“It may be worthwhile to define exactly what a democracy is. Votes and elections and representative assemblies are not democracy; they are at best machinery for carrying out democracy. Democracy is government by the general will. Wherever, under whatever forms, such laws as the mass of the people desire are passed, and such laws as they dislike are rejected, there is democracy. Wherever, under whatever forms, the laws passed and rejected have no relation to the desires of the mass there is no democracy. That is to say, there is no democracy in England today... “The idea of representation is to secure by an indirect method the same result as is secured directly in such communities. Since every man cannot, under modern conditions, vote on every question,it is thought that a number of men might combine to send a man to vote in their name. Men so selected may then meet and people, may be taken as the decision of the people. Under no circumstances would such a system work perfectly. But that it may work tolerably, it is essential that the representatives should represent... Either the representative must vote as his constituents would vote if consulted, or he must vote in the opposite sense. In the latter case, he is not a representative at all, but merely an oligarch... If, on the other hand, he does not vote as his constituents would vote, then he is merely the mouthpiece of his constituents and derives his authority from them... In a true representative system the Executive would be responsible to the elected assembly and the elected assembly would be responsible to the people. From the people would come the impulse and initiative. They would make certain demands; it would be the duty of their representatives to give expression to those demands, and of the Executive to carry them out. It must be obvious to everyone that these conditions do not prevail in England today. Instead of the Executive branch being controlled by the representatives assembly, it controls it. Instead of the demands of the people being expressed for them by their representatives, the matters discussed by the representatives are settled not by the people, not even by themselves, but by the ‘Ministry’ - the very body which it is the business of the representative assembly to check and control. It will be the main business of this book to inquire what is the force which not only obstructs but largely reverses the working of the representative machine, turning into an engine of oligarchy what was meant to be an organ of democracy. The detailed causes of this reversal will require some careful analysis; but if the thing which makes representative institutions fail here must be expressed in a phrase, the two words which best sum it up are the “Party System.” -Hilaire Belloc & Cecil Chesterton, “The Party System” 1911 (Belloc served as a MP in the House of Commons from 1906-1910) books.google/books?id=-QRMAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
Posted on: Sun, 08 Sep 2013 15:28:36 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015