| Democracy: From Classical Times to the Present |
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POLS A316
Democracy: From Classical Times to the Present
| Introduction |  |
Welcome to POLS A316 and a new academic year! It is a pleasure to have you enrolled on Democracy: from classical times to the present. I'm delighted you have chosen this course and the whole course team wish to extend their welcome to you; we all hope you will find this course as rich and stimulating to study as we found it to create.
POLS A316 introduces you to the history and development of the ideas and practices of democracy. Both the concept and reality of democracy are examined as they crystallized in changing historical epochs. The course seeks to integrate an appreciation of the key ideas and debates about democracy; a comparative study of why democracy developed in some countries and not in others; and an understanding of why today -- when so many people are celebrating the spread of democracies across the world-national democracy may be under threat from transnational or global processes of environmental, social and economic change. For a quick guide to the course (I shall come back to the course structure later) have a look at Figure 1, which sets out its major sections and parts.
Figure 1 Course outline
Course Introduction Books Section 1:
History of the idea and development of democracy Models of Democracy Classic models Twentieth century variants Section 2:
Comparative study of why democracy developed in some countries and not in others Democratization Framework for analysis Europe and the USA Latin America and Asia Africa and the Middle East Communist and post-communist countries Conclusion Section 3:
A reappraisal of democracy in the context of globalization Book 3: The Transformation of Democracy? Part I: Global transformations Part II Democratizing world order Plus,: Book 1 Models of Democracy, Part III: What should democracy mean today? Review and revision POLS A316 matters greatly to me and to the course team that produced it. If I say a little bit about why this is so it might provide you with a context for the course as a whole and an introduction to its themes and concerns. Let me start on a personal note.
| 1 A personal starting point | |
We all come to an understanding of democratic ideas and practices in different times and places. Clearly, our individual conceptions of democracy will vary with the nature of our personal experience, our personal history and the interpretative frameworks of our particular cultures and countries. My interest in the nature and shape of democratic life started when I was a child; this is not to claim that I had a great academic interest in democracy when I was six or seven years old! (I was a child who had more than his fair share of learning difficulffes.) Rather, it came from experiences of growing up in a household in which there was a clear -- and to my young mind -- unjustified imbalance in the distribution of power.
My family has always been a close one and I've always enjoyed good relations with nearly all family members. But as a child growing up I was acutely aware of how opportunities to talk, to participate and to be involved in family discussions and decisions were unevenly or asymmetrically distributed. Take an instance from the family dinner table. A typical weekend meal would involve everybody eating together and talking over the week's events and occurrences. My father would always sit at the end of the table and, although he did no shopping, cooking and only rarely cleaned up, was the general master of ceremonies. He was and is a wonderful man and always entertaining. Nonetheless, I was always curious about why family discussions were so determined by him, and shaped by his agenda. I benefited from his agenda a lot. As the only boy in a family with three daughters, my father showered me with attention. Conversation between my father and I was direct and continuous. In this mini world, I was, one might say, a citizen; that is to say, I was fully included and had the opportunity to participate in the discussions and decisions of the day (to the extent to which they were open to children at all of course).
However, I was acutely aware that the axis of communication which benefited me so directly also served to exclude my sisters and even my mother on some occasions from full involvement. I cannot claim much credit for noticing this or for duly worrying about it. How many seven-year-old boys treat such issues seriously, especially when they gain from such a position in all sorts of spoken and unspoken ways? Nonetheless, I was aware that what I later in life came to know as the 'patriarchal' structure of many families and political cultures had a negative effect on the opportunities and aspects of the well-being of those whom it did not directly privilege.
In short, family life was an early introduction to politics -- the process which broadly determines who gets what, where and how much of life's resources, opportunities and chances -- and to the nature and problems of accountability -- the process which determines how those who wield power and authority answer to those whom they affect. As a student many years later in France and the USA, I was not at all surprised by some of the issues raised by the political movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s and by my first encounters with civil rights concerns and feminist thinking. These movements raised questions about the nature of power and democracy not only within the arena of the state and politics but also within the arenas of personal life, the community and work. They argued that the quality of democracy depended not just on the formal access that citizens enjoyed to the public sphere and to the polity -- to the domain of public deliberation and decision making -- but also on the subtle and complicated processes whereby citizens gain or fail to gain access to the resources and rules of public life -- access which depends on a complex pattern of social involvements, cultural processes and economic factors. In other words, they illustrated how it is not enough to be a citizen in name only and how a fully involved and active citizen requires the actual opportunities and confidence to enter the political fray -- something my sisters and even my mother lacked in the mini politics of the household. Although as a student I barely understood many of the complex issues involved in thinking about the nature of democracy and political power, I always felt that politics and democratic procedure was a matter not just for the wider collectivity of groups, institutions and states but also for the minutiae of everyday life.
