rule, and representative government can only very seldom be seen as fully
applying the majority principle. Other arguments are equally important. To
Rousseau, for example, direct democracy is necessary for true freedom,
because one is only free when obeying a law which oneself has ‘willed’. As,
according to Rousseau, one cannot delegate one’s will, it follows that no law in
the making of which one has not directly shared can be obeyed without a loss
of freedom. A somewhat similar argument is that direct involvement in
politics, listening to and joining in debate and voting, has an educative
influence. People are seen as coming to understand their own and others’
needs more clearly, and to grow in personality and morality through direct
participation in decision-making and law-creating. This idea is shared by some
theorists of representative democracy, such as John StuartMill, who emphasize
the importance of local politics because such political activity comes nearer to
direct democracy. At a less elevated level demands for direct democracy often
arise out of a sheer mistrust of putting power in the hands of a few, often
because of a feeling that hierarchy, even if it is supposed to be representative,
inevitably becomes corrupt. It is not necessarily the case that advocates of
direct democracy as a legislative process also insist on full and equal participa-
tion in decision-making at the stage of executing policy—indeed Rousseau
clearly sees theexecutiveas separate from the mass meeting of all citizens that
legislates. However, the only arenas where direct democracy is at all widely
practised, for example colleges or clubs, usually do not have a clear distinction
between legislating and executing.
The problems are fairly obvious. If all citizens are to share fully in decision-
making, the society must be very small indeed. Classical Athens could only
manage to employ the system because, at its height, the free adult male
citizenry probably numbered no more than 20,000, and because most people
seldom took up their rights. A second major technical problem is that, unless
the society is to be very simple, and operate at a very low technology level, the
time consumed in policy-making would prohibit all those who had to work
full time from any serious use of their rights to participate. No political system
today comes anywhere near operating direct democracy at the national level,
nor has one ever done so. At times, local government may have approached this
system (the Town Meetings of early New England states are the best example,
while newly-democratic Hungary introduced measures for regular consulta-
tion at the local level, although the low participation rate in most parts of the
democratic process suggested that there was no great enthusiasm for them).
However, the cry for direct democracy is being increasingly heard, and
increasingly answered, in the running of institutions. Universities, political
parties and to some extent industrial plants (seeindustrial democracy) are
subject to the demands for such governance, as part of the more general value
attached to participation throughout the developed world.
Direct Democracy