democracy

"It is an important laboratory not just for a collection of ideas, plural, but for an idea, singular, that unifies these innovations: the most populist (in the objective sense of the word) democracy in the world. Switzerland answers the potential question of the political scientist or citizen: What happens if we place so much faith in the people that we make them lawmakers? The much earlier experiences with this far-reaching democracy, as in the city-states of Greece, took place without the benefit of advances in communication that make it possible to have popular government without having government by physical assembly. The great dynasties in Europe and Asia... have much experience. But the Swiss have much experience with Democracy. America is great in space... But Switzerland is great in time; a bold experiment sweeping back almost a millennium."

"Every student of political science knows that the American system of government codified in the United States Constitution is not actually a "democracy" as that term was defined in the eighteenth century. In fact, most of the American Founders considered "pure" democracy like that practiced in ancient Athens—where the people ruled themselves directly through votes of a popular assembly—to be a particularly unstable and dangerous form of government. ...despite this aversion to democracy and the absence of a popular assembly dictating policy by majority vote in the United States, American government could be said to embody the principle of "popular sovereignty"... Over the course of the nineteenth century, Americans... increasingly applied the words democracy and democratic to America's government and society. ...By the twentieth century, the term democracy had largely ceased to carry the stigma of mob rule... In essence, the term democracy was gradually redefined..."

"Everywhere, in the commune, the canton, the Confederation, the persistent dominant desire of the people to retain direct control over specific acts of government, and to refuse plenary powers to elected representatives, gives special character to Swiss democracy."

"In the Jacksonian period... American democracy triumphed in theory over all enemies. But real political practice fell far short of true democracy. The new machinery which was devised for Jacksonian democracy [as opposed to Jeffersonian democracy] made the people's rule too indirect. It suited better the secret rule of Privilege. It was particularly fitted for the skillful manipulation of "bosses," the agents of Privilege. About 1900, the conviction grew among political reformers that the first need of our Republic was more direct democracy, with less power in "political middle-men"—direct nominations by the people in place of indirect by bargaining conventions; a direct check upon officials after election by the recall; direct legislation by the initiative and referendum; direct "home rule" for cities, in place of indirect rule at the State capital; direct election of United States Senators; and a direct voice by women in the government. This need of more democratic political machinery was to be met, in the early stages, almost wholly by State action, not by National law. It was fortunate that such could be the case. One State moved faster for direct legislation; another State, for woman suffrage; while those States which did not move in any matter, and which might have had drag enough to prevent any movement in the beginning in a consolidated nation, had at least to look on with interest while their more far-sighted or more reckless neighbors acted as political experiment stations."

"In a free-market economy, the consumer is king: labor unions don't run things, business people don't run things, bankers don't run things, politicians don't run things, but the success of a business depends on how people spend their money."

"The Swiss Referendum and Initiative are sometimes advocated on the ground that they bring back direct democracy in the only manner in which this can be adapted to large political communities. Now, personally, I think the "Referendum" (not the "Initiative," to which there are many special objections) may, under certain conditions, be a useful supplement to (not a substitute for) parliamentary legislation; though we must not expect that an institution which has grown up under the special conditions and traditions of Switzerland would prove equally well adapted to other soils and climates. But I certainly think that no argument for it whatever is to be found in the fact that it means "pure and direct democracy." If history can teach us anything—and it is from the details of history, and not from the wide formulæ of biological sociology that we can safely learn— it teaches that "pure" democracy may be very corrupt, and that it is an unstable form of government unless under the simple conditions of some small thinly-populated country, with a stationary population, not altered by immigration, and therefore tenacious of old habits. At its very best, pure and direct democracy is open to the objection that in many matters it is likely to be excessively conservative and adverse to progress. At its worst, there seems hardly a limit to the folly, corruption, and tyranny to which it may give rise. All government must be government by the few over the many. The only question is, how are the most suitable few to be found? The ideal government must always be" aristocracy," in the literal sense of the term—i.e. government by the best—"the best" meaning not the best scientific investigators, nor the best artists and poets, nor the best generals, nor the best and most pious divines, nor the most eloquent orators, nor (though they may think it) the best and most successful journalists, but the best for the special work of making and administering laws."

