(soft music)
- Our speaker is James T. Kloppenberg,
and he is the Charles Warren Professor
of American History at Harvard
and teaches European and American intellectual history.
Today he will be discussing
his recently published magnum opus,
entitled Toward Democracy:
The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought.
- My history of democracy
in European and American thought
begins with Michel de Montaigne,
a French writer who lived during the wars of religion
that convulsed Europe throughout the 16th century.
From his chateau east of Bordeaux
in Southwestern France,
Montaigne could see the roaming bands
of Catholic and Protestant soldiers
that made life in the region
insecure for decades and sometimes made it a living hell.
If you visit Montaigne's chateau today,
you get a sense of the life that he lived.
In his study where he created the book of essays
that rank among the most important writings
of the early modern era,
you can still see painted on the beams of his ceiling
his watchwords, the words he lived by.
These include the words that he had inscribed
on a medal that he had cast for himself.
One side reads "Je m'abstiens"
or "I restrain myself"
and on the verso "Que sçais-je," "What do I know?"
Those qualities, restraint and humility,
lay at the heart of Montaigne's personal creed,
along with two other values,
his emphasis on autonomy or self-rule
and his ethic of reciprocity.
Those four values,
restraint, humility, autonomy, and reciprocity,
are central to my argument concerning
democracy as a way of life,
the conception of self-government
whose history I trace in Toward Democracy,
and that explains why I am so worried
about our current situation.
Some of these cultural preconditions are especially crucial.
Restraint, humility, and the ethic of reciprocity
are required if people are going to allow
their worst enemies to govern if they win an election.
That willingness is always fragile,
and it can be destroyed with disastrous consequences.
Think how rare those qualities have been.
Think how often elections in emerging democracies
just precipitate a new round of civil war
between rival ethnic groups,
or rival religious groups,
or groups inhabiting different regions
with different histories or traditions,
or groups loyal to a defeated leader.
The second principle of democracy
is a commitment to autonomy,
the independence of the individual
who internalizes and follows legal and ethical norms.
Without that commitment to autonomy,
majority rule is not enough
because any group of three can yield a majority of two
committed to enslaving the other one.
Yet all of these values,
restraint, humility, reciprocity, and autonomy,
like the principle of popular sovereignty itself,
are delicate and multidimensional cultural constructs,
internally unstable
and very difficult to fit together
using the blunt instrument of politics.
As if that weren't bad enough,
successful democracies depend on
preserving cultural resources
that the struggle to achieve democracy
erodes and sometimes destroys.
And to complicate matters further,
the successful achievement of democracy
has often unleashed forces
that can endanger the cultural resources
on which democracy depends,
a dynamic that we're watching play out in our own day.
The word democracy, as I'm sure many of you know,
descends from the Greek words for the people, the demos,
and power, kratos.
It has always meant popular government,
but for most of Western history
it has been a term of abuse,
not the almost universally accepted ideal
it has become in recent decades.
The word itself entered European discourse only in 1260
with the translation of Aristotle's Politics into Latin,
when the Dominican monks who were charged
with purifying Aristotle's pagan texts
invented the term democracia for popular government.
But widespread challenges to hierarchy
and to the rule of monarchy and aristocracy,
challenges that can properly be called democratic,
because they rested on new assertions about the capacity
of ordinary people,
such challenges emerged only in the 16th and 17th centuries,
when the ideas of Renaissance humanism
mingled with radical varieties of Christianity
to shake the foundations of European culture.
From the appearance of Thomas More's Utopia in 1516
to the peasant rebellions of the 1520s
and the rapid spread of Calvinism,
revolutionary ideas about the capacity of ordinary people
challenged prevailing practices of governance.
As religious warfare intensified
throughout Europe in the 16th century,
the contagious savagery that inspired
Montaigne's emphasis on restraint and humility
infected much of European culture.
The only alternative to endless carnage
appeared to be unchallengeable authority.
For that reason, the anti-democratic
ideas of royal absolutism
came to be the dominant force
in both the theory and the practice of politics.
Democracy in Europe and America
developed against the backdrop
of those murderous wars of religion
and the authoritarian regimes
that emerged to bring order to that chaos.
Early modern misgivings about popular government
have to be understood against the background
of violence perpetrated by ordinary people
against other ordinary people for more than a century.
I think that most scholars
have neglected that gruesome history
that lies behind the emergence of democracy,
a history of horrific violence,
and I think that's the reason why
we so complacently dismiss as elitism
the misgivings about democracy
that were expressed in the 17th and 18th centuries.
