Democracy and Distrust: A Lesson from Thucydides

THERE IS ONE THING for which every democracy yearns, it is more democracy. Today we often hear that "more democracy" means, above all, direct or participatory democracy, in place of the representative sort. Participation figures as a major theme in democratic theory and spurs dreams of a post-liberal world transfigured by the experience of political community. The political community par excellence was the polis, or ancient city. For at least eight centuries now its memory has fired Western republicanism. Today many still look to it as a model of direct democracy. Not a sufficient model, surely, but one defective primarily in the respects in which it, too, fell short of full democracy: in holding slaves, for instance, or excluding women, or failing to abolish class distinctions. The credit for its allure here and now belongs above all to Hannah Arendt. She more than anyone popularized the polis as the definitive "public space" and interpreted the aspiration to recreate it as the "lost treasure" of the modern revolutionary tradition. She thus revitalized the study of the ancient city from a democratic leftist perspective. It is this perspective that I wish to question here. In particular I will challenge the view, widespread among democratic theorists, that as "community" requires "participation," so "participation" breeds "community." Many of the advocates of participation today view it as "transformative." They see it not merely as a better or the only legitimate way of going about addressing substantive political problems, but as itself the solution to most of our nagging discontents. To hear the participationists tell it, in fact, our ills seem to be of two sorts: those that must be cured if participation is to be "meaningful," and those that meaningful participation will cure. These latter include those sentiments of distrust, powerlessness, and "alienation" so rampant in modern democratic societies. Liberty, equality, fraternity, or community: these