Why did it take so long for Democracy to take hold in the world?

States are formed as conglomerates of different people comprising of different means, outlooks, wants, etc. coming together for some kind of mutual gain. They share power and resources, but also somewhat compete with each other. Generally, the form of government a given state creates will reflect the interests and values of the dominant class of people there.

That nowadays is usually an economic class, but in a pre-industrial world, it was usually the predominant military class, as the relationship between the two is weaker in a non-industrialized economy. Back when you had the heyday of feudalism, you also had a system where the feudal lords as a collective group were the main fighters or at least organizers of the polity's armed forces. Thus, democracy would be expected to take hold in a place where military power is spread relatively equally.

Where do we see democracy taking off? In Greece where (Sparta aside), you had militaries dominated by citizen militias. You see a similar setup in Rome, and it's no surprise that the Republic started to break at the seams when you had the Marian reforms, turning the citizen's militia into a professional soldier corps.

It wouldn't be for a very long time (at least in Europe) before you moved away from a military system dominated by landed and mounted aristocracies, and it's also no surprise that you start seeing it in nations with gunpowder era militias/levies.

tl;dr. The state follows the dominant military class. You only get democracy when you have mass warfare as opposed to warfare dominated by aristocratic warrior elites.

In the end democracy will triumph

>whig history

In regards to the middle ages , feudalism was a lot cooperative than people at taught.Sure nobles and peasants a like had their obligations.But if a local lord wanted say a larger levy beyond the peasants obligations, the lord had to make it worthwhile peasants.and given the rather decentralized nature of Europe at the time democracy really isn't necessary.

In general democracy has its benefits and drawbacks, like every other government form. Athens already showed that democracy could become a shitshow, and while the republic that Rome created solved some of the problems. It still became autocratic after a few centuries. Democracy just ain't the be all end all.

Democracy is incompatible with civilization. What we have now isn't real democracy.

I like your analysis but all it is saying is that the class with the power decides runs the government. This is somewhat self evident.

I have to repeat what's already been said:

Modern, Western governments are not democratic. The ancients would laugh in your face and immediately tell you that
"representative" government is a form of oligarchy.

4th century authors like Aristotle explicitly state that direct elections are an oligarchic method for filling offices. The legislature is oligarchic, the court systems are oligarchic, law enforcement is oligarchic, from top to bottom our society is broadly an oligarchy.

It is absolutely dishonest how we teach our kids. We say that democracy was born in Ancient Athens, but then turn around and pretend that our modern governments are also democratic. Absolutely dishonest.

>The Homosexual's definition of democracy is the only one

>t. /leftypol/

>pretend that our modern governments are also democratic
It is kinda weird, the founding fathers wrote lengthy diatribes about democracy, and Woodrow Wilson comes along and starts the trend of it being used every time representative government is brought up.

Oh, you have an entirely new definition? Or, is it more truthful that you are just taking things that were recognised in the ancient world as oligarchy, and then playing a semantic game so it looks prettier?

Change the curriculum so we don't explicitly teach everyone that Ancient Athens is the birthplace of democracy.

Stop using the term "democracy" to steal the glory and legitimacy that is associated with the ancient ideal.

Don't criticise other countries for not being democracies when you're own model is not one.

Throw away your copies of the Classics, because otherwise people are bound to figure out what a treacherous and dishonest little worm you are.

Democracy as a decision-making process would be difficult with pre-modern technology once your population gets to a certain point. Even today, we don't really use it, but instead use representative oligarchy.

Because voting is for faggots.
That's why it started in Ancient Greece and was revived in Western Europe 250 years ago.

>Equal pay
>Communism has wage labor in the most retarded way possible

>After the abortive start in Greece, why didn't peasants figure out that having a say in their government was beneficial to them?

The joke here is that federative democracy is pretty much the natural state of man, and save for a few brief spates, it has always existed.

For instance, consider the thing assemblies of the germanic peoples, the roman senate, or the prince-electors of the HRE.

The biggest change has been the universality of the franchise. No sane society over the past 2000+ years has done this, not even your precious greeks, who denied women, slaves and barbarians from the franchise.

On the note, specifically of:

>why didn't peasants figure out that having a say in their government was beneficial to them?

