Jonathan Sumption on the Challenges of Democracy
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Leila Ismail. Our guest today is British judge and historian Jonathan Sumption. He served as a Justice of the Supreme Court from 2012 to 2018 and has written several books on medieval history, including The Age of Pilgrimage, The Albigensian Crusade, and five books on the Hundred Years' War.

His latest book, The Challenges of Democracy and the Rule of Law, examines the enduring struggles and conflicts within democratic societies. Joining Sumption to discuss it all is historian of ideas, Sophie Scott-Brown. Let's join Sophie now with more. Hello and welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Sophie Scott-Brown. Welcome to Intelligence Squared, Jonathan. Hello. I'm glad to be here.

Well, it's wonderful to have you here and congratulations on the book. It's absolutely stuffed full with ideas and it's certainly not afraid to be provocative, which is great. Hopefully we'll be digging into some of those provocations in the course of this conversation. So

Before we launch too deep into anything, I thought perhaps we could go back a little bit to first principles and this idea or ideal of democracy that filters through the book and reappears in different forms across the essays that make up the book. Now, there's a lot of inflamed talk around at the moment. Presumably, this is partly why you were motivated or inspired to bring these essays together.

So, a lot of In Flame talk about the future of democracy being in peril, what democracy really means, invocations of the people left, right and centre. But Jonathan, in a nutshell, how do you see democracy? What is democracy? I think that it is a system of self-government. It's not a series of values like

human rights, the rule of law, those are important things but they are separate things. It is a system of self-government involving the making of decisions either by direct votes, which is very rare,

or else by representation through an assembly of people who are elected by the electorate at large. One of the phrases that you use throughout the course of the book, which really resonated and struck with me, and it's actually quite an interesting idea to dig at a bit deeper,

is this idea that democracy is a process. And as you've just described, it's a way of working through and negotiating our various individual interests without recourse to violence. It's a mechanism of collective decision making. A mechanism.

So that stands at quite a stark contrast with other popular notions of what democracy is or could be or should be. For me, I wondered if it had some bearing to what you might call a sort of open society position, which doesn't really see democracy as an end goal or final outcome, but very much stresses it as this

this process, this way of working through this mechanism. Would you say that was more or less that you are, you sort of, that was an element in your thinking, that kind of notion of democracy being a conduit for an open society? Yes. What I completely reject

is the suggestion that democracy requires one to adhere to certain values. Clearly, representative democracy or any form of democracy cannot work unless there are some basic values like freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and so on. But there is a tendency to suggest that democracy is not actually about counting heads,

It's about arriving at certain results. And that is a proposition which I completely reject. There may be a lot to be said for the results that people want to arrive at, but we're going to have a lot of intellectual confusion unless we distinguish between different things. We need a word for the mechanism of arriving at decisions, and we need a word for the values that we hope that those decisions will reflect.

But they are two different things. And if we use the same word for both, we are going to get into a terrible muddle.

Yeah. So again, I think this is very interesting and I think that it's a really good place and strong place to start from. This idea that with democracy, we need to separate that out from some of the attendant goods that we might associate with it. Perhaps democracy might result in justice. Perhaps it might result in equality. Perhaps it might result in more liberty. But it's not the same as those things. And I think that's quite a useful clearing ground position to start from.

However, this position has obviously, as all do, it has its detractors. So to put the sort of standard objection,

to it, you might say that, okay, well, if democracy is this mechanism, that's sort of presupposing that that's not value-laden. Somehow it's managed to escape being value-laden. Just to sort of try and detach it or detangle it from certain outcomes does not mean it's not infused with them. So in some senses, just saying that democracy is this mechanism, this process, does that not sort of...

accidentally, inadvertently, by default, favor the status quo? Does that maybe stop us striving to use it for more ambitious or more kind of aspirational motivations? Well, it may do, but that doesn't undermine the fact that we need to know what we are talking about when we use the word democracy.

