Psychology has a fundamental role to play in forging a politically constituted society of equals
Evangelia Vergouli & Tetiana Shyriaeva
Open University OppAttune Project PhD students Tetiana Shyriaieva and Evangelia Vergouli sit down with Stephen W. Sawyer, Ballantine-Leavitt Professor of History and Director of the Center for Critical Democracy Studies at The American University of Paris, and author of Demos Assembled.
To kick off our conversation, Stephen Sawyer talked with Tetiana Shyriaieva and Evangelia Vergouli about how we maintain a society of equals, and how people have tackled the question of privilege while putting democracy at the centre of our histories of political modernity.
Your book is entitled Demos Assembled. Could you clarify what you mean when referring to demos and what the relationship between demos and democracy is?
The term is taken from what I consider to be its two most convincing and powerful uses in the 19th century: by Victor Hugo, and by Karl Marx. According to them, a ‘democracy’ or a ‘demos’ is a body of people that understands its relationships to others as politically determined.
They both deny privilege based on things like race and, to some extent, gender… although they are less explicit about that. The relationships of people in the demos, to use the terms of Richard Worty, are ‘made and not found’; they are fashioned, and in this sense, they are political. It’s what I refer to as a politically constituted society of equals.
Once we have this politically constituted society of equals, the question is whether the best way of preserving it is through democratic government, an aristocracy, or some sort of mixed government, such as a Monarchy with a representative Parliament.
The demos must govern itself democratically. You can be a politically constituted society of equals and not govern yourself democratically. I’d say we have examples of that today, and I would put China in that category: it is a society that emerged out of communism, it has fashioned itself, and yet has decided to be governed by a single party. Even though they do have elections, they are not entirely governed democratically.
The idea here is that there are all kinds of definitions of democracy. Still, two essential concepts are hidden within it: one is this concept of a society of equals, and the other concerns the way in which we maintain that society of equals.
Do you think this understanding of the word has changed over time?
The first sort of major invocation of the word demos in a modern context that I’ve been able to study is by Thomas Hobbes in his De Cive (1642). He says that a country has a demos if the people join together to decide who will govern them. Even if they go to sleep or disband, as long as they say that they will join together later, they are still a demos. Even if they’re not the ones who govern themselves. So, for Hobbes, the demos is still always there, even if the group comes together and says, ‘We’ve chosen to be governed by a dictator for the next 20 years’.
A few years later, the political philosopher Samuel Freiherr Pufendorf discredited Hobbes’ ideas. According to him, ‘to be a demos, you obviously have to self-govern’. Hobbes and Pufendord, who were both writing in the 17th century, wouldn’t have been able to imagine the general critique of the aristocracy that emerged with the Enlightenment in the 18th century, which I understand to be a general critique of natural privilege.
That was fundamental for defining how a demos functions. It is also an essential part of what’s going on now in terms of the emancipatory movements against racial, gender, and sexual privilege. In many ways, the revolutions at the end of the 18th century, from Haiti to the US to France to the Netherlands and beyond, are characterised by the revolt against aristocracy or natural privilege.
What emerges then is this new concept of the demos, which is not just about politics, it’s about a kind of society. That’s what is new: this distinction between a society, on the one hand, and a political regime, on the other.
But in order for that to happen, there was this first move towards realising that to be a demos, you have to govern yourself. The second move was the realisation that you govern yourself towards the maintenance of a society of equals, and that didn’t emerge until the 19th century.