CLIVE E.HILL DEMOCRACY, POPULISM AND RIGHTS

CLIVE E.HILL DEMOCRACY, POPULISM AND RIGHTS

In the momentous years between 1789 and 1918, liberals, democrats, populists, socialists and conservatives were all important actors on the stage of international history. This

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article seeks to outline some of the most important institutional and theoretical questions raised by both supporters and critics of representative democracy—including the so- called ‘populists’—and the notable three-way debate about rights between the ‘liberal’, ‘historical’ and ‘socialist’ positions. In the interests of brevity, arguments to the effect that non-human subjects (e.g. animals, forests or buildings) can enjoy rights are not considered, as these had little currency in the nineteenth century. European and North American sources predominate, but some reference is made to South American, Asian and African writers as well.

While political slogans may not tell the reader very much about the detailed intellectual history of the nineteenth century, it is perhaps worth noting a few as signposts in a complex historical landscape. In Paris, in 1789, the National Assembly of France declared the ‘sacred’ significance of the ‘Rights of Man and of Citizens’; in 1848, in Seneca Falls (New York), a Woman’s Rights Convention protested the ‘entire disenfranchisement of over-half [of] the people’ (women and slaves) from these same liberal rights; and, in 1917, the President of the USA (Woodrow Wilson) argued in Washington, DC, that ‘the world must be made safe for democracy’ through warfare. Meanwhile, in 1843/4, an obscure German journalist named Marx had denounced the whole concept of ‘rights’, but only a few years later came to argue that it was essential for Communists to ‘win the battle of democracy’ (see MARX AND MARXISM).

Although Karl Marx used the latter phrase in the (implicit) context of a debate with radical anarchists, who wanted to abolish the state as well as to resolve ‘the social question’, his presence in the foregoing list reminds us that in Europe, in particular, democracy was often seen as the ideological reflex of industrialization. Marx certainly knew his audience, for, during most of the century, the idea that democratization would involve social change (greater economic equality, wider and more ‘integral’ education, etc.), as well as political/institutional change, was generally accepted by both sceptics (e.g. TOCQUEVILLE, ARNOLD) and enthusiasts, such as the Chartists and Jacksonians. In the Western world, however, it seems that by 1900 democracy had lost many of its negative associations with ‘mob rule’ and its more positive associations with ‘active citizenship’ had become increasingly disassociated from challenges to economic hierarchies (despite the strength of the movement known as ‘social democracy’) and was in the process of being redefined as a relatively simple method of selecting governments through party-political competition. Instead, at the end of our period, the language of rights was increasingly co-opted in certain discourses (e.g. ‘New Liberalism’ and ‘Progressivism’) to address the economic and social concerns of ordinary people; concerns such as education, employment, leisure and social security (the so-called ‘social rights’). It was in this context that we can perhaps best understand the less familiar slogans of ‘populists’ (amorphous groups of protesters whose ideas never solidified into a single ideology, even within individual countries), slogans such as ‘a pair of boots is worth more than Shakespeare’ (Russia in the 1870s) and ‘the people must be the sovereign’ (the USA in the 1890s).

The idea of ‘popular sovereignty’ was no doubt implicit in the theory (if not the practice) of Ancient Greek democracy and early-modern republicanism, but it was not formulated in a recognizably modern way until Jean-Jacques Rousseau published his Du contrat social in 1762. After his death, Rousseau was criticized by those to his ‘right’ for formulating the doctrine at all (e.g. by MAISTRE), and by those to his ‘left’ for failing to The idea of ‘popular sovereignty’ was no doubt implicit in the theory (if not the practice) of Ancient Greek democracy and early-modern republicanism, but it was not formulated in a recognizably modern way until Jean-Jacques Rousseau published his Du contrat social in 1762. After his death, Rousseau was criticized by those to his ‘right’ for formulating the doctrine at all (e.g. by MAISTRE), and by those to his ‘left’ for failing to

