122

7 The New Ochlophobia?

Populism, Majority Rule, and Prospects
for Democratic Republicanism

John P. McCormick

Leading participants in current debates over the republican revival

espouse skeptical views regarding majoritarianism and populism that
potentially undermine the practical realization of democratic ideals.1 In
particular, this aversion to majority rule and populist politics potentially
obstructs efforts to address the dire problem of proliferating inequality
that plagues contemporary democracies. This essay focuses on recent
books by Philip Pettit and Nadia Urbinati that manifest such anxieties
over majority rule and populism; it accentuates certain ideological and
historical mischaracterizations committed by each author when they
criticize majoritarianism and populist politics; and it explores more dir-
ectly democratic institutional alternatives, drawn from Athenian democ-
racy and the Roman republic, to their primarily elite-mediated political
prescriptions. Urbinati understands herself to be a critic of Pettit’s
republicanism, but I will demonstrate that her sociopolitical project
shares much in common with Pettit’s institutional model of republican
legitimation. Both authors, as it were, stack the deck in favor of models
of representative government centered on elections and qualified by anti-
majoritarian measures, models that debilitate rather than encourage the
kinds of institutional reform necessary to reinvigorate contemporary
democracy in an age of wildly expanding economic inequality.
I argue that between the abstractly normative level of Pettit’s arguments
and his institutional recommendations in On the People’s Terms (2012a),
anti-majoritarian preferences and commitments intervene to veer his
model of political legitimacy – Pettit’s egalitarian aspirations notwith-
standing – from the democratic to the aristocratic end of the republican
continuum. I also demonstrate that in Democracy Disfigured, Urbinati
(2014) refuses to acknowledge that representative government, as she
reconstructs it from intellectual history and from empirical reality –
despite the highly imaginative Arendtian–Millian theoretical frame-
work that she employs – does not encourage in any constructive way
the progressive reform of contemporary democracy. Very much like
Pettit in important respects, her account of contemporary representative
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The New Ochlophobia? 123

democracy dramatically downplays structural biases that skew electoral

politics in favor of certain powerful, entrenched minorities. I further-
more question Urbinati’s efforts to disqualify the Roman republic from
consideration as a polity worthy of comparison with democratic Athens,
and as an intellectual-political resource for institutional reform efforts
within contemporary democracies.
A genuine democratic republicanism, I will argue, needs to appro-
priate, in more imaginative and less ochlophobic ways than Pettit and
Urbinati do, lessons from the republican and democratic past, in par-
ticular the refreshing honesty with which the many, the people, the poor
confronted the first-order problem of economic-cum-political power.
For instance, to prevent oligarchs from using their wealth to diminish
the political freedom of less-advantaged citizens, the hoplites of ancient
Greece and the plebeians of republican Rome established institutions
that granted ultimate legislative authority to the majority qua the poor
and distributed executive and judicial offices through lottery or through
guarantees that the poor would hold such positions. Athenian democrats
favored majority rule and lottery-appointed offices and courts, and
Roman plebeians pushed for majoritarian reforms and the establishment
of a tribunate to counteract the danger that wealth would determine
public policy.
In sharp contrast with the electoral and counter-majoritarian models
of democracy set forth by Pettit and Urbinati, Athenian democracy and
the Roman republic exhibited primary institutions intended to ensure
that the poor would rule over or share rule equitably with the rich.
Looking to the use of lottery in multiple spheres of Athenian govern-
ment and the institutional ensemble associated with the tribunate in the
Roman republic, I accentuate how democratic republicans confronted,
head-on, constitutionally and collectively, what Pettit’s republicanism
and Urbinati’s representative democracy treat as a secondary, private
and individual matter: the imposing political power of wealth.

1 Philip Pettit’s “Republican” Anxieties over

Majority Tyranny
Philip Pettit’s On the People’s Terms (2012a) aspires to accomplish
two tasks: first, to serve as a philosophical reiteration of the theory
of nondomination that the author previously elaborated in his widely
influential Republicanism (1997) and A Theory of Freedom (2001a); and,
second, to formulate a novel theory of political legitimacy on the basis of
Pettit’s rearticulated theory of freedom. As a philosophical restatement
of Pettit’s earlier, paradigm-setting efforts in normative political theory,

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124 John P. McCormick

On the People’s Terms (hereafter OPT) is a resounding success; the book is

a deeply impressive and largely persuasive refortification of the theory of
freedom as nondomination. Pettit refines his philosophical justification
for the principle of nondomination without compromising the vitality
of his previous works; indeed, in OPT, Pettit successfully preserves and
advances the arguments, reinforcing the egalitarian and emancipatory
potential of his original normative vision.
Pettit quite compellingly sets out, as a matter of first principle and at
the most abstract plane of the project, the following conception of pol-
itical legitimacy: “People must have such a power over government that
the regime can be described, in a rich, egalitarian sense of the term, as
democratic: a regime that establishes the kratos, or ‘control,’ [by] the
demos or ‘people’ ” (OPT 239). Matters, however, become more prob-
lematic as Pettit elaborates the institutional model of democracy that he
hopes will best realize his theory of political legitimacy. Pettit is aware
that greater institutional specificity may generate further controversy
concerning his attempt to formulate a republican model of democracy.
Since the author intends for his institutional model to be “realizable” and
“realistic” (OPT 180-01), Pettit anticipates that, at the level of practice,
it may not “persuade everyone” – even many who are sympathetic to his
theory of freedom. This is the spirit in which I analyze Pettit’s project.
Throughout OPT, Pettit bristles at two notions that have been
associated with earlier iterations of his theory: (a) that his republic-
anism falls on the aristocratic rather than democratic side of the trad-
itional republican political spectrum (OPT 6, n. 4); and (b) that his
institutional assessments are more affirmative than critical of contem-
porary democratic practice; i.e., that they uncritically validate present
arrangements rather than enjoining spirited efforts to reform them (OPT
217). In response, Pettit takes deliberate steps in OPT to dispel such
perceptions of his political-institutional agenda (OPT 23, 61, 210, 227,
257, 289, 292).
Overall, I believe that Pettit’s sketch of an institutional model in OPT
is still, in fact, susceptible to both of these lines of criticism. Pettit’s
model inclines toward aristocratic rather than democratic republicanism
for the following simple reason: it is designed, primarily, to forestall
the danger of majority tyranny, and, only secondarily or incidentally, to
address the danger that wealthy and prominent citizens will wield exces-
sive influence over a democracy’s public policy. Moreover, the model, as
presently articulated, tends to be more affirmative than critical of con-
temporary representative democracy because Pettit employs a double
standard when he compares and contrasts existing electoral/representa-
tive institutions with non-electoral/more direct alternatives to them.

