Three Mistakes About Democracy

This paper addresses three claims that are often made among contemporary policy-makers, political scientists and political theorists about democracy. The claims, in my view, are false and indeed revealingly false: they display a serious misunderstanding of the nature and appeal of democracy. As we see why they are false, we will come to appreciate dimensions of democracy that easily escape notice. Hence the title of the paper. I name the mistakes after outstanding thinkers who have made them. The first I describe as Berlin's mistake, finding it in the work of the Anglo-Russian philosopher, Isaiah Berlin. The second I describe as Schumpeter's mistake, naming it after the Austrian-American banker, economist and political thinker, Joseph Schumpeter. And the third I describe as Riker's mistake, associating it with William Riker, the American political scientist, famous for his distinction between liberalism and populism. All three played important roles in promulgating the mistakes that they endorsed, though Riker probably made a smaller mark than the other two. In indicting these thinkers, I do so from the perspective of the republican tradition that emerged in classical Rome, came to life again in the Italian cities of the high middle ages, fuelled the Dutch and English republics of the seventeenth century, and inspired various eighteenth-century revolutions, including the American, the French and indeed the Irish. That tradition is built around a conception of freedom as non-domination, to be elucidated later in the text. And it requires a rich conception of democracy of a kind that the mistakes charted here would cause us to overlook.