mccormick - the new ochlophobia populism majority ru

8/18/2019 McCormick - The New Ochlophobia Populism Majority Ru

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The new ochlophobia?

Populism, majority rule and prospects for democratic republicanism

John P. McCormick

University of Chicago

Submitted for inclusion in Republican Democracy, Yiftah Elazar and

Geneviève Rousselière, eds. (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)

Leading participants in current debates over the republican revival espouse skeptical

views regarding majoritarianism and populism that potentially undermine the practical

realization of democratic ideals. In particular, this aversion to majority rule and populism

potentially obstructs efforts to address the dire problem of proliferating inequality that plagues

contemporary democracies. This essay focuses on recent books by Philip Pettit and Nadia

Urbinati that manifest such anxieties over majority rule and populism; it accentuates certain

ideological and historical mischaracterizations committed by each author when they criticize

majoritarianism and populism; and it explores more directly democratic institutional alternatives

to their primarily elite-mediated political prescriptions drawn from Athenian democracy and the

Roman Republic. Urbinati understands herself to be a critic of Pettit’s republicanism, but I will

demonstrate that her socio-political project shares much in common with Pettit’s institutional

model of republican legitimation. Both authors, as it were, stack the deck in favor of models of

representative government centered on elections and qualified by anti-majoritarian measures;


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models that discourage rather than inspire the kinds of institutional reform necessary to

reinvigorate contemporary democracy in an age of wildly expanding economic inequality.

Pettit: “Republican” Anxiety Over Majority Tyranny

Philip Pettit’s On the People’s Terms1 aspires to accomplish two tasks: firstly, to serve as

a philosophical restatement of the theory of non-domination that the author previously elaborated

in his widely influential Republicanism and A Theory of Freedom;2 and, secondly, to formulate a

novel theory of political legitimacy on the basis of Pettit’s restated theory of freedom. As a

philosophical restatement of Pettit’s earlier, paradigm-setting efforts in normative political

theory, On the People’s Terms (OPT) is a resounding success; the book is a deeply impressive

and largely persuasive refortification of the theory of freedom as non-domination.

Pettit notably avoids the unfortunate fates that befell two major philosophical

predecessors who formulated comparably ambitious theories of justice, John Rawls and Jürgen

Habermas. Many would say that these giants of moral and social philosophy notoriously

compromised the power, originality and radical implications of their major philosophical

statements when they attempted: on the one hand, to rearticulate their projects in response to

their most severe critics; and, on the other, in their endeavors to apply their philosophical

agendas more directly to politics.3

On the contrary, Pettit refines his philosophical justification for the principle of non-

domination without compromising the vitality of his previous works; indeed, in OPT, Pettit

successfully preserves and advances the arguments, and reinforces the egalitarian and

emancipatory potential of his original normative vision. Admirers of Pettit’s earlier articulations

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of freedom as non-domination will not be disappointed; critics of freedom as non-domination as

a philosophical project may have to recalibrate many of their objections as a result of Pettit’s

efforts in this book.

Quite compelling is the fact that, as a matter of first principle and at the most abstract

plane of the project, Pettit sets out the following conception of political legitimacy: “People must

have such a power over government that the regime can be described, in a rich, egalitarian sense

of the term, as democratic: a regime that establishes the kratos, or ‘control,’ [by] the demos or

‘people’” (OPT 239). However, as I will show, things become more problematic as Pettit

elaborates the institutional model of democracy that he hopes will best realize his theory of

political legitimacy. Pettit is aware that greater institutional specificity may generate further

controversy concerning his attempt to formulate a republican model of democracy. Since the

author intends for his institutional model to be “realizable” and “realistic” (OPT 180-01), Pettit

anticipates that, at the level of practice, it may not “persuade everyone”--even many who are

sympathetic to his theory of freedom. This is the spirit with which I analyze Pettit’s project.

Throughout OPT, Pettit bristles at two notions that have been associated with earlier

iterations of his theory: (a) that his republicanism falls on the aristocratic rather than democratic

side of the traditional republican political spectrum (OPT 6, n. 4); and (b) that his institutional

assessments are more affirmative than critical of contemporary democratic practice; i.e., that

they uncritically validate present arrangements rather than enjoining spirited efforts to reform

them (OPT 217). In response, Pettit takes deliberate steps in OPT to dispel such perceptions of

his political-institutional agenda (OPT 23, 61, 210, 227, 257, 289, 292).

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Overall, I believe that Pettit’s sketch of an institutional model in OPT is still, in fact,

susceptible to both of these lines of criticism. Pettit’s model inclines toward aristocratic rather

than democratic republicanism for the following simple reason: it is designed, primarily, to

forestall the danger of majority tyranny, and, only secondarily or incidentally, to address the

danger that wealthy and prominent citizens will wield excessive influence over a democracy’s

public policy. Moreover, the model, as presently articulated, tends to be more affirmative than

critical of contemporary representative democracy because Pettit employs a double standard

when he compares and contrasts existing electoral/representative institutions with non-

electoral/more direct alternatives to them.

Regarding the first criticism: historically, democratic republicans deemed the excessive

political influence of wealth to be the primary threat to the liberty of popular governments. I am

thinking of the hoplites in ancient Greek democracies, the plebeians of ancient Italian republics

and the lower guildsmen of medieval and early modern Swiss, German and Italian city-states.

As a result of this central concern, they placed at the forefront, not at the sideline, of institutional

reforms, practices that directly mitigated the excessive political influence of the wealthy: these

included, among others, the extensive use of lottery rather than election in the appointment of

public officials, and the reservation of powerful offices and assemblies for poorer citizens. Of

course, they always insisted that large citizen assemblies, governed by majoritarian procedures,

ought to function as the most powerful institutions within republics, even when the latter were

understood as “mixed regimes.”

On the contrary, Aristocratic republicans--Greek oligarchs, Roman nobles and the

grandees of early modern city-states--deemed majority tyranny to be the greatest threat to

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republican liberty. Consequently, they advocated the use of indirectly accountable senatorial or

judicial bodies to temper (some would say to undermine) the authority of majoritarian

assemblies, and they preferred election to lottery as a political appointment device. In OPT,

Pettit--admittedly with far greater qualification than in earlier works--places similar counter-

majoritarian institutional bulwarks against majority tyranny at the center of his institutional

model; and he declares explicit preference for election-based versus lottery-based modes of

political appointment. Also consistent with previous work, despite worrying gestures over

wealth inequality, in OPT Pettit sets out no institutional safeguards against the excessive political

influence of socio-economic elites.

