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Political Philosophy

The Material Creation of Freedom

Stephen Martin Fritz & Denise Morel contemplate what creates democracy.

When Biden was President he warned that his political opponents were a threat to democracy itself. Similar accusations were levelled against former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Indeed, many journalists and pundits claim that a threat to democracy is a global phenomenon. Conservatives have long criticized adversaries for being soft on crime, and liberals have slammed rivals for not caring about the poor; but to accuse the opposition of being ‘a threat to democracy’ seems to be a new low. But is it? Warnings like “Democracy will come to an end if you don’t listen to me!” are almost as old as the idea that the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer.

Since the formation of the earliest democratic republic, in Athens, pundits have been warning citizens of its imminent demise. For instance, in Book VIII of Plato’s Republic (c.380 BC), Socrates warns of democracy’s soft-on-crime tendencies, infatuation with youth, and excesses of equality extremism: “Have you not observed how, in a democracy, many persons, although sentenced to exile, just stay where they are and walk about the world?… old men condescend to the young … nor must I forget the equality of the two sexes… the excess of liberty passes to an excess of slavery… and so tyranny naturally arises out of democracy.” And in Rome, the demise of the Republic seemed immanent when, after Marcus Livius Drusus was elected tribune in 121 BC, the friends of his rival Caius Gracchus cried foul. They accused Drusus of ballot tampering. In response, the supporters of Drusus chased down Caius and murdered him.

Democracy still had centuries of life in Greece and Rome, and the death predicted for democracy itself has never materialized. Yet democracies are born, and do die. How can we know if our own democracy is threatened?

The Emergence of Democracy

Before we can determine if a democracy is threatened, we need to understand how democracies come about in the first place.

In The Life of Greece (1939), historian Will Durant offers us a clue: “In 459 BC, Pericles, anxious to control Egyptian grain, sent a great fleet to expel the Persians from Egypt. The expedition failed, and thereafter Pericles adopted the policy to win the world by commerce rather than by war.”

It’s not by chance that all the old democracies sprang up in centers of production or at the crossroads of trade. Commerce forced merchants – men as bigoted and xenophobic as anyone else – to barter civilly with dealers from other lands. If the first requirement of a salesman is the ability to spot a wholesale bargain, the second must be to tolerate the strange dress and habits of any customer who walks through the door. His success rests on treating everybody alike, whether he likes them or not. So commerce turns intolerance into tolerance. Centuries later, Rome, like Greece before her, ascended to dominance on the strength of her trade. Eventually, Rome’s perpetual wars led to greater percentages of wealth and authority being transferred to the state. Wars stifled the commerce of both empires, and each declined.

After the fall of Rome in the fifth century AD, almost a thousand years of illiterate darkness settled over Europe. Then, a flicker of light. In the tenth century, commerce again gave birth to democracy as widespread trade led to the formation of the Italian maritime republics of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa. Once again, endless fighting made their moment in the sun brief. However, current experience is teaching us the same lesson: democracies are born as the political expression of commercial societies.

Tolerance & Equality as Outcomes of Production & Trade

Let’s explore a little how commercial activity leads to the emergence of democratic equality, self-government, and freedom.

The expansion of commerce alters the relationships among citizens, and shapes them to match the psychology of the shopkeeper. Most of our relationships are superficial, their success or failure being gauged in material terms. The merchant is not essentially interested in the color of your skin, but rather in the color of your cash. It doesn’t hugely matter to him whether you’re a foreign visitor or his neighbor down the street. Looking to his profit, he cannot mind too much that you have a mistress, or that you worship an unpopular god. As long as you’re interested in buying what he’s selling, you are welcome. Gradually, marketplace equality evolves into a general acceptance of pretty much anything that still allows good business practice. So democratic commercialism eventually fosters a broader social and political tolerance. But the shopkeeper not only has to appear welcoming to people unlike himself; he also has to stock his shelves with the fancies they want. So the retailer, more than anyone else, is responsible for introducing the rest of us to other customs and other tastes.

