DEMOCRAZIA. — According to the etymological meaning, government of the people, or, in the definition of St Thomas, potestas populi.
I. HISTORY
Both as a concept and as an institution, it goes back to Greek culture. Aristotle lists it among the legitimate forms of government, together with monarchy, the rule of one, and aristocracy, the rule of a few excellent men.In the East, the classical land of despotism, there were no forms of popular self-government; nor could such forms arise among the Jewish people, subject to a theocratic regime, except in the time of the Maccabees, when some trace of a popular assembly is recorded.
They appear, instead, in full flower in the Greek cities, particularly in Athens, where Solon established a moderate democratic government. In the constitutions of these cities, the principle of equality was generally absolute, but in its application account was sometimes taken of property qualifications, so that certain magistracies could not be sought without meeting a specified economic condition. To remedy this inconvenience and place citizens on a footing of some equality, it was decided to provide compensation for those entrusted with public functions. The popular assembly was invested with all powers, nor was it subject to any control, veto, or limitation of any kind. Nevertheless, the d. of the Greek cities, modeled on the social life of that time, confined within the sphere of the civic community, and on the particularist conceptions that dominated it, assumed a distinctive character. It came close to bourgeois oligarchy because of the small number of citizens who were recognized as having the right to exercise public functions, which were denied to the mass of slaves and servants engaged in labor on rural estates.
In ancient Rome there was never a government in which the people exercised a predominant and decisive influence. Even after the expulsion of the kings, the patriciate held undisputed sway over public affairs for a considerable time. Despite the establishment of the tribunate, the gulf between plebeians and patricians remained profound. Only the latter had access to political and religious offices, and only after bitter struggles did the plebeians obtain the right to participate in the consulship, the pontificate, and public authority, which never assumed a truly democratic structure. Greek and Roman culture lacked the great universal concepts on which d. alone can be firmly grounded. Nor did the State recognize any limits to its own power, nor was the citizen granted a sphere of personal freedom as a requirement of his exalted dignity. Moreover, in a society that maintained the institution of slavery, theoretically justifying it through the distinction between slaves and free men by nature, any form of popular government was necessarily bound to become oligarchic, with a restricted number of citizens ruling over the great population of slaves and servants.
A broader concept of d. could be grafted only onto the peacefully revolutionary movement of Christian thought. By causing the supposed natural differences between slave and free man to disappear before God, the father of all men, Christianity also overturned the political patterns of pagan society, subordinating social life to the universal ends of man and assigning him a preeminent position within the collective organism. The concept of the original dignity of the human person set in motion the gradual movement toward the emancipation of man from political servitude and his more direct participation in public life.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, democratic institutions remained unknown under the feudal regime. They were, instead, affirmed in the Italian Communes, where the artisan population, freeing itself from the servitude of the barons, organized itself into municipal republics. This was a brief period of flourishing social life, in which, however, the idea of equal rights among citizens was not attained, nor was there an integral democratic form, since rule remained reserved to the artisan and bourgeois classes. Traces of popular intervention are found here and there in the Middle Ages in the constitutional charters agreed upon between the people and the sovereign, in which the former protected itself against possible abuses of power; but these are merely traces deriving from the conception then prevailing that power comes from the people.
D. achieved greater continuity and a more organic development in England, where from the earliest times the people participated in assemblies and obtained municipal charters. The impetus toward a true d., however, came under the Stuarts, through the Independent party, which succeeded in overthrowing Carlo I, dealing a decisive blow to the predominance of the Crown and the Lords. Almost parallel in time and conception were the two democratic movements that opened the modern age: that of the American republics, first constituted as autonomous States founded on popular self-government and later united in the federal State, which maintained the same institutional principles; and that of the French Revolution, which reached its culmination in the declaration of rights of 1789 and the republican constitution of 1791.
