Growing up in India, I was taught that democracy was the great good that we have to be eternally grateful for. Democracy was the Holiest of the Holy Cows and it was the gift that Gandhi and his lackeys had given to the people of India through their wisdom and generosity.
It seemed that democracy was so precious that the terrible poverty of India was a price worth paying for it. The link between poverty and democracy was never explained but the claim was that India was poor because it was a democracy.
Allow me a bit of personal reflections. It was pretty late in the day that I learned to think critically about our world. How should we live, how should we organize society to be peaceful and prosperous? How to think about those questions is at least as important—if not more—as the question of the structure of chemical elements and learning calculus.
I was totally ignorant of what democracy was and I was also incurious about how the system worked. The education system had much to do with my ignorance. I learned an adequate bit of math and science but fancy little of how the world worked, and practically nothing of critical reasoning.
I was told that India was the largest democracy in the world. I didn’t understand why that was a matter of pride but since I was expected to, I just went along since it didn’t matter to me. Though late in life, I did wake up eventually. Democracy was not what Messrs. Gandhi and Nehru claimed for it.
Indians were sold a bill of goods. They were told that since they could vote, they had freedom. This continues to fool Indians into thinking that they are free instead of being serfs under the control of a colonial government.
It’s a pity that our education was so one-sided. The focus was on engineering, science and technology. We learned nothing of history, sociology, or economics — subjects that would have explained how society functions and why.
Philosophy had interested me more than engineering. But I had to earn a living. The only profession open to me was engineering since I cannot stand the sight of suffering.
So it came about that I learned only in graduate school what I should have learned in high school. Economics introduced me to political philosophy and political science.
Political science is empirical/positive in its focus. What is, and why? It is primarily descriptive, explanatory, and predictive. What is justice? How does the government work? What gives government legitimacy? What are the rights of individuals? How do voters, bureaucrats and politicians behave and why?
Economics was formerly called political economy before it forked into economics and political science. The object of economic analysis is the human being as he[1] goes about interacting with other humans. Economic theories describe and explain the nature, causes and consequences of exchange—the activity that only humans among all living beings engage in.
Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, James Buchanan, et al, have been my primary gurus in this field.
Political philosophy is normative. Therefore it is value-oriented. It investigates what ought to be. Its conclusions are prescriptive: what we should do. What should be the limits of power? How should the good society be constituted?
Three political philosophers I found particularly interesting were John Rawls (A Theory of Justice), Robert Nozick (Anarchy, State and Utopia) and Karl Popper (Open Society and its Enemies.) I am thoroughly Rawlsian and Popperian in my conception of the good society.
In this piece my primary focus is on democracy. A few days ago, the BJP came out on top in the West Bengal legislative assembly elections. Much jubilation ensued among some people. A few of my friends asked me about my reaction. I said, “no comment.”
I like to study political science and political philosophy, the two sister disciplines of my primary interest: economics. I am only marginally interested in actual economies; I only refer to them to assess various economic theories, which is my main focus. Theories that explain why, for instance, the US is rich and India is poor. Or why China left India in the dust even though 45 years ago they were both wretchedly poor.
So also, I am only mildly interested in politics. I have no interest in knowing who won in, say, the West Bengal elections. As it happens, I don’t follow any news. Never read a newspaper in my life. Anyway, since so many of my friends are talking about elections in Bengal, I thought it would be nice to write a bit about democracy.
But why reinvent the wheel? Let’s just listen to and read what is already available. First, a short video.
Democracy is a procedural mechanism for decision-making rather than an inherently moral virtue. Elections are a means of transitioning power and resolving disputes without violence. They do not automatically confer moral authority on the outcomes produced.
The American founders created a constitutional republic that constrains popular will to protect individual rights from tyranny and oppression.
The tendency to equate democracy with moral virtue is dangerous because it frames property rights, speech, and due process as negotiable based on numerical superiority. Democracy has to be constrained by principles. That is why the US Bill of Rights begins with the words, “Congress shall make no law . . .”