Pettit’s model explicitly condones “inequalities in people’s private wealth and power”

(OPT 298). Yet, because the “ideal of equal status freedom” central to Pettit’s republicanism

requires that each individual “command the respect of others,” the author insists that his model

“puts significant constraints on how large material inequalities can be” (OPT 298). Moreover,

Pettit declares that, within his republican model of political legitimacy, government “will have to

provide in a decent measure against misery and poverty, unfairness and inequality” (OPT 3).

But Pettit provides no guidelines in OPT regarding: (a) just how much economic inequality his

model will permit, and, more importantly, (b) what institutional means he advocates to insure

that acceptable economic inequality will not translate into the kind of political inequality that

facilitates domination.

Pettit justifies these omissions because, he claims, OPT is primarily concerned with

political legitimacy and not social justice; that is, it addresses first and foremost citizen-state

relations not citizen-citizen relations, or, in Pettit’s terms, “public domination” not “private

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domination” (OPT 3). This approach to political legitimacy and public domination permits Pettit

to conceive of the state generally as either a self-motivated entity, or, as we will see, as an agent

of potentially dominating popular majorities--but not primarily as the agent of potentially

dominating wealthy interests (OPT 3). The mere fact that Pettit thinks that he can discuss

political legitimacy or public domination largely independent of considerations of social justice

and private domination would be enough for some to place his theory of legitimacy on the

aristocratic rather than the democratic end of the republican perspective. I will have more to say

about this below. But for now, it is telling, I think, that the word “class,” in the socio-economic

sense, is never mentioned in OPT; and that Pettit exhibits an unfortunate tendency to roughly

equate the respective political power of private corporations and trade unions (OPT 116, 234),

when, certainly in the present moment, power disparities between the two are growing

exponentially in the former’s favor.

To declare that Pettit’s institutional model of political legitimacy leans toward aristocratic

republicanism does not mean that it is fully anti-democratic. Quite admirably, Pettit aspires after

a form of democracy in which the people wield, not only immediate influence over their

government, as in more narrow “Schumpeterian” schemes, but also sustainable control over it

(OPT 23). Democratic control, for Pettit, means that citizens impose direction on government

policies along two tracks: firstly, through the short-term electoral-contestatory institutions of his

model; and, secondly, through the long-term generation of ever-expanding egalitarian social

norms in democratic societies. On Pettit’s understanding, these egalitarian norms gain

expression in legal and constitutional reforms that serve to facilitate further democratization

within society over time.

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However, for Pettit, democratic influence, control and direction is desirable only insofar

as electoral majorities do not dominate vulnerable minorities; specifically, as he lists them

consistently throughout the book, minorities identified by their religious, cultural, racial or

sexual characteristics (OPT 2, 135, 211-14, 226, 262, 304). As in previous works, these

vulnerable, “sticky” minorities are the ones that matter most to Pettit in OPT. The author is

much less concerned with invulnerable, privileged minorities (OPT 85, 172, 209-11, 218, 231-

34, 250), whom he deems to be not quite so “sticky.” Pettit consistently groups together wealthy

political actors (i.e., corporations or special interest lobbies) with independent militaries and

foreign powers; casting them all, generally, as actors who might, but do not necessarily or

inevitably, act as agents that dominate the common citizens of democracies. (Of course,

according to a more radical application of Pettit’s theory of non-domination than he himself

undertakes, the very fact that such agents can and might act non-consensually against the self-

conceived interests of less powerful agents means that the former are, de facto, dominating the

latter.)

On Pettit’s conception, therefore, majority tyranny is an endogenous threat to popular

government; disproportionate political influence by the wealthy poses only an exogenous threat.

Yet historical and empirical research affords us ample evidence to suggest that the wealthy have

always been, and invariably will continue to be, an imminently dominating force within

democracies. I mention here only Aristotle’s Politics, and, more recently, the work of Jeffrey

Winters and Thomas Piketty.4

Throughout OPT, Pettit assumes that the fundamentally “electoral” quality of his model--

namely, the fact that politicians must seek votes from as wide a constituency as possible--is the

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first assurance against majority tyranny. Politicians looking for an ever-increasing number of

potential supporters throughout the electorate will purportedly refrain from pursuing policies that

egregiously offend some segment of the population at the behest of another. Failing that, Pettit is

confident that the “contestatory” aspect of the model insures that majority tyranny cannot persist

indefinitely: his model provides individuals and subgroups myriad public avenues and private

resources, through and with which, they can appeal and litigate against potentially oppressive

policies generated by and through normal electoral mechanisms.

Under the electoral dimension of Pettit’s theory, political elites (either inherently or as the

agents of economic elites) do not pose dire threats to the liberty of common citizens because

such actors can be shamed into good behavior by public pressure to adhere to egalitarian norms.

However, Pettit does not give citizen majorities the same benefit of the doubt he affords political

elites. Notwithstanding the egalitarian norms that Pettit imagines to pervade democratic

societies, he does not seem to think that citizen majorities within the latter are swayable by the

following kind of public shame: for instance, the moral reservations that moved the Athenian

demos, in Thucydides’ unforgettable account, to reverse its previous decision to kill every male

citizen of Mytilene, and sell all of its women and children into slavery. Moreover, the

contestatory feature of Pettit’s model, through which individuals and subgroups are entitled to

litigate against the state, is suspect for two reasons: it places enormous cost-prohibitive burdens

on disadvantaged individuals and groups, and it leaves them dependent upon the good will of a

class of public interest lawyers and advocates, whom, Pettit somewhat whimsically insists, will

exist in sufficient numbers within a democratic society characterized by exponentially

proliferating egalitarian norms.

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Pettit seems satisfied by the prospect that the majority qua majority (that is, poorer and

middling citizens) in his model successfully influences and controls public policy through

electoral processes; and that the majority itself is protected from domination by factions of

governing elites through the proper functioning of constitutional separation of powers (OPT 220-

23). Pettit does not institutionally empower majorities to contest outcomes of government

policies because Pettit assumes: (a) that the latter already approximately reflects their

preferences, and (b) that an institutional redoubling of majority power would pose an undue

threat to minorities. Yet, much more than Pettit acknowledges, the extent to which majorities

actually influence and control policy-making in electoral democracies is a highly controversial

issue in political science. Moreover, the history of the kind of indirectly accountable,

countermajoritarian institutions that Pettit often endorses—constitutional and appellate courts,

senatorial and oversight bodies, administrative boards, and separated powers—points to the

following unsettling conclusion: privileged minorities have proven much more adept at using

such institutions for the purposes of domination than vulnerable ones have for avoiding it. In

other words, Pettit’s institutional model of democracy may sacrifice robust rule by the many for

the sake of a deeply ineffectual protection of the vulnerable few—and, contra Pettit’s sincere

intentions, it may actually inflate the dangerous influence of the privileged few within

democratic politics.

