SECTION 1

Key Ideas UnderlyingCitizenship Education

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Democracy

Bernard Crick

Democracy is both a sacred and a promiscu-ous word. We all love her but we see her dif-ferently. She is hard to pin down. Everyoneclaims her but no one can possess or evenname her fully. To give any definition for aclass to learn would not be particularly dem-ocratic. To have any open-ended discussionabout possible meanings could be reasonablydemocratic. Perhaps like ‘Britishness’ it ismore a matter of recognizable behaviour overtime than of definitive definition for a precisecurricular moment. Besides, definitions don’tsettle arguments. ‘Democracy’ can suggestcertain institutional arrangements or it cansuggest authorities or individuals behaving ina democratic manner. To some it means thatthe will of the majority must prevail; but tomany others it is simply a synonym for goodor just government – which may some haveto contradict and restrain majority opinion.Not every decision can be judged by whetherit is reached democratically reached or not.BBC news programmes, in the UK, ask lis-teners to send in their opinion on road-pric-ing for motor vehicles or on the provision ofa super-expensive new drug in the NationalHealth Service, but this is an illusion ofdemocracy, perhaps better called populism,not how representative government is best

conducted trying to mediate between opinionand knowledge, majorities and minorities.

A moment’s thought or reading a shortbook could remind us why the concept, whileso important, is yet so often so confusing,even sometimes dangerously misleading(Crick, 2002). Some world leaders recentlyassumed that if an oppressive and intolerantautocracy was destroyed, democracy wouldautomatically follow. But the concept that wetake so much for granted has had, at its best,an essential historical and logical precondi-tion: the idea of politics itself, practiced inwhat we would regard as pre-democraticsocieties; politics as a willingness both tooffer and to accept compromises binding onboth governments and majorities.

Historically ‘democracy’ has had fourbroad usages, each of which can be invokedas the real meaning even today. History is not a dead past but conditions how we understand the present and the future. Thereare no real meanings, only different usages of concepts; some more acceptable thanothers, some less self-contradictory or morecompatible with others. The report that led to Citizenship becoming a compulsory part of the national curriculum in Englandwas titled Education for Citizenship and the

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Teaching of Democracy in Schools (AdvisoryGroup: 1998); but noticeably offered noexplicit definition or even extended discussionof ‘democracy’; rather it chose to concentrateon ‘citizenship’, especially active not just good citizenship, ‘participation’, ‘rights andresponsibilities’.

The first historical usage is found in Plato’sattack on democracy and in Aristotle’s highlyqualified defence: democracy is simply, in theGreek, demos (the many, or more often invidi-ously ‘the mob’) and cracy, meaning rule. Platoattacked democracy as being the rule of thepoor and ignorant over the educated and theknowledgeable, ideally philosophers. His fun-damental distinction was between knowledgeand opinion: democracy is rule, or rather theanarchy, of mere opinion. Even in moderntimes this view has some resonance. BeatriceWebb, a democratic socialist, once said‘democracy is not the multiplication of ignorantopinions.’Aristotle modified Plato’s view ratherthan rejecting it utterly: good government wasa mixture of elements, the educated few rulingwith the consent of the many. The few shouldhave ‘aristoi’ or the principle of excellencefrom which the highly idealized concept ofaristocracy derives. But many more can qualifyfor citizenship by virtue of some education andsome property (both of which he thought nec-essary conditions for citizenship), and so mustbe consulted and can, indeed, on occasion bepromoted to office. He did not call his ‘bestpossible’ state democracy, rather politea orpolity, a political or civic community of citizensdeciding on common action by public debate.But democracy could be the next best thing inpractice if it observed ‘ruling and being ruled inturn’. As a principle unchecked, however, byaristocratic experience and knowledge democ-racy was a fallacy: ‘that because men are equalin some things, they are equal in all’. The citi-zen class in Athens in the 5th century BCexcluded women, the propertyless, foreignersand there were slaves. Citizens were a minoritybut they made decisions by public debate,chose officials by vote or by lot, and hadforcibly resisted and overthrown rule by tyrantsor narrow oligarchies (Farrar: 1988).

