The yearning for democracy is primitive—it is the basis for the unadulterated expression of individual potential in society; but the invariable social contradictions in which the very political ideal of democracy is enmeshed calls for a fundamental re-explication of human needs – the satisfaction of which ought to be the ultimate end of political theory
NIRMALYA DEB
A study of the forms of social organizations and patterns of government and their suitability for the human race has been a perennial body of human quest since the dawn of civilization. Aristotle delineated the features of oligarchy, republicanism and democracy, monarchy and autocracy as well as forms of dictatorships in the Politics. His study of Athenian democracy drove him to the view that democracy can often be vulgar in the form of the intolerability of the very concept of the rule of the majority in a body polity; but the more vital historical contradiction related with Pericles’ ideal of democracy in Athens, i.e. the form suited to the Greek city states as the supreme rule of rationality in social organization, was its failure to ward off external military infringements – first the Macedonian and then the Roman conquests which the Greeks of the antiquity suffered and the subsequent period of strong centralized rule that followed.
The concept of political power being unity in thought and identity and, by straightforward deduction, strong centralized rule, came to dominate political practice and theory. The Romans accepted and demographically spread the web of supreme centralized laws to keep the empire together. The social status accorded to minorities – both religious and cultural – as well as slaves and women was inferior to men in the empire, but that was a condition that prevailed in Athens too and which Aristotle thought could very well exist in a democracy. Here, as readers would readily discern, there is a distinct break between the modern concept of political justice in a democracy and the one Aristotle believed fit 3rd-4th century BC Athens perfectly well.
Plato, to an extent a recluse, held an aristocratic attitude to politics compared to Aristotle’s empirical objectivity in dissecting the features of the forms of governments of his day. However, he held that an intellectual minority – “Philosopher Kings” in his words – ought to rule over a vast majority of mathematically and philosophically unenlightened hoi polloi.
Again, modern readers would point out the distinct break between ancient and modern political thought. Even the harshest critic of contemporary democracy wouldn’t dare to build a utopia like Plato’s and criticize democracy for its lack of aristocratic sheen. Centuries of democratic experiment and constitutional governance in the advanced and “enlightened” world has convinced humanity of democracy’s enduring appeal as a rational alternative to authoritarianism and unbearable centralism. But critics in the modern period too, over and above Plato and Aristotle, have pointed out the vulgarization of culture that occurs in a democracy and have sought in vain to initiate a progressive movement to purge culture of all dross.
So democracy, too, as a political ideal is subject to scrutiny. The governmental structure of a national democracy in the modern sense was a political reality unknown to the ancients, but it is crucial to study the historical transformation of an ideal. The Roman absolutist idea of the empire glued well with the Christian doctrine of the universality of faith and the equality of mankind, and the church was to adjudicate on eternal matters of faith while the emperor was to govern over temporal subjects and issues. When this classification was endangered by lack of mutual temporal adjustments matters often took a violent turn. This contradiction was put to rest by the establishment of modern, constitutional, participative governance, and Puritanism laid emphasis on individual salvation rather than the church’s authority on issues of faith.
But it is important to appreciate that Roman republicanism was a vital political ideal of progress, vigorous in its appraisal of the fundamental political issue of the nature of social justice and the building blocks of a society governed by the res publica in a real sense. It is a society governed by a senate of representatives who can called back after a fixed term if they fail to deliver according to the expectations of the people. This form of participative democracy was a direct antidote to the alienation of the political process that is such a crucial issue even today after centuries of democratic experiment. Laws, the government machinery, the legislature and the judiciary take alien objective forms even in a democracy quite unlike anything that the popular mandate deems it to be and independent in its operations against the wishes of the people. This problem is still acute in advanced democracies and is certainly a historical product of inevitable forces that have shaped the contemporary government machinery into being and channelized it toward distinct ends apathetic to the real needs of social beings.
It is imperative to understand that just as in philosophy where there is a distinct contradiction between mind and matter and various debates of metaphysics and epistemology encircle that fundamental distinction or discord, whichever way we look at it, so too in political theory the fundamental discord is between the real social needs of the human race and its collective social representation in praxis or in productive social-political activity and conscious effort to understand and reproduce the self and society through practice. In politics the contradiction is to resolve, in other words, the fundamental dichotomy between human needs and the efficiency of abstract collective structures of governance in delivering justice, meeting to needs, and enabling creative individual expression.
The more democratic the government the less would be its distance from the level of efficiency required for human labour to quench needs, and if the level of people’s participation in governance is low then the distance invariably increases. If the government is G and the quantum of labour that it employs and puts into action is L, and the level of satisfaction as social beings is S, then the government that tends towards S is the one ideal for meeting the inevitable condition of employing labour, i.e. meeting the necessary social rationality of employing labour in the first place.
It is, therefore, necessary to argue that a government that doesn’t meet the primal social condition of employing, or putting into action through the necessary mechanisms at its disposal, creative labour fails to satisfy the condition of guaranteeing social expression essential for the reproduction of the species.
We ought to emphasize that this is a strict definition of democracy in the modern context, although there are plenty of other issues involved, that has the potential to resolve longstanding issues related to the very rationality of wielding political power and the social concern of universal development to which end political power merely serves as a tool.
