Prof: Where we ended
with last Wednesday was the tail
end of our discussion of the
anti-Enlightenment.
And I think some of you
discussed in section the
difficulties that arise when you
think about the complete
rejection of the Enlightenment
project.
For instance,
I think a very dramatic example
that fixes our intuitions very
quickly is the example that I
know some of you discussed which
is,
that in the 1950s in the United
States there was no such thing
as marital rape.
 
You can remember this from our
discussion of Mill.
The wife was the chattel of the
husband and her legal identity
was suspended for the course of
the marriage.
Not only could a husband not be
prosecuted for raping his wife,
he could not be prosecuted for
assault.
He could not be prosecuted for
doing all kinds of things to her
that if he did it to some
unrelated person on the street
would land him in jail or worse.
 
Now if you think about
MacIntyre's discussion of
practices,
in the 1950s this was an
accepted norm of the prevailing
practice,
and the argument that this
should be seen as unjust or
unacceptable wouldn't get any
purchase from an ethic that was
based on the idea that we must
accept inherited traditions,
and norms, and practices.
 
And so the one important
takeaway point from that is,
however difficult the
Enlightenment ideas of
individual rights and trying to
make objective statements about
what goes on within systems of
human association is,
however difficult that
Enlightenment project is,
giving up on it completely
presents even more insuperable
problems,
because very few people are
really going to want to go all
the way with abandoning the idea
that the individual should be
subordinated to community norms
and practices,
and abandoning the notion that
we can appeal only to tradition
in thinking about whether or not
traditions as we've inherited
them are acceptable.
And so, enter democracy,
the last section of the course
in which we're going to talk
about a tradition which I think
does a better job than any that
we have considered hitherto in
delivering on the promise of the
mature Enlightenment,
the promise to recognize
individual rights as the most
important normative ideal,
and to base politics on some
commitment to objective
knowledge about human society
that goes beyond the beliefs,
commitments and practices of
whoever happens to be around and
whatever values they happen to
have.
 
Now one thing about democracy
that distinguishes it from all
of the traditions we've
considered thus far is that it's
a tradition that was made famous
by its critics.
If you think about the ones
we've considered thus far;
the social contract was made
famous by Hobbes and Locke.
Utilitarianism was made famous
by Bentham.
Marxism obviously made famous
by Marx.
These were all ways of looking
at the world that had their
champions,
and it was the champions that
made the case for why we should
behave in accordance with their
dictates.
 
And with the anti-Enlightenment
as well, it was Burke as the big
champion of the
anti-Enlightenment.
And then we looked at some
modern anti-Enlightenment
thinkers.
 
Democracy was made famous by
its critics.
Who do you think this is?
 
Any guesses?
 
Who's that on the left,
that gent on the left?
Nobody know?
 
Nobody want to guess?
 
Who's that?
 
Student:  Aristotle?
 
Prof: Close. Who?
 
Student:  Plato.
 
Prof: Okay,
who's the gent on the right?
Anyone?
 
First one to get it gets a free
book.
Yeah?
 
Student:  Tocqueville?
 
Prof: You got it.
 
Come and see me later you'll
get your free book.
These are both people who were
not champions of democracy.
They were worried about the
potential that democracy has for
tyranny.
 
Let's listen to Plato.
 
I don't know if you can read
that, but I'll read it to you.
And don't try and write it down.
 
I will put it up on the server.
 
Plato has two very famous
analogies in The Republic
which sum up his appalling
disdain for democracy.
He says, "Imagine then a
fleet or a ship in which there
is a captain who is taller and
stronger than any of the crew,
but he is a little deaf and has
a similar infirmity in sight,
and his knowledge of navigation
is not much better (kind of
dopey old captain).
 
