Généralités

Littéralement "gouvernement du peuple, par le peuple, pour le peuple"

Trois sens:

(2) a form of government in which the citizens exercise the same right not in person but through representatives chosen by and responsible to them, known as representative democracy;

(3) a form of government, usually a representative democracy, in which the powers of the majority are exercised within a framework of constitutional restraints designed to guarantee all citizens the enjoyment of certain individual or collective rights, such as freedom of speech and religion, known as liberal, or constitutional, democracy.

Alexis de Tocqueville et l'exercice de la démocratie L'égalité des conditions est-elle compatible avec l'exercice de la liberté ? Cette question centrale de la pensée de Tocqueville (1805-1859) est aussi celle de la possibilité de la démocratie.

TABLE BIBLIOGRAPHIES

Geopublic

La cyberdémocratie

La Communauté des citoyens Dominique Schnapper, Gallimard, coll. « NRF essais », 1994.

Histoire

Une histoire de la démocratie en Europe Antoine de Baecque (dir.), Le Monde ( «Livres», mensuel n° 12, December 1991. Comprend l'encadré « Les démocraties scandinaves » )

La Démocratie athénienne à l'époque de Démosthène Mogens H. Hansen, 1991, trad. fr. Les Belles Lettres, coll. « Histoire », 1993.

HISTOIRE

Democracy had its beginnings in certain of the city-states of ancient Greece in which the whole citizen body formed the legislature; such a system was possible because a city-state's population rarely exceeded 10,000 people, and women and slaves had no political rights. Citizens were eligible for a variety of executive and judicial offices, some of which were filled by elections, while others were assigned by lot. There was no separation of powers, and all officials were fully responsible to the popular assembly, which was qualified to act in executive and judicial as well as legislative matters. Greek democracy was a brief historical episode that had little direct influence on the development of modern democratic practices. Two millennia separated the fall of the Greek city-state and the rise of modern constitutional democracy.

Monarchy, oligarchy, democracy

No Athenian believed that he had anything to learn from the bureaucratic monarchies of the East, which were incompatible with Greek notions of citizenship. All monarchies, indeed, seemed bound to deteriorate into such tyrannies. Self-defense necessitated that every adult male be required, and indeed be willing, to fight when called on; in return he had to be given some measure of respect and of personal autonomy--in a word, freedom. To protect that freedom, government was necessary; anarchy had no attractions for any Greek. The central question of politics, then, was the distribution of power among the citizens. Was Greek freedom best preserved and defined by the rule of the few or by that of the many? On the whole the great names favoured aristocracy, the rule of the best. Plato believed that the object of politics was virtue, and that only a few would ever thoroughly understand the science by which virtue could be attained. These trained few, then, should rule. Aristotle, his pupil, seems to have put the cultivation of the intellect highest among human goods; and he believed--quite reasonably, given the limited resources then available--that this fruit of civilization could be reaped only among a leisure class supported by the labours of the many. In return for their leisure the gentry would agree to sacrifice some of their time to the tedious business of governing, which only they would be sufficiently disinterested and well informed to do successfully. Neither of these apologies for oligarchy had any success in practice. The democrats carried the day, at any rate in Athens and its allied cities. In return for playing their parts as soldiers or sailors, ordinary Athenians insisted on controlling the government.

The result was impressive. The people were misled by demagogues; they were intolerant enough to put Plato's master, Socrates, to death; they were envious of all personal distinction; and of their three great wars (against Persia, Sparta, and Macedon), they lost two. Furthermore, passionate devotion to the idea that Athens was the greatest of all cities, the school of Greece, and the wonder of civilization, misled them into basing their society in large part on slave labour, into wanton imperial adventure abroad, and into denying Athenian citizenship to all who were not born to it (even Aristotle), however much they contributed to the city's greatness and however much more they might have done. The foundations of Athenian democracy were narrow and shallow and fragile. But to say all this is only to say that the city could not entirely shake off the traditions of its past. Its achievement was the more remarkable for that. Seldom since has civilized humanity equalled democratic Athens, and until the last the city was satisfactorily governed by law and by popular decision. It owed its fall less to any flaw than to the overwhelming force that was mounted against it.

For to the north of Hellas proper a new power arose. Greek civilization had slowly trained and tamed the wild men of Macedon. Their king Philip forged them into a formidable army; he and his son Alexander then seized the opportunity open to them. History and geography made it impossible for the Greek cities to unite, and so they hanged separately. It seemed as if the city-state had been but a transient expedient. Henceforward Athens and Sparta would take their orders from the Great King.

