Democracy's Place in World History

Author(s): Steven Muhlberger and Phil Paine

Reviewed work(s):
Source: Journal of World History, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring, 1993), pp. 23-45
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 Democracy;s Place inWorld History
STEVEN MUHLBERGER

Nipissing University

PHIL PAINE

Toronto, Ontario

the recent past, demands for democracy have come from all
In over the world. Almost no one expected this. It is an interesting
and important reflection on those events that historical scholar
ship has little to say about democracy that contributes, intellectu
ally or practically, to an understanding of them.
Democracy once had a prominent place in historical thought.
Dramatic changes in nineteenth-century European and North
American society produced a liberal historiography to put those
changes into context by identifying the history of Europe with
that of personal liberty.1 It held that Europe had evolved a unique
notion of liberty out of a combination of classical and Christian
ideas. This ideal had driven the political development of Europe
and its more advanced colonies and set them apart from the rest
of the world. It was taken for granted that the history of govern
ment (once any society had emerged from the historyless "state of
nature") began with monarchy, and that non-European peoples,

1 see William
For a summary, H. McNeill, Structure of European History (New
York, 1974), pp. 3-17. Two exemplary products of nineteenth-century liberal history
are Lord Acton, History of Freedom and Other Essays (London, 1909); and Sir Henry
Sumner Maine, Popular Government: Four Essays, 5th ed. (London, 1909). Many
other historians (especially, as McNeill points out, continental scholars) took a
more nationalist view of the progress of liberty, but all liberals
narrowly thought
of this progress as basic to human history.
Journal of World History, Vol. 4, No. 1
? 1993 by University of Hawaii Press

23
24 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, SPRING 1993

lacking the invigorating spark of European liberalism, had always

obeyed either kings by divine right or primitive chiefs.2 The lib
eral historians were not champions of democracy, which they
viewed with suspicion; still, demands for and experiments with
democracy in their own time informed their entire view of human
history.
When the liberal belief in progress sustained grievous wounds
inWorld War I, the history of liberty went slowly out of fashion,
to be replaced by conceptions of human history in which both per
sonal liberty and democracy were reduced to the status of
epiphenomena. In the twentieth century, the most prominent the
oretical framework for approaching the big questions of human
history has been the Marxist scheme. In it, democracy was a
passing phase, a mere by-product of the capitalist relations of pro
duction in a certain period of world history, one that would even
tually disappear with the advent of socialism. An alternative
interpretive scheme has been called, among other things, "total
history." Although its proponents are not all Marxists, they too
emphasize the
primacy of economic factors. Political events,
when not ignored, are treated as depending on changes in relative
economic power between different classes, peoples, or regions of
the world. Democracy has little place in total history. With total
a traditional
history, we have a new twist on interpretation of the
human experience, as the story of the "pursuit of power."3
The millions of people who have risked life and limb to secure
democratic reforms have that historians
demonstrated have been
too quick to dismiss
democracy. Despite the best efforts of one
party governments to convince them otherwise, people in China,
Poland, Benin, Burma, Chile, Albania, and the Philippines have
insisted in the most direct fashion on the relevance of electoral

2 Part I: The Ancient 2 vols.

Samuel Eliot, History of Liberty, Romans, (Boston,
1853), 1:5. Compare Aristotle, Politics 3.15, and Polybius, History 6.3-9.
3 to McNeill's
With reference, of course, Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed
Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (Chicago, 1982); McNeill himself cannot be
accused of indifference to politics and political techniques. The general dismissal
of democracy as an important subject is well illustrated by its treatment in the fif
teenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The 1984 version devoted only one
sixth of a page to discussing the history of democracy, in the quick-reference
Micropedia, 5:576); the articles on government in the
Micropedia ("Democracy,"
added very little. The same version included a full page on the history
Macropedia
of demography ("Demography," Macropedia, 3:484-96). The reorganized 1990 ver
sion of the fifteenth edition makes it easier to find material on the history of
democracy.
 and Paine: Democracy's Place inWorld History 25
Muhlberger

not only national sov

democracy. They want not only prosperity,
but also elections by universal suffrage, among compet
ereignty,
under conditions that allow voters an informed and
ing parties,
free choice. Calls for effective guarantees for human rights have
been equally widespread. It is obvious, in the light of these move
ments, that historians will have to reformulate their ideas of
world political development.
At the end of a century when antidemocratic theories have
dominated theoretical discussion of history and politics, attempts
to understand the development of democracy will have to over
come several blocks. In this article, we address one of
stumbling
them.
It is commonly that most people in the world have no
thought
democratic and that the democratic idea is fundamen
experience,
alien to most human cultures. This is what lies behind the
tally
"the western concept of democracy." On this basis,
catchphrase,
scholars have concluded that efforts to establish demo
many
cratic institutions outside of a few favored regions are doomed to
failure. The belief is found almost among friends and ene
equally
mies of the democratic idea. Aristocratic and authoritarian think
ers have argued that democratic ideas are merely a local quirk of
western tradition; those sympathetic to democracy
European
have feared that they were Both groups, as they consider
right.
the non-European world, have seen only a mass of churlish and
intractable too dumb to understand voting or the princi
peasants,
now or ever.
ple of human equality,
Recent events have put the lie to this, or should have. Room for
confusion remains. The inevitable setbacks of new democratic
or hyper-criti
regimes will soon be seized upon by unsympathetic
cal commentators as proof that this people or that are not yet
and probably never will be.4 Now is the time
ready for democracy,
to point out that doubts about the viability of democracy in vari
ous non-European cultures are an outdated relic of nineteenth
century liberal theories.
In the past, historians have supported the idea that Europeans
have a special fitness for democracy (one more aspect of Euro
every quasi-democratic insti
pean uniqueness) by emphasizing
tution or movement in European while dismissing or
history

4 The Theory Revisited N.J.,

Giovanni Sartori, of Democracy (Chatham, 1987),
the "realist" and "Utopian" critiques of democracy, and their
pp. 39-82, analyzes
limits.
 26 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, SPRING I993

ignoring identical experiences outside of Europe and its white

colonies.5 We argue instead that most people in the world can call
on some local tradition on which to build a modern democracy.
We believe that democratic ideas are so simple and straight
forward that people of any culture can grasp them, given half a
chance. And we believe the historical record supports us. Quasi
democratic methods of government (that is, methods imperfectly
democratic by twentieth-century standards, but using identifi
able democratic techniques, as outlined below) are far more com
mon than most historians realize.
In this article we have assembled examples of quasi-demo
cratic institutions in the non-European world. They are all per
fectly familiar to the specialists who deal with each of the specific
regions. Usually they are considered in isolation. We have brought
them together to challenge the half-unconscious assumption that
democratic ideas are unique to Europe, and that examples of dem
ocratic thinking or action found elsewhere are somehow irrele
vant exceptions, or at best evidence of European influence. Once
this assumption is discredited, we hope that scholars will move
on to a truer appreciation of humanity's democratic heritage.

