Hatred of Democracy

1. Democracy's Hatred: An Ancient and Evolving Critique

Hatred of democracy is certainly nothing new.

Historical Roots. The critique of democracy is as old as democracy itself. In ancient Greece, the term "democracy" was initially used as an insult by those who viewed it as the ruin of legitimate order. This historical context reveals that the discomfort with democracy isn't a modern phenomenon but a recurring theme throughout history.

Contemporary Manifestations. Today's hatred of democracy differs from historical forms. It's not about advocating for a more "real" democracy but rather a rejection of democracy's perceived excesses. Critics complain about the people and their mores, not the institutions of power.

The Author's Stance. The author clearly distances himself from those who spread hatred of democracy. His objective is to analyze the contemporary denunciation of democracy, not to engage with its traditional enemies.

2. The Paradox of Democracy: Freedom and Disorder

Freedom also means the freedom to do wrong.

The Double-Edged Sword. Democracy is often praised for bringing freedom, but this freedom also entails the possibility of disorder and wrongdoing. This paradox is exemplified by the American Secretary of Defense's statement regarding the pillaging in Iraq after Saddam Hussein's fall.

Controlling Democratic Life. A good democratic government is one that can control the "evil" of democratic life. This involves managing the intensity of democratic participation and the potential for individual withdrawal into private life.

The Expert's Solution. Experts propose that democracy's excess signifies the ruin of democratic government and must be repressed. This squaring of the circle once excited constitutional artists, but today's governments rely on governmental empiricism.

3. From Totalitarianism to Democracy: An Inverted Critique

What was only recently denounced as the State principle of a closed totality is now denounced as the social principle of limitlessness.

Reversal of Values. The properties once attributed to totalitarianism, such as the state devouring society, are now attributed to democracy. This represents a significant shift in the dominant perception of democracy.

The Jew as an Exception. The name "Jew" is now radically opposed to that of democracy, marking an overturning of the perception of democracy at the time of the Six-Day War. Israel was once praised for being a democracy, but now it signifies the contrary of the principle of democracy.

The Process of Disfiguration. The concept of totalitarianism, forged during the Cold War, has been disassembled and its traits recomposed to create a portrait of democracy. This process began in the 1980s with a reconsideration of the revolutionary heritage of democracy.

4. The Murder of the Shepherd: Politics Without Transcendence

Democratic crime has its origin, then, in the primitive scene that consists in forgetting the pastor.

The Lost Shepherd. The distress of democratic individuals is that of people who have lost the standard by which the One can be harmonized with the multiple and everyone can unite in a whole. This standard cannot be based on any human convention but only in the care of the divine pastor.

Plato's Republic. Plato's texts reveal the "murder of the shepherd," where he evokes the age when the divine shepherd himself directly governed the human flock. Plato effectively countersigned the farewell, relegating the reign of Cronus and the divine shepherd to the era of fables.

The Beautiful Lie. Plato compensates for the absence of the divine shepherd by means of another fable, that of a "republic" founded on the "beautiful lie" according to which God had put gold in the soul of the governors, silver in those of the warriors, and iron in those of the artisans.

5. Democracy's Scandal: The Absence of a Title to Govern

The seventh title is the absence of title.

The Seventh Title. Among the titles for governing, there is one that breaks the chain, a title that refutes itself: the seventh title is the absence of title. This is the democratic procedure by which a people of equals decides the distribution of places.

Breaking with Kinship. Breaking with the power of kinship does not require any sacrifice or sacrilege. All it requires is a throw of the dice. The scandal is simply the following: among the titles for governing there is one that breaks the chain, a title that refutes itself.

The Paradox of Politics. Politics begins whenever the power of birth is undermined, whenever the power of the highborn who lay claim to some founding god of the tribe is declared for what it is: the power of property-owners. Democracy signifies a rupture with the order of kinship.

6. Republic vs. Democracy: A False Dichotomy

The democratic process is the process of a perpetual bringing into play, of invention of forms of subjectivation, and of cases of verification that counteract the perpetual privatization of public life.

Beyond the Dichotomy. It is just as false to identify democracy with representation as it is to make the one the refutation of the other. What democracy means is precisely this: the juridico-political forms of State constitutions and laws never rest upon one and the same logic.

