Saturday Lecture: The Perils of Democracy

{In the late 1990s, the left-wing British historian Perry Anderson published an essay, “The Intransigent Right at the End of the Century,” analyzing the ideas of four seminal 20^th-century conservatives: Leo Strauss, Michael Oakeshott, Frederick Hayek, and Carl Schmitt. The essay later constituted a chapter in Anderson’s 2005 book, Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas. The following are the briefest of excerpts on three of the writers addressed by Anderson’s essay. Of particular interest, to me at least, is the last excerpt, which refers to Carl Schmitt’s politicization of a term (the ‘katechon’) used by St. Paul in explaining why ‘the day of the Lord’ had not yet arrived.}

Perry Anderson:

1. Michael Oakeshott, “The power of the ‘mass man’”

For Oakeshott, inequality was the outcome of a historical differentiation. In the late Middle Ages, a new character emerged on the scene, an autonomous moral individual freed from the shackles of community, capable of choosing his own way of life. The spread of this kind of individuality, the pre-eminent event of European history, gradually gave rise to institutions expressing its freedom. These achieved their climax with the parliamentary government that emerged in England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. But the salutary dissolution of traditional communities had also released a dangerous multitude of opposite bent, all those left behind in the new conditions because they were unwilling to accept the responsibility of personal independence, a swarm of moral and social failures consumed with ‘envy, jealousy and resentment’. By the late 19th century, this inferior mass had pressed towards a dire change: the gradual transformation of ‘parliamentary’ into ‘popular government’, whose ‘first great enterprise was the establishment of universal adult suffrage’. For ‘the power of the “mass man” lay in his numbers, and this power could be brought to bear upon government by means of the “vote”– that is, a regime based on ‘the authority of mere numbers’. Modern democracy in this sense defied, not the hierarchy of natural gifts, but that of existential choices. For the anti-individual behind universal suffrage ‘is specified by a moral, not an intellectual, inadequacy’.

2. F.A. Hayek, ‘Cosmos’ and ‘Taxis’

‘The predominant model of liberal democratic institutions’ in the Western world ‘necessarily leads to a gradual transformation of the spontaneous order of a free society into a totalitarian system’. To avert this fatal propensity, three truths urgently needed to be understood. The first was the fundamental difference between a spontaneous order and a purposive organization, or what Hayek termed a cosmos and a 'taxis' – the one an unintended yet coherent web of relations within which individual agents pursued their different ends, regulated only by common procedural rules; the other a willed enterprise seeking to realize substantive collective goals. The rule of law could be preserved only so long as the structure of government reflected a principled separation of the two, according an absolute priority to the maintenance of the first, as the condition of a market economy in a free society, and confining the second to strictly delimited, subordinate functions in the public interest. All current democracies confused these requirements, permitting the reckless trespass of ‘taxis’ onto the proper ground of cosmos, with the intrusion of macro-economic steering and the erection of a welfare state, in the name of an imaginary ‘social justice’ – a notion without meaning. For the spontaneous order of the market not only precludes equality, it necessarily ignores merit: success within it is undeniably often a mere matter of chance. The social hierarchy it generates is thus not founded on a cultural gradation in nature. Hayek confessed that this was perhaps too uncomfortable a truth to be widely proclaimed; he concluded that religion might be a necessary dummy to assure social cohesion, against dangers from those who were disappointed in the run of chance.

3. Carl Schmitt, ‘The Katechon’

Carl Schmitt’s later work is haunted by a theological image. Again and again, he alluded to one of the most enigmatic of all apocalyptic texts, the Second Letter to the Thessalonians, without ever quoting it. What does Paul say there? ‘The mystery of lawlessness doth already work; only there is one that restraineth now, until he be taken out of the way; and then shall be revealed the lawless one, whom the Lord Jesus will slay with the breath of his mouth, and bring to nought with the manifestation of his coming.’ It was the second clause that mattered. Who was the Restrainer – the katechon who holds back the prowl of evil on earth, until the arrival of the Redeemer? Learned speculation has debated the cryptic identity of the katechon (this is its sole Scriptural appearance) since the time of Tertullian. In Schmitt’s own writing, the obscure figure assumes various – typically oblique – historical guises, as political or juridical restrainer in different epochs, constructions designed to hold something back. What they all in the end sought to restrain was the risks of democracy – seen and feared through the prisms of the mystery of lawlessness.