With the Greeks systematic speculation re garding the foundations of society and politics first appears. In the Republic) and the Plato discussed the nature of de mocracy. He defined it as the rule of the many and held that it inevitably tended to degener ate into anarchy. Plato's "rule of the many,* of course, meant only the rule of the citizen minority of the population. Even this shadowy democracy did not attract Plato who pre ferred an enlightened monarchy. Aristotle devoted a portion of his 'Politics' to a discus sion and definition of democracy. From the standpoint of the terminology of political science he maintained that democracy was that form of government in which the majority of the citizens, excluding foreigners and slaves, directed the activities of the state for the ad vancement of their own class interests. It was, then, the corrupt form of govern ment, the term 'polity' being reserved for the virtuous administration of government by the whole body of the citizens. P'rom an economic standpoint Aristotle held that democracy meant the control of public policy by the mass of the poor citizens who possessed little or no property. Aristotle was no more favorable than Plato to the exclusive of the Greeks and held that valuable fune tion of the people lay in electing and "scruti nizing" the officials, and not in the direct and actual control and operation of the government. Finally, Aristotle was as distinctly opposed to the full application of the democratic principle in society as in the state. He laid down his famous dictum that merit should determine so cial and political position and held that certain individuals on account of their inferior intelli, gene were born to serve the more intelligent and capable members of society. It is scarcely necessary to add that by the "intelligent and capable," Aristotle meant the Attic Greeks, and by those fitted for perpetual servitude, the "barbarians." Thus, his seemingly useful oon ception of social differentiation on the basis of ability resolves itself upon closer examina tion into a chauvinistic apology for racial ego ism. While Plato and Aristotle had looked with disfavor upon even the limited democracy of Greece, Polybius held that in any stable state some permanent . concessions must be made to the democratic principle. Drawing upon the experiences of the early Roman re public he put forth his famous theory of "checks and balances" which were to be brought about by including in thF .organization of the government the monarchical element, the aris tocratic senate and the democratic assemblies. Only through this arrangement could one hope to prevent the continual changes yin. government which had been outlined in the famous classi cal theory of the cycle of governmental trans formations. Finally, one finds among the Greeks the first adumbration of the doctrine of a governmental contract as the origin of politi cal society— a theory first stated by the Sophists, Plato and the Epicureans and which was destined in the 17th and 1&h centuries to work strongly for the development of demo ctatic tendencies in politics.
Among the Romans the only significant de velopment in political theory making for democracy was the doctrine of the Roman lawyers concerning the origin and justification of the political order. The lawyers held that the foundations of political authority lay in the consent of the people. Though the emperor might in fact be chosen by his legions in a remote boundary district the legal theory alp ways held that he owed his authority to the tacit assent of the whole body of the Roman citizens. This theory fitted in well with, and advanced the doctrine of, the origin of political authority in a governmental compact.
Democracy in the Middle The Roman Empire ended with the growth of plu tocracy and the crushing out of practically all of the few democratic tendencies which ex isted. With the barbarian invasions and the establishment of the Teutonic kingdoms the fruits of classical civilization were for the most part lost and western Europe dropped back in a cultural sense into the conditions from which classical civilization had developed a thousand years earlier. Even the feeble advances which classical civilization had made in the direction of democracy had to be regained before further progress could be made toward the securing of personal freedom, political enfranchisement and popular control of public policy.
Feudal society, developing from roots in the Roman villa and in the German mark and &mutat.= offered little ntwwwtstnitv fur development of democracy. With its •perpetua tion to a slight degree of the slavery of classical times and its retention on an extensive scale of the serfdom or half-free condition found in the colonate of the later Roman Empire, the feudal age was in general even less democratic in a political sense than the classical city-states.
On the •manors there were some democratic tendencies in the intimate communal life of the serfs, and Professor Giddings has insisted that the real origin of modern social democracy is to be looked for in the enforced equality among the members of this servile class in the Middle Ages. Some symptoms of democracy also appeared in the mecliaval free towns, but they were not extensive. The political, social and economic organization was hierarchical restrictive, and equality in the medieval town, as in •the classical city-state, meant the equality of the favored few. The Magna Charta at a harbinger of modern democracy has withered before modern historical research quite as much as• the Teutonic folk-moot. It did not mark a movement looking toward' modern political liberalism, but was a reactionary manifesto of the feudal lords who were irritated by the recent extension of royal power and in' 1215 made an effort to pull England back into the decentralized lawlessness and local tyranny of the feudal period. The only notable develop ment of democracy in the Middle Ages occurred as an incident of the rise of Christianity. A number of writers have claimed with some degree of justification that the first instances of real democratic society are to be found in the early Christian communities of the Apostolic Age. Certainly, the only extensive development of democracy in social organization in the medieval period occurred in the monastic movement, and in the monasteries etsential equality was the general rule. The organiza tion of the secular clergy in the medieval Church, however, with its elaborate hierarchies for ecclesiastical administration and for the control of the sacraments, was scarcely less autocratic than the feudal society of the period. The only concession that the medieval Church made to democracy was that its offices were in theory, at least, open to all classes solely on the basis of merit. On the whole, however, democracy or any strong prophecy of democ racy scarcely appeared during the thousand years that followed the collapse of the western Roman Empire.
The advances made toward the development of the theoretical concept of democracy during the medieval period were as scanty as the achievements in the field of democratic prac tices. The Christian conception of the "brother hood of man" was certainly more democratic in its implications than the early Stoic doctrine. The Stoics had meant by this phrase merely the brotherhood of the intellectually elite, but the Christians rejected this limitation and em phasized the reality of universal human brother hood through the medium of faith and belief. jn the field of political theory there were few developments beyond a revival of various doc trines which had appeared in classical antiquity. Mangold of Lautenbach, in the last half of the 11th century, gave the first explicit meet to the medieval version of a govern mental compact as the basis of political society and held that breaking of this contract by the prince was sufficient to justify rebellion among his subjects. In the same century the revival of Roman law familiarized western Europe with the lawyers' doctrine of popular sovereignty, a conception later developed with great vigor by Marsiglio of Padua. The Con ciliar movement of the 15th century, based largely upon the Roman legal theory of the corporation, attempted to work out a theory of representation for ecclesiastical government. While the insistence of the great theorists of the Conciliar movement, such as Gerson and Cusanus, upon the validity of the doctrine of popular sovereignty was an important develop ment in the direction of democratic political theory, the Conciliar doctrine of representative government was rather one which looked back to the system of feudal estates than forward to the modern parliament. Those who look to the Conciliar movement for the origins of modern representative democracy are not less in error than those who try to derive it from the Magna Charts. The concept of democracy scarcely figured in any medieval discussion save in the writings of those mediaeval scholastic philosophers who revived the Aristotelian ter minology and analysis with its contempt for democracy. The concept of the °people,* which appeared so frequently in the latter part of the medieval period, in the discussions of popular sovereignty was scarcely a democratic notion. By the °people was meant only the first three estates, excluding the peasantry which cqnstituted the vast majority of the population, and it did not usually refer to the people as individuals but as a corporate entity.