The Tyranny of the Majority

History, Concepts, and Challenges

Tamás Nyirkos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780815380993
• eBook ISBN: 9781351211406
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Tamás Nyirkos provides a timely and essential reassessment of the concept of the "tyranny of the majority" for the study of democracy today. The analysis is divided into three parts: the first discusses the "prehistory" of majority tyranny; the second reviews the elements of the "standard theory" in the modern era; while the third deals with the current "postmodern" challenges to the prevailing order of liberal democracy.Combining different elements of theories dating from the Middle Ages to the present, Nyirkos theorizes that while the term "the tyranny of the majority" may be misleading, the threat that tyrannical governments justify themselves by reference to the majority will remain with us for the foreseeable future. He shows how some of the greatest political philosophers of the past – democrats and antidemocrats alike – shared the same fears about the majoritarian principle.

The Tyranny of the Majority will offer all those who read it a better understanding of what is meant not only by this term, but also by related terms like democratic despotism, populism, or illiberal democracy. It will be of interest to scholars of politics and international relations, political philosophy, political theology, and intellectual history.

1 The Greek Origins

Democracy and Isonomy

With some exaggeration – although it is a perhaps illuminating one – European political philosophy was born in response to the challenge of democracy. The most passionate and most frequently quoted passages of Plato discussed the moral and functional shortcomings of democratic government, although the author criticized almost all forms of government; excluding, of course, the ideal one envisioned by him in the Republic.

The reason why European political philosophy was born in ancient Greece is not difficult to understand: it was here that the diversity of political forms ab ovo ruled out the possibility of holding any one of those evident, as derived from a divine revelation or the law of nature. As Plato himself wrote: “Or do you think that constitutions are born ‘from oak or rock’ and not from the characters of the people who live in the cities governed by them, which tip the scales, so to speak, and drag the rest along with them” (544d)?¹ To argue for and against various constitutions is the very essence of all political philosophy even today, when occasional impatience toward philosophers derives from the fact that a certain type of democracy is supposed to be the one true form of government, which one has to believe in rather than argue for; or at least argue in such a way as to seriously contemplate other possibilities.

To Plato, a democratic constitution may have seemed even more problematic than others because – in contrast to the rule of one person or a few – it more obviously contradicted the idea of order. Even if no divine revelation or natural law sanctioned one form of government, at least so much seemed plausible that hierarchical ones were more harmonious with a likewise hierarchically ordered cosmos than egalitarian ones. To risk a timely comparison: one of the reasons why democracy seems now so self-evident to us might be that our physical or metaphysical picture of the world is less hierarchical than egalitarian, network-like, or simply chaotic.

Let us note, however, that modern democracy is not the democracy of Plato. What appeared then as a constitution or a form of government, now comprises much more: a complex system of ideas and practices, institutions and procedures, a discourse and a culture, which is a far cry from the original content of the term. The most important difference is, of course, that Plato’s democracy was direct, where important decisions were made by the entire political community, contrary to the present practice which usually confines public participation to the election of representatives, while limiting the power of representatives as well, partly by the division of powers, and partly by excluding certain decisions from the possibilities by the “rule of law” principle. The change in meaning has been radical, and it has been to some extent due to the threat of majority tyranny. But before turning to the latter, it is important to observe that already the original meaning of democracy was not without ambiguities.

Let us begin by saying that democracy was not even the only name for democracy in ancient Greece. The Athenians called their own government isonomia as well (or maybe this was the earlier name), where iso- means “same” or “equal,” and nomia comes from the Greek nomos meaning law. The essence of such government was therefore the equality of laws, which did not simply cover what we today call equality before the law; it rather meant that everyone could equally participate in making laws (Brunner, Conze, and Koselleck 1992: 823). “Everyone” in this case meant every member of the political community, or, in other words, the assembly of free adult male citizens, which excluded a large part of the population from decision-making. When the word “democracy” was born, it was therefore already weighed with the ambiguity that it presented the rule of the popular assembly (likewise called demos) as if it were the rule of the people.

When Plato criticized democracy, it was, of course, not in order to give political rights to women or slaves. What he nevertheless aptly observed was that the rule of the popular assembly was not even that of the entire assembly. In a time when the concept of the modern individual was not yet born, it was easier to mistake the decision of a part for the decision of the whole, and (as will be seen in the case of the Middle Ages), even when the inner divisions of society were no longer deniable, serious efforts were made to reconstruct decisions as if made by the whole community, a more imagined than real, unified entity.

