Steuart and Rousseau

[Brad DeLong]

>Why does the arch-democrat Rousseau dislike Athens so much?
>
>In the "Discourse on Political Economy" he says this: "Do not, therefore,
>raise the democracy of Athens as an objection to me, because Athens was not
>in fact a democracy, but a most tyrannical aristocracy governed by learned
>men and orators". And it's this last comment which gives a clue to his
>view: he doesn't like learned men and orators. In ancient Rome, the plebs
>got to cast votes from time to time, but never to discuss anything in a
>public forum -- and this was much more congenial to Rousseau, who rather
>liked voting, but who agreed with Plato, various Roman orators and Hobbes
>(who called a parliamentary regime "an aristocracy of orators") that
>political debate provided opportunities for clever speakers to manipulate
>the opinions of others, and thus to get more influence on the determination
>of the general will than they ought to possess. Much better to shut up, try
>not to think too hard, and vote.

Very nicely put...


>
>And I suppose that something of this atittude filters through to Marx, too,
>when he praises the Paris Commune for being a "working, not a parliamentary
>body", with the delegates "revocable and bound by the mandat impératif of
>his constituents" (which alone makes debate superfluous), abandoning the
>habit of only "deciding once in three or six years which member of the
>ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament". The
>dictatorship of the proletariat (two concepts with impeccably Roman
>origins) seems to be quite close to Rousseau's direct democracy of
>assemblies of silent voters...

The combination of revocable appointments and binding mandates seems 
to make Marx's concept of representation the opposite of Madison's 
(or Burke's)--according to whom our representatives are supposed to 
be smarter than we are, better informed with better judgment, and do 
what we would do with our values and interests if we knew as much and 
had thought as much about the situation as they have. Madison thought 
that progress in the science of government--the principles of 
representation, separation of powers, and an independent judiciary 
(coupled with modest restrictions on the male franchise)--allowed 
modern democracies to avoid the 
today-a-demagogue-persuaded-the-Assembly-to-order-the-execution-of-all-males-in-Mytilene 
problem. Marx is blind to this set of issues.

But is this surprising? For anyone who thinks that in the absence of 
class conflict there is no role for government--that the government 
of men is replaced by the administration of things, which can be 
carried out in a routine fashion by pretty much anyone--all the 
Madisonian issues must seem irrelevancies...

Brad DeLong