Similarly, the world forgets that the first democracies were not in Greece but in India at least around 500-600 years before Greek democracies, if not more!
People and cultures that are the most boisterous and showy usually garner the most attention and followers. It used to be Europe in general, now the best and worst of Europe are embodied in the USA, which is the new representative of Europe/West in the world.
Human beings worked out the moral frameworks of life, which includes concepts such as freedom, way before recorded civilisation began. These are all very, very old thoughts.
@SW-User When it comes to something primal to be codified or normalised - as in when we work out the rules, boundaries and implementational principles of our primal instincts - we have to perhaps treat these instincts as concepts. In other words, while freedom is a primal instinct, when it came to defining freedom, we needed to think of it as a concept.
@SW-User They say hunter-gatherer societies were democratic. The smaller the group, the easier it is to be democratic.
Some hunter-gatherer societies must surely have been democratic, but can we say that for all? How else did kingship emerge if at least some hunter-gather societies didn't also practice having one supreme leader? Democracy, monarchy, etc. all of these were later-day refinements of pre-historic or hunter-gatherer era thoughts/instincts.
About group size, it goes both ways: It's also easier to be autocratic - i.e. for one individual to dominate a group - if the group size is small.
What is democracy to you? Do you live in a democracy? In our present day, we know what a democracy is as most countries in the world are democratic. In its most basic form democracy is "Vox Populi" or voice of the people. Or we can fall back on the Greek origins of the word itself to define it: Demos (people) + Kratos (Rule, strength or power). The dictionary defines democracy as a system in which "supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections". I would agree with that.
Speaking historically, I would consider a democracy to be a substantially large group of people with some form of representative government with a periodicity of replacement or reconfirmation, whether it is for a few years or for life. I'm looking for historical records of codified practices, as opposed to tribal customs or hunter-gather instincts that must have preceded the codification.
The first such records emerge in India with the "Mahajanapadas"... a Sanskrit/Prakrit term literally translated to "Great (Maha) Public (Jana) Path/Way (Pada)" or "The Great Way/Path of the People".
At the time of the Buddha's birth, circa 500BC, his home kingdom of Lumbini, which was ruled by his father, was surrounded by such Mahajanapadas or democracies in north-eastern India. They were already in advanced stages of development and functioning, which means they had been existing for a long time prior. Lumbini itself was an affiliate of the Shakya Republic.
In fact, one of the oldest and most prominent of such democracies - the Vaishali republic of the Lichchhavi people - was already a republic with bicameral representative legislatures - the Sabha and Samiti. One was a gathering of "elders", the other a gathering of "commoners". The elders, however made most of the decisions, and assisted the MahaRaja or Great King, who was chosen from among them and was the leader until he no longer enjoyed the support of the house, at which point he was replaced by someone who did have the support. The "elders" were in turn chosen by an election in which the heads of all families participated as representatives of their families. These heads of families also gathered in the "commoners" house to voice their grievances to be heard by the elders and MahaRaja.
The Vaishali republic was also a part of the Vajjika League, a league of several republics that had already existed for over 100 years at the time of the Buddha's birth. Sparta and Athens were still developing their democracies at this point, and had not achieved their fully-mature state, which the Indian democracies had. It's around 350BC that we see the concretization of Greek city-states or democracies.
Among my sources is the noted Indian historian R.C. Majumdar's book History and Culture of the Indian People , the most definitive work on Indian history in several volumes. There are also references to ancient Indian democracy in A. L. Basham's book The Wonder That Was India , which is perhaps the most popular book on Indian history in the West, at least in English.
As for me, while I do not live in a democracy at the moment for professional reasons, I was born in one and brought up in another, of which I am a citizen.
SW-User
@chilloutab2 What are you talking about? We have no free elections. I don't know what your monologue about India is intended to achieve. What are you hoping to achieve? All of this nonsense is irrelevant. Are you also irrelevant?
Which country were you born in? I know of very few real democracies. Are you from Switzerland? If not, where is this country you are from and consider to be a democracy? The bigger the country, the less democratic it can afford to be. All of these western democracies ignore their citizens and meddle where they are not wanted. “Elected representation” is a lie.
@SW-User Our individual emotional responses towards the state of a democracy does not impact any reality. The USA is a democracy, whether any individual agrees or not, so is Canada, so are the UK, France, India, Australia, Japan, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Israel, Indonesia, Thailand, etc. etc. etc.
The purpose of my posts was, following up on the OP's questions, to clarify that thoughts held to be uniquely American or even Western, are indeed way older and more universal. I used democracy as a counter point to illustrate how the world thinks the West (specifically Greece) is the original democracy, but the truth is that democracy in various states was flourishing elsewhere in the world way before the Greeks implemented it Just as freedom and the desire for it was not an American thing founded in 1776, but actually as old as humanity itself. Since the OP mentioned West Africa as the birth place of democracy and you mentioned hunter-gatherer groups being democratic, I sought to clarify in my response that we would need records of functional, sophisticated democratic systems for a society to be considered a democracy, and the earliest of these, to my knowledge, are found in India. I don't think there is any relevance to where I was born, live or am a citizen of to the topic, because this is not personal.
@chilloutab2 The USA is a Federal Republic, not a democracy. And that's not me agreeing or disagreeing, that's what the USA actually is.
Apparently, to call it a representative democracy or a representative republic, are the same thing according to Professor Akhil Reed Amar. He's the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University. One of the nation's foremost constitutional law scholars and author most recently of The Words That Made Us: America's Constitutional Conversation, 1760 to 1840.
A Republic comes from Latin. It's two words, race publica, race means thing. So publica, the people, or the public, the people's thing.
That's a republic. Democracy is rooted in the Greek, Demos, Kratia or Kratos. It's ruled by the people. So you see even in their etymology, they're pretty similar. The people's thing ruled by the people. Here's how James Wilson actually describes both of these concepts, he says here's the key idea.
Quote, "Whether we call it a republic or democracy," quote, "The people at large, retain the supreme power and act either collectively or by representation." So you can have a representative republic or a representative democracy. And there are many advantages of the representative principle.
To say that the USA is a straight up, direct democracy is incorrect though.
According to Professor Amar, The USA is both. They're pretty synonymous, and I'm perfectly comfortable calling it a constitutional democracy. So it is important to understand that whether we say Republic or democracy, potato. These big concepts are defined by specific rules and principles in our constitution itself.
Now, the word Republic does appear prominently or cognate in Article 4 of the Constitution, which guarantees to each state a Republican form of government. But what I and most scholars who have looked very carefully at the issue believe is that a Republican form of government and a democracy are roughly synonymous.
