I heartily thank Jeffrey Winters for his sharp and insightful, generous yet critical, review of Machiavellian Democracy. I will confine my response to Winters's two most penetrating criticisms of the book.
Winters appropriately demands from Machiavellian Democracy a better account of the kind of political mobilization necessary to institute the recommended class-specific and randomizing institutions that would make the workings of contemporary representative governments more democratic. This raises not only the issue of class-consciousness on the part of non-wealthy citizens (which may be insufficiently intense today), but also of the concrete leverage that common citizens must command in order to effectively pursue democratic reforms in our time. Ancient demoi and plebeians collectively threatened to withhold their war-making capacities from the state in order to gain pro-democratic concessions from the oligarchs of their regimes. Worker-citizens in nineteenth- and twentieth-century North America and Europe achieved comparable, if arguably less substantive, results by withholding their labor power from industrial economies and/or by threatening to do so. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an asset shared by modern plebeians, the wielding or withholding of which would extort democratic reforms from contemporary political-economic elites.
As the present economic crisis persists, perhaps the “Occupy” movement, and others like it, will gain broader support, and rhetoric like “Main Street versus Wall Street” will become increasingly pervasive among average citizens. But even if citizens protest more widely and with greater intensity the fact that growing economic inequality is radically exacerbating political inequality, what will they use to extract democratic reforms from modern oligarchs and their political proxies? Consumer power is a possible, but deeply unsatisfying, answer for several reasons. For instance, even if, say, the internet were to better facilitate mass consumers' ability to coordinate their purchasing leverage against corporate power, it remains to be seen whether it can reproduce the political benefits afforded to democracy historically by citizens organized as armed forces or in trade unions. The close proximity, shared sacrifice and cooperative action fostered by such military and economic arrangements created uniquely tight solidarity among soldiers and workers, enabling them to exercise formidable collective power against political and socio-economic elites.
Moreover, Winters rightfully detects some reticence on my part to spell out the redistributive ends to which a modern tribunate might be put—or even to admit that such ends might exist. There are at least two justifications for such hesitation, one substantive, one rhetorical. On the one hand, the book's objective is to highlight forgotten means by which average democratic citizens might more directly and effectively decide policy outcomes themselves, leaving aside what those outcomes, in a more specific sense, might be. One could argue that democracy's raison d'être is primarily meaningful political equality, and socio-economic equality only to the extent that it impacts the former.
On the other hand, progressive reforms are always more effectively attained when their advocates declare that they are intended to achieve moderate ends. Indeed, the Roman nobility was quite surprised and dismayed by the extensive political and socio-economic ends to which Roman plebs eventually put the plebeian tribunate. An infamous Machiavellian maxim is apropos here: Prudent political actors do not request from their adversaries weapons with which they openly declare they will kill such enemies; they obtain the weapons and then use them however they wish.
