The interplay between liberalism and democracy is a pivotal topic in political philosophy, particularly regarding how each ideology shapes governance and societal values. Aristotle’s classification of states into monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy laid the groundwork for understanding these systems; however, French sociologist Émile Durkheim’s critique reveals a deeper complexity. Durkheim argued that the true distinction between forms of government is to be found in the types of consciousness they engender. This leads to a fundamental distinction between liberalism and democracy: while democracy emphasizes a particularized government consciousness that reflects the collective awareness and identity of a specific demos, liberalism prioritizes the universality of individual rights and freedoms shaped by historical consciousness. The tension between these forms of consciousness underlies key debates in contemporary political philosophy regarding which political regime is most preferable.
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In Book III of his Politics, Aristotle developed a now-ubiquitous taxonomy of the state. Aristotle distinguished between a government of one (monarchy), a government of the few (aristocracy), and a government of the many (democracy), a classification that persists in political theory to this day. One of the most insightful commentators on this taxonomy was Émile Durkheim. In his lectures on civil society at Bordeaux in 1900 (published in English as Professional Ethics and Civil Morals), Durkheim questioned the basis of Aristotle’s classification, wondering, “What are we to understand by ‘the number of those governing?’” Durkheim observed that regardless of whether a state was a monarchy, an aristocracy, or a democracy, the powers and affairs of government are always concentrated in a small group of people, “never in the hands of a single individual” or the masses. In a monarchic state, the sovereign always has “about him a host of officials and dignitaries often as powerful as himself or even more so.” In a democracy, those who can legally vote are often only a certain segment of the population; criminals, children, and adolescents are commonly excluded. Of those who can legally vote, fewer still actually exercise that right. Furthermore, the affairs and powers of government are carried out by a small elite, albeit one that is elected. Even in a hypothetical direct democracy, those with the charismatic power to sway the masses would entrench themselves as the ruling few.
What Durkheim noticed is that the exercise of government power is always and necessarily aristocratic: in a monarchy, the aristocracy of those closest to the sovereign, and, in a democracy, an aristocracy of the elected. Classifying states according to the number of those exercising state power is inadequate.
What, then, accurately distinguishes a monarchy, an aristocracy, and a democracy? The key lies in the relationship between the state and civil society. In different regimes, the amount of people consciously aware of the affairs of state is different. This factor, which Durkheim called “government consciousness,” is the true distinguishing factor between a state of one, a state of the few, and a state of the many. Government consciousness is the degree to which the affairs of the state have permeated the social thought of the people. Social thought, for Durkheim, takes two forms: bottom-up social thought arising from the masses, “made up of those sentiments, ideals, beliefs that society has worked out collectively and with time,” and top-down social thought originating from the government in speeches and policies, diffusing and echoing throughout society as a whole.
The rule-by-one state of ages past was sacred, transcendent, and, most crucially, private. However, once the masses set themselves upon the same questions as the state, government consciousness expanded. Critically, Durkheim observed that government consciousness is a two-edged sword; the state in which government consciousness is the most limited (such as monarchy) has “only a limited number of objects within its range.” Social thought and customs lie beyond the reach of the state because social thought and customs do not concern themselves with the affairs of the state. As government consciousness expands, so too does that which is “in reach of the state.” Consider, for example, the Tatar Yoke in Russia. The structure of government was extractive: the state existed to extract money and goods from the people but did not concern itself with the customs of the people. The state only began to concern itself with social thought and customs once the monarchy modernized in the 18th century and the people concerned themselves with affairs of the state.
As Durkheim wrote, in a modern democracy, “the state has really a far greater sphere of influence nowadays than in other times, because the sphere of…consciousness has widened.” Democracies, because of the expanded influence of the masses, are both more hegemonic and more malleable than despotic governments.
The two defining characteristics of democracy, according to Durkheim, are “(1) a greater range of the government consciousness, and (2) closer communications between this consciousness and the mass of individual consciousnesses.” The further the extent of government consciousness and the closer the communication between the state and civil society, the more democratic the regime will be. Democracy, for Durkheim, is ultimately “the extension of this consciousness to its maximum.”
The near-comprehensive nature of such a consciousness likely concerns the liberal, committed as he is to individual rights and freedoms in the face of both statism and populism. But just as with the classification of regimes, we ought not to rest content with liberalism’s customary account of itself, especially regarding a question as hotly contested as its relationship with democracy. As we learned from Durkheim, any regime must be evaluated and understood on the extent and nature of the consciousness that forms the regime. By using this notion of government consciousness, we can endeavor to understand the distinction and relationship between democracy and liberalism in light of the different types of government consciousness that constitute them.
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The most salient distinction between liberalism and democracy is the universality of liberalism in contrast to the particularity of democracy. Liberalism as a political ideology is based on a universal conception of human rights with a special emphasis on human freedom. Democracy, on the other hand, is based upon the will of the particular demos. Liberalism is universal; democracy is particular.
