The Public Philosophy > Chapter III. The Derangement of Powers > The People and the Voters
A recent historian of the Tudor Revolution, Mr. G. R. Elton, says that 'our history is still much written by whigs, the champions of political freedom,’ and that 'while the safeguards against despotism have long been understood and often described, -- strong rule, preventing anarchy and preserving order, requires still much exploration.’
There have been periods, he goes on to say, of which the Tudor Age was one--and our own, we may add, is another--when men were so ready to be governed, being so oppressed by disorder, that they have preferred strong government to free government.
The Western liberal democracies are a declining power in human affairs. I argue that this is due to a derangement of the functions of their governments which disables them in coping with the mounting disorder. I do not say, indeed it is impossible to know surely, whether the malady can be cured or whether it must run its course. But I do say that if it cannot be cured, it will continue to erode the safeguards against despotism, and the failure of the West may be such that freedom will be lost and will not be restored again except by another revolution. But for either contingency, for cure now or for recovery after a catastrophe, our first necessity is to work towards an adequate knowledge of the two functions, their nature, and their derangement.
In order to do so it is necessary at the outset to reduce the ambiguity of the term 'the people.’ For it has two different meanings, which it may be convenient to distinguish typographically. When we speak of popular sovereignty, we must know whether we are talking about The People, as voters, or about The People, as a community of the entire living population, with their predecessors and successors.
It is often assumed, but without warrant, that the opinions of The People as voters can be treated as the expression of the interests of The People as an historic community. The crucial problem of modern democracy arises from the fact that this assumption is false. The voters cannot be relied upon to represent The People, The opinions of voters in elections are not to be accepted unquestioningly as true judgments of the vital interests of the community.
To whom, for example, did the Preamble of the Constitution refer when it said that 'We, the People of the United States... ordain and establish this Constitution''? On September 17, I787, about forty members signed the draft on which they had been working since May 25, for one hundred and sixteen days. In Article VII of their text they stipulated that if and when conventions in nine states had ratified it, then for those nine states The People of the United States would have ordained and established the Constitution. In this context a majority of the delegates elected to nine state conventions were deemed to be entitled to act as The People of the United States.
The inhabitants of the United States who were qualified to vote for these delegates were not a large number. They included no slaves, no women and, except in New York, only such adult males as could pass property and other highly restrictive tests. We do not have accurate figures. But according to the census of I790 the population was 3,929,782. Of these, 3,200,000 were free persons and the adult males among them who were entitled to vote are estimated to have been less than 500,000. Using the Massachusetts figures as a statistical sample, it may be assumed that less than 160,000 actually voted for delegates to all the ratifying conventions; and of those voting, perhaps 100,000 favored the adoption of the Constitution.
The exact figures do not matter. The point is that the voters were not--and we may add that they have never been and can never be--more than a fraction of the total population. They were less than 5 per cent when the Constitution was ordained. They were not yet 40 percent in I952 when, except under the special conditions in the South, we had universal adult suffrage. Manifestly, the voters can never be equal to the whole population, even to the whole living adult population.
Because of the discrepancy between The People as voters and The People as the corporate nation, the voters have no title to consider themselves the proprietors of the commonwealth and to claim that their interests are identical with the public interest. A prevailing plurality of the voters are not The People. The claim that they are is a bogus title invoked to justify the usurpation of the executive power by representative assemblies and the intimidation of public men by demagogic politicians. In fact demagoguery can be described as the sleight of hand by which a faction of The People as voters are invested with the authority of The People. That is why so many crimes are committed in the people's name.
There are eminent political philosophers who reject this analytical distinction. Those who are strongly nominalist in their cast of mind, which modern men tend to be, look upon the abstract concept of a corporate people as mere words and rather like conjuring up spooks. Thus, according to that resolute nominalist, Jeremy Bentham, 'the community is a fictitious body, composed of the individual persons who are considered as constituting as it were its members. The interest of the community then is, what?--The sum of the interests of the several members who compose it.’
There is an apparent toughness and empirical matter-of-factness in this statement. But the hard ice is thin. For Bentham has forgotten that 'the several members who compose’ the community are never identically the same members from one hour to another. If a community were what he says it is, then in theory it should be possible to make a directory of its members, each with his address. But no such list could ever be compiled. While it was being compiled, new members would be being born and old members would be dying. That is why it makes no sense to describe 'The People of the United States’ who ordained and established the Constitution as the inhabitants of the United States on that particular June 21, 1788, when the Constitution was established and ordained. Between sunrise and sunset of that historic day the persons composing The People had changed. In thirty years they had changed greatly; and in a hundred years, entirely.
The people, then, is not only, as Bentham assumed, the aggregate of living persons. The people is also the stream of individuals, the connected generations of changing persons, that Burke was talking about when he invoked the partnership 'not only between those who are living’ but also with 'those who are dead, and those who are to be born.’ The People are a corporation, an entity, that is to say, which lives on while individuals come into it and go out of it.
For this reason Bentham cannot have been right when he said that the interests of the community are no more than the sum of the interests of the several members who happen to compose it at any particular instant of time. He cannot have been right when he said that 'the happiness of the individuals, of whom a community is composed, that is their pleasures and their security, is the end and the sole end which the legislator ought to have in view.’
For besides the happiness and the security of the individuals of whom a community is at any moment composed, there are also the happiness and the security of the individuals of whom generation after generation it will be composed. If we think of it in terms of individual persons, tile corporate body of The People is for the most part invisible and inaudible. Indeed as a whole it is nonexistent, in that so many are dead and so many are not yet born. Yet this corporate being, though so insubstantial to our senses, binds, in Burke's words, a man to his country with 'ties which though light as air, are as strong as links of iron.’ 6 That is why young men die in battle for their country's sake and why old men plant trees they will never sit under.
This invisible, inaudible, and so largely nonexistent community gives rational meaning to the necessary objectives of government. If we deny it, identifying the people with the prevailing pluralities who vote in order to serve, as Bentham has it, 'heir pleasures and their security,’ where and what is the nation, and whose duty and business is it to defend the public interest? Bentham leaves us with the state as an arena in which factions contend for their immediate advantage in the struggle for survival and domination. Without the invisible and transcendent community to bind them, why should they care for posterity? And why should posterity care about them, and about their treaties and their contracts, their commitments and their promises? Yet without these engagements to the future, they could not live and work; without these engagements the fabric of society is unraveled and shredded.