How To Think About Democracy
The following remarks have been prepared as background notes for lectures to be delivered at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, November 2022
‘Make not your thoughts your prisons’ Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, Act 5, Scene 2
These lectures at a distinguished university located in the heart of a fine global city aim to offer a few modest thoughts about the current condition of democracy, the myriad threats it is facing, the gnawing doubts about its future, and why it is that a renewal of the democratic imagination is so urgently needed to make sense of what is at stake when we speak of democracy and ask after its fate.
At the heart of the lectures stand tough questions: Might we be living in times in which many real-world things are happening to democracy that are not just unexpected or strange but far weirder than we can presently think? But what does it mean to think about democracy? Can we think about democracy democratically (Nicole Loraux’s question)? And more immediately: why bother thinking about democracy when, after all, there is climate change, NATO, war in Ukraine and many other pressing matters to think about?
The first answer offered by these lectures is or ought to be the most obvious: the ‘great democratic revolution’ of modern times, as Tocqueville once called it, seems to be stalling. There are plenty of positive countertrends left unmentioned by observers, but there are clear signs that more than a few territorially bound, state-organised democracies are in a mess. The fugitive spirit of democracy is on the run. With the disastrous experiences of the 1920s and 1930s in mind, many observers are inclined to say that something like an anti-democratic counterrevolution is happening on a global scale. Their generalisations and clichéd simplifications (talk of a great ‘democracy versus autocracy’ global conflict, for instance) are questionable, but most of the symptoms on which they base their assessments are real enough. They come to us as daily breaking news. Widening gaps between rich and poor. Fretful middle classes. Angry underclasses who see democracy as a façade for rule by the rich and powerful. Neoliberalism. Greedy banks. Surveillance capitalism. Pestilence. Populism. Resurgent racism, nationalism and xenophobia. Demagogues. Inflation. Lying, scheming politicians. Untrustworthy political parties. Political corruption. Sex scandals. Misogyny. Domestic violence. Guns. Street violence. Media untruths. Destructive metaverse wars. Weird weather. The extinction of species. Environmental catastrophes. Talk of the decline of the West. China. Russian despotism.
Whether or to what extent a deep and irreversible crisis of democracy is looming is currently the subject of heated political debate, but these symptoms are doubtless conspiring to produce a mix of reactions among scholars of democracy, ranging from glum silence and discombobulation to creeping anxiety and angry alarm about democracy’s fate. Settled certainties are crumbling. The opening lecture in this series probes this mounting sense among scholars that democracy is in trouble. Revisiting classic works by John Dewey, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others, the lecture notes that the scholarly anxiety confirms an old rule: when times seem out of joint, when people’s lives are plagued by chronic insecurities that have profoundly upsetting or paralysing effects, philosophical questions about how best to classify and make sense of the experience of uncertainty flourish. The lecture observes that catastrophism is also on the rise. For some intellectuals, molehills are becoming mountains. They assume the worst is happening. Ignorance of positive countervailing trends and blind jumping to the worst possible conclusions are rife. In the world of scholarship on democracy, Schopenhauer is suddenly fashionable.
The task of reinvigorating thinking about democracy under these conditions is complicated by the paradoxical fact - explored in the opening lecture - that in practice, even when it seems consolidated and is working well, democracy tends to breed public and private uncertainties. This elective affinity between democracy and uncertainty has a fickle quality. The German thinker Max Scheler long ago pointed out that democracy can be the unwitting friend of anti-democratic ressentiment – the frustrated envy and resentful desire of citizens to degrade others deemed superior in turbulent, open societies avowedly committed to the principles of democratic equality. That point, that everyday uncertainties experienced by embittered citizens don’t automatically or necessarily have democratic effects, is fundamental when analysing the contemporary resurgence of populism, the first lecture proposes. Ressentiment is a pathology of democracy.
