The Big Three Englightenment Thinkers on Democracy

Sometimes it can irk me when people oversimplify the beliefs of philosophers. [Not that I'm totally innocent of that crime...] Take for example the big three Enlightenment thinker on democracy: Locke, Rousseau, and Montesquieu. People tend to clump these three thinkers as proponents of some form of democratic institution.

Not exactly.

Locke was not necessarily a fervent supporter of democracy- direct or indirect. Rather, it is a common misconception to say that he supported any kind of democratic government. Lock believed that any government could be legitimate as long as it fulfilled certain criteria. He lists the essence of why men enter government in his Two Treatises on Government, “The reason why men enter into society, is the preservation of their property; and the end why they choose and authorize a legislative, is, that there may be laws made, and rules set, as guards and fences to the properties of all the members of the society: to limit the power, and moderate the dominion, of every part and member of the society.” For Locke, as long as a government could protect the natural rights of men: “life, liberty, and property,” the government was doing its job. Thus, the government could be a monarchy and still be legitimate as long as if protected other men from encroaching upon those rights, including the monarch himself. Locke’s philosophy, in fact, was one of the main contributors towards a movement of “Enlightened Monarchs” who believed that their legitimacy as monarch came not from a divine source, but from the consent of the governed.

Rousseau was clearly against a representative government in theory. In his Social Contract, he writes, “Sovereignty cannot be represented, for the same reason that it cannot be alienated; its essence is the general will or it is something else ... Thus the people's deputies are not, and could not be, its representatives; they are merely its agents; they cannot decide anything finally. Any law which the people have not ratified in person is void; it is not a law at all.” This quote is his most direct attack against a representative democracy and reveals his staunch opposition to the belief that a representative democracy can actually “represent” the people. For Rousseau, another person cannot truly possess another person’s sovereignty and make decisions as a proxy because the point of the government is to guarantee that sovereignty to begin with, thus making any representative system an inescapable paradox. It should be noted, however, that Rousseau ultimately conceded to an imperfect system of representative democracy because it did have the advantage of being able to support larger numbers of people.

Montesquieu, much like Locke, never blatantly supports democratic governments. In fact, in Book 3 of his Spirit of Law, he insinuates that a democracy may be the hardest government to maintain: “There is no great share of probity necessary to support a monarchical or despotic government. The force of laws in one, and the prince's arm in the other, are sufficient to direct and maintain the whole. But in a popular state, one spring more is necessary, namely, virtue.” While he is highly critical of the mechanisms a representative democracy would need to be functional- namely high virtue- he seems even more adverse to direct democracy than representative democracy. Montesquieu states that “The principle of democracy is corrupted … likewise when they fall into a spirit of extreme equality, and when each citizen would fain be upon a level with those whom he has chosen to command him. Then the people, incapable of bearing the very power they have delegated, want to manage everything themselves, to debate for the senate, to execute for the magistrate, and to decide for the judges.” Montesquieu states that in a society, men must give up some of their equality so that those in power, by power of virtue, can make laws to protect men and their equality and rights. Thus, for men to be truly equal, as in a direct democracy would be to re-enter into our natural state of being. Thus, Montesquieu’s argument itself could be construed as an attack on the legitimacy of a direct democracy. His closing words to the essay seem to be a warning that a direct democracy is not a valid form a government, but rather an advanced form of the state of nature: “In the state of nature, indeed, all men are born equal, but they cannot continue in this equality. Society makes them lose it, and they recover it only by the protection of the laws. Such is the difference between a well-regulated democracy and one that is not so, that in the former men are equal only as citizens, but in the latter they are equal also as magistrates, as senators, as judges, as fathers, as husbands, or as masters.”