Because hijacking of electoral processes by wealthy elites, in Pettit’s estimation, is only

an exceptional and not a normal circumstance, the majority qua majority enjoys no collective

power of contestation under his scheme--as they did, most notably, in the Roman Republic,

which is, supposedly, Pettit’s republican touchstone. Pettit might object that his theory sets no

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prohibition on the establishment of mass-contestatory institutions—and he certainly has good

things to say about, for instance, the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly (OPT 197, 200-05,

235-36), and, very kindly, my own writings that draw upon the example of the plebeian

Tribunate in ancient Rome (OPT 213, 217). Indeed, Pettit insists that any and all

experimentation with more direct and egalitarian institutional measures not expressly ruled out

by his institutional reflections are entirely permissible within his framework.

However, I suspect that Pettit believes that full empowerment of contestatory power on

the part of citizen majorities--even if it minimized the deleterious potential influence of

concentrated wealth--would serve to exacerbate the threat of majority tyranny, which stands as

the summum malum of his republican theory of democracy. As Pettit declares, republican

government ought to “protect against private forms of domination without perpetrating public

forms” (OPT 6). Therefore, Pettit’s anti-majoritarian commitments--his other egalitarian

aspirations notwithstanding--have the effect of discouraging and perhaps even disqualifying

experimentation with mass contestatory institutions that would mitigate against the inordinate

power of wealth in democracy. If this is a correct assessment, then Pettit may share, at a deeper

theoretical level than he is aware, Montesquieu’s and Rousseau’s negative views of institutions

like the Roman tribunate, which they considered to be a source of popular sedition and an

instrument of majority tyranny.

Turning to my second criticism of Pettit’s institutional model of democracy: I suggest

that Pettit is more complacent than he would like to be about contemporary institutions because

he applies a double standard to evaluations of, on the one hand, countermajoritarian and electoral

institutions, and, on the other, more directly majoritarian and lottery-based ones. Pettit levels

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two main criticisms of both “plenary” assemblies that include all citizens in political-decision

making, and smaller “indicative” assemblies, comprised of members drawn randomly from the

general citizenry. “Plenary” assemblies consistently fail the test of rational consistency (OPT

191-93, 207, 246, 303); and, “indicative” assemblies are liable to be insufficiently accountable to

the general public (OPT 198, 232). Plenary assemblies, Pettit argues, tend to generate, over

time, individual, discrete legislative acts that are deeply inconsistent with each other; and

members of indicative ones, undisciplined by the prospect of re-election, may behave in

irresponsible or self-serving ways that harm rather than serve the common good.

History provides an answer to each of Pettit’s charges against these kinds of institutions.

In the first case, the Athenian assembly system, which Pettit praises on different grounds (OPT

196, 222, n. 39), acted so as to prevent precisely the kind of irrational outcomes that so worry the

author. Two subordinate assemblies, the boulē, which served an agenda-setting function, and the

nomothetai, empowered to invite revision of laws, interacted with the citizen assembly, the

ekklêsia, to discourage the latter from lapsing into inconsistency when it promulgated legislation.

Secondly, no popular government that ever employed large-scale lotteries to appoint political

officials did so without also employing schemes of strict public scrutiny for former office

holders. Upon completion of lottery-appointed offices, individuals within such systems were

compelled to account for their behavior before tribunal boards of fellow citizens, where they

confronted the prospect of severe penalties for misbehavior—penalties ranging from fines to

exile to death. In short, plenary, indicative and lottery-based institutions were not as direly

susceptible to irrationality and accountability problems as Pettit avers. Thus, they should not be

so readily dismissed as inspirations for contemporary institutional reform.

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Pettit’s incomplete assessment of such institutions would not be so problematic if, in

addition, he were not so sanguine about the efficacious functioning of representative bodies

within contemporary democracies. Again, there are vast literatures, which Pettit does not

engage, that are far less optimistic than he is about the following: (1) the extent to which elected

officials actually represent their constituencies, and (2) the extent to which the prospect of

reelection keeps individual officeholders accountable to the general public. Wealth more

fundamentally than votes may be, in fact, the determining factor in both lawmaking and electoral

contests today.5 Regarding elections, of course, this is hardly a new issue: Aristotle, who had

never heard of the U.S. Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision, noted that the richest

citizens of democracies had good reasons to favor political appointment through elections rather

than through sortition.6

Furthermore, Pettit often associates too intimately and exclusively, on the one hand,

contemporary representative and electoral institutions with, on the other, several principles and

values that are no doubt indispensible for a democracy’s civic health. Here I mention just one:

freedom of speech (OPT 201-02). Pettit suggests that modern representative and electoral

democracies perform better than earlier direct and lottery-based ones at fostering a political

culture of free speech. But literatures in which Pettit is well versed (OPT 196, 222), including

the works of Josh Ober and Moses Finley, attest to the thriving culture of free speech in

democratic Athens;7 and I would add as counter-examples to Pettit’s claim from a different

republican context, Felix Gilbert’s and Nicolai Rubinstein’s scholarship on the Florentine

republic.8 Indeed, Pettit’s moral-historical narrative regarding free speech could be reversed

entirely. Drawing upon, for starters, Habermas’ landmark Public Sphere book,9 one could argue

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that free speech is diminished, not enhanced, under conditions of mass party, representative

democracy.

Returning to general considerations on the relationship between republicanism and

democracy in OPT. Pettit’s failure to successfully distinguish his own position from aristocratic

republicanism is perhaps attributable to a misunderstanding of what his critics mean by the term.

Allow me to use the issue of wealth inequality, which has been central to my analysis of OPT, to

illustrate this point as well. It is fair to say that aristocratic republicans like Cicero, Guicciardini,

Harrington and Montesquieu were sincerely worried about the following: that society’s richest

individuals rather than its “best men” would hold the preponderance of a republic’s offices; and

that extensive economic inequality would corrupt the virtue required of common citizens in the

maintenance of their liberty.

