The Sovereign Individual in Western Liberal Democracies

23 jun

How the Greek philosophy of democracy, and the universal ethic in the Judeo-Christian corpus of stories, resulted in the Liberal Democracies of Western societies today.

Moral ideals and legal structures sanctioned inherent differences in people for most of recorded history. Slavery was a standard which was universally practised and accepted. Differences in gender, race, social class, and ethnicity were the basis for legal distinctions and were accepted as inevitable and appropriate. Humans were not, unlike today, conceptualised as individual moral agents capable of self-directedness. Today, in principle, all human beings enjoy the same “human” rights. Even the most heinous killer, a fully disabled person, and a president have—in principle—the same equal rights under the law. This shift towards universal rights means that there has been a societal evolution from inherent inequality to universal equality.

This shift has primarily taken place in Western countries. To show the truth of this, slavery is abolished in the West, in contrast to most other parts of the world today. Women enjoy the same freedoms and rights as men. Minority groups never had the same rights as any other group in history except in Western society today. Most people participate in the decision-making process of Western societies by bearing the responsibility of voting as citizens, and all people in these societies enjoy more freedoms and have more inherent rights than any other people in the recorded history of our planet. Another strong argument in favour of this truth is that global emigration patterns show that the free liberal democratic countries of the West are highly preferred over all other countries in the world. Western countries are the countries that people aim to flee or emigrate towards. This is for their freedom, safety and highly increased chances for happiness and wealth.

However, this begs the question: what caused this evolution in the Western world? This essay explores this evolution by answering the question: Why and how did Western civilisation develop into the free liberal democracies as we know them? I will argue that it has been the merging of ancient Greek and Christian ideas. Western theological ideas, originating at Athens and Jerusalem respectively, have been the primary reason for why the West has evolved towards the free and universally equal societies that they are today. More specifically, I will contend that this evolution is based on the mergence of the illiberal Greek idea of democracy together with the Judeo-Christian ethic of the sovereignty of the individual. These two ideas merged together in the liberal democracies that we know today.

The reason why I believe that it is important to struggle with this question is because there is a growing scepticism towards the righteousness of the relatively free and equal societies of the West. The deepest criticism is aimed at precisely the countries that have produced the most equality and freedom on this world. This growing scepticism can be noticed by claims such as ‘the West has unjust privilege’, ‘the West is primary reason for the rape of the world and environment’, and ‘the white straight male has been oppressive to all other human beings for all of history’. These notions are in some way self-contradicting because they come from within the only free societies in which such claims can be made openly and freely. In other words, the fundamental freedom that Western societies hold as self evident allow all critics to be critical to begin with. In most other countries, challenging the status quo, or people in power, is highly dangerous. This leads me to share one core belief which I hold that will run through this essay: people in Western societies once again need their faith rekindled in the relative righteousness of the fundamental ideas on which their prosperous societies are based. As Victor Davis Hanson (2018, 49:34) puts it: people in Western democracies need to understand that they are good without being perfect, and if they lose this faith, history will not pardon them.

History of democracy in ancient Greece

In the city state of Athens, around 700 - 500 BC, democratic and constitutional history starts. For the first time in history, we see that individuals have names called politès, or citizens. Politeia is derived from the word polis meaning city-state and means (among others) "the rights of citizens". Something akin to these words did not exist in any of the Egyptian dialects or the Persian language. Still today in the Arab world, they use the Western words "democracy" and "constitution" because nothing in their experience needed a word for these concepts.

Hanson (1999, part II) argues that the main reasons for the origin of democratic governance in Greece was the need for the protection of property rights. This need resulted in the idea of popular sovereignty which means that ultimate authority is in the hands of the Demos, i.e. the citizens. Athenian citizens were the first people in history to enjoy citizenship meaning they had citizen rights. This citizenship was not necessarily dependent on influence, wealth or occupation. All citizens had the right to debate, to own land and slaves, and to vote. If any citizen's name over the age of 30 was drawn at the citizens council, that person had the responsibility of governing. Voting was more than a privilege and was seen as a responsibility. Slaves, women, and low class men did not have citizenship.

From illiberal democracy to liberal democracy

Athenian citizens were not "individuals", but a part of the organic city state. As citizens they were expected to participate equally in politics, to vote, and to be elected. Something akin to individualism did not yet exist. Looking at the individual from a political perspective, individual rights are negative rights. This is because individual rights exist to constrain the political power from the state. To serve the polis was one of the highest values in ancient Greece and individual rights constrained this power.

Athens was a very radically egalitarian community, and since the power of the Demos was almost unlimited, there were no checks and balances or constitutional guarantees. Citizen rights (note that these are not individual rights) were recognised, but as Hatzis (2016, p.6) shows, this constituted only 10 to 12% of the Athenian population, resulting in 30,000 males that had full citizen status and rights. The laws and legal judgments were subjected to the majority vote from the citizens with citizen status. This means that the form of democracy in ancient Athens was "direct", a 51% majority vote was needed for any decision to pass.

