Who Were the Sea Peoples?

One of the most prominent critics of democracy was, of course, Plato, who along the way gave us the metaphor of "the ship of state." Democracy, he argued, was akin to a ship being steered and navigated by the passengers. Different potential captains would sell themselves to the passengers by pandering to their desires rather than based upon their seamanship. Such a voyage could not but end badly, Plato thought. The argument for a mixed constitution flows pretty naturally from this metaphor, I think, although Plato did not pursue it in that direction. While it's true we don't want the passengers picking which channel to attempt or when to tack, we also don't fancy the notion of the captain essentially kidnapping the passengers and dragging them anywhere on the seven seas he wishes to go. A mixed constitution tries to balance sound seamanship and individual autonomy.

Consider the following passage: "[Some] Virginians... had openly conveyed their eagerness to alter the federal Constitution by pushing through amendments... to make the republic more democratic... Reducing U.S. senators' terms from six to two years would go far toward eliminating aristocratic pretense in that body. Direct election of the president would be an obvious improvement on the Electoral College. No longer giving judges lifetime appointments seemed a sensible move." -- Madison and Jefferson , p. 432 What is striking for me is not so much that any of these proposals are obviously wrong, but how the democratic prejudice of our age leads the authors to see them as obviously right, despite the weighty arguments put forward against pure democracy by a host of political thinkers, including many of the American founders, the latter being the very people in whose thought the authors are experts. Even someone as astute and well-read in the classics as our friend P.S...

My review of Roger Congleton's Perfecting Parliament: Constitutional Reform, Liberalism, and the Rise of Western Democracy is now online at the Review of Political Economy .

"We have to be clear about the fact that an interdependent industrial society can only function as a democratic society when the manifold tendencies toward a gnostic psychology of demonization of partners are radically suppressed. Whenever the psychology of demonization becomes socially dominant, no matter whether it springs from Marxist or positivist, from liberal or conservative backgrounds and subcultures, an industrial society becomes unable to function as a democracy. Since industrial methods of production cannot be jettisoned, there arises as an inevitable alternative the danger of a dictatorship of the right or the left." -- Eric Voegelin, "Democracy and Industrial Society"

In the classical and Christian epochs, few people would have worried about exactly how a government was constructed from parts or what operating procedures those parts followed when it came to deciding whether a particular government was justified. Instead, it was justified because it brought about a good end: generally speaking, because it was the most concrete expression of and ultimate protector of the civic order that underlay its existence. The details of how the government had been composed -- out of the monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements combined, or only one or two of those -- and how it operated -- by voting and of what sort, according to what sort of constitution, and so on -- were of interest not as ways to justify the existence of the government, but as methods that could be evaluated according to the extent to which they did or didn't help a government achieve its end. But with the overthrow of Aristotelian philosophy, the baby was tossed out with th...