To study democracy is to study the way power affects our lives and the way in which we can or cannot hold it to account. For power is about the capacity of social agents, agencies and institutions to maintain or transform their environment, social or physical. It is about the rules and resources which underpin this capacity and about the forces that shape and influence its exercise. And democratic politics is about this kind of power; that is to say, it is about the discourse and struggle over the organization of human affairs and possibilities, and about how this organization can be influenced and shaped by all those who are members of, or are touched by, the political communities they find themselves in.
To study and think about democracy is, accordingly, to reflect on and examine something which is fundamental to who we are and how we live. The nature of private and public decision making (from the household to the state), the nature of political debate (from the dinner table to the mass media), and the nature of participation -- affect us profoundly, whether we are aware of it or not. Although this course focuses on the character, extent and prospects of democracy in public settings and institutions, it also seeks to illuminate how political involvement in these is shaped by mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion -- involving gender, class, race and ethnicity, among other factors -- which have complex and contested ram)fications.
The ideas and practices of democracy are important to us, moreover, because they are fundamental to our civilization as it has been handed down to us from antiquity to the present. This course ought to have wide appeal because it is about one of the key notions of our civilization and about how that notion has been understood and entrenched over time. The idea of democracy is absolutely crucial to how we live and how our political opportunities are determined. No wonder then that the idea and practice of democracy have throughout history provoked the greatest human passions. They are a matter of academic concern and study -- but also a matter that involves us daily as citizens. They raise questions of academic importance but also issues which transcend the boundaries of the academic community.
| 2 Thinking about democracy | |
In thinking about democracy, ancient or modern, it is important to test one's own intuitions and understanding against the experiences of others. This is particularly critical if we are to distinguish individual or personal perceptions from those ideas and theories which can in principle command wider understanding and agreement. At root is the difference between personal views and opinions and the more tried and tested positions of social and political analysis. Without going into the latter in detail now, there are a number of very important 'don'ts' in social and political analysis which we must always bear in mind in thinking about the validity of our own views and thoughts (cf. Giddens, 1982, ch. 12). These are:
don't overgeneralize from personal experience to an account of what things necessarily mean for others in other groups, cultures and socioeconomic contexts;
don't overgeneralize from the present; don't, in other words, take one time period as typical of all time periods;
don't overgeneralize from the experience of one country; don't take what happens in one country as necessarily typical of what happens in all others.
While the idea of democracy is fundamental to who we are and what we might become, it is important to appreciate that this is an idea which is also fundamental to others in the modern world who often understand its meaning in very different ways. If we want to grasp and evaluate the meaning of democracy, we cannot simply generalize from our life and the present period of time, believing the way we understand the world now is the way it has always been and will be. What is happening in Britain today is, for example, very different from what was happening two or three hundred years ago. And it is different again from what is happening in Taiwan, parts of sub-Saharan Africa or Russia.
There is another 'don't' to consider:
don't confuse or conflate descriptive and analytical concerns with normative questions.
Or, to put the point another way, don't run together issues about 'what is going on' in a particular political system of a country, and explanations as to why this system has developed as it has, with issues about how things might be better developed in the future, i.e., how things ought to be. You will quickly discover that debates about democracy have involved shifting balances between descriptive-explanatory and normative statements; that is, between statements about how things are and why they are so, and statements about how things ought to or should be. But in assessing these shifting balances we must always seek to distinguish the nature and coherence of theoretical claims, the adequacy of empirical statements and the desirability of prescriptions. Don't run these different components together! (Further help on this will be given in Study Guide 1.)
Accordingly, to think about democracy in a rigorous and scholarly manner requires us to examine the diverse expressions of and huge variations in the experience of this idea and reality, and to do so while
avoiding hasty value judgements. POLS A316 takes a fresh look at the life and times of democracy, from the citizens' debates in Ancient Athens to the confrontation today between students and tanks in China and other parts of the world. In so doing, it offers a historical, comparative and international investigation of democracy- as an idea and as an actual political process involving organizations and institutions. If you grasp this, you will have already gone a long way towards understanding the nature and shape of the course (and towards avoiding some of the problems caused by not taking the 'don'ts' seriously).
| 3 The structure of the course | |
POLS A316 begins by exploring the history of democracy from pre-classical and classical times, through the development of representative government in the eighteenth century to the 'mass democracy' movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This involves a historical account of particular sets of democratic ideas and democratic states, each bringing a distinctive conception or model to our understanding of democracy. Alongside the accounts of particular political institutions and arrangements are set the commentaries of some of the greatest of all writers on politics -- Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Marx, Mill, Weber and many more. Section 1 of the course offers an examination of how democracy has been understood and debated at crucial moments in its history.
