Good government or Representative Government?
It's a false choice, I know, but there's a reason I put it this way - it makes an important distinction. Lose that distinction, and we can end up with an argument that makes us choose one or the other, splitting the public up into elites and masses, and producing government that is neither good nor representative as a consequence.
article by Giles Fraser
‘Plato famously insisted that the ideal society should be run by philosophers. Just as the master of a ship must be an expert in the craft of navigation, so too the master of the good society must be an expert in the craft of good governance. And just as you shouldn’t allow any old Tom, Dick or Harry to become the master of a ship, so you shouldn’t give them mastery over a society either. That is Plato’s case against democracy. Governance requires experts. Philosophers.
Step forward AC Grayling – philosopher. In his new book, Democracy and Its Crisis, he tells us that the Brexit result was the consequence of giving too much power to the wrong sort of people. The reason we have representative democracy rather than direct democracy, he says, is so that the various institutions of government are able to ameliorate the fickleness and ignorance of the ordinary voter. “Sometimes he drinks heavily while listening to the flute,” sneered Plato at this ordinary voter.’
A long, long time ago now, when asked how to demonstrate the relevance of political philosophy to a class of students, I set up a debate on good government and representative government, asking students which of these they would choose. I made them choose. Of course, the objection came that it’s not an either/or. I agreed, for reasons that I said would be made clear once they have made their choices. People have a right to be governed by laws of their own making. Individuals have a right to be wrong, if they choose, (as the old Gilbert O’Sullivan song goes, my philosophy talks can involve song and dance, I aim to entertain). The principle of self-assumed obligation holds that individuals are obligated only by those laws that they themselves have had a hand in making. We all agreed. I introduced Rousseau and spoke awhile about the possibilities for the democratic constitution of authority. I hadn’t quite realised then how much of a Platonist Rousseau was. I went into Rousseau’s idea of the moral and educative purpose of the law in ‘forcing’ individuals to be free. It’s a seemingly paradoxical notion that is designed to provoke controversy and heated argument. But all Rousseau was saying is that, however much consent and law rests upon will, individuals can be wrong, they can choose and act against their own interests, and that, therefore, the law exists as a generalised form of the human good, constraining often erring individuals to their own good. I wish I had introduced Rousseau’s ‘general will,’ another seemingly paradoxical notion, in that will, surely, is particular. How can will be general? Rousseau saw that the good cannot just be given passively to individuals but that it had to be willed by those individuals. That is, indeed, if we are to have good government, government for the general good of all, willed and recognised by all, and hence representative (or democratic, Rousseau was none too keen on representation …. See how the discussion opens up on what seems a simple and very wrong-headed question, a false choice). The democrats in the class all argued for the prevalence of the people’s voice. Some even claimed Rousseau himself to have argued this. But Rousseau made a crucial distinction between the general will and the will of all. The general will embodies an objective truth. This is the Platonic commitment to good government. The will of all expresses particular wills, wills which often err.
Read Giles Fraser’s article criticizing A.C. Grayling on his rejection of the wrong sort of voter. It is hard not to sympathize with Fraser. Whenever votes go against those who think they know better, there follows criticism that too many of the individuals composing the demos don’t know enough for their own good, or for democracy to work so as to produce good government. It sounds … elitist. Well, Rousseau has been criticized as an adherent of totalitarian democracy. Plato, too, was singled out by the liberal Popper as an enemy of the open society, (that is, the liberal society, which is indeed open to all views, so long as they are liberal).
As for my views in this exchange, I can see the truths on both sides. I think that whilst Fraser may well have misunderstood Grayling’s argument (and Grayling says so, see below), he is right to express a concern at the overriding of the popular voice. That said, that does not make Grayling wrong and Fraser right. On the contrary, I am wholeheartedly with Grayling. My concern is what has gone wrong with the forces of political education and socialization, creating the conditions in which democracy becomes an active reality through the demos stepping forward as an active, informed citizen body.
