13.1.1The political power struggle for estimation as a worthy politician – The government’s power to enact concrete policy and its mirroring in democratic public debate – The infection of the universal good with particular interests – Protectionism

The liberal conception of government and the state being a minimal one, law at its pith is concerned with the commutative justice of exchanges and interchanges of all sorts between individuals, and the state is legitimate insofar as it upholds and enforces this core law of individual liberty in its energetic exercise, its ἐνέργεια, in the diverse power plays of daily life. The enforcement of this core of law as in accord with the concept of freedom is a universal interest of all members of society even when it is not a common interest shared by all, for otherwise there would be no interplay of freedom at all. Nevertheless, there is a sundering of particular interests from the universal interest insofar as the state, according to its liberal socio-ontological concept, has to be an unbiased power superior to civil society and its members, and the universal at its core concerns the sacrosanct forms of individual freedom in interplay without favour to particular persons with their particular interests.

Despite its higher, universal status, the state itself is nevertheless composed of individual office-holders, each of whom wields some power in the name of the state in accordance with the position he or she holds and each of whom has particular self-interests, including especially ambitions to be estimated as somewho with standing. The actualization of law requires, at the very minimum, a legislature (controlled by a government composed of politicians who may also be ministers or the head of government), to formulate and promulgate law, a judicature to judge what is right and interpret the law in the context of the particular cases that arise, and a police force to bring those who have done wrong to justice. Furthermore, to enforce law, the state requires resources to carry out its tasks and therefore must raise taxes, for which it, in turn, requires a bureaucratic taxation apparatus administered according to administrative laws.

The fundamental concept of democracy is that those who are ruled by such an organized apparatus of state in which there is a multitude of individuals wielding power in a hierarchy are, in turn, also able to exercise political power, in elections, over who concretely are empowered to hold office and wield state power. The superior power of the state is thus to be returned to the people ruled by that state, so completing the circle of social power and insofar healing the diremption of the universal instance of society from the particularity of the many members of civil society through real, practised, constitutionally guaranteed, institutional mediation. The submission of the members of civil society to the state is to be complemented, compensated and mitigated by the governing, policy-making agents of the state (the politicians) intermittently having to submit themselves, in turn, to estimative validation by the people in a process of electoral estimation as to whether they are worthy to hold such an office. The ambitious politician’s aim is to wield political power, but at the same time, also to be estimated and esteemed as somewho, and such esteemed who-status is enabled by the who in question presenting him- or herself as an embodiment of the universal and not merely of particular interests.

But in this returning of power from the universal instances to civil society in its rivalrous diversity of particular interests, particularity itself does not remain unaffected. The members of society as having a say in and therefore also partly responsible for the universal affairs of state, i.e. in politics, are citizens, each with his or her own singular view of the universal good in which view the mere particularity of self-interest that does not have the whole in view, is supposed to be stripped off by the mediation of singularity, thus raising it to universality. In this way, too, universality “climbs down” (heruntersteigt255) into reality, thus becoming embodied in real, living individuals. Such closing together of particular interests with the universal interest through the mediation of a singular perspective on the universal good corresponds formally to the schema of the con-clusion called the “second figure” in Hegel’s Logik, Particularity— Singularity—Universality or P—S—U.

Hegel writes with respect to particularity in this schema of conclusion, “the particular is not the universal unmediatedly and in-and-for-itself, but rather, the negative unity [of singularity ME] strips off its [particularity’s ME] determinacy and raises it thus into universality” ([...] ist das Besondere [...] nicht unmittelbar und an und für sich das Allgemeine, sondern die negative Einheit [der Einzelheit ME] streift ihm die Bestimmtheit ab und erhebt es dadurch in die Allgemeinheit, LII W6:366). Such singularity is indeed a closing together of the rift between particularity and universality, but it remains irremediably plural because the concept of freedom corresponds further, at least in its formal schema, to the “con-clusion of induction” in Hegel’s Logik (LII W6:384), in which not only singularity as such mediates between the extremes of particularity and universality, but in this case, “all singularities” (alle Einzelnen, W6:385), or a countless plurality of more or less nuanced, singular conceptions of the universal good (a multiplicity of ‘truth’) remain in play as an estimative power interplay from which emerges only a provisional, temporary, singular version of universal well-being as a compromise — in a given conjuncture of a present at which the two temporal dimensions of absence, beenness (or yesterness) and future abut — among all the various players in the political power play, including citizens, politicians, political parties, heads of government and state, etc.

Democracy is rule of the people by the people in the sense that each citizen at least has the power to vote, i.e. to give his or her voice, in periodical elections that choose those who are to hold office in the superior, governing power. Insofar, the democratic form of government corresponds to the concept of freedom, being an extension of the power interplay of civil society into another dimension of social power, viz. the political power play over who is to hold and wield state-governing power. Just as each individual member of civil society is free to enter the fray in civil society, exercising its abilities to do well in the competitive interplay, so too, each individual citizen has the right to be a player in the political power struggle over who is to govern, either as a voter or as a candidate for election.

The politicians who vie for state power as democratically elected representatives exercise above all their rhetorical powers in the political power struggle. To be a successful politician, an individual must possess and wield rhetorical potency, not only to win election but also to exercise power in government, for all political interplay requires rhetorical competence in persuading and winning trust. Such rhetorical powers, no matter whether they be cheap or sophisticated, populist or soberly reasoned, demagogic or dialogic, are those of engendering trust in others, of winning people over by showing oneself off in a winning way, of gaining estimation by the electorate as someone worthy of holding public political office. That the political power play takes place especially in the medium of rhetorical power corresponds thoroughly with the concept of human freedom for, in rhetoric, it is a matter of winning people over with words, thus addressing them as free beings who are not merely manipulable things. This remains the case, despite the endless possibilities of employing bad, manipulative, ‘populist’ political rhetoric that appeals to the people’s baser instincts and interests, its floating, inarticulate anxieties and resentments, flatters it or caters to its urge to rid itself of its freedom for the sake of security under the strong hand of a ruler.

As shown in Chapter 10.2, it is above all who is speaking that carries most weight in a rhetorical situation, persuading and winning people over with a charisma that transports mood-swaying rhetorical arguments. Conversely, however, as who a politician is regarded is always also who he or she is held to be in the mirror of opininated estimation by the others, in this case, the electorate. A democratic politician’s who-standing is thus the reflection back and forth between rhetorical powers and their estimation by the electorate, and a politician only becomes who she or he is through this ongoing mirroring process of estimation. The political power struggle thus assumes the phenomenal form of politicians’ struggles to be estimated as somewho with the competence to govern for the universal good. This contrasts with the economic interplay in civil society in which it is individuals’ abilities of all the countless kinds, and not especially rhetorical abilities, that are evaluated in the mirror process of valuation and which lend individuals their status as somewho. Neither do the players in the gainful game have to present themselves as embodiments of the universal, but only as particular, competent, successful players.

Because elected politicians are validated as holders of political power through a process of electoral estimation, this provides them also with affirming legitimacy since the political power they then wield is mirrored as legitimate by the electorate, including even by those who did not vote for them. Just as the economic and other social interplay in civil society must take place according to rules of fair play formulated in law, so too must the democratic political power struggle proceed according to fair rules of political power play as enshrined in the constitution, whether written or unwritten. The democratic form of government therefore has a very high degree of legitimacy because the politicians holding political power are validated as such through the mirroring process of electoral estimation and according to rules of play that are constitutionally secured and acknowledged by society as fair. The freedom of the individual in sociating power interplay is mediated, more or less circuitously through democratic institutions, with state political power, and this cannot be claimed for any other form of government. If citizens are to affirm being governed at all, they can affirm being governed by their freely and fairly elected representatives. At the same time, the power struggle of democratic government is never-ending, being as it is a constant, ongoing struggle, mediated especially through the public media, for validation by the electorate.