Two factors have allowed historians, political theorists, and

others to represent democratic theory or practice as uniquely
western phenomena: ignorance, and the concentration of histori
cal research on the largest and best recorded institutions. That
many historians know little about history outside of Europe and
North America needs no demonstration. It should be equally obvi
ous that historians have traditionally been trained to see history
as a parade of kingdoms and empires, and that most still do. This
makes it easy to dismiss whole swaths of the map as lacking dem
ocratic experience. If historians concentrate on empires, on those
who command armies, collect taxes, and engrave vainglorious
inscriptions on cliff-faces, they will continue to believe that poli
tics has almost always been a matter of despotism and bureau
cracy, varied only by lapses into anarchy.

5
Indeed, Donald W. Treadgold's Freedom: A History (New York, 1990) shows
that this interpretation is still alive and influential today. Treadgold, like the nine
teenth-century liberals, attributes an overwhelming importance to European ide
als of freedom and political institutions. His reaffirmation of the uniqueness of
the European tradition is based not on a thorough acquaintance with the political
and ideological characteristics of other cultures, but on an a priori acceptance of
stereotypes that go back to Hegel, if not earlier.
Muhlberger and Paine: Democracy's Place inWorld History 27

Yet the vast majority of all political are local. It is on the

events
local level that most collective actionis taken, most of the con
structive work of the world has been and still is done, and most
conflicts of interest take place. By adjusting one's perspective to
that local level, studied more often by anthropologists than histo
rians, one often finds a style of decision making quite different
from lordship or bureaucratic autocracy. Most human govern
ment has been a matter of councils and assemblies, which often
incorporate a large proportion of the community and use a sur
prising degree of democratic procedure. In other words, human
ity possesses a long history of government by discussion, in which
groups of people sharing common interests make decisions that
affect their lives through debate and consultation, and often
enough by voting. By broadening the view of politics to include
not simply geographic communities but also religious and volun
tary self-help organizations?as De Tocqueville did when evaluat
ing democracy in the early American republic6?one finds a world
full of quasi-democratic institutions.
Few if any of these groups could meet twentieth-century stan
dards of democratic practice. Most have excluded all women and
many men. Their decision-making procedures have often been
loose and susceptible to manipulation by an inner circle of the
elders or the wealthy. We argue that the existence and practices of
such groups are nonetheless relevant to the story of democracy.
Any group willing to submit to decisions arrived at by discussion
and voting (formal or informal), or to abide by the judgment of
elected representatives, is in some sense democratic, for it has
devised methods to share political authority among its members.
Who those members should be is a separate question, although a
very important one.7 If one insists on perfect democracy in a com

6
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George
Lawrence (New York, 1969), pp. 287-94, 5I3~24- One could cite a vast modern litera
ture on the political of voluntary such as the quite rele
significance organizations,
vant work of Jane J. Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy (New York, 1980),
but the point is made briefly and well by Aristotle, who cites an aphorism well
known to tyrants (Politics 5.11.; trans. T. A. Sinclair [Harmondsworth, 1962], p. 225):
"Don't allow getting together in clubs for social and cultural activities or anything
of that kind; these are the breeding grounds of independence and self-confidence,
two things which a tyrant must guard against."
7
There is no better illustration of the complexities of this problem than the
tortuous arguments that Aristotle uses in his Politics to distinguish between aris
tocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and polity, the last his ideal and balanced form of
government. All involved both some attempt at inclusivity and a degree of exclusiv
 28 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, SPRING 1993

munity before conceding its relevance to the history of democ

racy, then democracy has no history and never will. The case is
quite different if institutions and habits that promote political
inclusivity are studied.8 And this is the common-sense position. In
discussing the United States, one does not dismiss its political his
tory before 1920 or 1965 as being irrelevant to the history of democ
racy.9 Similarly, historians with global interests should not ignore
the imperfectly democratic practices of myriad small, and some
times not so small, communities.10 The evidence is clear that both
the idea and the practice of democracy are foreign to no part of
the world; in fact, it is commonplace for people to make impor
tant political decisions in cooperation with their equals.
China provides a perfect example. Since that region has experi
enced long periods of rule by a vast bureaucratic empire, it is
often assumed that the Chinese people have had no democratic
experience, and that current democratic aspirations are a product
of "westernization" or "modernization." A more detailed look
reveals a different picture. Only during brief totalitarian frenzies
has imperial power been able to reach into everyone's home.
Under most emperors, the ordinary people of China have had a

ity; thus the definition of the key term citizen could not be taken for granted. The
same difficulties exist today. Modern states restrict citizenship and the franchise
in a variety of ways (e.g., in the cases of resident aliens, prisoners, or convicted
felons; in the recent past many states denied the vote to those receiving public
assistance). Such restrictions may or may not be justifiable, but are usually taken
entirely for granted.
8
Again the case of Aristotle is relevant. Aristotle knew that all nonmonarchical
constitutions existing in his own day mixed oligarchical and democratic features,
but he had no difficulty in distinguishing which elements in them were demo
cratic, that is, promoted inclusivity. See especially Politics 4.14.
9
The first date marks the nationwide enfranchisement of women on the same
basis as men; the second is significant because before 1965, large numbers of black
citizens of the United States were prevented from voting by a variety of state laws.
Adult suffrage of a sort we now expect from any country claiming to be a democ
racy is rare and a nineteenth- or twentieth-century phenomenon. The country with
the longest continuous history of adult suffrage is Finland (since 1919). A franchise
made up of all or most male householders is, however, not rare in the further past.
10
To use such awkward phrases as "quasi-democracy," "quasi-democratic
practices," or "quasi-democratic institutions" throughout this discussion would
lend only a specious precision, while obscuring an important element to our argu
ment. Such terminology has been rightly rejected by students of classical Greek
and Roman politics. We make no claim that we have discovered a multitude of true
or perfect democracies in the non-European past. If the reader can agree that
some or all of our examples are roughly as democratic as those cities considered
democratic by Aristotle, we are satisfied. See note 7 above.
Muhlberger and Paine: Democracy's Place inWorld History 29