Hatzis (2016, p.4) explains how this makes Athens a democracy, but not a liberal democracy. Majority rule was practiced but there were no individual rights. The rule of law, for example, did not exist to bind the majority rule. As Aristotle (Aristot. Pol. 3.1287a) later defined: “And the rule of law, it is argued, is preferable to that of any individual. On the same principle, even if it be better for certain individuals to govern, they should be made only guardians and ministers of the law.” Hereby he meant that the law had to be above men, even above majorities. Nevertheless, in ancient Athens, the Demos had all political power and no laws were in place to restrain them.

Aristotle questioned whether it was politically desirable for a majority of citizens to decide on everything without constraint. Aristotle in ancient Greece, and most Western societies today, answer no to that question. Modern Western people axiomatically believe there is an area where individuals should have the freedom to make their own decisions, even if those decisions are not necessarily in line with the rest of society. It is this area that is protected by individual rights. This is the area of the individual where he is free and where the majority, society, and the government cannot intervene. The amount of freedom a society concedes to individuals differs. Per country this is called the liberal principle. In America, the liberal principle was introduced in the U.S constitution by James Madison in 1787.

Consequently, in the liberal democracies we know today, there is a personal area protected by negative rights, i.e. individual rights. This domain should not only be shielded from authoritarian governments but also from a democratic majority such as the Demos in ancient Athens. This means that America is a liberal society because ‘the people’ (read: ‘the demos’) are expected to participate in politics by voting, to express themselves, and are protected by the force of law. The principle is ‘by the people, for the people’. People in these societies are in charge of their own lives and are personally autonomous. Well-being in such societies is connected to individual preferences. This is not determined by a ruler, the majority, society, or by experts.

Democracy in the 20th century

I will now turn to democracy in the 20th centory. Parker (1940, p. 52) describes the spirit of democracy in what it has become 2500 years after its origin in Greece:

Democracy is more than a form of government. It is a philosophy of life. Based upon the worth and importance of the individual, which postulates that institutions exist for men and not men for institutions. It is the philosophy of America. Our confession of faith as a nation is founded in these noble words of the Declaration of Independence:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

And the greatness of America exists in this: that to a greater extent than any other nation that has ever existed, she has lived this philosophy. She is not great because of the strength of her army or navy, not because of wealth of field and forest, mine or factory, but because she finds reality in the soul of the individual, because she stands for the open door of opportunity and the square deal to every man.

I do not mean to argue that Western societies, America among them, are perfect in their pursuit of democratic governance. No system of governance is perfect. However, Western countries have managed their pursuit to individual human freedom and equality better than any system of governance in recorded history. As Parker writes: to a greater extent than any other nation that has ever existed, America has lived the philosophy of the declaration of independence. The Declaration of Independence pins down the essence of what it means to be democratic in Western societies today. It is the emphasis on the individual that is autonomous and has inalienable rights. But how did this happen? These ideas are far from self-evident, and still, most people in the world are not perceived as self-moving autonomous individuals today. What happened in Western societies that resulted in the free and equal societies that we know?

Greek and Christian merging of ideas

The French philosopher Luc Ferry (2011) and intellectual historian Larry Siedentop (2014) both argue that it was the metaphysical concept from Christianity in places such as Genesis 1:27, that allowed humankind to overcome the universal belief that people are inherently unequal. "So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them". Right at the beginning of the Bible, it argues for a universal moral ethic inherent in every human being. Ferry argues that Christianity therefore had a fundamentally different worldview compared to the Greek aristocratic belief in intrinsic unequal human potentiality. Both Siedentop and Ferry describe the spread of the Christian story as disruptive to Roman and Greek ideas that some are born to obey, and others are born to command.

From the Christian worldview, all human beings are made in the image of God. This means that all human beings have a soul that has intrinsic worth in the face of God. Our souls have been given free will that, with every action, make a free moral choice between good and evil. From these ideas, political and social equality for all humans are a logical necessity. But if the Judeo-Christian corpus of stories really is the originator of the idea of freedom and equality, why the long lag between the original idea and the full practice of these ideas by most institutions? Siedentop (2014) argues that the change in fundamental concepts, such as a revolution in moral equality, require millennia to realise their full impact. Relative to the full span of human history, the Greek and Christian revolutions in moral equality were fast. Siedentop (2014, 114) writes: “Centuries would be required for the implications of Christian moral beliefs to be drawn out and clarified—and even more time would pass before long established social practices or institutions were reshaped by these implications”

Next to universal equality, in the book "The Disappearance of God, a Define Mystery", Friedman (1995) makes an argument for the emergence of the sovereign individual in the Hebrew Bible. He describes how gradually from Genesis to Ezra to Esther, there is a transition away from divine responsibility for life on Earth, to human responsibility for life on Earth. At some point in history, people were not self-aware, not self-conscious, and not seen as differentiated individuals with personal and free moral choices. Friedman describes the development of humanity towards these qualities of the individual in more detail, and shows how this development was based on the Judeo-Christian corpus of stories.