The second usage is found in the RomanRepublic, in Machiavelli’s great republicanDiscourses, in 17th century English and Dutchrepublicans, and in the early American repub-lic: that good government is mixed govern-ment, just as in Aristotle’s theory, but underconstitutional law – laws that could only bemade and changed by a special procedure nota simple majority vote. But a democratic pop-ular element could actually give greater powerto a state. The plebeians, the common peopleof Rome, elected tribunes to represent them inthe aristocratic Senate. Good laws to protectall were not good enough unless subjectsbecame active citizens making their own lawscollectively. When Oliver Cromwell at the endof the English Civil War argued in the PutneyDebates for a property franchise, one of hiscolonels, a Leveler, famously hurled back inhis face: ‘The poorest he that is in England haslife to live as the greatest he’ (but beneath therhetoric even Colonel Rainborough believedthat servants, debtors and tenants could nothave the vote because they would lack ‘inde-pendency’, would be in the power of another).The republican argument was both moral andmilitary. The moral argument is the morefamous: both Roman paganism and laterProtestantism had in common a view of manas an active individual, a maker and shaper ofthings, not just a law-abiding well-behavedsubject of a traditional rule-bound monarchi-cal or religious order. But also it was believedthat free citizens would defend their state fromaggressors more strongly and reliably thanprofessional soldiers or mercenaries.

The third usage of democracy is found in therhetoric and events of the French Revolutionand in the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau –that everyone, regardless of education or prop-erty, has a right to make his or her will felt inmatters of state; and indeed the ‘general will’or common good is better understood by anywell-meaning, simple, unselfish and naturalordinary person from their own experience andconscience than by the over-educated livingamid the artificiality of high society. Now thisview can have a lot to do with the liberation ofa class or a nation, whether from oppression or

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ignorance and superstition, but it is not neces-sarily connected with individual liberty. (In theEuropean 18th and 19th centuries most peoplewho cared for liberty did not call themselvesdemocrats at all – rather constitutionalists orcivic republicans, or, in the Anglo-Americandiscourse, ‘Whigs’). In the French Revolutionthe Jacobins turned Rousseau’s ideas into theslogan ‘the sovereignty of the people’ theyspoke of ‘Our Sovereign Masters, the People.’The difficulty was that they exercised sover-eignty on behalf of whom they took to be ‘thepeople’with no clear representative institutionsto check them. The general will could havemore to do with popularity than with represen-tative institutions, the rule of law or individualrights. Napoleon was a genuine heir of theFrench Revolution when he said that ‘the poli-tics of the future will be the art of stirring themasses’. His popularity was such, playing onboth revolutionary and nationalist rhetoric, thathe was able for the very first time to introducemass conscription – that is to trust the commonpeople with arms. The autocratic Hapsburg’sand Romanovs had to be most careful to whomand where they applied selective conscription.

The fourth usage of democracy is found inthe American constitution and in many of thenew constitutions in Europe in the 19th centuryand in the new West German and Japaneseconstitutions following the Second World War,also in the writings of John Stuart Mill andAlexis de Tocqueville: that all can be active cit-izens if they care, but must mutually respectthe equal rights of fellow citizens within a reg-ulatory legal order that defines, protects andlimits those rights. So what is generally meantby ‘democracy’ today, especially in the US,Europe and countries influenced by their polit-ical ideas, is the fusion of the idea of the powerof the people and the idea of legally guaranteedindividual rights. Sometimes this fusion can beconfusion. The two should, indeed, be com-bined, but they are distinct ideas, and can inpractice contradict each other. There can beintolerant democracies and reasonably tolerantautocracies. It may not be helpful to call thesystem of government under which we live‘democratic’ without qualification or pause for

thought. To do so begs the question. It canclose the door on discussion of how the actualsystem could be made more democratic, just asothers once feared – and some still do so – thatthe democratic element can become too pow-erful. For many years the Reverend Ian Paisley,in Northern Ireland, proclaimed it undemocra-tic to stop the majority in an elected parliamentfrom ruling over the Catholic minority. It tookhim a long time to accept such an artificial andimposed political device as power-sharing; andany system of proportional representation is a deliberate check on majoritarian democracy.