Modern concepts of democratic government were shaped to a large extent by ideas and institutions of medieval Europe, notably the concept of divine, natural, and customary law as a restraint on the exercise of power. Highly significant was the growing practice by European rulers of seeking approval of their policies--including the right to levy taxes--by consulting the different "estates," or group interests, in the realm. Gatherings of representatives of these interests were the origin of modern parliaments and legislative assemblies. The first document to notice such concepts and practices is Magna Carta of England, granted by King John in 1215.

Also of fundamental importance were the profound intellectual and social developments of the Enlightenment and the American and French revolutions, notably the emergence of concepts of natural rights and political equality. Two seminal documents of this period are the American Declaration of Independence (1776) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789; see Independence, Declaration of; Rights of Man and of the Citizen, Declaration of the).

Representative legislative bodies, freely elected under (eventual) universal suffrage, became in the 19th and 20th centuries the central institutions of democratic governments. In many countries, democracy also came to imply competition for office, freedom of speech and the press, and the rule of law.

Jacksonian Democracy.

The election of 1828 is commonly regarded as a turning point in the political history of the United States. Jackson was the first president from the area west of the Appalachians, but it was equally significant that the initiative in launching his candidacy and much of the leadership in the organization of his campaign also came from the West. The victory of Jackson indicated a westward movement of the centre of political power. He was also the first man to be elected president through a direct appeal to the mass of the voters rather than through the support of a recognized political organization. His victory was regarded by contemporaries and by historians as the triumph of political democracy.

Jackson was the beneficiary of a rising tide of democratic sentiment. The trend toward greater political democracy, aided by the admission of six new states to the union, five of which had manhood suffrage, along with the extension of the suffrage laws by many of the older states, weakened the power of the older political organizations and opened the way for the rise of new political leaders skilled in appealing to the mass of voters. Not the least remarkable triumph of the Jacksonian organization was its success in picturing its candidate as the embodiment of democracy, despite the fact that Jackson had been aligned with the conservative faction in Tennessee politics for 30 years and that in the financial crisis that swept the West after 1819 he had vigorously opposed legislation for the relief of debtors.

As the victory of Jackson reflected the emergence of new forces in U.S. politics, so Jackson himself brought to the presidency a new set of personal qualifications that were to become the standard by which presidential candidates would be judged for the remainder of the 19th century. He was the first president since Washington who had not served a long apprenticeship in public life and had no personal experience in the formulation or conduct of foreign policy. His brief periods of service in Congress provided no clue to his stand on the public issues of the day, except perhaps on the tariff.

Jackson approached the problems of the presidency as he had approached all other problems in life. He met each issue as it arose, and in the White House he exhibited the same vigour and determination in carrying out decisions that had characterized his conduct as commander of an army. He made it clear from the outset that he would be the master of his own administration, and, at times, he was so strong-willed and decisive that his enemies referred to him as "King Andrew I."

Mill's friend Alexis de Tocqueville, whose De la démocratie en Amérique (Democracy in America) appeared in 1835-40, was a French civil servant also concerned with maintaining the standards and creativeness of civilization in face of the rising tide of mass democracy. Since the United States was then the only large-scale democracy extant, Tocqueville decided to go there, and as a result of his visit wrote a classic account of early 19th-century American civilization. "We cannot," he wrote, "prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal, but it depends upon ourselves whether the principle of equality will lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or wretchedness." He feared the possible abuse of power by centralized government, unrestrained by the power of the old privileged classes, and thought it essential to "educate democracy" so that, although it would never have the "wild virtues" of the old regimes, it would have its own dignity, good sense, and even benevolence. Tocqueville greatly admired American representative institutions and made a penetrating analysis of the new power of the press. He realized, as few people then did, that the United States and Russia would become world powers, and he contrasted the freedom of the one and the despotism of the other. He also foresaw that under democracy education would be respected more as a ladder to success than for its intrinsic content and might thus become mediocre. He was alive to the dangers of uniform mediocrity but believed, like Mill, that democracy could be permeated by creative ideas.

