IMO the key factor was the rise of the middle class. You had a whole bunch of rich influential urban professionals, who were excluded from power because they were not part of the tiny aristocratic elite (even though in a many cases the rich gentry had more money than the poor aristocrats), and were able to do something about it. Once they had achieved suffrage for the “right sort”, sufferage gradually increased over the years.
You and I have very different views on Martin Luther King’s message.
Okay, a more serious response. I don’t think expansion of the electorate generally involves threats. I think it’s usually done by appealing to people’s higher selves. People who grow up in a democratic system are generally going to think democracy is good. (People generally think whatever ideological system they grew up in is good.)
So you start the conversation with a general discussion about the merits of democracy. Then when you’ve got people feeling good about democracy, you move the conversation to specifics.
“If democracy is a good system because the government answers to all the people who own property, wouldn’t it be better if the government also answered to the people who worked for a living?”
“If democracy is a good system because the government answers to all the men in the country, wouldn’t it be better if the government also answered to the women?”
“If democracy is a good system because the government answers to all the white people in the country, wouldn’t it be better if the government also answered to the non-white people?”
“If democracy is a good system because the government answers to all the adults in the country, wouldn’t it be better if the government also answered to the eighteen year olds?”
But that presupposes an existing sort-of democratic system.
What puzzles me is why a small elite class of rulers would choose to effectively give up some of that power to a wider group. Generally people are motivated by self-interest. There may be a few altruists among the elite class, but I suspect they are rare.
It seems to me that conventional historians have not really provided a convincing causal explanation for this. After the fact they discuss how this or that was an important factor… but hindsight is easy.
Where’s psychohistory when we need it?
It boils down to self preservation. As long as the bottom 99% are illiterate peasants you just need to to make sure they never get too hungry (and you have enough scary dudes with swords to keep them in place if not)
Once you start getting an large educated well off middle class, who are excluded from power, then the aristocratic elite is in trouble. Unlike the peasants they do have spare time and the means to organize, plan protests, and write manifestos, etc. So you either include them via democracy or things get a little guillotine-y.
That certainly seems plausible.
Going back in history though, it seems that there was at one time a somewhat broad (for a very limited value of ‘broad’) franchise in Greece and Rome. Given that there was no large scale industrial activity then, was there nonetheless a significant mercantile middle class?
Keep in mind the least developed societies tend to be more egalitarian. A tribe of hunter/gatherers is not going to have an aristocracy. Everyone lives and works alongside each other. Some individuals may have leaderships roles but it’s going to be based on their abilities and the consensus of the community, not on who their grandparents were.
So all small communities are proto-democracies. The question to me seems to be why do many societies abandon this democracy and begin a system of rule by hereditary aristocrats as they develop into larger states.
The “middling sort” in Greece and Rome were the smallhold farmers. People who owned small-medium sized farms that produced enough to feed their family with surplus that could be sold to provide enough cash for (among other things) the weapons required went called upon to join the legion or phalanx.
The death knell of the Roman Republic was when inequality exploded and these kind of smallhold farmers were replaced by the huge slave run estates of a few rich aristocrats
No. Not at any time during the Republic.
Rome divided its classes in different ways than we’re accustomed to, especially when it came to politics. Women could not take part and neither could slaves or male noncitizens. Only men who were citizens could, perhaps 2-3 hundred thousand of the total. The plebes were the working class, which included farmers, traders, and craftspeople. The may have owned small plots of land or small shops but couldn’t really be called middle class. Plebes were at least half of the men. They were looked down upon by the patricians as the mob.
As I said above, it was the mob and their combined overwhelming numbers, expressed in revolts, that forced the Senate to give them voting rights and representation, although that was a slow, dragged-out process over hundreds of years. Interesting article showing how numbers created power over time. Still, the gains were reversed when the Republic was abolished.
What we think of as a middle class didn’t truly emerge until after the Industrial Revolution, although guilds and merchants had increasing power in Europe after the Renaissance. They may have hastened the fall of monarchical power in the 19th century, but that would be anachronistic any earlier.
There wasn’t an urban middle class (at least not anywhere near the scale of the industrial revolution in northern Europe). But there was a rural “middle class” in the sense of smallhold farmers. Who owned small to medium sized farms and made enough (in theory) to equip themselves for battle.