"Athenian democracy was different from the much later American form, not only because it was the expression of a single city-state but because it was a direct, rather than a representative democracy. To us, looking backwards, it may seem imprudent to invite all citizens to vote on all major initiatives, but Solon was right to appreciate that no Athenian freeman could allow himself to be left out of anything."

"So long as Vox Populi, Vox Dei, was believed to be an aspect of cosmic truth, the stress of reforming effort was laid upon getting the Populus as big and as powerful as possible, and upon this the Radical doctrine followed, that a democratic franchise meant an intelligent and a progressive state. The doctrine did not rest at the just and proper claim that such a franchise was a necessary condition of such a state, but it related the one and the other in bonds of cause and effect. The error survives to this day amongst the many suggestions made from time to time as to our methods of government. The mechanical reformer is not yet at rest, and his newest discovery is that the representative system has been a failure, and that we must have direct democracy. This is no place to discuss either the representative system and its alleged failures, or direct democracy and its alleged successes; but it is impossible to see from our own experience how the substitution of the latter for the former will have any revolutionary and practical results. For, if the masses were so vigilant, so disgusted with representative authority, so clear-sighted regarding political aims, so interested in the making of the statute-book, as the friends of direct democracy assume, it is difficult to believe that those qualities could be entirely set aside at election times and that public opinion, when it has the opportunity, should show so few indications of that self-possession and independence of thought which we are asked to believe it would show if it voted on the details and not on the principles of legislation."

"There is... a peculiar interest... in surveying the institutions of those countries which in our own time have carried farthest the application of the democratic idea. In this, without doubt, Switzerland leads the way. The practice of direct democracy has been extended there to an extraordinary degree, and the end is not yet."

"The introduction of the referendum in Switzerland constitutes one of the chief victories of the principle of direct government by the people over that of representative government. No one has defended direct government with more power and conviction than Victor Considérant, the advanced republican of 1848, who was one of the precursors of legislation by the people. "When a people," he wrote, "has once assumed the exercise of its legislative will, no section, old or young, rotten or sound, will be able to contemplate encroachment upon it. Divisions will be blotted out and parties united one with another. So long, however, as the people, like an inert mass, is moved by the governmental machine external to itself, which each party can use to impose its will upon the nation, so long will furious party strife, intrigues, coups d'Etat and revolutions remain the order of the day." ...In 1850, a German publicist, [Moritz] Rittinghausen contributed to La Démocratie pacifique articles upon "direct legislation by the people or true democracy," in which the same ideas were developed. Neither Considérant nor Rittinghausen was a prophet in his own country."

"Wolff is logically confronted by a choice between a world of robots subject to authority, on the one hand, and, on the other, a world of human beings subject to no authority whatsoever but responsibly exercising their moral autonomy. … Consequently Wolff fails, as he must, in his attempt to show that authority and autonomy could be reconciled in a state governed by unanimous direct democracy. … In attempting to build the edifice of anarchism on the foundations of responsibility and moral autonomy, Wolff is ultimately self-contradictory. For it is perfectly reasonable to conclude that except in extraordinary circumstances that are rarely attainable in our world, if we wish to maximize autonomy our only reasonable and responsible choice is to seek the best possible state. If a democratic state is the best possible state (as probably few anarchists would deny), then the most responsible way of exercising our moral autonomy is to opt for a democratic state."

"The unhappy conflict in political thinking between representative government and direct democracy, which has been so much a feature of recent political discussion in the United States, is due more than anything else, I think, to a misunderstanding of what democracy means. A genuine democracy is not a mass-meeting, a mob, or a wildcat system of direct nominations. A genuine and efficient democracy must have two elements: responsible and representative leadership and the final lodgment of control over that leadership in the instinct, the common sense, and the conscience of the whole people. When this country was young and the Nation was forming after the Revolution, there was great confidence in leadership, and very little confidence in the good sense of the mass of the people. There were reasons for this which grew out of certain distressing experiences during the critical period of American history which immediately preceded the making of the Constitution in 1789. The Constitutional Convention itself had for a chief object the curbing of what was again and again described in the debates as "the turbulence and follies of democracy.""

