Democracies, Republics and Mistaken Pedantry
You may have noticed that I have referred to “popular governments” in Greece, Rome, and Italy. To designate their popular governments, the Greeks, as we saw, invented the term democracy. The Romans drew on their native Latin and called their government a “republic,” and later the Italians gave that name to the popular governments of some of their city-states. You might well wonder whether democracy and republic refer to fundamentally different types of constitutional systems. Or instead do the two words just reflect differences in the languages from which they originally came?
The correct answer was obfuscated by James Madison in 1787 in an influential paper he wrote to win support for the newly proposed American constitution. One of the principal architects of that constitution and a statesman exceptionally well informed in the political science of his time, Madison distinguished between “a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person,” and a “republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place.”
This distinction had no basis in prior history: neither in Rome nor, for example, in Venice was there “a scheme of representation.” Indeed, the earlier republics all pretty much fit into Madison’s definition of a “democracy.” What is more, the two terms were used interchangeably in the United States during the eighteenth century. Nor is Madison’s distinction found in a work by the well-known French political philosopher Montesquieu, whom Madison greatly admired and frequently praised. Madison himself would have known that his proposed distinction had no firm historical basis, and so we must conclude that he made it to discredit critics who contended that the proposed constitution was not sufficiently “democratic.”
However that may be (the matter is unclear), the plain fact is that the words democracy and republic did not (despite Madison) designate differences in types of popular government. What they reflected, at the cost of later confusion, was a difference between Greek and Latin, the languages from which they came.
Robert A. Dahl, On Democracy

Notes on a Theory... 
I dig this. Question about the context though: how is this so? “Indeed, the earlier republics all pretty much fit into Madison’s definition of a ‘democracy.'” Is that so because a small number of Greek or Roman citizens got together to directly and democratically decide governance, that small number happening to be the privileged male non-slaves? In other words, I find it hard to imagine him (Dahl) claiming that the Greek or Roman governments be actual direct democracy. Unless I’m completely wrong in my history.
Jeremy Mohler (@FutureDebris)
July 31, 2014 at 4:41 pm
Dahl himself argues that to be a true democracy, you need full adult political participation rights. He uses ‘popular government’ here to note that it was broad participation but many people were excluded. But Madison obviously did not make exclusion of women and slaves a deal breaker with respect to either republics or democracies, so he’s saying according to Madison’s definition, the older ‘republics’ were Madisonian democracies.
Does that make sense?
David Kaib
August 1, 2014 at 12:36 pm
There is a tradition in political philosophy, however, that distinguishes “democracy” and “republic”. A democracy is a state in which the people (the majority) govern, and a republic is a state in which the rule of law is respected. These are not mutually exclusive, of course. Democratic theorists focus on the equality of every legitimate member of society, such as the equality of all Athenians, of all Rousseauean citizens, of all Marxian communists. Meanwhile, republicans typically pursue the equality of classes as a way to guarantee the continuity of law, but this would seem to be a purely instrumental commitment. This puts Madison at least adjacent to the republican tradition. His discussion of “factions” is really the same discussion about the balancing of classes that previous republicans engaged in, except without the class language.
(Nowadays, though, I think we have a better idea of democracy than just majority rule.)
Alex Sparrow
July 31, 2014 at 10:28 pm
Interesting. I’d think rule of law isn’t the core of a republic, in part because the British tradition was understood to be bound by the rule of law even under a king. That said, Madison certainly sees his version of republic to include rule by the people (properly circumscribed). So either way I agree with Dahl that Madison’s distinction here is off base.
David Kaib
August 1, 2014 at 12:39 pm
Well, philosophical republicanism is okay with monarchism as long as long as the monarch is subordinate to the law (even if that sounds odd). The worst that a philosophical republican would say of kings is that they tend not to remain subordinate to law over time. Most republican philosophers are concerned more with advancing a distinctive conception of freedom that challenges the limitation of the liberal tradition. I posted some thoughts on the issue, as a sort of anti-neoliberal project.
But yeah, though, Madison was making up definitions out of nowhere.
Alex Sparrow
August 2, 2014 at 5:02 pm
I’m not a Republican. I’m a fiscally responsible American!
FlgranteDelicto
December 21, 2016 at 1:58 pm
[…] UPDATE: Here’s additional background on the distinction (if any) between republic and democracy. […]
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