Schumpeter on democratic survival

Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy¹, first published in 1942, has been called “the most influential twentieth-century approach to the democratic management of power relations.”² In that text, Schumpeter famously denies that democracy has any intrinsic value. There is no necessary association between democratic government and the values of equality and liberty. Democracy is merely one method of political organization among many. It means nothing more than that “the people have the opportunity of accepting or refusing the men who are to rule them,” via “competitive elections” (CSD, 284-285).

The debate within political theory over Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy has, for the most part, turned on whether Schumpeter’s “minimal” conception of democracy adequately captures what democracy is. Political theorists who advocate thick normative conceptions of democracy, or the value of widespread citizen engagement beyond elections, have generally denied that Schumpeter grasped the character of democratic government.³

On the other hand, scholars who are critical of the normative and participatory accounts of democracy that have flourished since the 1970s are frequently sympathetic to Schumpeter.⁴ Both sides of this debate, however, have failed to adequately explore Schumpeter’s interest in a different and more practical question about democracy: the question of whether it would survive. For Schumpeter, who denied that democracy was intrinsically worthwhile in its own right, the primary test of democracy’s value was whether it could endure as an institutional framework. Can “the democratic process reproduce itself steadily without creating situations that enforce resort to non-democratic means,” Schumpeter asked (CSD, 290)? Are democracies able to “cope with current problems in a way which all interests that count politically find acceptable” (CSD, 290)? The second of two chapters in which Schumpeter introduces his theory of democracy is devoted to answering these questions—which were far from merely academic in 1942. He explores the conditions under which a democracy will last, and examines a range of challenges to the survival of democratic institutions.

While political theorists usually presume that the importance of Schumpeter’s thought lies in his criticisms of normative democratic theory, this paper contends that Schumpeter was equally, if not more, significant as an observer and analyst of modern democratic practice. In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Schumpeter offers a theoretically coherent and unified, but at the same time surprisingly sweeping account of the challenges that democratic institutions must overcome if they are to endure. The basic insight underlying Schumpeter’s account of democratic survival is related to his more famous minimal definition of democracy. “The democratic method” obtains, Schumpeter declared, wherever “individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote” (CSD, 269). I will argue in this paper that in addition to seeing “the competitive struggle for the people’s vote” as the defining characteristic of democratic government, Schumpeter also conceived of that same struggle as the greatest threat to the survival of democratic government. One of Schumpeter’s central arguments, I will demonstrate, is that democracies can survive only if they succeed at moderating and containing the competitive struggle over leadership.

What makes this task so difficult is that democracy, as Schumpeter conceived of it, would not necessarily possess any truly independent constitutional authorities that were able to check and monitor democratic actors competing for power. Ultimately, “there cannot be any legal limit to what a parliament led by the prime minister might subject to its decision” (CSD, 292). In a democracy there exists no figure like Benjamin Constant’s pouvoir neutre.⁵ There is no hereditary monarch whose position is entirely independent of the democratic struggle for power, and who has the authority to police that struggle from the outside.⁶ Democracy often demands of voters and politicians that they police themselves. This introduces a surprising, and frequently overlooked moral element into Schumpeter’s political theory. According to Schumpeter, certain “moral and intellectual” qualities—including moderation, toleration, education, respect for the democratic process, willingness to compromise—are required so that citizens and politicians do not become completely wrapped up in the struggle over leadership. While Schumpeter did...