Sociologically and socially England is stillin many ways a profoundly undemocratic soci-ety (Scotland and Wales are perhaps somewhatmore democratic), certainly when compared tothe US – but even in the US there is now verylittle active citizenship or positive participationin politics in the republican style of the earlyAmerican Republic. There are some interest-ing but very localized experiments in directdemocracy, local referenda and ‘citizenshippanels’ etc, and of course people vote (albeit inperpetually disappointing numbers) in formalelections; but between elections talk about andactive participation in politics rates far lower asthe most favoured national activity, apart fromwork, than shopping. (Lipset: 1996). But insti-tutionally we know what we mean by callingBritain and the US democracies: institutionalprocedures protected by law and custom allowpublic debate, freedom of the press and freeand fair elections so that presidents, govern-ments and representatives can be changedpeaceably. But that is a different matter tobehaving democratically: treating everyoneone as worthy of equal respect even whenunequal in talent or status. All opinions are tobe respected (to a varying degree) but not allcan be judged of equal worth.

Aristotle said that as part of the good life, tofulfill our humanity, we must enter into thepolis as citizens, into political relationshipswith other citizens. ‘To be political, to live in apolis meant that everything was decidedthrough words and persuasion and not throughviolence … in Greek self-understanding toforce people by violence, to command rather

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than persuade, were prepolitical ways … char-acteristic of life outside the polis.’ (Arendt,1958: 26–27). What we mean by politics andcitizenship has been shaped by the Aristoteliantradition of thought. Politics is an activityamong free men living as citizens in a state orpolis, how they govern themselves by publicdebate. To him the special sense of polis orcivic state was that of a conditional teleologi-cal ideal: both a standard and a goal to whichall states would naturally move if not impeded,as well they might be impeded, by folly, unre-strained greed, power-hunger by leaders lack-ing civic sense, or by conquest. Aristotle bringsout the intense specificity of the political rela-tionship when, in the second book of ThePolitics, he examines and criticizes schemesfor ideal states. He says that his teacher Platomade the mistake in The Republic of trying toreduce everything in the polis to an ideal unity;rather, it is the case that:

… there is a point at which a polis, by advancingin unity, will cease to be a polls: there is anotherpoint, short of that at which it may still remain apolis, but will none the less come near to losing itsessence, and will thus be a worse polis. It is as ifyou were to turn harmony into mere unison, or toreduce a theme to a single beat. The truth is thatthe polis is an aggregate of many members(Barker, 1958: 51).

So politics arises in organized societies thatrecognize themselves to be an aggregate ofmany members, not a single tribe, religion,interest or even tradition. It can be defined asthe activity by which the differing interests andvalues that exist in any complex society areconciliated (Crick, 2005: 3–5). Democraticpolitics are a device for such conciliationneeded in modern industrial and post-indus-trial society. Politics only arises when there isa perception of diversities as natural and a tol-erant democratic politics when that perceptionis widely shared. But historically and logicallypolitics preceded what in the modern world isusually called democracy. Ruling elites in 5th

century Greece and in republican Rome did actpolitically among themselves (democratically,if you like), even while the majority of inhabi-tants were shut out of political activity – justlike in 18th and 19th century Britain.

Not all regimes that style themselves dem-ocratic are democratic in any sense other thanthat a majority of the people accept theregime and may, indeed, be proud of it – aswhen the ‘peoples’ democracies of the formerCommunist world had survived war and werein working order, or in many African, South-East Asian and South American regimestoday inspired (if sometimes deceived by)intense nationalism. It is bad mistake toassume that all dictatorships were and areunpopular, even if in our eyes their leaderssubvert political compromises and individualliberties by appealing to the masses againsttraditional institutions and restraints.

Consider by way of contrast to even the bestdemocratic practices of today a passage froman ancient author that in the 19th and early 20th

centuries ‘every school boy knew’, or so it wassaid; certainly all those who thought seriouslyabout politics – the Periclean oration.

Our constitution is called a democracy becausepower is in the hands not of a minority but of thewhole people. When it is a question of settling pri-vate disputes, every one is equal before the law;when it is a question of putting one person beforeanother in positions of public responsibility, whatcounts is not membership of a particular class, butthe actual ability which the man possesses. Noone, so long as he has it in him to be of service tothe state, is kept in political obscurity because ofpoverty. …

Here each individual is interested not only in hisown affairs but in the affairs of the state as well:even those who are mostly occupied with theirown business are extremely well-informed on gen-eral politics – this is a peculiarity of ours: we do notsay that a man who takes no interest in politics isa man who minds his own business; we say that hehas no business here at all. We Athenians, in ourown persons, take our decisions on policy orsubmit them to proper discussions: for we do notthink that there is an incompatibility betweenwords and deeds; the worst thing is to rush intoaction before the consequences have been prop-erly debated … (Rieu: 1954, 117–119).

