Democracy is often understood to be merely a matter of majority rule. But this is not sufficient to qualify as 'rule by the people' in any meaningful sense, as it would be a mistake to assume that the majority necessarily represent the people at large.  To bring this out, consider a static society that is split 60/40 into two comprehensive factions, such that co-members of a faction always vote together on every issue, and against the other faction.  Simple majoritarianism would effectively grant absolute power to the larger faction, who may then run roughshod over the minority.  Those in the minority faction – a significant portion of the citizenry – have no chance of influencing political outcomes under this system, and are thus effectively disenfranchised.  We see, then, that it is not the people (generally) who rule here; what we have instead is a form of oligarchy, however large: rule by the majority faction, a mere subset of the citizenry.

I claim that rule by the majority is not sufficient to qualify as rule by the people.  This raises the question: what more is required?  Rule by all the people is one obvious, if rather stringent, suggestion. Another intriguing possibility is that 'the people' in general may – in the right conditions – comprise a corporate agent who rules.  Let us explore these possibilities in turn.

Rule by all the people: diachronic and synchronic democracy

Total consensus is an unrealistic ideal, and democracy still ought to be possible in the face of robust disagreement. So a better suggestion may be to understand 'rule by all' to merely require that each person have the opportunity to make a meaningful and potentially efficacious contribution to the collective decision-making process.  This condition could be satisfied even for those who lose in the end, so long as they had a real chance of getting their way, and so weren't wasting their time all along.  Note that a member of the minority faction in the static society never had such a chance – their will was always going to be overridden by the opposing faction – and this plausibly forms the basis of our intuitive judgment that they were effectively disenfranchised and powerless.

In a society without factions, possessing instead a more dynamic and flexible political culture, "the majority" is constantly in flux. Each person will be in the majority on some issues, so their will is at least sometimes heeded. In this sense, they all contribute to the state's decision-making. Even if they do not always get their way, there is at least a (diachronic) sense in which we can describe this as a polity ruled by all, for all get to rule at some time or other. (A similar result might be obtained even within the static society, if decisions were made by randomly selected individuals rather than by majority rule.)

Still, we may worry that such 'diachronic democracy' is little more than a rotating oligarchy (or dictatorship, in the lottery case).  For if everyone were dogmatic and set in their ways, it would end up being the case that for each particular decision, those in the minority were simply disregarded, their "contributions" ignored and effectively nullified.  At least there is no consistently oppressed subclass of the citizenry, thanks to the absence of fixed factions.  But this only gets us a very weak sense of 'democracy', and leaves something to be desired.

This naturally raises the question: is synchronic democracy – rule by all at once – possible?  For minority participation to not be futile, it would at least require that decisions be made in such a way that it is not a foregone conclusion which side will win out.  But of course merely introducing an element of randomness is not sufficient to empower advocates of the minority view.  Rather, the possibility of a favourable outcome must depend in part on their efforts.  Assuming a backdrop of majority rule, synchronic democracy requires that there be a chance for those in the minority to sway others' opinions, or win more votes, so that they might become the majority.  It thus depends on the political culture being largely free of dogmatism, and on the citizens regarding each other with a distinctive kind of respect.

Civic Respect

Darwall (2006: 122-3) distinguishes between what he calls 'appraisal versus recognition respect'.  The former is a kind of esteem or positive evaluation, and so is contingent when present at all.  Recognition respect, on the other hand, consists in granting another "standing (authority) in our relations" to them.  The moral point of view is commonly thought to recommend equal respect for persons as such, regardless of their contingent characteristics, in recognition of their human dignity.  A similar suggestion may be offered from the political point of view: civic respect is owed to our fellow citizens in recognition of their rational agency, i.e. their  capacity to contribute to the collective decision-making process, and their equal political standing (or right) to so contribute.

Civic respect, so understood, is closely related to the values of receptivity and "conversability" (Pettit 2007: 274), as it essentially involves viewing one's co-citizens as potential collaborators in the political project of practical reasoning or inquiry into the common good.  An agent displays civic disrespect if his mind is set in stone: by remaining stubbornly unreceptive in principle to others' arguments, he is implicitly assuming that he has nothing to learn from them, and so bars others the opportunity to inform and contribute to his political decision-making.  Such an attitude would be comprehensible on the part of a radical subjectivist about normative truths, who conceives of politics as essentially a matter of warring wills, arbitrary preferences and power plays, and who simply wants his own pre-existing preferences to win out.  From such a perspective, opposing arguments can only be viewed as threats, or bad faith attempts at manipulation through intellectual bullying and false claims to objectivity.