That might also explain why scholars today
fail to acknowledge just how revolutionary
the ideas and experiments
with limited or partial popular government were
in the context of those wars of religion.
American historians in the middle of the 20th century
took for granted that the story of America was,
among other things, a story of democracy.
Today, many American historians assume the opposite.
In one recent study, the only democratic communities
in early America are to be found aboard pirate ships.
It is now standard for historians of 18th-century America
to lament the shortcomings of the Revolution
and to treat the Constitution as a retreat from democracy.
I think those judgments are unbalanced.
The history of early America
contains a history of democracy,
and it's not a story of triumph,
but neither is it a fiction.
It is instead the history of struggles
between people with different
and often incompatible ideas
about autonomy, reciprocity,
authority, and community,
and, perhaps above all, about salvation.
In the early 17th century
few of those who engineered the institutions and practices
of popular government on either side of the Atlantic
thought of themselves as democrats.
They associated that idea with the absence of restraint,
with the degradation of government,
and with the indulgence of sin.
Even so, some of the first English settlers to North America
embraced for religious reasons the doctrine of self-rule
that had led them to emigrate from Anglican England
and establish their own communities of saints
in the harsh climate and isolation of New England.
Puritans such as Roger Williams and Thomas Hooker
set up self-governing colonies
in places like Providence and Hartford
to escape the authority of the Church of England
and that of people such as John Winthrop,
the governor of Massachusetts,
people who were just as firmly committed
to the idea of divine sovereignty
as Williams and Hooker
were to the idea of popular sovereignty.
It's sometimes forgotten
that some of the towns and colonies
established in the first half of the 17th century
self-consciously chose the word democracy
to describe the form of government
they were putting in place.
Whatever we might think of such colonies,
which excluded women from positions of authority
and permitted slave-owning,
these new settlements conceived of themselves
as democracies.
And I think we're missing something
if we fail to pay attention
to the reasons why they used that word.
Struggles developed within these colonies
almost immediately,
and important differences separated New England
from the colonies to their south.
But all of England's North American colonies
developed forms of self-rule
in their legislative assemblies,
even those that lacked
the particular institutions of town meeting
that were so pivotal in New England.
When Alexis de Tocqueville
visited the United States in the 1830s,
he called the New England town the cradle of democracy.
I think he was right.
At roughly the same time
that these New Englanders were experimenting
with forms of self-government in the 1630s and 1640s,
the ideas of religious dissenters back home
were plunging England into civil war.
The English Levellers, as they were called by their enemies,
argued for replacing monarchy
with forms of popular government
that were similar in important respects
to the experiments bubbling up across the Atlantic.
Whereas democrats in New England
became the leading figures of new colonies,
such as Providence and Hartford,
the ideas promulgated by the Levellers
led to the execution of King Charles I
and the bloody struggle in the English Civil War
that eventuated in the protectorate under Oliver Cromwell.
The Leveller leaders were imprisoned,
put to death,
or otherwise marginalized as dangerous radicals.
When the monarchy was restored in 1660 under Charles II,
the story of popular government in England
pretty much came to an end until,
well, until today,
when the monarchy, against all odds, is as popular as ever.
Not until the 20th century was the word democracy
used in mainstream English political life
as anything but an epithet.
My study of democracy provides
extensive analysis of the writings
of many prominent theorists and many less well-known people
who struggled to flesh out the meanings of democracy
as it developed over a long period of time
on both sides of the Atlantic.
I examined the staccato process
whereby ideas and proposals emerged and were debated,
experiments with democracy were conducted,
sometimes deliberately, sometimes inadvertently,
or for different purposes,
and the results were then assessed,
sometimes positively and just as often negatively.
To reiterate, radical ideas about self-rule,
ideas advanced in England by the Levellers,
by James Harrington, later by John Locke,
who was harried into exile,
and by Algernon Sidney, who was put to death,
those ideas were decisively rejected in England.
But in England's North American colonies
such ideas were not only embraced,
as they were by John Wise,
they were also institutionalized
and they were defended against royal authority.
Those were the ideas that later became the armature
of 18th-century American resistance to Britain.
In short, the seeds of America's democratic Revolution
were planted long before the 1760s and 1770s,
long before Alexander Hamilton met Aaron Burr.
Those seeds developed into different forms
depending on the institutional soil
and the cultural climates
prevailing in the different colonies,
but they all pointed in the direction of self-government.
