It was the second world war Allies, according to John Dunn, who converted ‘democracy’ into a slogan. Their object was innocent enough. They wanted to identify themselves by a word which signified everything that the Axis powers were not. Yet a word that could embrace both Stalin’s Russia and Roosevelt’s United States must have seemed rather elastic even at the time. Honest thinkers have had more difficulty in deciding what it means. At one extreme, it has its literal meaning: a system of government by the people. At the other, it has no meaning at all: just a hurrah word for whatever political arrangements the speaker admires, as in the expression ‘Democratic and Popular Republic of North Korea’.
The starting point of Dunn’s remarkable book is that in its proper sense only the Athenians have ever really tried democracy. They put the power to make laws and conduct public affairs in the hands of a general assembly of all citizens, and allowed large citizen juries, which were in effect mini-assemblies, to pronounce on innocence and guilt in criminal cases. Athens was a unique political laboratory, a society supported by a large population of slaves, foreigners and voteless women, in which only about 30,000 adult males, perhaps a tenth of the population, had full political rights. The model is probably impractical in any larger or more inclusive community, although the advent of modern electronic communications may change that.
What is striking, however, is that the Athenian design has usually been rejected not just on practical grounds but on principle. The list of its critics begins with Plato, who argued for government based on virtue, not interest, and excoriated the Athenian democrats who judicially murdered his teacher Socrates for no better reason than that they didn’t like the cut of his jib.
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