For civic respect to make sense, then, we must adopt a more objective and collaborative conception of ideal politics – an ideal of politics as inquiry, rather than mere 'will to power'.  Our practical reasoning must be subject to norms or ideals that potentially outstrip our actual, pre-existing preferences.  That is, it must be possible for us to get things wrong, by our own lights.  Moreover, it must be possible for others to share our ideal ends, and thus to be engaged in the very same rational project as we are, i.e. determining what we, as a government, are to do.  When these conditions are satisfied, the inquiring agent should welcome collaboration.  When others disagree with her, this raises the possibility of error in her thoughts about what is to be done.  Since she is committed to getting things right, and not just to imposing whatever arbitrary preferences she might have started off with, this risk is one that the responsible agent will take seriously – and take care to avoid or overcome as necessary.  Others' arguments are a helpful contribution to the effort of determining what, in fact, is the right practical conclusion to draw.  So the responsible inquiring agent will welcome these arguments and take care to assess them on their merits.

If the citizens of a polity respect each other in this way, then – I suggest – they may realize a truly synchronic democracy, ruled by all at once.  Given the right background conditions, each citizen will be capable of making a significant contribution to the collective decision-making process, as others are receptive to their arguments and may change their own minds as a result.  Aside from the 'internal' requirement of civic respect, another necessary background condition is the 'external' communications infrastructure required to support public debate.  It must be possible for citizens to hear each other and to be heard, at least on those occasions when they have something worth saying.  It is not practically possible for everyone to be heard all the time, of course.  But it should suffice to have in place a system that will reliably enable the best arguments to filter to the top.  It will then be possible for each person to have an impact by offering sufficiently forceful reasons for their position.  No one is ruled out in advance as 'unworthy' or irrelevant to the decision.  There is formal, procedural equality, so that – ideally – the influence one wields over the ultimate outcome depends on the substance and quality of their contribution.  The outcome will emerge from the totality of all the citizens' contributions, and their impact on each other, in a way that is neither random nor predictable in advance.  In this sense, they all play a meaningful role.

Democracy without Reason?

The previous sections advance an ideal of deliberative democracy.  But it should be noted that there are alternative ways to satisfy the formal conditions for synchronic democracy, which after all merely requires that each citizen have the opportunity to sway the others by some or other reliable means.  The ideal case is rational persuasion, whereby what the others are receptive to is good reasons.  But in theory, we might just as well invert the substantive normative qualities of the system, to yield an anti-rational democracy, whereby anyone could influence the outcome by means of communicating sufficiently bad reasons to sway the others.  This anti-rational society would still be just as democratic as a matter of form, ruled by 'all the people', despite the deplorable outcomes that would soon result.

Another possibility is that a democratic society may be responsive to some other universal capacity besides reason: perhaps rhetoric, or humour, say. Again, these needn't be good political orders, but - so long as each citizen had the opportunity to exert significant influence in this way - such a state would presumably qualify as 'ruled by [all] the people' nonetheless.

One noteworthy feature of these 'unreasonable democracies', however, is that they will not make sense to their constituents.  As was argued in the above section on 'Civic Respect', it at least makes sense for a rationalist to be receptive to others' reasons, since they may educate and help her to achieve her stated goal of discerning the truth as to what best serves the common good.  There is no such sense to be found in the disposition to be anti-rational or receptive to bad reasons, nor in deferring to the suggestions of the most humorous or rhetorically savvy.  (I do not deny that it's possible for such non-rational agents to have the phenomenal feeling of making sense, but this is no less an illusion than the feeling of "sense" we find within many a nonsensical dream. It is not a positive appreciation of sense-making features of the situation (i.e. reasons),  for there are none; but rather a negative state of obliviousness: a failure to notice or recognize the nonsense for what it is.)  So, if we are interested in a system of synchronic democracy that makes sense, we must return our attention to deliberative democracy.

Meritocracy and the Objection from Unequal Rational Capacities

At this point, it may be objected that the deliberative approach unfairly privileges those, such as philosophers, who are skilled in the rational art of argumentation.  Granted, there may be formal equality in that no one is explicitly favoured in virtue of their birth or station.  But in practice there will be many people who stand no real chance of shaping public opinion.

I think that this is a serious challenge to the practical possibility of a fully-fledged synchronic democracy - 'rule by all the people at once' - that is based in deliberation.  More would need to be done to ensure that every citizen has a genuine opportunity to have an impact.  This might be accomplished by providing significant educational assistance, dialectical 'mentors' or advisers who would help citizens to develop their arguments and craft their messages so as to increase their persuasive power, etc.  This could be done - it is at least a conceivable state of affairs - but it may not be a particularly realistic ideal.  It would certainly rule out the possibility of finding any real democracies the world as it presently stands.  This may lead us to suspect that we've been exploring an overly stringent conception of what 'rule by the people' consists in.

