Does Democracy Rely on a Civic Bargain? Josiah Ober Makes the Case

What we really need to do is recommit to the idea that this is difficult, it is valuable, and in order to keep this valuable, difficult thing going, we need to basically pay the cost of educating ourselves, educating the next generation, the background knowledge and skills that citizens need if they are to continue to govern themselves...

Josiah Ober

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A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com.

Josiah Ober is a Professor of Classics and Political Science at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the coauthor, along with Brook Manville, of The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives.

Key Highlights

• Introduction - 0:49
• What is Democracy? 3:15
• Conditions and Constraints - 20:17
• Classical Democracy - 24:26
• Future of Democracy - 39:21

Key Links

The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives by Brook Manville and Josiah Ober

Demopolis: Democracy before Liberalism in Theory and Practice by Josiah Ober

Lean more about Josiah Ober

Democracy Paradox Podcast

How Can Democracy Survive in an Age of Discontent? Rachel Navarre and Matthew Rhodes-Purdy on Populism and Political Extremism

Marc Plattner Has Quite a Bit to Say About Democracy

More Episodes from the Podcast

More Information

Apes of the State created all Music

Email the show at jkempf@democracyparadox.com

Follow on Twitter @DemParadox, Facebook, Instagram @democracyparadoxpodcast

100 Books on Democracy

Learn more about the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at https://kellogg.nd.edu/

Transcript

Whenever we try to define democracy, I find we stumble into multiple caveats and exceptions. This is part of the reason why I call the podcast the democracy paradox. It is difficult to simplify our understanding of democracy. However, Josiah Ober and Brook Manville attempt to do just that in a new book called The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives. They simplify democracy down to a simple principle. Democracy, for them, is government without a boss. In other words, it is a government of the people.

I reached out to Josiah Ober to learn more about his ideas about democracy. Josiah is a Professor of Classics and Political Science at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Our conversation explores ideas about democracy through historical examples in Greece and Rome. I also press him about his basic ideas about democracy. It turns out there are conditions and exceptions in his vision of democracy as well. But I think it comes closer to what people generally imagine when they think of democracy. So, in some sense this is a more traditional view of democracy than some other guests on the show.

Now if you like this podcast, please consider leaving the podcast a 5 star rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. It’s the perfect Christmas present for a podcaster like me. I also want to give listeners a heads up that the show will start to feature ads in 2024. I’ve been talking to some nonprofit organizations and businesses about sponsoring the podcast and some have signed on. If you want to listen ad-free, I will have the latest episodes available for monthly donors on Patreon or paid subscribers on Apple Podcasts. If you have questions or comments, please email me at jkempf@democracyparadox.com. But for now… This is my conversation with Josiah Ober…

jmk

Josh Ober, welcome to the Democracy Paradox.

Josiah Ober

Thank you very much, Justin. Delighted to be here.

jmk

Well, Josh, I did love the book that's written by yourself and Brooke Manville, The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives. It's an interesting way to think about democracy. As we've seen countries, so many countries democratize, oftentimes it does actually begin with an actual bargain between the old regime and people who are fighting for democracy, for something new. A lot of countries, Chile's one. We've seen countries throughout the third wave of democratization that all begin with civic bargains the way that you're describing. So, to open up, it gets me thinking about what it is that we think of when we start to think about democracy as a bargain. Why don't we start there? What does it say about democracy when we describe it as a bargain?

Josiah Ober

I think the key thing that we try to get across in the book is that democracy, which we understand in a very basic sense as collective self-government by citizens and holds a lot of things at bay, which also goes into any sort of democracy I would want to live in, but still we're trying to start with a very simple definition. So, democracy, understood as self-government, is always imperfect and it's always imperfect from the point of view of those who are engaged in it, because democracy is, once again by our definition, always a way of organizing a society that is one way or another pluralistic. Not everybody has exactly the same interests. So, given that not everyone has the same interests and yet we have to govern ourselves, we're going to have to make an agreement.

