Book Review: The Hatred of Democracy
The Hatred of Democracy, Jacques Rancière, trans. Steve Corcoran. London: Verso, 2006, 106 pp.
In The Hatred of Democracy, Jacques Rancière polemically addresses what he views to be a widespread trend of anti-individualism in the past and present canons of social, political, and philosophical thought. Crucially for Rancière, this trend of anti-individualism is part of “the hatred of democracy,” a specific rationality that he claims is as old as democracy itself. He contends that the hatred of democracy is a rationality of ressentiment that identifies the “limitless desire of individuals” as the symptom of democratic excess (p. 1).
Historically speaking, there have been two interrelated critiques of democracy: the first, classical challenge – beginning with Plato – asserts that democracy as a government of the people by the people must be limited in order to reconcile itself with the will of aristocratic legislators, or the government of experts. The second, modern critique – beginning under the pressures of the drafting of the American constitution and carrying on to Marx in the nineteenth century – picks up immediately where the ancients leave off: that is, “the moderns” contend that since democracy cannot survive without “the government of the best,” that is, without its elites, democracy also cannot exist without the preservation of private property (p. 2). At least since Marx’s analysis of the hidden core of private property contained in the republican constitution, these critiques have made possible an argument in favour of significantly limiting the scope and reach of democracy; that is, reducing it to something else, such as oligarchy (with democratic aspirations perhaps). The problem from this perspective, then, would not seem to be that there is not enough democracy but rather the reverse: that democracy itself has become overburdening and excessive, and something to be guarded against. Democracy has become the elephant in the room of theories of government and politics, so to speak.
Following this discussion of the ancient and modern attempts to limit democracy, Rancière frames the book around what he calls the “new hatred of democracy” – a hatred that recombines both elements of democratic critique outlined above but in novel ways. Rancière’s polemic challenges his readers to reject the critique of democracy outright because such critiques consistently define democracy so as “to confine it within limits” (p. 2) seeking to control the so-called “evil quite simply called democratic life” (p. 4). These are strategies of critique or containment that have the effect of doing away with democracy as a politics. He warns:
This thesis of the new hatred of democracy can be succinctly put: there is only one good democracy, the one that ‘represses’ the catastrophe of democratic civilization (p. 4).
Guided by his denunciation of a limited or repressed sense of democracy, Rancière turns to current debates regarding the U.S. led war in the name of democracy in Iraq (p. 6) and ongoing European interventions in the Middle East (p. 9). In doing so, he rejects the reigning theoretical definitions of democracy that tend to conflate it with technocracy and oligarchy, authority and obedience (p. 16). However, the main target of Rancière’s polemics is not the Iraq war, or the ongoing struggles in the Middle East more broadly. Rather, Rancière turns his attention towards French debates on pedagogy and “the School”, to outline, in turn, his own theory of politics, a politics that comes near to the question of “limitless” democracy (as we will see below) in the last two chapters. Because of its ethos of equality, democracy is a politics that founds a constituent power of “heterotopy, the primary limitation of the power of forms of authority that govern the social body” (p. 45). The limit of authority, in this sense precisely, is democracy.
In the first chapter, “From Victorious Democracy to Criminal Democracy,” Rancière discusses “the scandal borne by the word democracy” (p. 4) to reveal its paradoxical status (for many theorists, and as taken-up by Rancière himself) as “the reign of excess” (p. 8). Rancière wishes to see the reign of democracy defined as an “excess” resulting in a celebration of its potential as a specific form of politics aimed to promote equality and to level socio-political hierarchies. What he does notice, however, is a constant elaboration by those with the power to do so (indeed those who hate the excess of democracy) to reinvent ways to limit or “repress” democracy’s extent and reach. This, in effect, is a strategy used by some to ignore those “feverish” or democratic consumers “drunk on equality” (p. 28) who demand equality in all realms of social life guided under the constitution of the Rights of Man. Regarding “the School”, Rancière wishes to move beyond those familiar images of so-called equality - such as that of the “student treating school as a supermarket where the client is king” (p. 18), a familiar criticism in many teaching and research institutions today.