The sailors are quarrelling
with one another about the
steering--
everyone is of opinion that he
has a right to steer,
though he has never learned the
art of navigation and cannot
tell who taught him or when he
learned,
and will further assert that it
cannot be taught,
and they are ready to cut in
pieces anyone who says the
contrary.
They throng about the captain,
begging and praying him to
commit the helm to them;
and if at any time they do not
prevail,
but others are preferred to
them, they kill the others or
throw them overboard,
and having first chained up the
noble captain's senses with
drink or some narcotic drug,
they mutiny and take possession
of the ship and make free with
the stores;
thus, eating and drinking,
they proceed on their voyage in
such manner as might be expected
of them.
Him who is their partisan and
cleverly aids them in their plot
for getting the ship out of the
captain's hands into their own
whether by force or persuasion,
they compliment with the name
of sailor,
pilot, able seaman,
and abuse the other sort of
man,
whom they call a
good-for-nothing;
but that the true pilot must
pay attention to the year and
seasons and sky and stars and
winds,
and whatever else belongs to
his art,
if he intends to be really
qualified for the command of a
ship."
 
"Now in vessels which are
in a state of mutiny and by
sailors who are mutineers,
how will the true pilot be
regarded?
 
Will he not be called by them a
prater, a star-gazer,
a good-for-nothing?"
 
And then Plato's other famous
analogy,
which looks at the masses
rather than how they would
manipulate the government he
says,
" Suppose a man was in
charge of a large and powerful
animal,
and made a study of its moods
and wants;
he would learn when to approach
and handle it,
when and why it was especially
savage or gentle,
what the different noises it
made meant,
and what tone of voice to use
to soothe or annoy it.
 
All this he might learn by long
experience an familiarity,
and then call it a science,
and reduce it to a system and
set up to teach it.
 
But he would not really know
which of the creature's tastes
and desires was admirable or
shameful, good or bad,
right or wrong;
he would simply use the terms
on the basis of its reactions,
calling what pleased it good
what annoyed it bad."
 
So Plato didn't have much
regard for democracy.
Not surprisingly,
because in 399 BC the democracy
in Athens had executed his hero
and teacher Socrates precisely
for pointing out the sorts of
lack of knowledge that he is
alluding to here both in the
ship's captain analogy and
playing to the mob sentiments
that he's alluding to with this
analogy of the people in a
democratic system as being a
powerful animal.
 
And so Plato was very
unimpressed with democracy as a
potential system of rule.
 
He thought it would quickly
collapse into tyranny.
The phrase "the tyranny of
the majority,"
though, was made popular by
Alexis de Tocqueville.
You've already run into this
when we talked about Mill's harm
principle.
 
Tocqueville was a
nineteenth-century French
aristocrat who went to America
to try and understand how
American democracy worked
because it seemed to him less
destructive of freedom and
individual liberties than what
was coming down the pike in
Europe.
He thought the French
aristocracy and the French
monarchy was way too
shortsighted in not seeing that
they had to understand the
egalitarian trends of modern
history and to create
institutions that could lasso
them,
and control them,
and domesticate them.
 
So people think of Tocqueville
often as a great defender of
democracy,
and in a certain sense he was,
but he was also a critic of
democracy,
and I'll go into that in a
little bit more detail shortly,
but his main reason for
thinking that American democracy
was a relatively good system was
its propensity to limit
egalitarian impulses that he
thought were breaking out all
over Europe.
 
And so Tocqueville's summation
of his fear of the tyranny of
the majority comes in
Democracy in America.
He says, "When I see that
the right and the means of
absolute command are conferred
on a people or upon a king,
upon an aristocracy or a
democracy,
a monarchy or a republic,
I recognize the germ of
tyranny,
and I journey onward to a land
of more hopeful institutions.
 
"In my opinion the main
evil of the present democratic
institutions of the United
States does not arise,
as is often asserted in Europe,
from their weakness,
but from their overpowering
strength;
and I am not so much alarmed at
the excessive liberty which
reigns in that country as at the
very inadequate securities which
exist against tyranny.
 
"When an individual or a
party is wronged in the United
States, to whom can he apply for
redress?
If to public opinion,
public opinion constitutes the
majority;
if to the legislature,
it represents the majority,
and implicitly obeys its
injunctions;
if to the executive power,
it is appointed by the
majority, and remains a passive
tool in its hands;
the public troops consist of
the majority under arms;
the jury is the majority
invested with the right of
hearing judicial cases;
and in certain States even the
judges are elected by the
majority.
 
