By Eric Weyerstrass, Bastien Vassort & Luka Nie
Course instructors: Jessica Duncan & Joost Jongerden
View of the course
The course “Major Works: Hatred of Democracy” was centered around the eponymous book by Jacques Rancière, published in 2006. Students met every week to discuss a specific chapter, which all previously read in their own time. For each chapter a subgroup of students prepared more thoroughly and presented their understanding in a podcast episode. These same students were then tasked with chairing the meeting of that week orienting the discussion towards the points they viewed as most interesting/important.
Main argument
Rancière begins his book with the observation that there seems to be a new kind of hatred of democracy: one that advances that “there is only one good democracy, the one that represses the catastrophe of democratic civilization” . Throughout the book his analysis builds on a number of societal observations, which focus on the inner machinations of liberal democratic rule. It is this governance, which Rancière criticizes, due to its fundamental lack of true democratic action. Thus, he stands in opposition to the ‘haters of democracy’, who represent a heterogenous group of voices, that uphold the status quo of limited democratic governance.
Chapter one presents the argument that democracy is perceived as empty by the critics, or ‘haters’ of democracy. Democracy is empty, being an encapsulation of nothing but the people’s ‘limitless desires’. For example, Rancière notes how the haters of democracy think that human rights are the disguised rights of egotistical individuals. One of the Haters’ arguments throughout the 20th century is that without a leader determined either by birth, strength or religion, people’s limitless desires are a threat to the common good. The limitlessness of democratic civilization is blamed for the failure of democracies to create stable states: people follow their wants on a whim, which makes stable governance impossible.
Rancière suggests that this hatred of democracy is not new. In chapter two, he invokes Plato, whose argument against democracy builds the basis for true democracy, according to Rancière. Plato’s idea of good governance relies on the existence of rules that govern the natural world. Of these, six concern people’s “entitlements”: strength, appearance, knowledge, and others. However, the final and the most critical is chance. Plato recognizes that chance is the core component of any government – none can rule without being a little fortunate, which means that each government must continually justify its own existence to the people. This, for Rancière, is key: chance means that any form of governance is fundamentally devoid of any legitimate and final justification, which makes governance inherently political (insofar as people must legitimize its rule). True democracy, then, is “simply the power peculiar to those who have no more entitlements to govern than to submit”. The haters of democracy, in contrary, are those who cannot accept the fundamental baselessness of government and require legitimacy through entitlements.
In chapter 3, Rancière highlights that democracy is not a form of government, nor of society. Instead, democracy is a process that is the exercise of the 7th entitlement: it is the wrestling against other entitlements, “the monopoly of public life from oligarchic governments, and the omnipotence over lives of power of wealth”. He identifies today’s liberal democracies as oligarchies.
In the book’s conclusion, Rancière identifies that fighting against today’s oligarchic governments is necessary. Not only that, it is democracy in action, since democracy is a process.
His final message is one of hope: “Democracy is as bare in its relation to the power of wealth as it is to the power of kinship that today comes to assist and to rival it. It is not based on any nature of things nor guaranteed by any institutional form. It is not borne along by any historical necessity and does not bear any. It is only entrusted to the constancy of its specific acts. This can provoke fear, and so hatred, among those who are used to exercising the magisterium of thought. But among those who know how to share with anybody and everybody the equal power of intelligence, it can conversely inspire courage, and hence joy.”
Personal reflections
What stuck with us from this book is how Rancière’s argument moves beyond political ideology. Democracy, in his opinion, is much broader than this. As Rancière notes in the introduction, the new hatred of democracy borrows arguments from capitalist- and communist ideology alike but does not fall under either of these models. To him, democracy is nothing other than the struggle against oligarchic rule and the power of wealth.
Rural Sociology Wageningen University 