We're going to have to negotiate an agreement and by definition, no one side is going to get everything that they want. It's a negotiated agreement. Now, if it was a zero-sum game and one side was just going to destroy the other side, then it wouldn't be a bargain. Of course, neither would it be a democracy. So, in our notion, democracy is essentially based on the idea that we're going to have to negotiate with one another in good faith, recognizing that none of us is going to get everything that we want and therefore from each individual citizen's perspective or each group's perspective, the arrangements are going to remain imperfect. As soon as we start demanding perfection, we start making it more difficult for us to actually live democratically.

jmk

How do civic bargains actually happen? How do people get to a point and how do people even decide who the civic bargain is actually between?

Josiah Ober

Yeah. So those are two really important questions. Who's at the table and how do we get to the table? We think about this as a bargaining situation. If we start with the question of who's at the table, that's one of the really challenging things that every democracy has to confront. It is called, in democratic theory, the boundary problem and it's insoluble. At least most democratic theorists like myself think it's insoluble in that there is always a kind of circularity. We the citizens will define who we the citizens are. There's no way to get away from the vicious circle.

So, one of the things that, once again, you have to sort of bite down on if you care about democracy is that there will always be those who are excluded from the citizen body. Certainly, children are always, or virtually always, excluded from those who have full participation rights. But in every working democracy I know about, there are also people within the jurisdiction who are subject to the rules that are set by the citizens who do not have citizen rights. The question is always, how is that decided? Is that something that can be changed or is it just once and forever? No one who is an outsider will ever be an insider. What are the rules for bringing people who are outside inside?

We tend to think in the book that democracy is a kind of citizenship ratchet - not racket, but ratchet. That is, it goes one way. When citizenship is reduced, when those who have citizenship are stripped of their citizenship, then something's going wrong. A majority is acting in a tyrannical manner. So, the first thing is that the citizenship problem is always there. It's never finally decided and it's something that every democracy has to continuously confront. Who are we and how do we treat those who are not yet or not allowed to be one of us, who don't have a formal seat at the table?

The related question you asked was about how do we get to the civic bargain. What we suggest is that every civic bargain is preceded by what we call political bargains. That is bargains among elites or between elites and those who are not elites. The final civic bargain, that is the agreement among citizens that we will govern ourselves and we will do that without a boss, is invariably preceded by a lot of bargaining that is political in which elites retain a lot of power in which a democracy has not yet come into being, and yet which begin to create the conditions in which democracy can come into being.

jmk

So, do you feel like there's a gray line between democracy and what many call autocracy? I mean, where you have a boss and you don't have a boss, but there seems to be no clear line between when it's kind of a boss and kind of not a boss. I'm thinking about a lot of different countries that have experienced democratic backsliding. Hungary would be an example where you have regular elections, but it looks like it's being governed more autocratically. We could talk about Turkey. They have elections. But they effectively have a boss and we could look at other countries that are even more gray where it's kind of democratic, but it doesn't always feel democratic. Is there a firm line between the two or is it gray and muddled in between?

Josiah Ober

Yeah, I think it's an important question. We're interested in the book, especially in the whole development of democracy. How did democracies come into being? Basically, it looks as if there really are two possible approaches. One is the revolutionary approach in which there is a tyrant, some boss. Somebody's running something, a king. The boss is thrown out. There's a revolution. The people, as it were, look around themselves and say, I guess it's us because we're not going to have that guy or that gang back in running and we don't want some similar guy or gang running things. So, if we look at Athens, for example, at the moment of the democratic revolution of 508 BC, that's an example of kicking out a tyrant and establishing a democratic system all at once. It looks like to me that that's a pretty bright line,

Look, then, at the United Kingdom, Britain, there's really no bright line. The king, once upon a time, was really the boss. But the king, over time, has to negotiate with nobles, with townsmen, with clergy, and the king's power is, as it were, reduced and reduced and reduced over time. The power of Parliament representing at least some part of the citizenry, of the people of first England and then of the United Kingdom, is increased. So, the moment in which the United Kingdom became a democracy is really hard to pin down. You can say that it's probably really not fully a democracy in our terms until sometime in the early 20th century.