So, were there any ‘genuine’ democracies in existence during the nineteenth century? If we define a ‘genuine’ democracy as a state in which the will of the majority of the adult citizens—ascertained through universal suffrage elections and periodic referenda on major issues—is treated as hegemonic by the whole apparatus of government, then very few, if any, nineteenth-century governments pass the test set for them. For example, the exclusion of women, native peoples and former slaves (through judicial convention, special treaties and ‘grandfather legislation’) clearly weakens the claims of the so-called ‘Anglo-Saxon republics’: Australia, New Zealand and the USA in the late nineteenth century. Moreover, the almost universal maintenance of various ‘emergency’ and extra- constitutional powers by governments of all types certainly qualified the extent of the juridical freedoms of movement, expression, assembly and association enjoyed by their subjects/ citizens throughout the period. In this sense, very few people enjoyed all of the necessary rights and powers that are deemed the prerequisites of democratic politics, as we commonly understand it today. However, thanks to a series of liberalizations in the years immediately before the First World War, we can perhaps designate Finland, Norway, New Zealand and Australia as ‘genuine democracies’ by 1914, and describe nations such as France, Switzerland, Italy and the USA as limited (‘male’) democracies by the same date. Yet the debate about democracy in the nineteenth century, taken as a whole, was largely one about aspirations, rather than practice, and these aspirations constitute the main subject of the next section of this essay.

For anti-democrats, of course, the political violence associated with the French ‘Jacobin constitution’ of 1793 only served to confirm the dreadful truth of Burke’s polemics, but the famous ‘People’s Charter’, issued by the London Working Men’s Association in 1838, embodied more humane aspirations that had been the stock-in-trade of British Radicals since the 1780s—universal male suffrage, secret ballots, equal-sized constituencies, abolition of the property qualification for (and payment of) representatives plus annual parliaments. The so-called ‘Knowledge Chartists’ favoured female suffrage as well and were willing to negotiate compromises with liberal reformers in pursuit of their goals. Regarding the ‘democratic aspirations’ noted earlier, the

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Chartists, who were a radical coalition rather than a political party in the modern sense of the words, might be said to have aspired to greater political participation, to greater accountability of national leaders and to material improvements following on from their proposed reforms.

In mainland Europe, however, both sides of the debate were more intransigent. Democrats were generally unwilling to set aside their ‘Jacobin’ heritage—and the associated vision of ‘militant virtue’—until after their defeats in 1848/9, while the consequences of later, ‘more realistic’ policies were not always as expected: for example the famous association of MAZZINI and Garibaldi with the creation of the liberal (but undemocratic) Kingdom of Italy in 1861. Consequently, Paine’s earlier assertion of the incompatibility of democracy and monarchy was still generally accepted and the American Republic retained a talismanic quality for many democrats living on the other four continents.

Ironically, during the period under consideration, a significant amount of North American intellectual ingenuity was devoted to qualifying (and even debunking) the power of the citizen majority, and not to celebrating it. This was the case from the years of the Federalist debate (the 1780s) right up to the fin de siècle period of the 1890s, when the founders of political science in US universities (e.g. Burgess and Bentley) accepted many of the assumptions of the European elitists. The fact that a significant number of Americans were Jacksonians, abolitionists, feminists, socialists and even anarchists at different points along the time-line of the nineteenth century only enhanced these anxieties, so that, for example, the system of indirect presidential elections was defended as a bulwark against ‘popular despotism’. Moreover, the concept of ‘state’s rights’ (the autonomy of the sub-national governments of the USA) underwent a significant change during the same period. Thus, having been originally associated with the ideal of a virtuous, homogenous agrarian democracy in the years between the American Revolution and the Jacksonian period (1829–37), the slogan of ‘state’s rights’ became associated with conservative, anti-Indian and pro-slavery sentiment in the period leading up to the Civil War. Even the famous Gettysburg Address of 1863 by ABRAHAM LINCOLN (‘government of the people, by the people [and] for the people’) avoided the word democracy, while the eponymous Democracy: A American Novel (by Henry Adams, 1880) turned out to be a veritable jeremiad against the practice of the post-bellum congressional system.

However, direct experience of the early years of the American Republic did at least inspire the patriotic efforts of the Venezuelan general, Francisco de Miranda (1750– 1816), as he unsuccessfully sought independence for his homeland through rebellion against Spain in both 1806 and 1811. Later, Miranda’s protégé, SIMON BOLIVAR, led further (and successful) Latin American revolutions across most of the continent between 1813 and 1824. Nevertheless, the republican (as opposed to the democratic) aspects of Bolivar’s vision—encapsulated in his support for ‘life-presidents’ elected by limited adult suffrage—became the dominant motif of South American politics for many decades, although Costa Rica did achieve a form of stable, multi-party politics in the 1890s.

