Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley 

April 16, 2007

Robert N. Bellah
Elliott Professor of Sociology Emeritus
University of California, Berkeley

Religion and Power

            I would like to begin this talk with an account of a visit I received last August from the most famous of Iranian dissidents, Akbar Ganji.  Ganji, who was born in 1960, became an enthusiastic member of the Revolutionary Guards as a youth, but grew disillusioned with the regime and took up journalism.  His increasingly critical articles about the Iranian government and its political and religious leaders, and his advocacy of secular democracy, got him a prison sentence in 2000.  Journalists and former dissidents, such as Vaclav Havel, all over the world, wrote to the Iranian government in his defense, but he was not released.  Early in 2006 he went on a prolonged hunger strike, rousing even greater international protest.  He was finally released in March a year ago, and allowed out of the country, though he has vowed to return.  He undertook a series of discussions with people such as Anthony Giddens, S. N. Eisenstadt, Richard Rorty, and Noam Chomsky and told me he intended to talk to Charles Taylor after his visit with me.  When he announced his intention to come to the United States, he was invited to the White House—after all a critic of the Iranian regime has to be a friend of George Bush, right?  Wrong.  Ganji told me he refused the invitation, as he did not want to appear in any way associated with a possible military attack on Iran, since that would be the worst possible thing for the Iranian opposition. 

            What was the first thing Ganji said to me when he came into my office in Barrows Hall last August?  He said, “It looks like both our presidents [Ahmedinajad and Bush] are fundamentalists who believe they were appointed by God.”  I had to agree.  I use this incident to highlight the fact that the relation between religion and power is not some academic subject dealing with ancient history—rather it is something we are very much in the midst of in most of the world right now.  I will be taking a rather long view of this subject, a couple of million-years view at least, but I will return to the present before this talk is ended.

            Before taking a look at the history of the relation of religion and power, let me say right off that however problematic these matters are in human history, getting rid of them is not an option.  I devoted much of my PSR lecture in January to the question of what religion is and why it is an ineradicable dimension of human life, so I will not repeat that here, except to say that religion is the sphere of life in which humans try to make sense of themselves and the world in which they live:  it is the sphere of meaning-making or meaning-discovering.  It cannot be abolished, Richard Dawkins and his friends to the contrary notwithstanding. 

            I need to say a little more about power before continuing.  By power we almost instinctively think of state power, military power, coercive power, and that is surely not wrong—it is to that understanding that I pointed to in my opening comments about my meeting with Akbar Ganji.  Yet power has other meanings that are at least as important.  Besides “power over,” which is what we first think of, there is “power to,” that is power as the indispensable enabling capacity to do anything at all.  If we think of the traditional attributes of God, surely power over is prominent:  in the Bible God is Lord, King and Judge, who will mete out punishments for the wicked and (we hope) rewards for the virtuous.  God is even at moments depicted as Lord God of Hosts, a warrior god.  But there are plenty of other conceptions of God that emphasize the “power to” side rather than the “power over” side.  I think of Paul Tillich’s great metaphor of God as “the power of Being,” who holds up everything that is so that it can be what it is.  And in the Bible God is often depicted as the nurturer, the supporter in our efforts to do the right thing, the comforter who helps us survive our times of trial. 

            And in politics, too, the state exerts not only power over its own citizens and often other nations as well, but power to, enabling power, without which its citizens would be much weaker.  In a nation with a long history of radical individualism and a negative attitude toward “government,” it would be well to remember how much every day and in every way we depend on the government for our safety and many of the amenities of civilized life.  That public education could be better and that the government response to Katrina was pathetic are not arguments against government; they are arguments for better government, something Americans often find particularly hard to understand.