The change in wording – the increasingly frequent use of “democracy” instead of “isonomy” (Samons 2004: 117, Hansen 2004: 172) – was therefore accompanied by a semantic shift of the word “democracy” itself: from the rule of the people to the rule of the popular assembly, and finally to the rule of its majority. To some degree, Plato is also responsible for some later conceptual confusions, the conflation of political rule and social structure, but let us remark in his defense that the distinction between “political” and “social” hardly existed at the time, and his meditations are illuminating exactly because they present the two in their primordial unity to which today’s postmodern politics, the principle of personal is political offers a return.

Book VIII of the Republic

Although Plato did not divide his work into “books,” the description of democracy is found in what was later numbered as Book VIII of the Republic. Previously, Plato – using Socrates as a mouthpiece – has already asserted that the principles of statecraft and justice (with a touch of anachronism, politics and morals) are inseparable, and outlined a theory of the ultimate unity of the two in Books V, VI, and VII. The discussions of governmental forms and moral characters in Book VIII are thus illustrations or case studies to prove that the faults of government result in the faults of character and vice versa. A mutually reinforcing interaction is at work, which finally leads to the destruction of each socio-political form and to the emergence of a new one, until the latter is also disintegrated, and so forth, without end; unless we accept Plato’s ex nihilo created ideal republic as a breakout from this vicious circle.

While it is difficult to tell whether Plato seriously contemplated the realization of such a utopia or it should be taken as a guiding metaphor only, the description of democracy itself is certainly not metaphorical. On the contrary, its continuing attractivity stems form the fact that the exercise of majority power and its effects on society have remained seductively similar to what Plato depicted. Seduction, as we know, is a thing to resist, but before resisting, let us look at what should be resisted.

The first thing Plato notes is that freedom, especially freedom of speech, the very foundation of democratic decision-making, is detrimental to the concept of truth. If anyone may express any opinion, and no authority is entitled to judge them, we will be left with no criterion to distinguish true ideas from false ones. Now if the story ended at this more post-than pre-modern stage, consequences would not even be unbearable. The plurality of convictions may pull into question the universality of Plato’s cherished moral truths, but this is – one might say – his problem; society will be just as happy – or perhaps even happier – to go on without them. The fact that distrust toward universal moral truths (I almost said “grand moral narratives”) leads to moral indifference, hedonism, or lotus-eating (560c) ought to disturb only those who think that human beings are meant for more, and even know what this “more” is. Nobody will prevent them from maintaining their opinion; freedom means exactly that they are as free as anyone to convince others of their own view.

The difficulty, however, is – and this is where Plato’s analysis becomes not an anticipation of the postmodern, but rather the post-postmodern condition – that this is never the final word of society. Minorities may argue for a while against the majority opinion, and they will not be automatically executed for doing so (although the case of Socrates recommends caution), yet sooner or later the discourse will excommunicate, stigmatize, and verbally terrorize systematical dissent (560d). Tocqueville will recognize that such oppression is more destructive, and more intellectually efficient than the stakes and executioners of kings. (Those who deny the possibility of majority tyranny in modern democracies because they seldom kill, should read Plato or Tocqueville more carefully.) Freedom of opinion will thus eliminate itself not because there is no authority, but because the evaporation of traditional – political or professional – elites leaves only one arbiter on the scene, and that is the majority.

Equality presents a similar self-destructive tendency. At first sight, the problem seems to be that disciples become equal with teachers, children with their parents, slaves and immigrants with free citizens, women with men, even animals with humans (563a–c). A more attentive reading, however, reveals that there is only a change in hierarchy: the teacher is “afraid of his students and flatters them,” while the old, obeying the informal terror mentioned above, are “full of play and pleasantry, imitating the young for fear of appearing disagreeable and authoritarian” (563a). This is, indeed, a form of social tyranny of the majority, since students are usually more numerous than teachers; in ancient societies, the young also outnumbered the old; just as in Athens slaves outnumbered free citizens, and – as in all warlike societies – women outnumbered men. I would not make a guess on the number of animals, but the mention of the latter is more like a rhetorical tool to highlight how small the difference between verbal and physical violence is. Animals keep “bumping into anyone who doesn’t get out of their way” (563c); in other words, uncurbed liberty and equality means nothing else than the rule of the strong over the weak.

Let us repeat that this is a description of the demos as society, and not the demos as the Athenian assembly, which – despite all its isonomy – never contemplated the idea of co-opting slaves, women, or animals to its ranks. As for the political system, Plato makes a further observation which will resurface in Benjamin Constant’s and Alexis de Tocqueville’s works in the modern era. This observation is that the rule of the majority is not even that of the majority. No matter how pervasive its influence seems to be in social life, at the level of political decision-making the rule of “elite” minorities (in emphatic quote marks) does not for a moment cease.

