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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PCModem who wrote (27697)	6/6/1999 12:25:00 PM
From: nihil	Respond to of 71178

I think it is better to say that UK is a democracy. Tony can wipe out privileges (like the House of Lords) or declare a republic and there is nothing on paper to stop him. The tradition is the Queen must accept the House of Commons decisions (after some permitted fiddling around) or the Crown must abdicate. Remember Edward VIII? "Republic" is another widely misinterpreted word. It comes directly from the Latin "republica" attributed to Cicero's coinage (just in time for the Roman Republic to collapse into despotism. It was meant by Cicero to describe the Roman state which was not a Monarchy -- it had expelled its kings -- but was not a democracy like Athens under Perikles -- where the common people ruled. The Roman Republic had many different assemblies (the people and the centuries, the senate) and magistrates (and priests with governing powers and vetos: consuls, praetors, dictators, prefects. quaestors, aediles, tribunes of the plebs, censors, and more haurauspices, vestals, pro-consuls, pontifices, and more I've neglected to mention, all elected by particular assemblies and often requiring previous service in another magistracy.) There were three orders of people (patricians, equites, plebeians). This mess appealed to conservative revolutionaries like Washington and Adams because the people (populus -- the source of publica in respublica) were excluded from direct control, so the patricians were able to manipulate everything. Washington and Adams saw themselves, of course, as patricians. The States -- all of them I believe -- had property, citizenship, race, religion, and sex qualifications for suffrage. The Presidency and Vice-Presidency were designed by the Constitutional Convention for you-know-who. Not close to a democracy. The senior magistrates were indirectly elected (as in Rome) instead of by an assembly of citizens (in Athens). As I pointed out, democracy in Athens meant that common citizens (non-noble people) got the vote. Immigrants, exiled nobility, slaves (who outnumbered citizens, and women were excluded from the vote. It has been estimated that at the peak there were about 25,000 citizens of a total population of Athens of 250,000 or more. Athens democracy ruled its conquered territories ruthlessly without representation on their part. In Rome, in later Ciceronian times, there were a few hundred senatorial patricians (they met in a single building)-- the Senate House. There were many hundred thousand citizens nearly all in Rome and close by in Italy and the Army, and several million Roman subjects who might have citizenship in their cities but not in Rome.