"The initiative and referendum are schemes for allowing the voters to make laws directly without using the legislature or asking its advice at all and to veto laws. The old idea was that the voters could not themselves know enough about government to decide policies, but that all they could do was to select representatives who should give their attention especially to government, relieving the voters of the task of bothering about anything except occasional elections of agents. Direct government, however, presupposes that the voters have made up their minds or can make up their minds on all matters, and that the officers whom they choose are merely agents to carry out their will. The system has an educational advantage through the publicity given to every proposal."

"Among the modern democracies which are true democracies, Switzerland has the highest claim... It is the oldest, for it contains communities in which popular government dates farther back than it does anywhere else in the world; and it has pushed democratic doctrines farther, and worked them out more consistently, than any other European State. ...the method of Direct Popular Legislation, i.e., law-making by the citizens themselves and not through their representatives... opens a window into the soul of the multitude. Their thoughts and feelings are seen directly, not refracted through the medium of elected officials."

"The milieu in which creativity can be developed is principally the field of culture, and Beuys starts his sociopolitical program in the area of culture, in order to develop from this special angle the concept of equality as well as of democracy and socialism as a genetic process. ...The primary necessity in Beuys' concept of direct democracy is freedom, meaning that every man should be able to completely realize his liberty, for example, his right to a free and equal unfolding of his personality, as is firmly established as a fundamental law in the organization's statutes."

"We no longer use the word "democracy" as the founders of our government used it, as meaning a government in which the people not only elect officers but make laws by voting. When we speak of democracy in this sense now, we add the adjective "direct"—meaning government by the voters directly rather than by agents chosen for the purpose of discovering and enforcing the voters' will."

"Why direct government has grown in favor. This increase in the power of the voters has been due to two main causes: (a) dissatisfaction with the way that the representatives actually conducted the government; and (b) the growth of a political interest among the voters which makes them want to take more part in government. Dissatisfaction with representative government began to appear early; representatives often would not make the laws for which there was a large popular demand; and they were frequently corrupt, and made laws for the benefit of private persons and corporations by granting them concessions and privileges of all kinds. Owing to the spread of education and the development of cheap newspapers and books, large numbers of voters now think that they can decide many matters better than their agents can."

"The representative system, Mr. Chairman, was not adopted in Massachusetts as a question of expediency. Representative government was adopted, sir, because no direct democracy in the history of the world ever had proved a success, and the framers of our Constitution knew that to be so. They knew that where democracy had been allowed to go uncontrolled, democracy had degenerated in the first place into anarchy, and from anarchy into a despotism. How long did it take the people of France, when they first burst asunder the barriers which had held them in check for centuries, to progress through the stages of constitutional government as laid down by their constitutional assembly and as embodied in the Constitution which they adopted, to anarchy? How long was it after they had established the Commune and other tribunals not properly elected, mere voluntary associations to direct the public effort, before under such domination they confiscated estates, they murdered their King, they killed their nobles, and thus prepared through such a process, the path for a Napoleon? If that example is not sufficient for us and for those who advocate direct democracy, how long has it taken Russia to go from an autocracy all the way through the stages of a popular frenzy in attempting to vote prosperity and happiness into their midst? How long has it taken them, Mr. Chairman, to go through those stages and arrive under the dictatorship which... is to treat those who do not agree with and who do not support this provisional government with the sword and with the bullet? In other words, Mr. Chairman, the advocates of direct democracy cannot point to a time in history or to an illustration in history when direct democracy in a large and heterogeneous community has done anything else than to degenerate into anarchy and to point the way for the despot and the autocrat who has ground those who were seeking liberty under his iron heel. So I say advisedly that the framers of our Constitution adopted representative government not as a question of expediency; they adopted it advisedly in the light of history, because, sir, they had an idea that a body of representative men chosen by the people, meeting annually in election, chosen from among the number of the people who appeal most to the voters as being capable of representing them,—that body so chosen should then meet in a proper form, far removed from the clamor of the market-place, in a higher atmosphere than the disturbing elements which every-day life and contact and attrition have upon the momentary judgment of a large crowd of irresponsible people, that such a body so chosen, sitting in such an atmosphere would be more apt to pass legislation in the interest of all the people of the community, regardless of class, regardless of color, regardless of all of the other handicaps which have retarded the development of particular groups in the community, whether social or industrial, that such a body of representative men, in other words, would be more apt to express in the form of legislation the real, sound, fundamental will of all the people than any other method that could be devised for framing legislation."