            There is a third meaning of power that I can only allude to here, but which I don’t want to leave out:  namely technological power, power in the form of energy.  Humans have been using such power at least since the invention of stone tools and the discovery of how to make fire.  We think of this mainly as power to, as enhancement of our capacity to do a variety of things we want to do.  But from the very beginning technological power has been power over as well as power to.  When the first inhabitants of the Americas used their simple tools to extinguish almost all the large mammals in the two continents within a matter of centuries that was power over, even though it was probably conceived by those first native Americans as power to, that is, relieve their hunger and get rid of dangerous predators.  But by now we are all aware that advanced technology is power over, big time, that is, power to pollute the atmosphere and cause global warming, power to poison the water and the air, power to reduce biodiversity, and so on and so forth.  Albert Borgmann, who has written so forcefully on the philosophy of technology, has distinguished between “regardless power,” which is how we so often use our enormous current technological power, and “careful power,” where we think of consequences, for the rest of the biosphere, for our own descendents.[1]  At present there is an enormous worldwide struggle between regardless power and careful power in how we use technology, and both political and religious power are very much involved in that struggle.  The future of the planet hangs in the balance and we have little ground for optimism though here, as elsewhere, we have a theological obligation to keep hope alive. 

What I mainly want to do in this talk is draw from my ongoing work on religious evolution to consider how the relation between religion and power has developed over time.  If we look at those small-scale societies that most closely resemble early human societies, what is most striking about them—hunter-gatherers, but also many horticultural and pastoral societies—is how egalitarian they are.  If we put Homo sapiens in evolutionary perspective this is hardly what would be expected.  All our nearest relatives, the several species of great apes, are despotic rather than egalitarian.  That is, they have status hierarchies that rank order all individuals from the strongest, the alpha male, to the weakest.  Chimpanzees and gorillas rank all males above all females; the bonobos rank the sons of high-ranking females higher than other males, but this doesn’t make them less despotic, since they too have a clear status hierarchy.  Among the chimpanzees, the alpha male not only physically abuses weaker males, he attempts to monopolize mating opportunities, mating promiscuously with the females in the band and preventing as far as possible the other males from mating at all.  Under these conditions nothing like the family as we know it is possible.  At most one can speak of long-term solidarities between mothers and children and some solidarity between siblings, but there is no continuing relation between parents and no significant relation between fathers and children.

For all that we have in common with the chimpanzees and the bonobos, our form of family is indeed different.  Frans De Waal has summarized succinctly the main differences:

Of three main characteristics of human society­—male bonding, female bonding, and the nuclear family—we share the first with chimpanzees, the second with bonobos, and the third with neither. . .  Our species has been adapted for millions of years to a social order revolving around reproductive units—the proverbial cornerstone of society—for which no parallel exists in either Pan species.[2]

What accounts for this difference?  The absence of a disposition for dominance?  Not likely.  Rather, a different kind of society has made possible a different kind of family.  Here I want to draw on the work of the anthropologist Christopher Boehm, particularly his book, Hierarchy in the Forest:  The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior.[3]  Boehm argues that we share with the chimpanzees and the bonobos a tendency toward despotism, that is, a disposition toward dominance.  We also share with them two further dispositions, the disposition to submit when it looks like confrontation is likely to fail, and the disposition to resent domination once one has submitted.[4]  But, Boehm asks, if we are a species with despotic tendencies, that is, a strong disposition to dominate whenever possible, how is it that the simplest known societies, namely the nomadic hunter-gatherers, are uniformly egalitarian, and probably have been so for thousands if not millions of years?  Boehm’s answer is not that hunter-gatherers lack dominance hierarchies, but that they have what he calls “reverse dominance hierarchies,” that is the adult males in the society form a general coalition to prevent any one of their number, alone or with a few allies, from dominating the others.[5]  Male egalitarianism is not necessarily extended to females—the degree to which females are subject to male despotism varies, even among hunter-gatherers, though gender equality is generally greater than in agricultural societies.  But what the reverse dominance hierarchy prevents is the monopolization of females by dominant males, and what it therefore makes possible is the family as we know it, based on (relatively) stable cross-gender pair bonding and mutual nurturance of children by parents, precisely what is missing in our closest primate relatives.

Boehm insists that human egalitarianism does not come easily, that it is not the absence of the disposition to dominate; rather, it requires hard, sometimes aggressive, work to keep potential upstarts from dominating the rest.  Egalitarianism is a form of dominance, the dominance of what Rousseau would have called the general will over the will of each.  The hunter-gatherer band is not, then, the family enlarged; rather it is the precondition for the family as we know it.  Boehm summarizes:

There appear to be two components of this kind of egalitarian social control.  One is the moral community incorporating strong forces for social conformity. . .  The other ingredient is the deliberate use of social sanctioning to enforce political equality among fully adult males.[6]

I would add ritual as the common expression of the moral community without which the process of sanctioning would make no sense.  Boehm is especially good on the way the sanctioning works.  Potential upstarts are first ridiculed, then shunned, and, if they persist, killed.  Boehm describes in detail how this system of increasingly severe sanctions works, with examples from every continent.  He is perhaps less good at what I think is equally necessary, that is the strong pull of social solidarity, especially as expressed in ritual, that rewards the renunciation of dominance with a sense of full social acceptance. 