The ideals of the American Republic were also exported to Liberia in 1821, a small West African colony that declared itself independent of the USA in 1847. In practice, it too became a fiefdom of a Europeanized elite (in this case, one made up of liberated US slaves and their descendants) at the expense of the native peoples. Yet the idea of a ‘dark

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continent’ is too simplistic if we consider Africa as a whole, for it is worth noting that in many territories the common tradition of tribal gatherings (a limited direct democracy, often known by the Zulu word ‘indaba’) survived into the twentieth century, and that Britain’s Southern African colonies saw the opening scenes in the story of the ‘experiments with truth’ (and democracy) that made up the career of MOHANDAS GANDHI. Moving northwards, moreover, the West Africa of the 1860s and 1870s domiciled a notable opponent of polygenism and advocate of African self-government, James Africanus Horton (1835–82), while late nineteenth-century Egypt was the home of another important thinker, the Islamic modernist scholar, Muhammad Abduh (1849– 1905), who argued at length (and with some success) that Islam was compatible with democratic institutions, scientific inquiry and the liberation of women.

The vice of ‘demagogy’ was well known to nineteenth-century critics of democracy, but the term ‘populist’ did not acquire this particular, unsavoury connection until the late twentieth century. Although academic students of populism have made no specific linkage between East Asian democratic thought and the much more famous examples of ‘populist’ ideology found in Russia and North America, there seems to be at least a certain family resemblance between the political ideas of the Chinese Revolutionary Alliance (led by Sun Yat-Sen), the Narodniki and the Farmer’s Alliance/People’s Party. Following the ‘Russian’ socialism of HERZEN, the Narodniki of the 1870s and 1880s celebrated the purity of the Russian peasantry at the expense of the city elites, and advocated a federation of communes (obshchina) instead of a moralized empire or a Western, liberal nation state. The North American populists of the 1880s and 1890s were mainly self-reliant (but increasingly commercial) farmers, who saw themselves as forming the productive and dutiful heartland of a nation, a people whose moral leadership had been usurped by the sinister interests of financiers and industrialists from the eastern seaboard. US populism accepted liberal political forms, but gave expression to dissatisfaction with both material insecurity and the lack of moral content in representative politics highlighted in Democracy: An American Novel. Finally, Sun’s famous ‘Three Principles of the People’—‘Nationalism, Democracy, Livelihood’— stressed the ‘purity’ of the Han Chinese peasants at the expense of their ‘corrupt’ Manchurian leaders and recommended a panacea for their economic woes, namely the ‘single Tax’ policy associated with the US economist, Henry George (1839–97). Moreover, although Sun did not become an advocate of ‘direct’ democracy until 1916, his earlier reticence on the issue may have been part of a strategy to appear ‘moderate’— and to distance himself from the extreme violence associated with the Taiping and Boxer rebellions—by seeming to endorse Western representative government. If populism had a core intellectual meaning (and this is open to some doubt) it was perhaps the form that nineteenth-century democratic aspirations took in certain societies where the agrarian interest remained sufficiently strong to resist (at least temporarily) the imperatives of industrialism.

The idea of rights as universal entitlements emerged in seventeenth-century Europe out of the early-modern concept of ‘natural right’, a privilege or immunity sanctioned by natural law, and therefore ultimately endorsed by God. In short-hand terms, this is often called the ‘liberal’ view of rights, although, as we shall see, this usage is somewhat misleading. In contrast, the ‘historical’ view of rights is a very different conception; rights are seen as entitlements that are always specific to a particular time and place (via

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the mechanisms of custom and donation). This was also a common-place of the nineteenth century, although the newly developed ‘liberal view’ often took centre-stage, particularly in the form of the ‘Rights of Man’, which were now enjoyed (or at least recommended) thanks to the assumption of a universal human capacity to exercise ‘right reason’.

The argument that the ‘natural’ rights of life, liberty and property were originally enjoyed by mankind in a primeval state of nature, before government was created to better protect those self-same rights (as civil rights), was developed by John Locke in the seventeenth century and was later implicit in the US Declaration of Independence of 1776. But while Locke carefully minimized the circumstances in which resistance to actually existing governments was justified, both the ‘Founding Fathers’ and the authors of The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens of 1789 placed greater weight upon the right of ‘resistance to oppression’ as an adjunct of the right of liberty. If the right of liberty was taken to include a self-justifying right of acting according to one’s own ‘private judgement’ (or conscience), it could even become part of an argument for anarchism, as it did in the writings of WILLIAM GODWIN.