Yet, while a stringent moralism held in check endemic subversion and anarchy, Darwinism and the machine analogy stimulated endless forms of self-consciousness. If man could fashion and continually improve these engines, perhaps he could also engineer an improved society. Because evolution was at last "proved," thanks to Darwin, perhaps it also gave warrant for social and political progress by gradual steps. Spencer's all-inclusive philosophy, likened then to Aristotle's, foresaw an inevitable movement from the simple and undifferentiated to the complex and specialized--as in modern life. Clearly, whether automatons or not, people kept thinking and having purposes; and among evolutionists and scientific socialists alike, thought and purpose included the hastening by voluntary action of what was sure to come by force of natural laws. These and other desires acting in the light of Realism and taking shape in the increasing organization of the toiling masses brought Europe to accept democracy as inevitable.

The word democracy is used here in a cultural sense. It does not imply a set of political institutions so much as the signs and the agencies that herald the coming populist state of our day: for example, the extension of the franchise, in parliamentary or plebiscite form; the secret ballot; the legalization of trade unions; the rise of a Roman Catholic social movement; the passage of education acts providing free, public, and compulsory schooling; the formulation of the paternalistic Tory democracy as a cure for the evils of free-for-all economic liberalism; the beginnings of welfare legislation (in France under Napoleon III, in Germany under Bismarck); the secularization of life by state action, by the prestige of science, and also by the liberal movements within the churches themselves; and finally, after a decade or so of public education, the great extension and popularization of the press. At the passage of the Reform Act of 1867 in Britain, which gave the vote to urban workingmen, Robert Lowe had said, "Now we must educate our masters." In a parliamentary system the means to that education cannot be the schools alone. The adult "common man" must continually be informed and appealed to for his own satisfaction as well as for coherent policy in government. The instrument for this purpose was the new journalism. The quarterlies of the early 19th century gave way to the monthlies in the 1860s and they in turn to the weeklies, while the daily papers, costing now but a penny and simplifying all they touched, began to reach the millions.

The Communist Manifesto

In the perspective of intellectual history, all of these pre-Marxist socialist thinkers produced ideas of considerable intrinsic worth. But from the viewpoint of the subsequent development of socialism their ideas seem to be tributaries feeding the mighty stream of the Marxist movement that came to dominate the socialist tradition in the last third of the 19th century.

Karl Marx (1818-83) had a synthesizing mind. He fused German idealistic philosophy with British political economy and French socialism. Marx's earlier writings are discussed elsewhere (see Marxism ). In this section the focus is on his mature thought as first developed in The Communist Manifesto (1848), which he wrote in conjunction with Friedrich Engels, his lifelong intellectual companion.

To Marx, society is a moving balance of antithetical forces; strife is the father of all things, and social conflict is the core of the historical process. Men struggle against nature to wrest a livelihood from her. In the process they enter into relations with one another, and these relations differ according to the stage they have reached in their productive activities. As a division of labour emerges in human society, it leads to the formation of antagonistic classes that are the prime actors in the historical drama. In contrast to his predecessors, Marx did not see history as simply a struggle between the rich and the poor, or the powerful and the powerless; he taught that such struggles differ qualitatively depending on what particular historical classes emerge at a given stage in history. A class is defined by Marx as a grouping of men who share a common position in the productive process and develop a common outlook and a realization of their mutual interest.

Marx, like Hegel and Montesquieu, considered societies as structured wholes; all aspects of a society--its legal code, its system of education, its religion, its art--are related with one another and with the mode of economic production. But he differed from other thinkers in emphasizing that the mode of production was, in the last analysis, the decisive factor in the movement of history. The relations of production, he held, constitute the foundation upon which is erected the whole cultural superstructure of society.

Marx distinguished this doctrine, which he called scientific socialism, from that of his predecessors whom he labelled utopian socialists. He asserted that his teachings were based on a scientific examination of the movement of history and the workings of contemporary capitalism rather than simply on idealistic striving for human betterment. He claimed to have provided a guide to past history as well as a scientific prediction of the future. History was shaped by class struggles; the struggle of contemporary proletarians against their capitalist taskmasters would eventuate in a socialist society in which associated producers would mold their collective destinies cooperatively, free from economic and social constraints. The class struggle would thus come to an end.

German Social Democracy

In Germany, Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-64), the architect of the German labour movement, agreed with Marx on the need for autonomous organization of the working class but differed from him in wanting the government to provide the necessary capital for the establishment of producers' cooperatives that would emancipate labour from capitalist domination. To Marx, any appeal to the bourgeois state was out of the question, and he proceeded to organize followers in Germany against Lassalle. In 1869 they created the Social Democratic Party. The division between the followers of Lassalle and those of Marx persisted until 1875, when the two parties united on the basis of a compromise program (which Marx sharply criticized for its Lassallean vestiges).

