collapse of public trust in politicians, a lack of popular participation and a deep scepticism about whether the democratic system can cope with pressing problems or serve the long-term interests of a country as a whole. But todayÕs crisis is qualitatively different insofar as it concerns a doubt as to whether we still live under a substantive democracy at all and whether democracy and liberalism are mutually compatible. This ÔmetacrisisÕ is, however (as in the case of the metacrises of liberalism and capitalism), but the upshot of an ever- increased unravelling of the founding logic of liberal principles Ð in this case those of representative democracy.
The latter, it has now been cogently argued by several scholars, is actually a misnomer insofar as the only true democracy was always in the past under- stood to be direct and participatory: thus in ancient Athens political actors were often chosen by lot rather than as elected representatives.1 The modern, liberal system is best described as unqualified ÔrepresentationÕ because it is, in reality, a hybrid of a democratic and a necessarily aristocratic or oligarchic element, given that representatives have rarely been conceived as simply mandated by the people, but rather remain trusted actors, ideally supposed to be men and women of outstanding ability, integrity and virtue.2 In this way, the liberal constitutional settlement did not, after all, wholly abandon the ancient logic of Ômixed constitutionÕ, which we will suggest below is the unavoidable grammar of any complex polity as such. For this logic, human rule over humans always requires a balance of the consent of Ôthe manyÕ with the advice of Ôthe fewÕ (however constituted) and the executive decisions of Ôthe oneÕ (or his representatives), which normally has to be in some fashion
literally embodied in one person, as it still is today, throughout the world, in the mode of monarchic, presidential and prime ministerial functions.
Traditionally, this mixture was variously allied to a notion that Ôthe manyÕ might concur in and help to shape the discernment of the just and good by Ôthe fewÕ, and that Ôthe oneÕ would act upon the basis of this wisdom. It therefore assumed a shared horizon of purpose, even though it was also felt that constitutional balance would tend to guard against the respective vices of the three parties: the potential tyranny of monarchy; the factional divisions and interests of aristocracy; and the anarchy and violence of the masses. Such bal- ance was not a negative, liberal safeguard Ð rather, it was but the reverse face of a positive, organic vision of naturally combining contributions: monarchy yielding political unity and defence; aristocracy, wise counsel; democracy, not merely consent but much more vitally Ôliberty, and the courage and liberty where industry beginsÕ.3
For this vision also, sovereignty, and even legislation in the broadest sense, was thought of as distributed across all three functions, with each preserving certain prerogatives. Inseparably linked to this distribution of sovereignty, especially in the medieval as opposed to the classical era, was the idea that Ôthe fewÕ do not just offer their own wisdom but also embody or ÔrepresentÕ the interests of various local and corporate bodies. ÔRepresentationÕ is a term that was first coined within Christian theology in sacramental and Christological contexts, and from the outset it had a double face: the representation of the central power by local ÔrepresentativesÕ like bishops, but also their representation of their own people to the centre and ultimately to God Ð just as Christ, God in human form, was taken to be the representative of both God and humanity.4 This paradigm naturally meant that representation assumed a certain common symbolic and axiological horizon. In this, now more decentralised way, Ôthe manyÕ were not represented as an aggregation of individuals, but, rather, as individuals always found in natural or legally recognised smaller groupings that tended already, at a microcosmic level, to operate both a mixed and a representational logic: ÔThe representatives who appeared in parliament were not representatives of inorganic collections of individuals, they represented shires and boroughs. ... The county was already a highly organised entity. County and county court were oneÕ.5
The rights of these bodies were part of what was recognised by Magna Carta, alongside demands that barons reciprocate in their treatment of sub- vassals and freemen the securities and liberties that they were demanding of the King.6 In most Western European states, these lower, commoner repre- sentatives eventually also came to be represented at either regional or national level in cortes, parlement or parliament. In this way, the circle was closed: just as mixed government implies decentred distribution of sovereign power, so also this distribution came to be fully represented at the heart of the polity.
Usually, liberal representation is taken to be an advance upon this broadly described medieval system of government and to have guaranteed more peace, balance and liberty beyond its vagaries, besides a greater granting of a political voice to the many. But there are several problems with this claim. First, there was no complete break with the older system in the early modern period, nor even the eighteenth century. In reality, eighteenth-century whig Britain relied upon an uneasily organic mixture of executive, legislative and judicial powers, rather than upon a Ôbalance of powersÕ, which Montesquieu mistakenly identified to be at work therein.7 The same thing was true for so- called ÔabsolutistÕ France, once one has realised that its ÔcheckingÕ functions were more distributed in the many regional branches of parlement and that it possessed, correspondingly, a far greater degree of survival of local and corporate independence.8 Power in Britain was relatively more contested at the centre, in France more so at the peripheries. But even these are but relative contrasts.