So, I think there are these two ways of, as it were, becoming democratic, one of which becomes a lighter and lighter gray and eventually you say, all right, they crossed the line. The other is, well, it's pretty dark and boom, we burst into light. We have to figure out what to do. I think at least this bears on the question that you asked is how do we think about the other side? How do we think about then when the government of a democracy becomes bossier and bossier? One of the scary things, of course, is that modern would-be autocrats have become cleverer and cleverer at keeping the apparatus of what looks like a democratic system going while actually bringing more and more authority into their own hands. So, the boot on the neck starts out very, very gentle, and only slowly does the pressure increase.

jmk

We're using the language from your book where you describe democracy being a society that doesn't have a boss. I mean, that's really the central premise. By boss, we could think of it as a dictator. We could think of it as the autocrat. We could think of it as something that's less formal where you have somebody who's effectively in charge calling all the shots, but the institutions on paper look very democratic. What's the line between somebody being a boss and a leader, because oftentimes we look at leaders and we just think of them as calling the shots, acting as a boss. But in democracy the leader is not somebody who has unconstrained authority. It's very different than what you describe as a boss. So, what's the line between those two? What's the difference between them?

Josiah Ober

I think that at least one key thing is that the leader is always accountable. Their leader can be and at least always risks being removed from the position of leadership. If you are sure that indefinitely in the future, the same individual or the same gang or the same political party even is going to be running things and you're going to adjust your behavior accordingly because they have a great deal of authority, they have a great deal of power, then, you've got a boss. If the current leader can indeed be deposed, replaced by election or by whatever means, and you think that there's a reasonable chance that they will be, and the leader also recognizes that there is a reasonable chance that he or they, if it's a gang, a junta of some sort will be, then I think you have a very different situation.

So, I think accountability and in a sense the fragility of authority is absolutely essential here. One way I think to judge what's going on now in some of these places is that the people, in say Hungary or Turkey, feel, it is very unlikely that the current regime will be ever changed, and therefore, given that the government has a great deal of authority over their lives begin to act as subjects rather than as citizens. Citizens recognize themselves as the ultimate power, the ultimate authority behind the rules and behind their enforcement of the rules and behind the interpretation of the rules, whereas subjects of a boss recognize that their duty is not rulemaking or rule enforcing. Their duty is obedience and indeed their best way in the game that they're in is obedience unless they're very brave, unless they're willing to suffer potentially catastrophic consequences.

jmk

Do you feel that bargains are unique to democracies? Because when I hear people talk about Russia, for instance, they describe it as a country that has a civic bargain between Vladimir Putin and the people where Putin and the Siloviki deliver economic benefits to the people or at least they used to before the war and before a lot of other stuff happened. They would deliver benefits to the people in exchange for the people to stay out of politics. So, instead of being a civic bargain, it was more of an autocratic bargain. I mean, are bargains seen commonly among autocracies as well? Is the civic bargain a unique type of bargain or are those more autocratic bargains not really bargains at all?

Josiah Ober

What we see is that the civic bargain is a very special case of the genre or genus, if you will, bargain. There are bargains in all political systems, one way and another. They may be good bargains or bad bargains by standards of somebody who likes democracy. So, you're in a sense, giving up your obedience for basic security or there's some hope for basic welfare or just because you're otherwise going to live in fear all the time. In that sense, in all societies there are political bargains of various sorts. Elites are constantly making bargains with one another. They're making bargains with non-elites, like you say, Vladimir Putin and others. So, I think the generic form, bargain, gets us a lot of traction. We do want to contrast bargain with a zero-sum game, basically to war.

So, a zero-sum game means I'm going to go in and try to get everything and you're going to get nothing. There may be autocracies that are like that, but I don't think they can be very stable. I think in a sense, if the population that is being ruled feels we're getting nothing from this it's not going to work. So, this idea that politics can and should be a zero-sum game and that one side should win, full stop, and the other side should lose, full stop, I think is one of the really dangerous ideas that actually is up and around these days.

Anyway, the civic bargain then is a very special kind of bargain. It's a bargain that citizens make with one another rather than with powerful elites and they agree that we will rule ourselves. We'll rule ourselves assuming that that isn't too great a sacrifice in terms of security and welfare. We're not going to give up all sense of basic security just to have democracy. That's a fundamental condition on democracy. It must deliver reasonably well security and welfare and then we're going to have to define what it is to be a citizen. We're going to have to bite that bullet, as we were talking about earlier. Then we're going to have to establish the rules. What are the rules? So, it could be the American constitution, for example, a set of formal rules.