State power is never limited to realizing the rule of law in its core sense of upholding the rights of personhood, which is the minimal, liberal conception of state. The state as superior instance of social power governs also in the sense that it posits and pursues myriad concrete purposes that are conceived to be for the universal or general good, including laying down the rules of interplay that are considered fair, the conception of fairness, as an ethical practice, being itself a component part of the universal good. Even though the state promulgates what it calls laws also to realize specific purposes it has posited, this has nothing to do with law in its originary sense as upholding the fairness of power interplay in civil society. Apart from administrative laws covering the running of its own apparatuses in all their myriad detail, there are laws positing the state’s will to provide certain universal services to society (e.g. education, healthcare, roads, water supply) or its will to pursue a certain policy in a matter concerning society as a whole (e.g. immigration, support for the family as a social institution, economic development, energy, new technologies, war and peace). State services provided to society as part of its indispensable infrastructure are nothing essential to the state’s role but depend entirely on pragmatic considerations, the main one being whether it is possible for the market economy to provide the same service at all or more efficiently. State service-provision is mainly a matter for corporations in the old sense of the term as corporate bodies, mostly on a regional or local level, charged with efficiently providing services to citizens such as street lighting, street cleaning, garbage disposal, electricity, communications infrastructure and mail delivery.

The ever-changing complexion of the market economy may make it pragmatically more feasible and more cost-efficient to allow private enterprise to take over the task of providing services deemed to be essential, especially since state-owned enterprises are invariably monopolies. There is nothing essentially ‘state-like’ about essential services, and the state needs to act like an efficient enterprise in providing them, which is hindered when state enterprises are not subjected to both the competitive discipline of the markets and the discipline of fulfilling the fundamental condition of a circuit of capital, namely, that of augmenting, or at least not losing, value in its movement through its circuit. Because they are removed from the discipline of the competitive value-interplay on markets, state enterprises ‘naturally’ tend at least toward inertia and invariably also toward a gross abuse of monopoly powers, and also inefficiency, and it is difficult for the electorate, through multiple mediations, to wield any political power over them.

Government is usually meant to cover the state’s will in acting concretely to pursue certain policies claimed to be for the public good. Democracy accordingly also goes beyond determining by elections simply who is to wield state power as the agency enforcing the rule of law to cover also, and most importantly, choosing those who are to govern as policy-makers of concrete policies formulated in terms of the general social good. The citizens want to have a say in how society is to be shaped in the name of the well-being of the social whole. Citizens have their say on public issues in the public sphere in which communication media for the expression of public opinion arise. What citizens of all kinds, from laypersons to professional political commentators, say in their exercise of freedom of speech is a major form of mirroring to the government its legitimacy or lack thereof as a holder and wielder of superior political power for the sake of the universal. As has been shown in Chapter 10, all social power, and especially political power, is a process of estimation. The media are media for circulating the public word and, more than ever, the public image that, above all, presents publicly influential whos as who they present themselves to be.

The democratic election of government therefore turns not so much upon the rule of law, which, at least in established Western democracies, is taken for granted as a basic given and protected by the constitution, but more upon how the state is to exercise its superior powers in realizing its concrete will in accordance with government policy, what Hayek calls “governmental measures” rather than “legislation”. (Hayek LLL3:27) Election of government thus becomes a contest among different, concretely formulated conceptions of universal social well-being, this contest being organized in political parties, and also politicians as the ‘personifications’ of certain policies or kinds of policy. The citizens as voters are supposed to vote in accordance with their evaluation of the policies proposed for the well-being of society covering the gamut of political issues vibrant in a given conjuncture. This means that they must, or rather ought to (in order to correspond to the concept of citizen) raise themselves above the standpoints of their own merely particular self-interests to adopt a universal viewpoint on the good of society as a whole. ‘Pork barrel’ politics that play out by pandering to particular interests in sectors of electorate damage the legitimacy of democracy per se as a form of government.

The political debates in the media, therefore, to be taken seriously, must raise themselves to the level of a concern with the universal interest, and a political standpoint can be devalued by showing in debate that it is nothing more than a thinly veiled strategy to pursue naked, individual or collective self-interest. The citizen, the politician and the statesman, as singular embodiments of the universal, must be seen to be, i.e. estimated as, above mere particularity of interests, whether it be merely their own self-interests or the particular interests of a sector of society, if they are to be acknowledged as who they pretend to be. On the other hand, any concrete policy at all that is adopted, pursued and implemented by a government, no matter how ‘purely’ it has been conceived with a view to the universal good, unavoidably also has concrete effects, both favourable and unfavourable, on particular interests in society, and therefore the universal interest and particular interests inevitably commingle. This is the ground for political parties that cater to one part of the electorate rather than another and thus have their clientele. Such political parties, in turn, are then criticized for their clientele politics that are claimed to be clearly not for the universal good.

The diremption between particular interests and universal interests — which from one perspective could be regarded as a healthy separation of particularity from the universal — is thus, on the one hand, transported back into the democratic citizen-voter’s way of thinking, and, on the other, the supposedly universal subject, the state, becomes re-infected with particularity; the election of government becomes a power struggle also among particular interests within civil society, and the work of government becomes a bargaining process of reaching ‘workable’ political compromises in which particular sectoral interests of society are either furthered or thwarted or appeased or kept in balance. The conception of the universal social good becomes the ongoing, provisional, muddled, patchwork result of the formation of majorities based on the partial satisfaction of particular sectoral interests and lobbies and ‘pork barrel’ politics, and not only on genuine, broad consensus in society on specific issues affecting the general well-being. Those who wield power and formulate the government’s policy — the politicians — are themselves subject to the democratic election process and have to tailor policy and even their law-making to particular sectoral interests in a kind of political electoral calculus if they are to be re-elected. Legislated law itself thus become infected with particular interests and the political power struggle among particular sectoral interests. In this way, such legislated law itself is delegitimized.

A well-known, ‘classical’ instance of such infection with particular interests — there are countless others with scarcely imaginable variations — is the protection that the government provides to certain industries through legislated trade barriers and the concomitant establishment of monopolies or near-monopolies by law, thus systematically biasing the competitive economic interplay to favour certain sectoral interests. Against this Adam Smith advises, “The legislature, were it possible that its deliberations could be always directed, not by the clamorous importunity of partial interests [a way of saying ‘lobbying’ ME], but by an extensive view of the general good [the true function of government], ought upon this very account, perhaps, to be particularly careful neither to establish any new monopolies of this kind, nor to extend further those which are already established.”256 What is said here concerning monopolies applies equally well to all legislation that comes about through lobbying by vested interests, allowing them to become entrenched and ensconced behind established positive law. Only insofar as a lobby puts forward proposals that can truly be regarded as contributing to the universal good can it be regarded as having raised itself above its merely particular self-interests.

