Do All Democracies Have to Die?

On Inauguration Day, an ancient theory of political collapse.

Ancient thinkers believed that political systems, like people, had natural lifespans and that, like seasons, one type of system followed another in a predictable and unchanging cycle. To the ancient mind, the modern concept of gradual progress towards a better political system (liberal democracy, say), and the idea that once achieved that political system would maintain itself by virtue of its own natural superiority, would have seemed a wishful denial of the laws of nature.

A theory of cyclical political change emerges in the works of Plato and Aristotle, but its best and most impactful expression is found in The Histories of Polybius.

A Greek statesman, brought to Rome as a hostage in 167 BC, Polybius fell into a learned circle centred on one of the greatest leaders of the age – the man who would come to be known, after the final destruction of Carthage, as Scipio Africanus. Polybius accompanied Scipio on campaign in Spain and in Africa; he watched Carthage, the capital of Rome’s most storied enemy, burn to the ground; and, a few months later, saw the desolate aftermath of the fall of Corinth, the last of the great Greek city states to resist Roman rule. The year was 146 BC and Rome was now the undisputed hegemon of the Mediterranean world.

Polybius had lived through an unprecedentedly swift shift in the world order. He had been born into a world dominated by the magnificent Hellenistic monarchies; he died in one ruled by the still unpolished Roman republic. It was a shift that needed explaining, and so Polybius turned to history.

Destruction, painted by Thomas Cole in 1836, is the fourth in a five-painting series entitled The Course of Empire which charts the rise and fall of a civilisation.

The forty-volume universal history he produced began with a statement of intent. He wanted to investigate, he said, how “almost the whole of the known world was conquered and fell under the single rule of the Romans, and that too in a space of not quite 53 years”.

Rome was on top, but what sort of constitution had brought it there? In pursuit of this question, Polybius identified six different forms of political organisation. Three of these (monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy) were good; three (despotism, oligarchy, and mob rule) were bad. Each good form had a bad equivalent, alike in structure and appearance but rotten at its core. The divergence between the good and bad version of each form began in the moral character of its leaders: just, honourable men, with a proper sense of public duty presided over monarchies, aristocracies, and democracies; unjust, corrupt, and selfish men presided over tyrannies, oligarchies, and mob free-for-alls.

The natural imperfections in human nature, Polybius argued, meant that each good form of government must inevitably degenerate into its darker counterpart. This, in turn, survived only until it became so intolerable that it was overthrown and replaced with the next good form of government in the cycle.

That cycle, according to Polybius’ theory, plays out as follows:

1. Kingship emerges from chaos. Imagine there has been some great disaster, Polybius instructs us, and the human race has been almost entirely wiped out. The survivors huddle together, forming herds and tribes. Within these groups, as happens in the animal kingdom, the strongest and bravest member emerges as leader, establishing a primitive form of one-man rule. The herd grows and the relationships within it become more complex. It now requires a system of law as well as protection from external threats, and so strength-based one-man rule develops into a justice-dispensing monarchy.

2. Kingship degenerates into tyranny. The hardship of state building initially forces the monarch – selected for his strength and wisdom – to continue to live and work alongside his subjects. As the state becomes richer and more powerful, however, and royal power becomes hereditary, the monarch’s heirs become lazy, entitled, and degenerate. They now view themselves as superior to and separate from their subjects and indulge their personal appetites without regard for the common good. As the rulers enjoy a decadence of luxury, gluttony, and sex, monarchy degenerates into tyranny.

3. Tyranny is ousted by aristocracy. Tyrants make enemies, fast. Men come to feel aggrieved by the imbalance of power, or to resent the tyrant’s ability to steal their wives and arbitrarily execute their sons. A small group of such men coalesces. They resent the injustices of tyranny more bitterly than their peers and channel this resentment into forming plots against the ruler. The tyrant is ousted and, in gratitude, the people give public power to the leaders of the conspiracy. Because wise, noble, and courageous men are the most likely to resist tyranny, the state is now governed by an aristocracy (in its original Greek sense: “rule by the best of men”).

4. Aristocracy degenerates into oligarchy. This first generation of aristocrats – virtuous men who had risked everything to oppose unjust rule and fight for the good of the state – look upon the public power they have been given as both a privilege and a duty, deploying it with the utmost care. Their sons, however, have had to fight for nothing; they have been brought up as the spoilt children of wealthy and powerful men and assume they have the right to use that wealth and power as they wish. They become greedy, drunken, and sexually predatory. This is no longer aristocracy (“rule by the best men”) but oligarchy (simply, “rule by the few”).

