Debt and Democracy

Abstract

A stark contract between ancient times when democracy first saw the light and the twenty-first century is that the population of people with the privilege of voting has radically changed. The citizens of ancient Athens who exercised their voting right were owners of something, even if this was only the (far from being widely available) privilege of being the city’s citizen. The concept of ownership also prevailed in nineteenth-century England, when modern parliamentary democracy was born. It makes a great deal of difference whether we talk of an electorate belonging:

• To a property-owning democracy, or

• To a debt-laden democracy, sinking in a sea of red ink.