James Madison, one author of the Federalist Papers, 1816. Wikicommons/John Vanderlyn (1775–1852). Some rights reserved.Major institutions of the established democracies – centre-left and -right parties, serious print and broadcast media, Tony Blair and Christine Lagarde – have entered an unholy alliance to exorcise the spectre of populism. But what do they have against it?
Although as Maxine Molyneux and Thomas Osborne note (oD 22 November 2016), the term can be used in a positive sense, to understand the predominantly negative connotations of the term, it is useful to go back to the treatment of democracy in the history of western political thought. For much of this history, as Jennifer Tolbert Roberts reminds us in her insufficiently appreciated Athens on Trial: the Anti-Democratic tradition in Western thought (1994) democracy has not been well regarded. Of the three forms of government distinguished in Aristotle's Politics by the one, the few or the many, the last was seen as most prone to distortion and thus a threat to the general interest. This was because the poor and, for the most part, poorly educated people were seen as unskilled in the evaluation of argument and therefore as particularly susceptible to the unprincipled appeals of demagogues.
This generally unfavourable western view of democracy changed over the course of the nineteenth century as the meaning of democracy itself shifted from government by the people themselves to representative government. In the late eighteenth century, the American Federalist Papers, while noting the importance of keeping the work of government out of the hands of the people in their collective form, nevertheless assumed that the people could be trusted to appoint those from a better class of person to represent them.
