Democracy tends to favour short-term decisions and put local before global interests. Perhaps, therefore, it is not the best way for our species to organise a world that is sliding rapidly from the Holocene into the Anthropocene. And maybe in retrospect democracy will one day be dismissed as a human folly. In this book I shall counter the characteristic human problem of ‘nearsightedness’ by taking the long view of the historian. When Roy suggests that democracy has been ‘used up’ or ‘hollowed out’, are we hearing a time-honoured complaint because people have always dreamt of a golden age when democratic politics once supposedly worked? Or has the democratic project lost conviction more recently because of the form democracy takes in the age of corporate capitalism? When today’s politicians pander to the ‘avaricious dreams’ of the supposedly free individual, it is easy to blame them for their personal weakness and failure to tell us the truth about a degraded planet. Perhaps, however, democracy has always required politicians to be actors, speaking the lines the audience wants to hear as their only means to stay in power. If so, is democracy inherently a form of theatre? And was Plato right to relabel democracy as ‘theatrocracy’?

I take up in this book the problem of political honesty. When the pre-democratic Greek reformer Solon went to watch a performance by the first tragedian, Thespis, he complained that he witnessed a form of lying. When Thespis responded that tragedy was merely a kind of ‘play’, Solon lamented that this theatrical pseudologia or ‘false speech’ would soon spread to things that mattered, that is, become the norm in politics.³ Unlike Solon, Athenian theatre audiences evidently valued pseudologia as a means of telling truth about the world. The problem is, there are different kinds of truth. Boris Johnson, when campaigning to become British prime minister in 2019, famously waved in the air a kipper sealed in ice and plastic, proclaiming that this wrapping was an imposition by the European Union. On one level this was a flat lie, and the relevant regulations were British. On another level, the ploy won emotional recognition from many who felt that they had lost control of their lives, and that their political selves had lost touch with their own biological selves subject to touch, taste and smell. Johnson’s political instincts led him to an image traditionally associated with the King of Carnival, whose enemy was the Lenten herring.⁴ In the Washington Post the distinguished political commentator Ann Applebaum pronounced that a doomed Conservative party was allowing Johnson to entertain them while their ship was sinking, but in the event Johnson won a triumphant victory in the next election.⁵ If Johnson’s stunt was an insult to the intelligence, then there were many British electors happy to see the intelligentsia being insulted, possessing enough emotional intelligence to distinguish categories of truth.⁶

In this book I shall look at democracy through the eyes of a theatre historian, seeking to develop the conversation between Solon and Thespis. I will argue that democracy always was and always will be an art of performance. Ever since Aristotle first formulated his theory of catharsis or ‘purgation’,⁷ it has been understood that theatre works not on the intellect but on the emotions. That is why theatrical scholarship has something unique to offer political science.

In the case of Johnson’s kipper there was a clash between factual truth and theatrical or emotional truth. Political persuasion always operates on the level of feeling rather than disembodied reason because reason can never resolve the question of values, of what constitutes the well-lived life. As the philosopher David Hume put it, a factual ‘is’ can never translate into a moral ‘ought’.⁸ Jonathan Haidt sums up the findings of modern cognitive and social science when he describes ‘reasons’ as ‘the tail wagged by the intuitive dog’,⁹ and in another helpful metaphor he suggests that the ‘mind is divided into parts, like a rider (controlled processes) upon an elephant (automatic processes).’ Since the rider, in this case, evolved to serve the elephant, it follows that ‘if you want to change someone’s mind about a moral or political issue, talk to the elephant first.’¹⁰ Analytic intelligence is a mixed blessing when most choices are made on the basis of unconscious emotions, rationalised only in retrospect. As the neuroscientist Tali Sharot explains, ‘The greater your cognitive capacity, the greater your ability to rationalise and interpret information at will, and creatively twist data to fit your opinions.’¹¹ The cognitive scientist George Lakoff claims that most of ‘what we understand in public discourse is not in the words themselves, but in the unconscious understanding that we bring to the words’, putting a figure of 98% onto the contribution of the ‘cognitive unconscious’, and he regrets that today politicians on the left generally have a poorer grasp of this principle than politicians on the right.¹² While science has, paradoxically, embraced human irrationality, popular sentiment clings to the idea that we make rational choices on the basis of individual free will.