And we shouldn't use the same word to talk about two completely different things, however desirable the other possibilities might be. So moving on a little bit, some of the themes you pull out in the introduction, sort of three kind of main areas of challenge or problem that currently democracy as this mechanism is facing. One of those is a representation crisis, perhaps crisis is a slightly overused term,

But a representation issue. How are the current democratic institutions and procedures that we have? Are they adequately representing people when populations become very diverse, very transient, very contentious? OK, so that was one. Then expectations, I think it's a very interesting area, the extent that people are expecting.

democratic mechanisms or institutions to intervene in spaces of life that they have not traditionally done. And we'll definitely pick up on that point a bit later, one very dear to my own interests.

And then finally, are the institutions and mechanisms that we have, are they going to be adequate for the kind of very distinctive global challenges we currently face? And you particularly highlight climate change in there. So hopefully we'll come to all of these various issues. But starting with this sort of thinking around ideas of representation, another concept that's quite important,

prominent in the loss of the essays, you refer to professional politics and the professional political class. It's got a wonderful ambivalence in some of the chapters, because on the one hand, you follow Aristotle in saying, "Well, okay, the creation of a professional political class is slightly problematic in the sense that as Aristotle claimed, they will always ultimately pursue their own self-interest,

On the other hand, I didn't say that. Aristotle did. You quoted him. I did. But I don't necessarily agree that the problem is that they pursue their own interests. I think the problem about representation is a different one, which is that the representatives are bound to differ quite a lot.

from the people who elected them. And that is something that the people who elected them tend to represent, sorry, tend to resent.

I think that that is unrealistic. In my view, all representative democracy suffers from the same problem, which is that it creates resentment against the representatives who seem to be different sorts of people.

And the reality is that if you are a representative, a political representative, particularly in a complex democracy like most modern representative democracies, you are going to do something very different from those who elected you. Namely, you are going to spend most of your time thinking about political issues.

Most people don't do that. Also, in order to do it well, you need to have a degree of intelligence, application and determination, which is actually quite rare.

People on the whole do not have the qualities that most politicians have to have if they're to be good. I'm not suggesting that all politicians actually have these qualities, but the ones that are successful, the ones that one would like to see at the head of one's affairs, are necessarily going to have talents that will not be shared by the majority of the population.

that creates an impression that politicians are an elite, that they are remote,

And this impression is sometimes accurate, but quite often, usually, in my view, not accurate. Now, this isn't a new problem. As you pointed out, and as I pointed out in the book, Aristotle raised this problem many centuries ago. And I do not see any alternative to it. Of course, if you take a thinker like Rousseau, he thought there was an alternative to it.

namely the entire population could meet together. And in his view, the problem about that was that you could only do it in a relatively small democracy like the city of Geneva.

where everybody could fit into a large public space. Now, modern technology has produced a situation in which we can, in fact, reproduce something like Rousseau's great public space electronically. We could actually have a system in which people would listen to discussion and press buttons to indicate which way they voted.

And that brings one to another justification for representative democracy, which is that it basically smooths out the jerkiness of popular sentiment. It avoids extremes, which, of course, is not welcome to the people who adhere to extreme views.

It avoids a situation in which decisions are made impulsively, since representative assemblies are more likely to make decisions after a degree of reflection and thought generally, which is not always characteristic of electors at large who tend to react angrily or joyfully to particular events.

It is also a much more consultative system, which is likely to be better at ensuring that decisions reflect a reasonably wide range of opinion.

It has many practical advantages. Many of these advantages were really first discussed in detail in the debates which surrounded the adoption of the American Constitution at the end of the 18th century, and in particular in the Federalist Papers, which are a remarkable collection of continuing relevance.

of reflections on the importance of indirect, i.e. representative democracy, rather than direct democracy. You mentioned the Federalist Papers. I think we could continue down this vein, if you don't mind, for a while longer. In fact, I've got a couple of questions about this professional politics. Firstly, I wonder if

