Sofia Näsström’s book, though in parts a bit inconclusive, constitutes an important contribution to democratic theory. Creatively drawing on concepts and arguments from Montesquieu and Hannah Arendt, she provides a new perspective on what is now routinely referred to as “the crisis of democracy.” Crises, she claims, are neither unusual nor unsurmountable for democracies; what truly threatens them is the corruption of their underlying principles—and the principle of democracy is emancipation. This framing is helpful in reconsidering both the meaning of institutions conventionally deemed crucial for democracy, such as free and fair elections, and controversial questions such as the extent of social rights necessary to sustain democracy. It is less helpful, however, in providing real answers to a challenge that Näsström, somewhat to the detriment of the overall coherence of the book, also makes central: the issue of how to identify “the people” in a democracy.
Näsström begins with a fundamental reframing of democratic theory. Our primary concern should not be what she calls “Rousseau’s trap:” the identification of democracy with popular sovereignty. Instead, we should remember Montesquieu’s insight that different regimes exhibit different “spirits.” A “spirit” is composed of an account of a regime’s particular “nature” (answering the questions of who governs and how) and a particular principle, which Näsström glosses as “the public commitment” needed to “set a political form in motion” (p. 4). As she puts it nicely, rather than merely examining institutional blueprints and the outer boundaries of a polity, we should try to “listen to the inner heartbeat” (p. 4) of a given political life form.
Montesquieu associated monarchy with honor, despotism with fear, and republics with virtue as the underlying principles. A republic, Näsström insists, is not the same as a democracy. The latter comes into existence when all external authorities, such as revelation, have fallen away, and politics no longer has any grounds of certainty. This thought, inspired by the French philosopher Claude Lefort, leads to the crucial insight that democracy necessarily creates what Näsström, riffing on Arendt, calls an “abyss of responsibility.” We carry the burden of an uncertain future (while also benefiting from democracy’s “ethos of openness”); democracy is not just liberating but is also demanding.
It is crucial that we share the burden equally. Somewhat idiosyncratically, Näsström, while mentioning the etymological origins of emancipation as exit from someone’s property, sees it mainly as an imperative to tame uncertainty by sharing and dividing it up equally. In particular, democracy must give citizens equal time and space to consider the future and set the course of a society collectively.
This rather abstract imperative translates into a somewhat more concrete precept that the institutions of a democracy—what Näsström often refers to as “intermediary powers”—ought to be animated by this spirit of emancipation: as she puts it in full Arendtian mode, “with such intermediary bodies in place, we do not have to carry the weight of the world ourselves” (p. 23). She quotes Arendt when she observes that such institutions create an “island of certainty in an ocean of uncertainty.”
This particular “spirit-oriented” theory of democracy comes into its own when Näsström turns to a reconsideration of existing institutions and policies. Elections, she argues—picking up seminal arguments by Bernard Manin—can be understood to have an aristocratic character, because they ask citizens to pick the most distinguished or, put more simply, the best candidates. They acquire a distinctively democratic character, however, when they are understood as a people’s effort to deal with uncertainty as best they can and, less obviously, also affirm citizens’ power to begin anew. Beginning anew, Näsström holds, is a particular democratic form of freedom; it accords with democracy’s open-ended nature, in which no external authority or internal authority, such as a one-time majority, can have the final say over the future direction of society. To understand oneself as a democrat means that one is open to revising any decision, that one is not only willing to try the new but also to accept failure and move on. Periodic elections—such that there can never be a “final election”—are still the best way to translate this spirit of emancipation into concrete political machinery.
Another area where Näsström’s account proves illuminating is social rights. One of Montesquieu’s original insights is that political institutions and the realm of the social should not be analyzed separately. Näsström’s imperative to give everyone equal time and space to deal with uncertainty generates novel arguments for the centrality of what she calls “social rights” for a democracy. It also animates a critique of, broadly speaking, neoliberal policies that make everyone into an entrepreneur exploiting their human capital, under the constant pressure to perform. Neoliberalism in effect privatizes uncertainty and makes time— which, for Näsström means both “alone-time” and “together-time” to form political judgments—a scarce resource. It also—here Näsström picks up Guy Standing’s seminal analysis—creates an ever-growing “precariat” suffering from fear of the future. Although it might be true that uncertainty always creates some anxiety, this pushing of uncertainty into the realm of the social is one of the prime factors behind threats to democracy today, she claims.
The latter thought is particularly important: today’s democracies are not so much “in crisis” as corrupted (and continuous corruption, Näsström holds, eventually results in disintegration). The institutions might still be standing, but the underlying spirit is gone: we no longer believe in dividing up the burden of facing uncertainty equally. Although in the end the diagnosis might not be that different from standard accounts pointing to “economic grievances,” the explanation is astute and suggests a particular justification for a distinctly social democracy. Näsström is optimistic that, just as every “spirit” authorizes a particular regime, it can also be revived to bring about a regime’s overall renewal; as she puts it: “once the principle of emancipation is revitalized, it pulls everything along” (p. 23). Once social rights are reinstituted, “crises” will just be ordinary policy challenges that we all can have time and space to consider.
The boldness of Näsström’s reframing of democratic theory is impressive, as is her ability to go beyond Arendt hagiography and make Arendt’s insights do work for understanding the present. The same is true for her use of Lefort’s account, which is highly suggestive and has been picked up by many theorists but often without really specifying what follows normatively from the end of certainty that Lefort diagnosed. Alas, Näsström also does not fully succeed in this: she is right to point out that Lefort himself never truly explored the relationship between uncertainty and political equality. But neither does she: at certain points she justifies decision making by the majority on the grounds that it best “discloses” or “decodes” the future. But that makes it sound as if the future is already decided or, more plausibly, that it holds particular challenges that some understand better than others (climate change would be an obvious example). It is less clear, then, why uncertainty could not serve as a reason to hand decisions over to experts, for instance, who are better placed than most citizens to “decode” and “disclose.”
One of Lefort’s other important insights was that the question of who the people are should always be up for debate; in fact, democracy ought not to be understood as a particular collective of particular individuals but as that never-ending debate. Näsström, following up on this thought, warns that today’s problems will not be solved by trying to fall back on the sovereign people (in the way those calling for a Brexit referendum did, for instance). But she also thinks that her spirit-oriented approach can generate answers to questions that preoccupy contemporary theorists of “peoplehood.” Citizenship politics, she claims, should also be animated by the spirit of emancipation; it should not focus on honor and distinction (as do policies aimed at recruiting the highly skilled for a global labor market) or become a matter of virtue (by having citizenship tests for civic knowledge and model behavior). Such approaches—here is another instance of productively redeploying an Arendtian insight—might have a boomerang effect by making existing citizens seem inadequate; for if they have no skills or have not been politically virtuous, should they be regarded as second-rate at best?
Still, what emancipation means for citizenship and how it could help draw the boundaries of the demos—questions that cannot be wished away by saying that we should no longer focus on sovereignty—remain elusive: Are citizens of a particular democratic state under a general obligation to enable others, such as refugees, to “begin anew”? Emancipation as an “immanent democratic yardstick” does not appear to tell us much about how, concretely, we ought to deal at the global level with uncertainty; nor is it clear how exactly we would judge political actors in terms of how well they make us share the burden of responsibility equally. Some of us simply have less time to think about the collective, and others are also less inclined to do so. Would emancipation become a de facto principle of justice here and require the redistribution of resources? Näsström herself concedes at the end of the book that her approach does not tell us what to consider right and wrong; it is more an invitation to think about well-worn questions differently. That goal is certainly met by this bold and—in the best, non-clichéd sense of the expression, thought-provoking—volume.