This book was written in the shadow of Brexit (Britain’s vote to leave the European Union), and the presidency of Donald Trump which culminated in an attack on the US Capitol. The UK referendum was a shock to me because I live in Oxford where there was no ‘leave’ poster to be seen on the streets. I move in social circles where there was no debate, and the vote left me feeling that part of my identity had been stripped away since I could no longer call myself a ‘European’. The immediate narratives around me were vehement: this vote was the product of ‘populism’, not ‘democracy’, because it was founded upon lies. And as the narrative built up it often took the form of: ‘How could these (uneducated) people be so stupid?’, ‘How could they vote against their own economic self-interest?’ In other social settings, a different story was told: here at last the ‘people’ had succeeded in asserting their will over the elite. In the USA a similar question was being posed: ‘How could so many people vote for an incompetent, narcissistic liar?’ And the counter-narrative went unheard: ‘Here at last was a man who voiced my anger’. The failure of democracy lay not in these competing narratives, but in the lack of any arena for mutual listening.

From my perspective as a theatre scholar, it was clear that there had been a failure on the level of performance. Johnson and Trump are accomplished performers with the skill of making the spectator in the back row feel that they are being personally and intimately addressed. Rational argument was powerless against men who knew how to play on the emotions of their audience, and the rationalists achieved nothing by unmasking the lies of people who made no pretence to be truthful. Conversely Johnson and Trump succeeded in unmasking the essential hypocrisy of the rationalists, who pretended they were not themselves driven by a complex of emotions, with outrage at human suffering tangled up with personal benefits derived from globalisation. In these political battles, two levels of pseudologia were at play.

Critiques of populism run into the problem that democracy means by definition rule by the people or populace, and one person’s populism is another person’s authentic democracy, so I prefer to see Johnson and Trump not as sources of the trouble but as symptoms. For chapter and verse on the ‘crisis of democracy’, we might turn to a report published in 2020 by the Centre for the Future of Democracy in Cambridge which concluded: ‘Across the globe, democracy is in a state of malaise. In the mid-1990s, a majority of citizens … were satisfied with the performance of their democracies’ – but not so any longer.¹³ Dissatisfaction was particularly marked in the UK and USA, with higher satisfaction reported in regimes condemned by liberals as ‘populist’, particularly among the young. Meanwhile, a survey of 2350 British adults aged 18–34 in 2022 found that 61% agreed with the proposition that ‘having a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections would be a good way of governing this country’.¹⁴

The existence of this democratic malaise seems obvious enough without such surveys, and explanations are not hard to find: democratically elected representatives powerless to resist corporate lobbying or halt the rising inequality of wealth; social media killing investigative journalism, while dividing society into tribes with no common language; the internet deluging us with facts but little fact-based argument; China’s demonstration that democracy is not the only way to deliver material prosperity. The term ‘democracy’ has ceased to resonate with people who have no living memory of fascism, Stalinism or imperial rule, though it has a much more positive ring for the educated young in places like Hong Kong, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

The first problem is to know what the word means. “Democracy!” has always been a convenient rallying cry to shout at your opponent, whoever they may be. When Winston Churchill observed in 1947 that ‘democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time’, he spoke as an orator using a familiar ploy to claim that he himself embodied the democratic voice of the people while the ruling Labour Party was a ‘dictatorship’.¹⁵ ‘Democracy’ has been an unstable term since its first emergence in Athens because the word demos refers ambiguously both to the common people – those who distinguish themselves from the few, the rich, the noble – and to the entire people, and populists have been adept at conflating these two definitions, bracketing themselves with the ‘people’ against an elite or supposed elite.¹⁶ In a sense, the vitality of democracy lies in the battle to define yourself as a democrat, and today there seems less interest in that battle.

In a recent essay entitled ‘Why feelings trump facts’ inspired by his participation in a parliamentary enquiry into ‘citizenship and civic engagement’, the political scientist Matthew Flinders observes that ‘citizenship’ means little to younger British people who have a new focus on ‘belonging’. Quoting multiple international surveys that identify a growing gap between governors and governed, he laments the methodological failure of the social and political sciences to address the problem of ‘feelings’.¹⁷ Flinders points us towards a wider social transformation, where, within the context of what has come to be called ‘identity politics’, a new sense of self yields a changed attitude to democratic debate.

In her 2022 BBC Reith lecture, the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie argued for the importance of disagreement and commented on the moment when she first came as a student to the USA more than two decades earlier: ‘I quickly realised that in public conversations about America’s difficult problems – like income inequality and race – the goal was not truth, the goal was to keep everyone comfortable. And so, people pretended not to see what they saw, things were left unsaid, questions unasked and ignorance festered. This unwillingness to accept the discomfort that honesty can bring is in its own way a suppression of speech.’¹⁸ The word ‘honesty’ can all too easily be used as a cover for conscious or unconscious hate speech, and in this book I shall scrutinise these troublesome categories of ‘honesty’ and ‘sincerity’. Adichie points us towards a marked swing of the pendulum in determining how freedom of speech must be balanced against the wish not to hurt others.