But in order to do all of that, we've got to be able to negotiate with one another. We've got to recognize that what we're doing here is giving up something in order to get something else. It can be very hard-nosed bargaining. You look at the American constitutional bargain in 1787, there was a lot of very hard-nosed bargaining there. But it's got to be done ultimately, at least we claim in the book, under the rubric, and this is probably our most controversial idea, civic bargaining requires something that Aristotle called civic friendship. Not that we the citizens consider each other personal friends, not even that we like each other particularly, but it does mean that we are not enemies. That we are engaged in some kind of an enterprise together and that we recognize that we have to be together.

There has to be some union that we are seeking to make more perfect through our bargaining and therefore we're not going to treat our fellow citizens simply as people who want to be destroyed. So that's a hard question and how to get there requires, we say, civic education. You want to do all of this stuff, you better think about what it takes for us as citizens to educate one another as citizens.

jmk

So, I found the book interesting because on the one hand, it makes the idea of democracy a lot simpler. It says a democracy is a society where citizens govern themselves without a boss. But then on the other hand, there still are a lot of conditions that are placed on that type of society, on the civic bargain itself. So, in some ways you're kind of liberating yourselves from what many people call liberal democracy by escaping from the trap of saying we have to have all of these liberal constraints on the state in order for us to call it a democracy and that's almost essential for the premise of the book with the way that you're looking to historic examples such as Athens, Rome, because they predate what we think of as modern liberalism.

But at the same time, you're creating new constraints for yourself. You're creating new standards that are necessary to be able to put into place in order for a country to be considered democratic. How do you feel about that? Do you feel like you're trying to escape from the typical trap of liberalism and do you feel that you've kind of created your own kind of trap itself where you're kind of boxing democracy into new constraints that say you're a society where you're governing by yourself and you don't have a boss, but you're still not a democracy because you haven't met all of these conditions that we've kind of imposed?

Josiah Ober

So, what we claim anyway is that the conditions are just the conditions of the possibility of real self-government by citizens. Our basic notion is indeed that we want to, as it were, abstract from the liberal conditions, a very full set of human rights that are often thought to be essential to democracy. We like those things, but we want to say that democracy as self-government is something that is different from that. Democracy as self-government is a platform that enables the development of very extensive rights and it's going to have to have some protections that we think of as rights in order to function. So, without free speech, for example, it's simply foolish to say that we the people are governing ourselves. Anyone who can tell me you can't suggest that is my boss.

It requires some level of political equality, because if a few people have all of the influence or the say, if their votes are going to count more than everyone else's vote, then they're the boss. The boss condition or the definition, really, does in fact require that there actually are some of these features that are often put in terms of natural rights or human rights, one way or another, described in the language of rights. We say that these are necessary conditions if you want to have the results of a society that is self-governing. Now, you might not. We don't have anything to say to people who say I'm perfectly happy to have a boss. But if you do want to have a self-governing democracy, then we claim that these are the conditions that are just minimal, that without this it's not going to work.

If you can't negotiate with your fellow citizens in good faith, if you insist on treating your fellow citizens as enemies who must be destroyed, then you're in really a condition of war rather than a condition of social peace. At that point, it's something really very different. So, you can have a peaceful autocracy and you can have a peaceful democracy, and you can have a condition of, in a sense, civil war. We tend to think of those three options. Democracy is by far the best.

jmk

So, the book leans heavily on four historic examples. One of them is Athens in Greece, another is Rome, the third one is Britain or rather England, and then the fourth one is the United States. You're a classicist, you know a lot about Athens and Rome, so I want to take a second to kind of ask you about those. Athens is often described as just the prototype for democracy in the future. It's what a lot of people actually aspire to get back to in terms of citizen engagement and citizen involvement in terms of democracy. But one of the critiques about Athenian democracy is that it was preliberal, not just in terms of who was involved in terms of citizenship, but also how they treated citizens.

