Machiavellian Democracy

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Machiavellian Democracy

 

John P. McCormick, University of Chicago

Intensifying economic and political inequality poses a dangerous threat to the liberty of democratic citizens. Mounting evidence suggests that economic power, not popular will, determines public policy, and that elections consistently fail to keep public officials accountable to the people. McCormick confronts this dire situation through a dramatic reinterpretation of Niccolò Machiavelli's political thought. Highlighting previously neglected democratic strains in Machiavelli's major writings, McCormick excavates institutions through which the common people of ancient, medieval and Renaissance republics constrained the power of wealthy citizens and public magistrates, and he imagines how such institutions might be revived today. It reassesses one of the central figures in the Western political canon and decisively intervenes into current debates over institutional design and democratic reform. McCormick proposes a citizen body that excludes socioeconomic and political elites and grants randomly selected common people significant veto, legislative and censure authority within government and over public officials.

 

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Power to the People

• Adrian Vermeule

  Adrian Vermeule

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• August 8, 2011 | 12:00 am
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Machiavellian Democracy

by John P. McCormick

Cambridge University Press, 252 pp., $27.99

AFTER SO MUCH has been said about Machiavelli, and so much that should be unsaid, one might be surprised to hear that there is anything new to say at all. Yet John McCormick offers a plausible and ambitious new interpretation of Machiavelli’s democratic theory, and then outlines some institutional proposals intended to translate Machiavelli’s commitments into current political conditions. These mechanisms of Machiavellian democracy need fine-tuning, and like other democratic theorists McCormick overlooks that the administrative state already contains a variety of institutions that serve the very goals he sets out. But one can only admire his willingness to step outside the usual comfort zone of political theorists by attempting to pin down the cash value of the best that has been thought and said.

On McCormick’s reading, Machiavelli should be understood as a theorist of populist democracy, who is concerned above all with identifying institutional mechanisms by which the people at large can constrain socio-economic elites and hold them accountable. Elites, on this picture, are a standing threat to a representative democracy, not primarily in the sense that they will seek to overthrow the democratic regime, but in the sense that they will bias the outputs of lawmaking in their own class interest. McCormick argues that modern “democratic” republics based on universal suffrage and representative elections (usually between candidates chosen by nomination) amount, in operation, to quasi-aristocratic republics, because the main effect of large-scale elections is to skew office-holding towards the wealthy, the privileged, and the highly educated. For Madison and other theorists of republicanism, this feature of elections was laudable. For this reason, Madison—at least the Madison of the founding, as opposed to his later more egalitarian persona—is one of McCormick’s foils and targets, along with Guicciardini, Schumpeter, and other elitist theorists.

Within the set of academic political theorists and intellectual historians who have discussed Machiavelli extensively, McCormick’s main target is the Cambridge School—J.G.A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and Philip Pettit. In McCormick’s view, these republican theorists have attempted to conscript Machiavelli, and in the process have downplayed the populist strands in his thought. By contrast, McCormick shows that Machiavelli believed that the people at large were both more likely to be motivated by the common good and epistemically superior at identifying where the common good lies, at least when popular participation is channeled through suitable institutions. The main point of disagreement between McCormick’s Machiavelli and the various elite theorists is that the former believed elections insufficient to constrain elites and hold them accountable ex post for their behavior in office, even when elections are supplemented by courts with the power of constitutional review and other checking mechanisms, themselves usually dominated by elites.

If representation and elections will not suffice, what will? McCormick thinks that Machiavelli’s main contribution was to have identified a set of populist institutional mechanisms that have been largely forgotten or ignored by the designers of modern constitutions. The most important is the Roman tribunate, a group of officials selected by and from the plebians, whose avowed purpose was to check elite self-dealing and enforce the rights of the populace. McCormick sees the tribunate as a sort of class-based affirmative action for the democratic masses, and his most striking and ambitious proposal attempts to update and adapt it to the American constitutional order. He proposes an amendment to the Constitution that would establish a People’s Tribunate—a randomly selected group of common citizens whose income or wealth may not be too high and who have not made a career of holding public office, and who assemble for a one-year non-renewable term. Omitting the intricate details of the scheme, the main powers of the Tribunate during its annual term would be to veto one congressional enactment, one executive order, and one Supreme Court decision, to initiate one national referendum whose product if approved by the voters would have the force of a federal statute, and to initiate impeachment proceedings against one federal official from each branch of government.