When that ceased to be the case then the Republic ceased to existm
But the plebes had real representative power through the peoples assemblies. The patricians hated it and tried to stamp it out whenever they could. But for most of the Republic there was huge democratic (small d) system operating with real power and widespread suffrage (as in male free citizens only but that’s still better than anything else in Europe for next millennia or so)
The farmers were still considered plebes in Roman society and only had power when combined with the other plebes. And if you check my cite, that power was achieved only over almost two centuries. That’s longer than from the start of the U.S. until women were given the right to vote.
Trying to use modern terminology to describe them is somewhat meaningless. They were not middle class or working class in the modern sense as neither of those things existed in the ancient world. But they weren’t the poorest or the richest, they were somewhere in the middle. And when they went away (so you only had the very rich and the very poor) the Republic was doomed
only had power when combined with the other plebes
Yeah and the way they did that was the peoples assemblies which were a large powerful democratic institution with widespread sufferage.
Wasn’t that the case for Hamilton and others who feared the “emotionalism” (forgot the word they used) of everyday voters House of Rep), so created the Senate for seniority?
Obviously, the class of plebes held wealth along a spectrum, but they had the same political power, even collectively a fraction of what the wealthy who controlled the Senate had. All they had were numbers. The Republic was doomed by the time of the triumvirate, and finished off when Clodius - a scion of a very old and famous family - organized the mob into gangs and took over the streets, fomenting essentially a civil war within Rome until street gangs were put down by better organized troops. That was the fate of all peasant revolts for the next 1500+ years.
No influential class of middle incomers leading to the end of monarchy existed in Rome or anywhere else until the 19th century. I’ve already said that the idea and reality of a middle class is a modern invention, and it is as modern as democracy, whose timing is highly correlated. Intertwined, but not causal. The rise of middle class power doesn’t explain the dominance of political machines in the U.S. in the late 19th century, e.g., built off the overwhelming numbers of immigrants who looked for help and protection. Democracy as we see it today is a 20th century product because only then was there sufficiently substantial middle classes in countries.
Yes, yes it was. Something we like to forget.
That’s not true. The popular assemblies and (at times) the tribunes of the plebes, had less power than the Senate, and it varied depending on which phase of the Republic you are talking about it, but it was not a “fraction” of the power of the Senate. They had real power, they were a significant part of the machinery of government who could propose, pass, and veto legislation.
Yup but so is the working class (arguably that’s a later invention than the middle class), so they weren’t that either.
The early and mid Republic absolutely had the “middling sort”, of smallhold farmers who were neither dirty poor peasants or rich magnates. Who had the means and inclination to take part in participatory democracy via the popular assemblies.
If argue it was doomed or at least put in mortal peril earlier than that, by the influx of slaves and wealth at the end of the second punic war (and other campaigns that followed in the East) that flowed to the senatorial elite. Which all but replaced the smallhold farmers (who had to do the fighting in those wars which made running them difficult) with huge slave-run estates.
The working class was a post Industrial Revolution term for factory laborers, but it’s essentially equivalent to earlier classes like peasants and serfs. And plebes.
Something not numerous or powerful enough to have a label is societally negligible. The only term in Roman culture for a class between patricians and plebes was equites or equestrians, which emerged from those wealthy enough to supply horses for the army. They remained wealthy.
The Emperor Augustus recognized the importance of the equestrians, reorganized them into a military class and encouraged others to join. Now Roman citizens of any social level could become equestrians, as long as they were of good reputation, in good health and owned at least 400,000 sesterces (Roman coins).
The annual wage for a soldier under Augustus was 900 sesterces.
At least in some places at some times, peasants worked less than American workers today. When the western Roman Empire fell, many people, no longer working on latifundia or in other exploitive relationships, did much better than under the empire. Also, revolts are not unknown and sometimes were massive
I realize it’s almost impossible to estimate given the different economic systems, but roughly how much might that equate to in current USD, in terms of buying power for common requirements at the time?
There’s an old SDMB thread that asked this question.
The answers wander all over the place from a sesterce equaling $10 to “unknowable,” with the latter far more believable to me.
However, @Jim_s_Son provides useful information, albeit a century after Augustus.
Here’s a better site that gives daily pay in asses, and a sesterce is said to be worth 2.5 asses (hence the name), so this refers to the Republic. There were 4 asses to one sesterce in the Empire.
An artisan made 12 asses a day. But a legionary makes 10 asses a day or four sesterces and that’s much more than 900 a year. So compare with caution.