August/September 2019 ●Philosophy Now 27Democracy and Practical Wisdom
One learns to be the captain of a ship by serving under a cap-
tain and having command of a crew (Politics,1277b 586). Sim-
ilarly, the ability to govern well depends on skills and knowl-
edge that are best acquired by practicing under the supervision
of experienced statespersons. The ancient Greeks understood
that cultivating the virtues necessary to be good rulers and cit-
izens was a necessary defense against the sophistry of self-
aggrandizing, power-hungry and opportunistic demagogues.
We moderns have been less concerned about this danger, at
least until recently. Perhaps we have grown too fond of the
false dichotomy between a government of laws and one of
people, and have forgotten that laws do not enforce themselves,
but are enforced by people. When charlatans attain power, our
best defense is the characters and judgment of the people
around them, not the laws alone. Since the defense of our insti-
tutions is in the hands of civil servants and rulers, should we
not take care to foster their character and judgment?
If the answer is yes, then training politicians is anything but
elitist. It may be more elitist for public institutions to failto pre-
pare citizens for the exercise of civic duty. We may neglect this
task out of a principled reluctance to tell other people how to
live their lives, yet one of the most challenging features of demo-
cratic citizenship (and a source of tension between democracy
and liberalism) is that for democracy to work well, citizens must
possess civic virtues.
We are invested in one another, and must rely upon one
other. That’s why we need each other to be virtuous. At the
very least, democracy demands citizens with the courage to be
reliable defenders of democratic institutions. As Alasdair Mac-
Intyre pointed out in After Virtue, the Greeks understood that
to be courageous meant “to be someone on whom reliance can
be placed.” That kind of courage does not arise spontaneously:
it must be cultivated.
If we are to prepare citizens for public life, we must go beyond
old-school civic education. Preparing people for democracy
should be at the core of the educational mission of public schools
and universities. Education must involve habituating aspiring
practitioners to feel, deliberate, judge, and act in the service of
the common good; it must instill civic virtue by providing oppor-
tunities to cultivate the knowledge, skill, and motivation to be
good citizens and statespersons; and it must restore the idea
that politics is an ennobling activity.
Aristotle complained that politicians were doing too little to
teach their fellow citizens how to legislate (NE , 1181a). His
lament still resonates over two millennia later.
© PROF. MAXWELL A. CAMERON 2019
Maxwell A. Cameron is Director of the Centre for the Study of
Democratic Institutions at the University of British Columbia, and
author of Political Institutions and Practical Wisdom (Oxford
University Press, 2018). He is grateful to Joshua Cohen, Philip
Resnick, and Kenneth Sharpe for comments and criticisms.Apply today
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