DEMOCRACY AND REPUBLIC
The Republic and Mixed Government
Polybius spent some seventeen years in Rome as a hostage. This experience inspired his interest in the growth of Roman power, which Polybius saw as part of a cycle of the rise and fall of great powers. Every powerful empire or country is doomed to decline, Polybius said, for both history and nature tell us that no human creation lasts forever. Still, some hold their power far longer than others, and Polybius thought the example of Rome helped to explain why this is so.
The key to Rome’s success, Polybius argued in his Histories, was its mixed government. This was not an entirely new idea—Plato had hinted at it, as had Aristotle in his discussion of the polity—but Polybius developed it more clearly than his predecessors. The Roman Republic was a mixed government, he said, because neither one person (monarchy), nor the few (aristocracy), nor the many (democracy), held all the power. Instead, the republic mixed or balanced these three regimes in a way that provided the benefits of each form while avoiding its defects. Rather than give all power to one person, or a few people, or the common people, in other words, the Roman Republic divided power among the three. Thus, the people as a whole exercised some control over policy-making through their assemblies—at least the free, adult males did—but so, too, did the aristocrats, who controlled the Senate. Then, in place of a monarch, the republic relied on consuls to put the policies into effect. In this way, Polybius said, no group was able to pursue its own interest at the expense of the common good. Each kept watch over the others, and the result was a form of government that was free, stable, and long-lasting. Like an alloy that is stronger than any one of the metals that make it up, a mixed government, Polybius believed, will prove more durable than any “pure” or unmixed form of rule.
A republic, then, was a form of popular government, but its defenders insisted that it not be confused with a democracy. Democracy promoted vice—the self-interested rule of the common people—while a republic promoted virtue. Republican virtue (in Latin, virtus) was the ability of an individual to rise above personal or class interest to place the good of the whole community above one’s own. Only active citizens could achieve and exercise this virtue, republicans argued. Such citizens would be eager to exercise their liberty, yet wary of any person or group who might try to seize power. Mixed government served both these purposes by encouraging some degree of popular participation in government while making it difficult for anyone to acquire enough power to threaten liberty and the common good.
Within 100 years of Polybius’s death, however, the Roman Republic had given way to the Roman Empire. Beginning with Julius Caesar (100–44 BCE), a series of emperors drained the power from Rome’s republican institutions and concentrated it in their own hands. Almost 1500 years would pass before the republican ideal was fully revived in the city-states of northern Italy during the Renaissance. Another 400 years would pass before the democratic ideal itself was revived.
Christianity and Democracy
There were, of course, many significant developments in the intervening years, perhaps the most significant being the rise of Christianity. In some respects Christianity seems a natural ally of democracy, for it proclaims that every person, regardless of gender, nationality, or status, is a child of God. By the standards of the ancient world, certainly, Christianity stood for radical equality. Rich or poor, slave or free, citizen or alien, Greek, Jew, or Roman, woman or man—none of these differences really mattered, the Christians preached, because all are equal in the eyes of God.
We might expect, then, that the early Christians would argue that everyone should have an equal voice in government. But they did not. This was not because the early Christians were antidemocratic but because they were antipolitical. Christians believed that life on earth is a preparation for the coming kingdom of God, an often painful pilgrimage to the Christian’s true home in heaven; so by themselves the affairs of this world have no true value or lasting significance. Many early Christians also believed that the end of the world was near. These beliefs led some to take a lawless attitude. The common or orthodox position with regard to the law, however, was that Christians are obligated to obey human laws and earthly rulers. As St. Paul stated, “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore he who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.”7 Where politics was concerned, in other words, the Christian message was simply to obey those in power and seek no power yourself.