But historians now tell us that Pericles wasa populist demagogue, a kind of democraticdictator. And today to say ‘a man who mindshis own business … has no business here at all’would be seen as a dangerous denial of

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individual rights. But, that point apart, the idealis eternally impressive that Pericles had to invoke to persuade and deceive his fellowcitizens.

There is little need to search further if wewant to find the moral and practical basis foran inclusive, just society: Alexis deTocqueville wrote his great book Democracyin America to convince conservative, auto-cratic Europeans that following the ideas andforces released by the French Revolution, thefuture lay with democracy whether they likedit or not. It held a great capacity for humanbetterment, but it could, if there were no internal checks and balances, degenerate into‘a tyranny of the majority’ or a ‘democraticdespotism’. His argument was balanced. Thefamous chapter on ‘The Unlimited Power ofthe Majority …’, which could lead to intoler-ance, conformity and mediocrity, was thank-fully followed by a chapter on ‘CausesWhich Mitigate the Tyranny of the Majority…’ (Bradley, 1945: 254–280). The maincauses were the dispersal of power: the fed-eral system itself and the strength of demo-cratic local institutions. A whole theory ofpolitical sociology emerged stressing theimportance of intermediary institutionsbetween the individual and the state, whatAdam Smith and his contemporary AdamFerguson in the Scottish enlightenment hadearlier called ‘civil society’. If Rousseau hadbeen right to search for some justificationwhy everyone should be a citizen regardlessof rank or education, yet he was wrong tosuggest in his theory of the General Will toargue that all intermediary groups and insti-tutions between the individual and ‘theLegislator’ (his selfless and benign state) aredivisive of the general interest. JeremyBentham had called intermediary groups‘sinister interests’; he was so concerned withsweeping away corrupt feudal and municipalrelics that he seemed not to notice the abun-dance in Britain of more benign voluntarygroups which we might see as the school ofdemocracy.

de Tocqueville, however, saw anotherdanger to liberty that could arise from the

very success of a democratic franchise and acontented people. He pictured democracy as:

… an innumerable multitude of men, all equal andalike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the pettyand paltry pleasures with which they glut theirlives. Each of them, living apart, is a stranger to thefate of all the rest; his children and his privatefriend constitute to him the whole of mankind.

Above this race of men stands an immense and tute-lary power, which takes upon itself alone to securetheir gratifications and to watch over their fate. Thatpower is absolute, minute, regular, provident andmile. It would be like the authority of a parent if, likethat authority, its object was to prepare men for man-hood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them inperpetual childhood … For their happiness such agovernment willingly labours, but it chooses to be thesole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; itprovides for their security, foresees and supplies theirnecessities, facilitates their pleasures …: whatremains but to spare them all the care of thinking andall the trouble of thinking. (Bradley, 1945: 318)

An ideologically conservative view of thefuture welfare state? But it could remind us thatthe downside of one type of democracy, whatwe now call the consumer society and dumbingdown, could be imagined by a political thinkerlong before its contemporary form and force.

Benjamin Constant in a once famous essayof 1820,’The Liberty of the AncientsCompared to that of the Moderns’, drew lessrhetorically a distinction for a democratic agebetween two ideas of liberty:

The aim of the ancients was the sharing of socialpower among citizens of the same fatherland: thisis what they called liberty. The aim of the modernsis the enjoyment of liberty in private pleasures;and they call liberty the guarantees accorded byinstitutions to these pleasures (Gauchet, 1997).

So if we see democracy as simply majoritywill and opinion, we must also see that to resultin good government constrains, whether cul-tural or legal, have to be considered. Moralityis the most general such limitation. Just asAdam Smith saw ordinary morality and trust-worthiness in observing contracts as essentialunderpinnings of a market economy, so a wellfunctioning democracy needs such commonvirtues. And beliefs in ‘the rule’ of law, humanrights and working through established procedures to change laws (rather than

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a president or prime minister simply appealingto public opinion) are parts of any sophisti-cated definition of democracy or necessary limitations on any simplistic definition.

