ABSTRACT
Ever since the Greeks, liberty and equality have been taken to be the central marks of democracy. In Chapter II it was shown how the citizens of classical Athens were said to have increased in liberty and equality as they becameincreasingly democratic. In the later historicalchapters liberty was more prominent than equality. However in Chapter IV Rousseau was seen to have granted it a central place. Even J. S. Mill, who was seen in Chapter VI to have sponsored inegalitarian voting schemes, quoted with approval ‘Bentham’s dictum, “everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one’”, which he said ‘might be written under the principle of utility as an explanatory commentary’. The drive towards democracy, in his day and after, has been marked by increasing equality in political power. If the eighteenth century tried to preserve liberty by the mixed constitution, as described in Chapter V, this was partly as a way of controlling democracy; when democracy, by contrast, came to take over, things were not so much mixed as levelled. Each successive increase of the franchise marked a growth of equality, rendering different groups of society more equal in their political power.
