Relation to others· Power and justice
Radical democracy
Axis: Who should decide — Do political decisions belong to everyone, or first to the most competent?
Politics rests on everyone's equal capacity to deliberate and decide: there are no experts in the common good. A free society institutes itself, one where anyone can take part in power without any special entitlement to rule.
Philosophers 5
Rousseauexplicit
Sovereignty resides in the people; it is inalienable and indivisible, and therefore cannot be represented. Rousseau pushes democracy to direct sovereignty, the assembled people themselves making the law, against any epistocracy as against purely representative government. Representation, in his eyes, dispossesses the citizen of the very liberty it claims to serve.
Rousseau, The Social Contract, III, 15
Benthamexplicit
Persuaded after 1809 that only the governed have an interest in aiming at the happiness of the greatest number, Bentham embraced representative democracy: near-universal suffrage, the secret ballot, frequent elections, against the sinister interests of the ruling classes. Power should belong to the people, the surest guarantor of the general utility, not to an elite presumed more competent.
Plan of Parliamentary Reform (1817) · Constitutional Code (representative democracy against sinister interests)
Lockeexplicit
Once the community is formed by consent, it moves as one body by the rule of the majority: the decision belongs to the greater number, else the compact would be void. Legitimacy springs from the people and their assent, not from a competence reserved to experts, which places Locke on the democratic side of the axis.
Two Treatises of Government, II, ch. 8, §95-99 (the rule of the majority)
Show inferred positions (2)
Marxinferable
The emancipation of the workers must be the work of the workers themselves: power must return to the associated producers, not to experts or a governing elite. Marx's praise of the Paris Commune, with recallable mandates and the fusion of legislative and executive, sketches a direct democracy of the armed people, hence a marked leaning toward radical democracy.
The Civil War in France (1871), on the Paris Commune · Rules of the International Workingmen's Association (the emancipation of the workers must be the work of the workers themselves)
Machiavelliinferable
Against the prejudice that despises the crowd, Machiavelli judges the multitude wiser and more constant than a prince when it is ordered by laws, and likens the voice of the people to the voice of God. But to found or save a state falls to one man: his trust in the many stays tempered by the role of the exceptional individual.
Discourses on Livy, I.58 · Discourses on Livy, I.9