An extreme case arose as I worked on this book when Kathleen Stock, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex, awarded an OBE for services to education, was driven from her post by charges of hatred for transsexuals. Her brand of feminism which only a few years earlier looked radical and progressive was viewed by many in 2021 as reactionary. My concern is not with the rights and wrongs of the charge against Stock, but with a cultural context where democratic debate became impossible. In Stock’s angry words, the students and more importantly colleagues who condemned her en masse had learned to ‘mark disagreement as an instant sign of bad and corrupt character. “Of course someone like HER shouldn’t have a platform”, they say. “She is a bad person”. Case closed. It’s a remarkably handy and self-serving worldview…’¹⁹ Adichie expressed herself no less bluntly: ‘There is something honest about an authoritarianism that recognises itself to be what it is. Such a system is easier to challenge because the battle lines are clear. But this new social censure demands consensus while being wilfully blind to its own tyranny.’²⁰ These are controversial positions, but they point to a problem of the moment. Democracy is a culture of disagreement, allowing differences to be resolved through words rather than violence, and when words are understood as a form of violence and moral categories are not open to challenge, then democratic debate is constrained, for better or worse.²¹ Democracy is manifestly under challenge from the far right, while on the left it has slipped down in the order of priorities, and perhaps the concept has just become too difficult.

The disengagement of the young from citizenship and democracy has complex causes, but a new sense of ‘who I am’ and ‘my right to be who I want to be’ looms large, along with a new sense of my ethical obligation to others. Scepticism about democracy is not linked to any diminished passion for social justice, rather the opposite, and the problem is that democracy seems an ever less plausible route to achieve social justice. Universities have done little to create a culture of democratic debate, with the transformation of collegiate structures into managerial structures, consumer satisfaction the mark of good teaching, and grant income the measure of professional success. It is not my intention in this book to wade any further into the muddy waters of contemporary public argument, but rather to step back from the contentions of the present in order to establish a context for these arguments. It is all too easy to imagine that a golden age of democracy has vanished, but historical scrutiny reveals that at any given moment in the past democracy was riddled with contradictions and cruelties. It has always been a quest rather than a state of being, and I continue to value the quest for ‘true’ democracy. As Sophia Rosenfeld argues, ‘truth, like democracy, isn’t something that simply exists in the world. It is, rather, something that we must always consciously and collectively forge.’²² If this is to be achieved, a shared understanding of what has gone before is indispensable.

Theatre-makers understand that their job turns upon moving the emotions of others, not upon being themselves. Novelists have the same need, and when Adichie argues for ‘honesty’, she writes not as a philosopher but as a writer and teacher of writing concerned with censorship of the imagination, an inevitable consequence if her private self is going to be identified with the characters she imagines. Politicians are trapped in the same bind, playing roles that they think will secure instinctive identification or approval, constantly attacked when a gap appears between the role and its creator. Through his historical work on the ‘fall of public man’, Richard Sennett has done much to inform my perspective on Western democracy. Sennett drew on the metaphor and institutional realities of eighteenth-century theatre in order to argue that before the age of Romanticism someone (normally male, to be sure) could enter the public sphere without feeling that a vulnerable private self was invested in every civic action.²³ In a useful essay on ‘performance and democracy’, the British theatre scholar Nicholas Ridout takes his cue from Sennett when describing his own experience of trotting out ‘ready-mades’ in political conversation, prompting him to conclude that becoming ‘other than oneself … is a precondition of democratic politics’.²⁴ The problem of role-playing is a perennial one. Theatrical communication is both complex and reciprocal, which is why, given the disciplinary lacuna which Flinders identifies in the realm of feeling, political science has much to glean from theatrical scholarship. Feelings have a history, and the search in modern political life for revelations of an authentic ‘I am’ is historically produced.²⁵

Hannah Arendt’s experience as a stateless Jewish refugee helped her see a gap between democracy as defined by the Athenians and the later ideal of democracy as an electoral system intertwined with a sense of universal human rights: ‘We are not born equal’, Arendt argued, in defiance of the preamble to the US Declaration of Independence, ‘we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights.’²⁶ Though Francis Fukuyama proclaimed notoriously after the collapse of the Soviet Union that Western liberal democracy had become a universal ideal which marked ‘the end of history’, from Arendt’s perspective ‘liberal democracy’ is a flat contradiction since of its nature the democratic state creates inequity through exclusion.²⁷ Her Jewish background alerted her to the role of Protestant Christianity in defining freedom as a function of the individual will rather than public life, and she turned to Athens for an alternative model. The democratic Greek polis, claimed Arendt, ‘provided men with a space of appearances where they could act, with a kind of theater where freedom could appear.’²⁸ Democracy and theatre emerged in Greece at the same historical moment, in a symbiosis that broke down when democracy became a matter of individual rights.

