Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 08:52:44 EDT
From: Robert Justin Lipkin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: A Democracy Theorist At the Founding?
I am currently researching two related issues: (1) To what degree was the Founding generation familiar with the distinction between democracy and republicanism? (I know, for instance, that Fisher Ames was aware of the distinction at least in the early 1800s, and made some harsh remarks against democracy) and (2) Did anyone embrace democracy as superior to republicanism?
One fairly obvious answer to query (1) is to look at Madison's distinction between the two in Federalist 39, which should be read in the light of his discussion of the difficulty of describing political phenomena in Federalist 37, and which is echoed in Federalist 55 in his well known remark, "Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob." Once you start with Madison's distinction, which rests on equating democracy with direct popular participation and decision and republicanism with representation, one can't say dem.>rep. because the former is no longer practicable. Among the major framers & founders, James Wilson is often cited as the most democratic theorist, both in his commitment to a doctrine of popular sovereignty and his willingness to have all three political branches of the national government elected by the people. There are good discussions of Wilson in Jenny Nedelsky's and Sam Beer's books. On the populist side, beyond Paine, one can look at the well-known 1776 tract, The People the Best Governors, reprinted in the Hyneman-Lutz collection for Liberty.
Jack Rakove
Stanford University