One might begin by asking what exactly is the problem, or set of problems, to which this is a solution. McCormick argues briefly, along lines explored by Larry Bartels and other political scientists, that in the United States circa 2011 socio-economic elites exert a harmful domination over the processes of politics and thereby skew political outcomes, resulting in widening economic inequality. McCormick does not purport to add anything new to the debate over whether such a diagnosis is correct, or whether it would be objectionable if correct; he merely takes those claims as premises for cashing out his Machiavellian approach.

Taking McCormick’s diagnosis as a given, his solutions are by no means airtight. At various points the Roman tribunes were successfully co-opted by the patricians and the senatorial class. So too here: socio-economic elites might at least partially capture the Tribunate, not necessarily by directly corrupting its members but in a more insidious epistemic form, by co-opting the experts who will inevitably be called upon to present the assembled citizens with information about the economic and administrative effects of complex proposals. McCormick mentions this problem, but his brief response—basically, that the experts should be as non-partisan as possible—is not particularly convincing. The problem is not partisanship as such, but elite bias, which may be quite bipartisan. Moreover, McCormick sometimes overlooks that the elites, too, will be able to observe the details of the institutional scheme and engage in strategic behavior accordingly. It cannot be right, for example, to authorize the Tribunate to exercise each of its powers only once. In the legislative sphere, elites might then cause two bad statutes to be enacted, secure in the knowledge that one of the two must survive the tribunician veto.

But all that said, McCormick’s proposals are as plausible as the genre will allow. Any institutional novelty looks questionable on paper—any clever graduate student can quickly throw out a thousand objections—and this one is no exception. Yet our status quo institutions are hardly perfect either, and in any event McCormick is only starting a conversation and hoping for an experiment. The details can be improved as his proposals swim up the salmon-run of politics. (But if his diagnosis is correct, the proposed remedy will probably be blocked by the elites who create the problem in the first place.)

A more serious problem is one of omission. Like other democratic theorists, McCormick invokes as precedents for his scheme a small set of quirky institutional experiments such as the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly, which was selected in part by lottery and empowered to place reform proposals on the ballot for referendum (although its proposals were ultimately rejected). Like other democratic theorists, McCormick overlooks a range of more or less populist institutions already in place within the gigantic and highly heterogeneous American administrative state, institutions expressly designed by presidents, legislators, or administrative agencies to serve many of the goals that the theorists themselves pursue.

Many agencies choose to take advice, or are statutorily required to take advice, from groups of ordinary citizens—not scientists or other experts—on the policy questions within their jurisdiction. The Advisory Commission on Childhood Vaccines within the Department of Health and Human Services must include members of the general public, to pick one example from a myriad. Such micro-institutions do at retail and in real life what the democratic theorists talk about at wholesale and for the most part hypothetically. The administrative state provides a vast terra incognita of democratic mechanisms that the theorists might explore, eval‎uate, and improve.

Still, McCormick’s book is something of a model for political theory that is engaged directly with problems in the world and only indirectly with texts. The aim is not so much to figure out Machiavelli, but to figure out what to think and do about a problem by drawing upon the intellectual resources to be found in Machiavelli. The result is a freshness and sensitivity to questions of institutional design that is notably lacking in, say, much of the interminable Rawlsian literature. One hopes that McCormick’s approach will become the professional norm.

Adrian Vermeule is John H. Watson Professor of Law, Harvard Law School.

