The Problem of Democracy

The Problem of Democracy by Alain de Benoist

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book seeks to cut through the quasi-religious tone surrounding ‘democracy’ and examine what the word actually means.

In the 20th and 21st centuries, everyone has wanted to be seen as ‘democratic’. Stalin’s Constitution of 1936 even proclaimed the USSR a ‘democracy’.

This wasn’t always the case, though, even among leftists. None of the major French revolutionaries used the term, except Robespierre towards the end of the terror (when it didn’t do him much good!).

‘Democracy’ wasn’t a household word until Toqueville’s ‘Democracy in America’ (1830s). Before that, writers who believed in ‘equality’, such as Rousseau, were admirers of Sparta rather than democratic Athens (ironically, the man who made Athenian democracy famous through the centuries, Pericles, exercised a quasi-royal authority over his city…)

Athenian democracy, in any case, was very different to the modern beast. It was linked to tribe and to place, and thus was very much a blood and soil ideology. Also, the Athenians saw equality (before the law) as a means to democracy, not as something valuable in its own right.

Some thinkers, such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, have seen democracy as ‘primitive’, and monarchy as more highly evolved. Alain de Benoist thinks both views, and ‘linear’ views in general, are wrong. In ancient Europe, kings themselves were often elected by popular assembly. Only in the 1100s were most European monarchies hereditary. The vast majority of historical regimes had mixed systems of government.

The working classes were often anti-democratic, as in Medici Florence - because the middle class who favoured democracy would give them less rights than the princes did.

Alain de Benoist thinks the best state is the one that gives the best form to the values of a specific people. (By ‘people’ he means something closer to the French word ‘peuple’ or the German word ‘Volk’, i.e. an ethnic group).

The modern liberal democracy actually distrusts the folk, but de Benoist on the contrary thinks that where there is no folk and only individuals, there can be no democracy.

In chapter IV, de Benoist gives reasons why ‘liberal democracy’ or ‘formal democracy’ (our current system) is indeed a farce.

Among other reasons:

- People elect representatives, but these must delegate their tasks to unelected officials (as portrayed in the classic 1980s satire ‘Yes Minister’).

- Party ‘brands’ mean that candidates aren’t elected for their personal qualities.

- Lukewarm voters are given the same weight as resolute ones.

And so on…

De Benoist’s solution is something he calls ‘Organic Democracy’, involving lots of referenda and plebiscites. This would be folkish, based on fraternity rather than liberty and equality, and thus more similar to the ancient Athenian democracy (something he doesn’t mention, however, is that the democratic faction in Athens fanatically pursued a ruinous fratricidal war with Sparta, whereas the artistocratic faction wanted peace).

His book was written in 1985, and I think things are too far gone now for de Benoist’s folkish democracy to put things right. It could never be implemented under the currect system, anyway. The closest equivalent, populism, has had little real success against the entrenched deep state.

Something more drastic will be required…

But if the crisis Western Man now faces is overcome, a future system of government will evolve organically, and will doubtless contain mixed elements of monarchy, oligarchy and democracy, just as it has throughout our history.





View all my reviews