Level and Rule: A Theory of Democracy as Threat

Abstract

For thousands of years, democracy was understood—by proponents and opponents alike—as a system that would lead to the rule of the poor and the abolition of property. Given that the poor constitute the majority, it follows that they would act in their self-interest and use the power of democracy to seize property. In vastly different times and places, political theorists saw democracy as a threat that had to be contained. This dissertation is an investigation into that threat and the subject—the poor—expected to carry it out. I theorize the democratic threat by putting forward the concept of levelling. Levelling names the democratic practices that endeavour to negate the political power that wealth confers and foster the poor as a collective subject. It describes the redistribution or nullification of the kinds of property that confer political power on their owners and the building of alternative democratic structures through which the poor can exercise their own power. This concept allows me to make three contributions. First, it allows us to better understand fears expressed by propertied elites in numerous, dissimilar moments in the history of Western political thought. Second, the concept of levelling allows me to trace important shared features of movements that otherwise have little in common—in this case, the Russian Revolution and tenant struggles in New York. Third, by drawing our attention to the tension between democratic equality and the unequal political power derived from property, levelling encourages deeper analysis of the kinds of property that have this function. My introduction develops the concept of levelling and analyzes the different ways that property confers political power: over government, over society, and over individuals. I argue that levelling does not seek to redistribute property for its own sake but rather aims abolish property’s ability to confer power on its owners. My first chapter engages in a deep reading of Aristotle, John Adams, and John Stuart Mill to understand what they found threatening about democracy and how they theorized the poor as democracy’s central agent. I argue that while the poor once appeared as a pre-political entity, it is in fact a political subject, one that must be constituted through political action. My subsequent chapters are devoted to case studies of levelling movements. The second chapter examines the workers’ councils of the 1905 and 1917 Russian Revolutions to understand the challenges confronting the poor when they attempted to rule. I show how the councils cultivated the poor as a political subject, attacked the nexus between power and property, and created an escalating confrontation with oligarchy. I also argue for a reassessment of the role of parties in the council movement, highlighting the duality of their role in the movement’s initial success and eventual demise. My third chapter investigates the interwar tenant struggles in New York to understand the possibilities and perils facing movements that seek to establish levelling institutions where none existed. I argue that landlords wield political power over their tenants by dint of their ownership of rental property. This chapter also puts forward a proposal for tenant juries as a new type of institution—in the tradition of neo-plebeian thought—based on insights from the preceding analysis. My conclusion draws together insights from the case studies on the issue of movement politics versus institutional politics.