Page "Majoritarianism" Paragraph 9

Anthropologist David Graeber offers a reason as to why majority democratic government is so scarce in the historical record.

" Majority democracy, we might say, can only emerge when two factors coincide: 1. a feeling that people should have equal say in making group decisions, and 2. a coercive apparatus capable of enforcing those decisions.

" Graeber argues that those two factors almost never meet: " Where egalitarian societies exist, it is also usually considered wrong to impose systematic coercion.

Where a machinery of coercion did exist, it did not even occur to those wielding it that they were enforcing any sort of popular will.