The German Social Democratic movement grew rapidly, despite Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's attempts to suppress it through anti-socialist legislation and to undercut its appeal by social reforms. In 1877 the Socialists obtained half a million votes and a dozen members in the Reichstag. In 1881 the party claimed 312,000 members, and, by 1890, 1,427,000. After the repeal of the anti-socialist laws the party adopted the so-called Erfurt Program of 1891, eliminating all demands for Lassallean state-aided enterprises and pledging itself to the orthodox Marxian goal of "the abolition of class rule and of classes themselves."

It soon became apparent that Marx's own thought had gone through a process of evolution so that different disciples could quote chapter and verse in support of fairly divergent political views. In particular, whereas Marx in the late 1840s and early 1850s had asserted that only a violent revolutionary overthrow of bourgeois rule and the emergence of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" would lead to the emancipation of the working class, by the late 1860s his views had considerably mellowed. Writing in England after the second Reform Bill (1867), which had given the vote to the upper strata of the workers, Marx suggested the possibility of a peaceful British evolution toward socialism. He also thought that such a peaceful road might be possible in the United States and in a number of other countries.

Although the leaders of German Social Democracy liked to speak in revolutionary Marxist rhetoric, they had in daily life become increasingly absorbed in parliamentary activities. Under the intellectual guidance of their theoretician Karl Kautsky (1854-1938) they developed a brand of economic determinism according to which the inevitable development of economic forces would necessarily lead to the emergence of socialism. The official Social Democratic platform remained ideologically intransigent, while the party's activities became increasingly pragmatic.

Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932), once a close companion of Engels, challenging prevailing orthodoxy in his famous Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie (1899; Eng. trans., Evolutionary Socialism, 1909), appealed to the party to drop its revolutionary baggage and recognize theoretically what it had already accepted in practice: namely, that Germany would not have to go through revolutionary convulsions in order to reach socialist goals. Ignoring the differences between political conditions in Germany and England, Bernstein urged the party to travel along the English road in hope of gradually transforming capitalism through socialist reforms brought about by parliamentary pressure.

The struggle between Kautsky's orthodoxy and Bernstein's revisionism shook the German party. Bernsteinian doctrine was officially defeated in 1903, but revisionism in fact permeated the party, especially its parliamentary and trade union leaders. At the outbreak of World War I practically all the leaders supported the government and the war, thus ending the party's revolutionary pretensions.

Géographie

Vers un modèle démocratique unique ? Les principaux pays démocratiques tendent vers une forme de régime politique dans laquelle le chef du gouvernement est élu ou légitimité par une élection au suffrage universel.Par Olivier Duhamel ( issu du hors-série n° 14, Vers la convergence des sociétés ? September 1996. Comprend l'encadré « Les attributs de la démocratie - le poids des institutions. » )

La marche de la démocratie Aujourd'hui, dictature et autocratie ne riment plus nécessairement avec sous-développement. En moins de deux décennies, un vent de démocratisation a soufflé sur le tiers-monde.Par Nicolas Journet ( issu du dossier «Tiers-monde, la fin des mythes» mensuel n° 50, May 1995. )

Multiculturalisme et démocratie. Entretien avec Michel Wieviorka ( issu du hors-série n° 15, Identité, identités. L'individu, le groupe, la société December 1996. )

Une histoire de la démocratie en Europe Antoine de Baecque (dir.), Le Monde ( «Livres», mensuel n° 12, December 1991. Comprend l'encadré « Les démocraties scandinaves » )

In October 1996, 15 months after lifting the house arrest of Nobel Peace Prize winner Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar's (Burma's) ruling junta, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), cracked down on dissidents, barricading Suu Kyi's house and arresting hundreds of her supporters. The SLORC's action galvanized advocates of Myanmar democracy abroad, particularly in the U.S., and put the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) on the spot. ASEAN had gained some credit for Suu Kyi's release in July 1995, but the SLORC's iron fist gave ammunition to critics of the organization's policy of coaxing Myanmar toward change by quiet persuasion and cordial dialogue rather than by sanctions and confrontation.

ASEAN's Myanmar quandary again threw into sharp focus the intertwined and entrenched issues in Asian democracy and development: Can economic pressure prod despots to liberalize? Should prosperity come before political rights? The remarkable success of the East Asian economies has occurred in countries under one-person or one-party rule, including Japan, governed almost continuously by the Liberal-Democratic Party for 41 years. Rather than immediately working to establish democracy, the region's winning formula has called for economic acceleration with one person in the driver's seat. Indeed, in the 1960s and 1970s, after a decade or so of trying to stay on the democratic path set by their former foreign colonial rulers, one Asian nation after another became autocratic.