The cluster of ideas characterized
as the 18th-century Enlightenment
certainly fed that process of growth.
My analysis of the Enlightenment
places America's democratic Revolution,
and perhaps even more controversially,
America's democratic Constitution,
in the framework of European ideas
that informed the Americans' thinking,
including the ideas of that notorious radical,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Rousseau was much more influential in America
than has been recognized,
and that's one of the principal arguments of my book.
When Rousseau proposed actual,
rather than hypothetical, constitutional arrangements,
as he did when he was invited
to write frameworks for Poland and for Corsica,
he envisioned regimes of representative democracy.
He intended his idea of the general will,
which is often caricatured
as a blueprint for totalitarianism,
merely to clarify the difference between the common good,
by definition, what is in the public interest,
and the momentary will of the majority,
which he called the will of all,
which has to be measured against something more permanent,
something more enduring,
something more like a constitution
than a public opinion poll.
The constitutions that Rousseau
proposed for Poland and Corsica
were more similar to than different from
those that emerged from the English colonies
that separated from Britain in 1776
and the document produced by the Constitutional Convention
in Philadelphia in 1787.
The templates for the United States Constitution
were forged during the years of the Revolution,
when each of the colonies either revised its charter
to establish its own form of democratic government
or wrote a new constitution.
In tribute to his indispensable contributions
to the debates that led up to this break from England,
it was John Adams who was selected
to write the constitution for Massachusetts,
which remains 237 years later
the fundamental law of the commonwealth,
and it was this document that became the template
for four of the other constitutions that were then written.
The constitution that Adams framed,
as he himself wrote proudly,
was "Locke, Sidney, and Rousseau reduced to practice."
Its purpose was to promote the general will.
Disagreements among Americans
ran deep in the 1780s.
There was widespread dissatisfaction
with the flimsy union created by the
Articles of Confederation
that prompted the calling of the Constitutional Convention
in 1787.
Scholars in the last century have disagreed
about how we should understand that Constitution
almost as vigorously as Americans disagreed over it
during the debates over ratification.
But I think the best studies
of recent years
show that the Constitution cemented, rather than betrayed,
the new nation's commitment to democracy.
The two leading architects of the Constitution,
James Madison of Virginia and James Wilson of Pennsylvania,
from first to last saw themselves
as working for the creation
of a democratic form of government.
But they believed that a democracy could survive
only if the dual dangers of democracy,
unrest leading to anarchy
or the reestablishment of tyranny,
only if both of those could be harnessed
by democratic means.
From Madison's perspective,
the various checks and balances of the federal plan,
and especially the various filters
that operated from the local to the state
and then the national government, would do just that.
Those institutions would provide,
as Madison put it in the first speech he gave
in the Constitutional Convention,
"The only defense against the inconveniences of democracy
"consistent with a democratic form of government."
This was Madison's first speech
at the Constitutional Convention.
"What we want," he says,
"is a form of government that provides a defense
"against the inconveniences of democracy
"consistent with a democratic form of government."
Representative democracy would ensure
that only those whom Madison called virtuous,
by which he meant people capable
of seeing beyond narrow self-interest to the common good,
only those people would be chosen to serve
in positions of authority.
One of the principal objectives of my book is to establish,
or I would say more accurately to reestablish,
the essentially democratic nature
of the American Revolution and the US Constitution.
For the first century after its ratification,
no one in the United States or Europe
doubted that the United States
was the first democratic nation.
I think we need to pay attention to the reasons
why they made that judgment
rather than assuming that we were right and they were wrong.
Few scholars have realized that in Pennsylvania
at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia
Madison's principal ally, James Wilson,
wrote the most decisive and influential speeches
in favor of the Constitution
with a copy of Rousseau's Social Contract at his elbow.
The purpose of the Constitution,
as both Madison and Wilson said over and over,
was to secure justice through democracy.
They envisioned a form of government
that would not empower self-interested individuals
or enable majorities to form around particular interests,
but would instead provide the cultural resources
as well as the institutional framework
necessary to enable citizens of the new nation
to defend democracy against its dangers.
Representative democracy would provide the best means
to the end that Rousseau and Wilson
called the general will,
and that John Adams and Madison more often called
the common interest or the public good.
I've noted that de Tocqueville's analysis
of American democracy is important to my argument.
De Tocqueville owed deep debts
to his New England informants
during his stay in Boston,
and his conception of American democracy
depended on those New Englanders' own ethic of reciprocity,
a sensibility that they correctly understood
to be descended from earlier Christian
and classical republican ideals
and that they explained to Tocqueville
lay beneath the institution of the New England town meeting.