I think I'm possibly less convinced that I still want to know a bit more about what this means. I mean, when I think about MPs, the great virtue of the representative system is supposed to be. I mean, it's sort of not necessarily what happens in practice, but this idea that representatives come up through the people and they are able to speak with some degree of confidence about relatively stable experiences and interests and,

that correspond to the people they purport to represent, that there is a sort of organic quality to this, that they do not sort of cease to be of the people. Again, this is probably idealized. And I suppose, actually, this is what's maybe interesting me, the sort of the professionalization of politics and the extent to which

that has strained that representative relationship, possibly even more than, I mean, as you pointed out, there's always uneasiness in this notion of representation. I mean, no group of people, no cohort of people is ever stable. I mean, in some ways, Rousseau's general will is possibly more of a thought experiment than anything else. And in it, he sort of ultimately... It's a mystical concept.

It is utterly because it's sort of, I mean, I think even he in his more sober writings has to concede it cannot and doesn't exist apart from an extremely controlled and contained circumstances. And even then, as you're saying, it's sort of, it has this sort of touch of the supernatural about it. But I suppose, again,

I'm wondering also if actually this, again, this professionalization of politics, I think it'd be fair to say, and you point out in some of your essays, especially sort of what is happening in the UK, not all of our politicians have been displaying particularly professional behavior, nor have they been displaying particularly artful behavior. So we can't even sort of salvage it that way.

What I mean is that by professional politicians is that they are politicians who do it much of the time, i.e. they are a core of decision makers. So they concentrate their days are spent doing politics over and over again in every conceivable direction.

But I mean, how does that sort of differentiate from systems of governance? Essentially, I suppose, what you would call the civil service and things like that, the kind of other mechanics of government. I mean...

Wouldn't that be more the professional space of politics? - Well, it's a different profession. I mean, I quite agree that civil servants belong to a professional caste. Judges belong to a professional caste. These are all organs of the state, but politicians also belong to a professional caste. That doesn't necessarily mean that they have sort of associations and rules, although many of them do.

what it means is that they are people whose job it is to attend to politics.

Okay, so there's two kinds of different classes going on there and one of the things I'm interested in drawing a bit more on is several of the essays approach, especially with regard to the legal systems, particularly international law, sort of reflect on the extent to which the sort of governance mechanisms in our lives have actually done very well. They've been very successful. They've encroached into increasingly more and more areas of our lives that they previously did not.

enter into. Whereas politics possibly, that's had a slightly deleterious effect on politics because actually it's taken away a lot of the activity that is politics and kind of

has relegated it into the background or relegated it into the broad, flashy, shouty headlines, as it were, whilst actually legislative mechanisms have spread everywhere into spaces they have not previously been. What would you say about that? Well, I think, well, certainly I agree with you that this is what has happened. There's a slight pendulum effect. The politics periodically reasserts itself

But it is true that the civil service and the law have both intruded to a greater extent than was the case before into the domain of politics.

The importance of this issue is that while these professional bodies may well be better at analyzing policy, they are not organs whose function it is to respond to the public's wishes. If we are going to have a working democracy, we need politics.

Politics is the mechanism by which the views of the public are imperfectly translated into policy. The process is imperfect and it's intended to be imperfect because it's intended, as I said earlier, to remove some of the jerkiness that would result from a, or might result from a direct democracy of the Rousseau kind.

So we do have in some sense, and this is what's really interesting me, the extent to which one of the biggest problems that democracy currently has is actually not an overload of politics, but a kind of lack of opportunity for doing politics. There was one particular line you were describing with regard to a larger discussion on rights. Absolutely.

And you said that the only sort of fundamental rights really were, and I'm paraphrasing terribly, so you'll need to correct me. I'm doing this from memory. But so it was the only fundamental rights that really mattered were that the rule of law should exist and that it should continue to exist.

And beyond that, all these other additions and developments and advancements, we're doing something quite different. And that brings us back to that essential understanding of what do we mean when we talk about democracy and what do we want and need it to do? And therefore, how do we arrange politics, the law, the civil service in and around this central concept?

Well, you need the civil service to bring expertise into the process of analysis of different policy options.

