Jacques Rancière, in his 2005 book, detected a new hatred of democracy in our day and age. However, he starts by looking briefly at the old hatred of democracy which is as old as Plato, whose mentor, Socrates, was ordered to death by a democratic body. This hatred is still very much with us. The term “democracy” started as a slur in the ancient and medieval world akin to the anarchy of mob rule. Democracy was often viewed as an affront to divine law and natural law by those who would use divine law and natural law to safeguard or expand their positions. Even during the renaissance, democracy was viewed as a danger, in that one needed protection for one’s property and privilege against the whims of the people, even while they embraced democracy in the mixed constitutions of some Italian city states.
Historically two broad critiques have been leveled against democracy. On the one hand there was the notion that professional rulers would be best because their devoted professionalism, education, and upbringing would allow for the best and most rational decisions to be made. The second tolerated democracy but sought to limit and contain it by having experts guide it and prevent it from harming established interests and property. “The drawing up of the United States constitution is the classic example of this work of composing forces and of balancing institutional mechanisms intended to get the most possible out of the fact of democracy, all the while strictly containing it in order to protect two goods taken as synonymous; the government of the best, and the preservation of the order of property.”
Today, the new hatred is not directed at the institutions of democracy nor at its power, rather, the new hatred of democracy “is about the people and its mores….democracy is not a corrupt form of government; it is a crisis of civilization afflicting society and through it the state….Democratic government [those who hate democracy in effect say] is bad when it is allowed to be corrupted by democratic society, which wants for everyone to be equal and for all differences to be respected. [Democracy] is good, on the other hand, when it rallies individuals enfeebled by democratic society to the vitality of war in order to defend the values of civilization, the values pertaining to the clash of civilizations. The thesis of the new hatred of democracy can be succinctly put: there is only one good democracy, the one that represses the catastrophe of democratic civilization.”
In his first chapter, entitled “From Victorious Democracy to Criminal Democracy,” Rancière starts by pointing out that everyone is overjoyed when democracy triumphs over dictatorship but the subtext is always to be aware that “bringing democracy to another people does not simply mean bringing it the beneficial effects of a constitutional State, elections and a free press. It also means bringing it disorder.” This is because people demand more and more. At first it is looting (which demonstrates the anarchy of democracy and suggests the need for strong and good government) and then people demand things that a new government allegedly cannot afford (and the lesson is repeated: everyone needs good and strong government). As such democracy has two enemies: the outside one: dictatorship and the inside one: the “insidious” demands of democratic society. “A good democratic government is one capable of controlling the evil quite simply called democratic life.” The intensity of democratic life is viewed as problematic and cautioned against for hundreds of reasons. The threat the democratic society creates is “persistent militant contestation in all domains of State activity; undermining of the principles of good government, of the respect for public authorities, of the knowledge of experts, and of the know-how of pragmatists.” The narrative of this “crisis” of democracy continues: The remedy “consists in redirecting the feverish energy activated on the public stage towards other ends, in sending it on a search for material prosperity, private happiness and social bonds….[this means] diminishing excessive political energy, and promoting the quest for individual happiness and social relations...[this] rendered citizens insouciant to the public good and undermined the authority of governments summoned to respond to the spiraling demands emanating from society.” The classic joke that illustrates this is the laughter that the phase “I’m from the government and I am here to help,” engenders. The argument boils down to the idea that too much democracy is a bad thing so to save democracy we must repress it in actuality while keeping its outward image. Rancière goes so far as to say that the pro-democracy camp today would have been labeled as the authoritarian camp by the hippy liberal democrats of the late 1960s (at least in France). Today, the former evils of totalitarianism and the threats it posed to society are attributed to the people’s democratic demands and expectations of their government – if they are not held in check by a strong government.
In order to flip democracy with totalitarianism without anyone noticing a threefold process was necessary. “[F]irst, to reduce democracy to a form of society; second, to make this form of society identical to the reign of the egalitarian individual by grouping under the latter all sorts of disparate properties, everything from mass consumption to the claims of special minority rights, not to forget union battles; and finally, to charge ‘mass individualist society’, henceforth identical to democracy, with pursuing the limitless growth that is inherent to the logic of the capitalist economy.” In other words we had to move from the traditional notion of democracy as the coming together in equality to find the common good (where the art of finding the common good required a “clear distinction between the domains of common affairs and the egotistical and petty reign of private life and domestic interests”) to an individual egalitarianism in which it is the pursuits of private life and domestic interest that become equal. What this means is that all power relations, including legitimate ones such as teacher/student, parent/child, etc. become suspect because they are not “democratic”. However, this can be alleviated as the new “democracy” can be expanded by giving more opportunities to express the new democracy through consumer choice. We are now in a utopia of egalitarianism and democracy since we are all equally free to choose whatever consumer products we want – we are even free not to choose if we choose not to work to get the money needed to exercise our new and expanding “democratic” privileges. Politics has been supplanted by economics and sociology. As long as this is true, government finds it much easier to eliminate or control and direct the unhealthy demands of any political action that people might try to achieve – in other words government and the systems of society have become totalitarian while looking democratic because the systems cannot be changed. Real democracy is almost criminal because real democracy has the option of changing the systems, privileges, and ends of government.
In chapter two, entitled “Politics, or the Lost Shepherd,” Rancière looks at the crime of democracy against kinship from the perspective of those who would have us believe that society needs a shepherd – a professional ruler or ruling class. From the shepherd point of view the ruler can tailor his good government particularly for the benefit of all and/or the benefit of each. However democracy honours the law as universal treating differences equally which is first unjust and second unrealistic because people do not honour the law for the sake of the idea of good government but rather for their own pleasure. People are egotistical in their individuality.
There have traditionally been 6 titles that legitimate rule: the first 4 are father figures: 1) parents over children, 2) old over young, 3) master over slaves, 4) highborn over those of no account. The last two who are often in opposition to these first 4 are the shepherd figures: 5) strongest over the weakest and 6) those who know over those who do not. Politics starts when these titles vie for control. Democracy introduces a new non-title in contest against all these: chance whether by election or lot. “Democracy first of all means this: anarchic ‘government’, one based on nothing other than the absence of every title to govern….the drawing of lots was a remedy to…government comprised of a certain competence, that of individuals skilled at taking power through cunning…good government is the government of those who do not desire to govern.” This is looked at as a scandal if you happen to have any of the first six titles: democrats would choose chance over father and shepherd figures.
“The criticism about democracy’s ‘criminal tendencies’ is therefore correct on one point: democracy signifies a rupture with the order of kinship. Only this critique forgets that it is exactly this rupture that realizes, in the most literal manner, exactly what this critique calls for: a structural heterotopy between the principle of government and the principle of society. Democracy is not a modern ‘limitlessness’ which allegedly destroys the heterotopy necessary to politics. It is on the contrary the founding power of this heterotopy, the primary limitation of the power of forms of authority that govern the social body.” Heterotopy refers to the evolution of the location of something; in this case the evolution of the change in position and relative importance of the principle of government and the principle of society. But the scandal of democracy continues, not only does it rip legitimacy away from traditional forms of government it grounds itself in its own contingency. “Democracy is not a type of constitution, nor a form of society…. It is simply the power peculiar to those who have no more entitlements to govern than to submit.” Democracy, as it is today, as a law of chance, provides a governing legitimation founded on nothing. This nothingness is what allows for the principle of the equality of persons, for politics, and for modern democratic government to exist. “[D]emocracy is neither a society to be governed, nor a government of society, it is specifically this ungovernable[sic] on which every government must ultimately find out it is based.”