Only in society do we become what we truly are: autonomous agents, each with a life of his own. The Constitution enshrined this truth, by guaranteeing both the authority of government and the sovereignty of the individual.

Looking back on that experiment from our modern vantage point, we are apt to see the American Constitution as a great beginning and to forget that it was also a culmination. Constitutions are not pieces of paper on which armchair philosophers have scribbled their thoughts. They are rules for the government of a community already shaped by history and custom into a posture of obedience. The community that the Founding Fathers inherited was one formed by the Protestant religion and the common law. The American people had acquired habits of self-reliance and accountability that made it wholly natural to suppose them capable of governing themselves. The Constitution was an enabling instrument, which permitted them to complete the project begun centuries before in England, when it was recognized that it was not the king who makes the law but the law that makes the king.

In other words, the democracy established by the American Constitution was not the beginning of a new order of things, but the final step along a path that had begun in the Anglo-Saxon moots. This path led through conflicts, trials, and legal discoveries to its culminating point, when the distinction between sovereign and people was finally abolished--or rather, not abolished, but discovered not to exist. "We the people" made this Constitution, and "we the people" now submit to it.

It is important to bear those points in mind when considering the democratic project today. There is a tendency among Americans to believe that people need only be offered democracy in order to embrace it. In other words, there is a tendency to believe that democracy is the default position of human societies, the position to which they revert when all usurpers and tyrants are removed from power. This seems to me to be a radical misreading of history. The lesson of the French, Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cambodian revolutions, of the English civil war, and countless other depressing episodes is that the true default position of mankind--the position to which all communities revert, when institutions crumble--is tyranny. Democracy is the last stage of a long process of attrition, a steady wearing down of the claims of personal charisma, creedal authority, and dynastic right, ...