Anti-democratic thought
Encyclopedia
Anti-democratic thought refers to opposition to democracy
. Anti-democratic thought is typically, though not always, associated with anti-egalitarianism. Important figures associated with anti-democratic thinking include Martin Heidegger
, Hubert Lagardelle
, Vladimir Lenin
, Charles Maurras
, Friedrich Nietzsche
, Plato
, Carl Schmitt
, Oswald Spengler
, Elazar Menachem Shach, and Leo Tolstoy
. A variety of ideologies and political systems have opposed democracy including absolute monarchy
, aristocracy
, collectivist anarchism
, communism
, fascism
, guardianship, forms of socialism
, and theocracy
.
on the basis that such democracies were anarchic societies without internal unity, that they followed citizens' impulses rather than pursuing the common good
, that larger democracies are unable to allow a sufficient number of their citizens to have their voices heard, and that such democracies were typically run by fools. Plato attacked Athenian democracies for being libertarian
societies where anarchy is mistaken for freedom. The lack of coherent unity in Athenian democracy made Plato conclude that such democracies were a mere collection of individuals occupying a common space rather than a form of political organization. As a result, Plato accused such democracies of lacking rules outside where its citizens see fit and lacking leadership due to the notion of equality in Athenian democracy. Plato claimed that in Athenian democracy, individuals' pursuit of their own desires led to self-centredness and conflict rather than the pursuit of the common good. Due to the citizens being free to pursue their passions, Plato claimed that rational leadership was impossible in Athenian democracy as elected representatives served the citizens' passions. Plato claimed that the significance of the voice of the individual in an Athenian democracy depreciates as the population of the democracy increases.
, saw western democracy as connected to it, claiming that "the democratic movement is Christianity's heir" and denounced the democratic man for being inherently unable to "feel any shame for being unable to rise above" his desire "to satisfy a host of petty wants through the calculation of long-term self-interest". Nietzsche claimed that in a democracy "[w]hen the individual's highest and strongest instincts break forth with a passion, driving him far and above the average, beyond the lowlands of the herd conscience", "the moral perspective now considers how harmful or harmless an opinion, an emotional state, a will, a talent is to the community, to equality". "Exalted, self-directed spirituality, a will to solitude, even great powers of reason are felt as a danger". "Morality in Europe today is herd animal morality
movement stated in a famous dictum "Democracy is evil, democracy is death". Maurras' concept of politique naturelle declared recognition of inescapable biological inequality and thereby natural hierarchies, and claimed that the individual is naturally subordinated to social collectivities such as the family, the society, and the state, which he claims are doomed to fail if based upon the "myth of equality" or "abstract liberty". Maurras criticized democracy as being a "government by numbers" in which quantity matters more over quality and prefers the worst over the best. Maurras denounced the principles of liberalism
as described in The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
and in Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
as based upon the "false" assumption of liberty and the false assumption of equality. He claimed that the parliamentary system
subordinates the national interest, or common good, to private interests of a parliament's representatives where only short-sighted interests of individuals prevail.
Hubert Lagardelle claimed that French revolutionary syndicalism came to being as the result of "the reaction of the proletariat
against democracy", which he claimed was "the popular form of bourgeois dominance". Lagardelle opposed democracy for its universalism, and believed in the necessity of class separation of the proletariat from the bourgeoisie, as democracy did not recognize the social differences between them.
leader Vladimir Lenin in The State and Revolution denounced democracy, and claimed "Democracy is a state which recognizes the subordination of the minority to the majority, i.e. an organization for the systematic use of violence by one class against another, by one section of the population against another".
to be the natural governance for Jews
and condemned democracy, he claimed that "Democracy as a machinery of lies, false notions, pursuit of narrow interests and deceit - as opposed to the Torah
regime, which is based on seeking the ultimate truth". Shach criticized democracy for having no real goals, saying "The whole point of democracy is money. The one does what the other asks him to do in pursuit of his own interest, so as to be given what he himself asks for, and the whole purpose of the transaction is that each would get what they want".
Democracy
Democracy is generally defined as a form of government in which all adult citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. Ideally, this includes equal participation in the proposal, development and passage of legislation into law...