            What I want to argue is that religion, expressed first in ritual, and then, with the acquisition of language, in myth, is an essential element in the preservation of rough equality in early societies.  Ritual, and then narrative, provide a structure of meaning and authority that transcends the struggle between all and each, the desire for dominance and the reverse dominance hierarchy that keeps it in check.  Already in simple hunter-gatherer societies there is an element of legitimacy that religion lends to the unstable but long-lasting egalitarianism that characterizes such societies. 

One way in which the ritual practices and mythic tales of hunter-gatherer societies mitigate the struggle for dominance is that they give expression to the disposition to nurture.  In egalitarian societies we come across another disposition that seems as basic as the disposition to dominate:  particularly in initiation rites adult men often display a disposition to take care of the young men being initiated, to “hold,” as one Australian group puts it, using the analogy of a nursing mother holding her child, that is, the disposition to nurture.  Among both Pan species as well as the earliest members of the genus Homo, the long period of infant dependency required that the mother not only nurse the child for several years, but look after it and help it find food for several more years after that.  Among chimpanzees and bonobos fathers do not seem to participate in this activity although whether or not they have a latent disposition to nurture is not clear.  Males do engage in grooming behavior and in some other forms of concern for others that might suggest that a disposition to nurture even in these species is not limited to females. 

Once the family became possible, fathers participated in the nurture of children, so it was not so difficult to transpose this nurturing behavior so that it was directed toward the young generation being initiated into the secrets of the tribe.  We should not see the disposition to dominate as “bad” in contrast to the disposition to nurture as “good,” though that is a tempting view, because nurture, if you think about it, is not unrelated to dominance.  A parent gives power to a child, but also, inevitably, exercises power over a child.  In the dangerous world of Paleolithic humans a parent who did not control the actions of a child would be guilty of serious neglect, would not be nurturing.

But if egalitarianism is virtually universal among small-scale societies, how is it that with chiefdoms and particularly with the early state we seem to have a return of despotism more ferocious than anything to be seen among the great apes?  There is a U shaped curve of despotism—from the despotic apes to the egalitarian hunter-gatherers to the re-emergence of despotism in complex societies—that needs to be explained.[7]  Why the long history of egalitarianism based on the reverse dominance hierarchy came to an end in prehistoric times with the rise of despotic chiefdoms and early states, and why despotism, though challenged, has continued to some degree ever since, is a question we must address in the rest of this talk. 

Although hunter-gatherers have, on the whole, successfully checked upstarts, subsequent human history is peppered with successful upstarts:  many—one thinks of Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Shaka Zulu, Mussolini, Hitler, among others—came to a bad end, though some, Stalin and Mao, died in bed.  The tendency of upstarts to try to monopolize females and undermine the family is illustrated by the ancient Hebrew upstart David, who took Bathsheeba to wife and had her husband killed, although Machiavelli warned potential upstarts not to fool with other men’s wives as that can spark instant rebellion.  For an upstart to become a legitimate ruler there must be a reformulation of the understanding of moral community and new ritual forms to express it, so that despotism becomes legitimate authority and therefore bearable by the resentful many who must submit to it, a consideration that leads to the next step in my argument. 

In order to understand why this U shaped curve is not quite what it seems we need to make a distinction between dominance (or despotism) and hierarchy, terms that get elided in most discussions—an elision that is hard to avoid, but that needs to be avoided if we are to understand what really happened.  I want to use dominance (despotism) to describe the straightforward rule of the stronger and hierarchy to describe status differences that are actually sanctioned by the moral community—that is, I want to define hierarchy as legitimate authority.[8]  It is part of the central paradox of human society that dominance and hierarchy have gone together from the beginning;[9] even though they always go together it is important that we separate them analytically.  Boehm’s term “reverse dominance hierarchy” contains both elements:  moral community justifies the hierarchical element (the group over the upstart) and the ultimate sanction of violence against the upstart has an inescapable element of dominance. 

