GOOD AND BAD POWER: The Ideals and Betrayals of Government
by Geoff Mulgan
Allen Lane ₤20, 384 pages

Over the past 100 years, some have died for love, but many more have died for politics. Governments have displayed an unprecedented capacity for good and for evil. We expect the state to take care of us, to provide for our security and welfare, to protect us against terrorism and war. For these purposes, it needs to be strong. Yet we are also on our guard lest it become too strong and overmighty.

We seek, therefore, to control the state and to render it accountable. But the machinery through which we try to achieve this - the 19th-century paraphernalia of representative democracy - seems increasingly outworn, archaic even. In 2005, Gallup International found that, while 79 per cent of people thought democracy was the best form of government, 65 per cent did not believe that their country was ruled by the will of the people. These percentages were highest in advanced and stable democracies - Britain, Sweden, Denmark, France and the Netherlands, countries in which voter turnout and party membership were falling.

Yet interest in politics is still high. The Harvard political scientist Pippa Norris has shown that there has been a steady rise in the proportion of the population joining single-issue groups or taking part in demonstrations, strikes and consumer boycotts. The democratic spirit seems healthy; it is the institutions that seem wanting.

How, then, is the relationship between the rulers and the ruled to be refreshed? That is the question Geoff Mulgan asks in his challenging new book, Good and Bad Power. Mulgan has worked at the centre of British government as head of policy at 10 Downing Street and director of Tony Blair’s strategy unit. Before that he founded the think-tank Demos. He is, however, more than a mere policy wonk. He has the enviable ability of getting to the heart of big questions, and writing about them with clarity and verve.

He begins by showing the inadequacy of two traditional answers to the question of how to achieve good government. The first, which stems from Plato, suggests that the quality of government depends upon the values of those who rule. The second, given prominence in western thought by Montesquieu and Madison, contends that the answer lies with institutions; it is the constitutional structure of a state that makes for effective government.

Both answers are incomplete, Mulgan says, because they imply that the role of the people in government, even in a democracy, is passive. Passive democracy was given a theoretical justification by elite theorists such as the Italian political scientist Gaetano Mosca and the Austrian-born economist Joseph Schumpeter, who likened voters to consumers, their task confined to a choice between elites. With the experiences of totalitarian regimes in the 20th century, liberals such as Hayek and Popper urged that the state be contained and participation limited since participation could spill over into anti-democratic extremism.

Yet, in the words of the French philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel, “a society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves”. It is only through the exercise of freedom that we become better able to use our freedom. We need to widen the debate, and to make the people participants, for only the people can hold the political class in check. Technology now makes it practical for large populations to deliberate together and replicate the direct democracy of the Athenian city state.

Sadly, just when we want to know how active democracy would work, the argument tails off. Mulgan talks of “scattered experiments with deliberative polls, citizens’ juries, open source methods of communication and participative decision- making”, but says that “the only successful innovations that have taken root are tools of research (the opinion poll and the focus group) and tools for communication (the ministerial statement on television rather than in parliament, and the more sophisticated marketing of the television spot and the internet)”. The political class has clung to its privileges “and fixed the rules of the game to make it harder for outsiders to break in”. We need to know more about what an active democracy would look like, how the machinery would operate and how feasible it all is. But Mulgan does not tell us. One finishes the book, therefore, with a sense of impatience.

Aristotle told us that we cannot judge forms of government merely in the abstract but must look at their actual working. It is time for Mulgan to heed Aristotle’s advice. He must, once again, dirty his hands and resume his role as policy adviser. And this time, he must become a policy adviser to the people rather than the government, so that he can spell out in concrete detail the institutional structure of his active democracy. There is no one better equipped to undertake the task.

Vernon Bogdanor is professor of government at Oxford University.