PERILOUS TIMES:

The Perils of Republics (Lucy Sullivan, Autumn 1998, Policy)

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. [...]

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. With the secularisation of the ruling classes, a judiciary has appeared which feels free to remake the Bill of Rights in its own image, promoting levels of individual choice in transiently fashionable directions previously debarred by religion, which disrupt the stability of tradition. Its innovative judgements are delivered as representing the will of the people when, free as judges are of the constraints of deliberative representative assembly, they have no real claim to even this authority. The Bill of Rights exacerbates rather than protects against this new sovereignty of individual rights.

Thus we will have to go back, seizing power usurped by the judiciary and restoring the authority of religion, if we are to forward a free nation.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 17, 2003 8:18 AM