However iniquitous or absurd
the evil of which you complain
may be, you must submit to it as
well as you can."
So democracy brings with it
this problem of the tyranny of
the majority and it was,
after all, we saw earlier in
this course,
against that that John Stuart
Mill erected his harm principle.
 
He too had this great fear of
tyranny of the majority.
And so, as I said,
democracy was made famous first
by its critics,
and they point out that it has
this propensity to pander to
mass opinion without regard to
whether it's true or false,
and to ride roughshod over the
individual rights,
again, without regard to
whether this produces domination
or worse.
So that being the case,
it seems like prima facie not
very encouraging to think that
democracy can deliver on the
Enlightenment where we're
talking about politics that's
based on science and politics
that respects individual rights.
And so you might,
given reading Mill as you have,
given what the little bit of
Plato and Rousseau that I've
just shown to you,
and your own thinking about
politics as you confront it day
to day,
you might well be skeptical of
the proposition that democracy
is going to deliver very well on
the mature Enlightenment.
And so just how that might be
the case is what's going to
concern us for this and then the
next three lectures.
 
 
And we're going to start our
consideration of democracy with
The Federalist Papers.
 
The Federalist Papers
are probably,
along with Rawls,
the two most important pieces
of political theory ever to come
out of America.
They were a series of articles
published in the newspapers of
New York State,
as I'm sure most of you know,
in order to try and help get
the Constitution ratified.
Although authored by these
three gentlemen,
James Madison,
Alexander Hamilton and John
Jay,
they were signed with the
pseudonym Publius,
which was short for Publius
Valerius Publicola who was
reputed to be the consul who had
restored the Roman Republic in
509 BC;
whether he in fact did is a
matter that's debated by
historians.
 
The Constitution,
by the time they wrote these
the vast majority of these
papers,
these letters to the people of
New York,
had already been approved by
the majority of the thirteen
states,
but few people believed that it
would survive if it wasn't
adopted in New York.
The Confederate Constitution
had required unanimity for the
adoption of the Constitution,
but in the actual Constitution
itself they had said,
"Well, nine out of the
thirteen states will be
enough,"
but nobody really thought it
could survive if it was not
adopted in New York.
 
And so the Federalists took
upon themselves the task,
Hamilton, Madison and Jay,
of persuading the people of New
York to support the adoption of
The Constitution and indeed they
were successful in that
endeavor.
But they had the fear of this
problem of majority tyranny that
I've already alluded to with
respect to Plato,
and Mill, and Tocqueville,
front and center in their
considerations.
 
And you shouldn't be surprised
that they would worry about
that,
because if you imagine yourself
back into the eighteenth century
thinking about democracy the
ancient ideal of democracy,
the ancient Athenian ideal of
democracy had basically been a
notion of ruling and being ruled
in turn.
 
So if you have an academic
department, let's say.
Let's set aside the issue of
untenured faculty.
Just imagine a department of
tenured faculty.
We have a circulating chair.
 
Somebody's chair for three
years, then somebody else,
then somebody else,
that's the notion of ruling and
being ruled in turn,
and the reason you can do that
is that everybody basically has
the same interest.
You don't have to worry about
monitoring or controlling the
current ruler,
because basically they have the
same interest as you do,
and they're not,
therefore, going to do anything
with the collective that you
wouldn't do yourself.
 
So that's the ancient ideal of
democracy as ruling and being
ruled in turn.
 
It obviously,
in the case of Ancient Greece
it excluded women,
it excluded slaves,
so it was a certain truncated
conception of a democratic
community about which people
have discoursed at great length.
But given that the model was
the idea that you could have
ruling and being ruled in turn
without loss because everyone
was assumed,
basically, to have the same
interest.
 
Now as soon as you get a
diversity of interests that
mechanism of government goes off
the table as a way of doing
things because then you might
have subgroups who see that
they--
let's suppose you introduce
non-tenured faculty.
 
They're going to have a very
different interest than the
tenured faculty.
 
And so the idea of ruling and
being ruled in turn wouldn't
work anymore.
 
Once you have a serious
division of interest within the
polity you have this problem.
 
And this is the problem Madison
articulates in Federalist No.
10 when he says,
"By a faction,
I understand a number of
citizens, whether amounting to a
majority or a minority of the
whole,
who are united and actuated by
some common impulse of passion,
or of interest,
adverse to the rights of other
citizens,
or to the permanent and
aggregate interests of the
community."
So once you have factions you
have this problem.
 