You mentioned about how important free speech is for democracy. I mean, there's no more famous example of citizens governing themselves, but lacking respect for free speech than the trial of Socrates. Should we think of Athens as being truly a democracy or is it pre-democratic?

Josiah Ober

So, by our standards, Athens is a democracy. It is collective self-government by an extensive and internally socially diverse, by ancient standards, body of citizens who understand themselves as citizens and who self-consciously reject the rule of a boss. In that sense, yes, the Athenians actually are the first organized society that we know of that develops a really detailed vocabulary of free speech. They have two general terms. One emphasizes equality of the right to speak among citizens and the other emphasizes the right to speak about anything that you please.

So, the Socrates case is interesting in that at the time of the trial, Socrates was 70 years old and had been a notorious, well known free speaker and free thinker for at least 25 or 30 years and probably more than that. He had said things out there in public that were deeply challenging to anyone who was a fan of democracy. He describes in the Apology, famously, the people of Athens as a sleepy horse who needs to be stung awake by the philosopher, that would be Socrates himself, in order to do anything at all. This is not the way a democratic people like to be described, but they put up with it for a very long time.

So, I think that you can say that the trial of Socrates ultimately said that Socrates had crossed some kind of line for a pretty narrow majority of the jurors who vote on that day. Socrates says in the apology, ‘Good heavens, I'm amazed, if only 30 of you had voted otherwise out of 500, I'd be a free man.’ Because he conducts his trial as an exercise in free speech, he doesn't cater to the jury, basically says what he believes. So, the question then is what line had he crossed? I've written on that. Other people have written on that. But I don't think it's just simply that the Athenians suddenly became fed up with the very idea of free speech.

I think, ultimately, it's because they believe that he had given up on the fundamental Athenian idea, related to free speech, the fundamental idea that you are responsible for the predictable effects of our public speech. They had decided that the predictable effects of Socrates’ public speech was his students forming an oligarchy and murdering a great number of their fellow citizens in the brief and bloody period in which they actually ran the place. The oligarchy was expelled. The democracy was put back into place and four years later there's the trial of Socrates. The reason for the trial is Socrates shrugged his shoulders and said it's my fault that my students decided to kill a bunch of y'all. I'm going to go out and do exactly what I did in public, saying the same things.

At that point, I think the Athenians say you're not getting it. You are responsible for the predictable public effects of your public speech and last time, it led to horror. You don't seem to see that this time it could lead to horror again. That's it. So at least that's one way to understand that it does relate to the question of free speech. But it's not simply a background community that rejected free speech. Arguably, Athens was among the societies we know in human history that was most committed to and most obsessed with the idea that we must be able to say what we believe or else we won't be able to have a system whereby we actually do rule one another.

jmk

Do you feel that the practice of democracy in Athens and in Rome might have oftentimes fell short because some leaders rose above those institutions. I'm thinking of Pericles. He did rise above the idea of the typical leader to something that I think some Athenians might have thought of him actually as a boss. If Pericles said this, that you were going to do what Pericles said. Rome had different leaders at different times, that even if they weren't formally a dictator, people were listening to them differently than they would to other people.

They might assume that they were more or less a boss, particularly Julius Caesar, even before he formally became a dictator had many people that were following him with the expectation that he effectively was the boss. Do both of these societies have episodes, periods that fall short of democracy in practice, even if they still had the institutions that allowed them to be more democratic on paper?

Josiah Ober

Yeah, I would separate the Pericles story from the Roman Republicans, especially the Julius Caesar story. Thucydides, the great historian who writes the history of the Peloponnesian War, famously said that during Pericles’ period of leadership that Athens was in name a democracy, but in fact it was led or ruled by the first man. I think that's false, actually. I think that is a tendentious statement on Thucydides’ part and actually can be refuted even within Thucydides own text. Once again, I've written on this. I'm committed to that position.