However, what actually makes them aristocratic republicans is the fact that they also

thought, and were more committed to the notion, that democratic and egalitarian solutions to

these problems were potential cures far more deadly than the actual disease.10

In response to the

wealth problem, they were loath to accept appointment of magistrates through anything other

than elective means, and, moreover, they were terrified to permit economic equality to be

legislated through majoritarian procedures. Therefore, simply because Pettit shares with Cicero,

Guicciardini, Harrington and Montesquieu an authentic, general concern with the socio-political

impact of wealth disparities, this does not make his republicanism, in any substantive sense,

egalitarian or democratic. To do so, Pettit would have to move his own political principles

(pertaining to majority tyranny) and institutional preferences (favoring elections and senatorial

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bodies) much farther away than he does in OPT from those of the aristocratic republicans

mentioned above.

Equality and hierarchy are complicated issues indeed in the history of republicanism. Yet

Pettit consistently casts republican principles and practice tout court in a more thoroughgoing

egalitarian and anti-hierarchical fashion than the historical record warrants. Pettit’s inattention to

important differences between democratic and aristocratic republicans on these issues skews his

narrative of the history of “republicanism”: in particular, radically anti-elitist outliers like

Machiavelli, Richard Price and the Levellers (OPT 6, 84, 83, 148, 150, 169, 174, 218, 221, 247)

wind up carrying the standard of republicanism much more prominently than do mainstream, less

egalitarian figures like Cicero, Guicciardini, Harrington and Montesquieu. Indeed, democratic

and aristocratic republicans would have interpreted statements like the following, which Pettit

asserts as straightforwardly “republican,” in decidedly different ways: “the republican theory of

social justice would argue that the state should establish equal non-domination for its citizens in

relation to one another” (OPT 18). For instance, one of the great divisions among different

republicans concerns the extent to which clientalism conforms with or is anathema to equitable

relations among citizens.

Many of the aristocratic republicans mentioned above would understand Pettit’s

statement to be completely compatible with patron-client relations among citizens of different

material endowments and social status.11 Pettit seems unaware that hierarchical practices

inherent to clientalism were, for dominant figures of the republican tradition, including

Rousseau, 12 not merely ancillary to, but constitutive of, the notion of the “Liber,” or free man,

that serves as Pettit’s exemplary republican citizen in OPT (OPT 6, 88, 221). 13 Clientalist

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practices condoned by republicans like Cicero and Rousseau would seem to violate, in

fundamental ways, the standards that Pettit sets for non-deferential interactions among citizens;

especially, the fact that all citizens, according to Pettit, must be able to unashamedly “look one

another in the eye” as full social equals (OPT 3, 17).

In their advocacy of patron-client relations, Roman and Florentine elites, as well as many

literati who translated their norms into philosophical form, thought the following to be entirely

appropriate in republican terms: that, contrary to Pettit’s aspirations, clients (less privileged

citizens) should be “subject to the will of others” (OPT 7), in particular, somewhat subject to the

will of their patrons (purportedly more prudent social superiors). Moreover, many political

actors and theorists, whose “republican” bona fides are beyond reproach, thought that citizens’

“ability to choose” as they wish, consistently upheld as an inviolable form of freedom by Pettit,

ought to be qualified by their ability to maintain the “goodwill” of their patrons (OPT 7). 14 In the

Roman and Florentine republican contexts, patrons had enormous influence over their clients’

choices regarding marriage, education, trade, and, most importantly, over their participation in

politics.

Whether Pettit gets republicanism “right” historically is largely beside the point. Pettit

asserts that among the strongest justifications for non-domination as an “ideal of freedom” is the

fact that the republican tradition makes this ideal “more widely acceptable” through “historical

credentials,” “historical pedigree,” and “intellectual plausibility” (OPT 19). But Pettit neither is,

nor should he be, a slave to standards of historical accuracy; he rightly asserts that “the

normative claims defended [in OPT] should not be judged by historical criteria” (20). Pettit long

ago, on robust philosophical grounds, earned the right to stylize and idealize the republican

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“tradition” however he wants. The more pressing question is whether Pettit’s peculiar

engagement in OPT with history undermines his attempt to systematically formulate a

democratic republican model. I submit that Pettit’s failure to engage the crucial differences

between democratic and aristocratic republicanism, and his refusal to acknowledge the historical

preeminence of the former over the latter, leave Pettit less than ideally positioned to properly

evaluate the normative and institutional alternatives that he considers in OPT and to properly

execute the ultimate choices that he makes among them.

To sum up, a potentially radically-egalitarian theory of freedom, such as Pettit’s, cries out

for instantiation by a radically democratic institutional model. The criticisms voiced here are

intended to encourage Pettit to formulate a more radical institutional model of democracy than

the one he sketches in OPT. The horizon of “realistic” or “realizable” institutional possibilities

are by no means exhausted by the electoral/contestatory model he expounds in the book. To do

so, Pettit, I suggest, needs to relax his anxieties concerning tyrannical majorities and intensify his

worries about materially advantaged dominating minorities. Moreover, he will need to evaluate

with equal skepticism and generosity all of the institutional possibilities afforded by the history

of democratic republics, ancient and modern.

Urbinati: “Athenian” Anti-Populist, Representative Democracy

I turn now to Nadia Urbinati’s spirited and provocative book, Democracy Disfigured.15 I

emphasize its provocative nature, because the book functions most fundamentally as a political

polemic: Democracy Disfigured (DD) reads as the polemical counterpart of what I consider to be

her signature scholarly work, Representative Democracy.16 In DD, Urbinati targets three trends

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within recent democratic theory and practice: what she calls the unpolitical--which she associates

with Pettit’s republicanism, the plebiscitarian and the populist understandings of democracy. I

will focus on populism, and what Urbinati identifies as pernicious ancient Roman influences on

populism. It is interesting that Urbinati uses the example of the Roman Republic quite

differently than does Pettit, but nevertheless in a way that also serves similar sceptical

conclusions regarding majoritarianism and, especially in her case, concerning populism. 17

Generally, one comes away from the book feeling that these three strands of political

theory and practice are Urbinati’s intermediary rather than ultimate targets. The animus with

which Urbinati argues against these three strands, the frequent mischaracterizations of these

strands – both the positions of scholars or actors espousing them, as well as the intellectual-

historical antecedents of these trends – prompt one to suspect that Urbinati is overcompensating

for leaving something crucially important unsaid. I, for one, wonder if there is a more

dangerous, unidentified target behind her attacks on these three academic/political trends. It is

quite possible that the book represents a kind of Berlusconi hangover. Indeed, no other political

actor is mentioned within DD’s pages as many times as the long-term Italian Prime Minister (DD

4, 14, 28, 110, 148, 174, 208-09, 233). During the book’s composition, Urbinati must have

known that the man himself would very soon be departing the political scene. But DD betrays a

deep and pervasive anxiety that Berlusconismo may persist for decades to come in unpolitical,

plebiscitarian and populist guises.