This was the point I got the class of students to come to appreciate for themselves back in the 1990s. Those who were the most vocal about representative government and democracy were, when challenged, all unanimous that government and politics was about something more than the assertion of opinions and interests, something that looked something like … truth and goodness. My view, right or wrong, my self- or sectional interest, right or wrong, was not, on analysis, a persuasive argument. Admitting that democratic elections often produce the wrong result, and that representative government can often turn bad, I noted how quickly and how easily the advocates of representative government invoked the values of truth, justice and goodness in supporting their argument. And asked by what standards we are to judge right and wrong, good and bad. Citizens have a right to be wrong, indeed, such is the nature of democratic will and choice – but that right is something that can be properly and meaningfully exercised only within a greater standard. I call it a transcendent standard.
Anyhow, I’ve written on this little exercise of mine in other places on this blog. I shall try to supply the reference, when I can find it. In the meantime, it is gratifying to see a couple of scholars putting the case for good government and for Plato.
AC Grayling responds to Giles Fraser’s article about ‘patronising elites’; while Deborah Cook says Fraser ignored the fact that Plato thought truth was paramount.
AC Grayling
‘I write in response to Giles Fraser’s article on my book Democracy and its Crisis (Loose canon, 22 September). It is so predictable that a lazy reading of any discussion about how a democratic order can rebut the patronising view taken by Plato that “ordinary people” are not fit to have a vote, that I repeatedly stressed that the great debate about how to honour the right of citizens to be the source of political authority in a state was precisely about the means to prove Plato wrong.’
That’s the challenge I have taken up in my own work. Plato’s philosopher-ruler is an easy target as elitist and anti-democratic. Critics who do this miss Plato’s interest in establishing the principles of good government, a class of rulers who rule for the common good, not self- or sectional interest. His Republic was not so much a blueprint for government as an elaboration of the principles of political justice. As such, Plato’s criticism of democracy was a criticism of the tendency of individuals to be led by the nose – ego, desire – and not by the nous, producing collective error, bad government, chaos and inviting tyranny to restore order. I take this not to be a rejection of democracy but as a challenge to the demos to live up to the demands of democracy, and learn the conditions and disciplines of rational freedom. In my own work, I sought to turn Plato’s philosopher-ruler into the ruler of philosophy, the democratization of philosophy, power and politics so that the principle of self-assumed obligation did indeed involve good government, government for the common good in which the freedom of each was coexistent with and conditional upon the freedom of all. A happy conclusion. An ideal state, no doubt. But it makes the point that the working of political institutions is to be set within a transcendent standard of truth and goodness. Grayling doesn’t argue the point this way, but I do, in line with the democratic Platonism of Rousseau.
Grayling argues that ‘the right we all have to a voice in the government of our lives is connected to another right we have: namely, the right to good government.’ The issue, then, concerns the ways in which the institutions and practices of representative democracy enable us to achieve this. ‘We have a right to good government,’ Grayling continues, ‘because without it we cannot fully exercise other important rights we have, including those to privacy and freedom of expression, the rule of impartial law, the right to assembly, and more.’ Very true, and all too prone to be overlooked and overridden in libertarian and populist assertions of freedom.
‘In anarchic situations these rights are forfeit; so a rational society needs to ensure that the diverse and often conflicting preferences and interests of we the people are translated through agreed institutions into good government.’
I establish this point in terms of a transcendent standard with respect to truth and goodness. That standard exists outside of the institutions and laws of time and place, serving to evaluate those institutions and laws, orienting actions and practices to the good, creating the will and motivation among the individuals composing the demos. Grayling puts it in terms of ‘agreed institutions.’ I’d agree on the need for an institutional framework which embodies universal rights, alternative platforms and justice. I’d just say that that framework is a matter of much more than agreement and convention.