But I think one way to think about it is that after the second year of the Peloponnesian War, when Athens had suffered a terrible plague, things hadn't gone the way that the Athenians had thought it would, Pericles was simply deposed from office. Probably slapped with a fine he couldn't pay and just simply pushed out of office. His office, by the way, was one of the ten generals of Athens who was annually elected. So, he had to be annually elected every year. I think the fact that he could be and was removed from office - he was then reelected the next year, so it wasn't a permanent thing - it does suggest that he wasn't any kind of absolute boss.

The fact that he actually had to negotiate with different interests within Athens… He makes it very clear in one of his speeches that he wishes that the Athenians could simply abandon all of their holdings in the territory of Athens outside the city walls, because then you wouldn't even have to protect those and you could have a very pure city island strategy, which is what he really favored. He couldn't do that. He had to, in fact, maintain garrisons out in the countryside. He had to use the cavalry to try to limit the ravaging of the Peloponnesian forces. Basically, he had to cut a deal. So, all of these suggest that Pericles was not in any sense an absolute boss. Very influential, certainly the most influential politician of his time, but not a boss.

In Rome, we get a different situation. Even in the early career of Julius Caesar, what we've seen is that citizenship has really been thinned down. The Athenians were very jealous about their citizenship. Expanded it radically at the beginning of the democracy so that poor men and rich men had the same equal vote and could gather in assembly and debate and vote on things. But they didn't expand it subsequently. So, it was the descendants of the original citizens that became the citizens. In Rome, there's a radical expansion of citizenship. This really solves the problem of scale that we think is really a problem that every democracy has to figure out how to deal with. When you have large and reasonably effective rival states, then the democratic state has to be able to be large and effective enough to deal with those rival autocratic states.

So, Rome had figured out how to do that by expanding its citizenship. There were, by the time of Julius Caesar, probably in excess of a couple of million Roman citizens. But this meant that citizenship had been really thinned out that they hadn't really figured out all of the modes of representation that are the hallmark of modern democracies, such that a lot of Romans just really didn't feel they had any say any longer in their government. On the other hand, they were being expected to serve in these long military campaigns abroad. For example, with Caesar up in Gaul, they became very attached to their military commanders. Their commanders gave them promises of the nice things they would get, like lands back in Rome once the campaigns were over.

So, they began to form attachments to their commanders that were stronger than their attachment to the old idea of the Roman Republic or the government of Rome. At that point, somebody, it turns out to be Caesar, is simply going to sweep the board and say the people who are opposed to me are our enemies. Follow me, soldiers. We will eliminate them and we will make ourselves into the masters of Rome and that's what happens. It's a long process. It takes hundreds of years for Rome to get to that point. It really is a different sort of development. This very strong association of soldiers with their commander and then the weakening of the idea. But what it is to be a citizen, what it means to be a citizen are essential to ultimately the collapse of the Roman democratic republic.

jmk

We could do a whole episode just about Rome and how its politics reflect democracy and how they don't. Its expansion of citizenship is definitely interesting, particularly in the early Republic, as Rome is conquering the Sabines, that it's incorporating their elites into not just citizenship, but even into the Senate. You have a massive expansion of citizenship from an early period within Rome, where it's redefining what it means to be Roman from the city of Rome to almost all of Italy at one point. Then even beyond that Saint Paul is a Roman citizen in the Bible. That's another example. He's Jewish. He's from what is today Israel and he's a Roman citizen.

So, citizenship was very expansive in terms of Rome. However, the key political institution, at least as far as I've understood, is the Roman Senate. The Roman Senate was limited to a small number of elites that to my understanding was incredibly aristocratic. I have a hard time describing Rome as a democracy when one of the key institutions, one of the key political institutions, is aristocratic and even in some ways, maybe even oligarchic.

Josiah Ober

So, there is a scholarly debate over is it fair to call Rome democratic in any sense. We once again use this very basic definition that when the citizens are ultimately self-governing then it is a democracy. So, the question is, is that the case in Rome? I think the fact that the Senate is a very influential body has to be taken into consideration. On the other hand, the Senate was not all powerful. One of my fellow ancient historians, Robert Morstein-Marx, has written extensively on this. He has demonstrated that there are a number of cases and well known, well documented cases in which the Senate tried to push through some particular piece of legislation and the people of Rome voting in their citizen assemblies, which is the ultimate decision-making authority of Rome, said, no. We're not going to take the Senate's recommendation.