The rapid expansion of democratic institutions after the French Revolution was caused by the altered economic and social conditions of the modern age. On the one hand, the introduction of machinery and the progressive industrialization of the European countries, while overturning the economic order that had existed for centuries and producing the great mass of so-called proletarians, concentrated in urban centers under precarious living conditions, enabled them to become conscious of their strength and to seek active involvement in public affairs. On the other hand, the continual expansion of State interference into every sphere of social coexistence—partly demanded by new requirements of order, and partly the consequence of a false conception of its powers, generally regarded as unlimited—made the need for public defense and control increasingly felt. The movement was kept alive by the more vigorous awareness that man had acquired of his worth and dignity, and by the jealous sense of personal freedom that is always associated with them.
II. THEORETICAL ELABORATION
In order to complete the historical outline sketched above, it is useful to mention the movement of ideas, particularly in the Catholic sphere. Inherited from Roman law, throughout the Middle Ages the conception almost universally prevailed according to which the original subject of sovereignty is the people; by virtue of an investiture from the people, the physical or moral person who exercises its powers in governing the community possesses sovereignty as a secondary and derivative subject. Thus there arose a constant doctrinal tradition that interpreted the origin and foundation of public authority democratically, grounding it in an act of free election by the people.This tradition appears in all its strength in s. Tommaso, who clearly distinguishes between the origin of the power of the leaders and kings of the Hebrew people, who received it through a direct intervention by God, and the origin of power in other societies, in which the prince possesses it through the consent of the people, whence his expression vicesa gerent multitudinis, used to designate the sovereign. Alongside the democratic conception of the origin of power, the Aquinate offers a theoretical assessment of the various forms of government, in which d. does not occupy the last place. From Aristotle he derives the familiar tripartition into monarchy, aristocracy, and d., but in evaluating them he goes beyond the strict Aristotelian view. Bearing in mind the need for the internal unity of the social organism, he considers the government of one person more perfect and efficient for achieving this unity, and polyarchical forms less perfect. Nevertheless, when he takes as the criterion of his judgment the abuses to which each form of regime may give rise, he objectively observes that monarchy is the most exposed to the danger of degenerating into tyranny, because of the concentration of powers in a single person, and he inclines to prefer a tempered government in which other citizens elected by popular suffrage also participate. According to s. Tommaso, the perfect constitution exists when it is composed simultaneously of royalty, insofar as one person alone possesses power; of aristocracy, insofar as many govern according to virtue; and of d., insofar as those who govern may be chosen from among the people and their election belongs to the people. The principles that would become the foundation of modern d. already appear in s. Tommaso: popular suffrage and the electiveness of those destined to govern.
The Thomistic conception continued uninterrupted through the seventeenth century. Vitoria, Suárez, il Bellarmino, and others were its representatives. The last two are particularly notable, having clarified and systematized it more fully in order to oppose it to the claims of royal absolutism, personified by the theologian-king Giacomo I of England, against whom they entered into controversy. The cardinal points of their theory may be reduced to the following: the original subject of authority is the people, considered organically, who possess it through the immediate communication of the natural law from the moment they have gathered into society; the physical or moral subject who actually exercises it receives it immediately from the people, potestas or Deo per populum, by virtue of a voluntary act of transfer that is irrevocable, necessitated by the people’s inability to exercise it themselves. Once the transfer has taken place, the monarch becomes the holder of sovereign right; nevertheless, the people, according to the qualification added by il Bellarmino, continue to possess it at its root, in the sense that they have the permanent right to supervise the manner in which it is exercised and to reclaim it should it degenerate into tyranny or external causes impose an institutional change (v. AUTORITÀ).
Although these solutions remain on the abstract plane of political theory, the vital elements they contain cannot nevertheless be ignored, both with regard to a more precise scientific reconstruction of democratic institutions and to the criticism of more modern conceptions.
