BOOKS
The Heresy of Democracy
By T. E. UTLEY DEMOCRACY is out. The symptoms of this have been multiplying for a long time : Mr. Oakeshott generating scepticism from his Chair while the ghosts of Graham Wallas and Harold Laski glower; the first volume of Dr. J. L. 1 Talmon's massive analysis of The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy which appeared in 1952; Mr. Isaiah Berlin's pedigree of contemporary tyranny (out of Liberty by Rousseau) which the Third Programme produced in the same year, and Mr. Beloff's revival of Mill's objections to majority rule in an article in the Fortnightly in February, 1953, distinguished by commendation in The 7'imes; all these are only random illus- trations of the point that those who enjoy sacrilege had better look elsewhere than to democracy for their target. It is the main theme of almost all intelligent writing about politics today that our contemporary troubles, arise from the eighteenth century and are attributable to the rationalist tradition in poli- tical theory and the most popular minor theme is that majority rule, as an institution, has a permanent and increasing tendency to produce either dictatorship or bankruptcy or both.
Lord Percy of Newcastle does not claim to be original in this latest contribution* to the evidence of the prosecution, but he has failed to do the most useful thing which he could have attempted, to distinguish the many different ingredients in the common complaint against democracy, and he has failed by falling into the common error of using the word in a bewilder- ing variety of senses. Starting with the large and now familiar idea that there is a fundamental difference between the religion of democracy which springs from Jacobinism and, in one of its forms, ends in Marxian Communism, and the system of political ideas and institutions which we cherish in this country and have been accustomed to describing loosely as 'democracy,' he allows it to be blurred by using the word one minute to mean what he is attacking and the next to signify what he is defend- ing. To take only two of several possible illustrations of the results of this confusion, Lord Percy invokes Marx and Engels to support the view that democracy is the parent of Com- munism, pointing out that they maintained that 'bourgeois democracy' must necessarily precede the revolution (page 44, note 2), but the bourgeois democracy of which they spoke was the kind of democracy (i.e., government by discussion and consent) of which Lord Percy approves, and in so far as their prognostications were correct Lord Percy must be wrong; then, again, in wanting to 'make the world safe for democracy' President Woodrow Wilson cannot fairly be said to have been `committing the old Liberal blunder of mistaking the dogma of popular sovereignty for the practice of parliamentary govern- ment by popular consent' (page 106). It was precisely the prac- tice of Parliamentary government by popular consent which he was trying to foster, albeit misguidedly. As a result of these inconsistencies, the reader is often left with really insoluble doubts about Lord Percy's meaning.
The complex arrangement of the book. which includes within a not very clear framework of analysis a good deal of pure and rather leisurely historical narrative, does not help to clear up the confusion. The conflict between something called `Democracy' or `Totalism,' on the one hand, and something
• The Heresy, of Democracy. By Lord Percy of Newcastle. (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 18s.)
called 'government by consent' or 'dualism' (the second concept more nebulous than the first) on the other, simply crops up from time to time as a reminder that the argument is tending to a conclusion. The two sides remain in battle array throughout, but the line between them is obscure and shifting. and both armies are astonishingly heterogeneous. All French revolutionaries, the two Napoleons, the authors of the Weimar republic, all advocates of parliainentary sovereignty, Hitler and Stalin, are massed under one flag with their unwitting camp followers like President Wilson and, apparently, with St. Augustine as an only slightly detached chaplain, while Burke, the British Commonwealth, and all exponents of a somewhat indefinite idea, 'the independent. Church,' are ranged against them.
This is unfortunate, because Lord Percy's life of John Knox did as much as any other book has ever done to illumine the nature of that fanaticism which is the malady of the age. To seek unity in Lord Percy's reflections would be a worthy task but one too long to be undertaken here. It must suffice to say that in the bad tradition which Lord Percy is trying to distin- guish, there are three ingredients which ought to be separated with scrupulous care : the passion for universal harmony, for the perfect social justice which will remove all tensions and reconcile all liberties, and which was the dominant and most dangerous passion of the eighteenth-century rationalists; the identification of this idea with the concept of majority rule, which was accomplished by Rousseau, arid which has invested the most numerous and highly organised class in the com- munity with a cloak of moral infallibility; and the historical circumstance that all this has been accomplished within the framework of the nation-state so that popular arrogance has been aggravated by historical romanticism. This contemporary democratic and nationalistic totalitarianism springs from the very roots of Ehrope, and innumerable cherished ideas like that of a universal law and a natural order of justice have con- tributed to it; the task now is to reassert, without denying these ideas, qualifying and balancing elements in the European tradition, like the idea of the inevitability of human imperfec- tion and the belief that the just order is not a simple thing but a thing built up from an infinite series of compromises.
In some respects, the prevailing preoccupation with the pedigree of ideas makes this task harder than it need be. It is always tempting to seek a clearly marked line of descent. It is always easy to forget.that, in the realm of ideas, the state- ment that x produced y may mean one of several totally differ- ent things : it may mean that y is a logical inference from x, or a logical antithesis inherent in x; or it may Mean that y is simply a natural reaction to x. The problem is further com- plicated by the habit of using expressions like 'democracy' to signify institutions as well as theories. The Liberal passion for a rational and rationally comprehensible social order is the parent of modern totalitarianism, the date of birth being the precise moment when Liberals discovered that the rational social order would not result automatically from unfettered individualism and must be sought through compulsion. To say this, however, is to describe the evolution of a particular type of mind; abstract Liberalism, in the course of its develop- ment, also helped to produce free institutions, and free institu- tions today find their best defence. in arguments which have nothing to do with abstract Liberalism, nor have these institu- tions any necessary tendency to develop towards totalitarian- ism. Thus, the relationship between ideas and institutions, between thought and action, is infinitely subtle and elusive. Lord Percy has failed to disentangle this relationship and this is the chief defect of his book. Had he been content to confine himself to an essay, in the popular meaning of the word, his initial moment of illumination might have been sustained, but to be useful, his numerous excursions into political history would have had to be at once more thorough and more dis- criminating than they were. As it is, he gives the impression of haVing been overpowered by a potentially admirable, though not, of course, original, thesis.
Previous page