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The New Ochlophobia? 125

Republicanism, Democratic or Aristocratic?

Historically, democratic republicans deemed the excessive political
influence of wealth to be the primary threat to the liberty of popular
governments. I am thinking of hoplites and thetes in ancient Greek dem-
ocracies, the plebeians of ancient Italian republics and lower guildsmen
within medieval and early modern Swiss, German, and Italian city-states.
As a result of this central concern, they placed at the forefront, not at
the sideline, of institutional reforms practices that directly mitigated the
excessive political influence of the wealthy; these included, among others,
the extensive use of lottery rather than election in the appointment of
public officials and the reservation of powerful offices and assemblies for
poorer citizens. Of course, they always insisted that large citizen assem-
blies, governed by majoritarian procedures, ought to function as the
most powerful institutions within republics, even when the latter were
understood as “mixed regimes.”
On the contrary, aristocratic republicans – Greek oligarchs, Roman
nobles, and the grandees of early modern city-states – deemed majority
tyranny to be the greatest threat to republican liberty. Consequently, they
advocated the use of indirectly accountable senatorial or judicial bodies
to temper the authority of majoritarian assemblies, and they preferred
election to lottery as a political appointment device. In OPT, Pettit – admit-
tedly with far greater qualification than in earlier works – places similar
counter-majoritarian institutional bulwarks against majority tyranny at the
center of his institutional model, and he declares explicit preference for
election-based versus lottery-based modes of political appointment. Also
consistent with previous work, despite expressed worries about wealth
inequality, in OPT Pettit sets out no institutional safeguards against the
excessive political influence of socioeconomic elites.
Pettit’s model explicitly condones “inequalities in people’s private
wealth and power” (OPT 298). The author insists that his model “puts
significant constraints on how large material inequalities can be” because
the “ideal of equal status freedom” central to Pettit’s republicanism
requires that each individual “command the respect of others” (OPT
298). Moreover, Pettit declares that, within his republican model of pol-
itical legitimacy, government “will have to provide in a decent measure
against misery and poverty, unfairness and inequality” (OPT 3). But
Pettit provides no guidelines in OPT regarding: (a) just how much eco-
nomic inequality his model will permit, and, more importantly, (b) what
institutional means he advocates to ensure that acceptable economic
inequality will not translate into the kind of political inequality that
facilitates domination.

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126 John P. McCormick

Pettit justifies these omissions because, he claims, OPT is primarily

concerned with political legitimacy and not social justice; that is, it
addresses first and foremost citizen–state relations not citizen–citizen
relations, or, in Pettit’s terms, “public domination” not “private dom-
ination” (OPT 3). This approach to political legitimacy and public
domination permits Pettit to conceive of the state generally as either a
self-motivated entity, or, as we will see, as an agent of potentially dom-
inating popular majorities – but not primarily as the agent of potentially
dominating wealthy interests (OPT 3). The mere fact that Pettit believes
that he can discuss political legitimacy or public domination largely inde-
pendent of considerations of social justice and private domination would
be enough for some to place his theory of legitimacy on the aristocratic
rather than the democratic end of the republican spectrum. Indeed, it is
telling, I think, that the word “class,” in the socioeconomic sense, is never
mentioned in OPT, and that Pettit exhibits an unfortunate tendency to
roughly equate the respective political power of private corporations and
trade unions (OPT 116, 234), when, certainly in the present moment,
power disparities between the two are growing exponentially in the
former’s favor.
To declare that Pettit’s institutional model of political legitimacy leans
toward aristocratic republicanism is not to assert that it is fully anti-
democratic. Quite admirably, Pettit aspires after a form of democracy in
which the people wield not only immediate influence over their govern-
ment, as in more narrow “Schumpeterian” schemes, but also sustain-
able control over it (OPT 23). Democratic control, for Pettit, means that
citizens impose direction on government policies along two tracks: first,
through the short-term electoral-contestatory institutions of his model;
and, second, through the long-term generation of ever-expanding egali-
tarian social norms in democratic societies. On Pettit’s understanding,
these egalitarian norms gain expression in legal and constitutional
reforms that serve to facilitate further democratization within society
over time.
However, for Pettit, democratic influence, control, and direction is
desirable only insofar as electoral majorities do not dominate vulner-
able minorities: specifically, as he lists them consistently throughout
the book, minorities identified by their religious, cultural, racial or
sexual characteristics (OPT 2, 135, 211–214, 226, 262, 304). As in pre-
vious works, these vulnerable, “sticky” minorities are those that matter
most to Pettit. The author is much less concerned with invulnerable,
privileged minorities (OPT 85, 172, 209–211, 218, 231–234, 250),
whom he apparently deems to be not quite so “sticky.” Pettit con-
sistently groups together wealthy political actors (i.e., corporations

