IT WOULD be wrong, however, to rest the case for direct democracy on utilitarian grounds alone. To vote directly on the issues of the day is more efficient than to delegate the issue-deciding job to a bunch of representatives, because it almost certainly provides more people with more of what they want at little or no extra cost. But it also does something else. By giving ordinary people more responsibility, it encourages them to behave more responsibly; by giving them more power, it teaches them how to exercise power. It makes them better citizens, and to that extent better human beings. It improves the producers as well as the product.

Getting more out of democracy, and out of the people who are supposed to be the operators of democracy, was bound to take time. For most of history most of mankind has been poor, ignorant and timid. It has not been hard for the minority who had some money, a sword and the rudiments of knowledge to persuade everybody else (and often themselves too) that they were the only ones fitted to take the decisions of government.

The turning-point came with the Reformation, which declared that every individual is directly responsible to God for his own life, and does not need a priestly class to tell him how to conduct that life. It then became possible for people to start working out the secular deduction from that religious premise. That too happened horribly slowly. But, two or three centuries after the Reformation, it was coming to be seen that equality before God must imply equality in the running of earthly affairs too.

Even then, this realisation had a hard time overcoming the self-interest of those who wanted to insist that they knew best how to run things. In particular, it was hindered by a damaging by-product of the Enlightenment, the next great sharpening of consciousness after the Reformation.

The Enlightenment was a necessary reassertion of the power of reason after too many centuries in which dogma had too often suppressed reason. The trouble was that this reassertion of reason tempted some people to think that reason could produce a scientific answer to every problem, including all the problems of politics. The most spectacular victims of the temptation of scientific certainty were the communists, who were so certain of the rightness of what they planned to do that they saw no need to consult anybody else at all. But a milder version of the temptation still tugs at other politicians. It is why so many of them still claim to possess a special skill which enables them to decipher what the incoherent voters are unable to say clearly: why, in short, they reckon they should be left in charge of the decision-making process.

If you believe in democracy at all, it is hard to see why in most democratic countries the proceedings of democracy should still be divided between, on the one side, a few hundred people who take all the detailed political decisions and, on the other, the vast mass who walk down the road once every few years, push a button or mark a cross in a square, and then walk home again. Democracy, after all, assumes the basic equality of all grown-up human beings. Yet the overwhelming majority of these beings are still expected to be content with an occasional vote for a party some of whose proposals the voter agrees with, but others he doesn’t; then a wait of several years to see whether the winning party does what it has said it will do, and whether it does the right bits; and after that another stab in the dark to find out whether this time more voters can get a little more of what they actually want.

It is unlikely that the 21^st century will put up with this for long. Of course, the fuller form of democracy, the one in which the voters directly take the decisions they want to take, will put down its roots only in places where the soil is ready.

The soil will generally be readiest in countries where economic and educational equalisation has made a special class of politicians largely unnecessary: which means, at first, chiefly in the countries around the North Atlantic. Even in these countries, parliaments will continue to exist; there is still plenty of useful work for a parliament to do once it has accepted that the people have a right to act over its head. And, if the new direct democrats of the 21^st century learn from the experience of late-20^th-century Switzerland, they will concentrate their referendum-voting work on things that really matter, by limiting the number of minor issues that parliament has willy-nilly to send to the voters and by tight signature-collecting rules for the referendums the voters can impose on parliament. Like all good things, direct democracy needs self-discipline.

If it is done right, though, it could finally remove one of the oldest and deepest of the dividing lines that run through mankind. So far, the business of government has always separated those who do the governing from those who are governed, the rulers from the ruled. The invention of democracy healthily blurred that distinction. But it did not wholly expunge it, so long as it limited the democracy’s voters to the subordinate role of saying every now and again which of various groups of politicians they on the whole preferred to the other groups.

The dividing line is bad for those on both sides of it. It is bad for the minority who hold most of the real power, because they can conceal what they are doing with their power, and can therefore be corrupted by it. It is bad for the majority, because it confines them to the generalities of politics and discourages them from voting with a proper, detailed sense of responsibility; that makes them superficial, careless and increasingly cynical. The division can now be removed. The idea that the people should govern themselves can at last mean just that.

© 1996 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved