We Can Have Democracy, But We Probably Need to Bring Back Slavery

Executive Summary

• People that use the term democracy often know little about how democracy worked in the Greek states.
• There is an essential connection between democracy and slavery.

Introduction

The term democracy is broadly used, but very few people, including those who use the terms democracy, are educated about the origins of Greek state democracy. However, critical details regarding democracy are foundational to the system.

The Critiques of Athenian Democracy

Excluded from everyday discourse on democracy is the poor reputation of democracy after it had been tested in the Greek states, as is explained in the following quotation.

Plato and Aristotle criticized democratic rule as the numerically preponderant poor tyrannizing the rich. Instead of seeing it as a fair system under which everyone has equal rights, they regarded it as manifestly unjust. In Aristotle’s works, this is categorized as the difference between ‘arithmetic’ and ‘geometric’ (i.e. proportional) equality.

In 399 BC, Socrates himself was put on trial and executed for “corrupting the young and believing in strange gods”. His death gave Europe one of the first intellectual martyrs still recorded, but guaranteed democracy an eternity of bad press at the hands of his disciple and enemy to democracy, Plato. From Socrates’ arguments at his trial, Loren Samons writes, “It follows, of course, that any majority—including the majority of jurors—is unlikely to choose rightly.”

While Plato blamed democracy for killing Socrates, his criticisms of the rule of the demos were much more extensive. Much of his writings were about his alternatives to democracy. His The Republic, The Statesman, and Laws contained many arguments against democratic rule and in favour of a much narrower form of government: “The organization of the city must be confided to those who possess knowledge, who alone can enable their fellow-citizens to attain virtue, and therefore excellence, by means of education.” – Wikipedia

This is curious. Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates are very highly regarded as some of the great philosophers in world history.

Therefore, why are the critiques of democracy by these Greek philosophers so little discussed? A bit about Socrates’ view on democracy is explained in the following quotation.

In the dialogues of Plato, the founding father of Greek Philosophy – Socrates – is portrayed as hugely pessimistic about the whole business of democracy. In Book Six of The Republic, Plato describes Socrates falling into conversation with a character called Adeimantus and trying to get him to see the flaws of democracy by comparing a society to a ship. If you were heading out on a journey by sea, asks Socrates, who would you ideally want deciding who was in charge of the vessel? Just anyone or people educated in the rules and demands of seafaring? The latter of course, says Adeimantus, so why then, responds Socrates, do we keep thinking that any old person should be fit to judge who should be a ruler of a country?

Socrates’s point is that voting in an election is a skill, not a random intuition. And like any skill, it needs to be taught systematically to people. Letting the citizenry vote without an education is as irresponsible as putting them in charge of a trireme sailing to Samos in a storm.

We have forgotten all about Socrates’s salient warnings against democracy. We have preferred to think of democracy as an unambiguous good – rather than a process that is only ever as effective as the education system that surrounds it. As a result, we have elected many sweet shop owners, and very few doctors. – School of Life

Essentially democracy eschews domain expertise in favor of input from the non-specialist, with the home that their lack of elite or bias will lead to better outcomes than those that come from elites making all of the decisions.

This is again, in reference to actual ancient Greek democracy, not to the republican form of governments that are called democracies. Socrates was criticizing the democracy that he lived in and is not a criticism of modern republics. In the articles I have read, the authors make the error of assuming that Socrates was referring to modern republics – because they buy into the false claims that modern republics are democracies.

Aristotle As a Supporter of Slavery

Aristotle was a supporter of slavery, and Aristotle considered the ownership of slaves necessary for one to have a fulfilling and “civilized” life.

Even Aristotle, the great defender of democracy and political freedom, believed that the goal of a civilized man was to attain a life of leisure so that he was free to pursue the higher things in life. How was this life of leisure attained?…With slaves, of course. Aristotle also believed that the laws of nature dictated that free men should rule and dominate slaves and women.

In doctrine he called “natural slavery” Aristotle said in “Politics” (1, 1253b15–55b40) that some people were born to be slaves, while others were born to be slave masters. Slavery, he said, was a good thing for slaves, because without masters, slaves would not know what to do with themselves. He described slaves as “animate tools”—pieces of property to be used, with no rights other than those granted by their masters. [Source: Cristian Violatti, Listverse, September 29, 2016] – Facts and Details

I have heard and read the term democracy an untold number of times. Yet before performing the research into this article, I had never heard of Plato’s critique of democracy or Aristotle’s support for slavery. I have never read Plato or Aristotle, so I would need others to bring such a thing to my attention. It would seem at some point rather than just using their names, writers would have discussed their views on slavery and democracy, especially since the term democracy is so widely used.

How Slavery Allowed The Athenians More Leisure and Study Time To Engage in Politics

As is apparent from discussing political subjects with many people, understanding politics takes mental effort and time. However, people working full-time jobs and having families typically do not have this time to devote to being educated on politics. But citizens of Athens were often slave owners — and this was an essential component of democracy.