And feeding the product of the civil services analysis into this political sphere is obviously much easier if you do have professional politicians whose job it is to understand what they're being told and decide whether these are intrinsically desirable and whether they are consistent with what the public wants. These two things may sometimes point in different directions.

Does that answer your question? I think it sort of certainly takes us further down the path. I'm sort of trying to set out some of the sort of refrains or arguments in the book.

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I'd like to actually come back to, okay, well, let's just say that there is a bit of a kind of

politics problem at the moment like people are for whatever reason you point to several symptoms if not necessarily causes in the in the book that people are expressing a dislocation a discontent a disenchantment with this role of politicians to do some of the bartering for them to imperfectly represent more or less views and put them on the on the sort of uh on the on the

on the bench for, for kind of policymaking. People aren't really accepting that that is either what is happening or it's certainly not doing so adequately enough. Potentially that is simply because the institutions and the procedures we have belonged to a period where we have a very different demographic landscape, um, a lot less transients, a lot less, um, global, uh,

forces acting upon us simultaneously. We are in very different times, as you acknowledge later in the book. But people have been finding alternative ways to do politics. And I would like to tease some of these out. Occasionally, I felt, you know, sometimes they sort of land together in a heap in some of the essays. But there is, for example, we can't deny it, there's a strong sort of populist wave happening at the moment. And that is possibly aligning with, it's an interesting example

kind of revised take on democracy, not far off from the sort of Rousseauian version that you've mentioned before, possibly not necessarily Rousseau's version himself, but definitely an interpretation of this in the sense that a lot of these movements invoke the people. And they therefore want to talk about democracy as being this collective will rather than what you're talking or describing, which is where we don't have a collective will. And that's precisely why we need

A lot of people who talk about the collective will are actually talking about their own will and the will of those who happen to agree with them. The whole purpose of democracy and the whole purpose of politics as a tool of democracy

is to arrive at a result which will not represent the will of everybody. It will represent the will of probably most people. But given that we have to vote at elections for a slate of policies, some of which we may agree with and some of which we may not agree with,

We're going to end up with a situation in which the result is something which does not represent anybody's preferred slate of policy, but is something that the widest possible number of people can agree with. Now, in a society of 48 million voters, that's probably as good as you can get.

I think that's, you know, perfectly reasonable explanation of the kind of democracy you defend. But the fact is, as we can see very clearly from recent events, that populism is getting somewhere. It's gratifying some sort of need or desire. So I'm wondering what you think about that. Why is...

The democracy you're describing is sensible, it's rational, it makes sense, it's the best of several bad options, so the traditional quote goes, and yet people are craving something else. So why are populist leaders getting somewhere when

Any long term experience of them whatsoever is going to presumably show what you're saying, that they don't represent everybody's will. They represent their own. Well, I don't think it's true that they represent their own. They may imperfectly represent the will of their constituents, but that's a different thing. I think the first thing that one has to say is that most populist programs are purely destructive programs.

they say, they lash out. They say, everything is going wrong. But when you turn to the question, what should be done to improve matters, they've either got no program at all or a variety of different programs. So I think the main problem about most current forms of populism is that they are essentially destructive and not constructive. But I think there are also much more fundamental principles at stake.

One of them, which we've already discussed, is dislike of the professional class that necessarily is generated by government, in fact, but particularly by democratic governments. But I think that there is also a more fundamental problem, which is that democracy creates expectations and demands,

many of which are impossible to satisfy. They demand more of the state than it can deliver. And that may be because the state is simply incapable

of achieving certain results, like, for example, stemming tides of immigration or preventing the spread of infectious diseases, to take two recently topical examples. It may be because the state is incapable of achieving certain results. They're just unachievable.

Or it may be because they can only be achieved at the cost of other goods, I mean goods in the widest sense benefits, which are thought to be more valuable. And that has led to people looking for alternative ways of achieving their desires.

