(I use the term republican throughout this article in its original Latin sense, res publica, or, in English, commonwealth; i.e., the wealth we hold in common and the political institutions that protect that shared wealth.)
As the framers of the U.S. Constitution were only all too aware, while republics brashly assert the good society as their goal, democracy is only as good as those by whom it is composed (see my Aristotle in America). It is a formal procedure, not a set of values. Or, if you like, democracy—popular rule—is itself the value.
Which may help to explain why democracy is so important to those who do not have it, but often seems of little value to those who do. Individuals who are locked out of decision-making want to be heard. But, there is nothing in the formal procedure of democracy that guarantees that your deepest values or ideals will at the end of the day (or end of the election) prevail. More often than not, what prevails is a compromise among values that satisfies no one and alienates all. What individuals want is not only for their values and ideals to be registered, but for them to be implemented and realized.
And, yet, might there not be a path that leads either from republicanism to democracy, from democracy to republicanism, or from some other third location to the realization of both? Can we not realize both the republican and the democratic ideals?
Carl Schmitt, the Max Weber student turned Nazi jurist, thought not. Leo Strauss, Schmitt’s celebrated student and University of Chicago political philosopher, agreed with his mentor.
Yet, the exercise of thinking our way from one side to the other (or from some third point to both) need not be entirely without value. Let us consider, first, what I think is the easiest path, the path from republicanism to democracy.
Republicanism holds the good society—or society composed of the best individuals—as its highest ideal. It embraces this ideal because, according to republican theory, only those individuals who are not coerced (by need, lack, work, necessity, illness, ignorance, thoughtlessness, sorrow) are able to think and make decisions freely on behalf of res publica. That is to say, only the best individuals who have no need are able to reflect and act selflessly for the sake of those things that we hold in common. Thus the frequent English translation of the Latin res publica: commonwealth, or the wealth we hold in common.
Clearly, two things are most likely to jeopardize the republic. The first, according to Aristotle, of course, is oikonomia or “private enterprise.” Private enterprise is most likely to jeopardize the republic because it arises out of and functions most smoothly when each of its unequal elements is limited to its unique place and function within an overall hierarchy of tasks and functions. And, while the aim of the private enterprise in a republic is only to sustain both itself and the republic, even Aristotle recognized that the masters of most private enterprises would find it difficult to limit themselves to this aim. They would, Aristotle thought, inevitably be tempted to accumulate unending wealth and, with it, unchecked power, overshadowing and overpowering res publica.
The second threat to republic were those who, on account of their poverty, sorrow, ignorance, or poor health were not fully equipped to make and execute decisions without respect for their own private need. And this meant that they would not be able to decide and act exclusively on behalf of the republic. Yet act they might, establishing a “democracy”—in fact a tyranny—of those in need at the expense of the few, independently wealthy and virtuous.
Yet, there is a relatively easy path from republicanism to democracy. And it is a path with which we are already familiar. In order to prevent private enterprise, oikonomia, from overshadowing and overpowering res publica, the republic needs to establish strict rules and limits within which private enterprise is obligated to conduct its business. In Aristotle’s language politeia needs to maintain strict control over oikonomia, not to prevent oikonomia from functioning as it must function, on the basis of unequal, hierarchical relationships of competence, power, and submission, but in order to prevent this manner of life from infecting and becoming the norm of political life as well.
To solve the threat posed by the ignorant and needy, the politeia then needs to do all in its power to eliminate the constraints that prevent individuals from realizing their full potential. To this end, the politeia must endeavor to grant ever more leisure to ever more individuals, to make sure that these individuals are healthy and well educated, and thereby lay the groundwork for their full emancipation as citizens who will themselves think and act not out of a condition of personal need, but think and act as they should on behalf of the wealth that all of them share: the commonwealth.
It is, of course, much more difficult to carve a path in the opposite direction, from democracy to republican rule. This is not only because democrats are much less likely to embrace republican values and institutions, but also because the democratic ideal is by definition empty of content; it is a formal procedure and not a set of values. And it is precisely for this reason that Carl Schmitt and his intellectual heirs have despaired over the possibility of realizing the good society beginning from democracy. With interests scattered across the spectrum, with the inevitability that individuals will be swayed by their own need and will thus make decisions not because they are good but because they are expedient, it seemed impossible to Schmitt and his admirers that republican values and institutions would ever arise from democracy.
Although strictly speaking, there may in fact be no path from democracy to a republic, history is full of examples of how democratic or democratically inspired movements, such as the French or American or South African revolutions, were eventually contained and channeled into institutions and laws by republicans. Here we need only recall how thoroughly the anti-federalists (radical democrats) were locked out of the American Constitutional Convention, enabling the federalists (radical republicans) to dictate the terms of the final document.
Some might here claim evidence in support of Schmitt’s concept of the political insofar as the federalists (in the U.S.) or the ANC (in South Africa) were only able to succeed by unilaterally taking control and asserting their authority at a moment of crisis. Yet, a far stronger case could be made for the argument that the republicans were always more or less in charge and that they allied themselves with the people or demos only so long as they needed in order to establish republican institutions.
The natural conclusion is that it is difficult to move from democracy to republicanism except under extraordinary circumstances.
Finally, we can conceptualize paths from third locations, neither republican nor democratic, toward government that is both democratic and republican. In fact, this was the case all across western Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and throughout much of the world in the twentieth century, where state-makers in formerly non-republican and non-democratic nations recognized the indispensible value of combining democracy as a formal procedure with republican values and institutions such as universal health care, free or nearly free education through post-secondary instruction, and an overall freedom from want. Such state-makers were already thinking beyond the classic opposition between democracy and republicanism. Herein they recognized the more recent dictum that democrats who live beyond necessity make good republicans; that is, they make good defenders of the wealth we hold in common.
Which brings us back to Carl Schmitt and his incapacity to square democracy and the social with the political. Under what circumstances would Schmitt be right? Clearly, Schmitt would be right and his analysis would be correct only under the condition that the demos—the people—lived and acted from a position of extreme want. Under such circumstances they could not help but represent their own private interests instead of the interests of res publica. And under such circumstances the state could not help but be fragmented and ever on the verge of civil war, in fact if not in name. Under such extreme circumstances, the state can only be preserved through an act of political assertion—in the case of Germany, Spain, and Italy, through an act of fascist closure.
This does not speak well for possibilities establishing, much less preserving, republican values and institutions in the United States where inequality, poverty, and need are so great on the one hand and where the pursuit of unending wealth is so deeply engrained in our national psyche that they very conditions Carl Schmitt spoke to seem unavoidable. And with such conditions, the seeming inevitability of fascist closure.
Yet, as participants in the European resistance of the last century would be the first to assure us, this does not render militant advancement of republican values and institutions unnecessary or worthless. To the contrary, if anything it means that we must redouble our efforts to affirm their value and necessity in the face of daunting odds.
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