Matters could not remain so simple, however, particularly when various Roman emperors sought to destroy this new and (to their eyes) dangerous religion. Matters became even more complicated when, in the fourth century AD, Christianity survived the persecutions to become the official religion of the Roman Empire. Then, following the collapse of the Roman Empire around AD 500, the Christian Church became the dominant institution in Europe. It remained so throughout the period we know as the Middle Ages—roughly AD 500 to AD 1400. With the disintegration of the empire, the church itself gradually divided into two wings: the Eastern Orthodox Church, led by the Byzantine Emperor, who ruled from Constantinople (now Istanbul); and the Roman Catholic Church, headed by the Bishop of Rome, who came to be known as the Pope. The rise and rapid spread of the Islamic faith throughout the Middle East, across Northern Africa, and into Spain in the seventh and eighth centuries also meant that much of the Mediterranean world was lost to Christianity. Yet the Roman Church saw itself as the one true church—“catholic” means “universal”—and it preached its message and enforced its doctrines wherever possible.
The Roman Church provided the spiritual bond that united most of Western and Central Europe throughout the Middle Ages. Yet there was no comparable political bond. The collapse of the Roman Empire had brought a return to localism, although not of the Greek city-state variety. There were some independent city-states in the Middle Ages—Rome, for instance, where the Pope ruled—but more common varieties of local rule developed around tribal loyalties or the old military regions of the fallen empire. This happened, in the latter case, as some regional commanders of the Roman army managed to keep their forces together and their regions secure even as the empire crumbled. From these duces and comites, who found themselves governing their territories as best they could, came the “dukes” and “counts” of the Middle Ages.
There were occasional attempts to revive a more nearly universal political bond in the form of a new empire, the most notable beginning on Christmas Day in the year 800, when Pope Leo III placed a crown on Charlemagne, king of the Franks, and proclaimed him emperor. Despite repeated efforts over the centuries, however, the new Holy Roman Empire never achieved the power and stature of the old; as the philosopher Voltaire later quipped, it was “neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” Local ties and loyalties simply proved stronger than the desire for a politically united Christendom.
These local ties and loyalties also encouraged feudalism. This form of social organization, rooted in the need for protection from marauding Vikings and Magyars, led to a great emphasis on “status,” that is, one’s station or position in society. A few people were aristocrats or nobles, some were free, and a great many more were serfs— peasants who lived and worked in bondage to an aristocrat in exchange for protection. According to the medieval ideal, every person occupied a rank or station in society and was expected to perform the duties and enjoy the privileges of that rank or station. In this way everyone supposedly contributed to the common good, just as every bee in a hive does what is best for all by performing its own strictly defined duties. In such a society, there was little room for the democratic ideal. The outlook began to shift with the Renaissance, however, as a renewed concern for human achievement led to a revival of republicanism.
Renaissance and Republicanism
In the late Middle Ages, particularly in the thirteenth century, several developments prepared the way for the Renaissance (or “rebirth”). One of these was Western civilization’s renewed contact with the East. This contact came about partly through the Crusades—that is, the attempts to recapture the Christian holy land of the Middle East from the “infidel” Muslims—and partly through dealings with Islamic Spain, which Muslims had conquered in the early 700s. As so often happens, contact with strange people and different cultures stimulated many in the West to examine their own customs and beliefs. The discovery that other people live quite satisfactorily in ways very different from what one has always assumed to be the natural and only reasonable way to live is often unsettling and disturbing. But it can also encourage creativity, as people begin to see that it is possible to live in different, and perhaps better, ways. This happened most directly as Christian scholars rediscovered, through Spain, many works of ancient scholarship that had been lost to the West since the collapse of the Roman Empire. The most significant of these in political terms was Aristotle’s Politics, which was translated into Latin in 1260—but only after the Church convened a committee of scholars to determine whether the “pagan” philosopher’s ideas were compatible with Christianity.
A second development preparing the way for the Renaissance was the revival of the self-governing city-state in Italy.8 Many Italian cities enjoyed a measure of independence before the thirteenth century, but they remained subject to the Germanic head of the Holy Roman Empire. After years of struggle, they seized the opportunity presented by the death of Emperor Frederick II in 1250 to become self-governing city-states. Even as empire and monarchy were the predominant forms of rule, the citizens of these city-states looked for a way to justify their “new” form of government. They found this justification in the ancient theorists of republicanism
These and other developments led to the flowering of Western culture in the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries that scholars of that time took to be a renaissance— a rebirth or revival that began in the Italian city-states. Under the inspiration of the ancient philosophers, they concluded that life on earth is not simply a vale of tears, a wearisome journey that the Christian must take on his or her way to the kingdom of God in heaven. On the contrary, life on earth, so rich and diverse, is not only worth living but worth living freely and fully. For human beings are capable of many wondrous things—not the least of which is self-government.