The East Asian Miracle, a much-quoted World Bank report on Japan and the newly industrialized economies, acknowledged the key role played by powerful governments whose technocrats forged sound economic and social policies--free enterprise, mass education, fiscal and monetary prudence, and business incentives--with a minimum of lobbying for special favours from politicians and interest groups. Rather than embracing the whole of Western democracy, East Asia absorbed mainly the capitalist elements. Thus, Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, Chiang Kai-shek on Taiwan, and Park Chung Hee in South Korea sternly presided over years of relative political and social stability and spectacular business growth. Hong Kong prospered under a laissez-faire regime run by competent, unelected bureaucrats. In its reforms China has also kept draconian political control while encouraging economic free enterprise. By contrast, India adopted democracy's political processes but rejected its market economics.

If East Asia put economics first, politics eventually followed, largely as a result of social changes brought on by prosperity. The rise of a confident, affluent, and educated middle class, the expansion of schools and mass media, the growing assertiveness of young people and women, and the increased exposure to Western culture made more and more Asians less willing to follow their leaders without question. To these social pressures for greater freedom, economics added a further impetus. Stanford University economist Paul Krugman caused a stir in late 1994 by predicting a long-term East Asian economic slowdown unless the region improved total factor productivity (TFP), the output produced per unit of input. He maintained that innovation in the workplace was needed for improvement of TFP. Lee Kuan Yew agreed, stating that new industries require work units with freedom to plan. Quite naturally, Lee concluded, such liberties could lead to demands for similar prerogatives in the political sphere, including the right to elect leaders.

Some of that is already happening in China. In a presentation for the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy, Minxin Pei, an assistant professor of politics at Princeton University, spoke of "the liberalizing effects of market forces." He notes the decreasing state control over people's economic decisions, the formation of thousands of business and professional groups, the widespread election of village councils, and even the expansion of a nongovernment press. Speaking in Shanghai in November, U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher acknowledged China's efforts to invest authority in its people through legal and administrative reforms and village elections. Henry Rowen, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, reported that the government media in China had only a third of the market in 1988, down from 95% in 1979. He predicted that if China's economy continued to grow at the present rate, its per capita gross domestic product would be $7,000 in 2015, the level at which democracy elsewhere has become stabilized.

What role, if any, have economic sanctions and international pressure played in democracy's new march across Asia and, indeed, the world? Not much. Eastern Europe and Latin America broke their chains with hardly any threats from Western nations. In Asia six nations made great strides in democracy over the past decade: Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand. None of them ever faced sanctions, most being U.S. allies. Rowen counseled patience in dealing with China and an end to "making economic relations hostage to political disputes." If anything, it appears that commerce with the rest of the world has been the best catalyst for both economic development and democratic change in Asia.

Organisation

Constitutional government

Constitutional government is defined by the existence of a constitution--which may be a legal instrument or merely a set of fixed norms or principles generally accepted as the fundamental law of the polity--that effectively controls the exercise of political power. The essence of constitutionalism is the control of power by its distribution among several state organs or offices in such a way that they are each subjected to reciprocal controls and forced to cooperate in formulating the will of the state. Although constitutional government in this sense flourished in England and in some other historical systems for a considerable period, it is only recently that it has been associated with forms of mass participation in politics. In England, for example, constitutional government was not harnessed to political democracy until after the Reform Act of 1832 and subsequent 19th-century extensions of the suffrage. In the contemporary world, however, constitutional governments are also generally democracies, and in most cases they are referred to as constitutional democracies or constitutional-democratic systems.

The contemporary political systems that combine constitutionalism and democracy share a common basis in the primacy they accord to the will of the majority of the people as expressed in free elections. In all such systems, political parties are key institutions, for they are the agencies by which majority opinion in a modern mass electorate is mobilized and expressed. Indeed, the history of the political party in its modern form is coincidental with the development of contemporary constitutional-democratic systems. In each case, the transition from the older forms of constitutionalism to modern constitutional democracy was accompanied by the institutionalization of parties and the development of techniques of party competition. The essential functions of political parties in a constitutional democracy are the integration of a multitude of interests, beliefs, and values into one or more programs or proposals for change and the nomination of party members for elective office in the government. In both functions, the party serves as a link between the rulers and the ruled: in the first case by allowing the electorate to register an opinion on policy and in the second by giving the people a chance to choose their rulers. Of course, the centralized, autocratically directed, and ideologically orthodox one-party systems of totalitarian regimes perform neither of these functions.