 
If you're the majority faction
it doesn't matter to you,
but it does if you're the
minority faction because things
are going to happen that you
don't like.
So the first thing Madison says
to himself is,
"Well, could we get rid of
factions?"
and if you read Federalist
No.
10 carefully you'll see
that he thinks that the costs of
doing that would be so great in
terms of lost human freedom and
the kind of repression you would
have to engage in,
it would look like the French
Revolution or the Russian
Revolution which,
of course, he didn't know
about, but which he didn't know
about either of those things,
but he wouldn't have been
surprised by them when he wrote
this.
 
So you can't get rid of
factions.
"The causes of factions
can't be removed,
and therefore you have to look
at their effects."
He says, "The latent
causes of faction are thus sown
in the nature of man;
and we see them everywhere
brought into different degrees
of activity, according to the
different circumstances of civil
society.
So strong is this propensity of
mankind to fall into mutual
animosities,
that where no substantial
occasion presents itself,
the most frivolous and fanciful
distinctions have been
sufficient to kindle their
unfriendly passions and excite
their most violent conflicts.
But the most common and durable
source of factions has been the
various and unequal distribution
of property.
Those who hold and those who
are without property have ever
formed distinct interests in
society.
Those who are creditors,
and those who are debtors,
fall under a like
discrimination.
A landed interest,
a manufacturing interest,
a mercantile interest,
a moneyed interest,
with many lesser interests,
grow up of necessity in
civilized nations,
and divide them into different
classes,
actuated by different
sentiments and views.
 
The regulation of these various
and interfering interests forms
the principal task of modern
legislation,
and involves the spirit of
party and faction in the
necessary and ordinary
operations of the
government."
 
Managing factions so that they
don't destroy the common
interest is the basic business
of politics.
Now how do you do that?
 
Well, how do you manage the
effects of faction?
He goes on and he says,
" The smaller the society,
the fewer probably will be the
distinct parties and interests
composing it;
the fewer the distinct parties
and interests,
the more frequently will a
majority be found of the same
party;
and the smaller the number of
individuals composing a
majority,
and the smaller the compass
within which they are placed,
the more easily will they
concert and execute their plans
of oppression.
Extend the sphere,
and you take in a greater
variety of parties and
interests;
you make it less probable that
a majority of the whole will
have a common motive to invade
the rights of other citizens;
or if such a common motive
exists, it will be more
difficult for all who feel it to
discover their own strength,
and to act in unison with each
other.
Besides other impediments,
it may be remarked that,
where there is a consciousness
of unjust or dishonorable
purposes,
communication is always checked
by distrust in proportion to the
number whose concurrence is
necessary."
 
"Hence,
it clearly appears,
that the same advantage which a
republic has over a democracy,
in controlling the effects of
faction,
is enjoyed by a large over a
small republic--
is enjoyed by the Union over
the States composing it.
" I will talk in a little
while about what advantages
Madison thinks a republic has
over a democracy,
but right now I want to focus
on this other point which is
that a large republic has an
advantage over a small republic.
A society that has no factions
at all presents no problems for
democratic theory as we have
already talked about in
connection with the stylized
idea of ancient Greece as one in
which everybody has the same
interests,
and you can have ruling and
being ruled in turn.
What Madison is most afraid of
is a single faction,
a majority faction,
because if you have a society
in which there's a majority that
agrees all the time or most of
the time,
the problem is what about these
people?
 
They're going to be on the
losing end.
So if you have a society in
which race,
and class, and religion all
tend to fall along the same
division these people are either
going to have to knuckle down to
tyranny or they're going to
reach for their guns.
They'll overthrow the system if
they can;
and if they cannot,
they might as well become
criminals.
 
They're not going to have an
incentive to participate in the
democratic order.
 
And so from Madison's point of
view this is the ideal society.
We think modern Poland
ninety-nine percent Catholic or
something like that,
but even there,
there are other divisions.
 
So even there it doesn't work.
 
But if you're going to have
factions the worst thing to have
is one or a small number.
 
