Professor Edward Hallett Carr, in his brilliant book, The Soviet Impact on the Western World, remarks that the concept of democracy in Western Europe has never been altogether univocal; that, on the contrary, from the time when democracy first became a force in Western politics, there have been two democratic traditions, or at least two strands of thought in the philosophy of democracy, which stressed different ideals and on occasion might seek quite different ends.2 The one was more characteristic of, and tended to prevail in, Anglo-American thought and practice; the other was more characteristically French or Continental. And though the two were never altogether separable and usually were not distinguished, they were different and in some respects were capable of becoming antagonistic. Professor Carr's diagnosis is at once historically correct and highly suggestive. This article is concerned with two questions: first, the mainly historical question about the contexts of political experience in which the two traditions originated and which were largely responsible for their differences; and second, the mainly philosophical question about the nature of the differences and the relationship between the two traditions. The latter question is posed by the significant fact that, despite their potential disparity, the two traditions have remained persistently linked, both in the sense that they were felt to express only different aspects of a single ideal and also in the sense that practical democratic politics made drafts as occasion dictated almost indifferently upon both traditions. The philosophical question is obviously a matter of present-day concern.

That the program of democracy might harbor incompatible purposes is of course no new idea. From its very beginning the theory of democracy linked together the two ideals of liberty and equality, and quite early it became apparent that these two would not unite as

1. Substantially this article was the De Laguna Lecture at Bryn Mawr College, delivered December 3, 1951, but the concluding portion has been rewritten.
2. Professor Carr's thesis is developed by J. L. Talmon in The Rise of Totalitarian Democracy (1952), which was published after this paper was completed.

easily as the democrats of Thomas Jefferson's generation had hoped. Both in Europe and America democratic thought had followed, sometimes tacitly and sometimes explicitly, Aristotle's conception of a middle-class polity, prevailingly agricultural in its economy and politically controlled by a relatively large proportion of landowners who, being neither very rich nor very poor, met on a footing of independence and equality. This conception was hardly more than an episode in the social history of the nineteenth century. Industrialism increased rather than diminished disparities of wealth and power, and in the Gilded Age that followed the Civil War liberty seemed to mean the power of the more able or the more energetic, or merely the more unscrupulous, to attain their advantage at other men's expense. And after De Tocqueville's study of democracy in America equality seemed to mean the tyranny of majorities and the rule of mediocrity. Thus in the accusations of its enemies, both conservative and radical, the democratic element seemed to be caught in a dilemma: the more liberty the less and the more equality the less liberty. Its more liberal friends, i.e., John Stuart Mill were more than half afraid that the accusation was true. Yet at no time could the practical purposes of democracy be merely abandoned either ideal, and a democratic philosophy today can hardly countenance the notion that they were combined by a sheer intellectual confusion.

This essay starts with the assumption, therefore, that there have been two democratic traditions, or at least two distinguishable strands in the democratic tradition; that one has been more characteristically Anglo-American and the other more characteristically French; and that the first gave primary, importance to liberty while the second gave primary importance to equality. There were substantial historical reasons for this difference of emphasis. But liberty and equality are very abstract words and taken out of context are very vague in meaning. When they symbolize realizable ideals they are shorthand for redressing quite definite grievances or bringing about quite definite results. For this reason history, which supplies context, is one of the ways of analyzing and clarifying their meaning; it shows what, concretely, the men who used the words intended to accomplish. It is also true that social philosophies, not being very scientific, are in large measure occasional performances, though significant social philoso-

phies are always charged with meanings that are not exhausted in the occasions that produce them. They flourish most luxuriantly in periods of tension and unrest, when the "cake of custom" is broken up and when traditional ideas and ideals must be adjusted to new contexts and new problems. Yet the adjustment proves to be not the matter of a generation but of an age. For these reasons also history is an indispensable aid to analysis.

All these statements hold good of the conception of democracy. Elements in that conception were drawn from a very distant past: from the notion of citizenship in the Greek city-state, from the long and varied tradition of natural law, and from the faith that divine grace imparts spiritual freedom and equality to the true Christian, Yet at most democracy merely used these old and familiar expressions to symbolize new meanings. The states of affairs with which it had to deal were new and violently disruptive of any traditional order or system, and the ideals in the light of which it hoped to re-establish order and system were new also. And this was true of the two strands of thought that have here been called the two democratic traditions. They had their points of origin respectively in the two great European revolutions which by common consent mark the beginnings of modern Europe-an politics: the Puritan Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, which was consummated in the bloodless English Revolution of 1688, and the French Revolution a century later. As is the habit of revolutions each had its philosopher: in the one case John Locke, in the other Rousseau. These men were the intellectual ancestors of the two democratic traditions. In their political philosophies were crystallized the purposes of the English and French revolutionists, and through them these purposes became a part of the meaning that later generations tried to work out in a realized idea of democracy. I