III. CONCEPT AND ELEMENTS
It is more difficult than ever to disentangle from the thicket of conflicting opinions the essential features belonging to the concept of d., so as to gather in a comprehensive definition the elements that distinguish and constitute II. “Nothing,” Toniolo had already written, “is more vague, more confused, more resistant to a theoretical formula than this word d.” Having become the common slogan of opposing and irreconcilable political movements, it has been subjected to an extensive and profound distortion of meaning, to the point of including, with the addition of some qualifying adjective, forms of a police and oppressive regime. Not only this, but the very ideas that should constitute its soul continue to wander in the sphere of the undefined, mingled with false theoretical orientations that make its content still more nebulous.For a more systematic exposition, it is necessary from the outset to distinguish social d. from political d. The former, as Toniolo defined it, consists in “that civil order in which all social, juridical, and economic forces, in the fullness of their hierarchical development, cooperate proportionally for the common good, ultimately redounding to the predominant advantage of the lower classes.” Its specific element is therefore the aim of the harmonious advancement of the common good for the benefit of the less fortunate classes. It consequently consists in a social movement in which all the forces operating within the community remain oriented toward the reform of civil and economic institutions, in order to mitigate injustices and excessively glaring disparities in living conditions. Catholic currents soon joined this movement, which began with socialist demands, guided by the teaching and example of eminent sociologists such as Kettler and Windhorst in Germany, De Mun and Harmel in France, Manning in England, and Toniolo and Talamo in Italy. Its lofty humanitarian aims on behalf of the disinherited classes were recognized and officially consecrated by Leo XIII in the encyclical Rerum novarum, defined as the magna charta of the workers, by Pius XI in Quadragesimo anno, and by Pius XII in various speeches and radio messages on the social question.
Whereas in the field just described one advances in the full light of clear concepts, one remains in semi-darkness when one proceeds to study political d. This is commonly defined in an entirely approximate manner, according to A. Lincoln’s well-known phrase, government of the people for the people, or simply government of the people; but as soon as one begins to analyze the individual terms, difficulties threaten to overwhelm the concept. It is immediately intuitive, first of all, that the end assigned to d. by Lincoln’s definition is not properly specific to this form of regime, since all the others have as their essential purpose the good of the people, which they are intrinsically bound to serve. Once this element has been eliminated, nothing remains but the simpler formula, government of the people, which must be clarified.
The term people is subject to various interpretations, among which a selection must be made. For individualist theories, the people results from the arithmetical sum of individuals, and therefore its concept cannot include the smaller societies into which man is born, such as the family, or those which he joins through elective affinity. The people, understood as a cloud of atoms, is set against the State in each individual, who is bound to the others by no organic link. Progressive movements, socialism and communism, in turn arbitrarily restrict the extension of the term, using it to mean only the mass of manual workers, thus performing a vivisection within the community in homage to the more general principle of the irreconcilable opposition of the classes. D. thus comes to mean class government or an oligarchy of the proletariat.
The two conceptions just mentioned must be rejected. The people, in living social reality, is not composed of isolated individuals or of their simple sum, but of individuals united by an internal principle that accompanies them in a social organism, and of smaller natural or voluntary societies. Moreover, the people cannot be identified with a single class, since all who in any manner contribute to the common welfare belong to it; nor can those who represent a burden for the community be arbitrarily excluded from membership: children, invalids, the elderly, and the sick—all are people and belong to the people. A true d. can be founded on this broad concept, and, as is easy to deduce, it can in no way be class-based.
The term government creates greater difficulties of interpretation. Government of the people, in its full meaning, can be realized only in direct d.; and this, in turn, if it is to function adequately, requires small communal or political bodies in which it is possible to gather citizens in deliberative assemblies. Outside this supposition, government of the people is an unachievable utopia. If the problem is therefore considered realistically, one arrives at the conclusion that contemporary d. can only be indirect or representative. The supposed government of the people consequently amounts to the people’s occasional participation in the administration of public affairs through the periodic election of representatives, and to its continuous supervision of the action of the public authorities, so that they do not betray their social purposes.
Reduced to this minimum, modern d. can be defined in no other way than as the participation of the people in the administration of public affairs through the exercise of the right to vote for the election of its repre-
sentatives, and through supervision of the State’s actions exercised by public opinion. A more modest concept than the resounding government of the people, but one more consistent with the facts of experience.