Then, in a society where the merchant class begins to acquire more authority, changes take place. Social mobility comes into effect: “In a democracy, when a carpenter goes into a restaurant for a meal, the waitress is his temporary servant. The next day, when that same carpenter shows up at the waitress’s home to install her cabinets, the waitress becomes the master and employer… In this way, they come to regard each other as social equals” (Our Human Herds, Stephen Martin Fritz, 2020).

History as an Outcome of Production & Trade

Commercialism creates more than wealth and democracy: it generates history. In nations of low production and little trade, almost nothing changes. Without much trade, poverty offers few opportunities, and social mobility is non-existent. When the son is guaranteed to be a farmer like his father, and his daughter is certain to be a housewife (or a nun) like the other women, nothing new happens. History itself seemed to stand still. Under such stagnant conditions, long-term relationships become entrenched. When your grandfather swindles my grandfather out of a mule, your family is remembered as untrustworthy for generations. In such circumstances, family histories matter immensely. When your uncle was selected as a local government official, like most people, he tried to maneuver his relatives into similar positions, and hierarchies developed that remained unchanged for years. Thus poor nations inevitably become hierarchical, with some families recognized as more worthy than others. Caste systems develop, led by kings and queens. Ideas like ‘honor’ and ‘reputation’ mean everything, and to a large degree replace cash as the currencies of poor societies.

All this is turned on its head in politically ever-changing democracies, and widespread trade guarantees a plethora of new inventions and lifestyle changes, too. Things evolve quickly, and people move around, following the money. So democratic culture is civilization on fast-forward, with a lot of change occurring in a relatively short period of time. Within a few generations, we hardly know our neighbors. The guy in line behind you at the store might be a pauper or a provincial governor; you don’t know, and you don’t care. Honor and reputation mean little when no one knows our past, and few even know our name.

Illustration © Jaime Raposo 2025. To see more of his art, please visit jaimeraposo.com

Self-Government & Freedom, Too

What gives societies the opportunity to transition from one form of government to the other is the fact that the iron grip of even once all-powerful monarchies and dictatorships fades. When there are few resources to be taxed and even fewer activities to be watched and regulated, the number of government overseers declines and the impact of far-away bureaucrats on local farmers and craftsmen shrinks. This creates opportunities for entrepreneurs. The enterprising merchant who opens a shop to sell novel imported wares may slowly increase his wealth. Interested in more wealth, governments then often give new enterprises a lot of leeway to expand. When businesses expand faster than government can control or tax them, the transition to democracy may not be far behind. Often, autocracies hardly know how to govern new businesses. They’re usually forced to employ members of the business community to suggest regulations. Producers are thereby recruited to rule themselves. Under such circumstances of ‘self-governance’, production and trade can flourish.

But while it is easy to see how tolerance and self-governance accompany the adoption of the shopkeeper’s outlook, the link between commerce and freedom is not as obvious.

‘Freedom’ is a term often bandied about during democratic periods, but is rarely championed in aristocratic times. Why? Because freedom makes no sense when there are no choices available. When Mr and Mrs Farmer wake up every day to do the same things they did yesterday; and when they’re doing the same things all their neighbors are doing, and when economic circumstances demand that they continue to do these things, what does ‘freedom’ mean? To be free requires opportunities to make other choices – to do something different. Basically, the more choices we have, the freer we are. And material production creates choices by the millions.

The geography and people on one side of the border between the United States and Canada don’t differ all that much from the geography and people on the other side. Yet there is a difference. People in the US are about ten percent richer, making them a bit freer to decide more things for themselves. In short, Americans enjoy more choices than Canadians. The same is true to an even greater extent for the differences between the United States and Mexico. But the difference between polities is really pronounced when you look at the differences between North and South Korea. The language and the climate are the same. What changes from one to the other is how much production and trade goes on, how easily it is carried out, and on how wide a scale it happens. Materially as well as politically, South Koreans are considerably freer than their counterparts in the North.

The Rocky Road to Democracy

When the advances made by the Scientific Revolution were applied to machinery, the Industrial Revolution was born. The resulting explosion of wealth gave rise to the modern global democratic era of freedom and equality.