"I have no intention of discussing the merits or demerits of the two systems, but the fact that direct democracy is old and our self-limited democracy is new must not be forgotten. When it is proposed to emasculate representative government, as was done by the Third Napoleon, or to take from the courts their independence, it may be a change for the better, as its advocates contend, because almost anything human is within the bounds of possibility, but it is surely and beyond any doubt a return from a highly developed to a simpler and more primitive stage of thought and government. A system of government which consists of executive and people is probably the very first ever attempted by men. Among gregarious animals we find the herd and its leader, and that was the first form of government among primitive men, if we may trust the evidence of those tribes still extant in a low state of savagery who alone can give us an idea of the social and political condition of prehistoric man."

"The number of which the House or Representatives is to consist, forms another and a very interesting point of view... In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever characters composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason. Had every American citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob."

"Direct democracy, made possible by the Internet, does not only relate to popular consultations, but to a new centrality of citizens in society. Current political and social organisations will be dismantled, and some will disappear. Representative democracy, by proxy, will lose its meaning. It is a cultural revolution rather than a technological one, which is why it is often misunderstood or trivialised."

"The characteristic of direct democracy is its deep-seated distrust of representative leadership, and its superior confidence in the instinct, the common sense, and the conscience of the mass of the people. There is no State which I visited in which this modern political tendency can be traced to its conclusion and partial confusion better than in the State of Oregon. Oregon is the native haunt of direct democracy."

"In the future, there will probably be two extremes: Orwellian dictatorships in which people think they know but in reality know nothing because the information they are given has been altered in some way. The other extreme is that of direct democracy, in which everyone participates and everyone is transparent."

"Most of the American State Constitutions depart further from English precedents than do those of the Australian States, for the former vest the elections both of judges and of administrative officials in the people, and many of them contain provisions for direct popular legislation by Initiative and Referendum. Yet as the American States give a veto to the State Governor, and limit in many directions the power of the Legislatures, the Australian schemes of government seem, on the whole, more democratic than the American..."

"To secure approval one must remain within the bounds of conventional mediocrity. Whatever lies beyond, whether it be greater insight and virtue, or greater stolidity and vice, is condemned. The noblest men, like the worst criminals, have been done to death."

"Men are not infallible; they err very often. It is not true that the masses are always right and know the means for attaining the ends aimed at. “Belief in the common man” is no better founded than was belief in the supernatural gifts of kings, priests, and noblemen. Democracy guarantees a system of government in accordance with the wishes and plans of the majority. But it cannot prevent majorities from falling victim to erroneous ideas and from adopting inappropriate policies which not only fail to realize the ends aimed at but result in disaster. Majorities too may err and destroy our civilization."

"The Indian National Congress' concept of nationalism is based on the establishment of a national state of the majority community in which other nationalities and communities have only secondary rights. The Muslims think that no tyranny can be [as] great as the tyranny of the majority."

"Even 51 per cent of a nation can establish a totalitarian and dictatorial règime, suppress minorities, and still remain democratic; there is, as we have said, little doubt that the American Congress and the French Chambre have a power over their respective nations which would rouse the envy of a Louis XIV or a George III were they alive today."