It has become the custom of historians to cast their generalizations about the two revolutions in the same mold. Both, it is said, are to be interpreted as the rise to power - social, economic, and political - of the middle class and as the disappearance of something from society which it is the custom to call "feudalism." This interpretation is no doubt true and important, but in part at least it is due to something more recent than either revolution: namely, the philosophical or scien-

tific preference of present-day historians for sociological and economic explanation. And this kind of explanation tends to obscure somewhat a primary virtue of history -the sympathetic appreciation of men in terms of their own conscious purposes and problems. It imposes on the historian a duty to understand the motives of the people he writes al out better than those people understood themselves. Oliver Cromwell was deeply concerned for the material and spiritual welfare of those whom he called "the poor godly people of England," but he would hardly have construed godliness as a prerogative of the middle class. Nor are Gerrard Winstanley and John Lilburne, who were as class-conscious as anyone of their generation, more humanly intelligible in the light of that fact than in the light of their whole-souled devotion to the different versions of Puritanism that each professed. It is quite certain that none of these men could have taken "middle class" in the same sense as Robespierre. In order to appreciate the contrast between the two. democratic traditions it is important to emphasize the differences that distinguished the two revolutions. And since democracy, in one of its phases at least, belongs to the history of ideas, the end--that were consciously before the minds of the actors are primarily important. Even from the point of view of sociological history it is certainly true that, if both revolutions gave power to the middle class, this was a very different operation In England in the seventeenth century from what it was in France. in the eighteenth; and if both resolutions extinguished feudalism, what was extinguished in England was very-different from what was extinguished in France.

The English revolutionist characteristically thought of himself as the exponent not of a social class but of a religious body or even of a religious revelation, and he pictured himself as trying to restore something rather than as trying to make a fresh start or as attacking that lay far back in the 'Middle Ages. In the history of ideas myths are often highly indicative of what people are thinking about. And the myth of the Puritan Revolution, even on a political level, was that it was trying to restore a pristine English constitution which had existed among the Anglo-Saxons, had been affirmed against the Norman kings in Magna Carta, and had been perverted and corrupted by Tudor and Stuart usurpations. This was, of course, pure legend Puritans knew no more about the Saxons than Montaigne had

known about the cannibals -but it was a belief so deep-seated that its vestiges have never been expunged from popular consciousness. The best efforts of English historians have never quite dispelled the illusion that 'Magna Carta was somehow the palladium of English liberty. Accordingly, the most radical slogan that the Puritan Revolution invented was to restore the Englishman's "birthright." This the revolutionist tool, to mean his freedom to follow his conscience in his religious affiliation, to, be free from taxation imposed in ways which lie took to be novel and arbitrary, to be released from the impositions of monopolies created by royal favoritism, and to escape the jurisdiction of prerogative courts, with summary and inquisitorial procedures, which lie believed had usurped the powers of the ancient courts of common law. Even on the level of religion what lie was consciously resisting was not medievalism but what he believed to be the Romanizing tendencies of Laud and Charles, and these he objected to not because they were old but because, after the Reformation, he regarded them as perversions. Many Englishmen disliked these even if they were not Puritans but remained royalist and Episcopalian. If the revolutionist were a Presbyterian, he thought them absolutely wicked, though he might still be a royalist and might still count himself a member of the national church. And if he were a Congregationalist or a Baptist, he might think there was little to choose between Episcopalians and Presbyterians; as Milton said, "New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ large." Whatever his affiliation, the Puritan imagined his revolution by an analogy with the prevailing myth of Protestantism: the return to a condition that was primitive and good, because it was undefiled by the machinations of evil men.

A more circumstantial account of the Puritan Revolution would enlarge and confirm what is thus suggested: its political purposes were everywhere crossed with religious purposes, and its thinking was permeated less with political ideas than with religious and theological ideas. This was the idiom that the Puritan spoke and these were the categories in which he thought. If his problems and his issues are stated in h's own terms, and not in the constitutional abstractions of nineteenth-century historians or the sociological abstractions of twentieth-century historians, the contending factions were not political parties or social classes but religious bodies. The Puritan Revolution,

in its own understanding of itself, was a contest between religious sects each bent on finding freedom for its -own beliefs and for its own manner of religious association and life, and too often equally bent on forcing its beliefs and manner of life on other bodies that also were convinced of their own divine mandate and their own inherent claim to liberty.

This was the root of its political failure and also of its greatest achievement. Even after its more radical wing, under Cromwell's leadership, had gained a complete military victory, they were unable to find a constitutional settlement because so few of them - including Cromwell himself - could conceive the revolution as mainly political or politics as mainly secular. John Lilburne's Levellers, who were the closest approximation to a popular political party, with constitutional and secular aims, were rendered politically impotent by the defection of the Baptists, who on sociological grounds should have been their natural allies.3 Cromwell himself could never get free from the incompatible purposes that ran through revolutionary Puritanism, the purpose of establishing the rule of Parliament and the purpose of establishing the rule of the saints, and this incompatibility "ultimately wrecked the revolution and restored the monarchy."4 Cromwell's government, despite his obviously sincere efforts, could never be made anything but a military dictatorship. In 1649 even the most moderate revolutionists, the higher officers in Cromwell's army, supposed that a reform of parliamentary representation was inevitable, and indeed the argument for it was in substance the same as that which prevailed in 1832 Yet the settlement in 1688 left Parliament unreformed and was so manifestly a compromise -between the conflicting claims of Parliament and the Crown that it might be said to have set up compromise-as a fundamental Principle of English constitutionalism.