13.1.2The tendential danger of the dissolution of freedom in merely democratically mediated, state-posited will – The erosion of the freedom of interplay through the sham universal of redistributive social justice – Constitutional law as a bulwark against merely positive law

The state’s primary raison d’être — upholding the fair, mutually estimative power interplay of individual freedom through the rule of law — tends to be taken for granted, is ‘forgotten’ and fades into the background in favour of the struggle over the assertion especially of material interests of sections of society through the formation of majorities in the democratic electoral process. In overstepping the bounds of preserving the abstract, formal freedoms of personhood, the state even becomes the battleground for fighting over differing conceptions of the accepted mores in society based upon the customary usages within which various sections of society live ethically. With this step, the state enters the hazardous domain of morality and its Ought, making incursions even into the private sphere which is private above all in the sense of being a refuge from society and its social pressures of public opinion to which ‘people’ are susceptible and to which, more often than not, they cave in. Any politicized ethical issue concerns also a political power struggle over where the limits of the private sphere are to be inscribed, and where these limits are drawn at any time is a reflection of the evolving ethical usages within which a people lives.

Such ethical usages can only evolve because they are simultaneously lived ways of thinking in preontological preconceptions, and therefore always exposed potentially to the freedom of thoughtful questioning. The state as the superior power that stands above the many powers of self-interested individuals in estimative exchange and interchange with one another in order to uphold the rule of law, is no longer impartial and aloof, but itself acts and governs according to the power struggle among diverse particular sectoral interests and moral convictions about how ‘people’ ought to live into which, through electoral considerations of government, it is inevitably drawn. Not only does abstractly private, individual freedom of the person fade as the state’s primary concern, but individual freedom itself is curtailed by the government’s positive, concrete, substantive, social policy measures that are legitimated and enforced by laws passed by the legislature. These laws are not law in the originary sense, but positive law posited and enforced by state will. Legitimacy is no longer a matter of laws conforming to the originary, ‘natural right’ requirements of justice as fairness, i.e. the commutative justice of individuals in power interplay with one another, but is conferred by legislation being enacted and promulgated in accordance merely with formal democratic procedures. The democratically elected government is empowered and legitimated to pass legislation according to its posited conception of the general good and social ‘values’ as expressed in strongly held convictions, especially moral and religious convictions, about how ‘people’ should live.

Law thus becomes a matter not of justice as fair play, but of will — the government’s will and, mediated through the democratic election process, the people’s opinionated will. Freedom itself comes to be understood as government of the democratically mediated will of the people as posited by the democratically elected government, thus becoming arbitrary, i.e. lacking inner criteria, since the people’s will itself is only a moodfully shifting, vacillating, motley composite of majorities formed ad hoc through power struggles on various issues that also affect and are driven by particular sectoral interests and opinionated convictions. ‘Just’ and ‘democratic’ become synonyms, just as ‘freedom’ becomes synonymous with the formal procedures of the political electoral struggles of democracy as laid down by the constitution. ‘Justice’, ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ become interchangeable terms, with ‘democracy’, as a vague notion of the majority rule of the people’s opinionated will encompassing its diverse moral and social opinions, enjoying the hegemonic position in this triangle.

Freedom is then equated with the ‘people’s will’ as expressed through the democratic process, and thus becomes a matter of the contingency of changing majorities. The only protection against such contingency and arbitrariness is the constitution which, however, itself is partially exposed to merely posited will. Even the constitution itself becomes partly the object of democratic will and political power plays through referendums or qualified majorities in parliamentary votes. The constitution nonetheless serves as a bulwark against the arbitrariness and vacillations of politically posited will by enshrining those freedoms which a people holds dear and which have become ethical second nature for it. The constitution can only continue to serve as a shrine for freedom for as long as a people genuinely does hold its freedom dear and has a preontological conception of it that accords with its deeper-lying socio-ontological structure as investigated throughout the present inquiry.

Furthermore, as investigated in Chapter 6.5 and Chapter 9.7ff, in ‘progressive’ Western societies, the very conception of universal well-being or the general good of society which is concretized in the state’s concrete, willed policy of action increasingly becomes interchangeable with a notion of social justice, and the state’s power and its role increasingly become that of positively redistributing the wealth created by society rather then ensuring merely its fair commutatio or interchange in power plays of all kinds. The results of wealth creation and allocation that come about through the (often bruising) interplay of economic market competition (a ‘value game’) increasingly become revised by superior state power in the name of redistributive social justice, solidarity and social security. This does not by any means imply that self-interest in its particularity has been overcome in favour of a more ‘universal’, ‘social’ ‘model’, but merely that the power play that is competitive, economic interplay has shifted to the power play that is politics in which the terms of reference are conceptions of the social good intermingled with sectoral self-interests, especially those of the weaker players in the economic power play who exert their mass egoism in the name of (merely redistributive) social justice.

The market interplay mediated by reified value becomes progressively eroded, displaced or overridden by the medium of the political power game as the element through which social wealth is distributed and redistributed in the name of democratically formulated, concrete conceptions of the social good to be implemented through the government’s empowered will. This means that the state’s policies, the concrete, and therefore particular, policy aims it posits and pursues, have all the more impact on the particular self-interests of various groups in society and therefore, in turn, the democratically elected government itself increasingly becomes the target of lobbying activity of the particular interests of organized social groups. Any change at all in government policy will adversely affect vested interests of some sector or other of the populace, so that any policy change at all, because it is particular rather than universal, will carry with it a political risk for the elected government of the day, namely, a risk of losing votes at the next election. Government policies nominally for the universal good become increasingly infected by considerations of the political power game of staying in office by catering to particular interests. Policies introduced in the name of solidarity and social justice (with its sham ‘universal’ status) become entrenched by having sectoral, vested self-interests ensconced behind them, resulting often in the immovability of a political gridlock, which is the price paid for ensuring social security vis-à-vis the demands of having to adapt to the rough-and-tumble of competitive power interplay in civil society’s gainful game in which agility is called for. The gainful game, however, nevertheless makes itself felt despite a protective wall of social security because its own competitivity is impaired, resulting, above all, in unemployement.

Individual freedoms in their sociating interplay can only be preserved if a part of law — namely, the constitution — enshrines individual rights and puts a constitutional limit upon what the government can posit as positive law. This possibility — that a law posited by the state in legislative procedure can be deemed to be unconstitutional and therefore unlawful — indicates that law and justice cannot be identified with positive law and the expression of the state’s (or, more precisely, the democratically elected government’s) will. A part of the state — namely, the constitutional or supreme court — must be given independence to decide whether the state’s own posited law contravenes constitutionally guaranteed individual rights. This court has power that overrides the elected government’s power to posit law by will. The superior universal subject is thus once again itself divided in its power, and this is in accordance with the concept of freedom itself, which, due to its inherent plurality, abhors oneness.

Furthermore, an attempt to undo the commingling of universal and particular interests in the administration of justice is made by separating the state’s legislative organ from the judiciary. The division of state powers becomes a crucial means of weakening absolute state power in favour of preserving the core rule of law, whose task is to protect individual citizens in who they are and what they have and also the mutually estimating interchange-metabolism of civil society. Absolutist democracy, conceived as the (compromising) will of majorities formed in competitive electoral procedures, is clipped and held in check by constitutional guarantees of individual freedom conceived as the wedding of the moments of singularity and universality in the socio-ontological concept of freedom as a kind of social movement sui generis. These constitutional guarantees of individual freedom, however, only remain effective for as long as there really are free individuals who are prepared to struggle for the preservation of the power play of individual freedom, because the erosion of freedom resides as an inexorable tendency within the concept of will itself, namely, the will to assert oneself against the other in the incessant power play that is social living. Such a will can seek security rather than facing the challenges of free interplay.

