Let me illustrate this logical point with an empirical example. Take the idea that
was noted of Ian Paisley’s ‘Protestant state of the Protestant people’. Up until
1972, it can be said that in Northern Ireland, the Catholic minority were oppressed,
and the Protestant majority ascendant. But how free was the majority? What
happened if an individual Protestant wished to marry a Catholic, or became
sympathetic to their point of view? What happened to Protestants who decided to
revere the anti-colonial heritage of Protestants like Wolfe Tone? How open could
loyalist-minded Protestants be about the partisan character of police or the electoral
malpractices designed to devalue Catholic votes? The point is that in a society in
which there is a ‘tyranny of the majority’, no one is free and thus able to govern
their own lives.
Chantal Mouffe, a radical poststructuralist theorist, has argued that democracy
leads to the dictatorial rule of the popular will. It embodies the logic of what she
calls identity or equivalence, whereas liberalism (which she prefers to democracy)
respects difference, diversity and individual self-determination (1996: 25). But is
this liberal polity a form of the state? On this crucial matter, Mouffe is silent, and
it is not surprising that her admiration for the pre-war conservative Carl Schmitt
places her argument in still more difficulty. While she praises Schmitt for identifying
politics with conflict, she is embarrassed by the avowedly statist way in which he
interprets conflict (Hoffman, 1988: 60).
For Schmitt, the other is an enemy to be physically eliminated. While Mouffe
identifies politics with conflict and difference, she is reluctant to see differences
‘settled’ in a statist manner through force. She seeks to distinguish between a social
agent and the multiplicity of social positions that agents may precariously and
temporarily adopt. The pluralism of multiple identities is ‘constitutive of modern
democracy’ and ‘precludes any dream of final reconciliation’ (Mouffe, 1996: 25).
But if democracy is a form of the state, then it will, indeed, rest upon an oppressive
logic of equivalence that suppresses, rather than celebrates, difference.
The argument that democracy can be tyrannical makes the assumption that
individuals and groups can be totally separated from each other. Democracy is
conceived of as a Hobbesian Leviathan in majoritarian form (Hoffman, 1995: 202),
by which is meant that democracy is analysed in terms of the kind of unrelated
individuals that lie at the heart of Hobbes’s argument for the state. Once we argue
that the mechanisms of government must replace those of the state, then the notion
of democracy becomes a means of resolving conflict in a way that acknowledges
the identity of the parties to a dispute. It goes beyond the need for an institution
claiming a monopoly of legitimate force – the state.Summary
What makes democracy such a confusing concept is that it has been acclaimed from
almost every part of the political spectrum – and is held to stand for contradictory
ideals. Contrary to the notion of ‘liberal democracy’, it is important to remember
that before the twentieth century, liberals generally opposed democracy even though
they were often accused by their conservative opponents of being democratic in
character. Although liberalism presented its ideals in universal terms, there were all114 Part 1 Classical ideas