Speaking of “drones” (564b) evokes different connotions today, but in traditional political literature the analogy of the hive with human society always exemplifies the necessarily hierarchical nature of all communities. Although democracy feeds no queen bees, of course, the dronely elite is divided into an upper and a lower branch: “its fiercest members do all the talking and acting, while the rest settle near the speaker’s platform and buzz and refuse to tolerate the opposition of another speaker” (564d). This can be done only because the real majority, the people, take no part in politics: as seen before, moral indifference leads to withdrawal to the private sphere, a sort of materialism, and a cult of pleasure. Although the “workers” (to stick to the bee analogy) assembled would be the largest and most powerful class in a democracy, “they aren’t willing to assemble often unless they get a share of honey” (565a).

As will be seen, this strange contradiction of democracy, which not only declares the rule or even omnipotence of the majority, but in fact retains it as an underlying possibility, and yet regularly acts independently of it, inspired many authors from Maistre and Constant to Tocqueville or Ortega. It was perhaps Tocqueville who came closest to Plato’s insight when he recognized that a political regime which was able to guarantee privacy, individual pleasures, and material welfare was on the best way to becoming a soft tyranny: a sort of tutelage over society in the name of the majority, but without its conscious participation. Although Plato knew no “representative democracies,” it is remarkable how democracy’s transition into tyranny presupposed an intermediary stage: the passage of power from the people to their representatives before it landed in the hands of the tyrant.

Similarities between seemingly direct ancient democracies and seemingly representative modern ones may be listed further, but analogies should not be overstretched. Plato does not ultimately equate majoritarian democracy and tyranny, nor does he use the exact term “the tyranny of the majority.” What he does say is that the fiction of majority rule leads to the reality of tyranny: because of the confused nature of democracy the people are “always in the habit of setting up one man as their special champion, nurturing him and making him great” (565c). The tyrant in turn will “smile in welcome at anyone he meets, saying that he’s no tyrant, making all sorts of promises both in public and in private (…) and pretending to be gracious and gentle to all” (566d). The ultimate result is that “by trying to avoid the frying pan of enslavement to free men, the people have fallen into the fire of having slaves as their masters” (569b): a real, unlimited, not even verbally democratic tyranny has come into being.

Someone might object that the Platonic scheme of democracy turning into tyranny has by now become obsolete. Modern democracies, which themselves rest on freedom, social equality, and a now formally regulated system of representation, do not usually show a similar dynamic. The supposed transition from morally and politically corrupt forms of democracy to dictatorships may have occurred sometimes in the past, but the number of contrary examples is not only greater, but also increasing. This is an important objection, but it only proves that the modern democratic system (as opposed to democracy as a simple form of government), which was meant precisely to cope with Plato’s problem, has been surprisingly effective. Our modern democracies – at least until they came to face the postmodern challenge – successfully, if latently constrained freedom in both public and private life (relying on certain cultural and moral traditions inherited from the premodern era), and also successfully maintained the dominance of intellectual and political elites from school to parliament. In other words, the success of modern democracies does not prove that the threat of majority tyranny has ever been illusory; on the contrary, it proves that the founders of modern democracies consciously aimed to eliminate such a threat. Or more provokingly: whatever the true meaning of the “rule of the people” is, it belongs to the essence of modern democracies to prevent the people (or its majority) from actually exercising this rule. The tools of prevention are of many kinds, but at least two of them have been suggested by Plato already.

The Laws

It is not the philosophical grounds of Plato’s Laws that are different from those of the Republic, only the answers proposed to the problem of political government. The Republic suggests an ideal polity in which people are ranked according to virtue (the wise govern, the bold fight, while those who are only capable of some temperance do the manual work), resulting in their unity under the greatest virtue of justice. Compared to this lofty idea, the system envisioned by the Laws is only the “second best” (739a). The original, “immortal” exemplar is not to be abandoned, but it can only be approximated, which gives a remarkably pragmatic flavor to Plato’s meditations:

But I believe that in every project for future action, when you are displaying the ideal plan that ought to be put into effect, the most satisfactory procedure is to spare no detail of absolute truth and beauty. But if you find that one of these details is impossible in practice, you ought to put it on one side and not attempt it: you should see which of the remaining alternatives comes closest to it and is most nearly akin to your policy, and arrange to have that done instead.

(746b–c)

It is one thing, of course, to praise practice, and another to be actually practical. Some ideas of the Laws seem just as utopian as those of the Rep...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Greek Origins
• 2 The Medieval Laboratory
• 3 A Majoritarian Liberal
• 4 General Will and True Democracy
• 5 Revolution in the Crossfire
• 6 America before Tocqueville
• 7 Tocqueville’s Synthesis
• 8 Individuals and Elites
• 9 The Contested Triumph of Liberal Democracy
• 10 A Brief Ontological Detour
• 11 Populism, Illiberal Democracy, Post-Democracy
• 12 The Postmodern Challenge
• Conclusion
• Index