5. Oligarchy is overthrown by democracy. Just like tyranny before it, oligarchy becomes increasingly unbearable for its subjects. At this point, it takes only one man to oppose the oligarchs; all the people rush to his cause, and the oligarchy is overthrown in popular revolt. The question of how to govern the state arises once again. There is still enough folk memory of the tyranny to evince a horror of monarchy; more recent experience demonstrates the dangers of an aristocracy. The people feel they can trust no-one to rule over them fairly and so they take on the governance of the state themselves, giving rise to democracy.

6. Democracy degenerates into mob-rule. The first generation of a democracy thrives. Each person knows the value of freedom and equality before the law by his own direct experience of their opposites, and so these are the values which drive his political decision making. The maintenance of such unifying, stabilising public virtue requires sacrifice on the part of the individual – he must put limits on his own ambition to avoid upsetting the balance of power and restrain himself from displays of wealth to avoid separating himself from his fellow citizen. The second generation of a democracy might deem these sacrifices worthwhile, but the third, forgetting the reasons they were made in the first place, does not – when more glittering and immediate prizes are on offer, they find themselves relieved to betray the values of their fathers.

   The richest men in the state, meanwhile, have become addicted to the prestige attached to public office, and seek to co-opt more and more of this power for themselves. To this end, they offer the poorest elements in the state riches, license, and opportunities for cathartic internecine violence. (Some might draw modern parallels here.) Factions arise, led by demagogues. Public votes and assemblies degenerate into violence; there are massacres and lynch mobs; looting and confiscations of property. The rule of law has broken down and the state is left at mercy of uncontrolled mob-rule.

7. Soon one leader – the man best able to channel the energy and violence of the mob to his own ends – seizes control of the state. He establishes himself as a sole ruler, and the cycle begins again. (Polybius is, regrettably, not quite clear on how the sole rule of a demagogue gives rise to the return of a noble king.)

This pattern of decline, Polybius suggested, was natural and unavoidable. Just as rust dissolved iron, and woodworms ate away at wood, every society nurtured within itself the source of its own ruin.

It had always been relatively easy, Polybius thought, to analyse Greek city states according to these categories. Classical Athens was a democracy; Athens under the Thirty Tyrants an oligarchy; Alexander’s Macedon a monarchy; Dionysus’ Sicily a tyranny etc. And once a state had been categorised you could simply follow the pattern to predict its political future ad infinitum. You might be wrong in your estimation of how long the degeneration would take or when a revolution would occur, Polybius conceded, but you would always know in which direction things were going.

Rome, however, posed a problem for Polybius. It had, over years of trial and error, developed a composite constitution that drew elements from each of the good forms of government. The consuls wielded some of the powers of a king; the senate of an aristocracy; the people of their counterparts in a democracy. These elements could support but also, crucially, oppose and check each other’s power. Balance in the state was thus maintained and no one element came to take precedence over the others.

No one – not even the Romans – could say whether their state was more monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy, and in never becoming one of these they avoided imminent degeneration into tyranny, oligarchy, or mob-rule. This mixed constitution, Polybius said, was the best of any that existed in his time.

Writing a century later, the great Roman orator Cicero agreed. In his De Republica, he has one of the speakers assert, with a mention of Polybius, that “by far and away the best constitution is the one handed down to us by our ancestors”. Its mixed nature, the argument ran, freed it from the most destabilising excesses characteristic of each pure form of government.

The idea that a mixed constitution could slow down, or even save you from, the pattern of political decline would go on to have a major influence on the men who drew up the US constitution. But how far did it hold?

Cicero, for all his pride in Rome, wasn’t entirely sure. “It is the foundation of civic wisdom,” he argued, “to observe the course and transitions of public affairs… their natural and circular motion… so that, by understanding in what direction a particular type of state might tip, you might hold it back or resist it”. As he wrote, the carefully crafted balance of the Roman Republic was collapsing around him; within fifteen years, Rome would be ruled by a single emperor.

It was an outcome that had been predicted, to some degree, by Polybius. Other mixed constitutions, he noted, had been destabilised by greed and expansionism; forces which put an unbearable pressure on civic morality and cohesion. A misgiving hangs over his work that the same forces may one day destroy the equilibrium at Rome.

Polybius recalls that as Carthage burnt Scipio turned to him. “A glorious moment, Polybius,” he said, “but I have a dread foreboding that some day the same doom will be pronounced on my own country.” Even in the moment of his greatest victory, the leading Roman of his day felt certain that no state, however great, could last in tact forever.