The two major types of constitutional democracy in the modern world are exemplified by the United States and Great Britain.

The United States is the leading example of the presidential system of constitutional democracy; Britain, although its system is sometimes referred to as a cabinet system in recognition of the role of the Cabinet in the government, is the classic example of the parliamentary system. The U.S. presidential system is based on the doctrine of separation of powers and distinguishes sharply between the personnel of the legislature and the executive; the British parliamentary system provides for the integration or fusion of legislature and executive. In the U.S. system the separation of legislature and executive is reinforced by their separate election and by the doctrine of checks and balances that provides constitutional support for routine disagreements between the branches; in the British system the integration of legislature and executive is reinforced by the necessity for their constant agreement, or for a condition of "confidence" between the two, if the normal processes of government are to continue. In the U.S. system reciprocal controls are provided by such devices as the presidential veto of legislation (which may be overridden by a two-thirds majority in Congress), the Senate's role in ratifying treaties and confirming executive nominations, congressional appropriation of funds and the exclusive ability to declare war, and judicial review of legislation;

in the British system the major control device is the vote of "no confidence" or the rejection of legislation that is considered vital.

The prestige of constitutional democracy was once so great that many thought all the countries of the world would eventually accede to the examples of the United States or Britain and establish similar arrangements. However, the collapse of the Weimar Constitution in Germany in the 1930s and the recurrent political crises of the Fourth Republic in France after World War II suggested that constitutional democracy carries no guarantee of stability. The failure of both presidential and parliamentary systems to work as expected in less-advanced countries that modelled their constitutions on those of the United States and Britain resulted in a further diminution in the prestige of both systems. Functioning examples are located throughout the world, though these are generally poorly institutionalized outside of those countries with direct historical ties to western Europe. Japan is a notable exception to this generalization, as are Costa Rica, India, and several other states to a lesser degree.

Numerous authoritarian and totalitarian states, notably the communist nations of the 20th century, have adopted outwardly democratic governments that nonetheless were dominated by a single authorized party without opposition. States with Marxist ideologies asserted that political consensus and collective ownership of the means of production (i.e., economic democracy) were sufficient to ensure that the will of the people would be carried out.

Openness and disclosure

Democracy rests upon popular participation in government, constitutionalism upon disclosure of and openness about the affairs of government. In this sense, constitutionalism is a prerequisite of successful democracy, since the people cannot participate rationally in government unless they are adequately informed of its workings. Originally, because they were concerned with secrets of state, bureaucracies surrounded their activities with a veil of secrecy. The ruler himself always retained full access to administrative secrets and often to the private affairs of his subjects, into which bureaucrats such as tax collectors and the police could legally pry. But when both administrators and rulers were subjected to constitutional restraints, it became necessary that they disclose the content of their official activities to the public to which they owed accountability. This explains the provision contained in most constitutions obliging the legislature to publish a record of its debates.

Division of power

Constitutional government requires a division of power among several organs of the body politic. Preconstitutionalist governments, such as the absolute monarchies of Europe in the 18th century, frequently concentrated all power in the hands of a single person. The same has been true in modern dictatorships such as Hitler's in Germany. Constitutionalism, on the other hand, by dividing power--between, for example, local and central government and between the legislature, executive, and judiciary--ensures the presence of restraints and "checks and balances" in the political system. Citizens are thus able to influence policy by resort to any of several branches of government.

Areal division of power.

A third element of any federal system is what has been called in the United States territorial democracy. This has two faces: the use of areal divisions to ensure neutrality and equality in the representation of the various groups and interests in the polity and the use of such divisions to secure local autonomy and representation for diverse groups within the same civil society. Territorial neutrality has proved highly useful in societies that are changing, allowing for the representation of new interests in proportion to their strength simply by allowing their supporters to vote in relatively equal territorial units. At the same time, the accommodation of very diverse groups whose differences are fundamental rather than transient by giving them territorial power bases of their own has enhanced the ability of federal systems to function as vehicles of political integration while preserving democratic government. One example of this system may be seen in Canada, which includes a population of French descent, centred in the province of Quebec.