But uncertainty can bite or disable democracy in other ways. The second and third lectures in this series note the ways in which mounting present-day uncertainties are paralysing the thinking of scholars who specialise in research on democracy. The greatest American political thinker of democracy of my generation, Sheldon Wolin, complained more than half a century ago that in the face of such trends as urban decay, cultural and economic inequality and environmental destruction ‘official political science exudes a complacency which almost beggars description’. Our circumstances are different, but uncaring thoughtlessness is again on the rise. Furrowed brows, heads in the sand, grumbling and ennui are today common in academic circles. But so is the addiction to bureaucracy: narrow-minded, business-as-usual disciplinary intransigence, complacency fed by preoccupations with holding down jobs, workloads, peer-reviewed publications, salaries and promotions.
Mainstream political science is the epicentre and main source of this bone-headedness. Empirically minded analysts of democracy, especially in the United States, have for many decades regularly thought of their research as a ‘science’ guided by Popperian conjecture-refutation methods or more vulgar forms of empiricism traceable to the 19th-century. They suppose that their political science is tasked with collecting large quantities of ‘data’ that can be used to validate generalisations about such matters as political party preferences, election outcomes, gendered political socialisation, the effects of television news on voters and the measurement of misperceptions.
Data is their deity, but these political scientists’ reverence for ‘facts’ has devilish effects. Their preferred data collection and survey methods, using hand-picked experts and interviewers in the field, are often blunt-edged and ignorant of the indeterminacy principle. For reasons of time and money, interview techniques variously called ‘street epistemology’, ‘conversation analysis’ and ‘deep canvassing’, in which people reveal their inner uncertainties, mixed opinions, ambivalence and willingness to change their minds, are rarely used. The orthodox political science methods are also marked by unexplained normative biases. Ethical concerns generally go missing in their research. They regularly speak of ‘liberal democracy’ without much thought about its genealogy, normative confusions or ideological functions. Even when they speak of ‘democratic backsliding’ or ‘authoritarianism’, usually without much back-up argument, they presume that American style ‘liberal democracy’ is the ‘endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution’, as Francis Fukuyama once famously worded his ‘end of history’ fable.
Their neglect of ‘theory’ is equally palpable. Theory is neither their strength nor their favourite word. Yes, these political scientists who publish in such journals as the American Political Science Review (the world’s top-ranked professional journal) might read Tocqueville, or perhaps John Rawls, but they are typically unfamiliar with the writings on democracy of influential scholars such as Max Weber, Gaetano Mosca, Ortega y Gasset, Hannah Arendt, Martha Nussbaum, Sheila Jasanoff, Elaine Scarry, Axel Honneth or Pierre Rosanvallon. In consequence, mainstream political scientists aren’t much interested or equipped to investigate big and pressing themes - the historically unprecedented greening of democracy and democide, how democracies die, are two examples explored in the following lectures - that require the combined methods of such disciplines as history, philosophy, economics, sociology and the earth sciences.
The fixation on harvesting and analysing present-day data also means that mainstream political scientists are specialists in amnesia. Their understanding of the history of democracy is limited. They readily admit that Gallup historical polls and proxy indices from the past (such as voter turnout figures) are of little scientific help, but whatever their lamentations about the lack of data from earlier times they remain unmoved in their attachment to empiricist methods. ‘We have to work with what we have’, a prominent political scientist once explained to me. ‘Our scientific methods require us to stick to the data.’ The unconcern with the past – their forgetful present-mindedness - means that these political scientists easily fall foul of the time-tested rule that those who ignore the past invariably misunderstand the present. Unsurprisingly, despite many things not going well in present-day democracies, they talk of ‘trendless fluctuations’ (Pippa Norris). Amnesia hinders them from making adequate sense of present-day concerns and conflicts. They have lost touch with the gravity and historic significance of the present moment.
In opposition to mainstream political science treatments of democracy, these lectures propose that the serious difficulties faced by contemporary democracies require a radical reinvigoration of thoughtfulness about the guiding principles and practices of democracy. The era when theorists could urge democrats to whistle their way through the world with an air of ‘philosophical superficiality and light-mindedness’ (Richard Rorty) is over. The moment has come for more thinking about democracy. But what might this renewal of thinking about democracy actually entail? What does it mean to think about democracy, and what exactly is thinking?