The Senate doesn't have any legislative authority. It only has recommending authority and when the assembly refused that authority, the Senate had no alternative. They don't have any sort of way to trump the popular will. So, if that never happened, if every time the Senate advised, the Assembly accepted, then we would say it's meaningless to call it a democracy. But I think as Morstein-Marx shows that happens often enough so that the senators always had to ask themselves, is our advice going to be taken? Too often you give advice and it's not taken then your power is really something they have to basically decide what is the game we're in.

They're in a sense in a negotiating game in which, yes, they were influential, wealthy men, but they weren't all powerful. They had to be careful to give advice that was likely to be accepted by the people of Rome. Sometimes they got it wrong. So, for those reasons, I think it's possible to call Rome a kind of democracy. We suppose that there are indeed a variety of institutional forms that can be described as citizen self-government. So, British parliamentarianism, American presidential system, Athenian direct democracy, participative democracy, the kind of mixed government, as the historian Polybius called it, of Rome in which the Senate has a very important role to play, but so do the people have a key role to play are all within our basic definition legitimately forms of citizen self-government, although the ways by which the citizens govern themselves are quite different.

jmk

One of the big ideas behind your book, behind the civic bargain, is that we've had civic bargains throughout history. So, if we just accept your premise that Athens and Rome are democracies and England is democratizing over the course of hundreds of years, beginning as early as the Magna Carta, it says that it was possible to develop the institutions to be able to create democracy from a very early stage of human development. But at the same time, many recognize that right now, today is possibly the most democratic age that we've ever had in terms of the number of democracies, the proliferation of democracy and really the depth of how democratic countries are right now.

So, from that sense, I get the impression that technological development was not necessary for democracy to occur, but it's definitely assisted us to become more democratic. Yet, we seem to be in the midst of a crisis of democracy and in a lot of ways, I think it's spurred on by technological developments and it makes a lot of us wish that we lived in a simpler time where democracy seemed to be easier to achieve like it was easier to be able to make these civic bargains. So, I'd like to put the question to you of whether you think technology makes democracy more or less difficult to achieve.

Josiah Ober

Yeah. It's a great question. In the background there is this challenge of scale that democracies need to scale up one way or another in order to be competitive in a world in which there are non-democratic rivals. Yet, as they scale up, as they become both larger and more diverse in terms of more interests being potentially at the table, it does become harder to negotiate bargains that will be regarded as fair enough, satisfying enough, so that we can go on and say yes, we'll live under these rules until we decide to change them at some point downstream. The civic bargain is always in process. It's never a finalized thing. So, this is a problem and technology is a part of it. We can think of some of the key technologies that have been important for democracy as technologies of communication.

So, in some ways, what the Athenian democracy, and then a little bit later, the Roman democratic republic, use is the technology of alphabetic writing. Basically, the ways in which records are not only kept, but made public in which the rules, the laws, that we're currently running ourselves by are put out there, inscribed on stone, for everyone to see and inscribed in a code, an alphabetic code, rather than a hieroglyphic or other form of more complex writing, which is really only accessible to a highly trained scribal elite. It's possible to have really quite widespread literacy once you develop alphabetic writing as we now know. We don't know how broad literacy was in Athens and Rome, but it's certainly much broader than it is in societies that aren't using alphabetic writing.

So, it's a technological breakthrough. You can actually express language in a way that represents the sounds that come out of our mouths and that can actually make it possible for us to make all the rules available to everybody. There's not any one-to-one relationship between alphabetic writing and democracy, but arguably that is a technology that really allows democracy to go places where it would have been very difficult had it not. Same thing, then, with a printing press. It is not something that simply creates democracy, but it does create the possibility of much wider dissemination of a whole range of ideas. Originally, of course, it's for printing religious texts, but very quickly becomes adapted to printing political texts.

Once again, it's very hard to think of the development of democracy or democratizing developments in the UK or in the US in the 18th century without printing, without the ability to really produce texts that could be read and discussed and debated across a really wide citizen population. If you think about the Federalist Papers, for example, being broadcast by Madison and company through the newspapers and debated, that becomes a key part of the ratification process of the constitution, which ultimately creates the civic bargain or creates the instantiation of the civic bargain for the United States. Okay, so where are we now? I think one way to think about the internet, social media, communications, technologies today are that we're in an early phase of their implementation.