With the advent of representative democracy as a way of completing the circle of power between the governing state and its governed people by giving the people the power to elect those who are to hold office in the state and govern, the state itself more than ever loses its status as a universal instance standing above civil society and itself becomes sorely infected with the particularity of self-interests which are not just those of its office-holders, but, above all, of sectors of the population with their mass will, their own particular self-interests and singular (social, moral, religious, etc.) opinionated convictions who exercise influence on government through the democratic vote. This degeneration could rightly be regarded, in part, as a moral failing of ‘human nature’ to raise itself above mere self-interest and idiosyncratic opinion to adopt the genuinely universal political standpoint of the well-being of society as a whole, but it has also a deeper, socio-ontological ground. The unity of the universal good has the inherent tendency to break down into the particularity of self-interests and also to splinter into a plurality of firmly held, singular views on ethical life that jostle against one another in the political power play. The more fundamental problem of democracy as a form government is that it tends to become understood merely as the freedom of the empirical will as formed in the ongoing power struggles over majorities, and not as freedom in its deeper socio-ontological dignity, according to which, in a basic, inviolable sense, that the free individual in fair, mutually estimative power interplay can never be ‘outvoted’ by a majority of whatever kind.

13.1.3Schumpeter’s competition theory of democracy – The democratic We not merely a summation of individual wills – The legitimacy of democratically elected government – The vacillating vagaries of democratic electoral power struggles – The necessary universality of the democratic vote

At the other end of the spectrum to Hegel’s sublime characterization of the state as owing its existence to “God walking in the world” (der Gang Gottes in der Welt, RPh. § 258 Add.), which is insofar truly a universal instance, we can also learn something from Joseph A. Schumpeter’s theory of democracy in his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1975; cf. Chapter 6.3.2). At least in part it could be described as a pragmatic, realistic and down-to-earth, explanatory account with a touch of worldly-wise cynicism. As such, Schumpeter, although lacking speculative, socio-ontological insight, fulfils Aristotle’s criterion of being experienced in life as a precondition for having something worth hearing to say about the political realm.

Here the focus is on a particular form of government, namely, modern, representative democracy, which is also proclaimed by many to be the freest form of government on the basis of some pre-ontological conception of freedom or other. Schumpeter takes issue in Chapter XXI The Classical Doctrine of Democracy with the eighteenth century Enlightenment notion of “the democratic method” as “that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions which realizes the common good by making the people itself decide issues through the election of individuals who are to assemble in order to carry out its will” (CSD. p. 250). Schumpeter questions the very notion of the “common good” and a “common will of the people”:

There is [...] no such thing as a uniquely determined common good that all people could agree on or be made to agree on by the force of rational argument. [...] [T]o different individuals and groups the common good is bound to mean different things. This fact [...] will introduce rifts on questions of principle which cannot be reconciled by rational argument because ultimate values [...] are beyond the range of mere logic. / [...] [T]hough a common will or public opinion of some sort may still be said to emerge from the infinitely complex jumble of individual and group-wise situations, volitions, influences, actions and reactions of the ‘democratic process’, the result lacks not only rational unity but also rational sanction. [...] In particular, we still remain under the practical necessity of attributing to the will of the individual an independence and a rational quality that are altogether unrealistic. (CSD. p. 251, 253)

The above selection of quotes, with its emphasis on so-called rationality, does not pretend to amount to a comprehensive retelling of all of Schumpeter’s objections to what he regards as the classical Enlightenment theory of democracy that rests on rationalist assumptions, but it does provide the flavour of Schumpeter’s qualms. He cannot discover the “common good” and the “will of the people” in “the democratic method”, no matter how these entities are conceived, whether it be in a utilitarian way or otherwise. This agrees with my observation above that “the people’s will itself is only a motley composite of majorities formed through power struggles on various issues that also affect and are driven by particular, sectoral interests”.

Schumpeter’s critique, however, is weakened by its assumption that the “common good” and the “will of the people” are rational entities that have to be known and willed by rational and independent individual minds attaining agreement. One should note first of all that Schumpeter’s use of the word “rational” has nothing to do with Hegel’s use of the term “reason”. Hegel would call Schumpeter’s rationality “Räsonieren”, i.e. mere understanding or mere pro-and-con, expatiating reasoning (freed of ‘irrational’ emotion), for it has no speculative, i.e. socio-ontological insight whatever into freedom as a kind (εἶδος, ‘look’) of movement sui generis. We will have to consider the alternative that these peculiar collective entities, the “common good” and the “will of the people”, are not collective at all and come about indirectly (vermittelt) behind the backs of individuals’ striving and willing, i.e. that a ‘we’ is constituted (cf. Chapter 11 and the previous section) by way of mediation (Vermittlung) through the democratic procedure that is not merely a summation of wills, just as in civil society a ‘we’ is constituted in contract that is an elevating Aufheben of two merely individual wills to a contractual will that is neither the one will nor the other nor their ‘rational’ sum.

Moreover, if reason is thought in its ontological depth, the realization of reason then lies precisely in the affirmation of freedom as power interplay that is immanent in the democratic procedure. For the moment I shall concentrate on the simple, stripped-down, alternative understanding of democratic government which Schumpeter offers. He proceeds to investigate democratic government in Chapter XXII Another Theory of Democracy by restricting himself to a definition of “democratic method” as

that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote. (CSD. p. 269)

This is paraphrased also as democracy’s being a system for “the elector’s vote [...] to produce government” (CSD: 273) including “evicting it” (CSD:272), thus bringing about “acceptance of leadership” (CSD:272). Democracy is a “competitive struggle for power and office” (CSD:282), a “competitive struggle for political power” (CSD:283), a “competitive struggle for political leadership” (CSD:293), “free competition among would-be leaders for the vote of the electorate” (CSD:285). This definition presupposes that democratic governments are elected governments but, as already stated, it aims to avoid the pitfalls of the so-called classical doctrine of democracy, which purportedly asserts that the government must be a rational, collective expression of the will of the people, by restricting the people’s power and role to simply electing those leaders who will wield government power for a certain term. Schumpeter does not hesitate to set this definition of the democratic method into relation with “the concept of competition in the economic sphere, with which it may be usefully compared” (CSD:271) — and which, we may add, in adhering to the rules of market interplay, results in the (abstract-universal) reified value of goods and services and thus, indirectly, the mutually estimative valuing of people’s abilities. The competitive struggle for political power is above all among candidates for leadership of government as whos with a certain estimated standing, and the people elects, either directly or indirectly, the leader who is to lead the government (and hence the state) rather than a representative of the will of the people which, Schumpeter argues, cannot be said to come to expression in elections based on majorities, no matter whether the electoral system is designed along the lines of simple majorities or of some more elaborate scheme such as proportional representation that is supposed to better reflect the profile of what sections of the population want.

The outcome of a democratic election as an estimating power interplay among various candidates for office can be regarded as a will of the electorate, but not as a collective will, i.e. the aggregated will of a heap of individual voters. Rather, the electorate itself is constituted already beforehand as a kind of we by the rules of power play for the election, so that the majority election outcome is per se the will of the electorate, i.e. an electoral We.