That sensibility was shared by Abolitionists,
by champions of women's rights,
such as Frederick Douglass,
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Margaret Fuller.
The sensibility of those antebellum reformers
with its emphasis on the ethic of reciprocity
reached a crescendo in the presidency of Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln understood better than most of his contemporaries
the underlying premises of democracy,
and his words are just as powerful in 2017
as they were during his lifetime.
In one of his first public speeches
before the Young Men's Lyceum
in Springfield, Illinois, in 1838,
Lincoln condemned the brutal murder
of an innocent black man by a pro-slavery mob.
He warned that such lawlessness
threatened what Lincoln called
America's as yet undecided experiment,
testing the capability of a people to govern themselves.
Initially, Americans' shared animosity against Britain
had enabled Americans to project their hatreds outward.
But now, what Lincoln called
the basest principles of our nature
had returned in the crusade to preserve,
and even expand, slavery.
The passions being whipped up
on both sides of that struggle now endangered the nation.
Lincoln's own ideas about race
evolved painfully slowly over the rest of his life
until he reached a conviction
concerning the evil of slavery
that Frederick Douglass described
as zealous, radical,
and determined.
No matter how determined Lincoln became to end slavery,
he always tried to balance his own ideas
with his understanding
of the convictions of white Southerners.
In his first inaugural
he pleaded with the South not to secede
but instead to continue to debate slavery.
He concluded with the familiar appeal
to what he called the better angels of our nature,
the commitment to reciprocity,
the commitment violated by slavery,
that he thought all Americans could come to share
across the color line.
Even in the greatest of his speeches
at Gettysburg, and then in his second inaugural
when the outcome of the war had finally become clear,
Lincoln refused the gloating triumphalism
of most Northerners.
Instead, he pledged to bind up the nation's wounds,
to achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace
by acting with malice toward none and charity toward all.
For Lincoln, finishing the work of the war
did not mean continued violence,
vengeance, or retribution,
but the slow, steady work of rebuilding the nation
on a broader foundation of justice,
a foundation that would now include those so long excluded.
In the disheartening retreat
from democracy after the Civil War,
white Americans in the North as well as the South
revealed the depth of their racism.
They also revealed
that their commitment to the ethic of reciprocity
that was prized by the Whigs,
by de Tocqueville, and by Lincoln
was rooted in soil far too rocky to survive.
The wounds that opened
during the United States Civil War have not healed.
The divide between
the Confederacy and the Union
remains the principal cultural divide
in the United States today,
the divide that continues to shape our political discourse
and that threatens the ethic of reciprocity
in American democracy.
If you trace the lines
of the most vociferous criticism
of the 21st-century Democratic Party in general,
and of former President Barack Obama in particular,
those lines lead back to the Confederacy.
The Civil War had tragic and lasting consequences
for American democracy.
In its aftermath
the suffrage and civil liberties expanded in the North
and contracted in the South.
Slavery was abolished,
but forms of racial segregation
were reconfigured and reinvigorated
until the Civil Rights Movement at last
forced the nation to dismantle the regime of Jim Crow.
The American Civil War poisoned
the ethic of reciprocity on which democracy depends.
It sanctified the liberty of some individuals,
notably white men,
at the expense of others.
Like all civil wars,
it left a legacy of hatred and distrust
that has made further progress toward democracy
less likely rather than more likely
even today, a century and a half later.
Democracy begins in bloodshed
and it comes to life only through conflict.
In the Atlantic world from the 16th
through the end of the 19th century at least,
when that conflict has taken the shape of civil war,
it has meant if not the end,
then at least the indefinite suspension,
of the trust
on which democracy must rest.
Montaigne was right to emphasize
the importance of restraint and humility
as well as autonomy and reciprocity.
In the absence of those qualities,
he believed that individuals would prize freedom
only to dominate others
and democracy would be impossible.
In such circumstances
only absolute authority could ensure peace.
When we look at the history of democracy
in Europe and America,
it is apparent that the struggles to achieve self-government
have often generated conflicts
that have weakened the cultural conditions
necessary for democracy to survive.
In America our current culture of hyper-partisanship
tends to reinforce the destructive tendencies
toward self-righteousness,
dogmatism, and intolerance,
and to threaten the sensibilities
on which democracy depends.
To conclude with the title of my book's final chapter,
that dynamic has been the tragic irony of democracy.
(audience applauds)
(soft music)
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