In a modern democracy the politician must,of course, always be aware of the dangers oftrying to ignore strong public opinion. But theymust also be aware of the dangers of simplytrying to flatter and follow public opinion at agiven moment if it appears to be against thelong term public interest or common good. Thedemocratic politician must have the courage tostand up and argue back when the public isbeing urged by populist leaders (whether otherpoliticians, preachers or press lords) to breaklaws or conventions democratically legiti-mated and designed to mediate compromisesbetween the different interests and values thatare characteristic of a modern state and a com-plex society. Pericles had said in his praise ofdemocracy, ‘the secret of liberty is courage’.The great American jurist, Oliver WendellHolmes, a Justice of the Supreme Court, oncesaid ironically, ‘Democracy is what the crowdwants’. He was defending his view of constitu-tional guarantees of freedom of speech underthe Bill of Rights against some repressive but highly popular anti-socialist legislation bya State legislature.

Sometimes democracy is ‘what the crowdwants’, but more often not. Populism can arisefrom the failure of intermediate institutionsand experts to consider ordinary opinion at all;or when a political party, president or primeminister appears to treat the governmentmachine and the institutions of state as theirown property, rather than as a public trust.Populism is when it can be thought plausible totreat the diverse citizens of a state as if theywere ‘the people’, a single entity with acommon will or moral consensus (Crick,2007). Both the broadcast media and the pressare then tempted to present almost any ordi-nary sounding individual (the more ordinarythe better) as if their opinions are typical ofeveryone. Populism is the simplification ofdemocracy. Populism can be stirred – perhapseven should be stirred, on occasion – when a purely pragmatic, purely compromising

practice of politics lacks any sense of vision ormoral purpose. ‘[When] too great a gap opensbetween haloed democracy and the grubbybusiness of politics, populists tend to moveonto the vacant territory, promising instead ofthe dirty world of party manoeuvring the shinyideal of democracy renewed’ (Canovan,1999:2–16). The practices of politics in a democracycan be as difficult as understanding in theclassroom or seminar the different meanings ofthe concept; but as important and compellinglyinteresting to do so.

Nevertheless perhaps the shrewdest con-temporary student of government, theAmerican Robert Dahl, has suggested thefollowing characteristics of the institutions ofmodern democracy: elected representativeswith free, fair and frequent elections; freedom of expression and access to alterna-tive, independent sources of information;autonomous associations, that is citizensmust be free to combine together for a widevariety of purposes – including religion,interest groups and political parties; andinclusive citizenship – that no one permanently resident in a country should bedenied rights available to citizens (Dahl,1991;1999). Perhaps one only needs to addas institutions the independence of the judici-ary and respect for a professional and politi-cally neutral bureaucracy. But it is men andwomen who work institutions and who mustalways decide whether or not to exert them-selves as citizens to breathe into them the lifeof participative democracy.

REFERENCES

Advisory Group on Citizenship (1998)Education for citizenship and the teaching ofdemocracy in schools. London: Qualificationsand Curriculum Authority.

Arendt, Hannah (1958) The Human Condition.London: Cambridge University Press.

Barker, Ernest (ed.) (1958) The Politics ofAristotle. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Bradley, Phillips (ed.) (1945) Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville, Vol. I.

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New York: Knopf. (There have been severallater translations but this still reads best).

Canovan, Margaret (1999) ‘Trust the People!Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy’,Political Studies, 47 (1): 2–16.

Crick, Bernard (2002) Democracy: a very shortintroduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Crick, Bernard (2005) In Defence of Politics 5thedn. London: Continuum

Crick, Bernard (2007) ‘Politics, Populism and Democracy’ in Julio Faundez (ed.) On the State of Democracy. Abingdon:Routledge.

Dahl, Robert A. (1991) Democracy and itsCritics. New Haven and London: YaleUniversity Press.

Dahl, Robert A. (1999) On Democracy. NewHaven and London: Yale University Press.

Farrar, Cynthia (1988) The Origins ofDemocratic Thinking: the invention of politics in classical Athens. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Gauchet, M. (ed.) (1997) ‘De La Libert desAnciens Comparee a celle des Modernes’ inBenjamin Constant Ecrits Politiques. Paris:Gallimard.

Lipset, Seymour Martin (1996) AmericanExceptionalism: a Double-Edged Sword.New York and London: W.W. Norton.

Rieu, R.V. (ed.) (1954) Thucydides, ThePeloponnesian War (tr. Rex Warner) London:Penguin.

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