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The New Ochlophobia? 127

or special-interest lobbies) with independent militaries and foreign

powers, casting them all, generally, as actors who might, but do not
necessarily or inevitably, act as agents that dominate the common citi-
zens of democracies. On Pettit’s conception, therefore, majority tyr-
anny is an endogenous threat to popular government; disproportionate
political influence by the wealthy poses only an exogenous threat. Yet
historical and empirical research affords us ample evidence to suggest
that the wealthy have always been, and invariably will continue to be,
an imminently dominating force within democracies. I mention here
only Aristotle’s Politics, and, more recently, the work of Jeffrey Winters
(2011) and Thomas Piketty (2014).
Throughout OPT, Pettit assumes that the fundamentally “electoral”
quality of his model – namely, the fact that politicians must seek votes
from as wide a constituency as possible – is the first assurance against
majority tyranny. Politicians looking for an ever-increasing number of
potential supporters throughout the electorate will purportedly refrain
from pursuing policies that egregiously offend some segment of the popu-
lation at the behest of another. Failing that, Pettit is confident that the
“contestatory” aspect of the model ensures that majority tyranny cannot
persist indefinitely; his model provides individuals and subgroups myriad
public avenues and private resources, through which they can appeal and
litigate against potentially oppressive policies generated by and through
normal electoral mechanisms.
Under the electoral dimension of Pettit’s theory, political elites (either
inherently or as the agents of economic elites) do not pose dire threats
to the liberty of common citizens because such actors can be shamed
into good behavior by public pressure to adhere to egalitarian norms.
However, Pettit does not give citizen majorities the same benefit of the
doubt he affords political elites. Notwithstanding the egalitarian norms
that Pettit imagines to pervade democratic societies, he does not seem
to think that citizen majorities within the latter are swayable by a kind
of public shame; for instance, the moral reservations that moved the
Athenian demos, in Thucydides’ unforgettable account, to reverse its pre-
vious decision to kill every male citizen of Mytilene and sell all of its
women and children into slavery. Moreover, the contestatory feature of
Pettit’s model, through which individuals and subgroups are entitled to
litigate against the state, is suspect for two reasons: it places enormous
cost-prohibitive burdens on disadvantaged individuals and groups, and
it leaves them dependent upon the good will of a class of public-interest
lawyers and advocates who, Pettit somewhat whimsically insists, will
exist in sufficient numbers within a democratic society characterized by
exponentially proliferating egalitarian norms.

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128 John P. McCormick

Pettit seems satisfied by the prospect that the majority qua majority
(that is, poorer and middling citizens) in his model successfully influences
and controls public policy through electoral processes and that the
majority itself is protected from domination by factions of governing
elites through the proper functioning of constitutional separation of
powers (OPT 220–223). Pettit does not institutionally empower major-
ities to contest outcomes of government policies because he assumes: (a)
that the latter already approximately reflects their preferences, and
(b) that an institutional redoubling of majority power would pose an
undue threat to minorities. Yet, much more than Pettit acknowledges,
the extent to which majorities actually influence and control policy-
making in electoral democracies is a highly controversial issue in polit-
ical science. Moreover, the history of the kind of indirectly accountable,
counter-majoritarian institutions that Pettit often endorses – constitu-
tional and appellate courts, senatorial and oversight bodies, administra-
tive boards, and separated powers – points to the following unsettling
conclusion: privileged minorities have proven much more adept at using
such institutions for the purposes of domination than vulnerable ones
have for avoiding it. In other words, Pettit’s institutional model of dem-
ocracy may sacrifice robust rule by the many for the sake of a deeply
ineffectual protection of the vulnerable few – and, contra Pettit’s sin-
cere intentions, it may actually inflate the dangerous influence of the
privileged few within democratic politics.
Because hijacking of electoral processes by wealthy elites, in Pettit’s
estimation, is only an exceptional and not a normal circumstance, the
majority qua majority enjoys no collective power of contestation under
his scheme – as they did, most notably, in the Roman republic, which
is, supposedly, Pettit’s republican touchstone. Pettit might object that
his theory sets no prohibition on the establishment of mass-contestatory
institutions – he certainly has good things to say about, for instance, the
British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly (OPT 197, 200–205, 235–236),
and, very kindly, my own writings that draw upon the example of the ple-
beian tribunate in ancient Rome (OPT 213, 217). Indeed, Pettit insists
that any and all experimentation with more direct and egalitarian insti-
tutional measures not expressly ruled out by his institutional reflections
are entirely permissible within his framework.
However, there is reason to think that Pettit believes that full empower-
ment of contestatory power on the part of citizen majorities – even if it
minimized the deleterious potential influence of concentrated wealth –
would serve to exacerbate the threat of majority tyranny, which stands
as the summum malum of his republican theory of democracy. As Pettit
declares, republican government ought to “protect against private forms

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The New Ochlophobia? 129

of domination without perpetrating public forms” (OPT 6). Therefore,

Pettit’s anti-majoritarian commitments – his otherwise egalitarian
aspirations notwithstanding – have the effect of discouraging and perhaps
even disqualifying experimentation with mass-contestatory institutions
that would mitigate against the inordinate power of wealth in democracy.
If this is a correct assessment, then Pettit may share, at a deeper theoret-
ical level than he is aware, Montesquieu’s and Rousseau’s negative views
of institutions like the Roman tribunate, which they considered to be a
source of popular sedition and an instrument of majority tyranny.

Elective/Representative versus Randomizing/Direct Institutions

I suggest that Pettit is more complacent than he would like to be about
contemporary institutions because he applies a double standard to
evaluations of, on the one hand, counter-majoritarian and electoral
institutions, and, on the other, more directly majoritarian and lottery-
based ones. Pettit levels two main criticisms of both “plenary” assemblies
that include all citizens in political decision-making, and smaller “indica-
tive” assemblies, comprised of members drawn randomly from the gen-
eral citizenry. “Plenary” assemblies consistently fail the test of rational
consistency (OPT 191–193, 207, 246, 303); and, “indicative” assemblies
prove potentially unaccountable to the general public (OPT 198, 232).
Plenary assemblies, Pettit argues, tend to generate particular, discrete
legislative acts that are deeply inconsistent with each other over time;
members of indicative ones, undisciplined by the prospect of reelection,
may behave in irresponsible or self-serving ways that harm rather than
serve the common good.
History provides an answer to each of Pettit’s charges against these
kinds of institutions. In the first case, the Athenian assembly system,
which Pettit praises on different grounds (OPT 196, 222, n. 39), acted so
as to prevent precisely the kind of irrational outcomes that so worry the
author. Two subordinate assemblies, the boulē, which served an agenda-
setting function, and the nomothetai, empowered to invite revision of
laws, interacted with the citizen assembly, the ekklêsia, to discourage
the latter from lapsing into inconsistency when it promulgated legisla-
tion. Secondly, no popular government that ever employed large-scale
lotteries to appoint political officials did so without also establishing
schemes of strict public scrutiny for former officeholders. Upon com-
pletion of lottery-appointed offices, individuals within such systems
were compelled to account for their behavior before tribunal boards of
fellow citizens, where they confronted the prospect of severe penalties
for misbehavior – penalties ranging from fines to exile to death. In short,