Urbinati takes two tacks on the issue of populism: on the one hand, populism is, she

claims, too amorphous a concept to have any meaning; and, on the other, she casts it as a

definitive step down a slippery slope toward the most nefarious forms of authoritarian extremism

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(DD 4-5, 7-9, 11-12, 128-29, 231-32, 134, 152-58). Thus, the book presents proponents of

populism as either conceptually confused naïfs or as proto-Caesarists. Urbinati provides much

evidence for the ambiguity of populism; she notes correctly that populism can and has facilitated

and enhanced democracy in certain contexts (for instance, in the nineteenth century United

States, and in certain twentieth century Latin and South American cases) (DD 145-49, 232). 18 It

is therefore especially perplexing that Urbinati leaps to the insistence that, all in all, populism is a

right-wing phenomenon; that it invariably threatens to transcend democratically salutary

constitutional norms and threatens to abusively curtail the rights of minorities (DD 131-42, 145-

46, 166-67). Urbinati accuses democrats sympathetic to populism of conveniently defining it

according to its progressive forms. But Urbinati provides no convincing evidence why it should

be identified categorically with its most reactionary forms.

Virtually all of the charges that Urbinati levels against populism – particularly the spectre

of uncertain outcomes, and the possibilities of worst-case abuses of power – could be directed

toward the status quo of representative democracy, as she defines it. Urbinati worries that there

is no accountability mechanism built into the logic of populism, such that the many – and more

likely, the demagogues who mislead it – will use appeals to the existential legitimacy of “the

people” as justifications for abrogating democratic constitutional norms (DD 137-43). But this is

overly alarmist. Urbinati ignores the extent to which the interactions of social movements,

political parties and government institutions pose, in most cases, serious obstacles to unhindered

Caesarism; and, in fact, she never for a moment considers the extent to which such interactions

may generate precisely the kind of public debate conducive to salutary public opinion-formation

that she attributes only to the status quo of representative democracy.

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It is not, after all, as if there is an excess, a surfeit of robust accountability operating

within contemporary representative democracy – a fact which, in no small part, explains why

various forms of populism have gained such profound political purchase today. Urbinati’s model

of representative democracy is, along these lines, quite often, much too far removed from this

political reality. Urbinati’s version of representative democracy constitutes an idealized version

of some amalgam of Arendtian pluralism and Millian deliberative democracy (DD 3-4, 45, 77-

78, 171); an undeniably attractive ideal model in which robustly representative public opinion

emerges from interactions between society and government in a way that incorporates all citizens

as genuine actors and not as mere spectators.

But Urbinati’s idealizations much too uncritically legitimate the political reality of

contemporary representative democracy. The only shortcoming of the latter that Urbinati is

willing to concede is the problem of money in politics (DD 54-68), a problem easily corrected, in

her estimation, by robust campaign finance reform (DD 56-57). Indeed, such reforms might be

successfully enacted in her idealized model of democracy. But given the lack of accountability

mechanisms characteristic of real world representative democracies, necessary reforms are

highly unlikely to be realized in a system where those charged with enacting such reforms

benefit the most by scuttling them.

Moving now to historical considerations. I have always admired Urbinati for audaciously

re-theorizing and defending modern representative government by highlighting its affinities,

rather than its differences, with ancient Athenian democracy.19 But I believe that Urbinati pushes

this line of argument much too far in Democracy Disfigured. Modern representative government

remains Athenian in principle, Urbinati insists, because it shares with Athenian democracy a

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commitment to isonomia and isegoria, the formal equality of all citizens before the law: more

specifically, the equal right to participate politically by speaking-out and by voting, such that the

voice and the vote of each citizen carries equal dignity and equal political weight (DD 20).

This affinity with Athenian democracy makes modern representative government vastly

superior to populism, in Urbinati’s estimation, because populism inherits too many elements

from ancient Roman republicanism that are fundamentally inimical to such equality (DD 166-

69). On Urbinati’s view, virtually any principle or practice that can be traced back to ancient

Rome is a threat to contemporary democracy: for instance, the toleration of formal inequalities

among citizens, an undervaluing of free speech, the absence of genuine public opinion, and so

on. These fundamentally Roman elements, Urbinati insists, always portend unjust and perverse

political consequences for the functioning of contemporary representative democracy.

But Urbinati’s interpretation of Roman history is decidedly narrow and inordinately

hierarchical; it is derived much more extensively, let us say, from Momigliano than it is from

Machiavelli. If I were tempted to be as uncharitable to Urbinati here as she so often is to her

interlocutors in DD, I might even suggest that her account of ancient Rome owes less to

Momigliano than to Mussolini. Urbinati’s rendering of Roman politics is almost invariably

drawn from the early history of the city, where there was more segregation among classes, and

more fixed separations among popular and aristocratic institutions; a society in which social

mobility was undoubtedly quite limited. But this is a deeply distorted view of the Roman

Republic as it evolved over the course of its history; a regime in which Romans continually

negotiated, and renegotiated, its two notions of citizenship – that is, between the universal notion

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of the populus Romanus, and the more differentiated notion captured by the expression SPQR:

the people and senate of Rome. Rome, for Urbinati, is always the latter and seldom the former.

However, by the republic’s middle period many of the bogeymen that Urbinati associates

with Roman politics had disappeared or at least had fundamentally transformed in less alarming

ways.20 For instance, the strict plebeian/patrician social division was supplanted by the more

permeable plebeian/noble distinction. Voting classes in Rome were not castes, as Urbinati

insists, but rather fluid categories determined by property assessments that were revised with

every census. Urbinati is right to point out that there was no deliberation in Rome’s formal

assemblies, but she drastically underplays how much robust public deliberation took place in the

contiones (DD 222). She dwells at some length over the free speech enjoyed by the Roman

people in the Forum (DD 46, 166), but she rushes past the discussion among citizens that took

place in the deliberative assembles, whose convening preceded meetings of the voting

assemblies.

