Crick complains that the term has become a bland synonym for ‘All Things Bright
and Beautiful’, a hurrah word without any specific content (1982: 56). The glow
of approval has made it an idea very difficult to pin down.Democracy and liberalism
Weldon, the linguistic analyst, has argued that ‘democracy’, ‘capitalism’ and
‘liberalism’ are all alternative names for the same thing (1953: 86). Yet this view
has been challenged by a number of theorists. They note that historically liberals
were not democrats, even if they were attacked as democrats by conservative critics
of liberalism. John Locke, for example, took it for granted that those who could
vote were men, merchants and landowners, and the question of universal suffrage
(even for men only) is not even raised in his Two Treatises of Government. The
fact that liberals declared that men were free and equal was taken by conservatives
to denote support for democracy, but this was not true!
A hapless King Charles (1600–49) reproached English parliamentarians (who
had taken him prisoner) for ‘labouring to bring about democracy’ (Dunn, 1979: 3).
Yet it is clear that Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) and his puritan gentry did not
believe in democracy, and even the left wing of the movement – the Levellers –
wished to exclude ‘servants’ and ‘paupers’ from the franchise. Cromwellians were
alarmed that the egalitarian premises of liberal theory might extend the freedom to
smaller property owners to rule (Hoffman, 1988: 154–5). It is true that Tocqueville
(1805–59), writing in the 1840s, could describe the America of his day as a
democracy, but in fact until the 1860s, Americans themselves identified democracy
at best with one element (the legislature) of the Constitution – an element to be
checked and balanced by others.
Madison, one of the founders of the US Constitution, had spoken in the Federalist
Papersof democracies as ‘incompatible with personal security or the rights of
property’, and John Jay, one of the authors of the famous Papers, declared that the
‘people who own the country should govern it’ (Hoffman, 1988: 135). Tocqueville
might describe Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence (1787), as ‘the
greatest democrat ever to spring from American democracy’ (1966: 249), but in
fact Jefferson was a liberal who took the view that voters should be male farmers
who owned property. The American political scientist Hofstadter has commented
on how modern American folklore has anachronistically assumed that liberalism
and democracy are identical (Hoffman, 1988: 136), and it has missed the point
which Crick makes, that there is ‘tension as well as harmony’ between the two
bodies of thought.
Tension – because liberals did not intend the invocation of universal rights to
apply to all adults; and harmony – because their critics from the right assumed that
they did, and their critics from the left felt that if rights were universal in theory,
then they should be universal in practice. It is important not to assume that liberal
theorists were necessarily democratic in orientation. Rousseau, the eighteenth-
century French theorist, felt that democracy was unworkable. It assumed a
perfectionism that human nature belied, and was a form of government ever liable
to ‘civil war and internecine strife’ (Rousseau, 1968: 113).102 Part 1 Classical ideas