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130 John P. McCormick

plenary, indicative, and lottery-based institutions were not as direly sus-

ceptible to irrationality and accountability problems as Pettit avers. Thus,
they should not be so readily dismissed as inspirations for contemporary
institutional reform.
Pettit’s incomplete assessment of such institutions would not be so
problematic if, in addition, he was not so sanguine about the efficacious
functioning of representative bodies within contemporary democracies.
Again, there are vast literatures, which Pettit does not engage, that are less
than optimistic about the extent to which: (1) elected officials actually
represent their constituencies, and (2) the prospect of reelection keeps
individual officeholders accountable to the general public. Wealth more
fundamentally than votes may be, in fact, the determining factor in both
lawmaking and electoral contests today (Bartels 2008; Gilens 2012).
Regarding elections, of course, this is hardly a new issue; Aristotle, who
had never heard of the US Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision,
noted that the richest citizens of democracies had good reasons to favor
political appointment through elections rather than through sortition.
Furthermore, Pettit often associates contemporary representative and
electoral institutions too intimately and exclusively with several principles
and values that are no doubt indispensable for a democracy’s civic health.
Here, I mention just one: freedom of speech (OPT 201–202). Pettit
suggests that modern representative and electoral democracies perform
better than earlier direct and lottery-based ones at fostering a political
culture of free speech. But literatures in which Pettit is well versed (OPT
196, 222), including the works of Josiah Ober (1989) and Moses Finley
(1985), attest to the thriving culture of free speech in democratic Athens;
I would add, as counter-examples from a different republican context,
Felix Gilbert’s (1957) and Nicolai Rubinstein’s (1968) scholarship
on the Florentine republic. Indeed, Pettit’s moral-historical narrative
regarding free speech could be reversed entirely. Drawing upon, for
starters, Habermas’ landmark work The Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere (1999), one could argue that free speech is diminished, not
enhanced, under conditions of mass party, representative democracy.

Republicanism,Wealth Inequality, and Clientelism

Returning to general considerations on the relationship between republic-
anism and democracy in OPT: Pettit’s failure to successfully distinguish
his own position from aristocratic republicanism is perhaps attributable
to a misunderstanding of what his critics mean by the term. Allow me to
use the issue of wealth inequality to illustrate this point as well. It is fair
to say that aristocratic republicans like Cicero, Guicciardini, Harrington,

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The New Ochlophobia? 131

and Montesquieu were sincerely worried that society’s richest individuals

rather than its “best men” would hold the preponderance of a republic’s
offices and that extensive economic inequality would corrupt the virtue
required of common citizens to maintain their liberty.
However, what actually makes them aristocratic republicans is the
fact that they also thought, and were more committed to the notion,
that democratic and egalitarian solutions to these problems were poten-
tial cures far more deadly than the actual disease (Nelson 2004). In
response to the wealth problem, they were loath to accept appointment
of magistrates through anything other than elective means, and, more-
over, they were terrified to permit economic equality to be legislated
through majoritarian procedures. Therefore, simply because Pettit shares
with Cicero, Guicciardini, Harrington, and Montesquieu an authentic,
general concern with the sociopolitical impact of wealth disparities, this
does not make his republicanism, in any substantive sense, egalitarian
or democratic. To do so, Pettit would have to move his own political
principles (pertaining to majority tyranny) and institutional preferences
(favoring elections and senatorial bodies) much farther away than he
does in OPT from those of the aristocratic republicans mentioned above.
Equality and hierarchy are complicated issues indeed in the history
of republicanism. Yet Pettit consistently casts republican principles
and practice tout court in a more thoroughgoing egalitarian and anti-
hierarchical fashion than the historical record warrants. Pettit’s inatten-
tion to important differences between democratic and aristocratic
republicans on these issues skews his narrative of the history of “repub-
licanism”; in particular, radically anti-elitist outliers like Machiavelli,
Richard Price, and the Levellers (OPT 6, 84, 83, 148, 150, 169, 174,
218, 221, 247) carry the republican standard much more prominently
than do mainstream, less egalitarian figures like Cicero, Guicciardini,
Harrington, and Montesquieu. Indeed, democratic and aristocratic
republicans would have interpreted statements like the following, which
Pettit asserts as straightforwardly “republican,” in decidedly different
ways: “the republican theory of social justice would argue that the state
should establish equal non-domination for its citizens in relation to
one another” (OPT 18). For instance, one of the great divisions among
different types of republicans concerns the extent to which clientelism
conforms with or is anathema to equitable relations among citizens.2
Many of the aristocratic republicans mentioned above would under-
stand Pettit’s statement to be completely compatible with patron–client
relations among citizens of different material endowments and social
status.3 Pettit seems unaware that hierarchical practices inherent to cli-
entelism were, for dominant figures of the republican tradition, including