It was this association between political disorder and the language of rights that concerned many liberals and, to give just one example, led to the famous attack on the French Revolutionary doctrine of the ‘Rights of Man’ as ‘nonsense on stilts’ by JEREMY BENTHAM. Bentham was both a utilitarian and a legal positivist but his ‘intellectual godson’, JOHN STUART MILL, was more sympathetic to the idea of ‘moral rights’ as imperative ‘social utilities’; that is, as part of a general utilitarian theory of justice. Mill associated strenuous defence of one’s rights with the energetic personal character that he valorized in On Liberty (1859) and Considerations on Representative Government (1861), although he was also concerned to stress the importance of performing one’s duties to individual men and women, and of protecting minorities. In the USA, the assumption that utilitarianism and rights were compatible was much more commonplace because, 20 years prior to Bentham’s protests against it, the idea of natural rights had been extended to include ‘the pursuit of happiness’ by the Declaration of Independence. Several more pragmatic aspirations were embodied in the Constitutional Amendments known as ‘The Bill of Rights’ (1791) and the language of rights became part of the warp and weft of US politics in the early nineteenth century. However, as we saw earlier, this was a political culture wracked by severe tensions; in the 1840s, HENRY THOREAU asserted the right of private judgement as a justification for disobedience to immoral legislation and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (with others) satirized the language of the 1776 Declaration in their own ‘Seneca Falls Declaration’ of the rights of women. Later in the century, US radicalism did not disappear, but the language of rights became more closely associated with the idea of a conservative, ‘rugged individualism’ expressed by writers such as WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER and Edward L.Youmans.

A hundred years earlier, the ‘historical view’ of rights had originally been expounded by Burke, who emphasized the general importance in human affairs of custom, particularly as the legitimate means of sanctioning specific rights and privileges in individual polities (the doctrine of ‘prescription’). In his opinion, as well as being contrary to the ‘organic’ principle of political evolution (which allowed for limited reform through a process of trial and error), the universalist theories of rights associated with the French Revolution were speciously egalitarian and metaphysical. As another

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conservative, de Maistre, observed (with irony) in 1797: ‘I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, [and] Russians…. But as for Man, I declare that I have never in my life met him; if he exists he is unknown to me.’ Shortly afterwards, in 1803, the German legal scholar, Karl von Savigny (1779–1861), argued that the study of Roman and European feudal history indicated an important distinction between ‘property’ and ‘possession’ that undermined any assumption of an ‘absolute’ right of private property such as the one enshrined in the Napoleonic legal Code. Although formulated in opposition to the French Revolution, and the radically universalist aspirations of some of its supporters, the influence of the ‘historical view’ can be traced into the latter part of the century as well; for example elements of it can be found in the theories of HENRY MAINE and WALTER BAGEHOT.

Of course the ‘liberal view’ of rights was open to socialist criticism too, and the most famous example of this is found in Karl Marx’s ‘On the Jewish Question’ (1843–4). Here, Marx argued that ‘the so-called rights of man’ were actually the rights of an ‘egoistic man’ living in a bourgeois society that sought to hide real, economic inequality behind legal, ‘abstract equality’. Referring to the four principal rights enshrined in The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens, Marx criticized liberty as the right to ‘withdraw into oneself’ (at the expense of our distinctively human and social qualities), property as ‘the right of selfishness’, equality as the right to be treated ‘without discrimination…as a self-sufficient monad’ while security was simply ‘the assurance’ of the egoism assumed in the discussion of the other three rights. Combining the historical view of rights associated with Savigny with the humanist critique of self-interest he had learnt from FEUERBACH, Marx argued that the ‘abstract’ individual of liberalism was wrongly ‘separated from the community’ as a whole, just as ‘a lord and his servants’ were once ‘cut off from the people’ under the feudal regime of ‘seignorial right’.

In fact, the argument that a liberalism that emphasized individual rights at the expense of material and social needs was an impoverished liberalism was put forward by many eighteenth-and nineteenth-century writers, notably those from mainland Europe. The importance of Christian humanitarianism (later known as ‘Christian Democracy’) was stressed by SAINT-SIMON, LAMENNAIS and Pope Leo XIII (De Rerum Novarum, 1891); more secular concepts of duty were emphasized by KANT, COMTE and MAZZINI, while LOUIS BLANC coined the slogan ‘the right to work’. Furthermore, it was commonly held that it was not only possible for individuals but also for groups to enjoy rights. The argument that every (linguistic/ cultural) nation has a ‘right of self- government’ was explained (to his own satisfaction) by Fichte, while the idea that both subordinate ‘corporations’ and the state itself have rights—the latter in its role as guarantor of the collective interest of society as a whole—can be found in the writings of Hegel and his various disciples (see HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM).