In another recent piece, Urbinati asserts the virtual absence of political equality among

Roman citizens; in contrast to Athens, where strict equality among individuals supposedly

reigned, Urbinati proclaims that, in Rome:

Inequality was the organizational principle! Roman political life never reached the

level of political equality the Athenians en"oyed, and was permanently dominated by the

influence of a small number of senatorial families from whom were drawn the top

magistrates who administered the law, deliberated on that law and on policy in general in

the #enate, and led the armies!$%

&hile the Romans generally tolerated more political inequality than did Athenians, Urbinati's

assertion concerning the full e(tent of inequality in Rome is highly controversial! It neglects

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more than a decade of debates over the role that plebeians played in governing the Republic,

especially during its middle period! #cholars such as )gon *laig, Andrew +intott, *ergus illar,

and -! .! &iseman have argued that institutions such as the plebeian tribunate, popularly "udged

political trials and legislation in the more equitably organized of Rome's assemblies made

Roman politics more democratic than scholars had traditionally assumed! Alternatively, /arl0

1oachim 23l4es4amp, Robert orstein0ar(, 2enri4 ouritsen and /urt Raaflaub have revived

and refined the arguments famously associated with omigliano and Ronald #yme, which

insisted that the Republic was an oligarchy, pure and simple!

Urbinati consistently sides with the latter group, and there e(ists ample, often compelling,

evidence entitling her to do so! 5ut she might ac4nowledge in 66 and elsewhere that a

legitimate controversy continues to rage over these issues! ost pertinent for our concerns is the

central argument of illar's wor4: since the consuls were usually away from the city leading the

Republic's armies, he suggests that most Roman domestic policy0ma4ing was conducted by the

tribunes in assemblies such as the concilium plebis and the comitia tributa, which, whether they

e(cluded patricians or not, more or less decided matters by ma"ority rule rather than, as did the

comitia centuriata, weighted votes for wealthy citizens!$$

And then there are the Roman legacies of Urbinati’s own conception of representative

government: she is silent about two major, counter-majoritarian features of most large

representative democracies throughout the world that are at least indirectly traceable to ancient

Rome: federalism and bicameralism. These features substantially undermine the commitment to

the formal equality that, Urbinati insists, Athenian democracy and modern representative

government supposedly share. Most inexplicably, Urbinati undermines the Athenian character

of her own notion of representative democracy, irrevocably severing its ties with isonomia and

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isegoria, when she claims that the supermajority rules employed by many modern “democracies”

do not violate the equal political dignity of individual citizens (DD 270, n. 68). I would like to

see her explain this to an average sixth century Athenian citizen. 23

In fact, returning to Urbinati’s interpretation of Athenian democracy: she emphasizes,

again, the formally egalitarian characteristics of isonomia, and the positive impact on free speech

entailed by the principle of isegoria, namely, that whoever wants to speak in assembly is free to

do so (DD 62, 163). But Urbinati ignores the crucially democratic principle of ho boulomenos

practiced in Athens: the fact that any citizen “who wanted to” could also put their name forward

to be chosen by lottery to serve as a magistrate in political office. Through such a principle, any

Athenian citizen who wanted to, in fact, enjoyed a genuine opportunity to hold office--largely

free of the impact of socio-economic power disparities in the city.

This is a central aspect of Athenian political practice that contemporary representative

democracy, even refashioned in its most ideal form by Urbinati, cannot offer its citizens; that is,

it rules out the general exercise of direct political power by any citizen who wishes to do so.

Urbinati insists – much too casually in my estimation – that the Athenian practice of lottery or

sortition cannot be effectively reproduced today (DD 12). Maybe this is true; maybe it’s not.

However, as long as representative democracy fails to afford some approximation of the equal

sharing and exercise of political power among citizens, populist movements will have legitimate

grounds for challenging it – especially, challenging it in ways more radical and, to my mind,

more justifiable than Urbinati is willing to tolerate.

Emile Durkheim once claimed that socialism was modern society’s “cry of pain.” 24

Populism, I contend, is modern, representative democracy’s “cry of pain.” Populism is an

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inevitable occurrence in regimes that adhere to democratic principles, but where, in fact, the

people do not rule. Exponents of populism decry painful insults and injuries caused by a

political system--especially a representative system--that promises, in some sense, to permit the

majority to rule, albeit with qualifications; but that in reality does not remotely facilitate majority

rule in any substantive sense. Urbinati’s diatribe against populism ignores the existence of

populists who want to make more democratic, more majoritarian, a political system that remains

fundamentally representative, electoral, party-based, and yet that might still preserve the

separation of powers and uphold the primacy of individual rights.25 Many populists today

sincerely ask: How can we introduce referenda, lottery for offices, and political trials decided by

ordinary citizens into the already existing system of representative democracy? Ancient Athens

cannot be recreated, Urbinati insists. But who says that it can? The question is whether

contemporary representative democracy can be amended in more “Athenian” ways than anti-

populist democrats imagine. Put simply, populist aspirations can help us mobilize on behalf of

political institutions that make representative government more democratic.

Urbinati’s over-determined position on populism in DD has the unsavory air of an

ultimatum: take the system as it is--and like it. Work within the rules as presently set, and do not

change them lest worse, unintended political catastrophes ensue. But, as Urbinati is fond of

pointing out, there is no legitimate form of democratic constitutionalism that does not entail the

possibility of revising the rules of the game (DD 17, 21, 33). And if Urbinati wants

representative democracy to be more truly representative and democratic she will have to adopt a

more expansive understanding of the standards that she sets for what counts as legitimate

changing of the rules.

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We must listen more attentively to the populist cry of pain that motivates the recent wave

of institutional reform proposals and initiatives that are emerging in democracies throughout the

world. Many scholars and activists now recognize that the prevailing institutions of electoral-

representative democracy cannot make government responsive and accountable to average

citizens. They see quite clearly that a privileged few--special interest lobbies, corporate elites

and wealthy individuals--are wielding excessive influence over public policy; that they are

effectively ruling in defiance of the preferences of the overwhelming majority of citizens—

specifically, members of the middle class, the working class and the poor.