But if compromise meant in a sense the political failure of Puritanism, it was also the unique achievement of the English Revolution. What was most obviously achieved in 1688 was religious toleration and the end of the religious conflicts which, as Luther had predicted at the beginning of the Reformation, would "fill the world with blood." In its broader implications this went far beyond the religious con-

3. The Leveller Tracts, 1647-1653, ed. William Haller and Godfrey Davies 1944). Introduction, p. 21.
4. S. R. Gardiner, Commonwealth and Protectorate (1897), II, 181.

troversies that it quieted. What the English Revolution contributed to the democratic tradition was the principle of freedom for minorities, together with-a constitutional system both to protect and to regulate that-freedom. For the individual it meant freedom of association in accord with his own understanding of his own interests, and for the group meant freedom to decide for itself its own manner of life within a framework of legally supported and legally limited rights and duties consonant at once with public order and a considerable, but not an unlimited, competence for self-determination. This is a principle that apparently must be acknowledged in some form by any government that is to remain free and constitutional. It is two-sided. It assumes that the area within which a government ought to act is limited, is defined by law, and cannot extend over all the interests and activities of its citizens; a free government cannot be totalitarian, On the other side it assumes that there is a wide range of social and moral and religious practices that can safely be, and ought to be, left to voluntary associations, partly because membership in them is compatible with the performance of all a man's duties as a citizen, partly on the more positive ground that diversity of interest is a genuine contribution to good citizenship. People can and ought to manage most of their affairs for themselves in groups that they organize for themselves and that make their own rules, the function of the state being largely protective and regulative. To no small extent this is what in fact political liberty has meant.

In the first place, religion is not a matter that directly concerns either the theory or the practice of a political society; what needs to be said about it can be summed up in the single word "toleration." This was indeed a summary disposition of a question that had been bitterly controversial; it accepted as a foregone conclusion a degree of secular-

ism in politics that as a rule neither the Puritans nor their opponents had been able to imagine. Only forty years before, Hobbes had expended half of Leviathan on the "Christian Commonwealth" and the "Kingdom of Darkness." And Locke's solution turned the "separation of church and state," which Calvinism had used to justify the legal enforcement of Christian discipline, into a defense of noncoercion. For Locke the church is "a voluntary society of men, joining themselves together of their own accord in order to the public worshiping of God in such manner as they judge acceptable to Him." The state's obligation in respect to religion is fulfilled if it preserves a general freedom of association. For religious belief is a private matter, and the life and practice of a religious community are matters which it can decide for itself.

In the second place, men and women, in so far as a political theory needs to consider their nature, are socially and morally adult, in short, reasonable. They acknowledge, and in general they practice, rules of fair dealing, justice, and right in their relations with one another. The validity of these moral rules may therefore be taken for granted; the "law" in this broad sense would be binding even if there were no governments. The state itself, considered as different from society, makes no moral rules at all but only supplements them when impartial judgement and enforcement are needed to give them effect. Its field of operation is limited, and government is in a sense a superficial thing in comparison with the society of which it is, so to speak, the coercive arm. A government may become tyrannous and its subjects may need to rebel against it, to replace it, and to create a new government consonant with their interests, but a society is never dissolved, short of complete chaos. Society provides an underlying moral structure that states support but do not create, For this reason they ought to act only by known rules of law and within limits set by constitutional guaranties. The justification for coercion, when it becomes necessary, is that it supports a moral and social order that is not coercive. This distinction between government and society is indeed seriously obscured by the looseness of Locke's terminology but it is fundamental to his political philosophy. His defense of the Revolution amounted in substance to the assertion that the Stuart kings had flouted the convictions and the settled practices of the English community.

In the third place, Locke assumed as a matter of course that society just as it should permit many churches, will harbor a maze of private relationships and permit a multitude of groups and associations that pursue their own interests and mostly make their own rules, subject only to such control by the state as is needed to protect the public interest and to preserve the inherent social purpose of the group itself. He clearly regarded the family, with its wide-spreading ramifications of authority and discipline and dependency, as in no sense created or superseded by political society. This phase of Locke's social philosophy is, to be sure, largely tacit, probably because lie never thought to question it. It is most clearly suggested by the deep congeniality he felt with Richard Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. His conception of natural law was thus continuous with that of St. Thomas Aquinas, and ultimately with Aristotle. The fundamental assumption of Aristotle, and indeed of Greek social philosophy in general, was that society depends on division of labor and therefore consists of social classes that perform indispensable social functions. From this point of view there is a close relationship between liberty and social position1because it is presumed that in finding a socially useful work the individual find~ also a satisfying expression for his natural capacities. In other words, the theory assumes that in principle at least there is no deep disparity, between individual aspiration and the existing structure of social classes, with the opportunities that the latter afford. In general Locke probably shared this belief and could therefore suppose that freedom of association, which had resolved antagonisms between religious sects, would also mitigate the most serious con-1pulsions that occur when social position becomes discriminatory and oppressive.

