What Is Democracy? Ancient Foundations and Colonial Collisions

3/6/2025

Part 1 of 2: A constitutional argument across time, empires, and oceans

Today I got into an argument. Not a loud one, just the quiet kind where you feel the ground shift and think, hang on, is this really where we are now?

A well-meaning person was presenting their idea of democracy. It was a lightly dressed version of representative government, with some deliberative garnishes: citizens’ panels, feedback loops, consultation events.

And they called it participatory democracy.

It wasn’t.

But what struck me wasn’t the misuse of the label. It was the deeper flattening underneath. In Aotearoa right now, I’m watching the democratic debate lose its shape.

People speak as if democracy is settled. As if it’s a stable form you can pin to a diagram: input, output, and legitimacy. But it isn’t. Democracy has always been plural, contested, and culturally situated. And it has always depended on a deeper argument:

What is the state?

Athens and the Birth of Public Rule (5th Century BCE)

When most people think of “democracy,” they often envision ancient Athens. And it’s true: that was the first place the idea of rule by citizens, not monarchs, took formal shape. But it wasn’t a universal model. It was a very specific answer to a very specific problem: How can we govern ourselves without being ruled by tyrants or kings?

Athenian democracy gave power to adult male citizens (about 10–15% of the population) to vote directly on laws in the ekklesia, serve on juries, and hold office by lot. It was participatory, but only for the few. Women, slaves, and foreigners were excluded (Ober, 2008).

Aristotle (c. 350 BCE) saw the polis as the highest form of human association. The state, he argued, exists not just to preserve life, but to enable eudaimonia: flourishing through virtue and reason. Democracy, for him, was just one possible form of rule, but not always the best one. He worried it could devolve into mob rule if not checked by law and moral education (Aristotle, trans. 1996).

Confucius and Order Without Elections (6th Century BCE)

Around the same time, in the Zhou Dynasty of ancient China, Confucius was laying out a very different idea of politics. He wasn’t interested in majority rule. For him, good governance was relational and ethical, built not on consent or competition, but on ritual, virtue, and proper conduct (li, ren, yi) (Confucius, trans. 2003).

The state, in Confucian thought, was a moral project. The ruler was expected to lead by example, cultivate virtue, and maintain harmony, not enforce compliance by law alone.

This wasn’t democracy in the Athenian sense. However, it was a theory of accountable leadership, and one that endured for millennia. Political authority, in Confucius’ view, rested not on votes but on trust, character, and the maintenance of social order.

Rome and the Rule of Law (509–27 BCE)

A few centuries later, Roman republicanism offered a different hybrid. The Roman state was a res publica: a “thing of the people” but not a democracy. It had elected magistrates, a Senate dominated by elites, and popular assemblies for certain laws. It balanced monarchy (consuls), aristocracy (Senate), and democracy (plebs) in a delicate and often violent dance.

Cicero argued that the legitimacy of the state came from the law itself: that good order was based on reason, custom, and divine natural law (Cicero, trans. 1991). Democracy was subordinate to the constitutional structure here. Popular power existed, but only when shaped and stabilised by tradition and elite oversight.

Han Feizi and the State as Machine (3rd Century BCE)

Meanwhile, during the Warring States period in China, Han Feizi presented a sharper theory. Unlike Confucius, he didn’t believe virtue could govern. People are selfish, he said. Order doesn’t come from goodness: it comes from law (fa), technique (shu), and power (shi).

Han Feizi’s legalism gave us a chillingly modern view of the state: not as a moral guide, but as a cold, impersonal apparatus. The ruler should govern by standardised rules, not personal judgment. The people should obey, not participate.

This wasn’t democracy: it was bureaucracy before its time (Han Feizi, trans. 2003).

And yet, it echoes in every technocratic system that claims to be fair because it treats everyone the same, regardless of context, history, or structural position.

The Great Houses of the Pacific

But while these empires rose and fell, across the vast oceans of the Pacific, a different constitutional logic endured.

Pacific democracies, including Māori forms of rangatiratanga, were never built around individual rights, elections, or fixed boundaries. They were built on whakapapa, mana, deliberation, and chiefly houses: great collective bodies where authority was negotiated, not imposed (Sahlins, 1985; Jackson, 1992).

Across Samoa, Tonga, Hawai’i, Aotearoa and beyond, governance was grounded in relational accountability: decisions were made in council, not unilaterally; authority flowed from standing within the kin group, not from institutional title; and political legitimacy was upheld not by law, but by reciprocity, presence, and collective judgement.

These were, and remain, Indigenous constitutional democracies, not proto-democracies. They answer the core democratic question: How should we rule ourselves? But, how should we do it in a way that centres connection over coercion, history over abstraction?

And they predate the Western liberal state by centuries.

Fear, Sovereignty, and the Leviathan State (17th Century Europe)

By the mid-1600s, Europe was on fire. Civil wars, religious schisms, the collapse of feudal hierarchies: everything that used to hold the political world together was coming apart.