firm network of local institutions that administered local affairs

and protected them from the worst pr?dations of the central
authorities. Some of these local institutions embodied a consider
able degree of democratic practice.
Every study of the traditional Chinese village has shown that it
enjoyed a great deal of autonomy. The magistrates and their
clerks were based far away, in the district capitals. Of course they,
like the land-owning gentry, could intervene in force in any given
village if they chose, and they often imposed severe burdens on
the inhabitants. Normally, however, village administration and
even local law enforcement was left in the hands of the villagers
themselves.11 Two institutions carried out all the functions of
local government: village temples and ancestral halls. The latter
were the organizational expression of the extensive and often
powerful clans, which acted as a social support system for their
member families. The property accumulated by the halls paid not
only for the ritual veneration of the clan founders but also for
such benefits as regular food distribution to the member families
and, if a clan was prosperous enough, the education of its chil
dren. The halls varied in political structure but commonly had an
executive council of twelve officers, elected annually from among
and by all adult males. Liang Y?-Kao's account, written in 1915,
does not suggest a passive electorate: "clan politics causes great
commotion in the village."12
Because the benefits provided by the ancestral hall were
restricted to a certain group, the village temple exercised many
important functions on behalf of the entire community: policing;
the maintenance of roads, canals, and landing-places; schooling, if
the clans were not providing this service; public relief work; and
the provision of an annual festival, including theatrical or oper
atic performances. These functions, and the property that pro
vided temple income, were administered by selectmen chosen

11Y. K. L. K. Tao,
Liang and Village and Town Life in China (London, 1915),
PP- 3-6
12
Ibid., p. 28. Liang and Tao generalize very broadly, taking little note of
regional variation. A more detailed account of the clan or zu can be found in Hsien
Chin-Hu, The Common Descent Group in China and Its Functions (New York, 1948),
which unfortunately does not discuss the decision-making process at any length.
This is a common problem in finding information about grass-roots organizations.
But Hu does give (app. 53, pp. 169-80) a riveting account of one intraclan contro
versy.
 3? JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, SPRING I993

annually by rotation from male householders, who acted on the

advice of an informally chosen body of respected elders and edu
cated men.13

In parts of China where clan and temple organization was

weak, other cooperative organizations filled the gap. The villages
of Shandong in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
are better documented than most. Here important local business,
such as watching the crops, enforcing internal law and order,
defending the village from bandits, and running the local school,
was done through village councils and other collective, and often
purely voluntary, bodies.14 Decision making was very informal;
indeed, the least impressive evidence of democracy is the sole
local election, in which the zhuangzhang, or village headman, was
chosen. In Daidou, according to Martin C. Yang, a native of the
place, there was never any competition for the position, which
always went to a rather insignificant person. That was because
the zhuangzhang was seen by the villagers more as a government
functionary, carrying out orders from above, than as a local
leader.15 The real local leaders were men who, rather than being
elected or appointed, were respected for their talents, character,
and importance in local society. The zhuangzhang had to negoti
ate with them if he hoped to get government orders imple
mented.16 These "lay leaders," to use Yang's term, had no coercive
power; their private leadership derived from their ability to influ
ence others through public or private discussions, or from their
acknowledged role as heads of families.17
In addition to these more obvious types of village government,
the Chinese people have engaged for millennia in a maze of guilds,

13 in China,
Liang and Tao, Village and Town Life pp. 32-41, especially 22-31.
Compare Gary Seaman, Temple Organization in a Chinese Village (Taipei, 1978), pp.
63-70, 146, a case where the elections are rigged, but the informal log-rolling
behind all practical projects is real and effective.
14
Arthur H. Smith, Village Life in China (1899; rpt. Boston, 1970); Martin C.
Yang, A Chinese Village: Taitou, Shantung Province (New York, 1945). Yang provides
an example of a voluntary organization in the main school of his home village. It
had been founded by the Pan clan but was attended by children of all clans and run
was a village-wide
by a school council of all parents. "The council organization"
(P-144)
15
Ibid., pp. 173-81.
16
Ibid., pp. 181-86; compare Smith, Village Life in China, pp. 170-76.
17
For a similar pattern in a Muslim community in southeast Asia, see Thomas
M. Fraser, Jr., Fishermen of South Thailand: The Malay Villagers (New York, 1966),
pp. 40-52.
 Muhlberger and Paine: Democracy's Place inWorld History 31

surname clubs, societies for unmarried associa

women,
savings
tions, tontines, Buddhist sanghas, scripture-reading clubs, and
secret societies, many of which have employed conciliar, repre
sentative, and quasi-democratic techniques.18 Most of these would
no doubt fail a test of ideal democracy. The influence of the elders
and the well-educated could be suffocating. Martin Yang con
demned the organization of his own Daidou as undemocratic
because "local affairs had always been dominated by the village
aristocracy" (using the term in a very loose way), and most indi
viduals took no role in initiating or discussing plans. His chief
criticism, however, was that the governance of Daidou was unpro
gressive, indeed obstructively conservative, and had no aim to
improve life, being content merely to stave off disaster.19 Yet his
account and those of others show that quasi-democratic coopera
tion?what an earlier observer called "the genius of the Chinese
for combination"?was the key to accomplishing any task relating
to the common good.20 The concrete, local experience of self-gov
ernment by the Chinese people can be compared to that of Euro
peans over the centuries.
There is nothing exceptional in the village self-government of
traditional China.21 The great majority of all the human beings

18
Smith, Village Life in China, pp. 98-124; C. K. Yang, Religion in Chinese Soci
ety: A Study of Contemporary Social Functions of Religion and Some of Their His
torical Factors (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1961), pp. 60-61,98-99.
19
Yang, A Chinese Village, pp. 240-41. Staving off disaster in a peasant commu
nity is no small thing, but Yang was a rural reconstruction officer and had greater
ambitions. Compare Yang's criticism of peasant conservatism to Sir Henry
Maine's criticism of democracy (1884). It was undesirable because in such places as
Switzerland, it had proved itself unprogressive: "The progress of mankind has
hitherto been effected by the rise and fall of aristocracies" (Popular Government,
p. 42). Kung-Chuan Hsiao, in Rural China: Imperial Control in the Nineteenth Cen
tury (Seattle, i960), pp. 261-63, sums up the arguments of scholars who have consid
ered democratic elements in village life as insignificant in comparison to the
power of various elites. Compare position, note 53 below.
Wittfogel's
20
Smith, Village Life in China, p. 102. Smith's testimony is the more interesting
in light of the fact that, from a missionary he was inclined to
coming background,
view the Chinese way of life as corrupt. Martin himself admitted
deeply Yang (A
Chinese Village, p. 241) that by denying the democracy of Chinese local government,
he was disagreeing with many other observers.
21
Nor was democratic practice restricted to villages. John H. Fincher's Chi
nese Democracy: The Self-Government Movement in Local, Provincial and National
Politics, 1?05-1?14 (London, 1981) documents the role of big-city democratic reform
movements in influencing the large-scale but largely with
forgotten experiments
parliamentary democracy in the late Qing period. Chinese democratic reformers
appealed not just to foreign ideals but to Chinese theoreticians who had argued
that administrators should be responsible to deliberative councils (p. 68). See also
 32 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, SPRING 1993