What you really want is lots of
factions, crosscutting cleavages
as we talk about them in modern
political science.
The notion here is if you're in
a majority on one question,
but you know you might be in a
different majority or in the
minority on the next question
then you have both the reason to
temper your own behavior when
you're in the majority and not
tyrannize over the minority,
and if you're in the minority
you have reasons to accept your
loss this time around.
As people always say,
when their team loses the World
Series, "There's always
next year, there's always next
time."
 
So next time you might be part
of some different coalition and
you might be able to prevail.
 
So the best we could have would
be a world with no factions as
all,
but that's unrealistic in
modern times,
particularly once you have an
economic division of labor,
class divisions,
as Tocqueville would point out
forty years later.
And so then what you need is
lots of factions,
and that's why Madison argued
you need a big republic because
the larger the republic,
the more likely it is that
you're going to have multiple
crosscutting cleavages,
and then the system--we
sometimes define democracy as
institutionalized uncertainty of
outcomes.
You don't know.
 
You don't know what the
majority's going to decide.
We don't know if--let's suppose
President Obama nominates
Justice Wood for the Court.
 
We don't know what the outcome
will be so everybody will
participate and lobby and so on
to try and affect the result.
People will talk about
coalitions.
A more dramatic case,
I think, when George Bush
Senior nominated Clarence Thomas
to the Supreme Court.
It split the African American
community right down the middle
because there were people who
were largely democrats who also
wanted an African American
justice on the court,
a good example of crosscutting
bases of political affiliation.
And so the Madisonian idea is
that that's actually a good
thing.
 
This institutionalized
uncertainty of outcomes prevents
the tyrannizing of some groups
over others and gives everybody
an incentive to remain committed
to the process.
And that is what would
subsequently become called the
pluralist theory of democracy
associated most famously in the
twentieth century with Robert
Dahl who was on the Yale faculty
for decades and decades.
 
And he's still--he's about to
turn, actually,
95 years old this year and he
lives in New Haven.
He's probably the most famous
democratic theorist of the
second half of the twentieth
century.
The pluralist theory of
democracy builds on this
Madisonian idea that what you
want is institutionalized
uncertainty of outcomes that is
a byproduct of crosscutting
cleavages,
multiple crosscutting cleavages.
So that present winners have
reason to limit the amount in
which they tyrannize over
losers,
and present losers have
incentives to remain committed
to the process for the future.
 
There's always next year.
 
You want people to believe that
in order to keep them committed.
 
 
But that wasn't enough for
Madison.
That was the basis of his
argument for an extended union,
but it wasn't enough for
Madison.
He was worried,
just as Tocqueville articulated
it in the nineteenth century,
that the institutional
structure could facilitate
tyranny.
He says, "But the great
security against a gradual
concentration of the several
powers in the same department,
consists in giving to those who
administer each department the
necessary constitutional means
and personal motives to resist
encroachments of the others.
 
The provision for defense must
in this, as in all other cases,
be made commensurate to the
danger of attack.
Ambition must be made to
counteract ambition."
Maybe the most famous line
Madison ever wrote.
Ambition must be made to
counteract ambition.
"The interest of the man
must be connected with the
constitutional rights of the
place.
It may be a reflection on human
nature, that such devices should
be necessary to control the
abuses of government."
Another famous line:
"If men were angels,
no government would be
necessary.
If angels were to govern men,
neither external nor internal
controls on government would be
necessary.
In framing a government which
is to be administered by men
over men,
the great difficulty lies in
this: you must first enable the
government to control the
governed;
and in the next place oblige it
to control itself.
 
A dependence on the people is,
no doubt, the primary control
on the government;
but experience has taught
mankind the necessity of
auxiliary precautions."
So your basic guarantor is the
crosscutting cleavages among the
people,
an extended republic,
but that's not enough because--
and this is really a view that
most famously associated with
the nineteenth-century liberal
British thinker Lord Acton when
he said,
"Power corrupts,
and absolute power corrupts
absolutely."
 
The notion is that you really
have to divide up power.
You have to have an
institutional scheme--
this is his auxiliary
precautions--an institutional
scheme which causes people in
the different branches of
government to check one another.
 
