Can classical forms of republicanism provide instructive models for modern democratic thought and practice? Many philosophers have been skeptical. In Federalist 10 (1787), James Madison famously argued that the “pure Democracy” of the Athenian assembly was untenable for modern states. Republicanism could only exist in the modern world as a form of government based on the “delegation” of sovereignty to “a small number of citizens elected by the rest.” Three decades later, in 1819, Benjamin Constant held that the public spiritedness of the Greek polis or the Roman republic could provide no satisfactory answers for the commercial world of bourgeois society, with its private freedoms, elaborate division of specialized labor, and inevitable drift towards representative government.
Such long-standing misgivings, from Madison and Constant through to twentieth-century commentators such as the classicist Moses Finley, have been based upon the understandable premise that the sheer complexity of modern bureaucratic government and commercial relations require forms of political representation which the ancient world simply did not possess. There are fundamental discontinuities, as Finley himself evocatively described, between “democracy ancient and modern.”
Yet, despite dismissals of its modern relevance, classical republicanism has also long provided a language of claim-making for critics of liberal, representative democracy—as this latter constitutional regime gained ascendance in western Europe, North America, and eventually in much of the rest of the world over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One particularly striking episode in the critical use of classical republicanism for twentieth-century democratic politics comes from a context which is only now beginning to receive full attention from political theorists: the formation of anti-colonial nationalism in British India.
Through the interwar and early postwar period, political thinkers in colonial India invented and then sought to revive a pre-modern Indian tradition of participatory popular rule as part of a larger project of anti-colonial democratic nationalism. In the aftermath of WWI, a group of Indian writers became increasingly critical of parliamentary, electoral democracy as an institutional mechanism for anti-colonial self-determination, decrying it as a form of unaccountable elite rule. They advanced an alternate constitutional scheme for swaraj (self-rule) rooted in federalism, access of citizens to legislative processes, control over the actions of lawmakers and public officers, and a collectivist transformation of production, ownership, and property relations. Drawing on archival and archaeological investigations across South Asia in the first two decades of the twentieth century, these thinkers located forms of direct democracy and economic collectivism within a pre-modern Indian tradition of republican federalism, and posited their anti-parliamentary politics in terms of a republican revival.
To take one notable example: from the early 1920s onward, nationalist historians began to take sortition—or the selection of public officials through random lottery (what the political scientist Yves Sintomer refers to as “government by chance”)—as a common practice in the medieval states of southern India, between approximately the eighth and eleventh centuries CE. They relied on temple inscriptions from the region around Madras as their primary evidence for this claim. Sortition had been the means of actualizing popular government in local jurisdictions under a monarchical arrangement during the medieval period, in the absence of formal elections or political parties. While a fundamentally pre-modern practice, sortition had the virtue of opening up political office to many more citizens than would be possible under even the most inclusive form of party-based electoral representation. The latter was a system of representation which inherently prioritized the sovereignty of a new class of professional politicians—namely, the members of political parties. Radical democrats in India thus repeatedly called for the revival of a pre-modern form of lottery-based election as a possible alternative to the perceived elitism of party politics and parliamentarism. Indeed, it is striking to find Indian political thinkers appealing to medieval sortition as a corrective to postcolonial party politics well into the 1960s.
The anti-parliamentary tradition of Indian democratic theory, active for about a half-century from the late 1910s to the early 1970s, functioned on two registers simultaneously. Its proponents used newly available primary sources to construct a classical republican tradition in Indian history, comparable to the republicanisms of Athens and Rome. Secondly, they sought a revival of at least some institutional aspects of this classical tradition, particularly around the question of political representation. The historiography of pre-modern popular politics was, then, most relevant in terms of the intellectual resources it provided for rethinking the nature and function of representation. Historical studies were able to outline how collective self-government had been practiced prior to the onset of nation-states, political parties, and liberal constitutional orders—prior, that is, to the rise of a particular modular form of electoral representation. Through this task, the discipline of history itself became a tool in a concerted political effort to de-link self-government from the dominant electoral institutions of the twentieth century.
It is in its normatively-oriented approach to the history of democracy that I think the Indian anti-parliamentary tradition continues to be particularly resonant for contemporary political philosophy. Recent years have witnessed a remarkable upsurge of interest in philosophical experiments regarding non-electoral or extra-electoral forms of popular participation. There is a deep sense from many sides in political theory that the interlinked structures of multi-party election and global financial markets have created serious crises of accountability and legitimacy for large majorities of voters, and that contemporary practices of electoral representation may not, on their own, be able to adequately meet the strenuous standards of popular legislative control demanded by basic democratic principles. Diagnosing these shortcomings has, in turn, motivated greater attention to reform measures and to alternate schemes of representation. The philosopher Alexander Guerrero, for instance, has recently proposed the idea of a “lottocracy”—a system in which popular officeholders would be chosen through lottery (as in jury selection) rather than through the party-based election of candidates.
Such attempts to supplement and in some cases even replace electoral government can stand to greatly benefit from closer study of past republican models. As Indian radical democrats recognized, examining what participatory self-government looked like before the hegemony of electoral representation is one way to broaden our imagination of what it may look like again in a more democratic future. James Madison was undoubtedly correct about the fundamental differences separating our world from the world of the ancients. But that does not mean that ancient democracy cannot be strategically, carefully marshaled to address modern challenges.
Tejas Parasher
Tejas Parasher is Assistant Professor of Political Theory at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests lie in theories of statehood, representative government, and self-determination, with a particular focus on the globalization of modern democracy. He is the author of Radical Democracy in Modern Indian Political Thought (Cambridge 2023), the first study of anti-parliamentary popular politics in modern South Asia.