Such a theory of democratic government as exemplified by Schumpeter’s theory of a competition for power to rule the country shows that it is based on the viewpoints, convictions and interests of an electorate composed of human beings with finite understanding and preconceptions, and not infinite, speculative reason with its insight into the ontological concept, nor even necessarily with a sound appreciation of the universal interests of society, its general good. However, as I have cited above, just as Hegel claims that “it is not necessary that those governing have the idea.” (Es ist nicht nötig, daß die Regierenden die Idee haben. G.W.F. Hegel VGPII W19:34), it also holds true that the voters do not have to have speculative, ontological insight. We also have to consider whether or in what way or to what extent it is necessary for the voters to raise themselves above their merely “particular purposes” (besondere Zwecke, W19:34). The standpoints adopted by individual voters are not necessarily merely aligned narrowly with self-interest, but they are based also on ‘universal’ opinions of how individuals firmly hold the world to be in its truth, or, above all, how it ought to be.

Schumpeter is at pains to emphasize that i) these opinions are open to being swayed by “psycho-technics” (CSD:264) akin to “advertising and other methods of persuasion” (CSD:257) so that “what we are confronted with in the analysis of political processes is largely not a genuine but a manufactured will” (CSD:263), and ii) in political issues of moment, the individual lacks a “pungent sense of reality” (William James, cited CSD:261) and most often “expends less disciplined effort on mastering a political problem than [...] on a game of bridge.” (CSD:261) The individual’s opined truth concerns not only the individual’s self-interest, but usually also what the individual holds to be the best course for the general well-being of society, including the preservation of the valued ways of living practised in that society, in short, its ‘values’ or basic convictions about how to live ethically. The view held about the general well-being of society — and how voters accordingly act in elections — is, of course, not entirely divorced from or incongruent with self-interest, but it nevertheless exceeds the horizon of narrow self-interest.

Even if, especially after Heidegger’s questioning of the ontotheological structure of metaphysical thinking and his insistence on the finitude of human being itself, the state cannot be regarded as owing its existence to “God walking in the world” (der Gang Gottes in der Welt, RPh. § 258 Add.) — a view which Schumpeter would dismiss contemptuously as metaphysical make-believe —, the following thought of Hegel’s deserves further pondering with a view to a possible secular, metaphysical translation: “Actions are undertaken according to general/universal thoughts on what is lawful, ethical, pleasing to God; the idea is realized thus, but by mixing thoughts, concepts with immediate particular purposes.” (Es wird nach allgemeinen Gedanken des Rechts, Sittlichen, Gottgefälligen gehandelt; die Idee wird so verwirklicht, aber durch Vermischung von Gedanken, Begriffen mit unmittelbaren partikulären Zwecken. Hegel VGPII W19:34) The Hegelian Idea is nothing other than another name for the ‘look’ of the beingness of beings, thought by Plato as the ἰδέα that is seen ( ἰδεῖν) by the speculative eye.

People do not act with an (explicit) insight into the beingness of beings, even though they are intimately acquainted with and (implicitly) always already understand the beingness of beings, including the freedom of human being as a kind of freedom of movement in power interplay. Hegel’s terms for explicit and implicit are für sich (καθ’ αὑτό) and an sich, respectively. Philosophical thinking is the endeavour to raise the implicit, pre-ontological understanding of the beingness of beings, without which a human could not be a human being, to explicit ontological insight or reason. The beingness of beings itself, however, takes shape nonetheless in history mediated also through the actions of people being led mainly by their restricted particular interests but within certain accepted ethical usages that, in the present context, are customary rules of power play. Beings show up and take shape in a world as what (and who) they are not through directly intentional human agency, but human individuals undertake their actions and shape their lives according also to what they glean in their preconceptions of how the beingness of beings is shaping up in an historical world. What does this realization of the idea, i.e. the coming to presence of a Gestalt, a cast of the beingness of beings, in history have to do with the democratically governed state and electoral struggle?

The democratic procedure provides for the opinions held by eligible voters determining by way of majorities of votes cast who is to gain legitimate power to govern for a given term. The institutional, constitutional set-up within which the competitive democratic procedure takes place as an estimative power struggle is itself accepted and validated a priori as a given ethical form of social movement that lends legitimacy to the outcome of the struggle. That is, the people accepts the government it has elected if constitutionally proper, fair democratic procedure is adhered to, and the election is regarded as being an expression of the will of the people precisely because free and fair elections are a mode and rite of freedom itself in its ontological dignity as a social power interplay.

The constitutionally enshrined rules of power play for the democratic election of government is a Gestalt of the We of a people. The issues on which an election is fought are those concerning both particular interests and general or ‘universal’ issues affecting the whole of the community or nation, including what the electorate holds dear as the nation’s heritage, customary societal values and what role the nation is to play on the world stage. What becomes an election issue depends to a large extent on what those fighting to be elected through a kind of “process of estimation” choose to make into an issue, but also on what moves and concerns the electorate at a given time, in conjunction with what the mass media generate by way of issues, along with contingent events in the world that impact the electorate’s fickle mood and can be taken up rhetorically by candidates to influence (including manipulate) voters. The election issues are presented and debated within the terms and horizon of eligible voters, i.e. within a sphere of finite understanding of largely practical issues, issues concerned with proposed courses of action to be formulated as government policy by the victorious political party, the bigness of government as expressed through taxation levels, social services, etc. etc.

The outcome of an election depends in part on the momentary mood of the electorate, especially of undecided or ‘swing’ voters, even on election day itself, which ultimately determines the majorities in the various electorates. This is analogous to how a product offered for sale fares on the markets and it is no coincidence that — as Schumpeter does — political elections are often compared with the purchase of products, where the dollars spent by individual consumers are regarded as the equivalent of votes cast by individual eligible voters. Schumpeter even condones and underscores this analogy between votes and the prices paid for commercial commodities when he approvingly cites a politician who remains anonymous, “What businessmen do not understand is that exactly as they are dealing in oil so I am dealing in votes.” (CSD. p. 285) The democratic political struggle for power in the state is a struggle of politicians to be estimated and validated in their who-status as worthy representatives of the people, where individual votes of the electors function like dollars in the market-place which estimate the value of products offered for sale.

Like the market-place, therefore, democratic elections are very much exposed to contingency (after all, it is a fathomless power interplay), especially in the guise of the voters’ arbitrary whims and opinions, and how these can be rhetorically influenced, swayed, wooed and manipulated by election campaigners through the various mass media which do not refrain from stooping to every possible tactic for flattering or scaring the electoral masses. And the analogy does not end there. Just as market-place interplay continually brings about value as an ongoing, ever-changing result, something that exceeds anything individuals as such can ‘subjectively’ posit, so too do democratic elections as an ethical practice bring about a will of the people as a Gestalt of the universal We that is more than a mere quantitative majority of votes dependent upon all sorts of contingent factors, including even the weather. The result of the democratic electoral process is a universal with its own dignity that is neither merely the sum of individual votes nor an outcome of mass individual rationality, but the culmination of an ethical, i.e. customary, practice sanctioned and legitimated and thus accepted as being in accord with freedom, just as the final score in a football match has its own status as a kind of universal acknowledged as such as long as it has been arrived at according to fair rules of play.