I have referred to the despotic founders of early states, who came to power through blood and terror as they almost always did, as upstarts of the kind that tribal society usually managed to repress.  As opposed to René Girard’s theory, it would seem that the first killing among culturally organized humans was not the killing of a scapegoat, but the killing of an upstart who genuinely threatened to revive the despotism of the old primate alpha male.  I have argued that hunter-gatherer egalitarianism is not the abandonment of dominance, but a new form of it, the dominance of all against each.  Effective dominance, however, brings on not only submission but resentment, and a desire to resist dominance.  That is why upstarts wishing to recreate despotism, can be found in every society.  We do not need to go to sociobiology for an understanding of the ubiquity of upstarts:  modern philosophy has had more than a little to say about this human proclivity.  Hobbes spoke of the “desire to be foremost,” Hegel of the fundamental human dialectic of “master and slave,” Nietzsche of the “will to power.”  But if we really want to understand what is at stake here we can go all the way back to Saint Augustine, who held that a central human tendency is libido dominandi, the desire to dominate.  “Libido Dominandi” could well be the title of this talk.

Though upstarts are found in all societies, successful upstarts appear only in complex societies.  Two aspects of complex society help to make this possible.  An increasing agricultural surplus allows larger groups to form—groups beyond the face-to-face bands of hunter-gatherers—and the age-old techniques of dealing with upstarts are harder to apply in such large societies.  The opening wedge for the successful upstart is most often militarization.  Large, prosperous societies are almost always in danger from the have-nots at their fringe, or from other prosperous groups who would like to become even more prosperous.  In a situation of endemic warfare, the successful warrior emanates a sense of mana or charisma, and can use it to establish a following.  Thus in Polynesia, the toa (warrior) could challenge the ariki (priest/chief).  “Heroic ages” in many parts of the world have seen the rise of such warrior chiefs.  The brave warrior alone could not challenge the old egalitarian consensus.  As Hobbes pointed out, the strongest man can be overcome by a coalition of others, even by someone weak when the strong man is asleep.  It is when the outstanding warrior can mobilize a band of followers that he can challenge the old egalitarianism and, as a successful upstart, free the disposition to dominate from the controls previously placed on it.  The warrior band, however, can turn out to be a self-defeating project if all it does is stimulate the creation of other warrior bands leading to an ever escalating increase in violence (a real possibility—the “nightmare of history” of which James Joyce spoke).[10] 

Chiefdoms are notoriously ephemeral, but early states are also quite fragile.  It is only when a successful warrior can fashion a new form of authority, of legitimate hierarchy, that he can break the cycle of violence and hope for lasting rule, perhaps one to be inherited by his offspring.  But this involves a new relation between gods and humans, a new way of organizing society, one that finds a significant place for the disposition to nurture as well as the disposition to dominate.  This is the task that archaic religions and societies have to complete if they are to be even briefly successful.  In doing so they elaborate a vast hierarchical conception of the cosmos in which the divine, the natural, and the human are integrated. 

            There are clear continuities between tribal and archaic religions:  in the moments of collective effervescence in the great festivals of archaic society, the solidarity of the social whole was reaffirmed.  But most of the time in archaic societies hierarchy, not collective solidarity, provided the organizing principle.  Archaic societies were much larger than preceding societies had ever been.  If they were to maintain any stability at all they had to find forms of solidarity that were based on more than tribal festivity on the one hand or warrior force on the other.  The solution that every archaic society of which we have adequate knowledge found was a new conception of kingship and divinity that moved beyond old ideas of ranked lineages and powerful beings.  In pre-contact Hawai’i, for example, kings acted like gods and gods acted like kings.  The cosmos, as Thorkild Jacobsen said, was seen as a state, and the state as an essential element in the cosmos.[11] 

            But perhaps we need to move back a step.  Once upon a time there was no state and no cosmos seen as a state.  How did we get from a society, even a ranked society, in which chiefs and people were still linked by strong kinship ties, to a society in which a genuine secondary formation, a state, no longer linked to the common people by kinship, could appear?  It would seem that that shift from tribal to archaic society only became possible when one man focused so much attention on himself that he could claim that he and he alone was not only capable of rule, but capable of maintaining society’s relationship to the gods—or, before long—to “the god.”  In this process the very notion of divinity shifts from a multitude of powerful beings in every rock and stream to high gods who demand worship and who can determine the fate of humans.  Gods and kings emerge in history together and mirror each other in power, but also in nurture.