who have ever lived have been citizens of small agricultural vil
lages. They have focused their loyalties on those villages and have
experienced government in that context. Most of these millions of
agricultural communities, past and present, have employed some
democratic techniques of government: decisions made and lead
ers chosen by unanimous consent or majority vote, after extensive
discussions in a public assembly. Almost all villages, everywhere,
have had a village council. These have many names: the ancient
tings of Scandinavia, the kampong assemblies of Malaysia, the
famous council fires of the Amerindian confederacies, the com
munes of the vill of medieval the gumlao of the Kachin
England,
in Burma, the Landesgemeinde of central Europe, the Maori
hapus, the kokwet of the east African Sebei, the panchayats of
India, and countless others. Voluntary self-help groups have also
been commonplace, and decision making within them has neces
sarily been by discussion and general agreement.
Africa is often portrayed as a continent dominated by kingship
and authoritarian rule. Although specialists know better, the
presence of kings in precolonial times is often cited as an explana
tion of the postcolonial plague of dictatorships. Nobody applies
the same reasoning to Europe, although it has had no shortage of
kings and emperors. The existence of kings in the past does not
make for a destiny of kings.
Africa, in fact, has not been particularly fertile ground for
kingship in past ages. Its monarchies and empires have been
ephemeral by European standards. At least half of the "tradi
tional" monarchies of the present were installed by the colonial
a hundred
powers years ago. Other precolonial kings were no
more than oligarchs and war chiefs of limited power. Precolonial
Africa was a latticework of decentralized and
farming villages
autonomous towns only occasionally subjected to genuine monar
chical states. The chiefs that existed varied greatly in power, but
most would fit Albert Doutreloux's description of Yombe chief
dom, as summarized by Wayne MacGaffrey: "Whatever the extent
of a chief's power, chief ship is inevitably associated with a collec
tion of people who surround the chief at least as much to control
him as to assist him."22

Fincher's comments on the supposed of Chinese hierarchical

strength thinking (p.
4in.23).
22
Wayne MacGaffrey, Custom and Government in the Lower Congo (Berkeley,
1970), p. 237. Compare S. J. S. Cookey, "An Ethnohistorical Reconstruction of Tradi
tional Igbo Culture," in Sol Tax, ed., West African Culture Dynamics: Archaeologi
cal and Historical Perspectives (The Hague, 1980), pp. 327-47, especially pp. 339, 346.
Muhlberger and Paine: Democracy's Place inWorld History 33

Quite often, the village councils were left to run things without
an overlord to help or hinder them. Among the Sebei of Uganda,
all villagers could attend the governing kokwet, and all circum
cised males could speak there. Opinion was most easily swayed by
kirwokik (judges), men with a reputation for eloquence, irrespec
tive of wealth or station. "Judgeship," says a Sebei proverb, "is
bought by the ear, not with cattle."23 Similar assemblies have been
described for dozens of other peoples. Commonly village polities
have combined in alliances?alliances organized through a series
of nesting councils and assemblies. For instance, the Aguinyi
"clan" among the Ibo of Nigeria is an acephalous confederation of
seven autonomous towns. Although the confederation has no
institutional expression, each of the towns is run by a council of
delegates elected from the villages that make up the towns. Each
village has an assembly in which everyone may speak, and which
is responsible for roads, scholarship schemes, revolving loan
funds, and (even in modern conditions) basic law and order. Below
the village level, both wards and extended families deal with com
mon business on much the same basis as the villages themselves.
Life among the Aguinyi thus embraces a variety of democratic
experience.24
The Aguinyi and other
Ibo peoples also provide an example of
an individualist democratic ethic that appears to have grown
entirely from indigenous roots. The Aguinyi often speak of the vir
tues of common effort and unanimity, but they also acknowledge
the power of chi. Chi originally meant a pagan deity or personal
god and now stands for an individual's fate or destiny, as well as
the combination of characteristics that makes someone "person
ally responsible and calculative in his life and actions." Chi is the
strength that enables individuals to stand up for their own views
when they disagree with the rest of the community. Obstruc
tionism is not popular among the Aguinyi, yet the concept of chi,
which makes the "individual. . . the last irreducible unit of re
sponsibility who must [guard] against all undue imitation and

23
Walter Goldschmidt, Sebei Law (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967), pp. 163-67;
Goldschmidt, Culture and Behavior of the Sebei: A Study in Continuity and Adapta
tion (Berkeley, 1976), pp. 55-85. The phrase "bought by the ear" meant that a judge
had learned the traditional law by diligent listening to the rulings of elder states
men. In Sebei Law, p. 164 and n. 2, Goldschmidt points out that women were
involved in council discussions what were regarded as "women's mat
involving
ters"; when Goldschmidt consulted male experts in Sebei law, they suggested to
him that women should participate in the discussions.
24
Lambert U. Ejiofor, Dynamics of Igbo Democracy: A Behavioural Analysis of
Igbo Politics in Aguinyi Clan (Ibadan, 1981), especially pp. 34-85.
34 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, SPRING I993

blind compliance," gives the dissident the courage of his convic

tions and grants his opponents a basis to respect them. At the
same time, chi enables a person defeated in politics to accept the
defeat without bitterness, on the rationale that another's chi has
proved stronger than his own.25
The large states that existed in Africa in the distant past did
their best to subvert local councils by installing paramount chiefs
and centrally directed headmen. The colonial empires did exactly
the same thing. Contemporary dictators continue the effort.26 But
village assemblies in Africa, as in the rest of the world, are resi
lient. At any period, local autonomy has been more common than
central control, and autonomy has often been expressed through
arrangements of one sort or another.27
quasi-democratic
Indiatoo, despite its now outdated
reputation as the home of
"oriental despotism" par excellence,28 has played a dramatic role
in the history of democracy. During the sixth and fifth centu
ries B.c.E. northern India, then undergoing explosive economic
growth, was primarily organized on the basis of city-states and
regional federations. Indian republics, though little known except
to specialists, were comparable to the contemporary polis com
munities of Greece, though the former were more numerous and
more populous. In India, as in Greece, democracy?in the ancient
sense?was commonplace. The democratic thought produced by