Many of these reform proposals appear “utopian” to mainstream, academic scholars like

Urbinati because they challenge core principles and practices of contemporary representative

democracy. These proposals--whether their sponsors know it or not, or admit it or not--attempt

to approximate if not duplicate the working of ancient popular government: they seek to revive

popular rule rather than popular consent to those who rule. More specifically, they seek to

facilitate direct judgment of the people over law- and policy-making, and they endeavor to

distribute political offices more widely among common citizens than do general elections. This

accounts for the central place of legislative referenda, and citizen lotteries within such proposals

throughout the world—structured in ways that elude Urbinati’s narrow criticisms of plebiscites

and render questionable her unconsidered dismissal of sortition (DD 12, 176-80, 217-25).26

Because this latest wave of institutional reform is, as it were, Athenian—and, yes, even

Roman--in spirit rather than Philadelphian or Parisian, it differs qualitatively from previous

waves of institutional reform. For instance, 19th century English reformers sought to expand the

franchise to the working class; and their 19 th and 20th century American counterparts successfully

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pursued the following goals: women’s suffrage, direct election of senators, and electoral

primaries through which rank and file party members would choose presidential candidates. In

other words, these earlier waves of democratic institutional innovation sought to expand the

electorate and extend the purview of electoral institutions. But—and this is paramount--they did

not challenge the very notion of electoral democracy itself; that is, they did not seek to enable

average citizens to participate more directly and extensively in rule, as such.

Democratically inclined populist scholars and activists are right to claim that, despite

such previous reforms, for the last half-century, the institutions of representative democracy have

permitted (or at least not prevented) an astronomical rise in economic inequality within advanced

capitalist democracies; and these institutions have facilitated the persistent hijacking of

government by privileged, insulated minorities. In response, reformers have set about proposing

non- or extra-electoral institutions that, on the one hand, empower direct judgment of common

citizens over law making, and, on the other, the use of randomization to distribute important

political offices. Urbinati should engage such proposal with a more open mind than she does in

DD.

Conclusion: Democratic Republicanism--Past, Present and Future

In the foregoing, I have argued that between the abstractly normative level of Pettit’s

arguments and his institutional recommendations in OPT, anti-majoritarian preferences and

commitments intervene that veer his model of political legitimacy--his egalitarian and

democratic aspirations notwithstanding--from the democratic to the aristocratic end of the

republican continuum. I have also argued that in DD Urbinati refuses to acknowledge that

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representative government, as she reconstructs it from intellectual history and from empirical

reality--despite the highly imaginative Arendtian-Millian theoretical framework through which

she views it--does not really encourage progressive reform of contemporary democracy. Very

much like Pettit in important respects, her account of contemporary representative democracy

dramatically downplays structural biases that skew a fundamentally electoral model in favor of

certain powerful, entrenched minorities. Urbinati reflects at length on many elements that in her

estimation disqualify the Roman Republic from consideration as a polity that can be either

affiliated with a democracy li4e Athens, or that can be used constructively as a resource for

institutional reform efforts in contemporary democracies!

In politics, someone must be subject--at least, from moment to moment--to the coercion

of someone else; this is an empirical fact. The choice, as Machiavelli incomparably sets it out in

the Discourses, is whether the few or the many are the more palatable “guardian of liberty” in a

republic; he asked the question who, the wealthy or the common citizenry, is the best defender of

their own liberty, and who, in turn, dominates less egregiously over the other party. We know

what Machiavelli’s answer was.27 Pettit seems to want to avoid the choice of who, at least to

some degree, must dominate whom. He goes to great lengths to evade this decision throughout

OPT, except in those moments when he decides, implicitly or explicitly, for subjection of the

many to the few by making wealth-domination a secondary concern to majority tyranny, and by

making contestation a cost-prohibitive capacity of individuals and sub-majority groups vis-à-vis

better resourced dominators.

Democratic republicanism prioritizes the threat posed to common liberty by wealth, and

renders secondary concerns about majoritarian tyranny; aristocratic republicanism prioritizes

these concerns in reverse order. Therefore, I have suggested, Pettit’s republicanism falls into the

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latter tradition. Pettit may attribute the appearance of aristocratic republican tendencies in his

work to misunderstandings resulting from the high level of abstraction at which he operates; or

by claiming that simply because he does not endorse any specific egalitarian and directly

democratic reforms, this does not mean that his republican model rules them out. But Pettit’s

anxieties over majority tyranny—anxieties that he shares with traditional aristocratic

republicans--weaken the democratic republican potential of his institutional reflections and

prescriptions.

In addition to free votes and free speech, Urbinati normatively values formal eligibility

for offices and assemblies over substantive political outcomes that might be gained through

recourse to neo0Roman class0specific institutions 766 $8, 9, 8, $8 n!%

that achiavelli praised the Roman Republic most highly when it realized full eligibility of the

plebeians for all the offices and assemblies of the Roman constitution, including the consulship

and the #enate!28 Urbinati's views are ambiguous regarding the one formal e(clusion that

remained in achiavelli's reconstruction of Rome: the e(clusion of the most wealthy and

prominent citizens from the tribunate 7and perhaps from a popular assembly li4e the concilium

plebis< 766 %$=, %90>, $$=, $$

such as the #enate, in the early Roman Republic, violate contemporary standards of political

equality does not hold against the mature Roman Republic, which formally permitted plebeians

to participate in such bodies!

An intriguing question then is whether reserving magistracies and assemblies for

common citizens also contravenes Urbinati's standard of equality and on what grounds it does

so!29 &hat specifically would be Urbinati's reasons for re"ecting affirmative action for common

people of the 4ind facilitated by the plebeian tribunate and the concilium? In the Athenian

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conte(t, Urbinati e(claims: @democracy meant that poverty was neither something the people

had to be ashamed of, nor a reason for political and civil disempowerment 766 $>, n! $

what if poverty were to serve as a source of citizen empowerment within government

institutions? &ithout relying on over0idealized conceptions of Athens and contemporary

representative democracies, how would Urbinati respond? Beither Athens, divided among deme

and tribes, nor contemporary republics, structured along federal and municipal lines, adhere in

Urbinati's purest sense with each citizen's @equal right to an equal share in determining the

political will 7one0person0one0vote, cf!, 8C

obtained within both the citizenries of Athens and modern democracies, and given greater

adherence to the principle of equality in Rome than Urbinati ac4nowledges, I suspect that

Urbinati's ob"ections to citizen0empowering class differentiations would be difficult to maintain

on normative grounds!

Indeed, it is not clear whether Urbinati's strict standards of formal equality would

normatively vouchsafe specific policies within any democracies, unitary or federal, that treat

individual citizens differentlyEsay, progressive income ta( codes, collective bargaining

arrangements or affirmative action efforts directed at disadvantaged minorities! I wholeheartedly

believe that Urbinati is indeed motivated by a @sincere desire to resist the following: @the

oligarchic transformation of our democracies, which she identifies, more specifically, as @the

e(traordinary power held by corporate interests and financial capital in the domain of opinion

and will formation!F= -o do so, however, I also believe that she will have to loosen her

unreasonably rigid standards of formal political equality that more often than not serve to

undermine the realization of substantive democratic equality today!