When the Shang king in second millennium BC China spoke of himself as “I, the one man,” he expressed a profound truth about archaic kingship.  The new secondary formation, the state, was to express his will alone, and it was he alone who stood before the god(s), maintaining the right ritual relationship to the divine.  It is as though the king, himself divine or semi-divine, was the necessary fulcrum to move society to a new level of social organization.  Or, to change the metaphor, it is as though the archaic king unleashed an explosion of atomic energy, capable of moving what had for millennia not been willing to move.  But, once achieved, the archaic state had quickly to weave a web of institutions and structures of power, but also of rituals and conceptions of the cosmos, which would make it seem both natural and inevitable.

            In archaic society traditional social structures and social practices were grounded in the divinely instituted cosmic order, and there was little tension between religious demand and social conformity.  Indeed, social conformity was at every point reinforced with religious sanction (taboo).  Nevertheless the very notion of powerful kings and well-characterized gods acting toward men with a certain freedom introduced an element of openness that was less apparent at the tribal level.  Once kings claimed to be protectors of the common people questions could be raised when the common people suffered, and the basis of political legitimacy became open to argument.  Once gods replaced powerful beings as the focus of ritual and myth, dramatic symbolic reformulations were at least conceivable. 

The archaic king was almost always depicted as a warrior, as a defender of the realm against barbarians on the frontiers and rebels within; as such he embodied a powerful element of dominance.  But he was also seen, and probably increasingly so as archaic societies matured, as the defender of justice, in Mesopotamia and Egypt as the good shepherd, in Western Zhou as father and mother of his people.  Gods as well as kings were increasingly thought of not only as dominant but also as nurturing.  It was these possibilities within archaic society, that is the great Bronze Age monarchies of the third and second millennia BC, that led to the axial age, that is the mid-first millennium BC period when cultural breakthroughs that would lead to the rise of world religions occurred all across the Old World.  The very appeal to ethical standards of legitimacy for both gods and kings opened new possibilities for political and theological reflection.  In the axial age a new kind of upstart, the moral upstart who relies on speech, not force, would appear, foreshadowed by voices already raised in archaic societies.

As we have seen, king and god emerged together in archaic society and continued their close association throughout its history.  It is not surprising, then, that the axial age sees some dramatic new twists in the relation between god and king.  It is not that these symbols or the close relation between them were abandoned, but they were transformed in remarkable new ways.  One of the questions that recurs is, who is the (true) king, the one who really reflects divine justice?

In Greece, Plato tells the Athenians not to look at Achilles, the hero of aristocratic Greek culture (we should remember that Achilles was a kinglet and his mother a goddess), but at Socrates, not an aristocrat at all, but a stonemason and a busy body, asking questions people would rather not think about.  For it is Socrates, the lover of wisdom, the philosopher, who should be king, who would be the only truly legitimate king.

In China, it is Mencius, living about 200 years after Confucius (conventional dates, 551-479 B.C.), who tells us that Confucius, the failed official who gathered a few followers as he traveled from state to state in ancient China, never achieving real influence anywhere, who was the uncrowned king, the one around whom the empire could have been rightly ordered, and by implication, he, Mencius, was another who ought to have been crowned, though his worldly success was no greater than Confucius’s. 

In India, who was the Buddha?  He was the son of a king and ought to have succeeded his father, but instead he abandoned his kingdom and his family to become an ascetic in the forest seeking enlightenment. 

