Rousseau recognised that owing to the great increase in population, owing to the greater intricacy of social relationships, and owing to the inequality of social conditions, direct popular government in the true sense of the term was impossible, and he declared that true democracy was a constitution for the gods. In practice, such equality as has hitherto been attained is but that measure of inequality which is found to be just endurable. As, in actual working, aristocratic monarchy was always an oligarchy, so also is democracy in actual working an oligarchy. The problem that has to be solved is, how to prevent democratic oligarchy from degenerating into aristocratic hierarchical rule.[1] The democratic organisation of society must in essence be a mutualist federation of social organisations (§ 172), and of the individuals who combine to form these organisations.
Anarchism as a system gives expression, in an extreme and largely distorted form, to the democratic aspiration towards liberty; socialism (social democracy) gives expression to the democratic aspiration towards equality. Anarchism and socialism originated simultaneously as soon as the philosophic and political revolution had uprooted theocratic absolutism.
Aristocracy is the rule of the non-workers over the workers. Democracy therefore demands that all should work, and refuses to admit that it is right for the product of labour to be assigned to the non-workers. The aristocrat rules, the democrat works.
Manual labour is for the most part work of a petty kind. The aristocrat, as born ruler and leader, will do nothing but work of a grand order, great deeds; he is the hero, the man who does only as he thinks fit. The theocratic aristocrat takes an indeterminist view of the universe and of mankind. Just as God is free so also is his representative an absolutely free agent. What is done or left undone is not controlled and regulated by any determinist foreknowledge; at most it is possible that the prophet and magician can at times foresee the future.
The theocratic aristocrat believes in magic; his religion is faith in miracle; and therefore he despises work, lives upon the enforced labour of slaves, lives upon the sweat of their brows. It need hardly be said that the slave, too, is averse to hard work; that is why he is coerced as a slave. Alike
- ↑ This problem has been considered in fuller detail in § 157, in connection with our study of the relationship of syndicalism to democracy.