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132 John P. McCormick

Rousseau (McCormick 2007, 14–15), not merely ancillary to, but con-
stitutive of, the notion of the liber, or free man, that serves as Pettit’s
exemplary republican citizen (OPT 6, 88, 221).4 Clientelist practices
condoned by republicans like Cicero and Rousseau would seem to violate,
in fundamental ways, the standards that Pettit sets for non-deferential
interactions among citizens, especially the fact that all citizens, according
to Pettit, must be able to unashamedly “look one another in the eye” as
full social equals (OPT 3, 17).
In their advocacy of patron–client relations, Roman and Florentine
elites, as well as many literati who translated their norms into philosoph-
ical form, thought the following to be entirely appropriate in republican
terms: that, contrary to Pettit’s aspirations, clients (less privileged citi-
zens) should be “subject to the will of others” (OPT 7), in particular,
subject in significant ways to the will of their patrons (purportedly more
prudent social superiors). Moreover, many political actors and theorists
whose “republican” bona fides are beyond reproach thought that citi-
zens’ “ability to choose” as they wish, consistently upheld as an inviol-
able form of freedom by Pettit, ought to be qualified by their ability
to maintain the “goodwill” of their patrons (OPT 7).5 In the Roman
and Florentine republican contexts, for example, patrons had enormous
influence over their clients’ choices regarding marriage, education, trade,
and, most importantly, over their participation in politics.
To be sure, whether Pettit gets republicanism “right” historic-
ally is largely beside the point. Pettit asserts that among the strongest
justifications for nondomination as an “ideal of freedom” is the fact
that the republican tradition makes this ideal “more widely acceptable”
through “historical credentials,” “historical pedigree,” and “intellec-
tual plausibility” (OPT 19). Pettit neither is, nor should he be, a sup-
plicant to standards of historical accuracy; he rightly asserts that “the
normative claims defended [in OPT] should not be judged by histor-
ical criteria” (OPT 20). The more pressing question is whether Pettit’s
peculiar engagement in OPT with history undermines his attempt to
systematically formulate a democratic republican model. I submit that
Pettit’s failure to engage the crucial differences between democratic
and aristocratic republicanism and his refusal to acknowledge the his-
torical pre-eminence of the former over the latter leave him less-than-
ideally positioned to properly evaluate the normative and institutional
alternatives that he considers in OPT and to properly exercise the
ultimate choices that he makes among them.
To sum up, a potentially radically egalitarian theory of freedom, such
as Pettit’s, cries out for instantiation by a radically democratic insti-
tutional model. The criticisms voiced here are intended to encourage

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The New Ochlophobia? 133

Pettit to formulate a more radical institutional model of democracy than

the one he sketches in OPT. The horizon of “realistic” or “realizable”
institutional possibilities are by no means exhausted by the electoral/
contestatory model he expounds in the book. To do so, Pettit, I suggest,
needs to relax his anxieties concerning tyrannical majorities and inten-
sify his worries about materially advantaged dominating minorities.
Moreover, he will need to evaluate with equal skepticism and generosity
all of the institutional possibilities afforded by the history of democratic
republics, ancient and modern.

2 Nadia Urbinati’s “Athenian” and Anti-populist

Representative Democracy
I turn now to Nadia Urbinati’s spirited and provocative book, Democracy
Disfigured (2014). I emphasize its provocative nature, because the
book functions most fundamentally as a political polemic – Democracy
Disfigured (DD) reads as the polemical counterpart of what I consider
to be her signature scholarly work, Representative Democracy (2006). In
DD, Urbinati targets three trends within recent democratic theory and
practice: what she calls the unpolitical (which she associates with Pettit’s
republicanism), the plebiscitarian, and the populist understandings of
democracy. I will focus on populism and what Urbinati identifies as
pernicious ancient Roman influences on contemporary populist pol-
itics. Interestingly, Urbinati uses the example of the Roman republic
quite differently than Pettit, but nevertheless does so in a way that also
serves sceptical conclusions regarding majoritarianism and, especially,
populism.6
Generally, one comes away from the book feeling that these three
strands of political theory and practice are Urbinati’s intermediary rather
than ultimate targets. The animus with which Urbinati argues against
them, the frequent mischaracterizations of these strands – both the
positions of scholars or actors espousing them, as well as the intellectual–
historical antecedents of these trends – prompt one to suspect that there
is a more dangerous, unidentified target behind her attacks on these
three academic and political trends. It is quite possible that the book
represents a kind of Berlusconi hangover. Indeed, no other political actor
is mentioned within DD’s pages as many times as the long-term Italian
Prime Minister (DD 4, 14, 28, 110, 148, 174, 208–209, 233). During
the book’s composition, Urbinati must have known that the man him-
self would very soon be departing the political scene. But DD betrays a
deep and pervasive anxiety that Berlusconismo may persist for decades
to come in unpolitical, plebiscitarian, and populist guises.

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134 John P. McCormick

Populism and Representative Democracy: Idealizations and Realities

Urbinati takes two tacks on the issue of populist politics: on the one hand,
populism is, she claims, too amorphous a concept to have any meaning;
on the other hand, she casts it as a definitive step down a slippery slope
toward the most nefarious forms of authoritarian extremism (DD 4–5,
7–9, 11–12, 128–129, 231–232, 134, 152–158). Thus, the book presents
proponents of populism as either conceptually confused naïfs or as proto-
Caesarists. Urbinati provides much evidence for the ambiguity of popu-
lism; she notes correctly that the phenomenon can and has facilitated and
enhanced democracy in certain contexts (for instance, in the nineteenth-
century United States of America, and in certain twentieth-century
Latin and South American cases) (Maloy 2013, 145–187; DD 145–149,
232). It is therefore especially perplexing that Urbinati leaps to the insist-
ence that, all in all, populism is a right-wing phenomenon that invariably
threatens to transcend democratically salutary constitutional norms and
threatens to abusively curtail the rights of minorities (DD 131–142, 145–
146, 166–167). Urbinati accuses democrats sympathetic to populism of
conveniently assimilating it to its most progressive historical expressions.
But Urbinati provides no convincing evidence why it should be identified
categorically with its most reactionary historical forms.
Virtually all of the charges that Urbinati levels against populism –
particularly the spectre of uncertain outcomes and the possibility of
worst-case abuses of power – could be directed toward the status quo of
representative democracy as she defines it. Urbinati worries that there is
no accountability mechanism built into the logic of populism, such that
the many – and more likely, the demagogues who mislead them – will
use appeals to the existential legitimacy of “the people” as justifications
for abrogating constitutional norms (DD 137–143). But this is overly
alarmist. Urbinati ignores the extent to which the interactions of social
movements, political parties, and government institutions pose, in most
cases, serious obstacles to unhindered Caesarism, and, in fact, she never
for a moment considers the extent to which such interactions may gen-
erate precisely the kind of public debate conducive to salutary public
opinion-formation that she attributes only to the status quo of represen-
tative democracy.
It is not, after all, as if there is an excess, a surfeit of robust account-
ability operating within contemporary representative democracy – a
fact which, in no small part, explains why various forms of populism
have gained such profound political purchase today. Urbinati’s model
of representative democracy is, along these lines, much too far removed
from this political reality. Urbinati’s version of representative democracy