Second, as some English tories and, later, Burke realised, the liberal irrup- tion against this inherited system involved a destruction of diversely varying corporate liberties and privileges, often perceived as ÔirrationalÕ and merely customary. But in this way, many highly substantial modes of participation and popular influence were destroyed Ð especially if we remember that individuals do not possess any real democratic power when acting alone. This raises a considerable doubt as to whether there is unambiguously more democracy in modern times than in the past Ð especially when we realise that ÔrepresentationÕ in medieval England, even if it excluded outright serfs (of whom there may have been far fewer than once thought), extended right the way down, at least in principle, to the sub-vassals or freemen of the vill and manor who acted for example as constables, churchwardens or ale-tasters.9 Such units were in any case represented by knights or lords.10
Liberalism, instead, is only able to recognise (as Hobbes saw with ultimate clarity) as politically relevant either the literal individual who is a human person or the artificial, aggregate person of the state Ð a fiction that must be sustained through a monopolisation of power by the fictionÕs real personal embodiments. LeviathanÕs absolute sovereignty is necessary to guarantee the social contract and the negative peace of a cessation of natural hostility. The freedom of the contracting individual is the prime site for liberal ideology; the sovereignty of Leviathan, as the expression of mass will, is the prime site at once for the ideology of absolutism and the ideology of modern ÔdemocracyÕ.
Suspended between the many real wills and one, armed fictional will, liberalism has, in principle, extirpated mixed government. Just for this reason, the shadow of absolutism always lurks over it. And it turns out that in eighteenth-century England the absolute sovereignty of Crown in Parliament, as insisted upon by Blackstone over against the power of precedent, amounted
more to the absoluteness of the royal prerogative (which had in many ways a
wider extension than that of the French monarch) than to the absoluteness of Parliament.11 As Nicholas Henshall explains:
The king continued to appoint ministers, make war and peace, grant pardons, issue charters, incorporate companies, coin money and willed all the other pow- ers subsequently listed by Blackstone. Legislation in the English [as opposed to the more extended French sense, which overlapped with the executive function] sense was ragged indeed. Some Georgian statesman believed a time would come when there were no laws left to be made.12
And in this respect we encounter a further aporetic oscillation as to whether this ÔabsolutismÕ will be conceived in the name of an active governing author- ity, or, rather, in the name of a ÔimprescriptibleÕ and essentially unaltering law, which in a sense renders government or statute unnecessary, save as a judicial application.13 Whether the ruler or rule itself be taken as absolute, either could be seen as purer safeguards than is democracy of a contractual, market freedom of the individual.
On this scheme then, mixed constitution is, in reality, abandoned. The ÔrepublicanÕ role of the few is excised; the political as opposed to the eco- nomic role of the many is rendered redundant. Instead, liberalism at its Hobbesian heart is really a suspension between the entirely political one and the depoliticised many.
Nevertheless, as we saw in chapter 1, both Locke and republican theorists argued, contrary to Hobbes, that political representation was necessary to preserve the economic liberty of the few and the free consent of the many. In this sense, they sustained elements of both aristocracy and democracy and, therefore, offered a bastardised mixed constitution. Bastardised in theory, and in practice partially corrupted, because the aristocratic function tends to become reduced to the guarding of negative freedom, with a concomitant diminution of the link of aristocracy to local corporate privilege, which is necessarily political, representational and guild-guided as well as economic. For this reason, though Montesquieu was wrong, he began to be right and was consciously adopted as right in America. Without the bond of teleology and virtue, the three constitutional elements came to be seen as having innately disparate interests, including the notion that intermediate corporate interests were necessarily at variance with those of the centre.
In this way, ÔmixtureÕ came to denote in the main not the cooperation of the needed different parts of a social body (with the checking function being nec- essary though secondary) but, rather, a negative ÔbalancingÕ. One can see this as having taken four main forms: first, the division of rule, as in the United States, between the executive and the judiciary (with the further negative
AQ: Please check if the word Ôpar- ticipationÕ introduced after the
balance of senatorial and popular congressional) powers, which leads in the end to rival sovereignties and, so, to both conflict and stasis. Second, with the lapse of a shared symbolic horizon, representation is aporetically caught between sheer mandation on the one hand and mere substitution on the other. This means that there is a permanent threat either of oligarchic rule or of an anarchic mode of democracy. Third, and in consequence, the interaction of the three ancient elements tends to be displaced (in the nineteenth century, but already anticipated by Machiavelli) by a permanent Ôclass-struggleÕ between the potentially democratic many and the potentially oligarchic few. Karl Marx failed to see that only capitalism produces endemic, necessary and foundational class-conflict. Fourth, and overridingly, there remains always the real bipartite constitutive tension of liberalism between the political one and the economic many. If sovereignty lies originally with the people, then how can it be so alienated that they may only express this through an unquestioned sovereign centre and an unquestioned legal formalism that is self-sustaining and totally outside popular control? Above all, in the case of the United States, it is unclear who is really in charge Ð the people or the divided powers at the centre, constantly contesting, but thereby reinforcing through patronage and lobbying the single power of the centre as such.
If today we can validly speak of a metacrisis of the liberal state, then this is just because this bipartition is threatening finally to shatter the lingering tripartition of the ancient Western constitution. This lingering alone upholds, against a latent Hobbesian logic, democracy as one dimension of representa- tion, whose other dimension is necessarily aristocratic. It is our contention that all the usual suggestions for saving democracy in reality increase this bipartition, insisting that the one more accurately and immediately reflect the many. Thereby, they only reinforce its ultimate liberal logic of removing any political relevance of the many Ð and so of democracy Ð altogether.
2. CONSTITUTIONAL MIXTURE SAVES DEMOCRACY