which wealth was created and distributed. The market seemed to have its own economic laws, independent of politicians and the state. In reality, the role of government was central. Its coercive hierarchy determined the rules of the market and stood in the wings ready to defend (and often expand) the growing inequalities of wealth, domestically and internationally. The evolution of the modern state is bound up with the fulfilment of this function. For instance, the need to finance astronomically costly wars played a vital role in shaping core institutions such as efficient tax-collecting bureaucracies, bond markets, stock exchanges and central banks.
Political struggles determine whose interests the governing hierarchy upholds and whose it ignores – what is permitted and what is not. Shifts in power are complex affairs, impacted by technological innovation, cultural change, popular resistance and war. Groups who benefit from these shifts can use the coercive apparatus to modify the ‘rules of the game’, consolidate their advantage and exert greater influence over the surplus. Social change can be fraught with contradiction, and usually unfolds over long periods of time, but gradually it has produced profound changes in how, and in whose interests, society is organised.
For thousands of years, states were ruled by unaccountable elites. In the age of the Enlightenment, revolutionary energy was unleashed and society transformed. The rise of electoral democracy opened up radical possibilities; it was a chance for the disadvantaged majority to take back control of government, and for the vast productive powers of humanity and the wealth created by them to be freed from the grasp of monarchs, emperors, merchants and industrialists, and placed in the hands of ‘the people’. In other words, the rise of democracy threatened to revolutionise – through social rather than technological change – the way wealth was produced, distributed and controlled. At least, that is what many hoped for and, of course, some feared.
The roots of the word ‘democracy’ – demos, meaning ‘people’ and kratos, meaning ‘rule’ – convey what appears to be a simple concept: rule of the people. But what it really means and how it should actually work has long been debated. Who are ‘the people’ and what does it mean ‘to rule’? Ancient Athens is often held up as the first democratic state, yet, even at its height, only a small minority of men had the right to take part. For the next two millennia, this was the rule rather than the exception. Until the twentieth century, in almost every instance of state-sanctioned electoral democracy, the majority of ‘the people’ were excluded.
The freedoms that have been fought for and won over the last five centuries have been substantial, paving the way for the creation of today’s democracies. In 1500, however, power and privilege was concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority of aristocrats and senior clergy who monopolised access to education, politics and wealth. Notions of individual liberty, privacy, freedom of thought and speech, universal education, rights for working people, equality before the law, representative government and universal suffrage were little more than distant dreams. Making them a reality meant overcoming enormous obstacles: the authority of the Church, the dictatorship of powerful monarchs, and a political culture that upheld institutions of slavery and patriarchy.
Since the first modern campaigns for democratic reform in seventeenth-century England, the transition from aristocracy to democracy has encountered powerful resistance from those who stood to lose power and privilege. As the forces for democratic reform grew over the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, old power structures sought new ways of maintaining control. An early strategy was simply to prevent those without wealth and property from voting. After the British Reform Act of 1832, only 18 per cent of men (and no women) could vote, and even late into the nineteenth century, the franchise was restricted to freeholders, leaseholders and householders whose property exceeded a certain value. In 1866, responding to plans to extend the right to vote, parliamentarian Lord Salisbury expressed a common concern when he said that granting the working poor the vote would likely lead to the passing of ‘laws with respect to taxation and property especially favourable to them, and therefore dangerous to all other classes.’33
James Madison, co-author of the US Constitution, saw the role of government as protecting ‘the minority of the opulent against the majority’. He claimed that those ‘without property, or the hope of acquiring it, cannot be expected to sympathise sufficiently with its rights to be safe depositories of power over them’.34 The solution, according to Madison, was to keep the power of the government in the hands of those who represent the wealth of the nation. Another Founding Father, John Adams, feared that ‘If all were to be decided by a vote of the majority, the eight or nine millions who have no property, would not think of usurping over the rights of the one or two millions who have . . . Debts would be abolished first; taxes laid heavy on the rich . . . and at last a downright equal division of everything be demanded.’35
It is no accident that neither the US Constitution nor the Declaration of Independence describes the US as a democracy. In fact, for much of its history, ‘democracy’ and ‘democrat’ were terms of abuse. The Canadian political philosopher Francis Dupuis-Déri has shown that major political figures only began to refer to themselves as ‘democrats’ decades after the American and French Revolutions.36 Such resistance to democratic reform among elites meant that by 1900 the world still did not have a single country in which all adults could vote.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the elite’s fears of public participation in the political process were growing as pressure to extend the franchise increased. These fears were clearly articulated by the influential sociologist Gustave Le Bon in a book entitled The Crowd (1895). Le Bon stressed that the inability of crowds to reason ‘prevents them displaying any trace of the critical spirit . . . of discerning truth from error’ and claimed that ‘the entry of the popular classes into political life . . . is one of the most striking characteristics of our epoch of transition . . . Today the claims of the masses are becoming more and more sharply defined, and amount to nothing less than a determination to utterly destroy society as it now exists . . . The divine right of the masses is about to replace the divine right of kings.’37
Historically, the majority of venerated political thinkers have been critical of democracy in both theory and practice. Influenced by the writings of Le Bon, Joseph Schumpeter, one of the twentieth century’s leading theorists of democracy, believed that ‘democracy does not mean and cannot mean that the people actually rule in any obvious sense of the terms “people” and “rule.” Democracy means only that the people have the opportunity of accepting or refusing the men who are to rule them.’38 Reflecting a common attitude, he saw the public as weak, overly emotional, impulsive and lacking the intellectual capacity to think for themselves about complex issues. Not even education could help: ‘people cannot be carried up the ladder’ for they are able to discuss complex issues only in ‘an infantile way’ and are ‘incapable of action other than a stampede’.
Power, he believed, should be in the hands of ‘governments of experts’. His justification is interesting. Living through the emergence of advertising as a potent social force, he observed the increasing power of advertisers to shape needs, cultivate desires and direct behaviour. For him, this process discredited the notion of an authentic ‘popular will’. If public opinion could be shaped by outside forces, it must lack any independent or rational basis. ‘If all the people can in the short run be “fooled” step by step into something they do not really want, and if this is not an exceptional case which we could afford to neglect, then no amount of retrospective common sense will alter the fact that in reality they neither raise nor decide issues but that the issues that shape their fate are normally raised and decided for them.’39
Well into the twentieth century, these sentiments were still being voiced. In 1934, the head of the American Political Science Association, Walter J. Shepard, declared that government should be in the hands of ‘an aristocracy of intelligence’, not directed by ‘the ignorant’ or ‘the uninformed’.40 This view of the people, held in common by Schumpeter, Le Bon, Weber, Madison and many others, has a lineage reaching back to Plato and Aristotle, both of whom thoroughly distrusted the notion of democracy. Aristotle was concerned with the power democracy would give to the poor, while Plato viewed democracy as rule by the unqualified, and advocated a system of elite rule instead.