Already Plato, in discussing democracy in his Republic, points out that the democratic polity (πολιτεία) takes the question of the origins, ambitions and particular qualities of someone standing for election too lightly, “but instead esteems someone already when they merely say that they mean well with the people” (ἀλλὰ τιμᾷ, ἐὰν φῇ μόνον εὔνους εἶναι τῷ πλήθει; Rep. 558c). This characteristic of democracy of being easily swayable and exposed to all kinds of rhetorical flattery (and scare-tactics, a kind of negative flattery) is echoed down through Western history to modern times when, for instance, Schumpeter writes in the twentieth century with regard to the “classical doctrine of democracy” that “politicians appreciate a phraseology that flatters the masses and offers an excellent opportunity not only for evading responsibility but also for crushing opponents in the name of the people”. (Schumpeter CSD. p. 268)

And Herbert Spencer writes in the nineteenth century with regard to politicians, “Each seeks popularity by promising more than his opponent has promised. [...] [W]hoever seeks their votes must at least refrain from exposing their [mass voters who “nurture sanguine anticipations of benefits to be obtained”] mistaken beliefs; [...] [S]uch hopes [of benefits provided by the state] are ministered to by candidates for public choice, to augment their chances of success” and, with regard to “journalists, always chary of saying that which is distasteful to their readers”, he writes that “journalism, ever responsive to popular opinion, daily strengthens it by giving it voice; while counter-opinion, more and more discouraged, finds little utterance.”257 Today, the same could be said in general of the mass media which invariably frame all questions concerning all the ‘burning issues’ of the day in terms of how ‘we’ — the constantly invoked fake we that the media are chary to offend — are to deal with them, what ‘we think’, what ‘we want’, etc. The “promising more” addressed by Spencer conforms precisely with the endless striving to have more (πλεονεξία) discussed in Chapter 4.1 which accounts also for the state’s finances being perpetually stretched to the limit and the state’s tendency to mount up public debt to satisfy the electorate’s endless desire for more.

“Meaning well with the people” is another way of saying that those vieing for political power must flatter the electorate in an attempt to sway how it exercises its voting power on election day. Democracy is accordingly for Plato “a pleasant, anarchic, motley polity, distributing a certain equality to those who are equal and those who are unequal alike” (ἡδεῖα πολιτεία καὶ ἄναρχος καὶ ποικίλη, ἰσότητά τινα ὁμοίως ἴσοις τε καὶ ἀνίσοις διανέμουσα; Rep. 558c). In a democracy, every adult is given a vote without prejudging and sifting out those who deserve a vote from those who do not deserve one. To make such a distinction would presuppose a criterion of ‘just desert’ and also a power superior to the people — perhaps an elite section of the population — empowered with selecting an eligible electorate. But such a preselecting power is intolerable for democracy, which has to be an open slather, market-place competition for gaining political power to govern a people without already allotting beforehand a preselecting power to some kind of elite that will inevitably select in its own interests.

The formal equality of all voters in a democracy corresponds to the deeper equality residing in the abstract character of free, formal personhood that does not tolerate the inscription of any concrete determination into personhood. Good governance and leadership of a country, if they are to emerge at all, have to emerge from the people holus-bolus, without distinguishing rank or social status, and despite the employment of more or less cheap rhetorical tricks to flatter, frighten or otherwise mislead the masses. Schumpeter says that all this, “the psycho-technics of party management and party advertising, slogans and marching tunes, are not accessories. They are of the essence of politics.” (CSD. p. 283) Given Schumpeter’s hostility to metaphysics and philosophy (“if we wish to understand and not to philosophize...”, CSD. p. 271), his use of the venerable metaphysical term “essence” here is telling. We should give back this term its full ontological weight and consider whether his definition of the democratic method as a competition for the political power to govern a people by means of elections, does indeed capture its essence, i.e. what democracy is, its whatness. The whatness of what democratic politics are presents itself to the socio-ontologically speculating mind as political power interplay.

13.1.4The socio-ontological isomorphism between the competitive gainful game and the competitive democratic struggle for political power more closely considered – The democratic constitution of a people as We with its customary way of life – Democracy’s wavering course between an appetite for freedom and a craving for security

Schumpeter is rightly comfortable with the notion that there is a strong analogy between competition on the markets and the competition for political power in the democratic procedure for electing government without, however, having the proper socio-ontological insight. One visible, pre-ontological basis for this analogy is that market competition and the democratic struggle for political power are both partly rhetorical undertakings in the sense that both depend on swaying and persuading people’s opinions and therefore both are engaged in a rhetorical interplay with free human beings. The rhetoric of the market-place is advertising of all kinds, just as democratic politics must be continually concerned with rhetorically persuading (a majority of) the electorate of the rightness of policy. Furthermore, just as a market economy is driven by the private striving for monetary gain but results, on the whole and behind the backs of the economic players, in the production of goods and services catering to the wants of millions of people, so too is democratic government motivated by a competitive struggle for political power which nevertheless results in society being governed under the rule of law and more or less for (a particular conception of) its well-being. That such an analogy can plausibly work is due to a deeper, underlying socio-ontological congruence which needs to be uncovered, as we have done. Schumpeter, who, given his anti-metaphysical, positivist bent, is concerned with developing a theory of democratic government which fits the observable “facts”, disdains digging too deeply into philosophical, “speculative” questions, so its falls to us to do so.

It is crucial to hold onto the insight that competitive struggle on the markets and for political power represent two different forms of power play in society relying on two different sociating media, namely, reified value and political power, respectively. The abstractly universal, quantitative medium of reified value, its role as mediator in exchange, arises through the social practice of commodity exchange itself and becomes, through use, a usage in leading a customary life. Money-mediated exchange becomes established historically in a society or between societies; it becomes “a custom, a habit” (zur Sitte, zur Gewohnheit, VGPII W19:36), an institution, a shared Gestalt of “objective spirited mind”, an ontologically constituted, ethical We. As an established usage, commodity exchange requires that certain rules of play are adhered to for it to take place at all. The economic players involved in exchange transactions must respect and estimate each other as commodity owners and carry out transactions according to accepted usage regarding delivery of goods, performance of services, promptness of payment, guarantee of quality, etc.

Moreover, what the countless goods and services are good for, their value for human living, becomes a reified, purely quantitative fact in monetary price. ‘We’ recognize and validate monetary value as the legitimate value of what is good for living as it comes about behind our backs through the ongoing practice of market exchange. The monetary value of goods becomes part of our shared values. In acknowledging money as the measure of value for goods and services, we carry on habitual — and in this sense, ethical — sociating interchange with one another. We are players in a game of interchange whose rules we respect and through which we become and are affirmed as a kind of economic or katallactic We. None of us, either individually or collectively, is able to revoke the monetary value-formation of goods and services because their value is rooted in an habitual, ethical usage, a Gestalt of the being of beings that is understood and practised. Reified monetary value is a way in which beings that are good for living (material goods as well as services) show up and present themselves as what they are. This reified Gestalt of the being of beings, monetary value — in Hegelian terminology, a “subject-object” (Subjekt-Objekt, RPh. § 214) — comes to shape our social lives insofar as we engage in economic interchange and competition in the pursuit of monetary gain.

The ‘ethical institution’ of money (or more strictly: reified value) as medium of reciprocal exchange allows our particular self-interests in gain to be pursued according to certain rules of the game. Although each of us is interested primarily in personal gain, not just selfishly, egoistically, but to support a life-world shared with others and also in a mutual give-and-take nolens volens beyond mere egoism, what we bring about through our reciprocating interplay is a functioning market economy that caters to the wants and desires of millions of participants, no matter how much critics of market economy bemoan the more or less effective rhetorical manipulation of these millions of consumers through advertising or the tacky consumerism thus practised to the detriment of allegedly ‘higher’ values. The ‘abstract universal’, i.e. reified value, thus enables an entire, shared way of life, gathering together the motley strivings for individual gain. Because this universal is abstract, by enabling multiple degrees of freedom through power interplay, it also allows for a bewildering diversity of concrete ways of livings, of life styles. The only prescription of the abstract universal of reified value on life style flows from its quantitative determination.