This may sound counterintuitive, however, this is explained in the following quotation.

Slavery was more widespread at Athens than in other Greek cities. Indeed, the extensive use of imported non-Greeks (“barbarians”) as chattel slaves seems to have been an Athenian development. This triggers the paradoxical question: Was democracy “based on” slavery?

It does seem clear that possession of slaves allowed even poorer Athenians — owning a few slaves was by no means equated with wealth — to devote more of their time to political life.[86] But whether democracy depended on this extra time is impossible to say. The breadth of slave ownership also meant that the leisure of the rich (the small minority who were actually free of the need to work) rested less than it would have on the exploitation of their less well-off fellow citizens. Working for wages was clearly regarded as subjection to the will of another, but at least debt servitude had been abolished at Athens (under the reforms of Solon at the start of the 6th century BC).

Allowing a new kind of equality among citizens opened the way to democracy, which in turn called for a new means, chattel slavery, to at least partially equalise the availability of leisure between rich and poor. In the absence of reliable statistics, all these connections remain speculative. However, as Cornelius Castoriadis pointed out, other societies also kept slaves but did not develop democracy. Even with respect to slavery, it is speculated that Athenian fathers had originally been able to register offspring conceived with slave women for citizenship. – Wikipedia

This brings up the question — if a country ever wanted to have an actual democracy, would it need to allow its citizens to own slaves, and to free them from the burden of work, and allow them the time to educate themselves on political subjects.

Slavery As a Major Pillar of Ancient Athenian Democratic Society

The Athenians had many slaves. There were far more slaves than voting citizens in Athens, as is explained in the following quotation.

It is difficult to estimate the number of slaves in ancient Greece, given the lack of a precise census and variations in definitions during that era. It seems certain that Athens had the largest slave population, with as many as 80,000 in the 6th and 5th centuries BC,[44] on average three or four slaves per household.

According to the literature, it appears that the majority of free Athenians owned at least one slave. Aristophanes, in Plutus, portrays poor peasants who have several slaves; Aristotle defines a house as containing freemen and slaves.

The Greeks had many degrees of enslavement. There was a multitude of categories, ranging from free citizen to chattel slave, and including Penestae or helots, disenfranchised citizens, freedmen, bastards, and metics.[79] The common ground was the deprivation of civic rights. – Wikipedia

Conclusion

When writers use the term democracy, they always use the term to describe countries with governments that are republics. A sleight of hand has allowed republics to be called “representative democracies,” when the terms are contradictory. Normally these writers are also unaware of the conditions under which the Greek states engaged in democracy. There were essential preconditions for democracies, which modern audiences would not be comfortable with and one of these preconditions was slavery.

Athenian democracy was real in that it was direct voting or referendum-based voting that has nothing in common with any modern government. Through a modern lens, it is natural to critique Athenian and other Greek state democracies for excluding slaves, women, and foreigners living in Athens and the respective democratic Greek states. However, it appears that slavery at least, (and naturally slaves would need to be excluded from voting, particularly as they would outnumber the citizens) is a major ingredient that made Greek state democracy possible.

What is curious is that Socrates critiqued democracy for essentially having uninformed voters — however, these voters were freed from the burdens of much work and had time to become politically educated. Yet Socrates still viewed Athenians as insufficiently politically educated to be able to vote intelligently. Or at least he thought this for a significant portion of Athenians. Imagine what Socrates would think of modern republics where the citizens are not allowed to own slaves, and where voters in elections are expected to become politically knowledgable without this extra time that was freed up through the ownership of slaves.

Practicing real democracy did not stop the Athenians from seeking to conquer their neighbors and capture more slaves. Democracy did not cause the Greek states to reverse slavery. It did not cause them to make women citizens and give them voting rights. Furthermore, something that seems to have been deliberately hidden from the public is that democracy was heavily critiqued in Greece and gradually fell out of favor as a political system.

The US founding fathers knew this, which is why they chose a republican form of government. People that think the founding fathers wanted to create a democracy are mistaken. The founding fathers were fully aware of the different political options — and selected to create a republic.

How The Modern Esteem of Democracy is Based Upon a Lack of Knowledge of How Greek Democracy Functioned

A primary reason that democracy has become so esteemed is that there are no modern examples of democracy in the world, and only a tiny sliver of the population is aware of how democracy worked in the Greek states. This allows elites to wrap their non-democratic systems with a democratic association without the publish pushing back on what is a falsehood.

The Role of Slavery in Greek Democracy

Through slavery, as in ancient Athens, the citizens of a country can have the time to focus and educate themselves on political topics, which can allow them to engage in a participatory government.

The modern forms of republican voting add on the responsibility of voting, but adds it to citizens who have many other concerns, and lack the time to become sufficiently educated on these topics. This is considered a desirable state of affairs by the elite, as it allows them to effectively manipulate the voting public in each country that has a republican form of government.