In Israel, the tension between God and king was endemic in the period of the monarchy:  at times God seems to have made an eternal covenant with the House of David, giving the monarchy quasi-divine status, but often kings, including David, are portrayed as sinners or even enemies of Yahweh who were punished for their bad deeds.  Yet in the Babylonian exile when the Davidic monarchy, the Jerusalem temple, and the land itself were all lost, Yahweh was proclaimed as the only God there is, and a God who can chose whomever he wants to serve his purposes—even the Persian king could be God’s messiah.  Christianity played its own changes on this theme, using the old royal epithet of the king as Son of God (and Jesus’s Davidic lineage was affirmed) in a new way, proclaiming the reign of Christ the King even on the cross.  And Muhammad, God’s chosen prophet, was, like Moses, a king and not a king, but surely a ruler of a people.  Those who led the community after Muhammad’s death would affirm their claim to rule as successors (khalifa) to the prophet.[12]  The old unity of God and king was broken through dramatically in every case, and yet reaffirmed paradoxically in the new axial formulations. 

            At this point it might be well to remember a central principle that has governed all my work on religious evolution:  Nothing is ever lost.  Just as the face-to-face rituals of tribal society continue in disguised form among us, so the unity of political and religious power, the archaic “mortgage,” as Voegelin called it,[13] reappears continually in societies that have experienced the axial “breakthrough.”  Kings who ruled “by divine right,” are obvious examples, but so are presidents who claim to act in accordance with a “higher power.”  At every point as our story unfolds, we will have to consider the relation between political and religious power, but one thing is certain, the relationship never goes away.

            Ancient China, on which my research is focused right now, is a vivid example of how archaic monarchy is broken through by axial reformulations of the relation of the divine and the human, and yet manages to reassert itself in new ways, never regaining its original legitimacy, but managing to subvert the full implications of the axial breakthrough nonetheless.  Confucius in the fifth century BC idealized the “ancient kings” as such paragons of virtue that no later ruler could ever live up to what was required.   Confucius did not reject the ideal of monarchy—the ancient Chinese could not really conceive of any alternative—he just made it impossible to live up to.  Those writers of books on statecraft that we have come to call Legalists countered the Confucian claim with a forthright argument for despotism and supplied the recipes for successful despotism as the only alternative to endless disorder and warfare. 

Thus at the very beginning of articulate Chinese culture we have the juxtaposition of Confucius, who believed that the only legitimate ruler was one chosen by Heaven because of his virtue to put into effect an ethical government in accord with the Way, and the utterly secular Legalists concerned only with the success of a ruler who could maintain his power, however oppressive he was to the people of the realm.  The unifier of China, Qin Shihuangdi, was a product of legalist teaching and he ordered that Confucian books be burned and Confucian scholars buried alive.  As his prime minister put it, “Anyone referring to the past to criticize the present should, with all the members of his family, be put to death.”  The ruthlessness of the Qin Dynasty guaranteed that it would only last a few years, but all succeeding Chinese dynasties, until the end of the Qing dynasty in 1911, were caught in the tension between an essential element of Confucian legitimation and Legalist domination, and we can hardly say that that tension is over.  We might remember that Mao Zidong was a great admirer of Qin Shihuangdi!

            Although monarchy has been the normal form of government in all premodern societies, wherever there has been a strong axial tradition, despotism has never ceased to be challenged.  In the Islamic world, after the first four “rightly-guided” caliphs, the religious community compromised with what were considered basically illegitimate rulers, conserving what they could of moral community and mitigating to the degree possible the ill effects of despotism while welcoming the civil ruler as at least a defense against anarchy and social breakdown.  While the Christian Church was, on the whole, more ready to grant legitimacy to civil rulers, it also wherever possible exercised restraints on despotic power and attempted to create institutions that would make a decent society possible.  Needless to say, religious efforts to ameliorate despotism were often co-opted by despots to give religious sanction to their domination.

            For us, monarchy has ceased to be the norm.  The modern world has produced a string of horrible despots, as bad as any in history, indeed worse, but they have been called dictators, not kings.  Napoleon crowned himself emperor, but his successors have not found the trappings of traditional monarchy essential, though they have invented new rituals to proclaim their glory.  Nonetheless these latter day upstarts have not prevented the global consensus from moving from an acceptance of monarchy as the norm to the new belief that democracy should be the norm, and many despots have obliged by having themselves elected presidents for life. 