Arendt blamed the atrocities of the French Revolution on a romantic quest for personal authenticity, and argued that politicians who follow their convictions and aspire to truth and sincerity are doomed to fail because the dark ‘life of the heart’ is always distorted and transformed by the ‘light of the world’.²⁹ If feelings are transformed through the process of their public representation, then liberal politicians seeking to persuade the public of their sincerity and personal authenticity are forced to choose between self-deception and hypocrisy. Nowadays only ‘deception’, Arendt argues, ‘is likely to create a semblance of truthfulness’,³⁰ whereas in antiquity, where truth was a philosophical not a political virtue, what mattered was the character of the speaker as defined by his actions.³¹ Arendt drew inspiration from Aristotle’s argument that in the theatre what counts is not character but ‘action’, and applied this principle to democratic politics.³² From her perspective, the modern problem of democracy is one of performance. Over the centuries Christianity, which draws much of its thinking from Plato and from Judaism, has created a cultural mistrust of appearances, denouncing the inherent immorality of actors and of theatre. Recognising this cultural legacy, Arendt insisted that no amount of honesty will of itself stir a crowd of individuals into collective action because emotions respond to appearances rather than realities.

Chantal Mouffe is a Belgian political philosopher who owes much to Arendt when she pulls apart two strands shaping modern political life. ‘On one side we have the liberal tradition constituted by the rule of law, the defence of human rights and the respect of individual liberty; on the other the democratic tradition whose main ideas are those of equality, identity between governing and governed and popular sovereignty.’³³ Because there is no rational way to synthesise these two ideals of liberty and equality, Mouffe urges that democratic politics should be ‘agonistic’, but not ‘antagonistic’.³⁴ Seeing no end to the process of trying to reconcile these opposites, Mouffe adopts the Greek term agon to capture the positive ideal of a structured and performative contest. A theatre performance in Athens was termed an agon, part of a public competition, and Greek tragedies and comedies feature a further agon, a set-piece verbal contest between two dramatic characters.³⁵ Liberalism prioritises the rights and freedoms of the individual over those of the community, and because the Athenians for better or worse, in what was never an easy human process, tried to put community first, they help us set liberalism in perspective.³⁶ I have not couched this book as an assault on liberalism, but rather as an attempt to understand the limitations of a tradition that has made me the kind of person I feel myself to be.

The most important theoretician whom I will draw upon in this book is Plato. Plato describes a recurrent process whereby democratic anarchy spawns demagogues (‘leaders of the demos’ or what we would today call ‘populists’), and a demagogue quickly morphs into a dictator or ‘tyrant’. According to Plato, tragedians in the theatre praise tyrants, likening them to gods, and for this reason he bars them from his idealised Republic, leaving them to ‘circulate round other cities, attracting crowds and hiring men with fine, loud persuasive voices to drag the citizens towards tyranny and democracy’.³⁷ Democracy and tyranny sit next to each other on Plato’s spectrum of constitutions, and he saw theatre as a device for securing the tyranny of demagogic rule. The persuasive or convincing voice of the tragic actor merges in his analysis with the voice of the demagogue to build the same collective surrender of rationality and admiration for a factitious hero. Plato’s description of Greek tragedy seems counter-intuitive until we recall that in Greek city states most so-called tyrants were populist orators who won the support of the demos by suppressing aristocrats. In Athens it was the populist tyrant Peisistratos who first established the festival where tragedies were performed,³⁸ the playwright Aeschylus had a close relationship with Hieron the ‘tyrant’ of Syracuse, while Euripides wrote not only for Athens but also for the Macedonian ‘tyrant’ Archelaus.³⁹ For Plato, who believed in rule by a deserving elite, the thread that binds the actor and the demagogue is rhetoric, the power of a public speaker to command the emotions of a crowd and subject them to his will.