Drawing on the writings of Aristotle and Polybius and the examples of the ancient republics of Rome and Sparta, the Renaissance republicans argued for a revival of civic life in which public-spirited citizens could take an active part in the governance of their independent city or country. The key concepts in this republican discourse were liberty, virtue, and corruption. Nowhere were these concepts deployed more sharply and effectively than in the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli.
Machiavelli (1469–1527) was a prominent official in the republic of Florence in 1512 when the Medici family overthrew the republican government and installed themselves as rulers of the city-state. Implicated in a plot to overthrow the Medici and restore the republic, Machiavelli was arrested, tortured, and banished to his family estate in the countryside. While in exile, he wrote two books. The better known of the two is The Prince, the small book in which Machiavelli apparently instructs princes and petty tyrants to put conscience aside and do whatever it takes—lie, steal, even murder—to stay in power. Indeed, Machiavelli became so notorious that Shakespeare later referred to him as “the murderous Machiavel.”9 Even today we sometimes call a cunning and unscrupulous person “machiavellian.”
Whether this is a fair reading of Machiavelli’s purposes in The Prince is something scholars continue to debate.10 But it definitely does not capture Machiavelli’s purposes in his second, longer book, the Discourses. In this book Machiavelli makes clear his distrust of princes as he analyzes the factors that promote the longevity of a vital, virtuous, and free form of government—the republic.
For Machiavelli, a republic is a mixed government in which no single class rules. Instead, all classes share power as each checks the potential excesses of the others. It is a system of government in which vigilant citizens jealously guard their liberties against the threat of domination by would-be tyrants in their midst. For liberty, as Machiavelli understands it, is self-government; it is something found not in private life but in public action. But why must citizens be vigilant? Because as soon as they become complacent and indifferent to public affairs they will find a tyrant waiting to relieve them of the burden of self-government and deprive them of their liberty. Thus, Machiavelli insists that the greatest enemies of free government are complacent and self-interested citizens.
Such citizens care more for money and luxury than for the commonwealth. The
love of wealth, luxury, and ease, together with a corresponding indifference
to public affairs, is what Machiavelli calls “corruption.” To keep
corruption at bay, citizens must possess and exercise “civic virtue.” That
is, they must be attentive and alert to public affairs, always striving to
do what is best not for themselves as private persons but as public-spirited
citizens acting in the best interest of their republic. If citizens are to
be “virtuous,” then, they must be free—free to assemble, to argue among
themselves, to expose corruption, and to criticize their leaders and one
another. If citizens neither enjoy nor exercise these essential liberties,
their republic is doomed to an early death and to be replaced by a
tyranny.
According to Machiavelli, the greatest danger a republic faces is that it will be destroyed from within by corruption. But because foreign enemies are also likely to threaten republics, a genuinely free republic must also require all able-bodied males—and only males could be citizens—to be members of a citizen militia, prepared to take up arms against any external threat to their liberty.
Above all, Machiavelli maintained that a free government must be ruled not by the whim or caprice of any person or persons, or even of the majority of citizens, but by law. A truly free government is a government of laws, not of men. A government of laws is more consistent, more concerned with fairness, than a government of men. More important, laws are impersonal. We can depend on the laws without losing our independence. When we depend upon individual people or even a majority of men, we are subject to their will—and this can hardly be called liberty. This is why Machiavelli, like Aristotle long before him, considered pure democracy a bad form of government while regarding a mixed constitutional republic as the best form.
A mixed government, a virtuous citizenry, the rule of law—these were the republican ideals of Machiavelli’s Discourses. If much of this sounds familiar, it is because this vision inspired the Atlantic republican tradition—a way of thinking about politics that spread from Italy to Great Britain in the seventeenth century, and from there to Britain’s American colonies in the eighteenth.11
Political Ideologies and the Democratic Ideal (9th Edition) 9th
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