DEMOCRACY, in political science, that form of government in which the people rules itself, either directly, as in the small city-states of Greece, or through representatives (Gr. 8rlµoKcparia from 8i uos, the people, and «paros, rule). Aristotle defined democracy as the perversion of that form of government, which he called roXcreia, "polity" or "constitutional government," the rule of the majority of the free and equal citizens, as opposed to monarchy and aristocracy. This restriction of "democracy" to bad popular government was due to the fact that the Athenian democracy had in his day degenerated far below the ideals of the 5th century, when it reached its zenith under Pericles. Since Aristotle's day the word has resumed its natural meaning, though in modern representative government the people does not govern itself, but periodically elects those who shall govern on its behalf. (See also ATHENS ; ECCLESIA ; ROME ; COMITIA ; GOVERNMENT, etc.) (X.) Greece and Rome.—With the growth of man's knowledge there has gone on continuously a struggle to widen the basis of political power iri the State, and the history of democracy is therefore, in a sense, the history of civilization. It is precisely because their civilization was microcosmic that democracy was possible to the Greeks. They were dwellers in cities, and the city all through history, has been the laboratory of democracy. The population was small and homogeneous, thought in the same sequences, and had common interests ; life was simple ; the people could meet in the public place and discuss their communal busi ness, much as it was done, centuries later, in the New England town meeting and, in a way, in the Swiss cantons of our own times. All the people in the city-state did not have the right to partici pate in government, but only those who were citizens, in the literal and original sense. Outside this charmed circle of the privileged were slaves, who had no voice whatever in the making of the laws under which they lived and toiled. They had no political and hardly any civil rights ; they were not "people." Thus the democracy of the Greek city-state was in the strict sense no democracy at all for it was precisely slavery that democ racy would abolish, and the history of its growth and development includes a long series of emancipations that were necessary before man could be free.
The republic proclaimed at Rome five centuries before the Christian era, was made possible there as in Greece by the sim plicity of the city-state. The political power was in the hands of the patrician families, with a Senate chosen from this body, and the plebeians struggling to wrest a share of the political power from them, gradually acquired a certain control over the Senate, exercised by the "tribunes of the people." But as Rome extended her dominion over the world, both aristocrats and people became imperialistic in the most sinister sense of the word. The con quered nations and provinces were not governed democratically, but administered and exploited as satrapies. In the struggle that went on in Rome itself between the privileged and the proscribed there were features familiar to modern democracy.. In the late days of the Republic Caesar and Pompey organized a machine that was more efficient and corrupt than Tammany Hall in the days of Boss Tweed. The masses in Rome had votes, but they lacked bread. They could be amused and distracted by shows and gladiatorial combats, and their cries stilled by the corn dole, but Caesar and Pompey saw to it that only those who voted as they directed should receive the dole.
From the 11th century onward there grew up two classes of men relatively free, those serfs who by their superior abilities had bought their freedom, and the burgesses of the towns who either by force or by compositions with their overlords obtained charters for their cities. It was the age of the crusades ; and to raise the funds for these chivalrous expeditions many of the lords abandoned their prerogatives to the burgesses in return for money. It was in this way that the bourgeois class, which for centuries was to carry on the struggle for liberty, came into being. The Hansa towns and the free cities of Italy were rising to importance; in them the influence of the merchants' gilds was predominant, and government was carried on in the interest of their members. But the masses below were growing increasingly restless, and while such democracy as existed was a kind of stone throwing democracy, able at times to pull down petty princes and there was more of popular government, autocratic as it was.
The influence of these rich and highhanded cities grew as they flourished. With trade and the luxury it induced came a relative refinement of methods ; the powerful could no longer seize prop erty by brutal force, and must devise more decorous and subtle methods. The Medicis at Florence began to lend money on in terest, and laid the foundation of the banking system which became one of the chief corner-stones of the capitalistic system. There was a revival of interest in Roman law ; the soldier was succeeded by the lawyer; force, as Gabriel Hanotaux says, was superseded by chicanery. The discovery of America diverted the commercial activities of Western Europe into new channels; the Hanseatic League declined and the city gave way before the rise of the great national States. The invention of printing popularized the literature of antiquity. A new and freer air blew through the world, and with the flowering of so much genius, a new spirit of inquiry was roused, that questioning doubt which leads to free dom and to progress.