This is the first article in a 3-part series, which was previously published in German political magazine casablanca (2/2024). We thank its editorial team for the permission to translate and republish this text.
The major social transformation that has been underway in the West for years, perhaps decades, but certainly since Covid, is at best perceived by academic political theorists as a “crisis of democracy”—and thus simultaneously misrecognized. In these theories, the affirmative use of the concept of “crisis” conceals a new form of governance, according to which hallucinated or deliberately induced “crises” are used to legitimize measures that in turn only provoke the next “crisis”. And the inflationary use of the concept of democracy in even the most critical democracy discourse—à la the “de-democratization of democracy”, the “democratization of democracy”, “democracy vs. liberal democracy” or “electoral vs. constitutional democracy”—also disarticulates what is at stake: namely, the disappearance of the bourgeois republic in a pre-totalitarian democracy.
The inflationary use of the concept of democracy disarticulates what is at stake: the disappearance of the bourgeois republic and the move towards a pre-totalitarian democracy.
The idea of the bourgeois republic is conceivably simple, clear, precise—and above all defined in terms of content. At its heart—alongside the separation of powers and the possibility of (re)electing governments every four years in free and secret elections—is the freedom of the individual, the smallest social entity. The bourgeois republic is expressed in various civil and fundamental rights, which—like the right to privacy —are considered categorically inalienable. They are conceived as defensive rights of the individual, also and especially against the state itself, which enforces them.
According to the liberal formula “as much state as necessary, as little state as possible”: the state must largely leave its citizens in peace and limit itself to creating and maintaining a framework for prosperous economic activity, in terms of domestic and foreign policy, and to working to resolve or pacify so-called economic and banking crises, in the name of social peace. In all of this, the actions of the government and the will of the majority are limited by the specific laws and by the “spirit of the republic” that governs these laws, as well as governing the people and institutions that interpret and apply them. A government that sets out to restrict civil rights and encroach on the freedom of the individual, can, for example, be checked by independent courts—even and especially in cases where such legal proceedings happen to go against the will of an actual or supposed majority.
In the literal sense, democracy as “popular rule” may carry legitimate, abstract impulses against dictatorships or monarchies; however, in relation to the idea of the bourgeois republic, its concept remains vague. In political theory, “democracy” therefore functions more as a formal majority principle, often also as a euphemism for the unspoken tyranny of the majority. Thus the idea that the individual must subordinate his or her selfishness to the interests of the collective is not something that anyone would call ipso facto undemocratic. As long as the rulers of even completely totalitarian regimes succeed (whether through fear, repression, manipulation, persuasion or offers of compensation) in organizing the consent of the subjugated to their own subjugation, and mobilizing the masses in their interests, democracy and totalitarianism are not only not mutually exclusive: a deflated understanding of democracy is virtually constitutive of the totalitarian path.
So if we are here talking about “pre-totalitarian democracy” in relation to the current transformation, it is because this formulation expresses the direction taken by Western societies, as well as the fact that the step towards complete totalitarianism—of the sort seen in the Soviet Union, during National Socialism, or in China and Iran today—has not yet been taken, even at the height of the Covid regime. Indeed, the shape of future development may be considered completely open as long as there is (albeit diffuse) resistance to that tendency.
