From rising inequality and climate change to the explosion of populist politics, neoliberalism is often blamed for today’s ills. So is the answer to return to a period before neoliberalism, to the “golden era” of democracy post–World War II when it was triumphally spreading across the globe? That, according to Kyong-Min Son’s The Eclipse of the Demos: The Cold War and the Crisis of Democracy before Neoliberalism, would be a mistake, because already then democracy was a much-impoverished version of what it should be. Indeed, for Son it is the weakness of Cold War democracy that facilitated the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s: instead of being a bulwark against neoliberalism, Cold War democracy was in fact its enabler.

Cold War democracy is known by many names, notably “minimalist,” “procedural,” or “competitive,” but Son prefers to label it “instrumental,” in that it was democracy conceived as “an instrument that individuals use only to advance their private interests” (p. 8). As developed by figures such as Joseph Schumpeter and Robert Dahl, this new conception abandoned democracy as defined as equals coming together to organize their political life in common, replacing it with the view of democracy as individuals making claims on institutions. In doing so they not only gutted democratic institutions of much of their substance but they also fundamentally altered how the people understood itself: democratic subjectivity, according to Son, was displaced. As such, postwar debates about whether apathy stabilized the system—a claim Son vigorously disputes—and whether what was needed was more (or less) participation only beg the question, as what remains fundamentally missing is a demos that conceives of democracy as something more than just a means to fulfilling its private ends.

In developing his thesis Son shows a welcome command of both Anglo American and Continental democratic theory (e.g. Bernard Manin). His most persuasive chapter is chapter 4 on David Easton and cybernetics, where he tracks how the notion of “command-and-control” migrated from the RAND Corporation to the Department of Defense under Robert McNamara during the Vietnam War. Previously commanders issued orders on the battlefield that their lieutenants were free to act on, but in the wake of the Cold War a feedback loop was introduced to stave off nuclear Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). Applied to the Department of Defense, this micromanagement, however, proved disastrous, because the positive “figures” that reached senior managers willfully distorted the reality of the war on the ground. More than 50 years later, with the ever-continuing rise of metrics, this is being played out again throughout the university sector, not least in the United Kingdom (REF, TEF, KEF, NSS), where universities are being forced to compete by the central government for resources that no longer exist, and university managers, focused solely on the numbers, are blinded to the disastrous day-to-day experience of academics. Particularly convincing in Son’s account is the fact that one of the highpoints of applying cybernetics to politics came through Stafford Beer’s Project Cybersyn in Salvador Allende’s Chile: i.e. before the Hayekian neoliberalism we associate with Augusto Pinochet’s regime.

Son locates his approach in the progressive tradition, but it is not clear that he has much to say to the Schumpeterian or Dahlian democrats who still dominate the field. Indeed, for a concept that grounds much of his intellectual apparatus, “democratic subjectivity” remains largely undertheorized. Throughout chapter 2, “Locating the Demos,” the line about “common good and political equality” is often repeated, without much being added to it. There is a passing reference to deliberative democracy, but the depth of reflection offered by, say, epistemic democracy is not given here beyond an insistence on the “affect.” Yet in a period of hyperpolarization is the “affect” truly the way forward? Of course, there is a long tradition—absent here—stretching back to Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees in which the pursuit of private vice is what leads to public virtue. Ultimately it is the figure of Dewey who stands behind the notion of “democratic subjectivity,” but how we might bring his “publics” back to life is not something that the book addresses in any detail.

As Son himself readily admits, his cast of characters—Schumpeter, Dahl, Easton, Hayek, and Arendt—are quite “eclectic” (p. 13), and there is reason to question the influence they wielded on one another. Did cybernetics influence Schumpeter’s and Dahl’s theories of democracy? Dahl certainly seemed concerned about stability in the system, but Schumpeter famously rejected the Lausanne School of Economics’ focus on equilibrium, preferring to speak about competition for markets instead of competition within markets. Son is entirely right to point out that the type of neoliberalism theorized by Wendy Brown leaves one with a sense of “exhaustion and despair” (p. 10), but the merit of that analysis is to show how neoliberalism attempts to be all-encompassing, extending economic rationality to all aspects of life. As Thatcher once put it, “Economics are the method: the object is to change the soul.” With Dahl—who was in favor of workplace democracy—and Schumpeter we have different economic theories marrying with converging democratic theories, but with no clear sense of how their democratic theories were consciously reforming individual subjectivity, in the manner that neoliberalism and indeed cybernetics tried to.

In chapter 5 on Hayek and Cold War neoliberalism, Son—echoing work done by, among others, Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists—shows how Hayek was in fact much more favorable to authoritarian regimes than to democracy as means to discipline modern economic man and preserve the economy. But he writes, “The resemblance between the democratic society Truman depicted [the New Deal] and the neoliberal civilization Hayek envisions is striking” (p. 134), later concluding that “despite the marginality of neoliberal economic policies, the postwar era brought American democracy remarkably close to the neoliberal social order envisioned by Hayek” (pp. 143–44). Son claims his book combines the “history of ideas and normative political theory” (p. 12), but it is doubtful whether “resemblance” meets the criteria of influence that intellectual history would require. Nor is it clear, as the final chapter on Arendt tries to make out, that it was to totalitarianism that “instrumental democracy” was responding: both Schumpeter and Dahl were responding to the rise of socialism, but in different ways.

“Fear of the masses” certainly haunted the development of postwar democratic theory, and Son is correct to point out that although that fear was long-standing, stretching at least back to the American founding and Plato himself, the Cold War was the first moment when it was integrated into a democratic theory rather than rejected. But what both Schumpeter and Dahl were responding to was the “elite” theory of Mosca, Pareto, and Michels.

Son closes his book with a call to “create institutionalized space in which citizens are actually tasked with the responsibility of discussion and addressing their collective problems” (p. 181). What that might actually look like Son does not say, and the reader may be left wondering whether this is first and foremost an “ethical” project, free to take place within the confines of instrumental democracy. But if Dewey remains the reference point, then perhaps C. Wright Mills’s “radical ambition” of developing a “participatory democracy” that integrates elite rule, hinted at in the conclusion, is a good place to start. In identifying the transformation of postwar democratic theory, Son has taken an important step in that direction.