More Articles On: History, Politics

http://www.tnr.com/book/review/machiavellian-democracy-john-mccormick 

Machiavellian Democracy

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* Book: John P. McCormick. Machiavellian Democracy, CUP, 2011

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Keith Sutherland:

"John P. McCormick’s new book (Machiavellian Democracy, CUP, 2011) is a fascinating attempt to appropriate insights from Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy (1513-17) in order to moderate some of the worst excesses of modern ‘democracy’ – in particular the Florentine’s advocacy of class-based magistracies to constrain the oppressive ‘humor’ of the grandi (political elite). Machiavelli’s template for this is the institutions of the Roman republic, especially the People’s Tribunes. Roman Tribunes were elected exclusively from plebeian ranks and were charged with popular advocacy." (http://equalitybylot.wordpress.com/2011/04/14/machiavellian-democracy/)

Discussion (review)

Keith Sutherland:

"McCormick’s suggestion is that a modern equivalent (for the US) might involve fifty-one tribunes selected by an annual sortition from the whole population (apart from the wealthiest 10% of family households). The powers of the tribunes would be three-fold (p.184):

1. To veto, by majority vote, one piece of congressional legislation, one executive order and one Supreme Court decision p.a.

2. To call one annual referendum p.a. which, if ratified, would take on the force of federal statute.

3. To initiate impeachment proceedings against one federal official from each of three branches of government.

McCormick is particularly attracted to the Roman practice of political trials – any citizen could publicly accuse magistrates of malfeasance and this would prompt a hearing in a voting assembly, which could comprise the entire citizenry.

According to McCormick, Machiavelli’s Discourses should be read as a work of radical democracy. He is scornful of attempts by Philip Pettit, Quentin Skinner and other ‘Cambridge-inspired’ neo-republicans to appropriate Machiavelli to their cause: ‘Democrats should worry when philosophers employ the language of “republicanism” ’ (p.141). This is because ‘Western philosophy emerged in hostile response to democratic politics and society’ (p.143). Pettit, in particular, freely expresses his ‘suspicion of both popular judgment and majoritarian politics’ (p.146). Although Pettit does from time to time (e.g. 2010) mention sortition and the need for ‘indicative’ (descriptive) representation, the sort of extra-electoral contestatory institutions he advocates ‘function much more like the countermajoritarian ones typifying liberal constitutionalism – namely, upper legislative chambers and supreme courts’ (p.155). To Pettit, and other Cambridge-leaning neo-republicans, the problem with democracy is the tyranny of the majority, whereas to McCormick [and Machiavelli] the problem is the tyranny of the ruling elite.

McCormick’s analysis will prove appealing to many members of this forum and I strongly recommend reading the book. But I have a number of problems with it:

The underlying sociology of the book strikes me as strangely archaic, in particular the sharp distinction between the grandi (elite) and the populo (masses), each of which has its own characteristic ‘humor’. The former are characterised by ‘the unquenchable appetite to oppress that [Machiavelli] ascribes to them – correctly, I [McCormick] think’ (p.181). This demonic humor is contrasted with a romanticised notion of the populo: ‘the end of the people is more decent (onestà) than that of the great’ (p.24). But is this really fair? No doubt Bill Gates, just like his robber-baron predecessors, is anxious to be viewed by posterity as more than a successful designer of windows, but is his decision to donate most of his wealth to charitable causes compatible with the view that he and all his class are characterised by a ‘humor’ to oppress?

McCormick questions why neo-republicans (from the late eighteenth century onwards) dropped Machiavelli’s class-based analysis and acknowledges that it might have been because they were ‘heartened by what seemed to be a dawning “pluralist” commercial age when a wide spectrum of social groups, relatively equal in power and influence, might supplant the rich/poor cleavage that prevailed in the republics of previous ages’ (p.179). But even if they were wrong, and continuing economic inequalities are the deciding issue, how is it decided which group (elite or masses) empirical individuals belong to? I’ve been a small capitalist all my working life, and I don’t feel many urges to oppress my employees or any other fellow citizens.