‘This point is comprehensively missed by Fraser, who trivialises the issue in the usual cheap and easy way of those who make populist jibes at “elites” and “experts” because they do not understand the extremely important point at issue. And this kind of unintelligence is dangerous, because it is what is corroding our liberal democracies at present,’ concludes Grayling. OK. But, I’d go much further and say that what is corroding these liberal democracies, the real cancer at the heart of liberal politics, is the chasm that has opened up between government and governed. If people are ignorant or mistaken, if too many are becoming dangerously prone to rejecting elites and experts, then we need to examine carefully at the corruption in the conditions of politics in the systematically anti-democratic abstraction of power and control from the real lives of people. The diminution in the power of government to actually govern our lives vis economic forces with private and often global priorities has been accompanied by a diminution in the public imagination – people turn to government for collective solutions to their problems less and less, and with dwindling hope. And that leaves people crying out for a genuine public community. To leave them crying, and to call them unintelligent, whilst failing to provide the means and mechanisms enabling conscious collective control – that is, to establish the social and the institutional conditions of good government, along with the psychological and intellectual – is very dangerous indeed. And suggests that the real threat to liberal democracy is not the bad character of the individuals composing the demos but the very rotten character of liberal institutions in relation to the socio-economic (not to mention military) forces that govern the planet from outside the popular will.
I turn now to the response of Deborah Cook, Professor of philosophy, who sticks up for Plato in all of this.
She recognizes that Plato did indeed criticise democracy, but not for the reasons given by Fraser. Plato argued for intelligent rulers (philosophera) not because he was an elitist, but because he was concerned with good government ensuring the common good of all. Plato’s rulers were educated in this concern, transcending any self- or sectional interest on their part. It was a case for government as an ethical agency securing the universal interest, not suppressing particularity, but letting it flourish in its own legitimate sphere. Good government concerned each and all, a universal concern that embodied and articulated the good of all equally. The intelligent rulers in Plato’s Republic, then, were selected from members of every class and gender. ‘As long as you (be you male or female) could think, you were capable of governing. Those men and women deemed suited to rule were given an education that lasted until they were 50. They had to prove that they held the good of their community over their own good. Only then could they rule.’
For Plato, truth is paramount. Is that elitist? I’d suggest it is itself an elitist notion to see the truth as something of value only to a few, of no concern to ‘the people.’ On the contrary, it is libertarian and populist notions which, in overriding truth in the rush to freedom as mere self-assertive licence, that sells people far short of their full stature, sending them headlong into their very illegitimate chains, ruling elites managing and manipulating them by immediacy, ego, desire and prejudice. ‘So if we extend Plato’s views on the ideal republic to the Brexit vote, where truth was trampled in the dust, and the politicians who pushed it forward were not chosen for their fitness to govern, but instead were part of an elite, mostly male, and with moneyed parents and an Eton education, then quite frankly, Plato’s my gender and class blind man.’ (Deborah Cook, Professor of philosophy, University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada).
Yeah! I am very glad to hear a female professor of philosophy say this about Plato. I have a bad experience of a job interview in which I tried to impress with my knowledge of Plato. It cut no ice. Plato was a ‘dead white male,’ symptomatic of everything that was wrong and patriarchal and Eurocentric about the western philosophical canon. I read Plato because I thought he was a great philosopher who treats the ‘big questions’ of philosophy with breadth and depth (not to mention his poetic and mystical qualities). Deborah Cook gets the point exactly! Plato’s good government is entirely without social and cultural implications, it is genuinely universal in transcending the various particularities of social existence. Plato has been treated as the whipping boy. He’s the real Elvis of philosophy, the one they all take down, the big, popular king of rock’n’roll that everyone measures themselves against, that everyone was better than (so those out to make a claim for themselves tell us).
Rot.
Read Plato properly. Read all the philosophers properly as well – think, philosophize. By this, I don't mean nit-pick like a bureaucratic of knowledge, dotting the 'i's' and crossing the 't's', but actually grapple with the questions and think them through, and think them anew. Bring philosophy to life, be a bit wild in being rational. Remember that for Plato, beauty is the supreme political category in the way that it lights the path to truth and goodness, and invites the heart to follow. Remember, too, that Rousseau pointed to the truths 'engraved on the human heart.' Give it a go. You can do it. We are all appropriately equipped for the life of reason.
In my own work I argue that Plato is the origin of the concept of rational freedom, the concept that is central to my work, and a view which I have sought to democratize so as to give us government that is both truly good and representative. These letters affirming Plato and good government confirm all those years beavering away on this on my part. I do want to get back on this in the near future, in relation to Rousseau. Work to come.