We are now in a position to better understand the deeper socio-ontological isomorphism between economic competition for gain and the competitive democratic struggle for political power. The struggle for political power is a kind of power interplay according to certain rules of play, just as the competitive struggle for monetary gain is, where reified value itself must be regarded as a kind of power (cf. Chapter 10.1). The democratic procedure for electing those who are to legitimately hold public office and govern constitutes a set of rules, an ethical usage that is institutionally anchored and constitutionally enshrined. The individual politician or would-be politician has to strive to be elected via voters’ estimation to gain political power that is exercised preferably by sitting in government or at least by sitting in parliament. The leader of government, the government and the parliament, in that order, have the say in how the country is to be concretely governed through the organs of state. As representatives of the people elected according to the institutionally established democratic rules of play, they wield legitimate political power estimated as such by the people. The constitution (πολιτεία) lays down the structure of political power and the rules for the political power game for a society by setting up the political institutions and guaranteeing basic individual freedoms as rights under the rule of law. Thus, although “the incessant competitive struggle to get into office or to stay in it imparts to every consideration of policies and measures the bias so admirably expressed by the phrase about ‘dealing in votes’” (CSD. p. 287), and although the power play of politics employs all the “psycho-technics” available to rhetorically influence and manipulate the electorate, and although “politicians appreciate a [democratic] phraseology that flatters the masses” (CSD. p. 268), the customary institutional arrangements of democratic government — despite the politicians’ ambitions for gaining and wielding power — serve to raise the governing of a country above the oft phrenetic fray of the competition for political power itself.

The linch-pin in democratic institutions is the constitution itself that lays down limits to state power, the rules for the political power play and also divides its powers to keep the state’s power in check (for any finitely human, social power can never be entirely trusted and has the tendency to augment itself, a kind of πλεονεξία sui generis often observed). Although Schumpeter asserts that “the democratic method cannot work smoothly unless all the groups that count in a nation are willing to accept any legislative measure as long as it is on the statute book and all executive orders issued by legally competent authorities” (CSD. p. 294), there is an important caveat. Those holding government power cannot put just any legislation on the statute books by force of numbers in parliament, even to please, or even at the risk of displeasing, sections of voters. The constitution must have such a definite form that it serves as a clear Gestalt for articulating, determining and protecting the metabolism of freedom in civil society under the rule of law. Individual freedom must have gained the form and fixity of a firm popular prejudice and second nature underpinned by certain institutional usages that represent red lines for the exercise of political power by those in power, beyond which government loses legitimacy.

Institutional safeguards, such as a supreme or constitutional court that serves to protect constitutionally rooted individual freedoms, democratic electoral procedure and the constitutional division of state power that serves to form a system of checks and balances, along with firmly held ethical convictions among the population at large, such as freedom from the state’s prying into its citizens’ affairs without very good reason and due process of law, together constitute an ethical shape of the beingness of beings, viz. the freedom of human being solidified in both ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ Geist, and act as a bulwark against the unfettered accretion of state power.

The constitutional checks and balances of a division of state powers are one important feature of democratic government that takes account of the (human)natural perversions of political power, but there is an impediment to democratic government that cannot be remedied by constitutional design. This impediment lies in the idea of democratic government itself as the attempt to create a ‘feedback loop’ of political power from the state itself to the people who are ruled. Since all social power tends to self-augmentation and thus, in the political realm, to overstep its proper bounds, those holding political office, too, tend to bend the limits of their legitimate power and to accumulate and extend political power. Not only is there the possibility of political corruption of all kinds (against which the constitutional system of checks and balances is wisely designed to serve as a safeguard), but of the more subtle reinterpretation of political powers which can go so far as to encroach upon and endanger constitutionally secured individual freedoms in sociating power play, the very basis of a free, democratic society.

Freedom of speech and the freedom of the media are in this connection crucial in maintaining vigilance over how the state, especially the politicians, concretely exercise or aggrandize their political power. All instances of political power within the state require oversight. But freedom of speech and the media, in turn, must be backed up by a vigilance of the people itself which holds its freedom of free and fair power play dear. People themselves must be concerned and engaged with political issues and prepared to take vocal political action against abuses of political power. The counter-tendency to this is the oft-lamented voter apathy that results ‘naturally’ from individuals being involved in their own private lives and the felt impotence about being able to influence how politicians and state officials concretely rule the populace and twist the rules of political rule. Such apathy and inertia reintroduce the rift between particularity and universality that democracy is intended to overcome. There is therefore a permanent tension in democracies between (the need for and exhortations to) vigilance on the part of citizens and the tendency toward apathy in which the citizens sink back into a passivity of allowing themselves to be ruled by those who occupy positions of political power.

The institutions and ways of thinking surrounding democracy are a way in which the historical We of a people is constituted socio-ontologically as customs. This does not exclude, of course, but rather includes the possibility that another Gestalt of human being, such as that based on the specious idea of redistributive social justice, may emerge and take shape to displace individual freedom in estimating interplay as essential to social human being. The hermeneuitc cast of human being as individually free, i.e. as each individual being the source of its own, self-chosen life-movements, along with the responsibility to care for one’s own self-world that inevitably goes along with individual freedom, may fade historically in favour of a cast of human being as absorption into a total social whole within which the members are securely cared for, of course, at the price of being administered from above by increasingly totalizing social instances of power.

Regarding the democratic form of government as a Gestalt of the freedom of human being that assumes the form of well established institutions and usages allows us to see not only how state power in the hands of government and politicians can be curtailed, but also how the arbitrary power of the people (or, pejoratively, the ‘rabble’) itself in absolutist democracy can be held in check. Schumpeter is not the only one to point out how democratic government can descend into a state in which “political life all but resolve[s] itself into a struggle of pressure groups” (CSD. p. 298). The lament is old. It goes back to the ancients. “We find in general that at that time the Greeks were completely dissatisfied with, disinclined toward and damned the democratic constitution and the state of their times [...] All the philosophers declared themselves against the democracies of the Greek states — a constitution in which generals were punished, etc.” (Wir finden im allgemeinen, daß damals die Griechen vollkommen unzu-frieden gewesen sind, abgeneigt, verdammt haben die demokratische Verfassung und den Zustand ihrer Zeit [...] Alle Philosophen erklärten sich gegen die Demokratien der griechischen Staaten, — eine Verfassung, wo die Bestrafung der Generale usf. geschah. Hegel VGPII W19:35)

This state of unfettered democratic caprice could only be corrected and pruned through the emergence of Gestalten of “objective spirited mind”, i.e. shapes of an historically constituted We, in which “the lawful state, the state of the courts, of the constitution, of spirited mind is so firm within itself that only decisions for momentary situations have to be made” (der gesetzliche Zustand, Zustand der Gerichte, der Verfassung, des Geistes ist so fest in sich selbst, daß nur zu entscheiden bleibt für das Momentane; VGPII W19:35) The idea, a Gestalt of the beingness of beings, has to assert itself in history and assume firm, palpable shape in the mind-set, usages and institutions of a society, for democracy to become genuinely a noble institution of shared human freedom exceeding a merely capricious or cynical political power game, as it appears ‘on the surface’ of life as chronicled in the newspapers and other media. The mind-set, usages and institutions of a democratic society attain crystallized unity above all in the constitution as a firm framework for democratic political life, keeping its power struggles within bounds of fairness. The constitution is a core part of a people’s ethical life in the sense of habituated usages in accord with the concept of freedom.