            Since today we take democracy for granted as the only legitimate form of government, we are inclined to forget the long rule of monarchy as the primary form of government and the never resolved tension between the axial religions and would-be despots that have characterized most of human history in the last two thousand years.  There is, of course, the special case of ancient Greece, where the axial transition went hand in hand with the first attempt to institutionalize democracy as the basic form of government.  Ancient Greek democracy, to be more accurate, perhaps we should say ancient Athenian democracy, was remarkable in many ways, too complex for me to go into in this talk.  That it was far from ideal goes without saying:  women could not participate in political life, nor, of course, could slaves, of whom there were many.  Before we become too judgmental about these restrictions, however, we should remember that the American Republic of which we are so proud, began with exactly these same limitations.  What was remarkable about ancient Athens was that all free men, regardless of class or property, could, in the fifth century BC, participate equally in the assembly, from which all power flowed.

            What we have to remember about ancient Athens is that it was neither as good as its defenders have argued nor as bad as its detractors, ancient and modern, have held.  It was a normal government, presiding over a powerful state, but one that became an oppressive empire controlling many other cities that had no say in what the Athenian citizens decided.  That the experiment lasted as long as it did, depending on how you read the evidence, from one to several centuries, is in itself quite remarkable.  And it was surrounded by monarchies and constantly threatened by upstarts.  Some of these, like Pericles, came to power by gaining popular support.  Others, like Alcibiades, sought power through something like a coup and were rejected.  But the threat was always there.

We might even see in ancient Athenian democracy, and so in modern democracy as well, a return in a new form to the reverse dominance hierarchy of the hunter-gatherers.  That is, democracy, in principle, is the rule of all that prevents the rule of one.  And democracy desperately needs a sense of legitimacy, of its rightness in terms of some larger moral order, to bolster what is always a precarious venture.  I might even say that democracy needs a civil religion, except that I have abandoned that term as more troublesome in its definition than it is worth.  In any case, democracy, like every form of government, needs the pressure of ethical and religious criticism, the prophecy of an Amos or a Jeremiah, to prevent it from returning in a new form to the despotism that is our heritage, a form of government where one or a few monopolize the benefits and the many are effectively disenfranchised.  A moral order that would reward solidarity and contribution to the common good more than the competition of individuals for monetary reward would make renunciation of the desire for dominance more palatable, an updated version of the ethos of hunter-gatherers that kept despotism at bay for many millennia. 

To conclude this talk I will now adapt a few paragraphs from the Preface to the new edition of Habits of the Heart that the University of California Press will publish this fall.

            Looking once again to Tocqueville, who was a major source of the argument of Habits from the beginning, it is worth remembering that he made a significant contribution to rehabilitating the idea of democracy, which through most of Western history had a bad reputation, and even he, working primarily with the contrast between democracy and despotism, shared traditional fears about democracy when he spoke of the possibility that there could be “democratic tyranny” as well as “democratic liberty,” though holding that American institutions favored democratic liberty.  Tocqueville’s greatest fear was not monarchy, but aristocracy, the rule not of one but of the few, which he saw as fundamentally opposed to liberty.[14] 

He saw aristocracy not only as characteristic of a past rapidly fading away, though he hoped that would be the case, but also as possibly arising again even in the midst of democracy.  His most famous admonition in this regard had to do with new forms of economic organization only incipient in his own day, as described in Volume II, Part II, Chapter 20, ominously entitled “How an Aristocracy May Be Created by Industry.”[15]  In the final paragraphs of this chapter Tocqueville modulates his criticism at the same time that he emphasizes it:

                        I think that, generally speaking, the manufacturing aristocracy which we see rising before our eyes is one of the hardest that have appeared on earth.  But at the same time, it is one of the most restrained and least dangerous.

                        In any event, the friends of democracy should keep their eyes anxiously fixed in that direction.  For if ever again permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy make their way into the world, it will have been by that door that they entered.[16]

It is the tendency to aristocracy, with its threats to republican liberty, which we believe is today on the rise, especially in the United States.