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The New Ochlophobia? 135

constitutes an idealized version of some amalgam of Arendtian plur-

alism and Millian deliberative democracy (DD 3–4, 45, 77–78, 171),
an undeniably attractive ideal model in which robustly representative
public opinion emerges from interactions between society and govern-
ment in a way that incorporates all citizens as genuine actors and not
as mere spectators. But Urbinati’s idealizations run the risk of uncrit-
ically legitimating the political reality of contemporary representative
democracy. The only shortcoming of the latter that Urbinati is willing
to concede is the problem of money in politics (DD 54–68), a problem
easily corrected, in her estimation, by robust campaign finance reform
(DD 56–57). Indeed, such reforms might be successfully enacted in her
idealized model of democracy. But given the lack of effective account-
ability mechanisms characteristic of real-world representative democ-
racies, necessary reforms are highly unlikely to be realized in a system
where those charged with enacting such reforms benefit the most by
scuttling them.

Ideological Uses of Athens and Rome

Urbinati’s scholarship deserves praise for audaciously re-theorizing
and defending modern representative government by highlighting its
affinities, rather than its differences, with ancient Athenian democracy
(2002). But she pushes this line of argument much too far in Democracy
Disfigured. Modern representative government remains Athenian in
principle, Urbinati insists, because it shares with Athenian democracy a
commitment to isonomia and isegoria, the formal equality of all citizens
before the law: more specifically, the equal right to participate politically
by speaking out and by voting, such that the voice and the vote of each
citizen carries equal dignity and equal political weight (DD 20).
This affinity with Athenian democracy makes modern representa-
tive government vastly superior to populism, in Urbinati’s estimation,
because populism inherits too many elements from ancient Roman
republicanism that are fundamentally inimical to such equality (DD
166–169). On Urbinati’s view, virtually any principle or practice that can
be traced back to ancient Rome is a threat to contemporary democracy –
for instance, the toleration of formal inequalities among citizens, an
undervaluing of free speech, the absence of genuine public opinion, and
so on. These fundamentally Roman elements, Urbinati insists, always
portend unjust and perverse political consequences for the functioning
of contemporary representative democracy.
But Urbinati’s interpretation of Roman history is decidedly narrow
and inordinately hierarchical; it is derived much more extensively, let us

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136 John P. McCormick

say, from Momigliano than it is from Machiavelli. I might even suggest

perhaps uncharitably that her account of ancient Rome owes less to
Momigliano than to Mussolini. Urbinati’s rendering of Roman politics
is almost invariably drawn from the early history of the city, where there
was more segregation among classes, and more fixed separations among
popular and aristocratic institutions – a society in which social mobility
was undoubtedly quite limited. But this is a deeply distorted view of the
Roman republic as it evolved over the course of its history, a regime in
which Romans continually negotiated and renegotiated its two notions
of citizenship – that is, between the universal notion of the populus
Romanus, and the more differentiated notion captured by the expression
SPQR: the people and senate of Rome. Rome, for Urbinati, is always the
latter and seldom the former.
However, by the republic’s middle period many of the bogeymen that
Urbinati associates with Roman politics had disappeared or at least had
fundamentally transformed in less alarming ways (Lintott 1999;Wiseman
2009). For instance, the strict social division between plebeians and
patricians was supplanted by the more permeable distinction between
plebeians and nobles. Voting classes in Rome were not castes, as Urbinati
insists, but rather fluid categories determined by property assessments
that were revised with every census. Urbinati is right to point out that
there was no deliberation in Rome’s formal assemblies, but she dras-
tically underplays how much robust public deliberation took place in
the contiones (DD 222). She dwells at some length over the free speech
enjoyed by the Roman people in the Forum (DD 46, 166), but she rushes
past the discussion among citizens that took place in the deliberative
assembles, whose convening preceded meetings of the voting assemblies.
Urbinati elsewhere asserts the virtual absence of political equality
among Roman citizens; in contrast to Athens, where strict equality sup-
posedly reigned among individuals, Urbinati proclaims that, in Rome:

Inequality was the organizational principle … Roman political life never reached
the level of political equality the Athenians enjoyed, and was permanently
dominated by the influence of a small number of senatorial families from whom
were drawn the top magistrates who administered the law, deliberated on that
law and on policy in general in the Senate, and led the armies.
(Urbinati 2011, 162)

While the Romans generally tolerated more political inequality than did
Athenians, Urbinati’s assertion concerning the full extent of inequality in
Rome is highly controversial. It neglects more than a decade of debates
over the role that plebeians played in governing the republic, especially
during its middle period, and, to some extent, its final centuries. Scholars