Aristotle was more sympathetic than Plato to the democratic ideal, and looked for a middle course. Unlike Plato, he recognised that the only alternative to rule by violence was rule by public persuasion, and this meant giving a central place to the art of rhetoric. He knew that mass juries and political assemblies would never be composed of philosophy students, and that collective decisions would always turn upon emotion rather than logical argument. He grasped also that emotion cannot be separated from cognition. ‘The emotions’, Aristotle wrote, ‘are those things that bring about change to make people alter their decisions.’⁴⁰ Although his influential Art of Rhetoric analysed the psychology of emotion, he steered clear of addressing the problematic art of the performer. Writing a generation after the death of the great playwrights Sophocles and Euripides, he lamented that nowadays tragedies win the prize in dramatic competitions thanks not to playwrights but to actors, ‘and the same thing happens in political contests because of the decay of polities’.⁴¹ Put another way, it wasn’t what you said that counted in the democratic Athens he knew, but how you performed those words. Aristotle’s phrase ‘decay of polities’ refers to precipitate edicts passed in defiance of the constitution, and he goes on to complain that ‘where the laws are not supreme, demagogues arise. Merged into a single entity, the demos turns into a king’. Like toadies paying court to a monarch, demagogues ‘get their power because the demos controls everything, and they control the thinking of the demos.’⁴²

Today Western liberals are caught in an intellectual trap. They complain about spin, mendacity and emotional manipulation, but lack any positive ideal of rhetoric of the kind that Aristotle and later Cicero in republican Rome tried to elaborate. How in practice can a politician be both honest and a consummate performer? If we seek a politician whom we judge to be ‘honest’ rather than ‘eloquent’, it is likely we shall be drawn to some individual whom we trust because they resemble ourselves, and this individual meanwhile will fail to win trust from people unlike ourselves. The human tendency to identify provides the entrée to leaders like Trump and Johnson, adept in the role of a flawed, rebellious human being who speaks as he thinks, and both are probably honest liars in the sense that they know how to bring themselves to believe what they say in the brief moment of saying it. Cicero established a principle that countless later orators have echoed. In Churchill’s phrasing of the mantra, for example, the orator who wants to convince the multitude ‘must himself believe. He may be often inconsistent. He is never consciously insincere.’⁴³ Gorgias, a flamboyant Greek rhetorician, set out the paradox of theatricality in these terms: ‘The deceiver is more honest than the non-deceiver, and the deceived is wiser than the undeceived.’⁴⁴ Many who vote for populists like Trump and Johnson are plainly not naïve but share this view.

When democracy was reinvented in the eighteenth century, it was tied to procedures of representation via a system of elections. This was different from the participatory Greek system based on mass meetings and lotteries for the random selection of officers. The cultural climate of the Enlightenment put a premium on rationality and amongst the educated classes it was taken for granted that elected representatives would be more capable of reasoned deliberation than the common people, often demeaned as ‘the mob’. Our modern thing called democracy was inspired not by quarrelsome Athens but by the Roman Republic, and this Rome was seen to be governed by free citizens, men with a decent level of education and property, capable of engaging in deliberation that was emotional but also reasoned. When the republican ideal slowly yielded to the modern democratic ideal of full adult suffrage, the educated and property-owning classes did not instantly relinquish their grip on power – and perhaps they never did. Greece was not the cradle of modern democracy, but it remains a revealing social experiment showing how a shared understanding of agonistic performance allowed power to shift with a minimum of internal violence.

An important distinction needs to be established between rhetoric and deliberation.⁴⁵ For Plato deliberation meant ‘dialectic’, the conversational to-and-fro undertaken by his students in the corridors of Academe.⁴⁶ In Athens, fifty citizens chosen by lot gathered in the Council Chamber to deliberate the agenda, but the Assembly where decisions were made was a space for rhetoric because 6000 people cannot in any meaningful sense ‘deliberate’ together. The essential difference is performative. In deliberation all are equals, typically seated, while rhetoric makes a clear distinction between the performer, normally standing on a podium, and his or her audience. Proponents of ‘deliberative democracy’, an ideal often associated with Habermas’ response to the rhetoric of fascism, point to all that can be achieved by a diverse group of randomly selected citizens sitting down together to work through disagreements, but there is a snag: few have been willing to grant binding legitimacy to decisions so reached.⁴⁷ As John Parkinson puts it, small groups may deliberate, but it is the harsh reality of large-scale democracies that the majority must take ‘a seat in the stalls, while the few occupy centre stage.’⁴⁸ Mouffe’s critique is more trenchant, arguing that conflict needs public enactment because conflict is part of being human.⁴⁹

Alan Finlayson is a British political theorist who champions rhetoric over deliberation. Building on Aristotle’s claims that the human being is in the first instance a ‘political’, that is, social animal rather than an individual, Finlayson follows Aristotle to define rhetoric as ‘the ability to identify in any particular situation the available means of persuasion’, the only way to put political judgements before the people en masse.⁵⁰ For Finlayson modern ‘post-democracy’ has suppressed collective decision-making in favour of aggregated individual preferences, and neoliberalism will always seek to denigrate and destroy rhetoric.⁵¹ An important strand of mainstream political science is based upon ‘rational choice theory’ which assumes that voting reflects the calculations of individual ‘actors’ about personal benefit.⁵² This theory, which seeks to equate the individualistic logic of the marketplace with the logic of the ballot box, receives little support from the analysis of actual voting behaviour.⁵³ People are, as Jonathan Haidt puts it, inherently ‘groupish’.⁵⁴

