ON DEMOCRACY

An Election Entertainment from The Humours of an Election series, by William Hogarth, 1755

---

Democracy, like liberalism, is not an ancient birthright of the West so much as a modern artifact of Rationalism. The word is older than the thing; and the thing itself did not take on its decisive form until the mid–eighteenth century, when “Reason” ceased to be a discipline and became a metaphysic. Once Rationalism declared war on history, it declared war—by necessity—on every authority whose legitimacy was historical: Church and State, nobility and clergy, dynasty and estate.

The old political imagination treated quality as real. A king could be called “France,” an assembly of estates could be called “England,” because the nation was understood as an organism: layered, hierarchical, embodied in enduring forms. Rationalism inverted this. Reason is quantitative. It counts. It levels. And so the “nation” became the mass. “The People” emerged not as a humble description but as a polemical weapon—an ideological cudgel used to erase estates and deny their right to exist politically. First came “the Third Estate,” then the abolition of estates as such.

But democracy was never merely an abstraction about equality, ballots, or representation. It was saturated with will-to-power. It was an organic idea precisely because it was born out of an organic crisis: that civilizational turning-point when a culture hardens into a civilization and begins to lose faith in its own metaphysical foundations. Democracy was a symptom of illness, yes—but also a necessity, a phase through which every high civilization passes when older legitimacies weaken and new energies demand political form.

If the ordinary man lacks an independent judgment—as he usually does—democracy supplies him one and calls it his own.

And that is the first thing modern moralizers misunderstand: democracy does not aim to abolish authority. It aims to seize it. It does not “balance” forces the way liberalism eternally bargains and compromises. Democracy negates the old aristocracy not to create a flat world, but to replace one ruling class with another. It rejects the aristocratic principle that social rank should automatically confer political significance—only to invert it, making social rank dependent on political-military success. That inversion is not a scandal; it is the entire point.

Napoleon is the symbol of this logic in concentrated form. He exported revolution against dynasty and aristocracy—and then created a dynasty and made his marshals into dukes. This was not hypocrisy or betrayal. Napoleon as emperor was no less democratic than Napoleon as the man who cleared mobs from Paris. Democracy, in practice, is the rule that a duke is not thereby fit to command—but a commander, by commanding, may become a duke. It is the retooling of aristocracy through political achievement rather than inherited pedigree.

This is why the sentimental version of democracy—democracy as the abolition of rank—has always been a fairy tale. Democracy contains, at most, an “equality” of opportunity: the career open to talent. Not the end of hierarchy, but the rearrangement of hierarchy. Revolution, consolidation, imperial expansion—this is the democratic cycle. Once democracy triumphs, it does not dissolve power; it concentrates it in new hands.

Unlike liberalism, democracy is not an escape from politics. It is politics widened. It drags the whole population into the political arena and demands that the masses become participants—at least in appearance. Where earlier wars were cabinet affairs and armies were professional, democracy nationalizes conflict. It puts the full manpower of a people onto the battlefield and then insists that everyone must “have an opinion” about the state. If the ordinary man lacks an independent judgment—as he usually does—democracy supplies him one and calls it his own.

Yet democracy was born at the worst possible time for its own inner logic: the Economic Age. Its authoritarian tendency—the natural endpoint of mass politics—was strangled by money. Democracy’s two poles were always ability and mass: it mobilizes the many, then elevates the capable into rulers with an intensity of power that makes old monarchs look tame.

But the nineteenth century was not, in most places, a political age. It was an economic one. And so, with Napoleon defeated, democracy’s vocabulary survived while its substance was steadily purchased.

That is the great historical irony: democracy became the tool by which economic powers struck down the State, and then, having weakened authority, bought democracy itself. By the mid–nineteenth century, “democracy” in practice increasingly served the financier. It was constitutionalized anarchy—a set of procedures that kept the State weak, the public authority hesitant, and the economic sphere effectively sovereign. Elections and parliaments became a theatre in which the deeper decisions were made elsewhere, by those who controlled credit, press, industry, and the social imagination.

In the twentieth century, the word democracy was exported and weaponized. It was declared synonymous with liberalism—not because the equation was philosophically honest, but because it was polemically useful. “Democracy” came to mean whatever served the extra-European powers that claimed it: the denial of qualitative differences, the flattening of nations into interchangeable units, the reduction of authority into mere administration. To money, democracy meant “the rule of law”—which is to say, the rule of its law: the legal architecture that made unprecedented usury, monopolization, and cultural control appear morally neutral.

But democracy cannot survive the death of Rationalism that produced it. Once politics becomes absolute—once war and power openly structure the world again—the need for democratic pretexts fades. Mass elections and plebiscites are, at best, a technique. Either they culminate in authoritarian rule, as in the Napoleonic pattern, or they remain a cover for unrestrained economic domination. In either case, democracy as democracy vanishes. Authoritarian rule is the end of democracy; but it is not democracy itself. And plutocracy is democracy’s parody: the mass mobilized as a battering ram against authority, then sent home while the real rulers count the spoils.

But democracy cannot survive the death of Rationalism that produced it. Once politics becomes absolute—once war and power openly structure the world again—the need for democratic pretexts fades.

There is another misunderstanding worth killing: the original democratic impulse was not, in its own self-understanding, a project of dragging everything down to the level of the lowest. Early propagators often came from higher strata and even dressed themselves in aristocratic affect. The first dream was not nihilism; it was universalization—the fantasy of making everyone, so to speak, a nobleman. When that proved impossible, the democratic spirit shifted from sharing excellence to destroying it: if quality cannot be distributed, it must be dissolved. The stronger the remaining tradition, the harder this dissolution was; the weaker the tradition, the more complete the victory of mass-spirit.

America offered the most extreme illustration: the mass principle applied even to education. Diplomas proliferated, institutions multiplied, and the appearance of higher learning was democratized—until democratization rendered the credential meaningless. This is democracy’s tragic comedy: it fails even in its successes. When everything becomes “higher,” nothing is higher.

By the twentieth century the transformation was complete. Democracy’s two poles—ability and mass—were merged into a single instrument for economic power. “Democracy” became a word meaning only quantity: numbers against quality, mass against authority. It was used to mobilize the many against the State, while real power settled more comfortably than ever into private hands.

And yet history does not end with slogans. The Age of Absolute Politics begins by mobilizing the masses against money as surely as the Economic Age mobilized them against authority. The cycle, if history is allowed to complete itself, ends not in perpetual electioneering but in empire: the restoration of Authority without apology. No more elaborate moral vocabulary. No more theatrical representation. No more rituals designed to pretend power is not power. The democratic centuries conclude not with the triumph of equality, but with the recognition—again—of what was true all along: authority exists, hierarchy returns, and the political organism does not ask permission to live.