Those ways include law, they include direct action, and they include

in my view the most sinister example, they include resort to a strongman who says that he will get things done and that is something that a strongman can only achieve by ignoring the problems. We are at the moment witnessing a very interesting experiment in strongmanism in the United States.

which is illustrating both the fact that people actually desire this strong man and the fact that the strong man is actually incapable of doing anything like as much as people want.

Well, I mean, yes, it certainly remains to be seen how much will be bluster and sound and fury and how much can actually be done. It's also a classic example, isn't it, of the fact that policy objects, which have the common feature that people want them, may conflict.

For example, people want tariffs and they want low inflation. They may not be able to have both. Well, they think they do until maybe some of the realities start playing out. And as you say, I mean, it's interesting what you're saying. Well, they may have to put up with one of them, but not both.

Well, I mean, one of the reasons I think why the sort of democracy that you're describing resonates with, certainly resonates with me, obviously resonates with you, resonates with the people doing it, is actually because what we all have in common is that we have an understanding of the complexity of these things and that, you know, we are not satisfied by these simplistic narratives anymore.

about the people or how all our lives can be better if we get rid of these people or we stop these people trading with us or whatever. And I'm wondering how much actually then the sort of populist instinct has partly come about because we've not been that ambitious with democracy. We've been actually maybe a little bit too content just to sit on having or rely on this professional political class backed up by the civil service, backed up by the law. I'm not saying that we should have backed

gone ahead and pursued the republic. And I know I probably share some of your misgivings about things like citizens assemblies, although they have their value and their virtues. But we haven't been very ambitious with democracy as a kind of culture. And when people don't feel represented and they don't have particular responsibility for any sort of serious decision making, when they're sort of

operating in very small bubbles and silos, ironically, in this globalized world, then democracy can quickly become demagoguery. And that's when invocations of the people become much more attractive. So do you think we could do more with democracy? Do you think we should actually think more about what democracy looks like as a whole culture rather than simply as a set of procedures that other people do? We're not looking at it purely democratically.

as a matter of mechanics, at least I'm not, because I think, as I have argued in the book, that a successful democracy requires more than the mechanics. A successful democracy requires a culture which is actually very difficult to impose on people. It's got to be a bottom-up process.

It requires a culture of restraint, it requires a culture of tolerance, and it requires a culture of respect for the difficulties and complexities of the process of actually making and applying policy.

Now, these are things that have seriously declined in many Western countries, including ours, over the last generation. And that has in part been the fault of politicians themselves. Populist politicians have oversimplified the process of policymaking themselves.

And some of them have also gone for the classic populist trope of saying that the reason why we don't appear to be getting closer to our personal nirvana is the deep state of

or the resistance of conservative institutions like the civil service, the judiciary, the broadcasting media, and so on. Now, these are classic tropes of populist politics. That is really how people are expressing their frustration with exactly the phenomenon that you are describing.

but they are not being realistic. We are never going to reach a state in which there is a popular will that can be seen to be translated into policy for the simple reason that we disagree too much among ourselves about what would be a desirable outcome. But what if more people had more, I mean, like I said, no one's talking about the general will or the republic, but actually what if people just had...

had more of a sense of what democracy is as a kind of mindset, as a practice, as something that you might do in a workplace or a community, you know, and something that wasn't quite so remote from people's lives. I mean, there is... The size of the modern state and the size of our populations is clearly a factor contributing to that.

Absolutely. But I mean, especially and this sort of comes to the last section of the book, quite interestingly, some of the kind of types of problems that we're facing, especially something like climate change, which is a really interesting political challenge in many ways. I mean, it's a ubiquitous phenomenon, but everywhere it's going to be extremely localised.

So to just rely on relatively small groups of people, nation state or even international levels of governance, making decisions, blanket policy decisions that are going to affect different communities, even within the same sort of national boundaries. They're going to feel the effects extremely differently from migration, if not directly from weather change themselves.

So, I suppose there's a lot of concern you might have about the future of democracy, especially in the face of challenges like climate change. But could democracy actually be a way that we actually can tackle these sorts of problems by dispersing and deferring a little bit more decision-making power a bit further than simply national governments? Well, we could do that.