25
Ibid., pp. 106-107.
26 shows how colonial and
MacGaffrey, Custom and Government, brilliantly
postcolonial rule has repressed popular quasi-democratic self-government in
favor of hierarchical structures, while denying the very existence and possibility
of "native" self-government.
27 of governments have been in unlikely
Quasi-democratic methods important
places, such as the hyper-competitive trading cities of the Niger Delta in the nine
teenth century, a culture in which slave trading and cannibalism were customary.
European observers characterized the culture as one in which monarchs
Early
and nobles held absolute power over a suppressed population. Detailed study has
shown that the key institutions, the canoe houses (extended households whose
power was based on trade and fighting strength), used quasi-democratic methods
to choose their leaders (often ex-slaves) simply because they could not afford the
inefficiency of hereditary leadership. See G. I. Jones, The Trading State of the Oil
Rivers: A Study of Political Development in Eastern Nigeria (London, 1963), espe
cially pp. 170-72. For an account of a recent election in a similar, "monarchical"
city in the same area, see Egiegberi Joe Alagoa, The Small Brave City State: A His
tory of Nembe-Brass in the Niger Delta (Madison, 1964), p. 21.
28 was of this view, but how
Marx, of course, the most influential proponent
commonplace it was in the mid-nineteenth century can be seen by reference to
Eliot, History of Liberty, Part I, 1:8-21. Although scholarship has long ago moved
past this point, the basic attitude toward India still survives in many contexts.
Muhlberger and Paine: Democracy's Place inWorld History 35

an environment characterized by democratic practice is still

accessible through the ancient literature of the subcontinent.29
Before the sixth century b.c.e., Indian society is documented
only through the religious writings known as the Vedas and
Brahmanas. They depict an entirely rural society where kingship
was the sole respectable form of government, and where religious
functions, including teaching, were the monopoly of the Brahman
class?at least, in the view of the Brahmans who composed and
preserved the scriptures. Ideally, early Indian society was divided
into four castes (varnas), which were divinely destined to fulfill
set social functions.
It is doubtful that Indian society was ever so neatly hierarchi
cal. Even the Vedas show traces of what J. P. Sharma has charac
terized as republican government.30 Certainly with the revival of
long-distance commerce and urban life about 600 b.c.e., the old
model broke down.31 In a mobile society experiencing new pros
perity and new strains, diversity was the order of the day. Com
munities both small and large organized themselves as gatherings
of equals, taking collective actions through unanimous decision,
voting, or both. Such organizations were called sanghas or ganas.
In many of these polities, it must be granted, the group of
equals was relatively small, as in Greek oligarchies. It was com
mon for the franchise to be restricted to the warrior caste (ksa
triyas), or even to a single clan among the warriors. But the num
ber of warriors in a thriving city-state could be large, and despite
the theologians there were often no hard and fast barriers to pre
vent new men from climbing into the caste.32 Furthermore, there
were polities where artisans, traders, and agriculturalists shared
in power.33 A final point is that it was relatively easy for those who
did not like the distribution of power in the polity to assert the

29 treatment
The most thorough of the subject is J. P. Sharma, Republics in
Ancient India, c. 1500 B.C.-500 B.C. (Leiden, 1968). See also A. S. Altekar, State and
Government in Ancient India, 3d ed. (Delhi, 1958). Steven Muhlberger, "Demo
cracy's Past: The Case of Ancient India" (forthcoming), is a historiographical
reconsideration of the significance of the Indian republics.
30
Sharma, Republics in Ancient India, pp. 15-80, 237.
31 at
Narendra Wagle, Society the Time of the Buddha (Bombay, 1966), pp.
156-58.
32
Ibid.
33 State as Known to
Altekar, and Government, p. 115; V. S. Agrawala, India
Panini: A Study of the Cultural Material in the Ashatadhyayi, 2d ed. (Varanasi, 1963),
PP- 436-39, interpreting Kautilya, Arthasastra 11.1. (trans. R. Shamasastry, 8th ed.
[Mysore, 1967], p. 407).
 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, SPRING
36 1993

right of their own subgroup?a guild, a corporation, a warrior

band, or an agricultural village?to self-government.34
Decision making in such communities was either oligarchic or
democratic in ways recognizable to Greek visitors. The members
of a gana or sangha, who were usually numerous, interacted as
members of an assembly. The terminology of corporate decision
making by voting is preserved by the systematic Sanskrit gram
marian Panini (fifth century b.c.e.), as are terms that reveal the
division of assemblies into political parties and the use of com
mittees or executive councils for certain purposes.35 The most
detailed information about democratic practice in India comes,
however, from the early Pali scriptures of Buddhism?a sixth-cen
tury religious movement that was itself a product of the diversifi
cation of Indian society and perhaps the most dramatic manifes
tation of a spirit of egalitarianism.36
The Buddha was a wandering
preacher, one of many who dis
puted the claims of Brahmans to a monopoly on spiritual instruc
tion. He, like others of the type, resisted the hierarchical assump
tions of Brahmanism and taught instead that all men were in
important respects equal. It is clear that Buddhist egalitarianism,
though primarily spiritual, was a product of an important strand
of social and political thought in the India of the day. The Maha
paranibbana-sutta, which preserves the teachings of the Buddha
just before his death, contains a passage in which the virtues of
the ideal republic and of the order of Buddhist monks, itself
called a sangha, are directly compared and said to be much the
same. Foremost among those virtues is the holding of "full and
frequent assemblies."37 This idea was supported by Buddhist

34 as Known to Panini, can be compared to the situ

Agrawala, India p. 432. This
ation in Italy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; see J. K. Hyde, Society and
Politics inMedieval Italy: The Evolution of the Civil Life, 1000-1350 (London, 1973),
PP- 56-57
35 as Known to Panini,
Agrawala, India pp. 433-35.
36An to the Pali Canon may be found in R. C. Majumdar, The His
introduction
tory and Culture of the Indian People, Vol. 2: The Age of Imperial Unity (Bombay,
1951), PP- 396-411.
37
Maha-paranibbana-sutta 1.1; a translation may be found in Buddhist Suttas,
trans. T. W. Rhys Davids, vol.11 of Sacred Books of the East, ed. F. Max M?ller
1881), pp. 6-7. (This series is hereafter cited as SBE.) The other virtues
(Oxford,
were: (2)meeting, rising, and carrying out their undertakings in concord; (3) acting
in accord with the ancient institutions; (4) honoring the elders; (5) ensuring that
none of their women or girls are detained among them by force; (6) performing the
customary rituals; (7) supporting and protecting holy men among them.
Muhlberger and Paine: Democracy's Place inWorld History 37

How ancient Buddhist monastic communities were run

practice.
is well known from the Pali scriptures. The sanghas were ex

pected to be punctilious about gathering all the monks together

for every important occasion of community life, to make all deci
sions unanimously insofar as possible, and to resort to majority
rule when unanimity broke down.38
From the time of the Buddha until the invasion of Alexander
the Great (327-25 b.c.e.), republics of various size, including large
federal republics, dominated Indian political life. Alexander's
destructive passage and active encouragement of monarchy
tipped the balance. Soon after Alexander, the Mauryan empire,
built by Chandragupta Maurya, engulfed most of the subconti
nent. Nevertheless, republicanism survived in one form or an
other until the fourth century c.e. The predominance of such men
as Asoka was fleeting and superficial enough that once an em

pire's grasp weakened, old ganas and federations sprang back to

life.39
The defeat of the democratic tendency in ancient Indian life
was a complicated process, not simply the result of the greater
power available to a successful warlord. There was a
military
revival of hierarchical thinking, and a willingness of the enfran
chised members of ganas to accept it. The most obvious manifes
tations of the former can be found in the orthodox Brahmanic
(Hindu) literature in the period between 200 b.c.e. and 200 c.e.
Many of the most important treatises on caste ideology and the
divine nature of monarchy were composed in this period, pre
cisely because alternative ideas were well known and widely
accepted.40 Yet both caste ideology and monarchy had something

38
Mahavagga 1.28, in Vinaya Texts, pt. 1, trans. T. W. Rhys Davids, vol. 13 of SBE
(Oxford, 1881), pp. 169-70; and Kullavagga 4.9-14, in Vinaya Texts, pt. 3, trans. T. W.
Rhys Davids and Hermann Oldenburg, vol. 20 of SBE (Oxford, 1885), pp. 24-65. The
latter section deals with the most contentious issues possible within the sangha,
those which concerned of the monastic rule itself. Such a dispute
interpretation
could be referred to a jury or committee elected by the sangha, or settled
specially
by majority vote. The Kullavagga shows a recognition that a democratic vote was
seen as the legitimate way to settle such disputes as well as a desire to "direct"
votes when threaten the unity of the sangha. The vote taker (himself an
they might
elected official) could disallow votes if the winners' opinions went against his
of the law (4.10; pp. 26-27). The provision makes no sense unless the
interpretation
belief in majority rule was strong in the order.
39
Altekar, State and Government, p. 136; compare Benoychandra Sen, Studies
in the Buddhist Jatakas: Tradition and Polity (Calcutta, 1974), pp. 60-64.
40 is the Santi Parva section of the Mahabharata, which
Among these treatises
justifies absolute monarchy as a guarantee of order and caste distinctions; inter
38 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, SPRING 1993

to offer the members

of ganas. The first offered them a cosmic
guarantee of whatever privileges they had won, if they recognized
that these derived from the group's position in a cosmic hierar
chy. Monarchy offered a down-to-earth guarantee of the same
thing. According to Kautilya, a political theorist committed to the
Brahmanic model of society, a king who was recognized as "the
only monarch [that is, the raja, or chief executive] of all the corpo
rations" would be in a position to preserve the legitimate privi
leges of each, and even to protect the lesser members of each gana
from the abuses of their own leaders.41 Eventually, willingly or
under coercion, all ganas and sanghas accepted the offer?even
the Buddhist sangha. This led eventually to the utter defeat of
Buddhism in India by its Brahmanic rivals. The idea that a small
republican community could maintain its independence was
abandoned, and Indians apparently despaired of constructing a
large-scale society on egalitarian or inclusive lines.42
It would be wrong, however, to think that democratic practice
has ever been completely suppressed on the Indian subcontinent.
Despite the best efforts of various imperial authorities and all
internal oligarchic tendencies, a surprising amount of quasi-dem
ocratic procedure always survived in the villages and subcastes of
India.43 In the nineteenth century, grass-roots democracy intri
gued British observers and inspired Indian seekers after self-gov

estingly, chapter 107 provides advice to a raja who is not yet an absolute monarch,
who is told how to manipulate his gana by setting the "leaders" against the igno
rant membership. The treatise attributed to Manu (Manu-Smrti, The Laws of
Manu) is the earliest of a series of Dharmasastras, or systematic treatments of
divine law in which caste is a key concept.
41
Kautilya, Arthasastra 11.1, p. 416.
42A can be seen
similar situation in the Greek polis communities in the Hel
lenistic and Roman periods and in the Italian city-states of the high Middle Ages
and Renaissance. See Simon Price, "The History of the Hellenistic Period," in John
Boardman, Jaspar Griffin, and Oswyn Murray, eds., The Oxford History of the
Classical World (Oxford, 1986), pp. 330-36; Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination:
City-States in Renaissance Italy (Baltimore, 1988), especially pp. 130-61,191-217; and
Giovanni Tabacco, The Struggle for Power in Medieval Italy (Cambridge, 1989). The
dynamics of such periods are among the most interesting problems facing histo
rians of democracy.
43
The classic study is R. C. Majumdar, Corporate Life in Ancient India, 3d. ed.
(Calcutta, 1969); another treatment is A. S. Altekar, A History of Village Communi
ties in Western India, University of Bombay Economic Series 5 (Bombay, 1927), who
was skeptical of claims that all Indian villages were alike, or could be treated as
small republics. His work documents how, in the Bombay area, a long series of
imperial governments slowly eroded village self-government, until British policies
almost destroyed it entirely.
Muhlberger and Paine: Democracy's Place inWorld History 39

ernment.44 During the twentieth century, attempts to revitalize

the village panchayat have become the basis of efforts thoroughly
to democratize Indian society.45
The most important legacy of ancient Indian republicanism is
undoubtedly Buddhism. Buddhism cannot be presented unambig
uously as a force for egalitarianism or democracy. It has often
enough served as an ideological prop for aristocratic or royal
regimes. Buddhist sanghas (individual monasteries or specific
orders) have themselves been run as aristocratic households. Yet
the original egalitarianism of Buddhist thought and the continu
ing practical democracy of Buddhist religious communities have
been very important in some political contexts. In southeast Asia,
the village monastery-temple, administered by a committee of lay
men, has long served to promote the welfare of the village as a
whole, acting as a repository for community property and the
means of educating village youth. Out of this tradition has often
come a concern with fair government, least in recent years.46
not
The existence of quasi-democratic institutions among the
aboriginal peoples of North America has been so much discussed
by anthropologists and social scientists that it has become a
clich?. Amerindian societies covered a great range of productive
modes, kinship systems, and political forms, but almost all
employed councils.
Nonagrarian societies, such as the western Apache, usually
made all decisions outside the nuclear family by unanimous con
sent in council. Failure to reach agreement led only to inaction or
to withdrawal of the dissatisfied. In such a political world view,
the ultimate authority rested with the household, with each sue