How is Schumpeter’s assertion to be assessed that “the psycho-technics of party management and party advertising, slogans and marching tunes, are not accessories. They are of the essence of politics.” (CSD. p. 283)? If the essence of politics is the competitive struggle for political power through the democratic procedure of popular elections, and the essence is exhausted in this struggle for power through winning votes, then of course the “psycho-technics” of manipulative rhetoric would also exhaust discussion of the democratic form of government. But we must consider also that when people act according to “particular purposes”, but within established, accepted rules of economic and political interplay, they bring about something behind their backs that none of them intended. Whereas competition on the markets (this assumes neither so-called perfect competition nor a rational homo oeconomicus) enforces a discipline that the services offered and exchanged are provided efficiently and every effort is made to incessantly improve quality and efficiency, thus enforcing on the whole a highly productive economic metabolism of society in which demand for services, through the workings of an “invisible hand”, is actually met, in the case of the competitive struggle to gain power by garnering electors’ votes, one could doubt that this could lead to anything beneficial for the government of society.

Nonetheless, the political struggle does result in a selection of the personnel that is to govern the country, including the head of government, and this government is subject to dismissal by the voting population if it governs poorly. To be more precise, the government will be dismissed if it loses majority support of the voters, and whether it does so will depend on a multiplicity of public issues on which the voters decide to vote for one candidate rather than another. In ousting one governing party or coalition, there is no guarantee that the newly elected government will be any better, nor is it unambiguously clear what ‘better’ and ‘worse’ mean in the context of the exercise of power by a government, since the universal good always remains a contradictory, controversial, ever-changing unity. Voters will decide to withdraw their support for a given government in considering not only whether their self-interests have been furthered or hampered by the government, but also whether the government has performed well in serving (an estimated conception of) the general good, which in turn covers a gamut of issues from securing peaceable living in civil society through the provision of certain essential services and infrastructure, and preserving certain social values, usages and institutions, right up to foreign policy regulating relations with other states.

Because numerical majorities of votes will decide whether a government is re-elected or dismissed, by virtue of this practically workable quantitative reduction, in any particular election it will be impossible to say precisely what the electorate’s vote means. This, of course, does not prevent pundits and party advisers from analyzing the election results interpretively and singling out the decisive issues on which a government was confirmed in power or defeated. This analysis is part of a disciplining, corrective cybernetic feedback loop, just like competition on the markets: if you have been unsuccessful, you must try to figure out why from what has factually come about in order to do better in future. This negative feedback loop, in weeding out bad governments that do not on the whole enhance the way a people lives, is how the evolution of government and the state proceeds and is cultivated over time as a cultural Gestalt of social life, where ‘cultural’ implies both ‘venerating’ and ‘cultivating’. In fact, to win elections, political parties — a party being “a group whose members propose to act in concert in the competitive struggle for political power” (CSD. p. 283) — must strive to organize election campaigns around the issues which they surmise will be decisive for voters. It is a surmise because election campaigns, too, are a kind of polyarchic, rhetorical, social power interplay with an uncertain, unpredictable outcome. The election issues will be in part simply the interests of sectors of society such as sugar farmers or workers in the automobile industry or first-generation immigrants, and in part universal issues affecting the whole of society such as the education and healthcare system, taxation policy, or immigration policy.

These universal issues concern how the society as a whole is to live and how they are decided partly determines in the long run the particular national character of the way a people lives, even sedimenting to become part of its traditions and the customs of a people along with its characteristic mind-set or habitual way of understanding the world. Such a characteristic mind-set of a people is not a momentary affair but itself ‘exists’ in the 3D-temporal clearing of its history with its ‘stretchedness’ into both past (beenness, yesterness) and future. Above, who a people has been historically with its cultivated and cherished traditions pre-defines who it is today and in the future, including how certain decisive universal political issues are finally decided as outcomes of political power plays.

The democratic power struggle over who is to govern therefore does indeed bring about something that none of the participants, whether it be in the electorate or among the politicians, intended, and this is a shaping of a society’s polity, i.e. how it lives together and also with other peoples. This way of living as a Gestalt of ethical life can be examined also socio-ontologically with regard to the concrete look which a people’s freedom assumes historically and whether there is a shortfall measured against the yardstick of freedom. Just as the value of commodity goods and services as constituted through exchange interplay on the markets is beyond a judgement as to whether this value ought to be as it is, but rather comes about as the brute, reified fact of a given, quantitative market price, so, too, the way the democratic choice of government plays out and how this chosen government exercises its power, thus helping shape willy-nilly the shared historical way of life of a people, are beyond any simple extrinsic moral judgement. Rather, the traditions of democratic government themselves become part of a nation’s identity, i.e. its understanding of itself and its values. ‘Identity’ here means that the people regard themselves, beyond and even against the mere particularity of their self-interests, as belonging to these democratic traditions that in part constitute who they are, and ‘values’ means that these traditional practices are held to be valuable to, i.e. good for, that people’s historically established customary way of living.

Democratic government — pace Schumpeter — therefore goes far beyond or socio-ontologically deeper than the democratic method of an electoral competition for the power to govern in which voter-manipulative “psycho-technics” “are of the essence”, being part of the very constitution of a people, where ‘constitution’ is taken in a double meaning as how a people is cast historically as a people, on the one hand, and how its government is organized in a constitutional structure or polity of the state, on the other. Only this constitution in the double sense can prevent democratic government from degenerating into an unscrupulous, cynical contest for political power in which voters’ favour is ‘bought’ by a calculus of electoral favours to sectoral self-interests (thus reducing the electorate to mere particularity and ignoring its singular concerns also for the universal which come to expression in a plurality of contesting and contradictory conceptions of the universal good that only ever attain an ongoing, dynamic, ragged unity in a temporary compromise of political forces).

The traditionally established constitution in the double sense will also largely influence, in particular, whether a people tends to regard the state as the guarantor of its personal, individual liberty or rather is inclined to expect the state to secure and care for it. As shown in Chapter 9.10, this alternative corresponds to the distinction between two fundamental modes of caring for others. Where the government and the entire state care for the people by “leaping ahead”, they enable and encourage personal liberty and private property intercourse as a mutually beneficial power interplay under which people can go about earning their livelihood in sometimes bruising competitive exchange and enjoying their lives in more or less fair and civil interchange with one another; they give the people secure room for play in which they can actively become themselves, learning in challenging interchanges who they are in casting their own selves.

Where, however, the government and the entire state care for the people by “leaping in”, they relieve people of their cares of bearing the responsibility of having to take care of their own self-worlds and instead guarantee them a certain level of secure, material comfort, thus reinforcing their dependency, and consolidating and extending political power over them in myriad, often subtle ways, thus entangling the citizenry ever more in a web of minutely posited legislative will, bureaucratic regulations and control over the citizenry’s every life movement. Whether this web of political rule is actually effective is not the crucial point, but rather whether an ethos of free and fair interplay within civil society is valued and practised as a counterweight to the ethos of the state’s exercise of power for the sake of taking care of its people in the double-edged sense of ‘taking caring of’.