Back in 1897 Churchill rejected complaints that rhetoric had been killed off by newspapers and public sophistication,⁵⁵ and although the same claim about the demise of rhetoric is often repeated in the context of digital media and a culture of the soundbite, we should recall how Boris Johnson wrote a eulogistic biography of Churchill, the most celebrated British orator of the twentieth century, and as Prime Minister kept on his desk a statue of the great Athenian orator Pericles.⁵⁶ There is no escaping rhetoric, broadly defined, because history offers few compelling examples of collective leadership, and in practice a single leader needs to win over the many. The skill of engaging a crowd changes in a recording studio, where there is always anxiety that recorded words will be taken out of context, but the art of talking to persuade in the heat of the moment remains for better or worse central to democratic life. Philip Collins, once a speechwriter for the British Prime Minister Tony Blair, claimed in 2018 that ‘[r]hetoric and democracy are twinned; their histories run together.’ Setting up Pericles’ ‘funeral speech’ pronounced over the Athenian dead as a foundational moment, Collins argues for ‘better’ rhetoric as the key to defending liberal democracy from populism.⁵⁷ Political speech writers are a group who normally seek to keep themselves invisible, because no politician will let it be seen that they are actors voicing words written for them by others.⁵⁸

Collins’ introduction to political rhetoric focuses on the written word, with nothing on body language or the art of adjusting the written word to a specific performer, and Finlayson has the same textual orientation, influenced by Aristotle’s sense of priorities.⁵⁹ Performance is harder to analyse than a written text because the traces it leaves are elusive. A speech on television or circulating on social media responds to the public mood of the moment, and the single lens of a camera offers a poor impression of the exchange that takes place between speaker and listener. My undertaking in this book will be a delicate one as I try to catch key features of past performances, accessible only through inferences built on the material traces which those performances have left. For all its difficulties, the attempt is worth making because democracy is and always has been a mode of performance. For theatre historians, unlike political scientists, the challenge of recovering lost performances is a familiar part of their trade.

In my last book I examined the rhetorical tradition which was the foundation of European stage acting from the Renaissance until the nineteenth century, and which assumed that the skills of preacher, politician and actor were essentially the same because they used public speech to move an audience.⁶⁰ In mainstream twentieth-century stage acting, the emphasis shifted, and acting became less the art of moving the emotions of an audience than of expressing something hidden inside the actor. The name of Stanislavski came to be associated with words like truth, belief and motivation, and the private psychological processes of the actor were the new focus of Western actor training.⁶¹ In the same era it grew harder for politicians to frame democratic arguments about issues as they faced a similar audience demand for inner truth. The new focus upon who I am made it harder for politicians to concentrate on the problem of what makes an audience change its mind.

Alongside ‘rhetoric’, the other key term which has always tied democracy to theatre is ‘representation’. Plato opposed tragedy more vigorously than any other form of representational art because here, confusingly, humans represent other humans. As an aristocrat who considered his mentor Socrates a martyr and victim of democracy, Plato yearned for a society without social mobility where there would be no gap between a person’s nature and their social role. In the Christian era Pope Innocent III was another notable authoritarian who hated representation. Innocent loved to wield his authentic relic of Christ’s cross, and laid down the doctrine that in the Mass the bread does not represent the body of Christ but changes its substance to become that body. This proposition was tied to a political claim that, as Pope, Innocent was not God’s representative but his actual voice with authority over secular monarchs and the right to launch a Crusade against Moslems.⁶² In the Enlightenment era Jean-Jacques Rousseau was an enthusiastic reader of Plato who shared his hostility to representation. Having made his name as a playwright, Rousseau published a manifesto condemning theatre, and this anti-theatricalism chimed with his political argument that the state should be governed by a homogeneous ‘General Will’ without any elected representatives.⁶³ Modernist theatre renewed Rousseau’s assault on the falsity of representation, and in avant-garde aesthetics the emphasis shifted from ‘representing’ a character towards ideas like ‘presence’, ‘enactment’ and ‘embodiment’.⁶⁴ In this book, avoiding looser notions of ‘the performative’, I shall keep my sights fixed on theatre as a historically defined practice of representation, and for this reason a paradigm to understand the historical phenomenon we call democracy.⁶⁵