44
Sir Henry Maine, Village-Communities in the East and the West (1889; rpt.
New York, 1974), especially pp. 122-24; Carl C. Taylor et al., India's Roots of Democ
racy: A Sociological Analysis of Rural India's Experience in Planned Development
since Independence (New Delhi, 1965), pp. 29-43.
45
Henry Maddick, Panchayati Raj: A Study of Rural Local Government (Lon
don, 1970), a report from one reformer actively involved in the imposition of the
new (post-1958) panchayat system, depicts it as inspired by the old village com
munities but as having no direct historic link. Compare N. R. Inamdar, Function
ing of Village Panchayats (Bombay, 1970), who looked at four village panchayats in
the period 1960-62; the two more successful ones were precisely those where local
initiative predated government decree.
46
Frederica M. Bunge, ed., Thailand: A Country Study, 5th ed. (Washington,
1981), pp. 81-84; Charles F. Keyes, Thailand: Buddhist Kingdom as Modern Nation
State (Boulder and London, 1987), pp. 36,137-38,140; Manning Nash et al., Anthropo
logical Studies in Theravada Buddhism, Cultural Report Series 13, Yale University
Southeast Asia Studies (New Haven, 1966).
4o JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, SPRING 1993

cessive level of collective decision making?groups of neighbors

and business partners, clans, tribes, and confederacies?com
manding less loyalty.47 Such autonomy is easy where families can
fend for themselves and choose their coworkers without risking
economic failure. In more sedentary cultures, such as those of the
eastern Woodlands, the problems posed by a need for more
intense and consistent
cooperation tended to be solved by ela
borating the councils
and loading them with more ceremony and
mystique, but without
sacrificing their democratic component.
Elaborated conciliar systems existed among the Muskogean
tribes of the southeast and the Iroquoians farther north.48
The influence of the democratic aspects of Amerindian life on
the subsequent growth of Canadian and American political sys
tems is hard to measure but widely acknowledged. In the super
charged atmosphere of the Enlightenment and the age of revolu
tions, exposure to Amerindian politics often provided inspiration.
James Adair, an adventurer who lived among the Chickasaw in
the 1770s, became an enraptured ideological convert. Undoubted
ly primed by Rousseau, Montesquieu, and the Scottish philoso
phers, he clearly felt the excitement of one who at least thought
he had leaped from theory to reality.49 A century and a half later,
Gene Weltfish, a young woman who lived among the Pawnee, was
in the same way overwhelmed by the individualistic and demo
cratic qualities she saw in their society.50
This kind of discovery could work both ways. The Cherokee,

47
This is well described by Grenville Goodwin, The Social Organization of the
Western Apache (Tucson, 1969).
48 The Chickasaw The Children
Arrel M. Gibson, (Norman, 1971); Bruce Trigger,
of Aataensic: A History of the Huron People to 1660, 2 vols. (Montreal and London,
1976).
49
[James Adair], Adair's History of the American Indians, ed. Samuel Cole Wil
liams (New York, 1930), pp. 406-407, 459-60: "They are all equal?the only prece
dence any gain is by superior virtue, oratory, or prowess.... Governed by the
plain and honest law of nature, their whole constitution breathes nothing but lib
... no words to express
erty. [They] have despotic power, arbitrary kings, op
or obedient subjects.... When any national affair is in debate, you may
pressed,
have every father of the family in his house on the subject with rapid,
speaking
bold language, and the utmost freedom that a people can use."
50 The Lost Universe: Pawnee
Gene Weltfish, Life and Culture (Lincoln, 1965), p.
6: "Gradually I began to realize that democracy is a very personal thing, which like
at home. it means not being coerced and having no need
charity, begins Basically
to coerce anyone else.... In the detailed events of everyday living as a child, [the
Pawnee] began his development as a disciplined and free man or as a woman who
felt her dignity and her independence to be inviolate."
Muhlberger and Paine: Democracy's Place inWorld History 41

in the early nineteenth cen

setting up their independent republic
tury, were thoroughly conversant with contemporary constitu
tional theory and adopted many of its conventions in an effort to
preserve their traditional individual liberty.51

Examples of quasi-democratic communities?some shadowy,

some well recorded; some quite limited in their democratic devel
opment, some as impressive as the self-governing towns of early
New England?could be multiplied almost indefinitely. But two
questions would not be settled simply by bulk of documenta
tion.52 They must be confronted directly.
First, is the degree of democracy seen in such communities,
compared to undoubted inequalities in them, important enough
for the communities to be worth studying as examples of democ
racy? Our answer is yes?if democracy is worth studying at all.
Just as the history of monarchy is not simply a search for the per
fect example of absolute one-person rule, the study of democracy
must be more than the vain search for an egalitarian utopia. We
argue that something reasonably called democracy exists in the
present, and that a suitably comprehensive view of its history
should include the quasi-democratic practices of many self-gov
erning or partially self-governing communities that have existed
around the world in all periods of history. An awareness of these
phenomena is especially important for those interested in global
history, since an appreciation of the universality of government

51 The Lost Birthright the American

Dale Van Every, The Disinherited: of
Indian (New York, 1967), pp. 73-87.
52Some be worth The Berber of the
other examples may listing. communities
are relatively well thanks to Ernest Saints of the Atlas
High Atlas known, Gellner,
1969). Gellner's hesitation about classifying these communities as demo
(London,
cracies (pp. 28-29) is an explicit expression of a typical attitude. See also James A.
Miller, Imlil: A Moroccan Mountain Community in Change (Boulder and London,
1984), pp. 71-72, for a more recent report on the same area. William Robert Geddes,
Migrants of the Mountains: The Cultural Ecology of the Blue Miao (Hmong Njua) of
Thailand (Oxford, 1976), pp. 94-96, discusses how the migratory habits of the Miao
preserve a quasi-democratic method of decision making. Pedro Carrasco, Land
and Polity in Tibet (Seattle, 1959), pp. 57-61, documents conciliar government
among the Bhotias of Sikkim in the early twentieth century. It is worth noting that
this same area in the nineteenth century had a village headman who was suppos
edly the seventh of a hereditary line. Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities
in Western Europe 900-1300 (Oxford, 1984), surveys medieval European manifesta
tions of what she calls "collective judgement." She emphasizes, as do many histori
ans of such phenomena, that collective judgment coexisted with deference to rank
and wealth. That is undoubtedly true, but in our view it does not exclude medieval
quasi-democracies from the history of democratic practice.
42 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, SPRING I993