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A genuine democratic republicanism needs to appropriate, in more imaginative and

somewhat less ochlophobic ways than Pettit and Urbinati do, lessons from the republican and

democratic past; in particular the refreshing honesty with which the many, the people, the poor

confronted the first order problem of economic cum political power. Again, to prevent oligarchs

from using their wealth to diminish the political freedom of less advantaged citizens, the hoplites

of ancient Greece and the plebeians of Republican Rome established institutions that granted

ultimate legislative authority to the majority qua the poor, and distributed executive and judicial

offices through lottery or through guarantees that the poor would hold such positions. Athenian

democrats favored majority rule, lottery appointed offices and courts, and the Roman plebeians

pushed for majoritarian reforms and the establishment of a tribunate to counter-act the inherent

danger in all polities that wealth would be the determining factor in public policy.

Athenian democracy and the Roman Republic exhibited primary institutions intended to

insure that the poor would rule over or share rule equitably with the rich. Through the use of

lottery in multiple spheres of Athenian government and the institutional ensemble associated

with the tribunate in the Roman Republic, democratic republicanism confronted, head on,

constitutionally and collectively, what Pettit’s republicanism and Urbinati’s representative

democracy treat as a secondary, private and individual matter: the imposing political power of

wealth.

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1NOTES

A version of this paper was presented at the conference, “Reclaiming Republicanism: Recovering the Tradition’s

Radical Heritage,” Oxford University (26-27 June 2015). For comments and criticisms, I thank Karma Nabulsi,

Stuart White, Bruno Leipold, and the conference participants; as well as Gordon Arlen, Lorenzo Del Savio, Alex

Gourevitch, Rob Jubb, Steven Klein, Matteo Mameli and Natasha Piano.

. Philip Pettit, On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy (Cambridge University

Press, 2013), hereafter OPT.

$. Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford University Press, 1999), and Pettit,

A Theory of Freedom: From the Psychology to the Politics of Agency (Oxford University Press, 2001).

F. Rawls and Habermas arguably earned more not fewer philosophical detractors in the transition, respectively,

from A -heory of 1ustice 75el4nap %C%< to .olitical +iberalism 7Golumbia University .ress %CCF8< to 5etween *acts and Borms 7I- .ress %CC9. Felix Gilbert, Florentine political assumptions in the period of Savonarola and Soderini (Bobbs-Merrill, 1957),

and Nicolai Rubinstein, Florentine studies: politics and society in Renaissance Florence (Northwestern University Press,

1968).

C. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois

Society (MIT Press, 1991).

%=. This point is made nowhere more clearly than in Eric Nelson’s The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought

(Cambridge University Press, 2004).


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%%. See Neal Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought (University of California Press, 1991) 28, 78, 110, 136,

170, 183-87, 202, 210.

%$. See John P. McCormick, “Rousseau’s Rome and the Repudiation of Populist Republicanism,” Critical Review

of International Social and Political Philosophy 10, no. 1 (2007) 3-27, at 14-15.

%F. On the ways that clientalism structured citizen self-understanding and interactions in, respectively, the Roman

and Florentine republics, see Erich S. Gruen, “Patrocinium and clientela,” in Gruen, The Hellenistic World and the Coming

of Rome (University of California Press, 1986) 162–163; and Paul D. McLean, The Art of the Network: Strategic

Interaction and Patronage in Renaissance Florence (Duke University Press, 2007).

%. On the prevalence of clientalism in Roman and Florentine republicanism, and Machiavelli’s severe criticisms of

it, see Amanda Moure Maher, “The Corrupt Republic: The Contemporary Relevance of Machiavelli’s Critique of Wealth

Inequality and Social Dependence” (PhD Dissertation, Political Science Department, University of Chicago, 2016).

%8. Nadia Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured (Harvard University Press, 2014), hereafter DD.

%9. Nadia Urbinati, Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy (University Of Chicago Press, 2006).

%. I have debated some of these issues with Urbinati in a series of postings on the blog, Il Rasoio di Occam,

initiated by Lorenzo Del Savio e Matteo Mameli (February through December 2014).

%>. See J. S. Maloy, Democratic Statecraft: Political Realism and Popular Power (Cambridge University Press,

2013), especially 145-87.

%C. Nadia Urbinati, Mill on Democracy: From the Athenian Polis to Representative Government (University of

Chicago Press, 2002).

$=. See Andrew Lintott, The Constitution of the Roman Republic (Oxford University Press, 1999), and T. P.

Wiseman, Remembering the Roman People: Essays on Late-Republican Politics and Literature: Essays on Late-Republican

Politics and Literature (Oxford University Press, 2008).

21. Nadia Urbinati, “Republicanism: Democratic or Popular?” The Good Society 20, no. 2 (2011) 157-169, at 162.

22. Fergus Millar, The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic (University of Michigan Press, 2002).

$F. See Melissa Schwartzberg, Counting the Many: The Origins and Limits of Supermajority Rule (Cambridge

University Press 2013) 23-43.

$. Emile Durkheim, Durkheim on Politics and the State, ed. Anthony Giddens (Stanford University Press, 1986)

99.


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$8. See Oliver Dowlen, The Political Potential of Sortition: A Study of the Random Selection of Citizens for Public

Office (Imprint Academic, 2008); Graham Smith, Democratic Innovations: Designing Institutions for Citizen Participation

(Cambridge University Press, 2009), Peter Stone, The Luck of the Draw: The Role of Lotteries in Decision Making (Oxford

University Press, 2011), and Robert E. Goodin, Innovating Democracy: Democratic Theory and Practice After the

Deliberative Turn (Oxford University Press, 2012).

$9. See Dowlen, The Political Potential of Sortition; Stone, The Luck of the Draw; Smith, Democratic Innovations;

and Goodin, Innovating Democracy.

$. See McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2011)!

$>. See Machiavelli, Discorsi !"0!

$C. See McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy, 1#0$%%& Martin 'reagh, he Plebeian

*+erience- . Discontinos /istory o Political reedom (Colmbia University Press, 201)& and

3e4rey *! 5reen, he Shado6 o Unairness- . Plebeian heory o Democracy (7+ord University

Press, orthcoming)!

F=. Urbinati, @Republicanism: 6emocratic or .opular? 168.

mccormick - the new ochlophobia populism majority ru

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