"These pioneering codifiers of working liberal democracy — from James Madison to Mill — were all agreed on the three fundamental pillars standing in the way of either Caesarist domination or majoritarian tyranny. The first was the inviolable sovereign authority of an elected legislature, without whose consent no laws could be enacted or executed. The second was an independent judiciary committed to upholding the rule of law, from which no one including (and especially) the chief executive would be exempt. The third was the sanctity of freedom of the press and all forms of expressed opinion; a principle most majestically articulated in John Milton’s Areopagitica."

"When an individual endeavors to lift himself above his fellows, he is dragged down by the mass, either by means of ridicule or of calumny. No one shall be more virtuous or more intellectually gifted than others. Whoever, by the irresistible force of genius, rises above the common herd is certain to be ostracized by society, which will pursue him with such merciless derision and detraction that at last he will be compelled to retreat into the solitude of his thoughts."

"Critic: Are you trying to say that majority tyranny is simply an illusion? If so, that is going to be small comfort to a minority whose fundamental rights are trampled on by an abusive majority. I think you need to consider seriously two possibilities; first, that a majority will infringe on the rights of a minority, and second, that a majority may oppose democracy itself. Advocate: Let's take up the first. The issue is sometimes presented as a paradox. If a majority is not entitled to do so, then it is thereby deprived of its rights; but if a majority is entitled to do so, then it can deprive the minority of its rights. The paradox is supposed to show that no solution can be both democratic and just. But the dilemma seems to be spurious. Of course a majority might have the power or strength to deprive a minority of its political rights. [...] The question is whether a majority may rightly use its primary political rights to deprive a minority of its primary political rights. The answer is clearly no. To put it another way, logically it can't be true that the members of an association ought to govern themselves by the democratic process, and at the same time a majority of the association may properly strip a minority of its primary political rights. For, by doing so the majority would deny the minority the rights necessary to the democratic process. In effect therefore the majority would affirm that the association ought not to govern itself by the democratic process. They can't have it both ways. Critic: Your argument may be perfectly logical. But majorities aren't always perfectly logical. They may believe in democracy to some extent and yet violate its principles. Even worse, they may not believe in democracy and yet they may cynically use the democratic process to destroy democracy. [...] Without some limits, both moral and constitutional, the democratic process becomes self-contradictory, doesn't it? Advocate: That's exactly what I've been trying to show. Of course democracy has limits. But my point is that these are built into the very nature of the process itself. If you exceed those limits, then you necessarily violate the democratic process."

"The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought. That this should be so terribly apparent in a country whose symbol is democracy, is very significant of the tremendous power of the majority. [...] Evidently we have not advanced very far from the condition that confronted Wendell Phillips. Today, as then, public opinion is the omnipresent tyrant; today, as then, the majority represents a mass of cowards, willing to accept him who mirrors its own soul and mind poverty. That accounts for the unprecedented rise of a man like Roosevelt. He embodies the very worst element of . A politician, he knows that the majority cares little for ideals or integrity. What it craves is display. It matters not whether that be a dog show, a prize fight, the lynching of a "nigger," the rounding up of some petty offender, the marriage exposition of an heiress, or the acrobatic stunts of an ex-president. The more hideous the mental contortions, the greater the delight and bravos of the mass. Thus, poor in ideals and vulgar of soul, Roosevelt continues to be the man of the hour. On the other hand, men towering high above such political pygmies, men of refinement, of culture, of ability, are jeered into silence as mollycoddles. It is absurd to claim that ours is the era of individualism. Ours is merely a more poignant repetition of the phenomenon of all history: every effort for progress, for enlightenment, for science, for religious, political, and , emanates from the minority, and not from the mass. Today, as ever, the few are misunderstood, hounded, imprisoned, tortured, and killed."

"An effective defense of the must begin with an empirically-minded account of its complex inner workings and its surpassing value. Liberal is humanity's greatest achievement. That may sound like hype, but it’s the cold, hard truth. The liberal state, and the global traffic of goods, people, and ideas that it has enabled has led to the greatest era of peace in history, to new horizons of practical knowledge, health, wealth, longevity, and equality, and massive decline in desperate poverty and needless suffering. It’s clearer than ever that the multicultural, liberal-democratic, capitalist welfare state is far-and-away the best humanity has ever done."