It was this aspect of Locke's political philosophy, and of the democratic tradition that grew most directly from it, that gives rise to the contrast between it and the second democratic tradition now to be considered. Locke's political philosophy was never detached from a theory of society which accepted status as-a matter of course and which regarded status as not only compatible with political freedom but even condition of it. This phase of the philosophy was quite definitely in accord with the actual outcome of the Revolution of 1688, which was a political rather than a social revolution. It established the outline of constitutional and representative government and it provided a

measure of intellectual freedom and civil liberty which made English government the model and the envy of French observers like Voltaire and Montesquieu. But that government, until well into the nineteenth century, was virtually the monopoly of a ruling class, and English society, despite a formidable amount of intermarriage and infiltration, preserved intact the distinction between trade and gentility and a stratification that was none the less real because it had no special support in law. Certainly England would never have been counted a democracy by anyone who got his connotations of the word from French Jacobinism; Hegel regarded its government as a degenerate form of feudalism. Except in America the democratic tradition that stemmed from Locke applied very little of social equality, and the American version was due to America and not to Locke. The other democratic tradition was widely different, in origin, in context, in purposes, and in philosophy. III

In this other case the historian's formula about abolishing "feudalism" was ready-made; the French Revolution really did abolish feudalism -by resolution of the National Assembly on August 4, 1789. The abolition of feudalism was the myth of the French Revolution, much as restoring the Englishman's birthright was the myth of the Puritan Revolution. In its context the myth had a definite and concrete meaning, even though it had little to do with feudalism as a living political system. Certainly no Frenchman in 1789 would have fought for his birthright because he was not aware of having any. The one political attribute that he had in common with all other Frenchmen was his loyalty and subjection to the king, which the Revolution transformed into loyalty and subjection to the nation. Any possible parliamentary tradition that he might have had far back in the Middle Ages had been severed by more than two centuries of royal absolutism. Nor could his revolutionary purposes have any special. relation with the liberties of religious sects; in France as nearly as possible there were no sects after Louis XIV expelled the Protestants. If they concerned religion at all, they made him a militant atheist bent on destroying what Voltaire had called "the infamous," a fact that in itself made his democracy suspect to Frenchmen who valued their loyalty to Catholicism. Neither in France nor in England were these contrasting relations cf democracy to religion transient or unimportant. Long after the

Revolution De Tocqueville deplored the fact that pious Frenchmen regarded the checking of democracy as a religious duty, and still later Gladstone acknowledged that nonconformity was a pillar of English liberalism.

For the revolutionist of 1789 the abolition of feudalism meant relief from very galling realities of his everyday political experience.5 Everywhere he found himself confronted by the fact that his legal rights and his political privileges depended not at all on the fact that lie was a Frenchman but on his membership in some group to which custom or royal grant assigned a special place in the society and the economy and the government. Affiliations of this sort determined his social standing, his place in the army, his position in the economy, his taxes, and the part in politics that he might hope to play. If he belonged to the nobility, he had substantial privileges but he was debarred by law from engaging in manly occupations. If he were a professional man, a lawyer for example, his position was fixed by membership in a professional association, and such membership was costly and hard to get, for the association held a monopoly of some branch of practice and membership conveyed the right to take part in the affairs of some municipal corporation. The same was true if be were a skilled artisan and the member of a guild. And if he were a peasant, he shared privileges in common land controlled by his village but he shared also a communal responsibility for taxes and road work. If he were an official, his office was likely to be property which he must inherit or buy, and he was irremovable. In 1789, when the government revived the obsolete practice of electing a States General, everyone voted with the group were his station in life placed him, for according to the constitutional theory what was represented was not the individual but the corporations which composed the estates of the realm. French society was a maze of corporate bodies that were at once legal, vocational, and political and that were endowed with privileges and monopolies and duties. Whatever rights a Frenchman possessed he had as a member of one or more such groups; his rights were privileges in the etymological sense of the word, that, is, private laws. In French politics there were hundreds of liberties, corresponding to the hundreds

5. The following three paragraphs depend on R. R. Palmer, "Man and Citizen: Applications of Individualism in the French Revolution," in Essays in Political Theory, ed. Milton R. Konvitz and Arthur E. Murphy (1948), PP. 130 ff.

of positions or ranks or stations, but there was no liberty conceived as the civic or political attribute of men as citizens. It was this fact that gave force to revolutionary slogans like the "Rights of Man and Citizen."

The abolition of feudalism meant that the revolutionist, quite definitely and consciously, intended to sweep away this whole cumbersome and irritating complex of status, which was in truth obsolete for any existing economic or political purpose. For it lie meant to substitute a uniform citizenship giving equal political rights and imposing equal political obligations on everyone, and he meant it , open all occupations to every qualified person, without regard for social position or membership in any special kind of association. In a profound sense the revolution was a revolt against status and its ideal was to-destroy every status except one - namely citizenship in the state. which by becoming universal would cease to be invidious. And broadly speaking something of this sort was what the French Revolution in fact accomplished. It put at the center of modern politics the concept of equal national citizenship and as its counterpart the concept of the sovereign national state, supreme over every other form of social organization.