Plato famously defined thinking as a soundless inner dialogue (eme emautō). Thinking is a silent conversation with ourselves about some or other matter, ‘asking questions of ourselves and answering them’ (Theaetetus, 189-190). He had a point. So did Aristotle, who celebrated the life of the mind (bios theoretikos) as the life of a stranger (bios xenikos). Thinking typically requires a measure of retreat from the world. Sustained thinking needs preparation and readying ourselves to mull over matters. John Dewey retreated for twenty summers to the bays, lakes and harbours of Nova Scotia. Wittgenstein found solace in a Norwegian fjord hut Skjolden locals called ‘Austria’. He spoke of ‘thinking as a process in the head, in a completely enclosed space’. ‘The philosopher’, he added, ‘is not a citizen of any community of ideas. That is what makes him into a philosopher’ (Zettel 606; 455). Heidegger was fond of ‘die Hütte’. And George Orwell carved out thinking time on a remote island of the Inner Hebrides. ‘Everyone keeps coming at me wanting me to lecture, to write commissioned booklets, to join this and that, etc,’, he told fellow writer Arthur Koestler in April 1946. ‘You don't know how I pine to get free of it all and have time to think again.’ Life on the island of Jura offered him the possibility of thinking again – Nineteen Eighty-Four was the result - equipped only with a typewriter, a few gardening tools, a cow and a battery powered radio that kept him in contact with the outside world.
These writers thought of themselves as outsiders for whom thinking required temporarily standing apart from others, and from the hubbub of social and political life. They walked Plato’s pathway. Plato might well have approved of their yearning to be alone, in peace and quiet. Extended thoughtfulness indeed requires solitude. But what Plato did not spot when thinking about what counts as thinking is the surprising thought that thinking has democratic qualities.
Most obviously, every human being, not just philosophers, is capable of thinking and feeling the need periodically to turn things over in their mind. It’s true we all take time out from thinking; blank minds and thoughtlessness are not the burden of idiots and fools alone. And although some people are more gifted or practised at the art of thinking than others, it’s also the case that everybody resorts to thinking, often many times each day. Thinking is not the exclusive privilege of (say) philosophers, political thinkers and writers, moralists, theologians, or ‘civilised’ peoples. Thinking happens in all cultures, past and present. The anthropologist Paul Radin long ago pointed (in Primitive Man as Philosopher [1927]) that aboriginal peoples, once supposed by Europeans to be genetically incapable of thinking abstractly, regularly ‘envisage life in philosophical terms’, turn their surrounding worlds into ‘subjects for reflection’, and embody their ‘ponderings and searchings’ in storytelling, paintings, songs and rituals. The general truth should be self-evident: all people are endowed with the potential to think, to think often, and to think well.
The capacity for thinking is common to each and every person, but it is democratic in other, more surprising ways. Thinking has public qualities. It is not a solo performance. We often speak as if thinking is a lonesome experience. That’s what we imply when we say we are ‘thinking out loud’. It portrays thinking as a wordless inner dialogue, as an act of talking to oneself in the imagination. But thinking actually connects us to others. Wittgenstein pointed out (Zettel 123) that thinking is a bodily activity conjoined with others, not only (for instance) when we urge others to ‘think it over’ and they then get on with doing just that, but also in the sense that thinking takes place inside bodies that are steeped in language and entangled with others in fields of everyday life and wider social relations. Thinking is always publicly situated. It is not synonymous with the work of superior minds who linger in libraries and proclaim universal truths from ivory towers distant from everyday life. The vita contemplativa and the vita activa are conjoined twins. Thought comes entangled with institutions, events and power relations among people. It involves remembering what we did in the past, where we now belong, and where we might be headed. Thinking is earthbound, a practical way of picturing ourselves in relation to others, strangers and adversaries and friends alike. It is thus not understandable in terms of either the antiquated mind-body dualism or the problematic of the lonely self who lives at a distance from a community of others. When we think, whether or not we realise it, we share our own lives with others.