Representative d. nevertheless raises a host of questions that are anything but settled. Two of them are fundamental: on what title does the people’s right to active participation in the administration of public affairs rest; and how is political representation consequently to be understood? According to the well-known individualistic thesis, expressly condemned by Pius IX in the Sillobo (prop. 60), extracted from the allocution Maxima quidem of 9 June 1862, every person living in society, by virtue of a supposed original and total autonomy, would possess a particle of sovereignty which, added to the others through the expression of individual will, gives rise to social sovereignty and the general will, which becomes law to which the minority too must submit. On the other hand, since sovereignty is inalienable, the people always remains sovereign, so that its representatives come to be configured as genuine agents, who act solely in its name and on its behalf. This is the concept of popular sovereignty developed by contractualist Enlightenment thought, whose complete untenability legal science has demonstrated, adopting a proposition taught by Catholic theologians, and maintaining with sound reasoning that sovereignty is a unitary and original power of the entire social organism, to which alone belongs the right to order and govern its own life.
Democracy must therefore be founded on a different conception, and this is provided by the Catholic theory concerning the democratic origin of power, which has already been mentioned. If, in fact, the original subject of sovereignty is the people, and the people freely chooses the democratic form, it retains the right to intervene in public affairs on two grounds: one original, since, assuming the definitive transfer, it retains, in Bellarmine’s expression, radicaliter the right of sovereignty, together with the power to oversee its exercise; the other deriving from the democratic organization positively chosen by common consent. In this theoretical construction, its representatives are not mere agents, and they act as vices gerentes multitudinis insofar as they are organs of the community and must interpret its will. Political representation thus enters into crisis, since it will be difficult to apply to it the model of private-law agency without an analogical interpretation (v. RAPPRESENTAZIONE). This makes still clearer how problematic democracy is.
Remaining on the empirical level, it may be asserted that contemporary democracy, despite the extreme variety of its forms, displays the following characteristics: derivation of authority from the will of the majority; legal protection of certain fundamental rights, known as rights of freedom; free and periodic election of rulers and public oversight of their conduct; division of powers among several constitutional organs, each entrusted with one of the functions of sovereignty. Each of these raises complex legal and theoretical questions, which there is no need even to examine cursorily.
IV. IDEOLOGICAL PRESUPPOSITIONS AND DEMOCRATIC INSTRUMENTS
Democracy is also defined as a regime of freedom, both because it safeguards its rights and because the exercise of electoral power attributed to the people cannot take place if the people do not enjoy a certain degree of autonomy. One must, however, beware of attributing absolute value to freedom. In democracy too, it has intrinsic limits, as the faculty of doing good, and extrinsic limits in the demands of the common good. True democracy does not consist in permitting the unrestrained exercise of freedom, but in the conscious safeguarding of order, which cannot be achieved without enforcing its just and necessary moral and juridical limitations.One of the aims toward which the democratic regime tends is equality, not merely formal equality before the law, but also effective equality, through the adjustment of the social classes to a standard of living that is, as far as possible, common to all. In this regard too, however, one must not lose sight of the fact that social equality is not arithmetical but proportional, and therefore cannot consist in leveling all disparities.
The instruments of democracy are universal suffrage and political parties. Popular suffrage as an institution, intended for the election of representatives and for ascertaining the will of the people, raises no difficulty, nor do the very varied forms in which it is organized, provided that they ensure the secrecy of the vote and the greatest possible freedom of choice. Universal equal suffrage, on the other hand, has aroused numerous objections, particularly in Catholic circles: it has been judged a fiction, since ordinarily a large number of citizens remain excluded from the right to vote, and contrary to the living reality of human society, in which that perfect equality on which it rests does not exist, and in which, alongside individuals, there are lesser associations that would have the right to exert influence as such in public life. These criticisms, particularly when the danger of demagogic degeneration is added, are serious when directed against equal suffrage; they carry less weight against qualitatively differentiated suffrage, which there is no reason should not retain the character of universality.
