It’s time for Thomas Jefferson's village-states

His small, democratic communities would revive and defend our republic.

Let’s create lots of democracies. We’d create one for every sixty to a hundred citizens or so. Each democracy would discuss, decide on, and execute policy for everything in its neighborhood.

We'd keep our Constitution's fundamental structure—its federalism, its guarantee of each state’s republican government, and its three balanced branches of national government. But we'd extend the Constitution's federalism upward to the associational level of neighborhoods.

Thomas Jefferson wanted this. From 1810 to 1824, Jefferson wrote at least eight letters proposing that Virginia, and by extension America, divide their county governments into “ward republics” the size of Saxon hundreds to encourage the practice of public freedom.

These ward republics, Jefferson argued, would become “the salvation of the republic.” He believed that if we didn’t practice direct democracy in our neighborhoods, America would lose its republican form of government. To Jefferson, it wasn't enough for each citizen to vote. We had to exercise public freedom: we had to discuss and debate face to face—to engage in decision-making with neighbors.

We Americans love our private freedoms, which allow us to work, play, buy, sell, and travel as we wish. But private freedom isn’t public freedom. Public freedom isn’t even civil rights, which protect us from discrimination and governmental overreach and oppression. Instead, public freedom, political theorist Hannah Arendt said, "is participation in public affairs, or admission to the public realm."

To rediscover public freedom and to revive the American republic, let’s adopt Jefferson’s idea of ward republics and update these republics as what I call village-states.

Jefferson found examples of public freedom and a model for his small republics in New England’s townships. In a letter to Joseph C. Cabell, Jefferson praised the revolutionary spirit that emanated from the townships to counter Great Britain’s depredations: “How powerfully did we feel the energy of this organization in the case of embargo? I felt the foundations of the government shaken under my feet by the New England townships.”

These townships were collections of towns, each of which amounted to a democratic republic. Before and during the Revolutionary War, New England towns never grew too large for every male to practice public freedom. If all males couldn’t perform what historian Lewis Mumford called “the duty of participating in the political affairs of the town,” then the town would send out citizens to establish a new town. Each New England town made “politics the school of the people,” according to Ralph Waldo Emerson, and therefore it served as “the unit of the Republic.”

As the Revolutionary War approached, American colonists began to refer to this participation in political affairs as "public happiness.” Citizens attended town assemblies only partially out of duty. They went mostly, Arendt said, “because they enjoyed the discussions, the deliberations, and the making of decisions.”

But after the United States Constitution was ratified, Americans' involvement in self-government waned. Mumford blamed the Constitution itself, in part, for this new lack of civic involvement. Its framers overlooked hyperlocal institutions that the colonists had participated in during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: “The failure to grasp [the political importance of the New England township] and to continue it—indeed to incorporate it in both the Federal and the state Constitutions—was one of the tragic oversights of post-revolutionary political development. Thus the abstract political system of democracy lacked concrete organs.”

Arendt agreed, using language similar to Mumford's "abstract" democracy and "concrete” constitutional organs needed to foster it: America’s “spirit of revolution," she said, "failed to find its appropriate institution." For Arendt, the appropriate institution was the village-state.

Jefferson’s sections of carved-up counties—"little republics," “small republics,” "ward republics," or "elementary republics," as he variously called them—wouldn't be city-states. Size matters: Jefferson's wards would be much smaller than city-states to accommodate the wards’ invariable governmental structure—democracy. Historical city-states, by contrast, have had many forms of government, including democracy (e.g., Athens), republicanism (Florence), oligarchy (Sparta and Venice), and monarchy (later Florence, Classic Maya). A city-state as a political unit, then, doesn't guarantee public freedom.

Jefferson's wards, of course, would also have failed to guarantee public freedom for most Americans if implemented in his day. Jefferson was concerned only with the early republic’s "citizens"—not with slaves (the vast majority of African-Americans), not with indigenous peoples, and not with women. In this respect, Jefferson's wards would have resembled Athens's democratic city-state, which existed only for its limited notion of citizens—not for the women and slaves who were relegated to the citizens’ households and were subject to the citizens’ whims. As part of adopting Jefferson’s ward system today, we would follow Jefferson’s plan to “make every citizen an acting member of the government.” But we would update his conception of a citizen by defending birthright citizenship, guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment, and by defending subsequent laws and court rulings broadening citizenship.

In other respects, Jefferson’s ward system would not have to be adjusted to differentiate it from ancient Athens or from other city-states. To explore these differences, I have preferred to speak of Jefferson's wards as "village-states” rather than as "little republics" or "ward republics." The moniker "village-states" has three advantages. First, a republic, at least in the ancient Greek and Roman traditions of mixed constitutions, may include not only democratic elements but also oligarchic and aristocratic elements. Therefore, the word “republics” might not clearly convey the democratic nature of the wards—a quality Jefferson highlighted in every letter he wrote about them. Second, "village" includes the idea of “little” but suggests also the community dynamic within the wards. And finally, "city" in "city-states" implies an urban setting, and a rural area within a city-state is subject to urban hegemony. By contrast, the word "village" has adopted a settlement-type agnosticism. "Village" is used today in rural, urban, and suburban as well as in burgish contexts. The village-states likewise would operate in all of these contexts.

