Is Politics Insoluble?

Popular Government^
All students of politics owe a debt of gratitude to Liberty
Classics for bringing Sir Henry Maine's Popular Government
back into print. First published in 1885, with several early
reprintings, the book has been out of print for many years. Yet
this work deserves to rank with John Stuart Mill's Represen-
tative Government and Tocqueville's Democracy in America.
Maine's Ancient Law is accorded such a rank; but Popular
Government is usually passed over in embarrassed silence.
It is not difficult to account for this neglect. Maine ques-
tioned the virtues and inevitability of democracy when it was
approaching the apex of its prestige. That prestige, it is true,
had not yet reached the height it was to reach in 1917, when
Woodrow Wilson took the United States into war "to make the
world safe for democracy." The word "Fascist" did not yet exist
to throw at anyone who expressed the slightest misgivings
about the complete wisdom of all existing democratic institu-
tions. But it was already almost fatal to the election of any
politician, or even to the reputation of any political philoso-
pher, to question the contention that vox populi was practi-
cally vox Dei.
Yet a closer study than was apparently accorded it on its
original appearance reveals that Sir Henry Maine's book is by
no means the sweeping condemnation of democracy it was
long assumed to be. He several times remarks that "the best
Constitutions are those in which there is a large popular ele-
ment."i But he did contend that: "Of all forms of government.
From the October 1977 issue of The Freeman.
93