Although universal human rights originated from Christianity and the imago Dei, it was not until the Enlightenment that liberalism emerged as a coherent political ideology. In Immanuel Kant’s essay What Is Enlightenment?, he described Enlightenment as the liberation of human reason from our “self-imposed immaturity,” leading to freedom of thought. He linked this shift in human consciousness to the historical period he inhabited: the Age of Enlightenment. Kant was a formative thinker of liberalism, developing one of the most advanced conceptions of politics based on the idea of universal human rights. Key to Kant’s thought is the link between universal human rights, the political regime based on said rights, and historical teleology.
History, for Kant, is a progressive process in which mankind proceeds toward the establishment of a universal, cosmopolitan political system. Thus, Kant’s essay What Is Enlightenment? can be read as an attempt to foster historical consciousness, in which the masses become aware of their place in history and the political and moral duties that follow. These universalist duties, following Kant’s premises, are ultimately liberal. Kant also saw Enlightenment as liberation from oppressive institutions that suppressed free thought (such as the Church, in his view) and from the immature prejudices of mankind. The shift in consciousness necessary for liberal universalism is thus the shift from the immature prejudices of belonging to a specific polity or people toward a sense of belonging to a specific time. The temporal has replaced the spatial; historicist universality has replaced spatial pluralism.
However, this shift in consciousness from space to time is not, in fact, a liberation from prejudice. Enlightenment – the advent of liberal historical consciousness – is not freedom from Plato’s cave. Rather, it is merely the creation of a ‘second cave’ of historicism – the teleological explanation of phenomena through their history. The Enlightenment project of liberation from spatial prejudice resulted in the creation of new prejudices that underpin a different kind of politics.
Following Nietzsche, we must ask ourselves what the use of historicism is, liberal or otherwise. History is constructed and used for political ends; it can be understood in terms of its political goal. Liberal historicism such as Kant’s legitimizes the liberal regime of universal human rights. For monarchy, historical consciousness takes the form of a history of sovereign power – the sovereign is legitimized by linking his authority to an unbroken lineage of past sovereigns, sometimes since “time immemorial,” and the theological foundations of the regime. For the radical activist, historicism is constituted by ressentiment against the supposed historical injustices and illegitimacy of the ruling elite.
Democracy, too, has an attendant historical consciousness, and opposing it to that of liberalism can help us understand the difference between the two political ideologies. Modern democratic historicism is the history of the demos, and it attempts to construct that demos historiographically. The explosion of European nationalism in the mid-nineteenth century was accompanied and formed by new histories of “peoples,” that constructed a historical consciousness of a specific people in time, from its ethnogenesis to its suppression by foreigners or empires. (In this way, democratic historicism maintains the ressentiment of radical activist historicism.) Unlike liberalism, democratic consciousness still stubbornly retains its original spatial and ethnic prejudices.
The project of many critics of liberalism, especially those on the right (post-liberals, nationalists, and others), can be understood as an attempt to reverse liberal consciousness, replacing modern temporal identity with an older (read: pre-Enlightenment) spatial one. Their attempts have deep roots. In Book III of Plato’s Republic, Socrates tells a noble lie, a “Phoenician story” of the origins of the state. In his story, the people were “nurtured inside the earth” and “the earth, who is their mother, delivered all of them up into the world.” The purpose of this noble lie was to foster fraternal sentiment and social cohesion – the pre-political creation of the demos. As Socrates says, “If anyone attacks the land in which they live, they must plan on its behalf and defend it as their mother and nurse and think of the other citizens as their earthborn brothers.” Similar ideas of spatial identity are prominent in right-wing ideas of ethnonationalism, as well as left-wing conceptions of “indigeneity.”
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Liberalism and democracy differ fundamentally: democracy focuses on the rule of the people, while liberalism focuses on rights held by the individual against power. At its core, this divergence reveals a fundamental distinction between types of consciousness and identity: are we to identify with the “we” of a particular demos, constituted by our history and space, or are we to identify with the universal “we” of modernity? The true conflicts between liberalism and democracy are conflicts of identity, consciousness, and history.
This account of the state being constituted by historical consciousness bears a concerning resemblance to Heidegger’s understanding of the historicity and “rootedness” of Being. Heidegger’s basic claim was that the spatial and temporal prejudices that constitute historical consciousness are themselves constitutive of Being. While his philosophical critics aptly accuse him of taking relativism to its worst extreme by ontologizing historicism, neither their criticism nor his argument applies to the argument put forward here. It is one thing to observe the types and nature of government consciousness, and quite another to claim the prejudices that constitute government consciousness are an integral part of human ontology, as Heidegger does. Historical consciousness is here to stay – it is impossible to construct any political ideology without some limiting prejudices, whether rooted in time or space. Many thinkers have forcefully repudiated historicism – and especially Heidegger – as dangerous and relativistic. However, Heidegger’s most important influence, Nietzsche, would have understood historicism not as something to be dialectically analyzed for its truth, but as something to be used. As mentioned above, Kant was the philosopher who best “used” historicism, leading the West from one prejudice to another, changing government consciousness, and thus the regime, in a subtle yet monumental way. Contemporary liberalism is the descendant of this revolution, while democracy challenges its success. The necessary normative question facing us today is which form of government consciousness, and thus which regime, is the most preferable. The task of political philosophy is to ask and answer this question.
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