Public freedom takes a village. Cities, by contrast, don't always offer their residents convenient public freedom, and sometimes they don't offer it at all. Even in the most democratic of city-states, a citizen often must travel somewhere within the city—the agora in Athens, for instance—to find public spaces. Public freedom in cities is often "there," not "here." By contrast, a village-state situates public space just over our homes' thresholds. In a village-state, our immediate community and the natural world at our doorsteps offer us public happiness and public responsibility again.

Jefferson considered the village-states’ local democracy—what he called "the only pure republic"—an essential component of good republican government. He wrote John Taylor that “every government is more or less republican in proportion as it has in its composition more or less of this ingredient of the direct action of the citizens.”

But Jefferson’s proposal would retain county, state, and national governments. He believed, though, that those governments were necessarily less republican than village-states because they were necessarily less democratic: “The further the departure from direct and constant control by the citizens, the less has the government of the ingredient of republicanism.”

Jefferson wanted the Constitution’s federal framework retained and extended to the village-states. In this reconstituted federalism now extending to our neighborhoods, Jefferson said, “these little republics would be the main strength of the great one.”

Most of us consider the federal government at the national level to be the most powerful and important level of government, but Jefferson’s system would flip this script. Jefferson believed that a constitution should “trust fewer and fewer powers” to each successive level of federalism beyond the village-states. In Jefferson’s reconstituted federalism, therefore, the village-states would have more powers than their fellow “republics” at the county, state, and national levels.

What powers would citizens exercise in their village-states? Jefferson envisioned citizens building and staffing elementary schools; serving as justices of the peace and as constables; serving in militias; electing jurors; running elections for county, state, and federal offices; providing assistance to the poor; and constructing and maintaining roads. The citizens would also serve as small constitutional conventions to debate and pass on proposed amendments to the Federal Constitution. To these powers and activities would be added others that might be called for today and that Jefferson probably wouldn’t have thought of, such as caring for local fauna and flora, increasing urban foot traffic, and organizing farmers markets. Our flexible approach to the village-states’ functions would match Jefferson’s: “Begin them only for a single purpose; they will soon show for what others they are the best instruments.”

Jefferson’s “begin them only” remark gets across not only his entrepreneurial public spirit but also his urgency. For public freedom to take root soon, we must practice it now. The importance of practice is reflected in the different outcomes of the American and French Revolutions. Alexis de Tocqueville argued that the French Revolution ended badly—ended, we know, in Bonaparte's autocracy—because the French people were unpracticed in public freedom: “A people so badly prepared to act on its own could not attempt to reform everything at once without destroying everything.”

We’re no more prepared today than were Tocqueville’s French countrymen before their political crisis. In advocating for village-states, Jefferson warned America that free elections alone wouldn’t prevent the rise of an American authoritarian. Jefferson did so by contrasting the effect of the village-states’ daily public life favorably to our model of governmental participation limited almost entirely to voting:

Where every man is a sharer in the direction of his ward-republic, of or some of the higher ones, and feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day, when there shall not be a man in the State who will not be a member of some one of its councils, great or small, he will let the heart be torn out of his body sooner than his power be wrested from him by a Caesar or a Bonaparte.

To counter the threat of an American Bonaparte, we must do more than vote. We must practice public freedom locally and daily.

If we would practice public freedom face to face, as Jefferson and many of his fellow founders had done in the Continental Congress, we’d start to love it. As Florentine Renaissance political theorists Francesco Guicciardini and Nicollo Machiavelli believed, the practice of public freedom makes us into different people. We’d resist would-be authoritarians with what the Declaration’s signers pledged to one another—”our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

We need everyone involved, and no citizen would be excluded from practicing public freedom in village-states. Where participation in village-states isn’t possible because of poverty, we might consider Aristotle’s dictum: the best democracies pay the poor for their civic service. That way, a democracy won’t be impoverished by a lack of input from the poor, many of whom must work long hours.

Admittedly, this daily public freedom practiced by all Americans would change elections. The village-states would use election, sortition, and/or rotation to select representatives to the more distant levels of this expanded American federalism. However, Arendt acknowledged that village-states would “spell the end of general suffrage as we understand it today.” Surprisingly, perhaps, she wasn’t concerned about the loss of the general vote.

We shouldn’t be, either. "Representative democracy" is, after all, an oxymoron: before Jefferson’s 1800 election, people elected representatives in oligarchies and aristocracies, not in democracies. Political historian Bernard Manin has pointed out that all political theorists before 1800 who have spoken of elections—including Aristotle, Machiavelli, James Harrington, Montesquieu, and Rousseau—either stated, discovered, or assumed that voting is an aristocratic or oligarchic institution, not a democratic one. And even after Jefferson’s election, Tocqueville—and Adams and Jefferson, too—remarked that voting is an aristocratic institution.

We devolve into an oligarchy not in spite of general suffrage but partly because of it. But we renew and defend our republic through democracy—through exercising our public freedom face to face in village-states.

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This essay is by

Bryce Tolpen

, author of

Political Devotions

. It is part of CITY STATE, a collection of seven writers exploring autonomous governance through an online series and print pamphlet.