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Declining voter turnout will only be reversed by making our political institutions more inclusive, says historian Paul Ginsborg. Here, he revisits the ideas of two 19th-century political thinkers, concluding that their common ground could be our answer

My story begins in London, on a spring evening in 1873. It is a wet but not particularly cold night and the city is enveloped in a humid mist. Two middle-aged men, one 54, the other 66 years old, meet for the first time. The older one has invited the younger to dinner, at his home in Albert Mansions, Victoria Street. Of the two men, the younger one seems the worst for wear. He is dressed badly, suffers from carbuncles and bronchitis, and has an enormous grey-white beard that is not impeccably clean. He speaks English with a polished German accent; indeed, he is German. The other is extremely English, even if he spends much of the year in the milder climate of Avignon in the South of France. The Englishman is as courteous and correct as the German is impatient and irascible. The one is an intellectual greyhound, the other a bull. They are, with the exception of Charles Darwin, the two greatest minds of the Victorian era.

The older man, who is John Stuart Mill, the foremost Liberal thinker of his age, had become increasingly interested in Socialism, if not in Communism. In July 1870 he had expressed his approval of a document that the General Council of the First International had published on the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war. It had been written by the second of my protagonists and no reader will receive a prize for guessing who he is. In his statement on behalf of the First International, Karl Marx stressed the need for the working classes of the two countries, France and Germany, to fraternise instead of fight. Mill agreed with him.

The two men touched upon many topics during the course of that long evening, but it is that part of their discussion concerning democracy that interests me here. I think it would be fair to say, though of course there is much debate on this point, that both men were and weren’t democrats. Mill believed in representative democracy and in 1861 had published an extended essay about it, Considerations on Representative Government. At the end of its third chapter he had written that “nothing less can be ultimately desirable, than the admission of all to a share in the sovereign power of the state”.

However, and this is the part where his democratic credentials are found wanting, he also felt passionately that the working classes, men and women, were not yet ready, nor sufficiently educated for democracy. He was scared of the tyranny of an ill-informed and prejudiced majority, and insisted, at least for a period, on an electoral system that weighted votes in unequal fashion, so-called plural voting, and that guaranteed greater representation to the cultured classes. Nor was this all. Mill was also convinced that “the effective direction of public affairs” should be entrusted to a non-elected elite: “a small number of eminent men; experienced, correctly prepared by their education and their experience, personally responsible to the nation.” Marx, by contrast, believed in direct or participative democracy, based on the active involvement of all the citizens of a given nation. He thought representative democracy a sham, “the sophistry of the political state” as he had described it in The Jewish Question (1843); a system in which all men appeared to be politically free and equal, but in which they remained in reality profoundly divided by inequalities of income and differential access to power. Human emancipation could only be realised when this profound separation between political man and man in society, between the abstract ‘citoyen’ and the real man, was effectively healed.

In 1871, two years before Marx and Mill met in London, Marx had perceived in the Paris Commune, the brief and radical insurrection that had engulfed the French capital in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war, the embryo of a new, more advanced system of political organisation. The Commune, at long last, as he wrote in his pamphlet The Civil War in France, “supplied the republic with the basis of really democratic institutions”.

However, Marx, like Mill, could also be said to have a shadow over his democratic credentials, for he had not one but two models of a possible future democracy. His attachment to the idea of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, a phrase that snaked ominously in and out of his correspondence without ever being systematically developed, promised absolutely no good in democratic terms. Nor is there any evidence in his writings to suggest that his two models – the dictatorship of the proletariat and the Paris Commune – were linked diachronically; proletarian dictatorship was not presented by him as the necessary but temporary prelude to popular, decentralised participative democracy. It was simply a different and contrasting model of political organisation, far more centralising, excluding and authoritarian than that of the Paris Commune. Because Marx never worked systematically on the question of democracy, it was never very clear which of his two models he preferred, or how, if at all, they were linked. That evening in London, after more than one glass of port, Marx attacked Mill on a number of crucial points concerning democracy. He found quite unacceptable Mill’s wish to exclude illiterates from the vote, and his insistence on weighting votes unequally. Marx also found it strange that Mill had never paused to contemplate the democratic significance of the Paris Commune of 1871.

Mill responded with patience and in classic liberal fashion. He agreed with Marx that the federal system of government that the Communards were suggesting was probably the best way forward. However, he warned Marx that democracy and proletarian dictatorship had nothing in common. “The working classes,” said Mill, “or somebody on their behalf”, would create a centralised  economy, crush all opposition and demonstrate an “insensibility towards the suffering of others of which not even Robespierre and Saint-Just were capable”. But then, to soften the pill and bring Marx over to his side, he welcomed what Marx had said to a working-class audience in Amsterdam just six months earlier. On that occasion Marx had embraced the idea that in countries like America, Holland and England “working-people may achieve their goal by peaceful means”. For Mill, that was the sunlit road along which they could walk together.