A Mixed Form. What is referred to as "representative democracy" is a mixed form: a form of State functioning initially founded on the privilege of "natural" elites and redirected little by little from its function by democratic struggle. Universal suffrage is a mixed form, born of oligarchy, redirected by democratic combats and perpetually reconquered by oligarchy.

Enlarging the Public Sphere. Enlarging the public sphere does not entail, as it is claimed in liberal discourse, asking for State encroachments on society. It entails struggling against the distribution of the public and the private that shores up the twofold domination of the oligarchy in the State and in society.

7. The Duality of Man and Citizen: A Source of Political Action

Political subjects exist in the interval between different names of subjects.

The Interval Between Identities. The subject of politics can precisely be identified neither with "humanity" and the gatherings of a population, nor with the identities defined by constitutional texts. They are always defined by an interval between identities, be these identities determined by social relations or juridical categories.

Playing Man Against Citizen. Political action opposes to the police logic that separates into spheres another usage of the same juridical text, another staging of the duality between public man and private individual. It overturns the distribution of terms and places by playing man against citizen and citizen against man.

The Rights of Those Who Have Not. "Women's and citizen's rights" are the rights of those who have not the rights that they have and have the rights that they have not. They are arbitrarily deprived of the rights that the Declaration attributes to the members of the French nation and the human species without discrimination.

8. Oligarchic Law: The Illusion of Democracy

We do not live in democracies.

States of Oligarchic Law. We live in States of oligarchic law, in other words, in States where the power of the oligarchy is limited by a dual recognition of popular sovereignty and individual liberties. These States hold free elections, respect individual liberties, and have freedom of the press.

The Monopolizing of la Chose Publique. What we call democracy is a statist and governmental functioning that is exactly the contrary: the monopolizing of la chose publique by a solid alliance of State oligarchy and economic oligarchy. The evils of which our "democracies" suffer are primarily evils related to the insatiable appetite of oligarchs.

The Democratic Process. The democratic process is the action of subjects who, by working the interval between identities, reconfigure the distributions of the public and the private, the universal and the particular. Democracy really means, in this sense, the impurity of politics, the challenging of governments' claims to embody the sole principle of public life.

9. The Expert's Dilemma: Governing Without the People

The hope is that under this name they will be able to lump together every form of dissent in relation to the prevailing consensus, whether it involves democratic affirmation or religious and racial fanaticism.

The Rise of Populism. The word "populism" captures the explanation for every disruption to the consensus: if science did not impress its legitimacy upon the people, it is because the people is ignorant. Populism is the convenient name under which is dissimulated the exacerbated contradiction between popular legitimacy and expert legitimacy.

The Government of Science. The government of science will always end up a government of "natural elites," in which the social power of those with expert competences is combined with the power of wealth, at the cost once more of provoking a democratic disorder that displaces the boundaries of the political.

The Illusion of Necessity. Ineluctable historical necessity is comprised of nothing except the conjunction of two specific necessities; the limitless growth of wealth; and the growth of oligarchic power. The alleged weakening of nation-States on the European and world scene is a perspective en trompe l'oeil.

10. The Intellectual's Resentment: Blaming Democracy for Modernity's Ills

The antidemocratic discourse of today’s intellectuals adds the finishing touches to the consensual forgetting of democracy that both state and economic oligarchies strive toward.

The Shift in Blame. Formerly, it was a global system of domination that explained individual behavior. But as soon as the Marxist rupture failed to accomplish what the denunciation required, the denunciation was turned round: the individuals are not victims of a system of global domination.

The Diabolical Subject. With politics forgotten, the word democracy thereby becomes both a euphemism designating a system that one no longer wants to call by its name, and the name of the diabolical subject that appears in place of that effaced word: a composite subject where the individual subjected to this system of domination and the one that denounces it are amalgamated.

The Intolerable Egalitarian Condition. The rationalization serves to ward off an anarchy or an "indistinction" more formidable than that of streets encumbered by insolent children or stubborn asses: the primary indistinction between governors and governed, one which becomes evident when the obviousness of the natural power of the best or of the highborn is stripped of its prestige.

Last updated: April 4, 2025