REVIEW: Manville & Ober: "The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives"
Manville, Brook, & Josiah Ober. 2023. The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives. Princeton: Princeton University Press <https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BZFXYLPW/>.
Democracy is not doomed to fail or decline, but rather needs to be renewed and defended by its citizens. So say Brook Manville and Josiah Ober in their The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives”=, in which they survey the four key democratic moments of human history: classical Athens, republican Rome, parliamentary Great Britain, and the United States. They claim that their historical and comparative perspective on how democracy has survived and thrived challenges the widespread pessimism and despair about the fate of democracy in the world today. I, however, find myself more pessimistic after reading their book, rather than less. The steps they call for for renewal and defense of democracy seem, to me, unlikely to be taken.
Their main argument of the book is that democracy depends on a “civic bargain”—a political pact among citizens about who is a citizen, how decisions are made, and what are the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. The civic bargain is not a fixed or formal contract, but rather an evolving and flexible agreement. They say it has seven elements, but I see two of their seven as key:
NO BOSS.
Civic friends.
The others, I think, follow immediately from those.
Last month I set out to write a review of Manville and Ober. And I failed. I wrote something else:
I got distracted by my memories of working for the Clinton administration and after, in which I watched the Republican Party’s leaders and spear-carriers follow Newt Gingrich into the strategy of doubling-down on the idea that Democrats were their civic enemies, thus rejecting the second pillar on which democracy depends. (And now, of course, the Republican leaders and spear-carriers have rejected the first principle: Donald Trump is their BOSS, his reversals of position and incoherences are clever strategy, and they no longer dare think for themselves.)
So let me try again:
The historical part of Manville and Ober is of enormous interest—is, indeed, a treasure for all time, as it helps us understand clearly the events that happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future.
The historical part of Manville and Ober focuses on how democracies are created, and how they function. Their definition of “democracy” is expansive. It refers to the internal workings of politics within a full-citizen body, no matter how brutal the domination it exercises is over those whom it deprives of voice. Their definition of democracy includes what most would call mixed régimes—ones in which both the aristocratic-oligarchic few and the popular many have their own institutions, power centers, and veto points:
Parliamentary Britain had such up until 1920.
Republican Rome had such always.
The U.S. had such—even for white guys—up until the coming of Jacksonian “democracy” in 1828, for only afterwards was the hierarchy of wealth and social status divorced from direct control over the workings of politics and governance).
And I detect—but I may well be wrong—aristocratic networks and thus a preëminent role for aristocratic leaders like Perikles, son of Xanthippos, of the tribe of Akamantis, in the Athenian democracy down to –380 or so; only afterwards does influence over the demos and thus political power seem to go to the silver-tongued rather than the well-networked, established, and rich.