In late-Victorian Britain, for example, the philosophical defence of rights became less closely related to individualism and more closely associated with the general project of moralizing society, as espoused by the Oxford Idealists. Hence, although T.H.GREEN acknowledged that the ultimate ground of rights was simply membership of the human race (a fact that had been increasingly recognized in recent history), he also argued that the state had rights in relation to its citizens over and above a simple right to punish those who transgressed the legal claims of innocent parties. In particular, the ultimate value of developing the human personality was deemed to trump the right of personal liberty with

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reference to issues such as compulsory education and the regulation of alcoholic beverages. Green’s ideas prefigured those of the British ‘New Liberals’ and US ‘Progressives’ of the early twentieth century, while the more conservative Ethical Studies by F.H.BRADLEY expounded the Victorian ideal of ‘duty’ only three years before it was so mercilessly satirized in Gilbert and Sullivan’s famous operetta, The Pirates of Penzance (1879).

Leaving humour to one side, thanks to the inhumanities of empire, to late twentieth- century decolonization and the various historical analyses that accompanied those phenomena, one of the least-admired components of ‘Victorian deontology’ has been ‘the White Man’s Burden’; the idea of a civilizing mission that was often used to justify European (and US) colonialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The values of self-sacrifice and respect for custom were certainly maintained in the indigenous societies of Asia, Africa and Latin America, but with reference to educated elites, this observation must be qualified by noting an increased awareness of the leading characteristics of Western philosophies and ideologies—as we have already seen with respect to ‘democracy’. The traditional hierarchical collectivism of many of these societies was certainly antipathetic to liberal and individualistic conceptions of rights, but this tendency was often exaggerated in the polemics of conservative, European anthropologists such as Maine. Indeed, by the close of the period considered by this volume, the language of rights was being increasingly well used in a number of anti- colonial discourses, such as Indian nationalism and the campaign to protect ‘Aboriginal Rights’ in West Africa. For example, in the early 1900s, the Indian sociologist, Shyamji Krishnavarma (1857–1930), used Spencer’s ‘law of equal freedom’—a fusion of evolutionary and Kantian ideas about rights—to criticize the British Raj, while the Ghanaian intellectual, Caseley Hayford (1866–1930), engineered a sophisticated defence of the West African system of family property rights in works such as Gold Coast Native Institutions (1903) and The Truth About the West African Land Question (1913).

In the nineteenth century, many traditional patterns of social deference declined and new political loyalties and rhetorics were invented. Returning to the topic of mottos and slogans, it can be argued that two of the most famous (‘the sovereignty of the people’ and ‘the sovereignty of the individual’) seek to invest the bearers of citizenship and of rights with a dignity once reserved for royalty alone, while the anti-democratic slogan, ‘the tyranny of the majority’, seeks to ascribe the vices of usurpers to the masses. Intellectual historians have become increasingly aware that the cultural identity of ‘a people’ is itself structured by questions of politics, economics and gender, although the otherwise valuable treatment of our topic in Roper (1989) ignores the third dimension entirely.

Discussions regarding the cultural conditions that allowed liberalism to develop have stressed factors such as warfare, urbanization, associational culture and (industrial) commerce. According to some commentators, ‘external’ dangers and cheek-by-jowl living mitigated conflicts about the distribution of both rights and material goods; democracy became a more ‘natural’ way of conducting politics. By the same token, if association with persons outside of one’s immediate family and locality became ‘natural’ (thanks to the development of ‘civil society’ and the market economy), investing ‘strangers’ with universal rights became an intelligible philosophical move. There is some resonance here with Macpherson’s well-known argument that liberal democratic theory was originally ‘protective’ (and was simply opposed to arbitrary government), but

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subsequently became ‘developmental’ and aspired to create a moral community. However, one of the main problems with this line of reasoning is that even in the most liberal nations, the mothers, daughters and sisters of citizens (who were clearly never ‘strangers’) met great resistance to their case for political equality. On the other hand, if the male citizens of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries really did believe that both ‘commerce’ and the ‘rights of man’ were ‘natural’, perhaps we can at least understand why so many gave their support to the dictatorships of Bonapartism and of fascism; in extreme conditions, it seemed ‘natural’ to trade ‘liberty’ for ‘security’.