"And yet republican America was no more the end of history in the mid nineteenth century than Western democracy was after the Cold War. Liberal democracy as we understand it today in fact only properly took root across the Western world in the early years of the new century. It grew from the same bloodied soil of war, revolution, and economic crisis as its principal competitor ideologies of fascism on the right and communism on the left. The term itself had relatively little traction in America until President Woodrow Wilson roused the nation to war in its name: to “make the world safe for democracy” (he meant safe for America) in 1917. And it took the experience of yet more illiberal regimes and failed democracies—by 1941, there were just eleven democracies left amidst the carnage of the Second World War—before the commitment to combining liberal values and the institutions of democratic equality was reaffirmed amid the “general political fatigue” of the postwar moment."

"Let us confidently declare that is not liberal. Liberal democracy is liberal, while Christian democracy is, by definition, not liberal: it is, if you like, illiberal. And we can specifically say this in connection with a few important issues – say, three great issues. Liberal democracy is in favour of multiculturalism, while Christian democracy gives priority to ; this is an illiberal concept. Liberal democracy is pro-immigration, while Christian democracy is anti-immigration; this is again a genuinely illiberal concept. And liberal democracy sides with adaptable family models, while Christian democracy rests on the foundations of the Christian family model; once more, this is an illiberal concept."

"What modernity requires is not that you cease living according to your faith, but that you accept that others may differ and that therefore politics requires a form of discourse that is reasonable and accessible to believer and non-believer alike. This religious restraint in politics is critical to the maintenance of liberal democracy."

"Manifestly, in August 1914 the status quo of western Europe was about to vanish. Either the liberal democracies would engage in a terrible episode of bloodletting in order to preserve their independence, territorial integrity and great power status, or they would avoid bloodshed by permitting the autocracy and militarism of the kaiser’s Germany to overwhelm them. That is, the alternative to the horrors of this war was not the continuation of the existing order. It was western Europe's abandonment of some of its finest achievements. These achievements derive from its struggles against absolute church and absolute monarchy, and from its endorsement of the principles of the enlightenment: elected governments, freedom of speech and of conscience, respect for the rights of minorities, and at least partial acknowledgment of the notion that all people are created equal and possess the same entitlements to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

"Even in the most liberal democracy the artist does not move with perfect freedom and unrestraint; even there he is restricted by innumerable considerations foreign to his art."

"Liberal democracy has never dared face the fact that industrial capitalism is an intensely coercive form of organization of society that cumulatively constrains men and all of their institutions to work the will of the minority who hold and wield ; and that this relentless warping of men's lives and forms of association becomes less and less the result of voluntary decisions by "bad" or "good" men and more and more an impersonal web of coercions dictated by the need to keep "the system" running."

"In terms of marginal efforts to improve liberal democracy, perhaps one of the best things we can do to entrench better values in our institutions and in society at large is to promote sentiocracy — working to gradually increase the concern for and representation of non-human beings in the political process, and thus to make sentiocracy the future of democracy."

"In a capitalist democracy there are essentially two methods by which social choices can be made: voting, typically used to make ‘political’ decisions, and the market mechanism, typically used to make ‘economic’ decisions. In the emerging democracies with mixed economic systems Great Britain, France, and Scandinavia, the same two modes of making social choices prevail, though more scope is given to the method of voting and to decisions based directly or indirectly on it and less to the rule of the price mechanism. Elsewhere in the world, and even in smaller social units within the democracies, the social decisions are sometimes made by single individuals or small groups and sometimes (more and more rarely in this modern world) by a widely encompassing set of traditional rules for making the social choice in any given situation, for example, a religious code."

"Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy."

