Bonapartist Democracy, Self-Government, and Burnham

There are two persistent narratives about the source of the recurring collapses of liberal democracies. The first narrative, popular on the left (and which I associate with Karl Polanyi), argues that markets are inherently fragile and that proper functioning markets are very disruptive of traditional forms of life and destroy previously existing organic culture. These facts generate reactions that have the (conflicting) aims to shore up and protect the market and protect society to slow down the rate of social change. In some cases these reactions work in the same direction by strengthening forces that threaten to overwhelm liberal society. Since the age of neoliberalism, this narrative has been reinforced with the idea that cuts to the welfare state and to public services as well as the undermining of union power have strengthened the hand of those forces that reject liberal society.

The second narrative, popular on the free market right (and which I associate with Hayek) argues that massive wars made social and collective planning part of the DNA of modern states, and that the peacetime continuation of collective planning by way of the welfare and subsidy state strengthen the forces that end up subsuming and overwhelming liberal society leading to fascism. Among so-called ordoliberals, there is a strain (also familiar from Arendt) that in virtue of the growth of prosperity and the overcoming of systematic conditions of famine, mass society makes individuals feel isolated and lonely and so vulnerable to the lure of fascism. In recent years, this narrative has been strengthened with the thought that within the advanced division of labor, socially opaque economic process makes groups of voters ignorant of how their choices have perverse effects.

I don’t mean to suggest that these narratives cannot be developed further. On the left one will hear more about the natural tendency toward monopoly in markets and (more recently) the financialization and hollowing out of the economy. On the right one may hear more about rent-seeking practices due to badly enforced anti-trust and/or patent law. But despite the many differences of emphasis, the left and right analysis of the recurring collapse of liberal democracy, have two commitments in common: first, that political economy is destiny and that beyond a certain point, democracy cannot fend for itself. And, in fact, there are ways to combine elements of the left and right wing versions of these narratives to make them reinforce each other.

Even so, as liberal democracies are succumbing anew to what was once known as Bonapartism or Caesarian democracy, it’s worth considering alternative ways of thinking about these social patterns. I have noted before that left and right approaches ignore agency. As the more liberal, Michael (the brother of Karl) Polanyi, noted (recall), the collapse of liberal democracy is often preceded by a deliberate attempt at eliminating intermediary, potentially countervailing elements in society be they intellectual, social, economic, and political. This is why anti-democratic political agents always routinely and repeatedly attack the prestige and status of such intermediaries. When, for example, some in the press treat experts as the enemy they are doing the dirty work for fascism, etc.

In some respects, in his (1943) The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, James Burnham (who is no liberal at all) shares (recall) in the diagnosis of Michael Polanyi. He, too, thinks that conflictual countervailing powers (he calls them social forces) are necessary for the maintenance of what he (recall) calls liberty. And he also thinks that such countervailing powers can only be preserved if one prevents the rise of concentrated wealth and privilege. But unlike nearly all the established ways of thinking about the recurring collapse of liberal democracy (which anticipating, and presumably the source of, Churchill, he thought, while quoting Michels, “least evil” (p. 168)), he also claims that how we think about or conceptualize democracy — or the myths we embrace about it — matters to our possibility of defending it.

In particular, Burnham (like Marx and (recall) Lewis Namier) is fascinated by the rise of Bonapartism within democracy (which he sometimes also calls ‘totalitarian’ democracy). Burnham thinks that what we might call the ordinary republican conception of democracy, as self government that expresses the will of the people is in virtue of such a conceptualization quite vulnerable to the rise of Bonapartism. We may add that in so far as the ordinary republican conception is articulated in Rousseau’s terms of a homogeneous and univocal general will the problem that Burnham diagnoses is even worse.

For, in ordinary representative government common in liberal democracies, the ordinary republican conception of democracy is generally and repeatedly falsified by the experience of normal political life. What people experience is, when mediating institutions work as they normally would, the fracturing and frustration of any will of the people. And since, by definition, the people are themselves good, the sources of political corruption are to be located in special and sinister interests, lobby-groups, and political elites. Overwhelming empirical evidence supports this thought.

Now, as an aside, drawing on Michels, Burnham thinks that all large groups give rise to minorities that rule them. He thinks this is a function of the fact that such large groups require rules to police their boundaries (and who has standing in them) and require rules to create decisions. In virtue of the fact that space, time, and skills are often scarce, a small sub-set of a group ends up in charge even in grous sincerely committed to democracy. (It’s quite clear that if a large group were not in competition with other groups some of the pressures that lead to minority rule would not be present in Burnham’s account.) So, for Burnham no form of political life can eliminate well organized minorities from playing a decisive role.

Be that as it may, Burnham thinks that given the experience of normal political life, and given the commitment to the ordinary republican conception of democracy as self-governance that expresses the will of the people, a singular elected leader can make a much better case for embodying the undivided and univocal will of the people than a representative assembly that may be checked and balanced by other assemblies and other forms of authority. For the singular leader is a delegate of the people, and can exercise its will if intermediary bodies are removed. Burnham attributes this story to Michels and also reiterates it in his closing chapter, when he concludes that “when democracy is defined in terms of self-government, there can be no convincing democratic answer” (p. 239) to Bonapartism. For Bonapartism “does not violate the formula of democracy” and often avails itself of (recurring) plebiscites. (Of course, we may well note, as Burnham is less willing to do, that Bonapartism is not above fraud and intimidation in how it exercises the formula of democracy.)

What’s attractive about Burnham’s analysis of the ‘road to Bonapartism’ is that in addition to taking our conceptualizations seriously, it does not deny the exercise of agency by voters who put Bonapartists in power. This strikes me as a good baseline to start any analysis of the rise and fall of democracy. I wanted to end here today.

But it is worth noting that while Burnham is no liberal or liberal democrat, he does think that liberal democracy is worth preserving. Because in it pacific opposition to power is not treated as disloyalty or revolution, but has a constructive role to play. On his view, it’s only when such organized opposition to ruling power is possible that freedom is possible. And this requires something like freedom of speech.

Because Burnham’s mitigated defense of liberal democracy does not argue from the (individual) rights of man his argument in defense of such freedom is highly pragmatic. Opposition to rule always risks splitting the ruling class/elites into wasting time in fruitless and distracting internal conflicts. Even so such freedom has two great benefits to would-be-ruling elites: (i) there will be more space for the development of creative social forces that are conducive to the development of all kinds of (scientific, artistic, economic, and social) benefits to the group. And (ii) there is less risks for engaging in fatal mistakes from which one cannot recover. As David Runciman (The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present) has noted, that while (ii) may be true, taking it as infallibly true may generate its own existential risks.