. Anti-democratic thought is typically, though not always, associated with anti-egalitarianism. Important figures associated with anti-democratic thinking include Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...
, Hubert Lagardelle
Hubert Lagardelle
Hubert Lagardelle was a French syndicalist thinker, influenced by Proudhon and Georges Sorel. He gradually moved to the right and served as Minister of Labour in the Vichy regime under Pierre Laval from 1942 to 1943....
, Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and communist politician who led the October Revolution of 1917. As leader of the Bolsheviks, he headed the Soviet state during its initial years , as it fought to establish control of Russia in the Russian Civil War and worked to create a...
, Charles Maurras
Charles Maurras
Charles-Marie-Photius Maurras was a French author, poet, and critic. He was a leader and principal thinker of Action Française, a political movement that was monarchist, anti-parliamentarist, and counter-revolutionary. Maurras' ideas greatly influenced National Catholicism and "nationalisme...
, Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...
, Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
, Carl Schmitt
Carl Schmitt
Carl Schmitt was a German jurist, philosopher, political theorist, and professor of law.Schmitt published several essays, influential in the 20th century and beyond, on the mentalities that surround the effective wielding of political power...
, Oswald Spengler
Oswald Spengler
Oswald Manuel Arnold Gottfried Spengler was a German historian and philosopher whose interests also included mathematics, science, and art. He is best known for his book The Decline of the West , published in 1918, which puts forth a cyclical theory of the rise and decline of civilizations...
, Elazar Menachem Shach, and Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...
. A variety of ideologies and political systems have opposed democracy including absolute monarchy
Absolute monarchy
Absolute monarchy is a monarchical form of government in which the monarch exercises ultimate governing authority as head of state and head of government, his or her power not being limited by a constitution or by the law. An absolute monarch thus wields unrestricted political power over the...
, aristocracy
Aristocracy
Aristocracy , is a form of government in which a few elite citizens rule. The term derives from the Greek aristokratia, meaning "rule of the best". In origin in Ancient Greece, it was conceived of as rule by the best qualified citizens, and contrasted with monarchy...
, collectivist anarchism
Anarchism
Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...
, communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
, fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
, guardianship, forms of socialism
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...
, and theocracy
Theocracy
Theocracy is a form of organization in which the official policy is to be governed by immediate divine guidance or by officials who are regarded as divinely guided, or simply pursuant to the doctrine of a particular religious sect or religion....
.
Plato's rejection of Athenian democracy
The ancient Greek philosopher Plato rejected Athenian democracyAthenian democracy
Athenian democracy developed in the Greek city-state of Athens, comprising the central city-state of Athens and the surrounding territory of Attica, around 508 BC. Athens is one of the first known democracies. Other Greek cities set up democracies, and even though most followed an Athenian model,...
on the basis that such democracies were anarchic societies without internal unity, that they followed citizens' impulses rather than pursuing the common good
Common good
The common good is a term that can refer to several different concepts. In the popular meaning, the common good describes a specific "good" that is shared and beneficial for all members of a given community...
, that larger democracies are unable to allow a sufficient number of their citizens to have their voices heard, and that such democracies were typically run by fools. Plato attacked Athenian democracies for being libertarian
Libertarianism
Libertarianism, in the strictest sense, is the political philosophy that holds individual liberty as the basic moral principle of society. In the broadest sense, it is any political philosophy which approximates this view...
societies where anarchy is mistaken for freedom. The lack of coherent unity in Athenian democracy made Plato conclude that such democracies were a mere collection of individuals occupying a common space rather than a form of political organization. As a result, Plato accused such democracies of lacking rules outside where its citizens see fit and lacking leadership due to the notion of equality in Athenian democracy. Plato claimed that in Athenian democracy, individuals' pursuit of their own desires led to self-centredness and conflict rather than the pursuit of the common good. Due to the citizens being free to pursue their passions, Plato claimed that rational leadership was impossible in Athenian democracy as elected representatives served the citizens' passions. Plato claimed that the significance of the voice of the individual in an Athenian democracy depreciates as the population of the democracy increases.
