Three Definitions of Democracy

First, the clichés of the State and of Democracy, clichés that must be removed if we wish to get hold of any kind of political problem at all. “The State” has had a quite particular meaning in Germany since the Romantic period, and particularly through Hegel’s philosophy of law and of the State. I will, therefore, quote the key passage from Hegel’s Philosophy of Law in which the State is defined, so that you may see how one cannot and should not carry out political science.

This is what §257 says:

“The State is the actuality of the ethical Idea. It is ethical mind qua the substantial will manifest and revealed to itself, knowing and thinking itself, accomplishing what it knows and in so far as it knows it. The State exists immediately in custom, mediately in individual self-consciousness, knowledge, and activity, while self-consciousness in virtue of its sentiment towards the state finds in the state, as its essence and the end and product of its activity, its substantive freedom.”

And then still another sentence from the following paragraph:

“The State is absolutely rational inasmuch as it is the actuality of the substantial will which it possesses in the particular self-consciousness once that consciousness has been raised to consciousness of its univer­sality. This substantial unity is an absolute unmoved end in itself, in which freedom comes into its supreme right. On the other hand this final end has supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the State.”¹

Now in no way do I intend to dispute that these sentences make good sense within the Hegelian gnosis. And if one is a professional Hegelian, one may be edified by them.

But what we in politics wish to know is whether Mr. Minister X understands his business, whether he has initiative, whether he is informed, whether he steals more than is absolutely necessary, whether he lies more than is publicly beneficial, and so on, but not that the State is the reality of the moral idea. That is completely uninteresting in politics. So in politics we have to do with human things, and if in place of the men who are the representatives we put the State as cliché in this way, as Hegel does here, then we have already got completely away from political reflection . . . .

The second of these clichés is “Democracy.” Here we must go into more detail. One can do nothing at all with a textbook definition of democracy, which again is only a cliché. It is no use to you to know that there are three forms of government, a monarchy, an aristocracy, and a democracy, and that in a monarchy one is at the head, that in an aristocracy several rule, and that in a democracy all rule. It is also no use to you if you know that in the democracy the people rules and that there is the great principle of popular sovereignty. All of that is of no use at all for a human understanding of democracy. One must draw upon other definitions of democracy, which are not intended as definitions in the textbook sense but as empirical observations of intelligent human beings.

Three Definitions of Democracy

I will now give three such definitions.

The first is from George Santayana, the American philosopher: Democracy is the unreal­izable dream of a society of patrician plebeians.² If men were all patricians, which however they are not, then a democracy could work. But since the majority is made up of plebeians, the greatest objections can be raised against the practicability of a democracy.

You see that this definition is geared to the human problem, but it is no textbook definition. You cannot write it down and take it home as a dogma about democracy. But there are still other views on democracy that complement this one, without their thus being false. Churchill once defined democracy as the worst form of government with the exception of all the others.³

All forms of government are bad, because they have to take account of the human factor of imperfection. Democracy is a wretched form of government simply for the reasons Santayana mentioned in the first definition. What is really needed is a society of patrician plebeians, and we do not have that. But we nevertheless have to put up with democracy, for the other forms of state are even worse.

A third such definition is from the American humorist Mark Twain, whom I quote with particular fondness, since I am myself a member of the Mark Twain Society, just like Churchill. Mark Twain says democracy rests on three factors: “freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.”⁴

With that you now have an interpretation of the first definition by Santayana; for what matters here is that freedom of speech and freedom of conscience belong to the free society but that a democracy cannot work if its members have principles and want to realize them. This insight of Mark Twain is a commonplace of democratic politics that you can read in every English or American textbook of politics.

Courtesy, Compromise, and Concession

Every society that works, a society of patricians, is based on cour­tesy, on compromises, on concession to the other people. Whoever has a fixed idea and wants this to be carried into effect, that is to say, whoever interprets freedom of speech and freedom of conscience to the effect that the society should behave in the way that he considers right, is not qualified to be a citizen of a democracy.

The political interplay of every society, of every patrician and function­ing society, is patrician. It is based on the fact that one thinks a lot about what the others do, but does not say it; that one is always aware that in the society there is more than one good to achieve, not only the good of freedom, but also the good of security, the good of welfare, and that if I specialize in one or other of these goods, I could thereby bring the whole society into disorder, because I could destroy the balance between the realization of goods on which the society is based.

I could even destroy it if I kept advocating the good that is my hobbyhorse that I want to get accepted and realized at this time–if I continually force it on the others; for they will then become recalcitrant and pigheaded. That is the problem that Aristotle treated under the heading of stasis.5 If I harden myself with a particular idea and pursue only this goal, this one good, then in reaction there arises the counterstasis, the counterhardening, and with this the impossibility of social cooperation.

Now we are excellently equipped with freedom of speech and freedom of conscience [but with respect] to the third factor that Mark Twain emphasized, the wisdom or cleverness not to make unconditional use of these rights, there is still an ominous shortage. And a democracy will not function as long as there is a lack of this wisdom

Notes

1. Georg W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 155-56.

2. Voegelin is summarizing the discussion on democracy in George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Reason in Society (New York: Scribners, 1936), 321-24.

3. The actual quotation is: “Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all of those other forms that have been tried from time to time” (Winston Churchill, W. S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897-1963, vol. 7, ed. Robert Rhodes James [New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1974], 7,566).

4. The actual quotation is: “It is by the grace of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them” (Joseph R. Conlin, ed., The Morrow Book of Quotations in American History [New York: McMorrow, 1984], 294).

5. See Eric Voegelin, Plato and Aristotle, vol. 3 of Order and History (1957), 322, 349. CW 16.

This excerpt is from Hitler and the Germans (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin 31) (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1999)

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