Demokratia

As was noted in We, The People and Demos [Ethnos], Jacques Ranciere (2011) engages with ‘the ancients’ in his discussion of ‘democracy’. Let us look a little more closely at the Greek term ‘demos’, as discussed in a text by Joshua Ober (2007).

Ober outlines the etymology of the word ‘democracy', a composite of the Greek terms demos and kratos. Demos can be translated as ‘the people’, or “the whole of the citizenry”, i.e. 'native, adult, male residents of a polis’ or ‘free, native, male population of a national territory'; and kratos can be translated as as ‘power’. Democracy, then, translates as ‘the power of the people’. ‘Power’ in what sense, though, Ober questions. By considering classical, i.e. 4th and 5th century BC, terminology for regime types, Ober suggests that democracy referred to ‘power’ in the sense of ‘the capacity to do things’. The modern interpretation of democracy, construed as being concerned, in the first instance, with a voting rule for determining the will of the majority, is a reduction that elides much of the value and potential of democracy, Ober argues.

Ober continues, Greek terms for political regimes initially focused on the ruling body, the body empowered to rule. This might be rule by a single individual, the one; it might be a limited number of persons, the few; or it might be a large and inclusive body, the many. There is an extensive Greek vocabulary for regime types. However, three key terms for the rule of the one, the few and the many stand out: monarchia, oligarchia and demokratia, respectively. 

There are two important points to be made in respect of this small sample, Ober indicates. First, unlike monarchia, from monos meaning solitary, and oligarchia, from hoi oligoi, meaning the few, demokratia is not initially concerned with number. It refers instead to a collective body. It does not answer the question of 'how many' are empowered. It is interesting to note, Ober points out, that the standard Greek term for 'the many’ is 'hoi polloi’. Yet, there is not Greek regime called pollokratia or indeed pollarchia. 

Second, Greek regime-type names fall into two categories, those with an -arche suffix and those with a -kratia suffix. Ober comments that there are terms that stand outside the one/few/many scheme but nevertheless fall into the -arche/-kratos grouping. The examples Ober selects are aristokratia, derived from hoi aristoi, meaning the excellent, isokratia, derived from isos, meaning equal and anarchia, derived from arche, a term that has several meanings: beginning or origin; empire or hegemonic control of one state by another; and office or magistracy.

Even so, not all names for regimes use -arche or -kratos roots, for example, tyrannia, basileia (kingdom) and politeia (a mixture of democracy and oligarchy, as defined by Aristotle). Nevertheless, as Ober shows in a table, -arche and -kratos families dominate the terminological set. By the time of Plato and Aristotle, classical philosophers and comic poets had invented terms to describe imaginary regimes, such as timokratia, derived from time, meaning honour, and gynkaikokratia, derived from gynaikos, meaning woman. 

Ober reasons that, while both terms concern ‘power’ in some sense, that -arche must differ in some significant way from -kratos. One possible distinction, following Weber, might be to contrast legitimate power (Weber’s Herrschaft) and power without legitimacy (Weber’s Macht), but the terms on which Ober is focusing do not divide in this way.

To clarify matters, Ober suggests that the primary meaning of monarchia was domination of the official apparatus of government by a single person. Similarly, Ober argues, classical Greek descriptions of oligarchia indicate a form of government defined in the first instance by access to participation rights in general and, in particular, access to magisterial office. Thus, an oligarchia was a governing regime access to whose offices were strictly limited to a few, on the basis of a property qualification and often, in addition, on the basis of occupation and ancestry. Following this logic, anarchia describes a state of affairs in which the magisterial offices are vacant, due to civil disagreement over who should occupy them. 

On the basis of the evidence, Ober suggests that the -arche root names concern ‘how many’ people may occupy official positions of authority within a constitutional order of some kind. It is no surprise, on this assumption, that oligarchic regimes were often named to indicate the fixed number of potential office holders there could be, for example, The Thirty, The Four Hundred and The Three Thousand.

