"The other problem with the concept of consent is simply that it is susceptible of very weak and even negative interpretations. Even authoritarian regimes, if they are to last, must be able to count on some measure of consent, though not necessarily that of a majority. Brute force, however effective in terrorizing people, is not by itself enough in the longer run. Consent in such circumstances does not have to be formally registered: it is enough for the regime that it can count, in practice, on the support and co-operation of key sectors of the population. It is tempting for any regime to claim that its very survival proves that it has consent and support; And such a claim might be based on the notion of ‘tacit consent’. Tacit consent was the tactic which Locke used in his Second Treatise to escape from the dilemma of reconciling his basic principle — The 'Liberty of Man in Society, is to be under no other Legislative Power, but that established, by consent, in the Commonwealth . . .' (22, p. 301) - with the desirability of a stable and durable system of government which would not have to be submitted to the people for re-endorsement. People were deemed to consent to the government they were born under when they came of age by virtue of the fact of their remaining within that particular society. The lack of positive objection was interpreted as consent. Unless you withdrew from the society, you were deemed to have contracted into it (see 119, p. 366).

Silence means consent. In practice, and at innumerable levels where decisions have to be made, this assumption is made all the time. Perhaps it has to be. It is nevertheless a false equation, and at times a seriously misleading one. The negative failure to to opt out, may signify one of a whole range of reactions: fear, or prudence in the face of power, indifference, paralysis of the will, sullen resignation, sheer hopelessness, a feeling of ignorance, or habits of subservience. Any or all of these may lie beneath a surface of silence. They clearly are not identical with consent. But the facile equation of silence with consent results in those in power forming exaggerated ideas of the degree of support or acquiescence they can command. They are then disagreeably surprised when the resentments and even despair which are so often concealed by silence break out in violent rebellion.

Never was this more dramatically demonstrated than by the collapse of the Communist regimes of eastern Europe in and around the year 1989. The passivity, the silence, the acquiescence of the peoples of East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary in previous years must have tempted the rulers of those countries to believe that, even if they were not exactly popular, then at least their rule was accepted, and in that sense consented to. They must have been astounded by the uprisings of the autumn of 1989; yet the very swiftness with which the ancien regimes of Communism crumbled demonstrated their ultimate hollowness, the lack of genuine and positive support for them. The 'silence' of most of Czechoslovakia in the twenty years between the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 and the popular uprising of 1989 indicated, not any kind of consent, but resignation, hopelessness and despair, all reinforced by the fear inspired by the regime’s relentless persecution of those who dared to oppose it.

But even when consent is given a more positive content, and a definite ‘yes’ is required rather than the mere absence of ‘no’, it remains an indelibly passive concept. Consent is essentially a response to initiatives taken by someone else. The initiative still lies with governments, parties, political leaders, But why should the people’s role be so confined? A. D. Lindsay asked the r&evant question nearly sixty years ago:

Is democracy a means of bringing about that the people shall consent to what the government proposes to do or that the government shall do what the people want? The two things are very different, and yet if all we want is to produce consent, it can be got in either way.

Consent, then, is too passive and restrictive a conception to provide an adequate account of the proper role of the people in a democracy. But how are they to play a more positive role? is it realistic to expect initiatives to come from the people themselves? For that to be possible there are certain conditions, not so far discussed, which must be fulfilled.

First, there must be a climate of freedom within which opinions can be freely expressed and discussion conducted without fear or restraint. Democracy requires freedom...

Closed societies, marked by a high degree of coherence in belief and custom, can be found throughout history. They are often, and perhaps even typically, characterized by authoritarian rather than democratic forms of government. Unless collective pressure is to be treated as democratic by definition, the only ground for specially associating it with democracy is that democracy might be held to give collective pressure on exceptional legitimacy. But this is so only if we equate democracy with a simple and unrestrained majoritarianism, and as we have seen, there are good democratic reasons for not making that equation.

Secondly, it is very striking that this liberal disjunction between liberty and democracy so readily overlooks the fact that in history the struggle for democracy and the struggle for fundamental liberties have very often been one and the same. The British radicals, including the Chartists, who campaigned for a democratic franchise in the early nineteenth century also campaigned for a free press, by which they meant one unhampered by government censorship and taxes. This was by no means fortuitous. How could the working class make effective use of the political power which the vote was expected to give them without the opportunity to engage in all open discussion of political principle and perspectives? Or, more widely, how could citizens fulfil their role in a democracy without undergoing some political education, and how was such an education possible without free communications and free debate?

The assumption that there is a necessary connection between democracy and freedom is surely correct, even if we take some of the narrower definitions of democracy. For example, even if the essence of democracy is taken to be the process of choosing between elites competing to govern, the very business of choosing can hardly be confined to the visit to the polling booth. The parties (or elites) must be allowed to publish their programmes and make their competing claims to office; the elector must be able to question them, and voice his or her doubts or support. Once public debate is permitted in the election period, prohibiting it at other times becomes difficult. Choice, however limited in scope, implies debate, and debate implies a degree of freedom, even if limits are set on what can be debated.

If we adopt the more expansive conception of democracy which has been used throughout this book, the case is even stronger. Democracy as popular power, it has been suggested, should be seen as a continuous process of interaction between government and society, with a maximum involvement of the people in public decision-making at every level. A parody of this, a pseudo-democracy, occurs when the decision-makers put on a show of consulting those whom their decisions affect when in fact the crucial decisions have already been taken and the policies decided on. These are the circumstances in which, as Lindsay shrewdly observed, 'consent can be manufactured' (p. 43). If, however, genuine, convinced, voluntary consent is being sought, then free and open discussion cannot be avoided, for what genuine consent needs is that people should feel quite free to voice their doubts and opposition, if only to create the possibility of overcoming such doubts and hostility. And if we look to the people to play a more positive role, freely voicing their demands and hopes, their fears and grievances, as well as introducing ideas and initiating policies, plainly this can only happen in an atmosphere of the greatest possible freedom and openness, free from any taint of intimidatory anxiety or apprehension as to the possible consequences of speaking out.

That individuals and groups should feel free and unintimidated is certainly a necessary condition of free discussion, free decision-making and free consent; but it is not a sufficient condition. People may possibty feel free and independent even when they are actually being manipulated. What seems to the individual to be a free and spontaneous response can be seen from ‘outside’ to be the product of either social and ideological conditioning, or in some cases, of a concerted campaign to mould public opinion This can produce a response which each individual feels and believes to be authentically his or hes alone. As Hans Magnus Enzensberger observed in a notable essay on ‘The Industrialization of the Mind’:

All of us, no matter how irresolute we are, like to think that we reign supreme in our own consciousness, that we are masters of what our minds accept or reject . . No illusion is more stubbornly upheld than the sovereignty of the mind.

And yet, since at least the time of Flegel and Marx, we have been increasingly aware that, as Enzensberger’s pathphrase of Marx has it, 'What is going on in our minds has always been, and will always be a product of society.' There is a history df ideas, and it is the history both of how human beings shape ideas and also of how ideas shape human beings. The idea that the individuals mind can remain a wholly independent entity, uninfluenced by its social and intellectual environment, is certainly a piece of individualist mythology."

--- Anthony Arblaster (1994) Democracy (2nd Ed.)