But that would involve making the process of government even more remote from people. Climate change is a problem that can only be resolved at a global level. It's completely useless for even a large country like the United States to do it on its own. It's got to be done remotely.

globally. But interestingly, within that global approach, and I agree, it's no point one country doing something on its own. But within that global approach, there's got to be, excuse the phrase, but many hands to the pump. So you've actually got to have a lot of different types of expertise, a lot of different types of decision-making activity going on within large shared common global goals. There's no shortage of those. But the basic problem about climate change

But there are really two basic problems about climate change. One is that it involves a direct conflict between the interests of us right now and in the near term and the long-term interests of humanity of which we and our children will be part.

And that is an issue which in a democracy is extremely difficult to deal with because voters tend to vote not entirely on the basis of their personal interests, but to some extent on the basis of their personal interests. And their personal interest is to push it off as a problem to future generations. That's one problem.

The other problem is that a functioning democracy requires some kind of sense of coherence within the society that is organized democratically.

And this kind of sense of being in it together is something that is not international. Maybe one day it might become so. But at the moment, the reality is that democracies can only work within a community that has some kind of sense of collective identity.

And nation states at the moment are the only outfits that do have a sense of collective identity. But is that entirely necessary or compatible, consistent with the idea of democracy being this process whereby actually you don't need a common or collective identity because you are going to go through a process of negotiating your interests, etc., and come to democracy?

and create a kind of new understanding through that process. You don't have to start with a kind of common identity to begin with. The reason why I think that you do is that a democracy is actually only going to work if people respect the process of decision making. In other words, they have got to accept the decisions of the majority of their fellow citizens.

or the decisions of the government, which represents the majority of their fellow citizens and can be removed by them in the next election if they don't. People have got to be prepared to accept results that they don't agree with.

Now, in order to accept a result that you do not agree with, you do, I think, have to feel that there is a collective interest which transcends the individual interests of people who happen to agree with a particular policy.

So a sort of kind of a thin common identity as opposed to the sort of thick one represented by the general world. The thin one is as much as one can achieve. But I mean, a very good example of this is the kind of political sentiment which led to the United Kingdom leaving the European Union because people did not wish to have decisions made.

at a level which embraced the interests of those with whom they felt no commonality at all. Now, I happen to think that this was misguided, but I don't think there's any doubt that that was the way that people felt. And it explains why people were not prepared to have

have democracy at a transnational level. There is an elected parliament in the European Union, but people did not identify with it. And the reason for that was that it contains representatives of a lot of people who I think many Englishmen felt were not part of their own community and therefore not a legitimate source of democratic decision making. Now, I think that

It may well be that, particularly among a younger generation, the sense of international community might strengthen over the following generations. But it will be a very long drawn out process. It will be very accident prone.

And it will be very difficult to achieve in countries like the United Kingdom and I think also perhaps France, which have a very long history of political association within the nation, even if it wasn't always democratic.

So again, I think, you know, we're coming back to this issue of representation being such a sort of fragile, querulous kind of a concept. We're just sort of coming up to the end of our time together, Jonathan, but I can't resist having written this book, having spoken very eloquently on all the different kinds of problems and challenges that we have to think about. Do you see, what sort of things do you think we could be thinking about now to kind of

reclaim or regenerate our kind of enthusiasm, our passion, our kind of ambition for democracy? I don't think we are ever going to do that. I don't think we ever did and I don't think we ever will.

And the reason is that humanity is imperfect. Tolerance does not come naturally to human beings. It requires a self-conscious process of self-control and self-discipline to do it. That is achievable.

but it's very difficult to achieve and it's impossible to achieve perfectly. I'll settle for possibility there. I think you've left the door open for the possible. Jonathan, thank you so much. That was a really interesting conversation.

Thank you, everyone, for joining us. That was Jonathan Sumption, author of The Challenges of Democracy and the Rule of Law, which is available now online or at a bookshop very near you. I've been Sophie Scott-Brown and you've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thank you for joining. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by me, Leila Ismail.