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Notes -
Or a representative form, for those of us fortunate enough to have one, for as long as we can keep it.
And the Citizens of Rome kept theirs for just short of five centuries—and the Emperors were about a hundred years away from matching the stability of democracy when one of them broke the empire clean in half.
That's called oligarchy, and any investigation of the history of Rome will reveal exactly how "representative" the Senate was.
It’s not all or nothing. Plebs had a small amount of power, officially recognized. Every fighting man has a small amount of de facto power (though some, like rich men, generals etc, have far more than others), and when de facto power diverges too much from de jure power, it frequently results in civil war (“I guess we’ll see about that”).
The social war was near-zero power de jures getting their de facto power recognized. The end of the republic came about because the aristocrats had too much de jure power, relative to their actual power. English civil war and french revolution follow the same pattern.
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