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such as Egon Flaig, Andrew Lintott, Fergus Millar, John North, and T.P.
Wiseman have argued that institutions such as the plebeian tribunate,
popularly judged political trials, and legislation in the more equitably
organized of Rome’s assemblies made Roman politics more democratic
than scholars had traditionally assumed. Alternatively, Karl-Joachim
Hölkeskamp, Robert Morstein-Marx, Henrik Mouritsen, and Kurt
Raaflaub have revived and refined the arguments famously associated
with Momigliano and Ronald Syme, which insisted that the republic was
an oligarchy, pure and simple.
Urbinati consistently sides with the latter group, and there exists
ample, often compelling, evidence entitling her to do so. But she might
acknowledge in DD and elsewhere that a legitimate controversy con-
tinues to rage over these issues.7 Most pertinent for our concerns is the
central argument of Millar’s work: since the consuls were usually away
from the city leading the republic’s armies, he suggests that most Roman
domestic policy-making was conducted by the tribunes in assemblies
such as the concilium plebis and the comitia tributa, which, whether they
excluded patricians or not, more or less decided matters by majority rule
rather than, as did the comitia centuriata, weighted votes for wealthy citi-
zens (Millar 2002a).
And then there are the Roman legacies of Urbinati’s own concep-
tion of representative government to consider; she is silent about two
major, counter-majoritarian features of most large representative dem-
ocracies throughout the world that are at least indirectly traceable to
ancient Rome: federalism and bicameralism. These features substantially
undermine the commitment to the formal equality that, Urbinati insists,
Athenian democracy and modern representative government supposedly
share. Most inexplicably, Urbinati undermines the Athenian character of
her own notion of representative democracy, irrevocably severing its ties
with isonomia and isegoria, when she claims that the supermajority rules
employed by many modern “democracies” do not violate the equal polit-
ical dignity of individual citizens (DD 270, n. 68). I would like to see her
explain this to an average fifth-century Athenian citizen (Schwartzberg
2014, 23–43).
Returning to Urbinati’s interpretation of Athenian democracy, she
emphasizes, again, the formally egalitarian characteristics of isonomia,
and the positive impact on free speech entailed by the principle of
isegoria, namely, that whoever wants to speak in assembly is free to do so
(DD 62, 163). But Urbinati ignores the crucially democratic principle of
ho boulomenos practiced in Athens: the fact that any citizens “who wanted
to” could also put their name forward to be chosen by lottery to serve as
a public magistrate. Through such a principle, any Athenian citizen who

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138 John P. McCormick

wanted to, in fact, enjoyed a genuine opportunity to hold office – largely

free of the impact of socioeconomic power disparities in the city.
This is a central aspect of Athenian political practice that contem-
porary representative democracy, even refashioned in its most ideal
form by Urbinati, cannot offer its citizens; that is, it rules out the gen-
eral exercise of direct political power by any citizen who wishes to do so.
The massive costs, material and otherwise, of electoral campaigns, even
within representative democracies with publicly funded elections, rules
out office holding for average citizens. At the very least, electoral dem-
ocracies compel average citizens who do run for office to become clients
of the individuals and groups who fund their campaigns. Urbinati insists
that the Athenian practice of lottery or sortition cannot be effectively
reproduced today (DD 12). Maybe this is true; maybe it is not. However,
as long as representative democracy fails to afford some approximation of
the equal sharing and exercise of political power among citizens, populist
movements will have legitimate grounds for challenging it – especially,
challenging it in ways more radical and, to my mind, more justifiable
than Urbinati is willing to tolerate.

Populist Means and Democratic Ends

Emile Durkheim once claimed that socialism was modern society’s “cry
of pain” (1986, 99). Socialism, Durkheim insisted, was the outcry of
people who suffered the excruciating pain of alienation, exploitation, and
disaffection under the duress of modern, secular, commercial society.
Promised unprecedented freedom, security, and happiness, modern
individuals feel instead the pain of anomie to which, in important ways,
socialism appeared to be an antidote. Populism, I contend, is modern,
representative democracy’s “cry of pain.” Populism is an inevitable
occurrence in regimes that adhere to democratic principles, but where,
in fact, the people do not rule. Exponents of populism decry painful
insults and injuries caused by a “representative” political system that, in
some sense, promises to permit the majority to rule, but that in reality
does not remotely facilitate popular rule in any substantive sense. This is
why Urbinati is correct, albeit for different reasons, to suggest that popu-
lism is “parasitic” on representative democracy (DD 278, n. 15).
Populism is certainly not an unmitigated good, even if there are valid
reasons to resist Urbinati’s wholesale rejection of populist politics. An
especially unattractive feature of populism, I would argue, is that it tends
to reproduce many of the deficiencies of representative or electoral dem-
ocracy; that is, it empowers others besides the people (say, a charismatic
leader or an outsider political party) to act on behalf of the people – a

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scenario always at odds with democracy in principle and practice. Indeed,

populist politics puts modern democratic citizens in a peculiar bind; citi-
zens demand policies that better reflect, or more faithfully enact, their
preferences and interests than do policies produced through electoral
institutions. Populism, however, entrusts such popular demands to the
custodial care of individuals or parties who still merely “represent” the
people, much as electoral institutions do; and these populist leaders
or parties likewise only represent the people in highly tenuous ways.
Populist leaders or parties may or may not deliver policy outcomes that
actually improve the lot of common citizens; this is entirely dependent on
the competence or good faith of such elites (who too often prove entirely
incompetent or self-interested). Moreover, history shows that populism
does not always result in laws, policies, or institutions through which
the people are empowered to more substantively and directly rule them-
selves. Very often, a party or a leader merely takes the place of electoral
institutions that are meant to rule on behalf of the people rather than
allowing the people to do so themselves.
In this sense, populism may undermine the quality of the kind of
robust democracy that can only be achieved today through populist
means of mass mobilization. But this does not mean that it should be
entirely dismissed. One way of evaluating whether a populist movement
is progressive or reactionary – a criterion ignored by Urbinati since she
rejects its underlying motivation – is whether the movement sets as its
goals institutional reforms through which citizens can rule themselves.
Populism, in this sense, ought not serve as an end in itself, especially
if it merely substitutes charismatic or party rule for rule by parliamen-
tary, judicial, or bureaucratic elites. However, populism can serve demo-
cratic ends when its goal is the establishment of procedures and practices
through which the people better and more directly rule themselves.
We must listen more attentively to the populist cry of pain that motivates
the recent wave of institutional reform proposals and initiatives that are
emerging in democracies throughout the world (Dowlen 2008; Goodin
2008; Smith 2009; Stone 2011). Many scholars and activists now recog-
nize that the prevailing institutions of electoral-representative democracy
cannot make government responsive and accountable to average citizens.
They see quite clearly that a privileged few – special interest lobbies, cor-
porate elites, and wealthy individuals – are wielding excessive influence
over public policy, that these privileged few are effectively ruling in defi-
ance of the preferences of the overwhelming majority of citizens – spe-
cifically, members of the middle class, the working class, and the poor.
Democratically inclined populist scholars and activists are right
to claim that, despite previous reforms, for the last half-century the