Nietzsche on democracy
Friedrich Nietzsche as an opponent of ChristianityChristianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
, saw western democracy as connected to it, claiming that "the democratic movement is Christianity's heir" and denounced the democratic man for being inherently unable to "feel any shame for being unable to rise above" his desire "to satisfy a host of petty wants through the calculation of long-term self-interest". Nietzsche claimed that in a democracy "[w]hen the individual's highest and strongest instincts break forth with a passion, driving him far and above the average, beyond the lowlands of the herd conscience", "the moral perspective now considers how harmful or harmless an opinion, an emotional state, a will, a talent is to the community, to equality". "Exalted, self-directed spirituality, a will to solitude, even great powers of reason are felt as a danger". "Morality in Europe today is herd animal morality
Maurras on democracy
French nationalist and neo-royalist Charles Maurras as member of the Action françaiseAction Française
The Action Française , founded in 1898, is a French Monarchist counter-revolutionary movement and periodical founded by Maurice Pujo and Henri Vaugeois and whose principal ideologist was Charles Maurras...
movement stated in a famous dictum "Democracy is evil, democracy is death". Maurras' concept of politique naturelle declared recognition of inescapable biological inequality and thereby natural hierarchies, and claimed that the individual is naturally subordinated to social collectivities such as the family, the society, and the state, which he claims are doomed to fail if based upon the "myth of equality" or "abstract liberty". Maurras criticized democracy as being a "government by numbers" in which quantity matters more over quality and prefers the worst over the best. Maurras denounced the principles of liberalism
Liberalism
Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...
as described in The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought.His novel Émile: or, On Education is a treatise...
and in Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen is a fundamental document of the French Revolution, defining the individual and collective rights of all the estates of the realm as universal. Influenced by the doctrine of "natural right", the rights of man are held to be universal: valid...
as based upon the "false" assumption of liberty and the false assumption of equality. He claimed that the parliamentary system
Parliamentary system
A parliamentary system is a system of government in which the ministers of the executive branch get their democratic legitimacy from the legislature and are accountable to that body, such that the executive and legislative branches are intertwined....
subordinates the national interest, or common good, to private interests of a parliament's representatives where only short-sighted interests of individuals prevail.
Lagardelle on democracy
French revolutionary syndicalistSyndicalism
Syndicalism is a type of economic system proposed as a replacement for capitalism and an alternative to state socialism, which uses federations of collectivised trade unions or industrial unions...
Hubert Lagardelle claimed that French revolutionary syndicalism came to being as the result of "the reaction of the proletariat
Proletariat
The proletariat is a term used to identify a lower social class, usually the working class; a member of such a class is proletarian...
against democracy", which he claimed was "the popular form of bourgeois dominance". Lagardelle opposed democracy for its universalism, and believed in the necessity of class separation of the proletariat from the bourgeoisie, as democracy did not recognize the social differences between them.
Tolstoy on democracy
While not explicitly anti-democratic, Tolstoy rejected democracy alongside all forms of state as being based upon violence and deception.Lenin on democracy
BolshevikBolshevik
The Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903....
leader Vladimir Lenin in The State and Revolution denounced democracy, and claimed "Democracy is a state which recognizes the subordination of the minority to the majority, i.e. an organization for the systematic use of violence by one class against another, by one section of the population against another".
Shach on democracy
Israeli politician Rabbi Elazar Menachem Shach promoted Judaic lawJudaism
Judaism ) is the "religion, philosophy, and way of life" of the Jewish people...
to be the natural governance for Jews
Jews
The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...
and condemned democracy, he claimed that "Democracy as a machinery of lies, false notions, pursuit of narrow interests and deceit - as opposed to the Torah
Torah
Torah- A scroll containing the first five books of the BibleThe Torah , is name given by Jews to the first five books of the bible—Genesis , Exodus , Leviticus , Numbers and Deuteronomy Torah- A scroll containing the first five books of the BibleThe Torah , is name given by Jews to the first five...
regime, which is based on seeking the ultimate truth". Shach criticized democracy for having no real goals, saying "The whole point of democracy is money. The one does what the other asks him to do in pursuit of his own interest, so as to be given what he himself asks for, and the whole purpose of the transaction is that each would get what they want".