The factory owners and textile entrepreneurs of Britain were the first to apply science to technology in a big way, in the middle of the eighteenth century. This was initially welcomed by the government, mostly aristocrats who were eager to tax the growing wealth that resulted. And many of today’s great democracies are former British merchant colonies whose entrepreneurial practices put the rights of the tradesman above local customs. Cultural straitjackets had to give way to the needs of the factory owner, commercial fisherman, and shopkeeper. And in 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville noted in his book Democracy in America that one way democracies differed from the aristocracies of Europe, was that ‘in democracies, everybody works’.

However, the transition from autocracy into democracy is often bloody. It took the British two centuries to restrain their royalty and unleash their industry, beginning in 1649 with the beheading of Charles I and not finalized until the nineteenth century under Victoria. In France, the transition was as tumultuous, and almost as lengthy. It began with expanding trade, the rise of the equality-seeking Jacobins, and the beheading of Louis XVI in 1793; took a step back with the dictatorship of Napoleon, and then lurched forward again with the Third Republic, finally settling into a stable democracy at the beginning of the twentieth century. Modern political analysts are frequently frustrated with the slow pace that Russia and China are taking to make the transition. But if it took Britain and France two centuries to transform from autocracy to democracy, why should Russia or China be able to do so any quicker?

Within every nascent democracy, familiar patterns emerge. The first people to buy into factory and storefront cultures can become fantastically wealthy, which creates suspicion and unease in the old money. If the merchants gain too much social power before the transition to democracy is complete, the established autocrats often find reasons to jail or kill them to confiscate their wealth. The same sort of suspicion arose in America, as pioneering industrialists such as Carnegie and Ford were lampooned in the press as ‘robber barons’. Thankfully, though, a democracy had already formed in America, and these industrial giants were left untouched to generate wealth.

Political leaders who do not understand the engine of production and trade that drives the creation of a democratic mind-set imagine that democracy can be imposed upon people. The thinking goes that if impoverished nations could only be made to understand the benefits of democracy, they would rise up and demand it for themselves. The assumption is that, by invading a country and marching its citizens to the voting booths, a democracy will magically be created. But it’s mistaken to believe that people can be cajoled, educated, or converted to democracy. Unless the invading power can foster a broad base of production and trade in the conquered land – as was witnessed in Japan and South Korea after the Second World War – their efforts are doomed to fail, since, as we’ve seen, political freedom is a derivative of free production.

Can a Nation be Smart if its People are Dumb?

Political writers have often fretted about the survival of democracy. After all, might not putting the political process in the hands of the common man prove catastrophic unless he’s educated to a level where he can appreciate his freedom? In Considerations on Representative Government (1861), John Stuart Mill even suggested that though in a democracy every adult deserved a vote, maybe the brighter and more accomplished should be given two or three.

So why haven’t our democracies fallen apart when the selection of our leaders has been placed in the hands of narrowly trained and broadly ignorant voting hordes? For a sample of the level of education of the masses, we laugh over man-in-the-street interviews that show Americans being unable to identify Asia on a map, or say what language is spoken in Paris. The reason for the survival of democracy is as clear as it is revealing. What matters in democracies is not how broadly educated each individual is; what matters is how easily each person can specialize and trade with each other. Politics is not what matters most in our lives; production and trade are. The President doesn’t provide for our needs; supermarkets and stores do. So the average citizen might be allowed to select the next President of the United States; but nobody in his right mind would trust him to select the next district manager for Costco.

Democracy emerges from a type of application of David Ricardo’s theory of ‘comparative advantage’ in On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817): we are not sages; we are specialists. Specialization allows us to produce the most while knowing the least, because our focus is narrow. Individually, then, each of us knows very little; but through production and trading with others, we can have a lot. Everything I ever need to know is stored somewhere in the heads of my neighbors, or their neighbors… The modern Renaissance man, who knows classical and modern music, reads foreign novels in their original languages, and who can converse on science, politics, philosophy, and theology, has few to talk to. Few people he meets are likely to be capable of (or interested in) conversing with him on any subject at the level he understands them. But a society of specialized producers has no need for such a broadly educated person. He is Albert Jay Nock’s ‘superfluous man’ (Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, 1943).