"Although the Romans disavowed Athenian democracy, there are many “Roman” arguments for involving the citizenry in political life as deeply as possible. Machiavelli had no taste for Athenian democracy, but preferred citizen armies to mercenary troops, and like Roman writers before him and innumerable writers after him thought that, given the right arrangements, the uncorrupted ordinary people could check the tendency of the rich to subvert republican institutions. That was a commonplace of antiaristocratic republican thinking in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe; it is a standing theme of American populism."

"The contrast between the Persian state—and by the same token the late Imperial Roman, Bismarckian, or modern European state—and the Greek polis is far from the only theme that dominates this story. A familiar contrast is between Athenian and Roman notions of freedom and citizenship. The Athenians practiced a form of unfiltered direct democracy that the Romans thought a recipe for chaos; the Romans gave ordinary free and male persons a role in politics, but a carefully structured and controlled one."

"The key to Athenian democracy was the Assembly, or ecclesia. It was in modern terms legislature, judiciary, and executive, and there was no appeal against its decisions except to a later meeting of itself, or a court that was part of itself. Although its potential membership was 40,000, it operated through many smaller bodies, through courts of 500 members, and in particular through the 500 members of the governing council, or boule, whose members formed the Athenian administration for a year, and the prytany, the 30-strong body whose members formed the managing committee of the boule for a month at a time."

"The other old democracy... the one I teach about... was in Athens. Now Aristotle said democracy means "to rule and to be ruled in turns"... because the system the Athenians set up was designed to ensure that nobody would... cease power. So they took people and... forced them to be political units composed of multiple clans... so different clans had to be together. They couldn't be segregated, and they had a 10 month calendar and every month a different group was in charge. Hence to rule and to be ruled in turns. ...[I]t worked for 200 years. [Much of] our Constitution is based... on the experience of Ancient Athens, of . All of the Founders of this country... were well steeped in the history of the ancient world."

"There is such a thing as fighting the battle of democracy in the front rank too long. It is ever the Aristides experience over again. Everybody remembers Aristides— the sturdy citizen of the Athenian democracy, who was one of the generals at Marathon, one of the victorious captains at Salamis, the conqueror at Plataea, who put through with a punch a very much needed programme of civic reform in Athens, and helped organize the Delian League with the purpose of making Greece a real nation at the time when she was able to be one. He pushed the Athenian democracy to the point of diminishing returns; the people had an attack of fatigue, escorted Aristides to the city gate, and bowed him into the ostracism of silence. That has been the way with democracies. They get over their blue funk after a while. Everbody in Greece is for Aristides now. But he is dead. And it is too late. It is yet a question whether the American democracy has learned its lesson from history so that it knows how to value its Aristides citizens, little and big."

"The Athenian practice had been, even before Plato’s birth, precisely the opposite: the people, the demos, should rule. All important. political decisions—such as war and peace—were made by the assembly of all full citizens. This is now called “direct democracy”; but we must never forget that the citizens formed a minority of the inhabitants—even of the natives. From the point of view here adopted, the important thing is that, in practice, the Athenian democrats regarded their democracy as the alternative to tyranny—to arbitrary rule: in fact, they knew well that a popular leader might be invested with tyrannical powers by a popular vote. So they knew that a popular vote may be wrongheaded, even in the most important matters. (The institution of ostracism recognised this: the ostracised person was banned as a matter of precaution only; he was neither tried nor regarded as guilty.)The Athenians were right: decisions arrived at democratically, and even the powers conveyed upon a government by a democratic vote, may be wrong. It is hard, if not impossible, to construct a constitution that safeguards against mistakes. This is one of the strongest reasons for founding the idea of democracy upon the practical principle of avoiding tyranny rather than upon a divine, or a morally legitimate, right of the people to rule."

"To the extent that they drew on classical governments for inspiration or illustration, the Founders much preferred republican Rome (or even timocratic Sparta) to Athenian democracy. They used the terms republic and democratic republic, or sometimes representative democracy, to describe early American state governments and the new national system."

"Greek democracy was not, in fact, Greek democracy; it was Athenian, or Corinthian. Although the city-state mentality may seem quaintly parochial today, the same issue is still with us."