Thomas Hobbes looked at the wreckage and made one of the most influential political arguments in Western history: when left to themselves, human beings descend into chaos. They lie, they kill, they hoard. In his words, life outside political order is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Hobbes, 1651/1996).

So, Hobbes said, we build a state, not through affection or virtue, but through fear. The people consent to give up their power to a single sovereign, an artificial person, a Leviathan, who holds absolute authority. And in exchange, the sovereign keeps the peace.

There is no democracy here. What Hobbes gave us is the template for modern statehood: centralised, indivisible, authorised by contract, justified by necessity.

It’s the west catching up with the east: the state as machine: rational, sovereign, self-authorising.

And it becomes the silent foundation for nearly every form of Western state power that follows.

Locke and the Liberal Pivot: Consent, Property, Exclusion

Where Hobbes saw the state as a solution to war, John Locke saw it as a mechanism for protecting rights, especially property.

People, Locke argued, are not brutes in need of subjugation. They’re reasonable enough to enter into a social contract. But they don’t give up all their rights; instead, they delegate authority to a government that protects their life, liberty, and estate (Locke, 1689/1988).

If that government breaks the contract, the people have the right to dissolve it.

This is the root of what would later become liberal democracy: a state restrained by law, accountable to the governed, and designed to secure individual freedom.

But Locke’s liberalism came with deep exclusions. His consent was narrow. Women were subjects of the household, not citizens of the state. Colonised peoples, including Māori, were positioned as outside the contract altogether. Their land could be claimed, their political forms erased, because they supposedly hadn’t yet entered “civil society.”

So while Locke gave us a state built on rights, those rights were fenced off: for the propertied, the white, the male, the settler – for a time.

Pacific Sovereignty Under Pressure

Here in Aotearoa, the 1600s passed without Leviathan.

Iwi and hapū were governing themselves through deeply embedded systems of rangatiratanga: based on whakapapa, deliberation, and relational authority. Power wasn’t given once and for all. It was renewed through presence, dialogue, and accountability to whānau and whenua.

But by the early 1800s, the collision had begun.

Missionaries, traders, and then colonial agents brought with them the Hobbesian and Lockean state: centralised, contractual, self-justifying. A state that saw itself as the only legitimate power, and other forms of authority as either backwards or invisible.

He Whakaputanga (1835) and later Te Tiriti o Waitangi (1840) were attempts to hold a space for Māori constitutional forms, to assert Pacific sovereignty in the face of imperial expansion. However, the colonial state interpreted those documents through Hobbesian and Lockean lenses, viewing sovereignty as indivisible, consent as one-time and permanent, and land as transferable property.

This is where the rupture begins. Democracy, in the liberal settler state, meant elections. Sovereignty, in the Westminster model, meant Parliament. And rangatiratanga, a relational, living, plural, and directly accountable approach, was treated as if it didn’t exist.

The Collision Continues

What we see in this historical survey is not a linear progression toward better democracy. Instead, we see multiple, competing answers to the fundamental question of political authority. Each system: Athenian, Confucian, Roman, Legalist, Pacific – offered different solutions to the problem of collective governance.

The European social contract tradition, which emerged from Hobbes and Locke, wasn’t inherently superior. It was simply more violent, more expansionist, and more willing to erase other forms of political life.

But those other forms didn’t disappear. They persisted, adapted, and in many cases, thrived. Pacific governance systems continued to operate alongside and beneath colonial structures. Confucian ideals shaped East Asian modernisation. Indigenous political traditions worldwide have maintained their own constitutional logics.

The story of democracy isn’t the story of Western enlightenment spreading across the globe. It’s the story of multiple democratic traditions colliding, competing, and sometimes learning from each other.

In the next part of this exploration, we’ll trace how these collisions played out in the modern era: how liberal democracy evolved, how it was challenged by socialist and feminist critiques, and how Indigenous and decolonial thinkers are reshaping our understanding of what democratic governance might look like in the 21st century.

The question remains: What is the state? And perhaps more urgently: What could it become?

Continue reading: [Part 2 – Modern Transformations and Democratic Futures]

References:

Aristotle. (1996). Politics (E. Barker, Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published c. 350 BCE)

Cicero. (1991). On Duties (M. T. Griffin & E. M. Atkins, Trans.). Cambridge University Press.

Confucius. (2003). The Analects (D. C. Lau, Trans.). Penguin.

Han Feizi. (2003). Basic writings (B. Watson, Trans.). Columbia University Press.

Hobbes, T. (1996). Leviathan (R. Tuck, Ed.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1651)

Jackson, M. (1992). The Treaty and the word: The colonisation of Māori philosophy. In G. Oddie & R. Perrett (Eds.), Justice, ethics and New Zealand society (pp. 1–10). Oxford University Press.

Locke, J. (1988). Two treatises of government (P. Laslett, Ed.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1689)

Sahlins, M. (1985). Islands of history. University of Chicago Press.