Democracy & Social Engineering

Commerce reshapes our ideas about the purpose of government. In earlier times, political philosophers imagined that the purpose of government was to improve each of us morally: for early thinkers like Aristotle or Aquinas, government existed to help make each of us a better person – to lie less, to be less boastful, and (in Aquinas’s case) to love God more. By making better people, we create a better nation.

In modern democracies, moral arguments still take place, over things like gay marriage, drug legalization, climate change, and abortion. As social creatures, we are still eager to persuade others of our view of what’s right or wrong. But unlike in autocracies – where the man at the top sets the moral agenda for everyone else – in democracies, such decisions involve the entire adult population in seemingly never-ending disputes. Yet this is not a weakness of democracy, it is a strength. Contrary to what we hear from pundits, endless debate does not indicate a democracy in peril; it indicates that the democracy is thriving. Democracy means disagreement. But if there were only one clearly ‘right way’ we’d need only one enlightened leader. Moreover, the transient lifestyle of many people these days makes it unlikely that we’ll even know whether our neighbors are gay, if they smoke marijuana, where they stand on climate change, or if they’ve had an abortion.

The final touch of a democracy, and possibly the least important, comes with the ballot. In the political market, we purchase our leaders like we purchase our soap – but we do so with votes instead of money. And no matter which politician we happen to choose, things work out about the same after that election cycle as before it. But after all, it is what happens at the mall, not in the legislature, that matters most to us.

The franchise always comes after one gains the ability to produce and trade. Historically, voting was always initially limited to male property owners, and only later became extended to all men. Then, as women took their places next to men on the assembly lines, they eventually gained their place next to them in the voting booth, too. With ever-spreading wealth, some now talk of giving the vote to children. And why not? As long as our factories and storefronts continue to operate freely, it won’t really matter much.

In the end, democracies are fundamentally commercial, productive, and materialistic, and libertarian live-and-let-live attitudes dominate democratic cultures. Government, in its day-to-day practice, becomes an institution whose primary purpose is not to make its people good, but to make them prosperous. So, while liberal or conservative moral sloganeering might dominate political campaigns, legislation to ‘improve the lives of people’ actually focuses mostly on business subsidies, taxation, and wealth redistribution.

How Does Democracy Die?

Turning again to history, we discover that democracies do not simply die; rather, democracies are murdered. They’re strangled when society changes its focus from production and trade in peace and prosperity to endless war and the redirection of industry to socially-destructive ends – ends which hinder varied production, and leave ever fewer choices available to citizens.

Supplies of money are the sinews of war. For most of history, democracies have been threatened by the redirection of wealth to satisfy militaristic goals (although America proves that the world’s richest democracy is able to finance seemingly endless wars while its population grows fatter and lives longer than ever before). Nationalistic tendencies and anti-foreigner sentiment can also stifle needed immigration, creating worker shortages which drive up costs to industry. And if the street protests that are normal and natural to free societies become too violent, the frightened citizenry often react by granting government excessive policing powers that could eventually expand into heavy-handed control of the economy. Historically, however, people trade liberty for safety. For instance, as we have recently witnessed, entire economies can be shut down in response to a disease outbreak, by leaders striving to look like saviors to tomorrow’s voters.

Today, left leaning socialistic politicians are joining right leaning nationalistic ones and businesses are being harassed into altering their focus from efficient production to social concerns that satisfy liberal causes. In America, stock exchanges might soon be expected to favor companies that conform to ‘diversity’ standards. Corporate boards are pressured to expand their hiring requirements to satisfy more than just entrepreneurial competency, but to consider factors such as an employee’s gender or race. Businesses have emerged from many different democracies, making millions rich and free by sidestepping the assorted handcuffs put on them by their political, religious, or cultural authorities. If modern manufacturers continue to dodge and weave to avoid being straitjacketed by the moralists of our time, the futures of our democracies look bright. Their ongoing success will guarantee ever more wealth, ever longer and healthier lives, and ever greater independence and security for all.

Stephen Martin Fritz is a philosopher and author of the book Our Human Herds: The Theory of Dual Morality, and the fictional philosophical short story titled TimeNell.

Denise Morel is a retired teacher and curriculum designer with a background in philosophy and linguistics, and co-author of two books on educational theory.