Winston Churchill once famously declared: ‘democracy is the worst form of government, except
for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time’.1
This was certainly not true for the
great majority of thinkers who wrote about politics in the early modern period. Not that things had
been any better in ancient Greece: for Plato Demokratia was the rule of the rabble. Likewise,
Socrates, Aristotle, Thucydides and Aristophanes all decried democracy, and Polybius used the
pejorative ‘ochlocracy’ to describe its degeneration. The legacy of this mistrust towards popular
rule persisted through to the Roman epoch into the Middle Ages and found fertile ground in
England, not just from the Civil Wars (1642) onwards, but since the start of the Elizabethan reign
(1558). By accepting this picture, or by observing that since democracy then did not exist, criticisms
of it are not worth exploring before the nineteenth century, the historiographical mainstream has left
a few major questions unanswered:2 why was this so? How was such widespread criticism of
popular government articulated? In what ways did different authors and genres depict the people
and their power? Which political concerns and social prejudices informed this anti-democratic
paradigm? What was democracy actually thought to stand for? In order to address these points the
following pages analyse how anti-democratic ideas were elaborated in political, theological,
philosophical and public discourse in the Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline reigns. In particular,
they offer a panoramic view onto the variegated landscape of anti-democratic thought to show
continuity and changes informing its rhetoric. Inevitably selective, the chronologically-ordered
sections of the paper provide a hopefully innovative illustration of an important but overlooked
topic as well as an examination of the long-term relevance of principles that are still much debated
today.
No comments:
Post a Comment