Thinking is democratic in still one other sense. My Power and Humility (2018) and The Shortest History of Democracy (2022) and other publications have tried to make the point that democracy is the friend of contingency. It has no pre-defined form or substance. Not only does democracy vary through time and space; it defies fixed ways of living and refuses all forms of top-down power masquerading as ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ or ‘necessary’. Democracy has a punk quality. The actions unleashed by its spirit and institutions create space for unexpected beginnings. Always on the side of the targets and victims of predatory power, democracy doubts orthodoxies, loosens fixed boundaries, widens horizons and pushes towards the unknown. Seen in this way, there is in practice an elective affinity between thinking and democracy in that both tend to render contingent things that seem self-evident, or are taken for granted. Thinking is not ratiocination, reasoning that obeys the rules of deduction or induction, or that follows steps in search of a correct or definitive answer. Pointlessness is a mark of thinking. ‘Everyone is a philosopher’, said Gramsci, but in the next breath he wrongly concluded that true thinking, a Marxist ‘philosophy of praxis’, would guide ‘the popular element’, which in bourgeois society ‘“feels” but does not always know or understand’. Thinking is not a codeword for the affirmation of certainty, or mental imprisonment, or guided revolutionary action. It is not the search for an accurate and definitive mental picture of the world about us. Thinking yields no firm conclusions or necessary practical gains. It stands against all creeds. Thinking is not knowing, as Hannah Arendt reminded us. Nor does thinking tell us immediately how we should act in the world. Thinking is neither deliberation, nor willing, nor strategic calculation. Thinking has no immediate terminus ad quem.
Thinking can be slow or fast (Daniel Kahneman). Pondering a particular subject can absorb a ‘whole lifetime’, as Heidegger said. But whatever the rhythm, thinking involves disorientation, confusion, perplexity. Thought brings the unsought. It springs surprises. It draws our attention to things we hadn’t before noticed (Vinciane Despret). It attunes our senses, opens our minds, prompts new ways of seeing the world. Thinking offers fresh insights, doubts, breakthroughs and wondrous ponderings. Thinking is not equivalent to holding or reinforcing some or other opinion. Thinking is more chaotic than that. It encourages us to see the need for a polyphony of ways of interpreting the inherent plurality of what matters. It can bring us joy, but it can also be painful. Thinking can induce the sinking feeling that we have been doing things all wrong. It is embodied mental activity that places a question mark over the way things are, or how they are conventionally thought about. Critical thinking and lateral thinking are in this sense redundant phrases. When we think we are by definition in two or more minds about matters. Perplexity is our companion. Often prompted by dissatisfaction with how things are, thinking can change minds and change lives. Inherited dogmas, clichés and cherished opinions are rendered vulnerable. Thinking can get itself in knots – by definition it is a complicated process – but it often has the effect of untying the knots of orthodoxy. To speak as Wittgenstein did, thinking threatens ‘the fixed rails along which all our thinking runs’ (Zettel 375). It pokes and prods thoughtless presumptions and dogmatic prejudices.
It is my aim and hope that the lectures in this series will be understood as efforts to apply these rather general and simplified thoughts about thinking to the subject of democracy itself. They are guided throughout by the wise remark of the American philosopher William James that ‘many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices’. Lecture two attempts to think through the profoundly radical implications of green politics for the way people imagine and live democracy. It notes the present-day upsurge of catastrophism and its ‘après nous, le déluge’ mentality. It observes that there are activists, probably a dwindling minority, for whom the priority is to give up on democratic politics and to live simply, in ‘harmony with nature’, as if wilderness is medicinal for lives ground down by environmental degradation. More striking is the high levels of lip service and support for democratic principles within green circles, as confirmed by the widespread discomfort triggered some years ago by James Lovelock’s widely reported suggestion that it ‘may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while’. Green commitments to conventional democratic principles such as equality, openness, and respect for diversity and one person-one vote seem unwavering. But why people with green sympathies should embrace democracy for more than strategic and tactical reasons, whether it is possible to ‘green’ democracy, surely a thoroughly anthropocentric norm that has always supposed humans are masters and possessors of ‘nature’, and what that redefinition might imply for people’s understanding of democracy: these and related matters all remain rather obscure within green political circles and among leading green thinkers such as Dipesh Chakrabarty and Bruno Latour - or so this lecture suggests.