Arguing that the concept of political representation derives from the arts, the political theorist Frank Ankersmit distinguishes a ‘resemblance theory’ from a ‘substitution theory’,⁶⁶ and as an example of ‘resemblance’ cites an American Federalist who championed bottom-up localism in 1787: ‘The very term, representative, implies, that the person or body chosen for this purpose, should resemble those who appoint them – a representation of the people of America, if it be a true one, must be like the people’. The Federalist emphasises that those ‘who are placed instead of the people, should possess their sentiments and feelings’.⁶⁷ For the opposite view, Ankersmit turns to Edmund Burke, who argued that it was not his job to represent the views of his local electors in Bristol because his duty in Parliament was to follow his conscience and judge on behalf of the nation. To put the representational dilemma another way: if we think of democratic politicians as performers on the political stage, then they may either play their script in the character allocated to them by their electorate, or they may hold onto a clutch of masks and improvise in response to the moment. As in art, so in politics representation entails choice in how to play one’s role.⁶⁸

The revolutionary activist Thomas Paine understood that American Independence produced ‘representation engrafted upon Democracy’.⁶⁹ For Paine, pure democracy without representation could be no more than an abstract theoretical construct. Barely two years after Paine’s Rights of Man fired up the American public, Robespierre in France, with the moral authority of Rousseau behind him, jettisoned representation on the basis that he himself embodied the General Will. Arendt argues that Robespierre’s private virtues and motivations might have been genuine and heartfelt, but in the public arena they ‘degenerated into mere appearances and had become part of the show in which Tartuffe was bound to play the principal part.’⁷⁰ Tartuffe is the calculating religious hypocrite in a play by Molière that provoked public outrage in Louis XIV’s Paris (Figure 0.1). Molière took for himself the complex role of the patriarch Orgon whose devotion to Tartuffe renders him an unconscious hypocrite blind to his own domestic tyranny, and the cruelty of Orgon presages for Arendt the blind cruelty of Robespierre’s Committee for Public Safety.

Figure 0.1 Unmasking the hypocrite. In Molière’s Tartuffe (1664/1669), Orgon discovers that Tartuffe has been trying to seduce his wife.

Source: Frontispiece to Tartuffe in the first edition of the Oeuvres complètes de Monsieur de Molière. Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, 1682. Engraving by Pierre Brissart.

While Arendt was a communitarian who believed that human fulfilment lay in active political citizenship, Judith Shklar, another escapee from the Holocaust, embraced the individualistic ideals of American liberal democracy, arguing that personal cruelty is the worst of all human evils. While Arendt’s imagination was fired by the heroes of Sophocles who held the fate of the city in their hands, Shklar in Ordinary Vices (Reference Shklar1984) found inspiration in Molière’s three archetypes of hypocrisy: Tartuffe who knowingly dons a mask of Christian self-righteousness, M. Jourdain the social snob, and Alceste the misanthropist who trumpets his moral honesty. What Shklar witnessed in post-war America was a world more concerned with unmasking hypocrisy than with cruelty, and she argued for a reversal of priorities. Reading Tartuffe as a political parable about a ‘Puritan culture of fear’, she concludes that ‘liberal democracy cannot afford public sincerity’, because hypocrisy is ‘a very necessary pretense, a witness to our moral efforts no less than to our failures’.⁷¹

In Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power, from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond (2008) the English political philosopher David Runciman notes the origin of the word ‘hypocrisy’ in hypokrites, the Greek term for a stage actor, and makes much of Hobbes’ argument that every ruler or ruling body has to don a persona or ‘theatrical mask’.⁷² Hobbes underpins his argument that ‘[t]o over-personalise politics, to collapse the distinction between the mask and the person behind the mask, is either culpable hypocrisy, or self-delusion’.⁷³ He builds on Shklar in order to argue for the necessity of hypocrisy in the liberal political tradition because all politicians need to separate their public and private selves. In an afterword published in 2018, Runciman comments on the success of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair who, as ‘sincere liars’, managed to wear their masks without seeming effort, and he explains the rise of Donald Trump on the grounds that most people prefer overt liars to hypocrites.⁷⁴

The danger of proving oneself a Tartuffe haunted alike the puritans of the English revolution and the rationalistic protestants who drove the American revolution and ‘enlightened’ French revolutionaries. Rousseau, a product of puritan Geneva and a fierce advocate of personal and public sincerity, admired Molière as a writer but complained of the playwright’s moral compromises, which he blamed on the demands of a public audience.⁷⁵ Molière was a brilliant unmasker of hypocrisy because he was himself a ‘hypocrite’ in the form of a stage actor, a profession vilified by the puritans upon whom Tartuffe was modelled. He was an actor who happened to write and not, as viewed by Rousseau and most modern scholarship, a writer who happened to act. I will show in this book how the practical workings of the stage shine a light on the paradoxes that Shklar and Runciman begin to unpick when they explore that other form of stage acting, democratic politics.