This sort of analysis made more sense at a time when society was delineated along class lines (for example when Marx wrote Capital), but even at the time of the Roman republic it wasn’t quite so simple (as McCormick acknowledges): the patrician/plebian divide was a formal and hereditary distinction and did not map exactly onto economic statistics – so if the notion of a coherent political-economic elite was suspect even at that time, then how much more in a period of universal education, progressive taxation and (relative) social mobility?

But these are contentious issues and are not the main thrust of my criticism. McCormick is clear as to what sortive bodies do well:

- Strong evidence suggests that common citizens, when provided with pertinent, even conflicting, information, and when given the chance to deliberate among themselves in such settings, come to well-informed and consensus-oriented judgments over policy (p.182).

The body of evidence that he refers to is primarily drawn from the experiments of the Stanford Center for Deliberative Democracy and the preceding sentence could well have been written by its director, James Fishkin, but then McCormick goes on to propose a ‘thought experiment’ (a Tribunate) that breaks pretty well every one of the principles that Fishkin has found necessary to ensure the effectiveness of sortive bodies:

1. A sortive group comprising fifty-one members (especially when disproportionately weighted to favour African Americans and Native Americans) is not large enough to ensure accurate descriptive representation.

2. Notwithstanding the sanctions proposed (ex-post indictment for corruption and misbehaviour), it will be comparatively easy for lobbyists to target such a small group and to conceal inducements in offshore bank accounts.

3. Experiments in sortive democracy indicate that ‘pertinent, even conflicting, information’ is best ensured when it is ‘provided’, rather than invited. Given that members of the group are, ex hypothesi, amateurs, how are they to know which experts to invite? The reliance by the British Columbia Citizens Assembly on staffers’ advice would indicate that the adversarial model used by Fishkin’s DPs is a better way of ensuring balanced advocacy from expert witnesses.

4. The proposal for the Tribunate to propose a referendum contravenes the descriptive-representative mandate of a sortive assembly.

5. Given the gridlock built in to the US Constitution, is there really a need for yet another veto? Kevin O’Leary’s proposal for a ‘gate-opening’ function would make more practical sense (p.218, n.53).

McCormick dismisses the competing Guicciardini/Harrington model in which ‘senatorial bodies initiate or amend laws that the people, formally assembled, either acclaim or reject’ (p.182). But this is unfairly anachronistic – Machiavelli’s proposal has been duly updated for a large modern democracy but the competing model has been frozen in its original context. However, if we apply a similar treatment (as I have done to Harrington) the result is rather different. The defining principle of a senatorial body is aristocracy, and McCormick endorses throughout the book Manin’s ‘brilliant’ (p.173) account of election as the (democratic) method of selecting an aristocracy. If this is the case, then the modern filter for initiating legislative proposals is election – the ‘aristocrats’ who receive most votes in the election should be empowered to initiate and amend laws. Regarding the second element – the assembly of the people that acclaims or rejects laws – democratic norms would suggest that the assembly should be constituted by sortition. When Guicciardini and Harrington proposed their models, the educational gulf between the senate and the ‘prerogative tribe’ would have been so huge that there would be no way of the latter participating in active deliberation, hence the call for mere acclamation or rejection. In modern democracies this is no longer the case, so the ‘people, formally assembled’ would certainly be able to deliberate in the Fishkinian sense, thereby arriving at ‘well-informed and consensus-oriented judgments over policy’.

In sum, Machiavellian democracy is suited to societies divided along strict class lines, whereas Harringtonian democracy is better suited to reasonably well-educated societies with relatively high levels of social mobility. This is not to deny that such societies are also characterised by high levels of economic inequality, but does imply that such inequalities are not linked with political inequality (or aptitude) in the simple linear way that McCormick (or Machiavelli or Marx) would have us believe. Whereas the principle of Machiavellian democracy could provide a useful corrective to elite domination, the particular thought experiment offered by McCormick fails on account of the five reasons delineated above." (http://equalitybylot.wordpress.com/2011/04/14/machiavellian-democracy/)

http://p2pfoundation.net/Machiavellian_Democracy

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