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140 John P. McCormick

institutions of representative democracy have permitted (or at least

have not prevented) an astronomical rise in economic inequality within
advanced capitalist democracies, and these institutions have facilitated
the persistent hijacking of government by privileged, insulated minor-
ities. In response, reformers have set about proposing non- or extra-
electoral institutions that, on the one hand, empower direct judgment
of common citizens over law-making, and, on the other, use randomiza-
tion to distribute important political offices. Urbinati should engage such
proposals with a more open mind than she does in Democracy Disfigured.

3 The Past, Present, and Future of Democratic

Republicanism
In politics, someone must be subject – at least, from moment to moment –
to the coercion of someone else. Those whose political preferences are
not borne out in any particular policy enactment will be quick to claim
that they are being dominated, or even tyrannized, by those whose
preferences have prevailed. The fundamental choice, as Machiavelli
incomparably sets it out in the Discourses, is whether the few or the many
are the more palatable “guardian of liberty” in a republic; he asked the
question who, the wealthy or the common citizenry, is the best defender
of their own liberty, and who, in turn, dominates less egregiously over
the other party. We know what Machiavelli’s answer was (McCormick
2011). Philip Pettit, in On the Peoples’ Terms, seems to want to avoid the
choice of who – at least to some degree, and at least from the perspective
of some political actors – must dominate whom. He goes to great lengths
to evade this decision throughout OPT, except in those moments when
he decides, implicitly or explicitly, for subjection of the many to the few
by making wealth-domination a secondary concern to majority tyranny
and by making contestation a cost-prohibitive capacity of individuals and
sub-majority groups vis-à-vis better-resourced dominators.
Democratic republicanism prioritizes the threat posed to common
liberty by wealth and renders secondary concerns about major-
itarian tyranny; aristocratic republicanism prioritizes these concerns
in reverse order. Therefore, I have suggested, Pettit’s republicanism
falls into the latter tradition. Pettit downplays the appearance of aris-
tocratic republican tendencies in his work by, on the one hand, attrib-
uting misunderstandings on the part of his readers to the high level of
abstraction at which he operates, and, on the other, insisting that simply
because he does not endorse any specific egalitarian and directly demo-
cratic reforms, this does not mean that his republican model rules them
out. However, Pettit’s anxieties over majority tyranny – anxieties that he

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shares with traditional aristocratic republicans – weaken the democratic

republican potential of his institutional reflections and prescriptions.
In addition to free votes and free speech, Urbinati, in Democracy
Disfigured, normatively values formal eligibility for offices and assem-
blies over substantive political outcomes that might be gained through
recourse to neo-Roman class-specific institutions (DD 25, 67, 75, 245,
n. 17). It is worth noting that Machiavelli praised the Roman republic
most highly when it realized full eligibility of the plebeians for all the
offices and assemblies of the Roman constitution, including the con-
sulship and the Senate.8 Urbinati’s views are ambiguous regarding the
one formal exclusion that remained in Machiavelli’s reconstruction of
republican Rome: the exclusion of the most wealthy and prominent citi-
zens from the tribunate (and perhaps from a popular assembly like the
concilium plebis) (DD 120, 176–178, 220, 224). Her protest that bodies
reserved exclusively for the nobles, such as the Senate in the early Roman
republic, violate contemporary standards of political equality does not
hold against the mature republic, which formally permitted plebeians to
participate in such bodies.
An intriguing question then is whether reserving magistracies and
assemblies for common citizens also contravenes Urbinati’s standard
of equality and, if it does, on what grounds it does so (Breaugh 2013;
Graham Smith and David Owen 2011; Green 2016; McCormick
2011, 170–188). What specifically would be Urbinati’s reasons for
rejecting affirmative action for common people of the kind facilitated
by the plebeian tribunate and the concilium? In the Athenian context,
Urbinati exclaims: “democracy meant that poverty was neither some-
thing the people had to be ashamed of, nor a reason for political and
civil disempowerment” (DD 248, n. 24). But what if poverty were to
serve as a source of citizen pride and empowerment within government
institutions? Without relying on over-idealized conceptions of Athens
and contemporary representative democracies, how would Urbinati
respond? Neither Athens, divided among deme and tribes, nor contem-
porary republics, structured along federal and municipal lines, cohere, in
Urbinati’s purest sense, with each citizen’s “equal right to an equal share
in determining the political will (one-person-one-vote)” (DD 28, cf. 59).
Given the formal differentiations that obtained within both the citizen-
ries of Athens and modern democracies, and given greater adherence to
the principle of equality in Rome than Urbinati acknowledges, I suspect
that Urbinati’s objections to citizen-empowering class differentiations
would be difficult to maintain on normative grounds.
Indeed, it is not clear whether Urbinati’s strict standards of formal
equality would normatively vouchsafe specific policies within any

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142 John P. McCormick

democracies, unitary or federal, that treat individual citizens differently –

say, progressive income tax codes, collective bargaining arrangements, or
affirmative action efforts directed at disadvantaged minorities. I whole-
heartedly believe that Urbinati is motivated by a “sincere desire” to resist
“the oligarchic transformation of our democracies,” which she identi-
fies, more specifically, as “the extraordinary power held by corporate
interests and financial capital in the domain of opinion and will forma-
tion” (Urbinati 2011, 163). To do so, however, she will have to slacken
her unreasonably rigid standards of formal political equality, which more
often than not serve to undermine the realization of substantive demo-
cratic equality today.

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