Initially it was this is going to be great for democracy. Now we're saying this is awful for democracy. It's causing all of these problems. So, I think to my mind, the question is will citizen self-government find ways to make use of the new communication technology to actually extend what we can do to expand citizenship, maybe to reintegrate citizens into the government, be more active in self-government, more Athens like or will it continue to fragment us into more and more mutually hostile bubbles? Will it ultimately lead to something like a commitment to zero sum games and therefore ultimately to something like civil war?

Once again, if our argument is right, it's either negotiate or fight. It's either bargain or zero sum. Then I think the question is are the technologies in front of us potentially ways in which we could communicate better and therefore bargain better or is it going to degenerate into ways that we're just our own weapons by which we fight each other.

jmk

So, Josh, sometimes it feels like we've gotten really bad at bargaining these days. We’ve gotten really bad at compromising. We look at the United States Congress and it seems to have a difficult time making compromises that seem to be just absolutely necessary just to do the very basics of governing. It's not just the United States Congress. It's even amongst ourselves. It just feels like people these days have a hard time finding compromises between different sides when they're working with each other. So, I want to ask a two-part question here. First off, as we look back to history, is that really true? Are we worse at bargaining today than we used to be in the past? Then secondly, what can we learn from history to be able to help us become better at bargaining in the future?

Josiah Ober

Yeah, the first question, are we worse at it now, I guess depends on where you want to put yourself in US history. If you say we're now in the 1850s, I'd say we're probably still better at it than in the immediate run up to the Civil War. Now, clearly that goes back to the bargain that was made at the time of the Constitution, which slavery was not dealt with in the adjustments and the changes that were made in the way that the country was run in the Constitution up to that point. They didn't deal with it. By that point, we're even worse at bargaining. We're going to fight. I don't think we're quite there yet. I trust not. What's to be done about it?

Here really our answer in the book and my answer in what I'm doing now at Stanford University is that we need to really recognize the importance of civic education, the education of citizens. I think we've come to think in some ways that democracy is easy. That it's the stable background condition of our lives. We don't have to work at it. Our argument in the book is it's not easy. There are reasons that there are not a lot of pre modern examples that we can study in detail because it's really hard to get self-government up and running. Arguably, it's easier to get an autocracy up and running and to keep it running. So, we really need to work at it. There is certain knowledge I think that citizens have to have, basically skills of negotiation that citizens have to learn. These aren't entirely obvious to everybody.

If we look at the successful democracies, the periods in which these cases that we look at were successful. They each had various forms of civic education, not necessarily in schools, in the background culture. The stories that were told. Norms that were inculcated. In a sense, rewards that were given. Not monetary rewards, but rewards in terms of honors and the punishments that were meted out, not necessarily in terms of imprisonment or fines, but in terms of dishonor or less social respect for those who don't do what is their duty as a citizen. Now, in every case, the education of citizens was an integral part of what made these democratic societies work.

I think we need to begin to work on that again. We need to work at it in formal educational institutions, universities, and K-12, but we also need to think about how that happens in the culture. This is really, in a sense, a long game. I don't have a rabbit out of the hat. If only we do this, democracy will be just fine. I don't think it is that easy. There may be some quick fixes that we could put in that'll keep us going for the time being. I think in the end, what we really need to do is recommit to the idea that this is difficult. It is valuable and in order to keep this valuable, difficult thing going, we need to basically pay the cost of educating ourselves, educating the next generation, the background knowledge and skills that citizens need if they are to continue to govern themselves without a boot on their neck.

jmk

Well, Josh, thank you so much for joining me today. To plug the book one more time, it's called The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives. It's a great read in terms of connecting the dots between democracy and history to help us better understand about the problems that we deal with today. I love it whenever you can connect politics from today to historical episodes from the past. So, this is a great read for that. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you so much for writing the book.

Josiah Ober

It's been a delight. Thank you for having me on.