It was nearly midnight before Karl Marx left Mill’s house. Accompanying him to the door, Mill quoted a few lines of consolation for them both, ageing intellectuals, still eager to discuss and learn. They were from the two-part Prelude of his favourite poet, William Wordsworth:

Many are the joys of youth, but oh, what happiness to live
When every hour brings palpable access
Of knowledge, when all knowledge is delight,
And sorrow is not there.

The meeting that I have recounted to you never took place. I apologise to experts on Marx and Mill for having taken some liberties, but every word and position that I have ascribed to the two men comes directly from their writings. The meeting never took place, but it could have done. That last March in Mill’s house in Albert Mansions – he was to die just a month later – had been a busy social time, with regular visitors invited to dinner at seven o’clock. As for Marx, he too became quite sociable in his latter years, even going so far as to accept an invitation to dine at a gentlemen’s club from a Liberal member of parliament, the very unproletarian Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant-Duff.

I have invented the meeting to introduce the subject of my little book: the nature and possibilities of present-day democracy. Significant issues divided Marx and Mill in 1873 – the extent of the electorate, the political role of different social classes, the nature of economic democracy. But they also had many points in contact – “the admission of all to a share in the sovereign power of the state,” as Mill put it, the need for men and women to be active subjects in both politics and society, the possibility of the working classes exercising political power by peaceful means. None of these objectives has been achieved. Furthermore, over the next hundred years, the two major intellectual traditions of Liberalism and Marxism, which were to dominate world politics in the 20th century, far from converging in any way – as my invented meeting gently suggests they might have done – moved radically apart. Liberalism and Communism could unite their military force to defeat the terrible threat of international Fascism and Nazism, but that was as far as they were able to go.

In 1989 liberal democracy triumphed unqualifiedly over its, by now unpresentable, opponent. But at the moment of its global victory, many of  its basic practices have been found wanting and many of its proudest boasts unfounded. While formal, electoral democracy has expanded with great rapidity all over the world, disaffection has grown in democracy’s traditional heartlands. It has been expressed in a number of different ways – declining voter turnout, declining membership of parties, loss of faith in democratic institutions and in the political class in general. Let me take just one example, from one of the most robust of Europe’s democracies – Sweden. In 1968, 60 percent of the respondents to the Swedish Election Study said that political parties were interested in people’s opinions, not just their votes. By 1994 that percentage had declined dramatically to 25 percent. A similar decline was to be found in regard to the activities of the Riksdag, the Swedish parliament. Today, liberal democracy is highly vulnerable. To protect it adequately, there is urgent need for theoretical discussion and practical innovation. Beginning with Marx and Mill and, to tell the truth, without ever really losing sight of them, my book addresses some of the most pressing questions to have arisen in the history of democracy, and relates them to the possibilities, as well as dangers, of our own times. It does so with reference to democracy in general, but with a particular eye on European democracies and the destiny of the European Union. And it does so with a particular problem in mind – that of the need to invent new forms and practices that combine representative with participative democracy, Mill with Marx.
 
Democracy, then, has to be combined, but we must be clear about what this entails. It is not sufficient for politicians to make a few token gestures in the direction of consultation or participation, such as instituting the occasional citizens’ jury. This is little more than hoodwinking. The independent report on the state of British democracy, Power to the People (2006), was quite explicit on this point: “The evidence received by us…is that popular cynicism towards public consultation is very strong. The process is widely regarded as meaningless, in that it is often unclear how a consultation process can influence final decisions taken by officials or representatives.”

Participatory democracy must ensure that people are truly involved in the decision-making process. However, we must also be aware that participation and deliberation of this sort take time. All the meaningful recent experiments in democratic participation, such as that in Porto Alegre in Brazil, have only ever managed to involve a small minority of the population. We should not try to pretend that the historical record is otherwise. It is quite clear, therefore, that participatory democracy, however precious, is for the time being a minority activity. It cannot replace representative democracy, which for all its failings still involves well over half the adult population in a secret and formal process of voting.

But the two can and indeed must meet, with the liberty of the ancients coming to the aid of that of the moderns. The power and responsibility of representatives need not be negated or even diminished. They are, rather, modified, enriched and institutionally constrained by the deliberative and participatory activity that is taking place around them. And the crucial theoretical point regarding the relationship between the two – between representative and participatory democracy – is that the activity of the second guarantees the quality of the first. If it works well, deliberative democracy guarantees transparency, builds wider circles of decision-making and plays a crucial role in the formation of a small but expanding group of educated and active citizens, with an ethic of public service in their very bones. In his mild way, Mill would have been surprised and enthusiastic about such an extension of democracy and Marx would have noted in his explosive prose the analogies with the Paris Commune, though this time without the enemy at its very gates.

Democracy has many enemies waiting in the wings, politicians and movements that are for the moment constrained to play by its rules, but whose real animus is quite another – populist, manipulative of the modern media, intolerant and authoritarian. They will seize their chance if we do not reform our democracies swiftly and make them more inclusive. Nowhere is this reform more needed than in the European Union itself.

Paul Ginsborg’s book, Democracy: crisis and renewal is published by Profile books in July. He will be speaking on this subject at the RSA on 1 July 2008. For more details, visit www.theRSA.org/events.