In Habits of the Heart, we followed Tocqueville’s pioneering analysis of the social results of the new political form of democracy.  Tocqueville saw a variety of unique features in American democracy, especially what he called equality of condition and, famously, individualism.  While he affirmed the historical tendency toward equality as divinely inspired, he worried about the consequences of the tendency toward individualism.  In Volume II, Part IV, Chapter 6 of Democracy in America, “What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear,” Tocqueville considers some of the despotic potentialities that lie within democracy.[17]  The sort of despotism democracies have to fear has been called “soft despotism,” that is, a sort of despotism that comes on without hardly being noticed.  One condition for this to happen is the individualism that Tocqueville warned is the Achilles heel of the American experiment.  As he described it, “Each one of [the citizens], withdrawn into himself, is almost unaware of the fate of the rest.  Mankind, for him, consists in his children and his personal friends.  As for the rest of his fellow citizens, they are nothing.”  Under these circumstances those in power may become absolute almost without the citizens being aware of what is happening.  He writes that an “orderly, gentle, peaceful slavery,” such as he described, “could be combined, more easily than is generally supposed, with some of the external forms of freedom, and there is a possibility of its getting itself established even under the shadow of the sovereignty of the people.”[18]

            When Tocqueville pointed to the possibility of a new industrial and financial aristocracy (we might more accurately call it an oligarchy), he did not imagine the mechanisms it would develop to underpin its rule, a rule that would continue the form but not the substance of democracy and lead to increasing inequality as well.  The enormous power of money to determine election outcomes, the fact that in the United States both major parties are beholden to the financial magnates, these could not have been clear in his day.  He foresaw the soft despotism at home but he did not foresee a foreign policy that would support hard despotism abroad wherever it serves our interests.  And of course he could not foresee the ecological crisis and the growing demand for fossil fuel in the face of decreasing supply that is sparking ever more violent global conflict.

Tocqueville saw many things, but, writing in the first half of the nineteenth century, he could not see everything.  His sense that equality was on the march turns out to have been a mistake after all, though his fear that democracy could end up more as form than substance seems to be coming true before our eyes.  Since Habits of the Heart first appeared more than twenty years ago, the United States has witnessed a great increase in inequality of life chances among its citizens, especially in the areas of health care, economic security, and educational opportunity. The growth in this kind of inequality has been much greater in the United States than in other developed countries.  Even though overall economic productivity has risen considerably during this period, thanks in part to new information technologies, almost all the profits from that growth have gone to a few at the very top of the income distribution. Why, then, have Americans been unwilling or unable to halt the growth of inequality or to use our increasing wealth for the common welfare? 

Here, we believe Tocqueville’s analysis still has much to teach us. The link between individualism and a strong suspicion of government, especially the national government—at just the time private wealth and control of government has grown enormously—are major reasons for our drift toward oligarchy. These developments make Tocqueville’s warning about the reentry of “aristocracy,” quite directly applicable.  Indeed, since the publication of Habits, the growth of global inequality has continued its ominous march, and awareness of it is increasing, even to the point where Marxism in some quarters is making a comeback.  No one in his right mind should welcome the return of a dogmatic ideological system that seems inevitably linked to a coercive state, but are we so much better off with a dogmatic market ideology, one that argues we hardly need a state at all?  Does the latter really support democracy in any meaningful sense?

In the axial age, that is the middle of the first millennium BC, all across the Old World, in Greece, Israel, India and China, the fusion of god, king, and parent was broken through in principle, and in several different ways.  As heirs of axial civilizations and of Enlightenment modernity, we may think we have entirely outgrown this archaic obsession.  In principle we have, and we have tried to create institutions that will show that we have, democratic institutions designed to prevent the return of despotic rule.  Yet we Americans have increasingly acquiesced to the rise of oligarchy in the new form, not of hereditary nobility, but of enormous disparities in wealth and income, that act to deprive ordinary citizens of any but residual influence over the great decisions that determine their lives.  This shift has been blessed with ideological orthodoxies, the idolization of market competition, what was called a hundred years ago social Darwinism, and given the religious blessing of returning to individual responsibility as we abandon what has been called disparagingly the nanny state. 

It is also my argument that in the individual and social subconscious, and not very far below the surface of consciousness, the wish for, the need for, and also the dread of, the powerful fused figure of god-king-parent remains very much alive in human society to this very day.  This wish too finds its religious basis when, as in the case of archaic kings, democratic leaders are seen as chosen by God to defend us from our internal and external enemies.  Democracy is a fragile flower.  The founders of our republic doubted it would last for long.  Can we not see that in the moment of its global triumph, democracy, not in its form but in its substance, has already been subverted?