Self-Government

In the Educated Electorate page, self-government is the premise that makes that concept load-bearing: citizens who “mean to be their own Governors” must, in Thomas Jefferson’s phrase quoted there, “arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” Self-rule presupposes competence — a public informed enough to make reasoned judgments — which is why Democracy degrades into technocracy or rule by the uninformed when that condition fails. Jefferson’s “elementary republics of the wards” appears as the structural unit of informed self-rule: local participation as the smallest cell of a self-governing republic.

Context: “Self-government” denotes the political principle that a people govern themselves through their own institutions rather than by external or unaccountable authority — a foundational idea of the American constitutional tradition and of republican political theory generally.

Where this appears

• Educated Electorate — self-government framed as presupposing citizen competence; Jefferson’s “arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives” and the ward-republic as the unit of self-rule.