In Chapter 1, I will examine the interplay of theatricality and political persuasion in fifth-century Athens. Here there was no civil society distinct from political society, so comedy and tragedy were inextricably part of the political process. Because the heady ideals formulated in Pericles’ funeral speech, the nearest we have to a democratic manifesto, proved unworkable, the contradictions of democratic life led Plato to attack political rhetoric as the enemy of truth. The relationship of rhetoric to truth will be a thread guiding my path. Chapter 2 is devoted to a single case study: a rhetorical duel between Aeschines, a trained stage actor, and Demosthenes, who tried to demonstrate personal sincerity by making it clear he was no such actor. The first set himself up as a champion of democracy, the second as a champion of nation, which leads me to the central difficulty identified by Arendt: democracy is posited on a bounded nation and on an artificial entity taken to constitute the demos or ‘people’.

Post-classical democracy, particularly in the USA, owes a huge debt to the Protestant assumption that every individual should be true to his or her private conscience. Chapter 3 is therefore devoted to the English puritan revolution, and it centres on two stories. I begin with the puritan lawyer William Prynne, who lambasted theatre as part of a broader attack on the trappings of aristocracy and monarchy, while his own techniques of persuasion were in practice deeply theatrical. From Prynne’s dogmatic conviction, I turn to Putney where soldiers and officers in Cromwell’s army debated as equals, and in an extraordinary democratic enterprise tried to demonstrate that they all spoke with open hearts, which is to say without hypocrisy or theatricality. In chapter 4, I turn to France, a Catholic culture which broadly embraced rhetoric and theatre, but was profoundly influenced by a citizen of Protestant Geneva, Rousseau. I trace how six different orators approached the task of persuading the demos of France to build a more honest and more democratic world.

In chapter 5, I pass to the USA, founded on an uneasy compromise between secular rationalism and a puritan tradition that was not granted any formal place in the Constitution. Sennett’s bourgeois ‘public man’, epitomised by President John Adams, lost his claim to moral authority when working-class Irishmen, liberated slaves and finally women found their voices and demanded an equal place at the democratic table. Only one idea could unite these disparate groups, a shared insistence that people are not in the first instance social beings and performers of social roles but are unique and inimitable individuals. Chapter 6 takes me to twentieth-century India as it threw off the shackles of empire, and a new question arises: does the postcolonial condition mean that democracy must be discarded as unwanted Western baggage, a belief system incompatible with Indian tradition, or does it mean that India should partake of democracy as the thing it was too long denied? I pit Gandhi, a man who laid claim to total sincerity, against Rabindranath Tagore, a man of the theatre who believed that truth lay in metaphor, both men sharing much the same unease when faced with the Western democratic model.

Rather than bring my story up to the present, where perspective becomes ever harder to achieve, I have couched my concluding chapter as an epilogue. I turn back to Athens, and instead of looking at democracy as a form of theatre I place theatre within democracy. If democracy cannot liberate itself from rhetoric, then it must embrace rhetoric, and to that end it needs audiences attuned to the pleasures, tricks and techniques of rhetoric. In Athens, I argue, theatre was the pre-eminent place where democratic citizens were formed. I write as a historian, but plainly there are implications for modern education.

The democratic revolutions of England, France and America have left their residue, creating patterns of behaviour that continue to distinguish these cultures in the present. Historical distance, like geographical distance, reveals the contingency of much that we take for common sense. Globalisation has in practice made it harder to think historically because the diversity of the present is overwhelming. Why think back, it is common to ask, when there is so much to discover about the present? Why attend to older political experiments when recent years have witnessed such profound transformation? Two answers. First, the past shapes the present in unsuspected ways, and it is only through recognising cultural patterns that we can free ourselves from being trapped by them. Second, behind the facade of diversity constructed by globalisation and consumerism lie constants that stem from technology, the marketplace and the dominance of the English language. The past introduces us to a cultural other who may have bracingly different assumptions about the performances people give in order to function as social and political beings.

Presentists throw up another challenge to theatre historians: Why attend to live theatre in a world that now belongs to cinema, digitization and multimedia spectacle? If theatre has become, as some would see it, an exercise in cultural nostalgia, then in the same vein we have to ask, is democracy also something we should feel nostalgic for, a cultural practice of yesterday which a technological revolution has rendered at best unappealing, at worst unworkable? It is a question that I leave open, confining myself to the simple overarching argument that democracy is and has to be a form of theatre. Despite gloomy prognostications, theatre has always had a knack of reinventing itself, and democracy may or may not prove to have the same resilience.