Speech, Law and Civil Society: Liberal Thought Against Democratic Politics

Historically-informed reflection on democracy reminds us of a curious fact: representative government, supposedly the modern form of democracy, was not originally envisioned as a technical solution to the difficulty of assembling the citizen body of an extensive nation state, but rather as a qualitatively different political form. The first thinkers to dedicate their attention to representative government in a systematic way were perfectly candid in contrasting this type of regime with democracy, which they viewed as an archaic form of politics that was at worst anarchic and at best inappropriate to modern conditions.

Much of twentieth century democratic theory has been staged as a dispute between the advocates of a normative model of participatory democracy and an empiricist research program that takes the identification of democracy with representative institutions for granted. This project does not attempt to relitigate this dispute, but rather to widen its stakes. Political representation is only one facet of the modern anti-democratic project. The fact that modern democratic institutions are composed of anti-democratic political forms raises a more extensive set of problems than an exclusive focus on representation would permit us to see. Behind the debate concerning participatory and representative democracy lies an older and more extensive field of conflict: the dispute between liberalism and democracy. Whether one considers the norm of popular sovereignty, the use of elections, or the practice of parliamentary government by discussion, a cursory historical investigation reveals that the political forms which today are considered inseparable from democracy originate in a struggle waged by hereditary aristocracies against monarchical power, or a struggle waged by the “natural aristocracy” of civil society against democracy itself.

The following study has two stages. The first is a history of liberal thought written with an emphasis on this tradition’s responses to the threat of democracy. This history is divided into three moments, each of which outlines a distinct family of political reflection: juridical liberalism, empiricist liberalism, and parliamentarism. The second stage is an attempt to identify the contribution of each family of liberal reflection to the modern understanding of democracy. In the final chapters, this is extended to contemporary democratic theory, which is correctly understood as the inheritor of liberal, not democratic, political forms, and which renews many aspects of the liberal tradition’s critique of democracy despite its avowed acceptance of democracy.