They did, but you don't vote out a despot who would deny you the franchise. You emigrate or else revolt...which is exactly what history shows us. From the helot revolt in sparta, to the deposing of Tarquinius Rex in rome for the establishment of the republic, to the peasant wars in the HRE and britain, to the Norwegians who decided "fuck the king" and emigrated to establish the icelandic freestate...

peasants have been looking out for their own interests for centuries.

With a homogeneous population (or rather electorate) sharing common values political conflict will be in the realm of particulars, theories, ideologies. With the overarching principles and goals being relatively well defined you can constructively debate ways of reaching them.

Without such a population a democratic/republican system cannot exist except as a facade. Identity trumps ideology any day.

This is a thread where the first response is to blame DA JOOZ. Sometimes the simple needs to be pointed out.

That post wasn't blaming jews so much as the mercantile class (which is predominantly jewish).

Yeah. Nah.

1) The Republic's """Empire""" was more of a hegemony initially. When they started taking a more direct hand on their subject states (which were slowly morphing into provinces), their tiny-ass government wasn't fit to govern it.
2) The Roman Republic's democracy only involved the Citizens of Rome. Citizenship wasn't extended to Non-Romans, and then Non-Italians for a long fucking time. The rest were subjects of Imperialism.
3) What said.
4) Yes this picture was meant to piss you off.

>Yes this picture was meant to piss you off.
piss who off?

What did he mean by this?

Benis :D

See the Slavic polity of Carantania and the installation of carantanian dukes.

You had monarchies that didn't want to give up power. It's was the raise of capitalism that allow it.

People still doesn't have any say in anything, is not just in the middle ages.

Now they're immobile because an illusion of control. Then it was another illusion of control with another shape (I'm not that bad, the king has fucked the other guy, not me. Who cares, I didn't like him so much anyways. I don't see any king's men coming to my home in short term, so life is pretty good)

Most of the world was clan based caste systems since the neolithic and maybe before. There was no imagined idea as to such a system except maybe regarding the balance of power in the oligarchy.

From The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels.
(...)As there is only one God in heaven, Ignatius declares, so there can be only one bishop in the church. "One God, one bishop"— this became the orthodox slogan. Ignatius warns "the laity" to revere, honor, and obey the bishop "as if he were God." For the bishop, standing at the pinnacle of the church hierarchy, presides "in the place of God." Who, then, stands below God? The divine council, Ignatius replies. And as God rules over that council in heaven, so the bishop on earth rules over a council of priests. The heavenly divine council, in turn, stands above the apostles; so, on earth, the priests rule over the deacons—and all three of these rule over "the laity."

Was Ignatius merely attempting to aggrandize his own position? A cynical observer might suspect him of masking power politics with religious rhetoric. But the distinction between religion and politics, so familiar to us in the twentieth century, was utterly alien to Ignatius' self-understanding. For him, as for his contemporaries, pagan and Christian alike, religious convictions necessarily involved political relationships—and vice versa.(...) For Ignatius, as for Roman pagans, politics and religion formed an inseparable unity.(...)

>The peasant, sitting on the Stone, was representing the people during the ceremony and he had to ask in the Slovene language: "Who is he, that comes forward?" Those sitting around him had to reply: "He is the prince of the land".
>"Is he an upright judge seeking the well-being of the country; is he freeborn and deserving? Is he a foster and defender of the Christian faith?" the representative of the people had to ask them. "He is and he will be", they had to reply.
>"By what right can he displace me from this my seat?" he had to ask them and they had to reply: "He will pay you sixty denarii and he will give you your home free and without tribute".

>The peasant then had to give the duke a gentle blow on the cheek (un petit soufflet), after which the duke was allowed to draw his sword, mount the Stone and turn full circle, so as to face ritually in all directions. While this was being done, all had to sing the Slovenian Kyrie and praise God for the gift of a new ruler, in accordance with His divine will. Finally, the ruler had to be placed on horseback and conducted around the Stone three times.[2]

>The first mention of a sedes Karinthani ducatus in the course of the installation of Herman II of Sponheim in 1161 possibly referred to the Prince's Stone. The ceremony was explicitly described about 1341 by the chronicler John of Viktring in his liber certarum historiarum on the occasion of the coronation of Meinhard II of Gorizia-Tyrol in 1286: when the duke-to-be approached he found a free peasant sitting on the stone. Not before Meinhard had assured him he was worthy to accede to the throne and would be a just ruler would the peasant vacate his position.

