What makes democratic citizenship democratic?

ABSTRACT

I contend that parliamentary representative democracy betrays what must be democratic about democratic citizenship – its directness. I examine this betrayal to consider what makes democratic citizenship democratic, what is direct about direct democracy, and how it may provide a means to (re)democratize democracy. To do so, I engage the conundrums about citizenship Aristotle posed in the Politics. For millennia, theorists have used Aristotle’s dislike of democracy and related misrepresentations to dismiss direct democracy as impossible for large states. Moreover, the problems he raised have roiled political theory ever since because they established two issues that indicate how profoundly democracy troubles citizenship. The first concerns what it means for “the people” to remain sovereign even when most delegate the political powers of their citizenship to others. The second concerns the historical capacity of democracy to transform the political by disrupting entrenched power and legalized inequality. If so, democracy must somehow institutionalize disruption as a resource to keep it vigorous. I examine how the provocations of sovereignty, equality, and disruption democratize citizenship. These problems are unresolvable in a democracy. Their tensions are necessary to mobilize democratization, as Athenian democracy shows. Attempts to resolve them – such as republican representative democracy – destroy its energies.

KEYWORDS:

• Direct democracy
• representative democracy
• democratic citizenship
• Aristotle
• Athenian democracy

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Engin Isin for his insightful comments that sharpened my arguments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In three projects, I combined digital and in-person assemblies: participatory budgeting in Vallejo, California; strategic master planning for the seven-campus Federal University of São Paulo, Brazil; and community-based mosquito vector control to combat dengue in Nicaragua.

2. ‘Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.’ (Madison 1961a, 76).

3. The literature is enormous. An example for each modality is Hansen (1999), Barber (1974), Zuckerman (1970), Morgan (1962), Hansen and Stepputat (2006) and Appadurai (2002).

4. I have investigated metropolitan rebellion in (Holston 2019).

5. I have researched the force of this critique in my ethnographic and historical studies of Brazilian citizenship (e.g. Holston 2008). I showed that in the development of the poor peripheries of Brazilian cities, the historical sites of citizen differentiation – political rights, access to land, illegality, servility – fueled the irruption of an insurgent citizenship among the working classes that destabilized entrenched differentiated citizenship.

6. Athenian citizenship also had to be performed as a coming-of-age ritual to be fully activated. At eighteen, young men had to claim by oath membership in their local neighborhood assembly as a requirement for city-wide citizenship. See Hansen (1999, 96–97).

7. Whether ‘sovereign’ is the best English gloss of the Greek kurios is much debated. Some translators, such as Reeve (Aristotle 1998), use the word ‘authority’ instead. See Hoekstra (2016) for an interesting discussion.

8. Worth noting is the institution of ostracism which gave the Assembly the right to banish any citizen by democratic vote, with no justification required, making it a public demonstration of the absolute sovereignty of the collective body of deliberating citizens. See Kagan (1961) and Ober (1989, 73–75). For more on the ‘simultaneity of popular and legal sovereignty in Athens’, see Ober (1989, 300–302), as well as Hansen (1999, 150–155) on Athenian litigation.

9. Selected by lot from an annual list of 6000 citizens, a typical jury might have 200 members for a private trial and 500 for a public (Ober 1989, 142). Hansen (1999, 187) notes juries of 2000 for high-profile public trials. These astonishing numbers indicate a most complex system of allotment and procedure.

10. Hansen’s list of elected magistrates includes all military generals, the most important financial officers, some high priests, the director of the city’s water supply, the military trainers of young citizens, and envoys. Any citizen could be proposed and elected for these posts, even in absentia. The extent to which the election of these officeholders constituted a representative component is an interesting question. Direct democracy may include representation by election (or other methods) but, generally, not vice versa (see Manin 1997). However, the mere fact of election does not make it representative. To be so would require a theory of political representation about what is being re-presented and in what manner. To my knowledge, Athenians had no such theory. As they did not distinguish between popular sovereignty and government, a theory of political representation would be unnecessary. The elected military general and city treasurer were not selected and did not serve to re-present the people as a whole or by constituencies but rather to perform a specific job as the best qualified individual.

11. See Lane (2016) for the control of office through such procedures.

12. See Hansen (1999, 146) for discussion of relations between speakers and audience during Assembly debate and Ober (1989, 169-174) on the distrust of the rhetorical skills of politicians.

13. For Greek conceptions of equality, see (Harvey 1965) and (Vlastos 1984).

14. Space precludes citations for Hobbes and Rousseau (see Tuck 2016), but note Madison: In Federalist No. 10, he (1961a, 76) contrasts the ‘pure democracy’ of the ancients ‘consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person,’ with the modern republic based on ‘the scheme of representation’. In discussing the American Senate in Federalist No. 63, he (1961b, 385) discloses that ‘the true distinction between these [ancient democracies] and the American governments lies in the total exclusion of the people in their collective capacity, from any share in the latter’ (emphasis original).

15. Rancière (2006, 94) makes this point forcefully.

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James Holston

James Holston is a political anthropologist. He is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also founding director of the Social Apps Lab. His research focuses on the city as a strategic site for the emergence and erosion of citizenship, popular sovereignty, and democracy. He also develops software platforms for democratic citizenship, public health, and planning. His books include The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília, Cities and Citizenship, and Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. His software projects include AppCivist.org and DengueChat.org which engage people in assembly-based direct democracy. They have been implemented for participatory budgeting (Vallejo, CA), master planning (São Paulo, Brazil), and citizen entomology for arbovirus vector control (Managua, Nicaragua). He has conducted extensive research in Brazil and is currently engaged in collaborative projects in Brazil, Denmark, Nicaragua, Peru, and the United States.