For Rancière, democracy is “limitless”, in the sense that it is the limitless potential of equality. However, he cautions that because of this “limitlessness”, many wish to reduce democracy to something that it is not – to a regime, or a “form of society” in which “the political, the sociological, and the economic” are reductively collapsed into one socio-philosophical plane of analysis (p. 20). For Rancière, this reduction has the effect of combining sociology and philosophy and creating a dominant “sociology of narcissistic consumerism” (p. 22) that rules out, in advance, analysis of different forms of equality and inequality, focusing instead on analysis of knowledge transmission and the “self-destructive tendency born in a democratic society” (p. 29). Jean Baudrillard, for example, transforms “the alienated consumer of the day before into a narcissus who uninhibitedly plays with objects and the symbols of the market universe, favourably identif[ying] democracy and consumerism” (p. 22). Rancière attacks the collapse of the distinction between democracy and consumerism on all fronts, especially in those forms he detects in the republican (as opposed to democratic) works of Baudrillard, Hannah Arendt, J.K. Galbraith, Christopher Lasch, Claude Lefort, David Riesman, Leo Strauss, and Jean-Claude Milner in particular. As this list suggests, Rancière’s critique of the republican rejection of democracy is as extensive as it is exhaustive.
As I mentioned above, one of the most interesting engagements in The Hatred of Democracy is Rancière’s attempt to bring together the critiques of democracy and key debates in education and pedagogy. Working especially in the local context of his native France, the author argues that a majority of debates regarding the rejection of democracy have emerged in relation to questions of equality and inequality in education, and, more specifically, in regards to the difficult ethical relationship between schoolmaster and pupil.
It is precisely in relation to the question of education that the meaning of some key words – republic, democracy, equality, society – has radically changed (p. 29).
The main thesis of this book challenges its readers to rethink how easily the critique of democracy rolls off of the tips of our tongues. Rancière proposes that inequality (or authority) is not a necessary relation between teacher and pupil. He writes that the republican debate on education: “appeared to be about what public authorities could and should do with the means at their disposal to remedy social inequality” (p. 26). However, he adds,
in the stream of allegations about the inexorable rise of people lacking in values owing to the torrent of supermarket values, the root of evil would eventually be identified: it was, to be sure, democratic individualism. The enemy that the republican School confronted, then, was no longer the unequal society from which it sought to rescue pupils, it was the pupil him- or herself, who had become the representative of par excellence of democratic humanity – the immature being, the young consumer drunk with equality (p. 26).
On this basis, Rancière puts forward his egalitarian thesis. Since his now famous pedagogical treatise, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Stanford University Press, 1991), Rancière insists that the Master should not necessarily act as figure of authority over his or her students. Rather, education at base, like democracy and politics, is egalitarian.
With that said, the most important aspect of democracy from this perspective is the valuation of politics and uncertainty. He insists that democracy is neither a type of constitution nor a form of society – and, he notes, even the reservations regarding democracy in Plato’s dialogues demonstrates this point. Democracy is, rather, something much more contingent, open, and ever beyond the reach of those philosophers, teachers, sociologists, and politicians who wish to do away with politics (or democracy) altogether in search of certainty. If we are to accept this perspective, then, democracy lacks foundation and is
simply the power peculiar to those who have no more entitlements to govern than to submit (p. 47).
But the important point to note here is the distinction Rancière makes between authority and politics, the former being bound-up with the logic of “police” and the latter, as we have already seen, democracy. Drawing a sharp line of distinction between police and politics, between the basic tenants of authority and equality, Rancière leaves open the possibility of arriving at a sense of politics that would no longer have recourse to the principle of legitimacy. He writes:
From the moment obedience has to refer to a principle of legitimacy […] commanding must presuppose the equality of the one who commands and the one who is commanded (p. 48).
Pushing for a departure with the logic of police – and the concomitant terminology of “authority,” “legitimacy,” and “obedience” in our current intellectual context – Rancière’s project is as ambitious as it is radical. Politics is democracy.
Reviewed by Barret Weber, University of Alberta, Canada
- Ondine