Equality, Participation, Transition: Essays in Honour of Branko Horvat

28 Egalitarianism On Its Own
Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Virginia Constitution of 1776
included a radical provision for freeborn male suffrage with the rather
minimal property qualification of 25 acres. In the same document we
find Jefferson advocating that ‘Every person of ill age neither owning
or having owned 50 acres of land shall be entitled to an appropriation
of 50 acres’ (Jefferson, 1950: 349). The personal autonomy on which a
democratic society must be based required, in Jefferson’s eyes, an end
to economic dependence and hence, secure access to the means of
one’s livelihood. 2
Jefferson’s vision of a yeoman democracy based on a commercial
agrarian economy now seems quaint, for the autonomous propertyowning
farmer has been replaced by the collective work and dispersed
property of modern industry. Writing in Democracy in America just two
generations later, Alexis de Tocqueville (1933/69) observed that in the
great industrial centres ‘the workman is generally dependent on the
master … ’ and he warned his readers:
I am of the opinion … that the manufacturing aristocracy which is
growing up under our eyes is one of the harshest that ever existed in
the world … the friends of democracy should keep their eyes anxiously
fixed in this direction; for if ever a permanent inequality of
conditions and aristocracy again penetrates into the world, it may be
predicted that this is the gate by which they will enter.
(II, 170–1)
As Tocqueville feared, with the waning of the bucolic foundations of
yeoman democracy and the emergence of a modern capitalist economy,
the Jeffersonian marriage of autonomy and equality would prove
increasingly elusive. Tocqueville’s warning of the fragility of Jefferson’s
egalitarianism under modern conditions bore implications for political
accountability in a democratic order as well:
It is indeed difficult to conceive how men who have entirely given
up the habit of self-government should succeed in making a proper
choice of those by whom they are to be governed; and no one will
ever believe that a liberal, wise, and energetic government can
spring from the suffrages of a subservient people.
(II, 339)
Karl Marx echoed the agrarian republican conviction that secure access
to one’s livelihood is a precondition of freedom, but like Tocqueville