ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE?:

THE PERILS OF REPUBLICS (Lucy Sullivan, Autumn 1998, Policy)

The concern of the aforementioned French political philosophers, all writing in the last two decades, has been to understand why the acclaimed liberal principles - rationality, liberty, rights, democracy - which ushered in the modern period should have had such devastating consequences. We in the (British) Commonwealth, protected across three centuries from their most destructive effects by our tie to the pre-modern world through a constitutional monarchy, are able to embrace them with an innocence and insouciance which the French had necessarily lost by the early decades of the nineteenth century.

Why did democracy, when enacted in its purest form as the will of the people untrammelled by traditional power and authority, degenerate so readily into demagogy? Two intertwining lines of explanation are offered by the most interesting of this new group of philosophers, and they hinge on the source of political authority and the problem of unanimity in the people's will.

Marcel Gauchet, Bernard Manin and Pierre Manent explore the problem of the `empty seat' of power created in the modern world by the removal of the authority of monarch and religion. Gauchet develops the idea that traditional societies were given stability by the role of religion, as an authority outside the disputable affairs of men, which was deferred to as unquestionable. In late eighteenth century France, with the overthrow of both religion and its surrogate, the monarchy, and the advent of the republic, the state replaced religion as the exogenous (external, overarching) power, deriving its
authority from beliefs in the autonomy of the individual. But because, in a republic, the state is seen to represent the people's will, and is therefore sovereign, it can be concluded that no individual has the right to defect from its authority. This is why the modern nation has tended to totalitarianism as well as to democracy.

Manin arrives at a similar conclusion by a different route. The democratic ideal of the will of the people as the only legitimate source of power creates immediate problems of political practice, if each individual is to exercise personal freedom. Manin diagnoses eighteenth and nineteenth century liberal theories of justice as attempting to answer the question: How can we establish a political and social order based on the free will of the individual? The answer was a presupposition of unanimity of will in the political sphere. In practice this does not occur, and the practicalities of government require its relinquishment, again making the reach of authority problematic, and requiring the acceptance of compromise. But as a principle, the belief in unanimity is a powerful tool of totalitarianism which allows dissidence to be seen as disrupting the unity of `the people' and their rightful rule.

The French philosophers do not explore the situation of constitutional monarchies, but we can apply their insights to our own tradition, which has not suffered the political instability and tendency to demagogy of the republican record. The defence against totalitarianism offered by a constitutional monarchy would seem to be that the monarch, like religion (and in Britain reinforced by religion), provides an exogenous authority beyond the state which acts as an impediment to usurpation.

The tradition of the constitutional monarch is one of defender of the established law, while an elected head of government or state, representing the will of the people, may feel free to overthrow the traditional and accreted wisdom of common law in favour of a new, although temporary, authority conferred by a populace lacking the longer view. This has an obvious potential for political instability. Democracy, functioning within a higher order of tradition, is not so readily degraded into demagogy. Under constitutional monarchies, the functional seat of power, the government, retains a sense of order and authority beyond the immediate will of the people, and paradoxically this allows for greater tolerance of dissidence. Republics have generally been less kind to minorities than have constitutional monarchies. [...]

Let us now look at the position of the United States, a stable republic, in this development. Unlike the French republic, the American republic did not overthrow religion as a source of authority in the conduct of its citizens’ lives. De Tocqueville, in the nineteenth century, argued that religion, although unattached to monarchy, was an essential feature of democracy in America. Thus the religious fundamentalism of America, deplored for its personal restrictiveness when viewed from within the tolerance of constitutional monarchies, has provided for the United States the exogenous dimension which defends republics from totalitarianism.

The American Bill of Rights and its separation of powers, devised as defences against dictatorial law-making, may have been less important in this respect than has been supposed.

If the West is to engage in nation-building in the Islamic world for the forseeable future, we'd do well to try and understand why some democracies fare better than others. If a reformed (non-totalitarian) Islamic faith and some form of monarchy, mixed with democratic legislatures and other institutions, will over the long haul provide the kind of stability and freedom that an America or an Australia have enjoyed then we should not be too hasty to shatter societies that may already, to a surprising degree, be primed for a successful democratic future. Posted by Orrin Judd at January 14, 2003 8:44 AM