Issues of classification

Types of classification schemes

The almost infinite range of political systems has been barely suggested in this brief review. Confronted by the vast array of political forms, political scientists have attempted to classify and categorize, to develop typologies and models, or in some other way to bring analytic order to the bewildering variety of data. Many different schemes have been developed. There is, for example, the classical distinction between governments in terms of the number of rulers--government by one man (monarchy or tyranny), government by the few (aristocracy or oligarchy), and government by the many (democracy). There are schemes classifying governments in terms of their key institutions (for example, parliamentarism, cabinet government, presidentialism). There are classifications that group systems according to basic principles of political authority or the forms of legitimacy (charismatic, traditional, rational-legal, and others). Other schemes distinguish between different kinds of economic organization in the system (the laissez-faire state, the corporate state, and Socialist and Communist forms of state economic organization) or between the rule of different economic classes (feudal, bourgeois, and capitalist). And there are modern efforts to compare the functions of political systems (capabilities, conversion functions, and system maintenance and adaptation functions) and to classify them in terms of structure, function, and political culture.

Although none is comprehensive, each of these principles of analysis has some validity, and the classifying schemes that are based on them, although in some cases no longer relevant to modern forms of political organization, have often been a major influence on the course of political development. The most influential of such classifying schemes is undoubtedly the attempt of Plato and Aristotle to define the basic forms of government in terms of the number of power holders and their use or abuse of power. Plato held that there was a natural succession of the forms of government: an aristocracy (the ideal form of government by the few) that abuses its power develops into a timocracy (in which the rule of the best men, who value wisdom as the highest political good, is succeeded by the rule of men who are primarily concerned with honour and martial virtue), which through greed develops into an oligarchy (the perverted form of government by the few), which in turn is succeeded by a democracy (rule by the many); through excess, the democracy becomes an anarchy (a lawless government), to which a tyrant is inevitably the successor. Abuse of power in the Platonic typology is defined by the rulers' neglect or rejection of the prevailing law or custom (nomos); the ideal forms are thus nomos observing (ennomon), and the perverted forms are nomos neglecting (paranomon). Although disputing the character of this implacable succession of the forms of government, Aristotle also based his classification on the number of rulers and distinguished between good and bad forms of government. In his typology it was the rulers' concern for the common good that distinguished the ideal from perverted forms of government. The ideal forms in the Aristotelian scheme are monarchy, aristocracy, and polity (a term conveying some of the meaning of the modern concept of "constitutional democracy"); when perverted by the selfish abuse of power, they are transformed respectively into tyranny, oligarchy, and ochlocracy (or the mob rule of lawless democracy). The concept of the polity, a "mixed" or blended constitutional order, fascinated political theorists for another millennium. To achieve its advantages, innumerable writers from Polybius to St. Thomas Aquinas experimented with the construction of models giving to each social class the control of appropriate institutions of government.

Another very influential classifying scheme was the distinction between monarchies and republics. In the writings of Machiavelli and others, the tripartism of classical typologies was replaced by the dichotomy of princely and republican rule. Sovereignty in the monarchy or the principality is in the hands of a single ruler; in republics, sovereignty is vested in a plurality or collectivity of power holders. Reducing aristocracy and democracy to the single category of republican rule, Machiavelli also laid the basis in his analysis of the exercise of princely power for a further distinction between despotic and nondespotic forms of government. In the work of Montesquieu, for example, despotism, or the lawless exercise of power by the single ruler, is contrasted with the constitutional forms of government of the monarchy and the republic. As a result of the decline of monarchies and the rise of new totalitarian states terming themselves republics, this traditional classification is now, of course, of little more than historical interest.

Le Sacre du citoyen Pierre Rosanvallon, 1992, rééd. Gallimard, coll. « Folio histoire », 2001.

Relations

Pourquoi les démocraties font peu la guerre

( «Échos des recherches», mensuel n° 34, December 1993. )

Les démocraties préfèrent vivre en paix ( «Échos des recherches», mensuel n° 68, January 1997. )

War and peace

The Vietnam War ensured that discussions as to the justness of a war and of the legitimacy of conscription and civil disobedience were prominent in early writings in applied ethics. There was considerable support for civil disobedience against unjust aggression and against unjust laws even in a democracy.

With the cessation of hostilities in Vietnam and the end of conscription, interest in these questions declined. Concern about nuclear weapons in the early 1980s, however, has caused philosophers to argue about whether nuclear deterrence can be an ethically acceptable strategy if it means using civilian populations as potential nuclear targets. Jonathan Schell's Fate of the Earth (1982) raised several philosophical questions about what we ought to do in the face of the possible destruction of all life on our planet.

Economie

LA DEMOCRATIE DE MARCHE

New ideologies

One other point must be emphasized about these themes.

