Two new books that focus on the idea of democracy explore the way that it has been shaped and affected by modernity and global politics, and they offer insight into the possible dilemmas of democracy in the modern era. The first, Christopher Hobson’s The Rise of Democracy, wants to address the historical question of how democracy—a term and form of government that was reviled in the eighteenth century—has managed to become the “most legitimate form of polity in international society” (p. 42). His thesis is that this has come about largely because of the phenomenon of conceptual change, not merely within nation-states but also (and perhaps more importantly) in the realm of international politics. Only when it was able to gain legitimacy within the sphere of the international political order was democracy able to emerge as hegemonic, essentially defining the contemporary period.
With the American Revolution, Hobson argues, the idea of popular government, of democratic rule and democratic sovereignty, begins to emerge as a legitimate form of government. Central here is the concept of representation which, he claims, is one of the important keys to the rise of democracy. During the French Revolution, democracy again undergoes further conceptual change since it was the first time that democracy, “both as a form of statehood and as a method of rule, was fully activated in modern politics” (p. 104). Whereas the American political system was self-labeled as a republic and not a democracy, the French Revolution was able to make the concept of democracy a legitimate alternative to monarchical rule, the prevailing legitimate form of statehood.
According to Hobson, the revolutions in the United States and in France therefore positioned democracy as a conceptual paradigm on the international political scene. As a result, the reaction of conservatives was to fall onto increasingly abstract principles in order to maintain authority and legitimacy. Nevertheless, monarchy was beginning to lose legitimacy and democracy was taking on an increasingly positive meaning in the minds of early nineteenth-century Europeans. Hobson says that “once released the principle of popular sovereignty could not be fully maintained” (p. 138). But in order for this rise to prominence to succeed, he argues, it had to be, in a sense, domesticated to make it less threatening, a role well played by liberalism: “An essential part of democracy’s rise was precisely that it was revised in such a way that it was no longer a fundamental threat to the interests of the ruling classes” (p. 139). Liberalism was therefore able to channel and contain democracy within the sphere of representation.
It is in discussing the beginning of the twentieth century that Hobson’s thesis has its most persuasive bite. In Woodrow Wilson’s arguments in support of World War I, the author sees a pivotal turn toward an international legitimacy for democracy: “The manner in which US President Woodrow Wilson defined the war in reference to democracy, followed by the defeat of the Central Powers, would prove pivotal in the normative and political rehabilitation of the concept” (p. 140). Wilson employed the concept of democracy against the monarchical, autocratic forms of rule that had caused carnage in Europe. In time, with the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, he was also able to counterpose democracy to the Bolsheviks and, after the war, make democracy a principle not only for the nation-state but for international relations as well with his plan for the League of Nations. By “waging war in democracy’s name,” Hobson tells us, “the American President played a pivotal role as ideational innovator, acting both as catalyst and a symbol of the emergence of democracy” (p. 169).
After the World War I, Hobson argues, an ideational change occurs, however. At the end of the war, popular sovereignty (forma imperii) and democracy as a form of rule (forma regiminis) were closely unified, but a split between them occurs in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Now, “[p]opular sovereignty was embedded within international society, and contestation would revolve around different constitutional forms: democracy, communism and fascism” (p. 202). But with the failure of fascist regimes, the fall of communism, and the emergence of the United States as a unilateral world power, democracy became the standard for political legitimacy. “Democracy, usually thought of as being demanded from ‘below,’” Hobson tells us, “was increasingly something demanded from ‘above,’ as it came to be a marker of state legitimacy” (p. 203). Only now, with the slow erosion of the prominence of the United States, the question of how democracy will fit into a newly emerging international order is unclear.
Although I was at first skeptical of a theoretical approach that employs conceptual history and the contestation and transformation of ideas, Hobson's thesis has strong explanatory power. One might ask: did not democratic institutions and polities emerge out of struggles from below or from conflicts between bourgeois and aristocrats and also workers and owners? But this is not the question Hobson is addressing. Since he wants to explain the ways that the legitimacy of democracy as a form of state, as well as its gradual acceptance in the sphere of international politics, grew historically from a reviled to a hegemonic normative force, the question of how the idea of democracy gained this legitimacy is best captured through this conceptual-history approach. There is much to be gained from his historical analysis. The problem, however, is that this approach rarely gives us much to offer normatively, and the author does not venture much on this question. However, as an effort to bring together ideas about international politics, conceptual history, and the history of state forms, this is a unique contribution to our understanding of the history and process of democratization.
The second work under consideration, edited by Gerard Rosich and Peter Wagner, seeks to fill the normative gap that Hobson leaves unfilled and in many ways picks up where his book leaves off. Contributors to The Trouble with Democracy seek to interrogate the ways that the current political age evinces not the triumph of democracy but, rather, its possible destabilization. As the editors succinctly put the problem in their introduction: “This volume maintains that the commitments to freedom and democracy are highly ambiguous and volatile.” Although they admit that the dominant theories of democratization and individualization explained stable democratic regimes “in some parts of the world several decades ago, roughly around 1960, . . . this stability is long gone and unlikely to return in any similar form” (p. 1). As a basic framework for the volume, they frame the problem as emerging from a series of changes in world politics and political economy leading to the destabilization of democratic regimes, and calling into question the future of democratic states.
One change that the editors point to is the emergence of decolonization movements beginning in the 1960s. These movements, although initially seen as steps toward modernization, in many instances led away from the democratic paradigm, as the Iranian Revolution’s political course demonstrated. In addition, there was the fiscal crisis of the Keynesian welfare state in the 1970s, which led to the neoliberal response. Within democratic-capitalist societies, social movements that pushed for the expansion of identity politics weakened “the collective concepts the political use of which had marked the preceding one-and-a-half centuries: nation, class, state and also society” (p. 5). The picture that emerges is, therefore, one in which democracy has been transformed and now commands a weaker commitment. The lack of stability of modern institutions, along with the cultural fragmentation within democratic societies, means that the stable model of democracy that was articulated in the 1950s no longer is tenable.
Many of the essays that follow, however, lack much of the clarity of the introduction. Sadly, this applies mostly to the theoretical chapters in the volume, which do not seem to break any new ground, while those in the middle of the volume that focus on empirical questions have more to offer. Several highlights are worth mentioning. Manuel Garretón’s chapter shows how the older models of state-society relations have broken down in Latin America, even as a more vibrant, radical idea of democracy has emerged with new social movements, as well as new forms of citizen participation and collective action. Carlos Forment's analysis of the responses of workers to neoliberal transformations in Latin America is also worthy of note. Likewise, Ivor Chipkin’s chapter on the emergence of “townhouse complexes” in South America, or highly segregated gated communities, shows that despite the expansion of democratic institutions in the post-Apartheid era, new cleavages based on economic inequality have exacerbated social divisions, counteracting those more progressive changes. Chipkin shows that a kind of neo-Hobbesianism has crept in to crowd out a more inclusive, egalitarian society.
Despite the weakness of the theoretical chapters, the basic question that frames the volume is an interesting one. However, the weightlessness of normative ideas in both works should give pause to many in the discipline. The empirical and historical analyses in both point to a “democratic deficit” in modern politics. But the question of what this means has to move beyond ideas about rejecting the state form and relying on Arendtian ideas about active citizenship. The crisis of democracy is deeper than this and has infected the very attitudes, consciousness, norms, and practices of those affected by global economic logics. Whether our ideas about democracy have reached a nadir or not is still an open question. But one thing is certain; it looks increasingly that there exists no compelling alternative on the horizon to the problems afflicting the institutions and the culture of democracy.