Next, in Section 2, we examine why there are democratic polities in certain countries and not in others, and attempt to explain the patterns of democratization over the last two centuries in North America and Europe, and during the twentieth century in Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. This entails a comparative review of the very process of democratization itself -- democracy being created and consolidated -- all round the world. Upto-date case studies are offered from diverse countries and are used to analyse the social and economic conditions favourable to the emergence of democracy, and the factors which can render some existing democracies unstable or crisis-prone. Against this background we can begin to understand why some countries have become democratic while others have not, why democracy is more prevalent in certain regions of the world than in others, and why democracy has enjoyed a stronger impulse in some places but a weaker impulse in others.
Events such as the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in South Africa and the tearing down of the Berlin wall mean that in more and more countries citizen voters are, in principle, able to hold public decision makers to account. Yet at the same time the reality of the political community -- that is of the sovereign nation-state -- is increasingly challenged by processes of regionalization and globalization, processes examined in the third and final section of POLS A316. This section explores such questions as: How can regional and global problems such as environmental pollution, the flow of financial resources which escape national jurisdiction, international security and economic security -- all of which have been placed urgently on the contemporary international political agenda -- be satisfactorily brought within the sphere of democracy? What kind of accountability and control can citizens of a single nation-state have over international actors, e.g. multinational corporations, and over international organizations, e.g. the World Bank? In the context of trends towards European integration, fundamental transformations in the global economy, global communications and information systems, how can democracy be sustained? Are new democratic institutions necessary to regulate and control the new international forces and processes? In a world increasingly organized on regional and global lines can democracy as we know it survive? Section 3 of the course addresses these issues and presents the cutting-edge debates on the prospects and possibilities of democracy today.
POLS A316 is, of course, a third level course; this means that we can introduce you to a wider range of issues than would be expected at lower levels, and that its authors' professional interests can be more fully shared with you. As a third level course in politics, there is scope to present you with the main components of the Politics Discipline: political theory, comparative politics and global politics. Each section of the course introduces you to one of the foundations stones of the study of politics:
- Section 1: Book 1
Political theory
- Section 2: Book 2
- Section 3: Book 3
Different ways of thinking about democratic politics are introduced in each section, along with the relevant body of theory that has helped form each of the foundation stones. Thus, Section 1 focuses on elements of political theory as they have been developed in debates about the nature of democracy; Semion 2 examines different explanatory theories which have been elaborated to understand the creation and consolidation of democracy; and Section 3 introduces a mix of internadonal relations theory and political theory as both have been deployed to explore the changing nature of the democratic polity in a regional and global context. This range, the course team believes, enables POLS A316 to offer both a systematic analysis and a critical account of the changing conceptions and institutions of democracy over time.
In combining the history of ideas about democracy, a strong element of comparative politics, and a re-examination of democracy in the context of globalization POLS A316 is, I think, unique. The course team hopes to share its academic concerns with you; and we hope you will come to share our enthusiasm and understanding, from chapter to chapter, from book to book, from programme to programme.
To further orient yourself to the course you might like to look now at the Study Calendar which shows conclusively that we don't expect you to grasp the course all at once! The Study Calendar is a vital aid to your work since it sets out how to pace your studies on a week-by-week basis. The course team has taken a careful look at study speeds and, on the assumption that you don't read more than 3,000 words an hour (a fairly good, gentle pace), has adjusted all workloads accordingly. In other words, we have built-in sufficient time for reading, reflection, in-text exercises and all the course components.
By now you might be feeling excited and/or daunted by the task ahead. If you are simply feeling excited- excellent! But if you are daunted let me offer you a few reasons why you should not feel too nervous about the challenges ahead. These challenges are serious and demanding, and so they should be in any worthwhile academic course. However, there's no need to feel apprehensive; we have sought to provide guidance and reassurance at every point. The keys here are the study guides and audio-cassettes.
| 4 Study guides | |
The study guides on POLS A316 differ a little from those on other courses, and somewhat from each other. This is because POLS A316 has a special format. Section 1, about a quarter of the course, is based on an existing text, Models of Democracy by me (David Held), which has been very significantly rewritten for POLS A316. Because this is a normal commercially produced text, it lacks direct in-text exercises and detailed cross references to other parts of the course, although it contains many text summaries, diagrams and charts. Section 2, about half the course, is based on the Democratization volume. This book was specially written for POLS A316 by members of the course team and a range of distinguished external academic contributors, and so the authors have taken the opportunity to produce chapters which have a more direct teaching style. Finally, Section 3 is based around another new book specially written for the course, The Transformation of Democracy?' again by a mixture of OU academics and lecturers from other universities, but Section 3 also incorporates two further chapters by me (from Models of Democracy) and a final part on revision and examination technique. To complement these differing formats requires slightly different study guides for each section, and of course the different study guide authors draw on their own experience of teaching in what they have written for you.
