Rule of the one - good Monarchy - bad Tyranny.
Rule of the few - good Aristocracy - bad Oligarchy.
Rule of the many - good Democracy - bad rule by the mob (Anarchy, Demarchy?), perhaps the tyranny of the majority.
Using this conceptual framework, the pre-democratic British elite considered that their countries constitution blended the three types of good rule in a uniquely successful model of government. Thus to make law the concurrence of the Monarch (the one), the aristocracy in the House of Lords (the few) and the representatives of the people in the House of Commons (the many) was required.
From this viewpoint the development of democracy, by making the House of Commons overwhelmingly dominant over the other two elements, unbalanced and destroyed the traditional constitution.
There were critics of eighteenth century British smugness about the excellence of their government. The representative nature of the House of Commons (where an uninhabited grassy hillside might have two members of Parliament and a great centre of industry and population could be unrepresented) was sometimes doubted by those who could not aspire to own a rotten borough or three. There was also a French comment along the lines that the English think they are free, but this is only so when there is an election.
This leads on to the question whether a category error was being made in regarding representatives of an electorate as being equivalent to the electorate. More broadly is representative democracy (even under circumstances of universal adult suffrage) a democratic or oligarchic form of government?
The Athenian democracy took the view that elected bodies were oligarchic, so that where the whole body of citizens could not take a decision it was better to select a part of the citizenry by lot (a process known as sortition) than to elect representatives. A random sample of the citizens was more democratic than the elected representatives of the citizens.
There has been some use of sortition in Canada recently, to construct representative bodies to consider electoral reform which would not be affected by the partisan vested interests in the way an elected assembly would have been.
Gordon Brown, in the UK, has made some noises about citizen juries helping form policy. However it seems this is just a term for a focus group, with a properly pre-biased unrepresentative sample to ensure the jury agrees with Gordon Brown.
It may be that we are approaching a crisis of democracy, brought about by oligarchies of professional politicians getting in the way of democracy (perhaps this should be the definition of the democratic deficit in the European Union). It would be interesting if a democracy abolished elections and replaced them with sortition. Would such a polity be a better or worse democracy than the ones we have today?
Th
Almost all Greek writers who mention democracy (including Aristotle[1], Plato and Herodotus) both emphasise the role of selection by lot or state outright that being allotted is more democratic than elections. For example Aristotle says: "it is thought to be democratic for the offices to be assigned by lot, for them to be elected is oligarchic," [6] We see the same idea in the 18th century after the re-emergence of democracy in the writings of Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu: "The suffrage by lot is natural to democracy, as that by choice is to aristocracy"[7]
"it is thought to be democratic for the offices to be assigned by lot, for them to be elected is oligarchic," [6]
"The suffrage by lot is natural to democracy, as that by choice is to aristocracy"[7]
I was once talking with friends about the political compass and we tried to find historical figures to assign to the various corners of the diagram. At some point I argued that we should actually try to come up with positive and negative figures for all of them - for instance, "enlightened despots" or "benevolent dictators". We were quite successful populating the authoritarian edge, but the libertarian edge was hard to populate. We couldn't find prominent figures who had actually been rulers (Gandhi, MLK, came to mind, but they never held office even if they led social movements). It was also hard to place the "libertarian" historical figures on the left-right dimension. I drew two conclusions from this:
Migeru:
if you truly believe in freedom and tolerance you need to allow people to organise themselves as they see fit and then the left-right economic axis fades away because to fix a position you need some degree of coercion - this means the political compass is not a square but a triangle
The catch is that sometimes you need to enforce freedom and tolerance.
Self-organisation only works between socialised, approximately generous adults. If there are sociopaths in the game, they'll use any means they can to monopolise resources.
The left/right axis doesn't fade away because there's an irreconcilable conflict between left and right values. The left believes that sharing makes more for everyone at the cost of preventing resource monopolisation by a tiny minority.
The right wants to be that tiny minority and wants to avoid sharing at any cost.
But this is really a socialisation problem, not a political problem. If there's a strong dominant narrative supporting sharing, the extreme crazies on the right can be marginalised, and not left running things as they're doing now.
government is an essentially authoritarian function and so it is more likely that historical figures will fall on the authoritarian than the libertarian end.
This is only true if politicians are self-selecting.
You know, often I wonder whether I would ever want the job of police chief, and what the job would so to me. I think that is a question everyone on this blog needs to give an answer to: under what conditions would you take the job of minister of the Interior, or of police chief? How about being an enforcer by taking a job as a police officer? What would you do to the job and what would the job do to you? What if nobody took those jobs?
Maybe I should make it a diary. We have met the enemy, and he is us — Pogo
Here's the mission statement from Finnfuzz:
"The Finnish Police maintain public order and security, prevent and investigate crime and forward investigated cases to a prosecutor for decision (consideration of charges). The police also provide the public with various licence services. The objective of police operations is to ensure that people can exercise their rights guaranteed by the judicial system and social order."
The objective of police operations is to ensure that people can exercise their rights guaranteed by the judicial system and social order."
I point to the example of Brian Paddick, in a former life the head of the Metropolitan Police for the inner city London area of Brixton. He pioneered a system where the police reduced effort to arrest cannabis offenders, so they could rebalance operational resources to take on more serious crimes. (I am not inviting a discussion of the merits of such a policy, but using this situation as an example of liberal policing).
Mr Paddick has now left the police force and is currently the Liberal Democrat candidate for Mayor of London. I suppose I should also remark that he is openly gay, although that had no direct bearing on his style of policing.