And so we get what Madison
called a non-tyrannical republic
rather than a democracy.
 
And in that sense Madison is a
critic of democracy just like
Tocqueville, and just like
Plato.
They want to say that pure
democracy leads to tyranny and
we have to check it with an
institutional scheme that limits
what can be done.
 
And so the American system so
called checks and balances,
which you all learned about in
high school civics courses,
structures the constitutional
system that they created.
This is something that you can
tell from the passage from
Tocqueville that I read you that
Tocqueville didn't fully
understand or appreciate because
he thought that every branch of
the government was ultimately
controlled by the majority.
And the designers of The
Constitution intended,
rather, to have them at least
controlled in different ways by
majority opinion,
but more importantly to set up
a scheme in which they would
control one another.
Ambition would be made to
counteract ambition.
And so we've all been reading
in the newspapers this weekend
at the moment of the retirement
of Justice John Paul Stevens
that he was one of the people,
for instance,
who checked the expansion of
executive power after 9/11 in
the Hamdan case by saying it was
unconstitutional to use military
tribunals to try the Guantanamo
Bay detainees.
From the point of view of
Madison the specific issue is
not what's important here,
but rather that what we saw
after 9/11 was this big
expansion of executive power,
and then you see an assertion
of power by a different branch,
say to the executive, "No,
you can't do that,"
and so a limiting of executive
power in this case by the
judicial branch.
 
And so what you have in the
American scheme,
the American constitutional
scheme, is a large number of
veto points.
 
First of all we have The Bill
of Rights.
The Bill of Rights was enacted
after The Constitution,
but only when undertakings had
been made that it would be
enacted in most of the state
legislatures.
So it was basically,
even though it came afterwards,
there was an informal agreement
by the time The Constitution was
adopted that there would be a
Bill of Rights ,
what became the first ten
amendments,
that would limit the power of
the central government.
And so we have a Bill of Rights.
 
Then we have supermajority
requirements most obviously to
change the Constitution,
huge supermajority
requirements.
 
To amend the Constitution it's
very difficult.
You need two-thirds in both
Houses of Congress and then
three-quarters of the states.
 
Some of your parents were
around at the last serious
effort to amend the
constitution,
namely the ERA,
the Equal Rights Amendment,
which failed to pass that
threshold,
very hard.
 
But then we have other
supermajority requirements,
the filibuster rule in the
Senate which we may see come
into play in the Supreme Court
confirmation hearings.
That's not in the Constitution,
but it's a supermajority
requirement, nonetheless,
that we've embedded in our
institutional scheme.
 
Anytime you add supermajority
requirements you make it harder
for the current majority to work
its will.
Separation of powers,
already alluded to:
the Court versus the executive,
the legislature versus the
executive.
 
The notion that ambition of
players in one branch will
counteract the ambition of
players in a different branch.
Greatly debated subject,
how effective can the branches
really be to check one another?
 
After all, the Court does not
have an army at its disposal.
You guys are young enough to
remember the 2000 election when
we had a knife-edge result and
partisans on both sides were
saying their candidate won,
and it was being litigated in
various ways through the state
courts in Florida and we didn't
have a clear result.
 
And finally the Supreme Court
in Bush v.
Gore ruled in a very
controversial decision that
President Bush was the winner,
or then-candidate Bush was the
winner and Vice President Gore
was the loser.
And Gore stood up on national
television and he said,
"I accept the result.
 
I don't agree with the result,
but I accept the result."
He didn't have to.
 
You could imagine in many
countries at that point,
the Clinton Administration
would have sent the tanks down
Pennsylvania Avenue.
 
What would the Court have been
able to do?
Nothing.
 
It's far from obvious in Iraq
that the loser of the election
is going to accept the result.
 
So there's great debate.
 
Madison makes heavy weather in
The Federalist Papers of
the proposition that just
writing something on a parchment
doesn't guarantee that people
are going to accept what you
write.
 