This characterization throws into sharp relief the contrast between the French and the English revolutions. In making the churches into voluntary associations the English Revolution had recognized that a sect or a religious minority is in fact a community devoted to practicing a way of life that is at once communal and individual, and it assumed the value of such associations. The French Revolution, devoted to the ideal of equal citizenship within the single unity of the state, assumed that communities within the state, are potentially a threat to the state. So far as it could it abolished religious communities not only Catholic but Jewish, in the latter case often against the will of Jews who preferred their old corporate status to the new equality. Indeed it sought ,o spread the principle of a radical individualism right across the social structure. It abolished the corporate character of schools, hospitals, charitable foundations, the universities, and the learned academies. It nationalized perhaps a fifth of the land in the country but only for the suppose of transferring it to individual owners. And it forbade every kind of union or trade association either of workers or employers.

Andre de Chenier, a poet and a revolutionist who himself fell a victim to the Terror, summed up its aspirations as follows:

'Unwise and unhappy is the state where there exist various associations and collective bodies whose members, on entering them, acquire a different spirit and different interests from the general spirit and the general interest I Happy is the land where there is no form of association but the state, no collective body but the country, no interest but the general good!'

First, the human individual apart from the state is not at all the adult and reasonable being that Locke had taken him to be. Natively he is a nonrational and a nonmoral animal, guided in his behavior solely by instinct,, and his instincts are directed toward his own self -preservation. He achieves morality and reason, and therefore freedom, only when he becomes a citizen, for only then "the voice of duty takes the place of physical impulses and the right of appetite." The rights of man, therefore, are his rights as a citizen, and until lie is a citizen be is not a social or a moral being at all.

Second, it follows that the claims which the state can make upon its citizens and the area in which it can rightfully act are by no means limited, as Locke had regarded them, In Rousseau the state and society, which Locke had definitely though inadequately distinguished, are merged; the state overlaps and includes every phase of society, To the state the citizen surrenders totally his private rights and interests. His

6. Quoted by Palmer, op. cit., p. 149,

personal will, when properly understood, is identical with the General Will of the society, and this Will is identical with morality, is infallibly right, and quite exhausts the citizen's will when he has contributed to forming a consensus of the group. If he imagines his interest to be otherwise, he is mistaken, and if he is coerced, he is "forced to be free."

Third, a private association of citizens, merely because it is private, is inimical to the public interest. Deliberation about the public good could always reach the right conclusion if it could be conducted in such a way that "the citizens had no communication one with another." A party is a faction and faction defeats the common good. Corporate bodies, as Hobbes had said, are like "worms in the entrails of a private man." Ideally they ought not to exist and if they exist they must be weak. For every such association absorbs the citizen's loyalty, which ought to be directed solely toward the state; a democratic society should be one in which absolutely nothing stands between man and the state. Nothing points up the difference between Locke and Rousseau more sharply than differing attitudes toward religious toleration. Both men indeed supported toleration as a policy, but Rousseau's remarkable chapter on "Civil Religion" expressed a degree of hostility toward Christianity that has no counterpart in Locke. Rousseau perceived that the essence of Western Christianity had always been a claim of spiritual freedom, whether in the form of freedom of conscience or of spiritual independence in the church. And for Rousseau this was a radical vice, an incurable source of dissension in every Christian state. If a man were really a Christian he would for that reason be a bad citizen, and there have been good citizens only because most men have been bad Christians. Ideally the religion of the citizen should be the religion of the state, and "all the world is in its sight infidel, foreign, and barbarous." Toleration in Locke's eyes was so deeply ingrained in the spirit of Christianity that it "seems monstrous for men to be so blind as not to perceive the necessity and advantage of it." In Rousseau's eyes it is an unavoidable second best and its merit, one suspects, is that it renders impotent associations that the state cannot destroy.

Rousseau's version of democracy, therefore, is not in any fundamental sense incompatible with absolute government, provided absolutism can claim to speak for "the people." This fact always strikes

an Englishman or an American as utterly paradoxical, though it is not really more so than the parallel fact that Locke's version was not fundamentally incompatible with social stratification and a government that was hardly popular at all. Rousseau's famous sentence about forcing men to be free was prophetic. Robespierre echoed it when he described the Revolution as "the despotism of liberty against tyranny" and when he bluntly declared during the Terror, "the General Will is our will," meaning the will of his own party. In fact French radical democracy, coupled with the collapse of idealism that followed two revolutions, was a point of origin for the empires of the two Napoleons, and these discovered in the national plebiscite a democratic justification for dictatorship. Certainly the plebiscite is a sufficiently logical consequence of the notion that democracy consists in counting everybody as one and nobody as more than one. If it appears to be either doctrinaire or democratically spurious, as it does to anyone bred in the tradition of Locke, this can only imply the inadequacy of that principle to express the premises of his own democratic philosophy.

were authentically democratic. Any viable program of democracy, it seems, depends on finding a way to conserve the values affirmed both in the name of equality and in the name of liberty, and any valid analysis of democracy must relate them.

