since he asked: when the people govern, over whom do they rule? Many
conservatives overlooked the statist character of classical liberalism. After all, the
whole point of the classical liberal concept of the state of nature was to establish
the impossibility of life without the state. It is true that classical liberals assumed
that humans were ‘naturally’ free and equal, but they construed these qualities as
market-based abstractions, so that inevitably as ‘inconveniences’ (as Locke politely
terms them) set in, the state was required to maintain order. Rousseau could speak
of people leaving the state of nature in order to rush headlong into the chains of
the state, but he takes it for granted that the legitimate rule, which forces people
to be free, is of course a state.
When King Charles upbraided English liberals for labouring to bring in
democracy, and told them that a subject and a sovereign ‘are clear different things’
(Dunn, 1979: 3), he need not have bothered. Liberals were clearly aware of this
distinction. This is why Tocqueville could describe the USA as a democracy –
democracy could be many things, but Tocqueville never imagined it doing away
with the state. Dunn describes democracy as ‘the name for what we cannot have’- people ruling their own state (1979: 27) – but this is because he views the world
from the standpoint of a liberal, and he takes it for granted that people cannot
govern without an institution claiming a monopoly of legitimate force for a
particular territory. One of the delegates of the South German People’s Party
declared at a conference in 1868 that ‘democracy wants to become social democracy,
if it honestly wants to become democracy’ (Bauman, 1976: 43). It could be argued
that the same thing should be said about democracy and the state. Only an
institution that looks beyond the claim to exercise a monopoly of legitimate force
can call itself a democracy!
Democracy and the relational argument
Once we challenge the idea that democracy can be a form of the state, then the
argument that the will of the majority may favour arbitrary and repressive rule
ceases to be persuasive.
For the point is that majorities cannot repress minorities unless their rule expresses
itself in the form of the state. The examples that Crick gives are clearly statist in
character, so that the problem is not really with majority rule: it is with the state.
For how can we reconcile democracy with an institution claiming a monopoly of
legitimate force?
The idea that democracy can express itself as a tyranny of the majority is not
only empirically invalid, it is also logically problematic as well. For it assumes that
individuals are completely separate from one another, so that it is possible for one
section of the population (the majority) to be free while their opponents (the
minority) are oppressed. However, this argument is only defensible if we draw a
sharp (and non-relational) line between the self and the other. If we embrace a
relational approach, then the freedom of each individual depends upon the freedom
of the other. As the Zimbabwean greeting puts it, I have slept well, if you have
slept well: we may be separate people, but we are also related. It is impossible for
a majority to oppress a minority, without oppressing itself.Chapter 5 Democracy 113