On the same token, Judaism also played a pivotal role in the emergence of the emphasis on the individual. As can be read in the progression of the Old Testament, the state of Israel rises and collapses, and again, rises and collapses. At the beginning of the Old Testament it is the state that is worshipped by the people of Israel. The repeated collapse of their society happens until the Israelites realise that it is not the state that is the place of salvation: it is the sovereign individual. They realise that it is not the moral ethic from the realisation of a state that should be sought, but they realise that it is the moral integrity of the sovereign individual which has the potential to save humankind. "Israel" literally means "he who wrestles with God". In other words, those who wrestles with the ultimate universal ethic (read God) are the people of Israel. The people of Israel also turn out to be the chosen people of God. This means that the chosen people of God, therefore, are sovereign individuals, it is not a society. This is a Judeo-Christian realisation that has formed more of our conceptualisation than we can likely imagine.

I believe that it is important to note that this evolution also means that the individual becomes responsible. If the individual is indeed a free moral actor and the fate of societies and the world are based on those free moral actors, all those actors bear that responsibility personally. We can imagine that this allows for deep meaning for all individuals. Any one person is indeed responsible for everything that he or she does. This allows for a deep sense of meaning and engagement. However, there is a darker side to the same coin. It also means that if a person commits a wrong moral action, that person is ultimately responsible, and this puts tremendous pressure on the individual. It is easy to understand why some people would wish to evade this responsibility. To sum up, realising that the individual is sovereign makes the individual responsible. With that, both deep meaning and a possible

In sum, the change in morality that Judaism and Christianity brought is best explained through its emphasis on the sovereignty of the individual, not on the popular sovereignty of citizenship, as the Athenians did. The sovereignty of the individual is the idea that men are equal in dignity because every human being is made in the image of God. In Judaism and Christianity, the free will of the individual became the foundation for moral action and virtue. Free will was not based on the unequal inheritance of people but on how individuals decided to act. The belief that every human being is equally responsible for his or her personal actions and everyone is of equal merit. This makes both Judaism and Christianity the first universalist ethos. Universalism then, is the belief in universal salvation for all of humankind.

Consequently, it was the merging of the Judeo-Christian emphasis on the sovereignty of the individual together with the Greek philosophy of democracy and the idea of popular sovereignty, that resulted in the liberal democracies as we know it today. The enlightenment was partly the articulation of the idea of the sovereignty of the individual. The rational clarity that came from the enlightenment with thinkers such as Locke, Rousseau, Hume, and Medison articulated the millennia old idea of the sovereignty of the individual for the first time in human history. From the articulation of the Judeo-Christian ethic rose the instantiation into codified law in documents such as the constitution in the United States of America in 1788. This is reflected in the constitution by the sentence:

It took the project of the rational enlightenment to come to a full articulation of the unalienable rights of the sovereign individual and the case that this was universal. Remember: humanity rose out of unconsciousness into consciousness developing the truths that the founders of America deemed to be self-evident. This idea needed millennia of Judeo-Christian trial and error based in stories, grounded in Greek philosophy, to finally find its articulated potential in codified law.

Conclusion

Human inequality was universally sanctioned over all of history. It was, and still is, the norm in most places in the world. Around 500 BC the Athenians in Greece were the first people in the world to experiment with a government style which gave ultimate power to a large group of people in the state; the system called democracy. The idea was based on popular sovereignty, i.e. ultimate authority in the hands of the people as a state. This form of direct democracy had its downsides, individuals were in no way protected from the state or the majority. In other words, the individual was still subordinate to the state and to the majority.

Western civilisation developed into the free liberal democracies as we know it by the merging of Greek democratic philosophy, together with the fundamental belief that the individual is sovereign. The latter idea being based on the ethic in the Judeo-Christian corpus of stories. The faith based decision that the following truths are self-evident: both men and women are created in the image of God. This necessarily means that human beings are sovereign individuals capable of free will and creating their own happiness.

Before these ideas could be fully articulated and instantiated into codified law, some millennia were needed to fully live out and understand this Moral ethic. The enlightenment was the project that rationally articulated the ideas from the Greeks, Jews, and Christians on which all Western democracies are based.

All of these ideas have resulted in societies that discard slavery, enjoy open criticism of all, proclaim equality among all men and women by law, and have, in principal, equal rights for all minority groups. People in Western societies are more free and every person is fundamentally treated as a self-moving individual capable of making moral choices. All of this has not been the case anywhere else in history and nowhere else on Earth today.

To conclude, the ideas of democracy, liberty, and individual freedom are historically rare and far from self evident. People in Western societies need to be aware of the miracle they are living in, and have to rekindle the belief in their own moral righteousness, because fundamentally, the Western Greek and Judeo-Christian ethic is universally good without being perfect.

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Niek Wierenga