So what does it really mean to
say that there's separation of
powers because the Court,
ultimately, is dependent upon
people just going along with
what it says.
And likewise with the
legislature, yes,
there's this attempt to
separate--Congress votes.
In theory only Congress can
declare war,
and Congress has to fund the
military,
but in practice it's very
difficult for Congress to resist
what the executive branch wants
to do on all of those things.
And when we look at cases where
the Court faces down either the
legislature or the executive
branch it's usually only in
cases where what they're doing
is very popular.
When they're telling Nixon to
turn over the tapes,
1973-'74, it's a unanimous
court and it's a popular action.
If Nixon had been at 95% in
opinion polls at that time it's
less clear that the Court would
have faced down the executive
branch,
or at least so some scholars
claim.
 
So how much you really get
separation of powers is a
subject that's greatly debated
by political scientists,
because at the end of the day,
despite what Madison says
separation of powers is just
something written on parchment.
As Dahl puts it in his critique
of Madison in the preface to
Democratic Theory,
his most important book which
was published in 1956 and is
still in print.
Very few of us can say we wrote
a book fifty years ago that's
still in print,
but there it is.
It is still in print.
 
Dahl says the problem with this
famous one-liner of Madison's is
that there's actually no real
mechanism to ensure that
ambition will counteract
ambition,
and it's rather simply that
people accept this scheme.
But what if they didn't?
 
What if in 1800 there had not
been a turnover of power?
We had a knife-edge election in
1800.
Maybe that would have made
America much more prone to the
seizure of power by those who
currently controlled the levers
of power,
the military and so on.
The loser gave up in 1800 and
we began to create this culture
of democratic turnovers,
where the government loses an
election and gives up power.
 
Very unusual thing,
but it happens.
So separation of powers,
much debated,
and I'm going to come back to
this, much debated as to how
effective and important it
really is.
More veto points.
 
We have bicameralism.
 
As you know from reading The
Federalist papers,
the founders were mostly
worried about the power of
Congress because it seemed like
it was going to be the most
powerful branch.
 
The executive was weak and
designed to be weak,
much weaker than it is today,
and so they thought the thing
to do is to divide Congress,
have a bicameral system,
and legislation has to be
passed in both houses and have
them elected by different rules,
so we have Senate seats elected
at large in the states,
whereas we have small
congressional districts and
therefore we have very different
incentives that the politicians
are going to react to,
very different factions
overlapping with one another in
different ways to get back to
the basic pluralist ideal.
And then finally,
of course, last but by no means
least in terms of veto points,
federalism.
Federalism is another source of
veto points in what can actually
happen.
 
Think in the last few years of
the debates about gay marriage.
We have marital law as state
law, and for a long time there
has been a federal law which
says if you get married in one
state the marriage will be
recognized in every other state.
So if people move and then
later on they get divorced or
one dies it doesn't matter what
state you were in for the
purposes of the divorce or for
probate law.
You're still going to be
governed by--it's just this sort
of utilitarian efficiency thing.
 
Every state can have
differences in its marital law,
but California's got to
recognize Connecticut's
marriages as valid.
 
Then along comes a socially
divisive issue like gay marriage
and unsurprisingly some states
want to enact gay marriage and
some don't,
but then this federal
requirement that all states
recognize one another's
marriages suddenly becomes
ideologically charged.
Whereas it was presented as
just a utilitarian efficient
thing,
now it becomes ideologically
charged because if the state of
Massachusetts recognizes gay
marriage then it implicitly
means that the state of Georgia
has to recognize it as well.
 
So you get an upsurge of
political activism,
and finally the Defense of
Marriage Act in Congress to
preserve the rights of the
states to reject or accept gay
marriage.
 
And so that's an example of the
veto power of states in play
that rears its head in a setting
like that.
And so what you have in the US
is not a democracy,
certainly not a pure democracy.
 
You rather have--what they
designed was what they referred
to as a non-tyrannical republic.
 
They thought that that was the
best they could do.
They had misgivings about a lot
of it, but they thought that
this was the only way they could
create the union and head off
civil war.
 
Of course they didn't head off
civil war.
We had civil war anyway,
a subject I'll come back to on
Wednesday.
 
But we created this hybrid
between a non-tyrannical
republic, if you like,
and a democratic system.
And many of our arguments about
contemporary democracy are
really arguments about how much
we should preserve this hybrid
and how much we should have a
thoroughgoing democratic system.
And I'll take that up on
Wednesday.
 
 