Each of the study guides seeks to help you through a major section of the course; offers advice about how to read and interpret the texts; raises questions about the material which are helpful to bear in mind when going through it; provides clear signposts about the key topics and themes; assists in the integration of the books with radio, audio-cassettes and television; generates links and connections across the books, and sets up a framework for approaching TMAs and the exam. The study guides are, thus, indispensable. Read the relevant study guide before proceeding with each of the course books. Theywill not only help you through the substance of the book, but with their detailed in-text exercises and questions for further thought will also provide the basis for active and engaged learning -- so vital for the more independent study expected at third level.
| 5 Audio-cassettes | |
The seven course audio-cassettes serve a related role and aim to provide additional introductions to and help with each course section. The cassettes have been produced by the course team to aid you in coming to terms with each section, to help you gain a vital foothold on the problems ahead, to offer material related directly to the activities in the study guides, and to provide you, from time to time, with additional helpful information. Together, the study guides and audio-cassettes offer a vital learning aid to take you through POLS A316. A guide to when and how to use the audio-cassettes can be found in the study guides.
| 6 Television and radio programmes accessible only in cassettes-form | |
There are six television programmes and eight radio programmes to go alongside the course texts (see the stop press notes for transmission details). These programmes all play a key role in the course and provide a rich illustration or telling narrative to complement the academic volumes. The programmes are designed to make major issues come alive and to extend your imagination for many of the extraordinary tales of drama, passion, intrigue and conflict which accompanied each step in the development of democracy.
TV01 examines the nature and extent of democracy in classical Athens, challenging some of our cherished beliefs that democracy was born in the West in a 'civilized' ancient city-state. TV02 explores the role of the media in Britain and, in particular, the impact of television news on the public agenda. TV03 investigates the experience of the democratic revolution in Portugal (1974-76) with all its uncertainties and risks, while TV04 focuses on the dramatic break from authoritarian rule in South Korea in 1987-88 and the ensuing struggle for democratization there. The 5th programme is coded as TV07. It assesses the changing role of the UN in national and international political affairs; and the 6th programme (TV08) explores the increasing intensity of electronic communication via the Internet and the challenge this presents to democracy, within and beyond national territories.
POLS A316 radio programmes are available to you on cassettes. We will refer to these as radio cassettes (RC) and will categorize them by the letters 'A' to 'D' (as opposed to the standard audio-cassettes which we will simply number AC 1 to 7). Each audio-cassette contains two of the radio programmes. RCA1 presents a rich dramatization of a number of famous texts about classical Athens and offers a lively discussion about the relevance today of direct forms of citizen participation. RCA2 offers key illustrations from classic texts about the nature of liberal representative democracy and includes a discussion of some of the strengths and weaknesses of representative democracy. RCB1 provides a dramatic account of one of the most challenging years in the history of liberal democracies -- 1968 -- while RCB2 recounts the extraordinary events in the life of Central and East European Communist countries and their transition to liberal democracy in 1989. RCC1 examines the story of the end of apartheid in South Africa, and RCC2 explores the transition to democracy in Russia and whether this new liberal democratic country can weather the storms ahead. RCD1 examines the democratic reform of the UN while RCD2 presents debates about the nature and status of human rights.
Assessment of TMAs and the examination will take account of your grasp of these media components as well as of the written texts of the course. You will find more information on television and radio in the relevant study guides (into which we have integrated the traditional broadcast notes).
| 7 Assessment and tuition | |
Assessment includes the conventional mix at the OU of two components:
- continuous assessment, which takes the form of seven tutor-marked assignments (TMAs);
- a three hour examination.
Each of the these two components will be worth 50 per cent of your overall mark.
You will be allocated a course tutor who will mark your TMAs and provide you with extensive feedback on your written work. Your tutor will also be available to give you general advice about the course.
| Finally | |
The course team would like to wish you well in the study of POLS A316 and to emphasize once again how much we hope you will find the course not only interesting but also stimulating for your academic studies and concerns as a citizen! You should tum now to Study Guide 1.
| Reference | |
Giddens, A. (1982) Profiles and Critiques in Social Theory, London, Macmillan.