With that as the warmup, let’s read what Karl Popper has to say about democracy. The Economist invited the philosopher Karl Popper to write an article on democracy. The piece first appeared in April 1988 and was republished in January 2016.
In the introduction to that article, The Economist writes:
The first book in English by Professor Sir Karl Popper was accepted for publication in London while Hitler’s bombs were falling, and was published in 1945 under the title “The Open Society and its Enemies”. The book was well received, but in this article Sir Karl questions whether his central theory of democracy (which he does not characterise as “the rule of the people”) has been understood.
It’s not a difficult article but I read it slowly even though I have already read it several times over the years.
I asked grok to summarize it. I suggest reading the summary and then the main article.
Popper rejects the classical theory of democracy as “the rule of the people” or the question “Who should rule?” (e.g., the best, the few, the many, or by divine/legitimate right). He sees this as abstract, prone to misuse, and leading to paradoxes (e.g., what if the people vote for dictatorship?).
Instead, he proposes a more realistic, practical problem: How can the state be constituted so that bad rulers can be removed without bloodshed or violence? The solution is a constitution (rule of law) allowing a government to be dismissed by a (simple) majority vote. This is not based on the inherent goodness or wisdom of the majority but on democracy’s superiority to dictatorship as the least-bad system for preventing tyranny and preserving accountability.
In short, the article is a concise, accessible defense of liberal democracy focused on institutional mechanisms for accountability and non-violent power transfer, rather than idealistic notions of popular sovereignty. It remains influential for its emphasis on falsifiability and reform in politics, akin to scientific methods.
Here are a few extended quotes:
The classical theory is, in brief, the theory that democracy is the rule of the people, and that the people have a right to rule. … I will briefly examine some of the historical background of the theory, and of the terminology.
Plato was the first theoretician to make a system out of the distinctions between what he regarded as the main forms of the city-state. According to the number of the rulers, he distinguished between: (1) monarchy, the rule of one good man, and tyranny, the distorted form of monarchy; (2) aristocracy, the rule of a few good men, and oligarchy, its distorted form; (3) democracy, the rule of the many, of all the people. Democracy did not have two forms. For the many always formed a rabble, and so democracy was distorted in itself.
. . . From Plato to Karl Marx and beyond, the fundamental problem has always been: who should rule the state? . . . Plato’s answer was simple and naive: “the best” should rule. If possible, “the best of all”, alone. Next choice: the best few, the aristocrats. But certainly not the many, the rabble, the demos.
The Athenian practice had been, even before Plato’s birth, precisely the opposite: the people, the demos, should rule. All important. political decisions—such as war and peace—were made by the assembly of all full citizens.
Later —
In “The Open Society and its Enemies” I suggested that an entirely new problem should be recognised as the fundamental problem of a rational political theory. The new problem, as distinct from the old “Who should rule?”, can be formulated as follows: how is the state to be constituted so that bad rulers can be got rid of without bloodshed, without violence?
This, in contrast to the old question, is a thoroughly practical, almost technical, problem. And the modern so-called democracies are all good examples of practical solutions to this problem, even though they were not consciously designed with this problem in mind. For they all adopt what is the simplest solution to the new problem—that is, the principle that the government can be dismissed by a majority vote.
In theory, however, these modern democracies are still based on the old problem, and on the completely impractical ideology that it is the people, the whole adult population, who are, or should by rights be, the real and ultimate and the only legitimate rulers. But, of course, nowhere do the people actually rule. It is governments that rule (and, unfortunately, also bureaucrats, our civil servants—or our uncivil masters, as Winston Churchill called them—whom it is difficult, if not impossible, to make accountable for their actions).
Go read Popper and his Central Theory of Democracy. The article at The Economist is not behind a paywall.
Music time. The Thirteenth Dalai Lama. Music for Kundun. Philip Glass.
NOTES
[1] Instead of the awkward “he or she” construct, or the cringeworthy “she,” I follow the convention that the author or speaker should refer to his gender in his choice of the third-person pronoun to use.
Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 