They became, almost immediately in the 19th century, the bases of new ideologies.

How men reacted to the currents of democracy and industrialism stamped them conservative, liberal, or radical. On the whole, with rarest exceptions, liberals welcomed the two revolutions, seeing in their forces opportunity for freedom and welfare never before known to mankind. The liberal view of society was overwhelmingly democratic, capitalist, industrial, and, of course, individualistic. The case is somewhat different with conservatism and radicalism in the century. Conservatives, beginning with Edmund Burke, continuing through Hegel and Matthew Arnold down to such minds as John Ruskin later in the century, disliked both democracy and industrialism, preferring the kind of tradition, authority, and civility that had been, in their minds, displaced by the two revolutions. Theirs was a retrospective view, but it was a nonetheless influential one, affecting a number of the central social scientists of the century, among them Auguste Comte and Tocqueville and later Max Weber and Émile Durkheim. The radicals accepted democracy but only in terms of its extension to all areas of society and its eventual annihilation of any form of authority that did not spring directly from the people as a whole. And although the radicals, for the most part, accepted the phenomenon of industrialism, especially technology, they were uniformly antagonistic to capitalism.

Secteurs

CONTEXTES

APPLICATIONS

Société

Heurs et malheurs de la démocratie au travail De la représentation syndicale aux utopies de l'autogestion, le projet de redistribuer le pouvoir dans l'entreprise a connu plusieurs expressions successives. Échecs et déconvenues ont laissé la place, dans les années 80, à une conception participative du management, seule forme...Par Dominique Martin( issu du hors-série n° 11, Les métamorphoses du pouvoir December 1995. )

Social Democracy

political ideology that advocates a peaceful, evolutionary transition of society from capitalism to socialism using established political processes. Based on 19th-century socialism and the tenets of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, social democracy shares common ideological roots with communism but eschews its militancy and totalitarianism. Social democracy was originally known as revisionism because it represented a change in basic Marxist doctrine, primarily in the former's repudiation of the use of revolution to establish a socialist society.

The social-democratic movement grew out of the efforts of August Bebel, who with Wilhelm Liebknecht cofounded the German Social Democratic Workers' Party in 1869 and then effected the merger of their party with the General German Workers' Union in 1875 to form what came to be called the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands). Bebel imbued social democracy with the belief that socialism must be installed through lawful means rather than by force. After the election of two Social Democrats to the Reichstag in 1871, the party grew in political strength until in 1912 it became the largest single party in voting strength, with 110 out of 397 seats in the Reichstag. The success of the Social Democratic Party in Germany encouraged the spread of social democracy to other countries in Europe.

The growth of German social democracy owed much to the influence of the German political theorist Eduard Bernstein. In his Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie (1899; "The Preconditions of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy"; Eng. trans. Evolutionary Socialism), Bernstein challenged the Marxist orthodoxy that capitalism was doomed, pointing out that capitalism was overcoming many of its weaknesses, such as unemployment, overproduction, and the inequitable distribution of wealth. Ownership of industry was becoming more widely diffused, rather than more concentrated in the hands of a few. Whereas Marx had declared that the subjugation of the working class would inevitably culminate in socialist revolution, Bernstein argued that success for socialism depended not on the continued and intensifying misery of the working class but rather on eliminating that misery. He further noted that social conditions were improving and that with universal suffrage the working class could establish socialism by electing socialist representatives. The violence of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and its aftermath precipitated the final schism between the social-democratic parties and the communist parties.

After World War II, social-democratic parties came to power in several nations of western Europe--e.g., West Germany, Sweden, and Great Britain (in the Labour Party)--and laid the foundations for modern European social-welfare programs. With its ascendancy, social democracy changed gradually, most notably in West Germany. These changes generally reflected a moderation of the 19th-century socialist doctrine of wholesale nationalization of business and industry. Although the principles of the various social-democratic parties began to diverge somewhat, certain common fundamental principles emerged. In addition to abandoning violence and revolution as tools of social change, social democracy took a stand in opposition to totalitarianism. The Marxist view of democracy as a "bourgeois" facade for class rule was abandoned, and democracy was proclaimed essential for socialist ideals. Increasingly, social democracy adopted the goal of state regulation, but not state ownership, of business and industry as sufficient to further economic growth and equitable income.

Opinions

Formation des opinions

Opinions

Ideologies

Theories

Evaluation

CITATIONS

Perspectives

QUESTIONS

PERSPECTIVES