The simplest way to revise this would be to understand democracy as a meritocratic form of government which utilizes the rational capacities of everyone (insofar as they are able), rather than those of some limited subset of the population.  The fact that some people are able to contribute more than others in no way undermines democracy in this sense, so long as nobody is being under-utilized or unjustly ignored even when they have good suggestions, reasons, or other worthwhile contributions to offer to the decision-making process.  (Actually, the requirement is even more stringent.  Even an oligarchy might happen to utilize all that's on offer, if it just so happens that the oligarchs are the only ones with such contributions to make.  But the incapacity of the general population is not enough to turn an oligarchy into a democracy in any meaningful sense. Rather, a democracy in this meritocratic sense must be modally robust and sensitive to the rational capacities of the population, thus satisfying the further counterfactual condition that it would (still) utilize the rational capacities of all if more people were capable.)

This yields a system that is 'democratic' in the sense that political decisions emerge from the combined rational capacities of all the citizens.  We may further wish to interpret the modal status of 'capability' quite broadly, to include for example the capability of people to be educated and thereafter contribute. For it would be a weak and perverse 'democracy' that stifled its citizens' capabilities: if it is still ruled by the people, it is a stunted people.  Conversely: a society that invests in nourishing the rational development of its citizens, and is shaped by their combined efforts in return, is arguably 'ruled by [all] the people' in a sufficiently deep and philosophically interesting sense.

I think that this meritocratic interpretation of democracy is the most promising counter to the objection from unequal rational capacities.  A more radical alternative would be to explore the possibility of rule by 'the people' taken as a collective unit, rather than reducing 'the people' to the fine-grained level of each individual citizen ('all the people').

'The People', incorporated

Let us now explore the idea, inspired by Rousseau, that under certain conditions 'the people' may form a unified "public person" (SC I.6) with a 'general will' that "considers only the common interest" (SC II.3), in contrast to the mere sum of 'particular wills'. (Or, as Rousseau puts it in SC II.4: "the State is a moral person whose life is in the union of its members".)  The general will, so understood, emerges from the citizens' adoption of a peculiarly civic or public-minded perspective.  When a State is directed by this general will, rather than any individual's particular will, we may then say that it is ruled by "the public person", i.e., the people taken as a corporate body.

This collectivistic conception of democracy needs refinement, or at least clarification.  For one thing, it is surely not enough for one public-minded individual to implement their conception of the common good.  Incorporating the people cannot be such a unilateral affair.  However civic-minded its scope and content may be, the will of one person alone cannot truly qualify as the general will -- the will of the people -- unless it is somehow shared by the other members of the collective.  On the other hand, it would be absurdly strict to require that every citizen actually manifest the same general will or conception of the common good.  (As noted early, democracy surely does not require unanimity.)  What we want is a plausible conception of incorporation that invokes some degree of consensual mutuality among its members, whilst also allowing for the possibility of disagreements among them.

Hence we must understand the 'public person' as a construction that all citizens partake in, but that may potentially outstrip each of them.  The general will, so understood, is not found in any particular individual, but depends upon the civic consent of all. The following section will further clarify the process by which this may emerge.

Constructing Persons and Peoples

The idea of a 'people' as a collective being might seem implausible and metaphysically outlandish.  'All that really exists are individual people,' we are inclined to insist.  But a closer comparison may ease our metaphysical scruples.  For if we are going to be strict about it, we should instead say, 'all that really exists are momentary stages or time-slices of individual persons.'  Even so, this should not stop us from recognizing that those fundamental stages might constitute a temporally extended (persisting) person in the right circumstances.  It is not a much greater step to then allow that those persisting persons might in turn constitute a collective people in the right circumstances.

I assume here that Parfit (1987) is right that we should be reductionists about personal identity, holding that it does not consist in any further fact over and above the particular physical and psychological relations that hold between momentary person stages (e.g. memories, causal connections and counterfactual dependence, etc.).  For there to exist a persisting person, on this view, just is for there to exist person stages related in the right sort of way.  This is not an addition to our ontology so much as to our understanding of what the fundamental existents amount to.  Such constitution claims are thus not as metaphysically extravagant as they may at first appear.