by councils and through discussion among equals is more useful

and appropriate than seeing all democratic development in the
present as a result of modernization.
Second, given that nondemocratic institutions have predomi
nated on the larger scale, do the grass-roots quasi-democracies
discussed here have much significance? Both historians and polit
ical theorists have traditionally answered no. Karl Wittfogel
devoted a section of his influential Oriental Despotism to a discus
sion of what he called "the Beggars' Democracy/'53 Wittfogel, in
writing an exhaustive analysis of traditional despotic govern
ment, here dealt with claims that there was room in despotic
societies for autonomy and even "genuine democratic institu
tions" at the local level.54 Wittfogel was well aware that some
"genuine elements of freedom" existed in such societies, and he
conceded that although village politics lacked a "formal demo
cratic pattern," it had a "democratic flavor." Yet he concluded that
the freedoms of subjects under oriental despotism were "politi
cally irrelevant freedoms" that in no way threatened the existence
of despotic power.55 This is similar to the position of some Chi
nese historians who maintain that if the democracy of the village
was not perfect and complete, it was not democracy at all, and
was of no scholarly interest.56 It is equally valid?and perhaps
more productive?for historians to reflect upon the fact that even
under the most unpromising circumstances, "genuine elements of
freedom" can exist, and that even "beggars" can exhibit behavior
with a "democratic flavor." Whether or not such "beggars" are
strong enough to throw off their oppressors at any given time or
place, their political behavior is worthy of notice for those inter
ested in human history as a whole.
Few other theorists have given as much consideration to this
question as did Wittfogel, the passionate enemy of totalitarian
ism. Historians have usually accorded unique importance to the
state as the most advanced type of political institution. The state
(characterized by specialized, hierarchical structures of com
mand and a relative monopoly of "legitimate" force) has attracted
this attention not only because of its undoubted influence on the

53 A Comparative Total Power

Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: Study of
(New Haven and London, 1957), pp. 108-26.
54
Ibid., p. 116.
55
Ibid., pp. 122-26.
56
See note 19 above.
Muhlberger and Paine: Democracy's Place inWorld History 43

course of history, but also because historians have thought it to be

a superior form of human organization. It is often said that the
state has created peace and "integrated" activity over large areas,
across barriers that in the past divided humankind into tribal
societies and condemned them to live in a state of constant war.57
This highly positive evaluation of the state rests on two
assumptions, neither of which has ever been proved. The first is
that states do create peace better than tribal society. The second
is that states "integrate" human effort more efficiently than do
other forms of collective activity. The history of Europe over the
past century, when it has been dominated by states of unprece
dented power, would hardly seem to give much comfort to either
assumption, if examined from the point of view of an individual
seeking to survive a normal life-span without being murdered,
plundered, or uprooted. The twentieth-century experience of the
people of Silesia, to take but one example, should be enough to
make people pause in their praise of the state as an instrument of
peace and prosperity.
There is no doubt that state institutions have often promoted
economic specialization and have sometimes created spheres of
peace. But equally there is no doubt that states, in their real his
torical origins and behavior, are raw manifestations of "the pur
suit of power," and that their institutions were designed to create
and enforce political and economic inequality.58 That is what
states do best even today. Insofar as state institutions ever pro
mote the general welfare, it is because they have been reined in by
people concerned not so much with the "pursuit of power" as
with "the pursuit of fairness."59

57
For an eloquent presentation of this point of view by an anthropologist, see
Marshall D. Sahlins, Tribesmen (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1968), pp. 4-13.
58 case of the Roman
The paradigmatic empire has recently been the object of
convincing debunking: Peter Garnsey and Richard Sailer, The Roman Empire:
Economy, Society and Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987), and Benjamin
Isaac, The Limits of Empire: The Roman Army in the East (Oxford, 1990), show that
the imperial government, even at the empire's was hardly at all concerned
height,
with the well-being of the general population and devoted its energies almost
entirely to creating and maintaining a power structure that benefited a very small
minority. As Isaac puts it (p. 160): "The army's role was to protect the rulers rather
than the ruled." It is becoming more difficult to decide whether the Roman state
represented a case of Hobbesian war or civilized peace.
59
Aristotle, Politics 5.1, discusses the pursuit of fairness (or equality) as the
basis for any constitution, and the lack of it as the reason for internal conflict. The
same passage refers to some of the difficulties involved in interpreting the concept
of equality.
44 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, SPRING 1993

How common the latter pursuit is compared to the former as a

human motivation may be a matter for debate. But surely a con
cern with fairness is not restricted to any one time or place, and a
concern with fairness, if taken very far, leads toward democratic
institutions. The best way to assure that every individual's inter
ests are considered when common business is done is to allow
everyone access to the public forum where common decisions are
made. That is why quasi-democratic procedures are so common in
local communities around the world and why attempts to extend
them through regional federation are not rare.
Historians should take the pursuit of fairness and its demo
cratic manifestations seriously as global historical phenomena.
The historical record demonstrates that a desire for fairness, as
well as the institutions and customs that produce decisions fair to
all concerned, is a survival trait. No one disputes that the hunter
gatherer bands in which humans have lived for most of their exis
tence were egalitarian. They could not afford to be otherwise,
because human cooperation was their key resource.60 That agri
cultural villages all over the world preserve a large degree of the
egalitarian ethic and commonly act collectively through demo
cratic or quasi-democratic institutions results from their need for
fairness. That the most creative phases of urban history in many
regions, such as the Mediterranean, northern India, and Europe,
have been characterized by democratic tendencies is again symp
tomatic of the need for fairness, for democracy, if a society is to
achieve constructive goals.
The same point can be made with reference to the present. The
terrible record of undemocratic regimes in the handling of pollu
tion and environmental problems shows as well as anything the
destructive results for a modern society when democracy is sup
pressed and the state has its way unrestrained by considerations
of fairness. It is not an accident that environmental degradation
has been a central issue in democratic movements from Czecho
slovakia to Siberia.61 Similarly, the disastrous economic condition
of various undemocratic regimes, not least that of the former
Soviet Union, is no accident: It is one unavoidable concomitant of

60 An Evolutionary Per
See Elman R. Service, Primitive Social Organization:
spective (New York, 1962), especially his summary of band and tribal society (pp.
140-41).
61 are not perfect in this regard, but a fair com
Of course, democratic regimes
parison between western and eastern Germany, or Latvia and Sweden will make
the point.
Muhlberger and Paine: Democracy's Place inWorld History 45

the systematic crushing of both individual initiative and all mani

festations of democratic decision
making, whether on the local or
higher levels.62
The most interesting treatments of the "pursuit of power"
have been useful because they looked on that pursuit as an aspect
of human social adaptation?the adaptation of human beings to
the presence of large numbers of their fellows, who long ago
became their most important competitors in the struggle for sur
vival. Perhaps it is time to realize that social survival is not only,
or even primarily, a matter of competition in a zero-sum game.
Such a realization, we believe, will lead to a renewal of interest,
long overdue, in the history of democracy.

62
In the second century, the emperor Trajan his prohibition of a col
justified
lege or guild of firefighters in Nicomedia in these terms: "It is to be remembered
that this sort of societies have greatly disturbed the peace of your province.. ..
Whatever title we give them, and whatever our in it, men who are
object giving
bonded together for a common end will all the same become a political organiza
tion before long." Pliny, Letters 10.34, trans. William Melmoth (Cambridge, Mass.,
1963), 2:319-21.