Such an analysis, if it were to approach satisfactory completeness, would have to clarify the three concepts which played a major part in both democratic traditions: the human individual or the personality for whom freedom and equality were claimed, the society or complex net of social relationships in which human beings are always intermeshed and which is the medium both for realizing and repressing personality, and authority or coercion which is always more or less a 'actor in the relationship and which both traditions tended to identify too exclusively with the state or organized legal and political power. In particular it would have to clarify the actual connections and mutual interdependence of these three factors, which make the concepts virtually correlative. In truth these interconnections are so complicated and so little understood that nothing like a satisfactory analysis is possible. It can, however, be shown that the two democratic traditions had a common ground, which accounts for the. fact that liberty and equality were ethical presumptions inherent in both. As was made clear in the historical exposition given above, each tradition was in part dominated by the purpose of redressing a specific and really intolerable grievance, in one case the regimentation of groups associated by a religious interest felt to be personal and private, in the other the repression occasioned by vested interests and legally intrenched privilege. Each constructed its idea of democracy in terms of the grievance it meant to redress, and in so doing each failed to reckon with the mutual dependence between personality, society, and state just mentioned. A legitimate claim at one point became self-defeating at another which the theory did not envisage. The concluding portion of this article is intended to show how this was so. In general its conclusion will be that the ideal common to both traditions was social and political organization through mutual understanding and agreement, and hence as little coercive as possible, and that liberty and equality were conditions of there being any such understanding.7

It has been pointed out that, equalitarian individualism had as its

7. Cf. Grace A. de Laguna, "Democratic Equality and Individuality," Philos. Rev., LV (1946), III ff.

consequence, which certainly was not anticipated by Rousseau, the fostering of dictatorship based on an alleged mandate from "the people." In reality this relationship was wholly logical. For in so far as it is possible to produce a society in accord with Chernier's specifications quoted above - a society in which citizenship is stretched to cover the whole range of human interests and in which there are no private associations able to exert a collective influence in politics -the result is to reduce the individual to impotence. The absolutely sovereign and omnicompetent state is the logical correlate of a society which consists of atomic individuals. In general, extension of suffrage and representation on the basis of numbers did not increase the powers of the legislature, which Locke regarded as the center of power in the state, but tended rather to increase the power of the executive and to restrict the deliberative phases of government. Moreover, the elevation of the state to supremacy over all other forms of social organization did not necessarily diminish social stratification or reduce the power of special interests over government. One rather obvious consequence of wiping out the legal and economic privileges of the estates and corporations was to make property almost the sole index of social position, and in France the middle-class monarchy that followed the Napoleonic Empire made property the qualification for political rights. The competition of property interests for control of government led directly to, and in a large measure tended to justify, Marx's accusation that bourgeois democracy in fact means plutocracy. The individualist radicalism of the Revolution gave place to the class radicalism of the nineteenth century and the present. What the two types of radicalism had in common was a form of individualism that flattened down individuality into mere likeness of kind, in the one case of man in the abstract or citizenship, in the other of membership in a social class, But likeness of kind carries no implication of spontaneous, active, and contributing membership in a social community, which is certainly what the individualist intended that liberty should mean.

The identification of society with mass, and of democracy with the action of individuals in the mass, is not a theoretical error only but a well-authenticated part of the mechanics of dictatorship. That it spells the death of political democracy is not a matter of speculation. It has

been the formula for dictatorship of all sorts to destroy and regiment associations that had been created by the freedom to organize and that had the power to pursue a common interest by collective action. It was this formula which in Germany destroyed the free labor unions and regimented workingmen into a Labor Front, which had twenty-five million members and not an atom of independence. It was the same formula that produced the single-party states, and this in effect means no parties at all in any sense in which parties are indispensable factors in democratic government. A group of human beings associated according to a principle of unadulterated individualism is not a society but a rabble,8 and a society approaches such a condition only by being demoralized. This sort of disintegration reacts inevitably both on the individuals that compose the society and on government. It can be ruled by a combination of force and mass hysteria and indeed can rule in no other way. For its members, crowded into a structureless organization that is merely gregarious, are in effect isolated and powerless, and social isolation is incompatible not only with effective individual action but in the end with clear thinking or responsible judgment. Government tends to become a practice of applied psychiatry designed to produce rather than to cure neurosis. The ruler becomes tile messianic or charismatic leader, and the governed become amenable to manipulation by every form of unreasoning indoctrination. The tyranny of the majority, on which the philosophers of the nineteenth century wasted so much anxiety, was mostly a myth. What happens is the tyranny of a minority that can use social demoralization to monopolize terror and propaganda.

It is of course not the case that results of this sort, when they occur, are caused by a perverse belief in a bad psychology or a doctrinaire theory of democracy. The producing conditions are objective and are unavoidable hazards that democracy under modern conditions has to meet. Organization both of industry and government on a vast scale with consequent centralization of power, urbanization and high mobility which identify residence merely with the tie of the job, the reduction of the family practically to its biological limit, and the fact that religious

8. The expression is taken from Elton Mayo's chapter entitled "The Rabble Hypothesis," in The Social Problems of an Industrial Society (1945). See his criticism of the individualist psychology characteristic of laissez faire liberalism, especially of its economics, Cf. "Beyond Ideology," Philos. Rev., LVII (1948).

congregations have long ceased to be communities all tend to thin out the social medium and to increase the number of persons who in effect are socially isolated. Urbanization and industrialism were feared and disliked by first-generation democrats, but it is ironical that they are a risk to democracy precisely in so far as they produce a state of affairs superficially like what equalitarian individualism held to be desirable. That is to say the, level off highly differentiated work groups and neighborhood groups, in which membership may be a genuine personal good, but they bring the normal consequence of remote and impersonal authority.9

