The Perils of Republics
by Lucy Sullivan

Even while the Australian intelligentsia, with its characteristic hue and cry after any specious notion which offers novelty and a dismissal of cultural heritage, is in blind pursuit of a republican reformation, a group of French political philosophers is engaged in a close and thoughtful examination of what it is in the nature of republics which often spells political instability and, worse, totalitarianism.

The French can hardly ignore the peril implicit in republics, having experienced at first hand the speed with which, following the rejection of monarch and religion, the espousal of the rule of the people degenerated into a Terror, which was only alleviated by Napoleon’s assumption of dictatorial power. The response of the new nations of Europe to this spectacle, as they emerged from the dominion of the French and Austro-Hungarian Empires, was to establish constitutional monarchies as a defence against democratic populism, and where they have been sustained, democratic stability has been the rule. By contrast, where republics have superseded them, as in post-World War I Germany and Russia, frightening eruptions of totalitarianism, whether fascist or communist, have arisen.

The comparative stability of the republics of Western Europe in the post-World War II period can only be regarded with circumspection in view of this legacy, while the new republics of Africa, Eastern Europe and South-East Asia continue to exhibit the old violent characteristics. The United States of America is, however, an exception of two centuries’ standing to this pattern.

The concern of the aforementioned French political philosophers, all writing in the last two decades, has been to understand why the acclaimed liberal principles – rationality, liberty, rights, democracy – which ushered in the modern period should have had such devastating consequences. We in the (British) Commonwealth, protected across three centuries from their most destructive effects by our tie to the pre-modern world through a constitutional monarchy, are able to embrace them with an innocence and insouciance which the French had necessarily lost by the early decades of the nineteenth century.

Why did democracy, when enacted in its purest form as the will of the people untrammelled by traditional power and authority, degenerate so readily into demagogy? Two intertwining lines of explanation are offered by the most interesting of this new group of philosophers, and they hinge on the source of political authority and the problem of unanimity in the people’s will.

Marcel Gauchet, Bernard Manin and Pierre Manent1explore the problem of the ‘empty seat’ of power created in the modern world by the removal of the authority of monarch and religion. Gauchet develops the idea that traditional societies were given stability by the role of religion, as an authority outside the disputable affairs of men, which was deferred to as unquestionable. In late eighteenth century France, with the overthrow of both religion and its surrogate, the monarchy, and the advent of the republic, the state replaced religion as the exogenous (external, overarching) power, deriving its authority from beliefs in the autonomy of the individual. But because, in a republic, the state is seen to represent the people’s will, and is therefore sovereign, it can be concluded that no individual has the right to defect from its authority. This is why the modern nation has tended to totalitarianism as well as to democracy.

Manin arrives at a similar conclusion by a different route. The democratic ideal of the will of the people as the only legitimate source of power creates immediate problems of political practice, if each individual is to exercise personal freedom. Manin diagnoses eighteenth and nineteenth century liberal theories of justice as attempting to answer the question: How can we establish a political and social order based on the free will of the individual? The answer was a presupposition of unanimity of will in the political sphere. In practice this does not occur, and the practicalities of government require its relinquishment, again making the reach of authority problematic, and requiring the acceptance of compromise. But as a principle, the belief in unanimity is a powerful tool of totalitarianism which allows dissidence to be seen as disrupting the unity of ‘the people’ and their rightful rule.

The French philosophers do not explore the situation of constitutional monarchies, but we can apply their insights to our own tradition, which has not suffered the political instability and tendency to demagogy of the republican record. The defence against totalitarianism offered by a constitutional monarchy would seem to be that the monarch, like religion (and in Britain reinforced by religion), provides an exogenous authority beyond the state which acts as an impediment to usurpation.

The tradition of the constitutional monarch is one of defender of the established law, while an elected head of government or state, representing the will of the people, may feel free to overthrow the traditional and accreted wisdom of common law in favour of a new, although temporary, authority conferred by a populace lacking the longer view. This has an obvious potential for political instability. Democracy, functioning within a higher order of tradition, is not so readily degraded into demagogy. Under constitutional monarchies, the functional seat of power, the government, retains a sense of order and authority beyond the immediate will of the people, and paradoxically this allows for greater tolerance of dissidence. Republics have generally been less kind to minorities than have constitutional monarchies.