Just as the appropriate organization of suffrage, the presence of political parties is essential to democracy. Although, in fact, all members of the community strive for the common good, divergences of ideas and programs may arise concerning the means best suited to attaining it: ideas and programs that spontaneously form a center of attraction around which wills become polarized. The plurality of parties is therefore a natural effect of social life when it unfolds under the sign of freedom. The single party is the death of democracy.
V. L'INSEGNAMENTO DELLA CHIESA
The Church has never been opposed in principle to d. A fundamental point, to which her teaching has always adhered, is that the forms of political regime in which men may freely organize their social life are legitimate in themselves, provided that they respect morality, religion, and justice. The Church is more concerned with good rulers than with forms of regime. If on some occasions she may have seemed to take a stand against democratic institutions, this resulted from the fact that she found herself confronted with ideological errors that corrupted their content and rendered them dangerous.Thus, for example, the already mentioned condemnation of the Sillabo directed against popular sovereignty did not intend to strike at d. as such, but at a particular theory in which mechanism and materialism were intermingled, both enemies of the true concept of sovereignty, reduced either to the tyranny of the majority or to the leveling force of the State. Leo XIII continued to follow the path traced by his predecessor. In the encyclical Dinturum of 20 June 1881, while reaffirming the condemnation of popular sovereignty in the sense given to it by contractualism, he restates the genuine concept of authority as a power deriving from God and, reconnecting with a now-established tradition of thought, declares that for the Church there is no reason why she should not approve «the rule of one or of many, provided that it is just and directed toward the common good». Subject to justice, «peoples are not prevented — he adds — from procuring for themselves that form of government which best suits their character, or the institutions and customs of their forefathers».
The same ideas were then repeated in the encyclical Libertas of 20 June 1888. He deals more directly with d. in the encyclical Longingua Oceani of 6 January 1895, addressed to the bishops of America. In it he points out that in a State governed under a popular regime a deeper formation of the people is indispensable, so that
it may become conscious of its duties, upright in its conduct, and devoted to justice. In other words, against the easy abuses of d. and the dangers of corruption, already glimpsed and described by Toqueville, he emphasizes the warning, also adopted by writers far removed from the faith, that d. is a regime for mature peoples. Of the same Pontiff there should also be recalled the Graves de communi of 18 January 1901, devoted to determining the exact meaning of the term Christian d.
Pius XI, in turn, in the encyclical Ubi arcano of 23 December 1922, dwells on the danger of d. sliding toward demagogic disorder, when parties enter into conflict not «because of a serene divergence of opinions concerning the public good and the sincere and disinterested pursuit of it, but from an eagerness to prevail and in the service of particular interests to the detriment of others». This occurs more easily «in modern representative systems, which, although not in themselves opposed to Catholic doctrine, which is always compatible with every reasonable and just form of regime, are nevertheless more exposed to being subverted by the passions».
The most important papal document after the Graves de communi is Pius XII’s radio message of Christmas 1944, in which, reaffirming the legitimacy of the forms of a moderated regime, the Pope addresses d., «in order to examine according to what norms it must be regulated, if it is to be called a true and sound d.». In it, the citizen must have the right to express his opinion on the duties and sacrifices imposed upon him, and must not be compelled to obey without being heard. For the proper functioning of the democratic method, he must be placed in a position «to have his own personal opinion, to express it, and to assert it in a manner suited to the common good». Hence the need for education, which may raise the people from being an amorphous, inert mass moved from outside to becoming a living association with a life of its own, moved by awareness of its social ends. Freedom and equality must be contained within just limits: the former must not degenerate into the «tyrannical pretension of giving free rein to human impulses and appetites to the detriment of others»; the latter cannot lead to «mechanical leveling, to a monochrome uniformity».
The State, even under d., must be «invested with the power to command with true and effective authority», while respecting the rights of the human person and the natural limits of its function within the social organism, and must show resolute opposition «to that corruption which attributes to the legislation of the State a power without checks or limits, and which also makes the democratic regime, despite contrary but vain appearances, a pure and simple system of absolutism».