“Pericles delivers funeral speech”, Philipp Foltz (c. 1877)
A recent study concluded that democratic-style forms of collective governance emerged independently in ancient Mexico, the Indus Valley, and among the indigenous peoples of North America—and not just in ancient Greece or Rome.
We all learned at school that democracy was born in ancient Athenswas briefly cultivated by Rome and then lost for more than a thousand yearsuntil Renaissance Europe revived it and offered it to the modern world.
A new one, recently published in the magazine Science Advancesstates that this narrative is seriously incomplete — or will be, as Mark Twain would say, manifestly exaggerated.
Researchers who analyzed data from 31 ancient societies on three continents found that collective forms of governancein which power is distributed and citizens have real participation in decisions, emerged independently at various points in the ancient world.
The work, which used archaeological and documentary evidence, found evidence of democratic governance in Mesoamerica, in the Indus Valley and between indigenous peoples of North America — in parallel with, and in some cases possibly before, having emerged in the classical Mediterranean world.
As the political historian wrote Anne Applebaumin a work cited by the researchers, no nation is condemned to autocracy and none of them have guaranteed democracy. Political systems change.
With democratic institutions under pressure around the world today, researchers argue that understanding where collective governance truly came from, and that conditions allow it to survivehas much greater importance than the historical record usually recognizes.
Among the societies identified in the study as comparatively more collective in their governance were the Hatching saunaalso known as Iroquois Confederacyin North America, and the ancient Mesoamerican cities of Teotihuacan and Monte Albanin present-day Mexico.
Tlaxcallan, the city-state that became famous for resisting the Aztec Empire, and Mohenjo-daro, the city in the Indus Valley, in present-day Pakistan, are also mentioned in the study.
Several societies maintained collective governance for long periods. Monte Albán has endured as a relatively collective political entity for more than a millennium.
None of this depended on Athensnote the . Collective governance emerged in a independent in different cultures, climates and continents.
By comparing societies in the Americas, Asia and Europe, the study authors found no significant differences in average governance values. No region was consistently more democratic or more autocratic.
Among Mesoamerican societies alone, values spanned the entire spectrum, from highly collective to deeply autocratic, demonstrating that geography has little influence on the way a society organizes power.
For more than 150 years, social scientists have also assumed that Larger societies were naturally more autocratic. Large populations, this reasoning went, required strong centralized authority. More people meant more hierarchy and greater concentration of power.
The results of the study, however, told a different story. The size of the population had a only very tenuous relationship with the values of autocracy.
Also the antiquity of a society’s agricultural practicelong considered a driving factor in the political hierarchy, revealed practically no no correlation with type of governance.
A how a government finances its expenses was the strongest indicator in the data. The governments that depended on external resourcessuch as mining revenue, control of trade routes, slave labor or war loot, tended strongly towards autocracy.
When governments could finance themselves without taxing or recruit ordinary citizens, had few incentives to share powerand citizens had little ability to demand it.
The governments that depended on internal resourcessuch as taxes on local farmers and traders, market fees and labor contributions from the population, tended towards more collective governance.
The rulers who needed rrecipes from your own people had to negotiate with him, which gave citizens bargaining power and gave leaders reason to remain responsive.
The researchers emphasize that these are correlationsnot evidence that one factor directly caused the other. But the association, evidenced over dozens of societies and thousands of years, was consistent.
A bureaucratic structure followed a similar pattern. Autocratic governments tended to fill the positions based on loyaltyin kinship or personal loyalty to the ruler.
As societies with collective governance tended to select employees based on merit and subject them to functions defined according to established rules.
When Rome went from republic to empireelected office holders were progressively replaced by loyal hereditary aristocrats to the emperor, and the public administration buildings were absorbed by the imperial house.
A ritual practice was also aligned with the type of governance. In autocratic societies, public ceremonies tended to be spectacles centered on the ruler.
What the study demonstrates, as a whole, is a challenge to an assumption long-standing: that collective governance fhi a western invention and which tends to emerge naturally as societies become more sophisticated. Neither premise holds water.
Democracy, or something very close, turns out to be a recurring characteristic of human politics in history, and not a gift from a civilization to the world.