This conclusion follows, and the conclusion sets an inescapable problem for democracy: in order to be democratic a society has to be a complex structure of lesser societies , which are corporately or collectively units because they stand for interests that are at once personal to their members and are shared, and such groups have to provide the conditions for giving their members a justified sense of participation. Collectively they have to be self-governing in the sense that they set the standards of their own performance, gauge their own interests, and in general live their own lives in their own way, and at the same time they have to give their members individually a part in forming the collective decision. This is what liberty means, in so far as it is a personal experience in a social organization. The principle applies to government but obviously has no exclusive reference to it; so far as it affects the individuals concerned, there may be very little difference between public and private organizations. A labor union is not necessarily democratic merely because membership in it is "voluntary," and business in important respects is, to use Beardsley Ruml's expression, "a private government." Society is full of "rules-making institutions," but whether rules are oppressive or not depends very much on how they are made and enforced, and particularly on the attitude engendered in a person who is subject to them. If he genuinely feels that they are his rules and are not merely imposed on him, he is quite likely to think of them as the safeguards of his liberty. Liberty is not

9. The Tennessee Valley Authority is perhaps the most interesting, because the most self -conscious, effort in recent American politics to face this problem. See David Lilienthal, Democracy on the March (1944), and This I Do Believe (1949); also an effort to make an objective evaluation of its success by Philip Selznick, TVA and the Grass Roots (1949).

simply an attribute of an individual; it is a relationship between a person and the complex of societies to which he belongs. The extent to which freedom of association can b e generally and effectively achieved, and the extent to which association can preserve individual spontaneity, are the measures of liberty in any society.

From this conception of liberty. it follows that the exercise of authority, or the more specifically political aspect of social organization, is consequent on deliberation and only marginally becomes downright coercion. The theory candidly accepts the existence of many and diverse interests and of groups with real power to protect them, and also the certainty that diverse interests in many cases will be antagonistic. Democratic politics is inherently contentious, though not contentious without limit. The theory can lead to a workable policy only if negotiation and mutual adjustment lead to agreements that are at once reasonably acceptable and reasonably stable. Consequently the political institutions of a democratic society are primarily organs for keeping open the channels of communication on which consultation and negotiation depend, or for creating channels of communication where none exist. In point of fact the development of democratic constitutionalism has largely consisted in extending or inventing institutions before which conflicting interests could be made to confront one another under conditions leading to successful negotiation and orderly regulation. In its earliest stages the groups whose claims to autonomy made them potential centers of disorder were largely religious sects, and in our federal system the self-government explicitly protected was that of localities, but in practice the principle has been steadily, and very wide ly extended. Its fundamental assumptions are that the issues are so complex and changeable that parties at interest must be free to make their own case, that deliberation at this level must in the nature of the case take place largely through the spokesmen of organized interests, that communication between such interests is not only possible but has a reasonable chance of leading to a workable consensus, and that in any event to get the dispute into the open is indispensable for an intelligent exercise of authority.

also equality. This is true in the elementary sense that free bargaining does not in fact take place except between persons or groups with relatively equal power. But it is also true in the more profound sense that full understanding cannot be reached except on the basis of mutual respect and with a mutual acknowledgment of good faith and the acceptance of the principle that the purpose of understanding is to protect all valid interests. This condition is not inconsistent with there being differences of position or even of rank, but it is not met unless such differences themselves count as values that ought to be taken into account. Consequently a society that is hierarchical simply by assumption, or that depends on use and wont in such a fashion that it~ ranks and orders are not themselves subject to criticism and revision, does not offer the possibility of more than a qualified form of democracy. The historical exposition given above has tried to show that some such assumption, made tacitly by reason of its failure to make explicit its implicit premises, really was contained in the form of democratic constitutionalism that stemmed from Locke.

It was this which was met by the more equalitarian individualism of the other democratic tradition. This equalitarianism, despite its fallacious supposition that liberty could be gained by the absorption of personality into citizenship, was right at least in what it denied, namely, that personality can be identified with, or exhausted by, social position or status. It was this phase of Rousseau's thought that Kant summed up in the ethical axiom that persons are to be treated as ends rather than as means. And indeed the ethical dictum, vague as it is, corresponds to a quite genuine fact of social psychology. It throws into relief an important feature of the kind of relationship that connects a person with his cultural milieu. Every society depends on and exacts some kind and degree of conformity, and different cultures support widely different systems of status, but no culture reduces its members to automata or fails to acknowledge that self-respect is both a genuine good and a powerful human motive.10 While it is quite true that no theory of personality, psychological or ethical, can dispense with the conception of social role, it is a sociological exaggeration to describe a personality as a kind of intersection at which social relationships meet and cross. The process of internalization by which a growing personali-

10. Henry A. Murray and Clyde Kluckhohn, "Outline of a Conception of Personality," in Personality in Nature, Society, and Culture (1950), p. 25.

ty takes up interests and values from his culture is selective and is never wholly a passive acceptance. It does not foreclose a critical reaction on his society or his station in it, or even his rebellion against it, and originality, when it occurs, is as dependent on acculturation or socialization as conformity is. "Even the arts not only record values but are always in some sense criticisms of society."" A person takes society, so to speak, on his own terms and he demands that it take him on the same terms, and, when this proves to be impossible, mutual understanding stops.

