Facts and Arguments about the Introduction of Initiative and ...

succeeded: the turnout was less than the participation quorum,
so the referendum failed.
These types of examples lead to a simple conclusion: participation
quorums are fundamentally wrong. They give unequal
weighting to the votes of supporters and opponents of
an initiative, provoke calls for boycotts and negate the role
of the mandate in direct decision-making.
2-3: Frans van den Enden
For a long time, the Dutch philosopher Spinoza was held to
be the one who had laid the first philosophical foundations
for democracy – popular sovereignty and a radical freedom
of speech. This makes him a typical representative of what
the historian Jonathan Israel (2002) called the ‘radical enlightenment’.
Some of the famous people who are considered
to be the classic representatives of the Age of Reason
– Newton, Locke, and Montesquieu, for example – are in
fact representatives of the moderate Age of Reason. Locke’s
beliefs are representative of this moderate Age of Reason.
He argued for tolerance and freedom of religious belief for
all kinds of Christian convictions, but not for atheists – because
that would mean rejecting the basis of morality – and
also not for Catholics, because they recognised a foreign
authority, the Pope. The partisans of the moderate Age of
Reason fought against the ‘radical enlightenment’ and the
latter frequently had to operate underground.
In 1990, however, Spinoza expert Wim Klever discovered
that Spinoza had in fact borrowed his ideas from his tutor,
Franciscus van den Enden (1602-1674). Van den Enden
was from Antwerp, but later fled to Amsterdam, where
he founded a small private school at which he also taught
Spinoza. Klever discovered that Van den Enden was the author
of two revolutionary, anonymously published books:
‘Kort Verhael Van Nieuw Nederlants’ (‘A Brief Account of
New Netherlands’, 1662) and ‘Vrije politijke stellingen’ (‘Free
Political Proposals’, 1665, republished by Klever in 1992).
Van den Enden was the first to argue for political equality
“between more and less intelligent people, more and less
well-off people, the male and female gender, rulers and
subjects, etc.” Van den Enden states explicitly that political
equality does not mean ‘bringing into line’. He argues
that each human being is a unique individual with specific
talents and characteristics, and that political equality does
nothing to alter this. Equality provides for freedom. The
laws must provide everyone with the space to develop, to
speak and to think in an equal manner – for which Van
den Enden uses the term “equal liberty”. He formulated the
principle of popular sovereignty in the strongest possible
words. He warned – correctly, as we can now see – against
the creation of a political class that would serve its own
21
interests. Van den Enden argued that the people are best
able to take the political decisions themselves, and believed
that public assemblies were the best format for achieving
this. Van den Enden notes that as a result of the common
deliberation and decision-making in such assemblies, the
people’s knowledge and political skills would increase considerably.
He did have a limited concept of “the people” in
this context: only men who could provide for themselves
were entitled to vote. Men who were unable to do so, and
women, should not be allowed access to the public assembly
(to that extent, his theory of equality was inconsistent).
At the first public assembly, he argued, the citizens should
make a show of burning all existing regulations and laws
that granted special powers or privileges to the nobility and
clergy. He believed that such genuine direct-democratic
communities (then still cities) could enter into federative
links with each other. All this makes him quite possibly the
very first theorist of direct democracy. Van den Enden also
argued for the free bearing of arms by citizens, so that other
rulers would be not able to cheat them out of their democratic
rights.
Van den Enden considered that democracy was inextricably
linked to a free cultural life. “The most harmful thing in a
state is that no freedom is left for people to be able to proclaim
everything they consider to be in the best public interest...”
No obstacles should be placed in the way of anyone,
not even foreigners, where personal opinions or religious
matters are concerned. Van den Enden also argued for the
principle of mutual solidarity in relation to people’s physical
needs. Central to his beliefs was the right to work. The
state imposes state membership de facto on all those born
within its boundaries; that is only justified if the state also
provides equal levels of benefit to all its members. He also
argued for the introduction of social and medical facilities
and emphatically rejected the “humiliating giving of alms”
by rich people and churches.
Nearly 125 years before the French Revolution, Frans Van
den Enden had already espoused its celebrated trinity of ideals:
liberty, equality, and fraternity. But whereas the French
revolutionaries produced this rallying-cry in an entirely undifferentiated
form, Van den Enden brought much greater
discernment to it: he connects liberty with the cultural life
(freedom of speech and religion), equality with the political
and legal systems, and solidarity with people’s material
needs (see also chapter 3).
Van den Enden later moved to Paris, where he was arrested
for being involved in a plot against Louis XIV. On 27 November
1674, he was executed by hanging in the Place de la
Bastille. If one compares the contents of the ‘Free Political
Proposals’ with the situation today, it is clear that most of
the goals formulated by Van den Enden nearly three and a
half centuries ago are still waiting to be realised.