Scholasticism and Politics

CHAPTER IV. DEMOCRACY AND AUTHORITY

CHAPTER IV DEMOCRACY AND AUTHORITY I PRELIMINARIES I know not whether the question to be examined in this chapter presents itself to American opinion in the same way as it does to French opinion. On one hand, the crisis of political ideas is, as is well known, extremely acute in Europe, where democracies have to face both their own internal difficulties and the obstinate opposition of totalitarian propagandas; the latter imagine they offer a better principle without being aware that they are themselves but the fruit of the most morbid elements which afflict modem democracies. Qn the other hand, the very word ofdemocracy covers, in the historical concrete, extremely different realities. In Europe, the Helvetic democracy represents a very genuine democratic type, whose sources go as far back as the Christian middle ages. British Democracy rather appearsso it seems to me-as a singular combination of an aristocracy , whose hierarchies satisfy the people's pride and whose activity serves it, and of a plutocracy, whose appetites have coincided for a long time with the national interest. A vivid sense of personal freedom and of the importance of public opinion are linked in that country with an immense and admirable heritage of antique forms and structures, whose preservation is assured by a sort of plant-like perseverance. French Democracy conceptualizes and disguises in the con- [ 89 ] secrated formulas of an ideology, which corresponds above all to a ritual satisfaction of the mind, psychological and moral realities which have little relation to these formulas: I mean a deeply rooted sense, linked with the peasant's and artisan's life, of the freedom to judge, to criticize, to work according to all the resources of personal ingenuity, and to economize in the same way; virtues ofcivilization, embodied in the very depths of popular life, which constitute a source, perhaps inexhaustible, of human energy, and which accommodate themselves quite well-maybe too wellwith age-old negligences and most apparent disorders; an obstinate opposition against any eventual return to domination of social classes privileged in the past,-an opposition inscribed in the very fibres of collective memory,-which may become implacable, if it feels itself threatened, and whose natural political expression in such a case is Jacobinism . All these traits are combined, on one hand, with the cultural legacy ofthe oldest and most active Christian civilization and with the political heritage ofthe French monarchy and centralized State; and, on the other hand, with the internallogic of the democratic principle, taken in the very special and morbid form which we have inherited chiefly from Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In the Democracy of the United States, I believe that the ideology of the eighteenth century and of Rousseau also plays a certain role, but much less than in France; yet the mental disposition to dislike any human hierarchy can be connected with this ideology. But, I think, it is the ideology of Locke rather than Rousseau which has predominated in the American case. Moreover, in America democracy is based on human realities, wherein the sense of individual freedom, of initiative, of trust in the chance of every man, [90 ] are fundamental. To this profound democratic sense,nourished by the heroic memories of an epic which taught the world how peace can be established on a Continent,corresponds a political constitution, usually recognized as an excellent type of Constitution. Its structure owes little to Rousseau, if I am to believe some Dominican friends of mine that this Constitution has rather some relation to ideas which presided in the Middle Ages at the constitution of St. Dominic's Order. When America criticizes herself, I suspect that she has to deal muchless with thepolitical structure ofher democracy than with the practices ofpoliticians, or with the social and spiritual evils inflicted either by modem capitalism or by the philosophical and religious disorder ofour age. I have begun with these preliminary remarks in order to notify the reader that my exposition will inevitably be set in the perspective of those historical debates with which I am most familiar: debates and conflicts of the old continent. Nevertheless, I shall not concern myself, even in these perspectives , with particular realizations, full of contingent circumstances . My point ofview is rather a philosophical one, and I shall try, therefore, to disengage certain pure forms of the democratic principle, beginning with those I consider false, and ending with one I believe true. One could say of...