It would go beyond the scope of this paper to engage substantively with the literature on personal identity, so let me simply offer a suggestive analogy.  An attractive view for reductionists about personal identity is that temporally extended persons are really just a kind of rational construction.  Persons exist in virtue of their constituent person-stages adopting an appropriately broad and shareable perspective.  Each momentary stage conceives of itself as part of the larger, temporally-extended whole, and subordinates its particular, bounded perspective to that (which it reconstructs or imagines to be) of the timeless whole.  Similarly, we may think, a collective people (or Rousseauian 'public person') exists in virtue of the citizens adopting a broadly civic and shareable perspective.  Each citizen considers herself a part of the polity, and acknowledges that shared norms, laws, or goals - the common good - may appropriately trump her narrow self-interest or personal preferences when it comes to political decision-making. (It is worth noting here the contrast to commercial corporations, which standardly exert influence over others besides those who endorse or self-identify with its operation.)

We typically think that a person may survive moments of imprudence, where the momentary stage privileges their particular will or whims over the broader ideal of constructing a good life.  And so it is with the polity, where we think a democratic people may persist despite the inclusion of self-interested individuals who show little concern for the broader ideal of constructing a good society.  It suffices, in both cases, that enough of the atoms share in the broader perspective, perhaps given certain other conditions, such as a lack of systematic exclusion.

To shift now from being to acting: we say that a person acts when their momentary stages act on the broadly shared perspective that we take to be constitutive of their larger person.  And similarly, I propose, we may say that a democratic people acts when their government acts on the broadly shared (and universally shareable) perspective or 'general will' that we take to be constitutive of the larger 'public person'.  (One suggestion for further explicating this constraint, which I owe to Philip Pettit, is to say that a truly democratic government acts on the sorts of reasons which emerge as 'mutually acceptable' to discussants in the broader public debate.)

Why it matters

Cynics might grant the foregoing conceptual analysis, but wonder why anyone should care. There is nothing (philosophically) to be gained by quibbling over labels, after all, though in practice the term 'democracy' comes with positive connotations, so we might expect rhetoricians to happily redefine the term to suit their purposes.  I see my project differently, though.  Part of the reason why 'democracy' has such positive valence is because we generally recognize that there is something morally desirable about self-rule.  We value individual autonomy, not just welfare, which raises the prospect of analogous values holding at the collective level.  I cannot pretend to settle the debate here; it certainly remains open to one to insist that aggregate individual welfare, say, is the only relevant metric for assessing political regimes.  But I think my foregoing remarks help to clarify why one might reasonably be led to a more communitarian axiology, and thereby see some intrinsic value to democracy.

I argued that we can make sense of a democratic 'people', governed in such a way as to realize their collective autonomy as a 'public person', by analogy to ordinary (temporally extended) persons -- and without any further metaphysical extravagance.  But note: in the case of an ordinary individual, rationally constructed from their momentary stages, we typically recognize that though the whole may not be metaphysically fundamental, nonetheless it is fundamentally what matters.  In light of the above, I see no reason not to extend this lesson to larger unities, at least to the degree that we rationally endorse our incorporation into them.  So even though the collective 'public' is simply constituted by individual persons related in the right sort of way, it may nevertheless provide a locus of value and agency in addition to all those individual persons considered in isolation from one another.

Conclusion

This paper has explored the conditions under which a state might be described as genuinely 'ruled by the people'.  We saw that the institution of majoritarian voting - even with universal suffrage - is insufficient, for this leaves open the possibility of rule by a sectarian majority faction.  So we must move beyond formal institutions and consider also the informal political culture.  Here I suggested two possible routes to fully-fledged democracy.  The individualist route understands democracy as 'rule by (all) the people', which I argued may be realized in a deliberative-democratic society wherein citizens are receptive to being persuaded by each other as they trade arguments and opinions in the marketplace of ideas.  The collectivist route, on the other hand, understands democracy as rule by 'the people' taken as a unified collective or 'public person'.  Drawing on reductionist and constructivist understandings of personal identity, I suggested that this may be given a plausible, metaphysically non-extravagant reading, which merely requires a shareable and indeed widely-shared civic perspective to be driving the government.  In either case, one ends up with a society that is 'ruled by the people' in a deeper and more philosophically interesting sense than could be achieved by looking at the formal institutions alone.


Bibliography

Cohen, J. (1998) 'Democracy and Liberty' in Deliberative Democracy, ed. Jon Elster. Cambridge University Press.
Darwall, S. (2006) The Second-Person Standpoint. Harvard University Press.
Parfit, D. (1987) Reasons and Persons. Clarendon Press.
Pettit, P. (2007) 'Joining the Dots' in Common Minds, ed. G. Brennan et. al. Clarendon Press.
Rousseau, J. (1762) The Social Contract, trans. G.D.H. Cole.  Public domain.

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