Manent analyses the development of the Western republics of the last fifty years, which have, at last, avoided filling the empty seat of power with totalitarianism, dictatorship or demagogy. That seat has instead, he says, been filled by (individual) ‘rights’, as a substitute for ‘the will of the people’. The old authorities ruled by a law which was authoritarian and which modernism hoped to escape. The emptying of the seat of power, at the French Revolution, with the overthrow of religion and monarchy, was meant to give freedom, and rights are also intended as a bill of freedom. But since each individual’s rights compete with those of another, they do not of themselves deliver power and freedom. Again paradoxically, since rights have occupied the seat of power, their character has changed from voluntary acknowledgement to imposition by law. The authority of rights imposed by law, according to Manent, has become a new source of oppression.

Let us now look at the position of the United States, a stable republic, in this development. Unlike the French republic, the American republic did not overthrow religion as a source of authority in the conduct of its citizens’ lives. De Tocqueville, in the nineteenth century, argued that religion, although unattached to monarchy, was an essential feature of democracy in America. Thus the religious fundamentalism of America, deplored for its personal restrictiveness when viewed from within the tolerance of constitutional monarchies, has provided for the United States the exogenous dimension which defends republics from totalitarianism.

The American Bill of Rights and its separation of powers, devised as defences against dictatorial law-making, may have been less important in this respect than has been supposed. With the secularisation of the ruling classes, a judiciary has appeared which feels free to remake the Bill of Rights in its own image, promoting levels of individual choice in transiently fashionable directions previously debarred by religion, which disrupt the stability of tradition. Its innovative judgements are delivered as representing the will of the people when, free as judges are of the constraints of deliberative representative assembly, they have no real claim to even this authority. The Bill of Rights exacerbates rather than protects against this new sovereignty of individual rights.

The constitutional monarchies of the Commonwealth have been spared this too conscious emphasis on the freedom of individual will, a principle which for social man must inevitably require considerable constraint. Nevertheless, our High Court judges have already delivered several disruptive judgements making ‘rights’ into law, which they justify as representing the modern popular will.

Because the monarchy has symbolised an alternative principle, an immanence in society maintaining the nation’s political and social traditions independent of the collective wills of the moment, constitutional monarchies have been free to be secular without the risk of totalitarianism. If we cut that tie, we expose ourselves to the totalitarian danger, and, in that the pressure for a republic comes from the demagogic Left, there is in all likelihood an unconscious desire in that quarter to open the way for a totalitarian usurpation of political power in the name of the will of the people. When the Left produced the term ‘redneck,’ with its attempted de-humanisation of political dissidents, a step in the direction of fascism had been taken.

If the distant deliberations of some French political philosophers about empty seats of power appear rather too theoretical for Anglo-Saxon intellectual tastes, we can find their pragmatic equivalent in a former Governor-General, Bill Hayden’s, deliberations on the democratic value of the monarchy. He writes:

The Sovereign is regarded as being above the noisy, jostling and partisan fray of party politics.

Consider the case of a seemingly perfectly reasonable person, acceptable all round to the Parliament, but with a hidden streak of political populism – perhaps more correctly described as political fundamentalism – who, once in office, turns on the government, perhaps egged on by an unscrupulous opposition, misusing the extraordinarily wide black letter law authority available to a Governor-General within the Constitution to thwart government – like refusing to sign necessary but unpopular legislation …

This is indeed an evocation of the role of a traditionally filled seat of power in preventing demagogy, and supporting democracy. Hayden, from personal experience and in present-day Australia, discerns the risk of dictatorship implicit in republican government. And as he emphasises, it is the weight of tradition, a replacement for which cannot be created by mere devices of rule and regulation, which creates the authority of the exogenous power. In constitutional monarchies, the seat of power remains filled by a symbolic entity which neither degrades, arrogates nor stifles the active force of democratic government.

Endnotes
1 See their essays in Mark Lilla (ed.), New French Thought: Political Philosophy, 1994: Princeton University Press, Princeton.

2 Quoted in the Australian National Review, December-January 1997-8: 14.
 

Lucy Sullivan is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies.

Policy is the quarterly review of The Centre for Independent Studies. For more information on subscribing to Policy, click HERE

If you are interested in the Centre's activities and publications, why not subscribe to e-PreCIS, our regular email update on the latest news and events.

(e-PreCIS requires html capable email facilities, such as Microsoft Outlook Express or Netscape Messenger)