The question about which speculation has sometimes raged, from Rousseau to Freud, whether on the whole civilization liberates or inhibits personality, whether it makes men free or makes them slaves, is i1tterly fictitious. It is not fictitious to ask whether a given society imposes too many relationships on too many of its members that they experience as frustrating, or puts whole classes of them into positions that they feel to be ridiculous or degrading or humiliating. This is not a matter of social position as such, or of differing ranks and stations, or even of authority and subordination; these exist always and everywhere in societies. The question is rather how the persons concerned experience their position. They may take it as a matter of course, as something that has always been and that is intrinsically right and reasonable, and if so they accept their lot in life, even though it may be a very hard lot, with equanimity and self-respect. It is quite another matter if they are confronted by differences of rank that seem to them to be senseless, to correspond to no socially useful purpose, and to give power and privilege for no substantial service. In that case they feel themselves to be exploited and coerced, to be burdened with exactions that have no relation to their deserts, and to be placed in a position that is humiliating and menial. An organization may be held together hy the loyalty of its members, and that kind of relationship is not a burden but one of the most exhilarating of human experiences. It may be held together by meaningless routines and impositions from which its members will escape if they can. The difference is not altogether describable by the objective nature of the relationship but depends on the way it is experienced. And if the experience is of the latter sort, it

11.Clyde Kluckhohn and others, "Value and Value Orientations," in Toward a General Theory of Action, ed. Talcott Parsons and Edward A. Shils (1951) p. 398. Cf. Grace A. de Laguna, "Culture and Rationality," American Anthropologist, LI (1949), 379 ff.

is personally stultifying and it calls out resistance and resentment. Obviously it was this kind of experience that lay behind the revolutionary demand for equal citizenship. Equal citizenship meant escape from second-class citizenship.

The demand that men of differing position shall meet on terms of mutual respect and self-respect has been and will continue to be a recurring demand made in the name of democracy. The perpetuation of what is in effect second-class citizenship, one must sorrowfully admit, has been a rather conspicuous failure on the part of Anglo-American democracy. Its society has preserved irrelevant and invidious discriminations against classes of people to whom overtly it gave legal and constitutional equality. 'We have indeed given to minorities like the Jews and Roman Catholics the right to practice their religions unmolested, but a candid American who recalls occasional ugly outbreaks of religious intolerance in our elections will hardly claim that they have given them effective equality, even on a political level. In the aggregate the minorities thus relegated to a subordinate position add up to no insignificant part of our total population. Asiatics on the Pacific Coast, Americans of Spanish extraction in the Southwest, and Negroes both North and South have to be counted in millions. In reality they have neither full political equality, or equality of opportunity measured by capacity, nor equal access to education, though education figures in this country as a social service offered at public expense ostensibly to all citizens. The issue will not remain domestic; whether we like it or not, the status of the American negro will be discussed from Moscow to Singapore. For colonialism or imperialism, which are other names for second-class citizenship, is an issue the world over, in India and China and Southeast Asia, and in Iran and Egypt. A candid Englishman will hardly claim that the British Commonwealth dealt successfully with that issue. The root of the matter is not bad government, or imperialist exploitation, or even poverty; it is far more the resentment aroused in persons who feel themselves crowded into a position that is incompatible with self-respect. And it is idle to hope for understanding with people in that frame of mind.

What tied together liberty and equality in democratic thought was the ideal, common to both traditions, of a society and government formed by the willing coalescence of human beings who could be at

once spontaneous in their behavior and responsible in their dealings with one another. It was this hope that made "consent" or "contract" the symbols or metaphors by which the ideal was most naturally and simply expressed, for these terms suggest a relationship Which is at once free and binding. This conjunction of attributes is obviously an invitation to paradox. Yet the paradox is measurably resolved in any human association where there is a "meeting of minds" based on free communication and mutual understanding. But communication and understanding, in any sense in which a meeting of minds can issue in joint action, have moral as well as semantic presuppositions. It was these which democratic theory in all its forms was mainly concerned to express, and democratic practice has been an experiment in finding institutions which could make actual the moral conditions of understanding. The one democratic tradition was founded on the principle that understanding depends on the freedom of parties at interest to speak their minds without fear of reprisal, and it took for granted that a social and political system that does not allow for agreement by the tolerant device of agreeing to differ, or which equates difference of interest or belief or manner of life with moral delinquency, is not compatible with a workable plan of equality. The other democratic tradition was founded on the principle that there can be no genuine meeting of minds where one party negotiates on an assumption of superiority that the other party regards as gratuitous, and it took for granted that a social and political system in which status is virtually hereditary and which sets up discriminations that are practically impassible bars to opportunity is not compatible with a workable plan of liberty. And indeed a democratic philosophy can hardly avoid making both these assumptions. Equality does depend on liberty and liberty on equality, because each expresses a phase of the kind of human relationship that democracy hopes measurably to realize. If, as continually happens in the democratic experiment, an attempt to advance one puts an obstacle in the way of the other, the simple device of rejecting one is not a live option. Ideals that have been imbedded for centuries in a culture are not discarded with impunity, but neither do they carry with them a blueprint for their realization.

Cornell University