In contrast, Ober posits, the -kratos terminology does not seem to be about offices or their number. Ober pursues his reasoning through the example of isokratia. It does not refer to a group of persons but to an abstraction: equality. On the basis of an analogy with isonomia, meaning equal-law, and isegoria, meaning equal-public address, as well as the early regime term isomoiria, meaning equal-shares, Ober proposes that it seems likely that the iso- prefix roots refer to distributive fairness in respect to access, in the sense of ‘right to make use of’. 

Equal access in each of these cases is to a public good, i.e. law, speech and ‘shares', that, when equitably distributed, is conducive of the common good. Thus, isonomia can be understood as fair distribution of legal immunities across a relevant population and equal access to legal processes. Isegoria can be understood as equal access to deliberative fora, which is to say equal right to speak out on public matters and to attend to the speech of others. By analogy, then, isokratia can be understood as equal access to the public good of kratos as power, or, in other words, to public power that conduces to the common good through enabling good things to happen in the public realm. 

Through this process of reasoning, when kratos is used as a regime-type suffix, power can be interpreted in the sense of strength, enablement or capacity to do things. Under this interpretation of isokratia, each person who stands within the ambit of 'those who are equal’, for example, ‘the citizens’, would enjoy equal access to power in this sees of ‘capacity’ or ‘enablement’.

Ober argues that, rather than indicating a concern for the control of an already existing constitutional apparatus, as do the -arche terms, the -kratos root terms, when first used, referred to a newly activated political capacity. This would explain, Ober contends, why there is no monokratia or oligokratia, because ‘the one’ and ‘the few’ were regarded as inherently strong and capable, by dint of control of wealth, special education and high birth. It was not, therefore, in equation whether 'the one’ or ’the few’ possessed a capacity to do things. Rather, the equation was whether they controlled the apparatus of government. 

Demokratia, then, Ober concludes, cannot mean ‘demos monopolises the offices’. This is because the demos, unlike the implied plurals hoi oligoi and hoi aristoi, must refer to a corporate body, to a public, an that public cannot collectively be an office holder in an ordinary sense. 

Extrapolating from the definition Ober proposes for isokratia, demokratia can be seen to emerge as a regime type with the historical self-assertion of a demos in a moment of revolution, and therefore refers to a demos’ collective capacity to do things in a public realm, to make things happen, to initiate events. This capacity of the demos, Ober notes, was first manifested during the popular uprising that initiated the democratic revolution of 508/507 BC. 

To sustain the revolutionary momentum, demokratia as a form of popular self-government, required institutional forms. Notably, however, Athenian demokratia did not centre on elections. Isopsephia, meaning equal-vote, is unattested until the 1st century BC, after the classical period. The Athenian regime did not try to address the difficult collective action and coordination problems   required to maintain the democratic relationship among law, action and public goods, by voting rules alone.

The idea of democracy as defined in the first instance by voting rules and by the monopoly of offices on the part of the many, in part, emerges from ancient critics’ characterisation of popular rule. Those critics sought to rebrand demokratia as being equivalent to a tyrannical polloi-archia, the domination of the government apparatus by the many who were poor, an argument which can be found in a 5C pamphlet penned by the so-called Old Oligarch. 

To place democracy of a par with oligarchy, as little more, in principal or in practice, than the monopoly over established governmental offices by the many, is to accept a 5th century anti-democratic polemics as an accurate description of political reality, Ober concludes.

Ober, J. (2007). The original meaning of “democracy”: capacity to do things, not majority rule. Version 1.0. Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics. Stanford, CA.: Stanford University. Available at http://web.stanford.edu/group/dispersed_author/docs/OriginalMeaningDemocracy_Ober.pdf [Accessed on 18 March 2015]. 

Ranciere, J. (2011). The thinking of dissensus: politics and aesthetics. In: Bowman, P. and Stamp, R., eds., Reading Rancière. London, UK: Continuum, pp.1–17.