The Republic had it's legislative part formed by people who got the role because of their heritage, not merit, closest the roman republic got to representing peasentry was with the tribune of the plebs, and even that didn't apply outside of the italian peninsula.

because man with sword monopolises political debate
man who trains for life with sword cuts through hundreds of peasants with farm implements
man who trains and raises a small army of people like him is effectively unbeatable by peasants and merchants
only way to defend against trained warriors is with your own trained warriors manning their fortifications, but then they know they control a near monopoly on force and use it to dominate political and social life
and that's how feudalism happened

we have always had democracy on a small scale, large scale democracy is more difficult, we needed millenia to stumble across gunpowder, a few centuries for the Anglos to develop modern capitalism and about 2 centuries for it to sink in

religious institutions holding onto power

There's countless examples of nobles getting btfo. I know of one case where a castle was taken whereupon the lords were beheaded and their bodies thrown over the walls while the lady, dressed in peasant rags, was forced to work the fields. In another example they took the castle and killed the lord and his entire retinue.

The nobles paid for armies, mercenaries, and relied on other nobles and the monarch to come to their aid while rebellions were often localized. Nobles usually took refuge in castles or fortified towns rather than gloriously cutting trough hundreds of peasants with "farm implements". Swords weren't even the primary weapon on the battlefield and the peasants were more than capable of producing spears, pikes and axes as well as bows. They even had access to canon and firearms on several occasions. Peasants were not unfamiliar with war either, they often had to protect themselves during wartime and sometimes served as mercenaries. There's a reason why armies of thousands of men had to be sent to quell peasant rebellions and often these armies outnumbered the peasant armies themselves.

Their problems were more organisational, unifying the mass of peasants even well organised groups, from different regions into a single cohesive force with a unified goal was an almost impossible undertaking and they had to take care of their families and farms at the same time. Besides this, they often lacked effective cavalry as well, for obvious reasons.

>because man with sword monopolises political debate

Ironically, it is modern democracies love monopolizing military force. Most modern democracies today have very restrictive weapons laws ranging from gun licenses to outright banning.

In Feudal Societies and Imperial Monarchies, more often than not there was rarely a problem with peasants and commoners owning weapons and armor. In some cases like in the HRE, Italy, in Europe or Imperial China in the east, weapons ownership by the commons and the peasantry was encouraged in order that they could police themselves and spare the realm the job of running around putting down bandits.

>But what if they revolt!?
Peasant Pavel, I'm professional soldier.

>Ironically, it is modern democracies love monopolizing military force
another ironic thing is that most democratic governments in the west have more control over the ordinary person's life than any medieval or "absolutist" king.
You'd have to go back to the Bronze age kindoms to find governments that have that much power over everyday affairs

Patriarchal Authoritarian societies are the norm of human history NOT multilateral and pluristic government systems.

Also athenian democracy had slavery and was basically just a slightly expanded oligarchical system in that slightly more rich people could vote vs a few or just one.

Most people simply accepted their shitty spot in life and dealt with it so long as they didnt starve every winter.

>why did it take so long
why do you assume that democracy is some kind of destined end goal? people of the past recognized that people are too dumb to rule themselves, it only happened after memes like equality and human rights were invented

This really, in the United States there's some amount of direct democracy at the state level, as many issues go to the ballot box to vote on.

>democracy means people rule themselves

kys idiot

I think the infograph meant to say Equally (((low))) pay

>Why did it take so long for Democracy to take hold in the world?

Because democracy seems chaotic to a conservative mind and most people in history were extremely conservative and religiously so.

t. classcucks

This sort always bugged me about the marxist view of history.
Why would the techno-capitalists of today, suddenly lose power once they had robots doing most/all the work for them.
Wouldn't they just keep the welfare state going, while they keep much of the actual wealth?

Is democracy the best form of government or was it a mistake?