The final lecture proposes a different way of thinking about a basic question first posed by the sceptics and anti-democrats of the classical Greek world: why is it that the political form known as democracy is often so vulnerable to efforts by democrats and anti-democrats alike to destroy it? This question, it is pointed out, has a new urgency because global surveys are everywhere reporting dipping confidence in democracy and marked jumps in citizens’ frustrations with government corruption, broken promises and chronic incompetence. Young people are the least satisfied with democracy – much more disaffected than previous generations at the same age. Highly worrying are the survey findings for countries such as India, once described as the world’s largest democracy and now fast developing a reputation as the world’s largest failing democracy. In its Democracy Report 2020, Sweden’s V-Dem Institute noted that India ‘has almost lost its status as a democracy’. It ranked India below Sierra Leone, Guatemala and Hungary. The report fails to mention that India, together with Vietnam, South Africa, and Indonesia, is one of only four countries in the world where a majority of citizens (53 percent) say they would be prepared to support military rule. Equally worrying is the case of the world’s most powerful democracy. V-Dem’s Democracy Report 2021 ranks the United States as a major contributor to an ‘accelerating wave of autocratization’ engulfing 25 countries, alongside Brazil, Turkey, Poland, Benin, Bolivia, and Mauritius.
Things are serious. Not since the mid-20th century has democracy faced so much political trouble, which raises more general questions about how democracies of the past wilted and died. The lecture notes that political scientists concerned with the subject of democide have typically emphasised two connected dynamics. During our lifetimes, some power-sharing democracies have suffered sudden death, in puffs of smoke and rat-a-tat gunfire. The overthrow of a caretaker Greek government on the eve of elections (in 1967) by a regime led by colonels and the 1973 military coup d’état against the Allende government in Chile count as well-known examples. Many observers are interpreting the January 6th events in the United States in this way: as an organised violent attack on the Capitol that was part of a broader scheme to overturn an election result, directed from the top by a defeated president and his buddies.
The lecture notes that this catastrophist interpretation overlooks the fact, long ago emphasised by Juan Linz and other scholars, that the death of democracy by gradual cuts is more common. Democide is usually a slow-motion and messy process. Wild rumours and talk of conspiracies flourish. Street protests and outbreaks of uncontrolled violence happen. Fears of civil unrest spread. The armed forces grow agitated. Emergency rule is declared but things eventually come to the boil. As the government totters, the army moves from its barracks onto the streets to quell unrest and take control. Democracy is finally buried in a grave it slowly dug for itself. This is what happened in Burkina Faso earlier this year. Amidst gunfire, following a lengthy period of government paralysis fed by rumours and rebellion, the so-named Patriotic Movement for Safeguarding and Restoration seized control of the country. During the past generation, around three-quarters of democracies and failing power-sharing governments met their end in this slow-motion way. The military coup d’états against the elected governments of Egypt (2013), Thailand (2014), Myanmar and Tunisia (2021), and Chad, Mali, Guinea and Sudan (2021) are well-known examples.
The key thought of this final lecture is that both these ‘institutionalist’, narrowly state-centred accounts of democide belong to the same paradigm, to a mode of thinking that is of declining relevance and incapable of grasping the ways in which democracies can be gradually destroyed by social deprivation and environmental ignorance and decay. An appeal is made to think along the following lines: democracy is much more than pressing a button or marking a box on a ballot paper. It goes beyond the mathematical certitude of election results and majority rule. It’s not reducible to lawful rule through independent courts or attending local public meetings and watching breaking news stories scrawled across a screen. Guided by the spirit of equality and refusals of predatory power, democracy is a whole way life whose delicate geo-social foundations are ignored or neglected at its peril. Democracy dies a slow-motion death not only when citizens suffer such indignities as domestic violence, poor health care, religious and racial bigotry, and daily shortages of food and housing. Democracies also destroy themselves when these same citizens and their representatives succumb to a ‘great derangement’ (Amitav Ghosh): when they give themselves over to a delusion, to the thoughtlessness that prevents them from seeing that extreme weather events, pestilences and other environmental emergencies breed power grabs, and that democracy will have no future unless its ideals and practices are rid of the deep-seated prejudice that ‘humans’ live outside a ‘nature’ whose dynamics are administratively controllable and commercially exploitable for the use and enjoyment of ‘the people’.
