Democracy: A Word to Be Liberated

ABSTRACT

This essay takes a stand against the ideological abuse of “democracy” enabled by the substitution of the original meaning of the word with a far more reductive one. After outlining a brief overview of the word’s history starting with ancient Greece, then the struggle for universal suffrage and the democratic constitutions after WWII, sometimes embedded with significant elements of social democracy, it examines the attack on democracy from the post-war period to the present day, which took place through the practical demolition of universal suffrage, various forms of theoretical attack on democracy, the attack on state sovereignty through globalization and an increased use of “state of exception” after 9/11. The conclusions emphasize the worth of democracy as a value, as a dynamic concept that cannot be reduced to a specific form of government.

KEYWORDS:

• Democracy
• suffrage
• social rights
• globalization
• democratization

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 On this original meaning of the term democracy, see Meny (2005, 20), and all of the first chapter in Dunn (2019, 1–47).

2 In the following chapter, Polybius regards the degenerative forms of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy (Finley 2019, 94–95).

3 Paul Ginsborg enumerates five main reasons for exclusions from voting, enforced in turn by liberal democracies: insufficient income, illiteracy, female sex, ethnicity, political opinion. See Ginsborg (2004, 208–212; 2006, 31–32).

4 On this subject, see the whole of chapter 13 by L. Canfora (2004, 254–287). On the link between right to employment, equality and democracy in the Italian Constitution, see also Giacché (2015, 11–19).

5 In 1996, then president of the German Constitutional Court, Jutta Limbach, declared that in 1956 she would have voted against the ban of the German Communist Party (KPD), which was never formally revoked (see Blasius 2006). Today, even liberal leaning periodicals share the opinion that the ban on the KPD and the numerous political trials that ensued (up until 1969, there were up to 250,000 court proceedings, with 15,000 convictions) were “not worthy of a democratic rule of law,” and that they were in continuity with the Nazi penal legislation against crimes of opinion (see Seils 2006).

6 The expression “representative democracy” can be found in Alexander Hamilton (1961, 255), but it is rather incidental in nature.

7 For example, the UK utilizes a first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system, where whoever gets the majority of the votes in a constituency becomes its sole representative. In the 2005 parliamentary elections, the labor party won the majority of the seats (with 67 seats to spare), having won just 35% of the expressed votes. In reality, the newly installed government had been voted by no more than 20% of the British population. Every labor deputy had, in average, been elected with 26.877 votes, while conservatives and liberal democrats had respectively needed 44.251 and 96.378 to get their deputies elected.

8 On the Trilateral, see Boiral (2003), and the dedicated pages in the excellent book by Moro (2013, 95–144).

9 It was precisely this absence of democracy, or rather of real popular participation in political choices, that would allow for the restoration of capitalism at the hands of most of the CPSU (Communist Party of Soviet Union) apparatus, at the end of the following decade.

10 For an illustration of the controversies stirred up by this stance (which, moreover, was electoralistic in nature) see Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (2005).

11 This does not mean that ratification does not sometimes come with surprises, as show the referendums on the draft European Constitution in France and the Netherlands, which led to its resounding rejection.

12 James K. Galbraith stated, in a conference on the relevance of his father’s (John K. Galbraith) thinking, that “The battle of our time for civil rights must be aimed at regaining for all Americans the right to vote, the ability to exercise that right, and the right to a full, fair and verified vote count” (Galbraith 2006, 17). The reference is both to the presidential elections of 2000 and to those of 2004. On the latter, see Vidal (2005).

13 This trait is now evident in the composition of parliaments themselves, from the point of view of social class of origin. One example: in the legislature begun in 2006, in the two branches of Italian Parliament, sat only 5 workers (representing 31% of the country’s whole work force), while there were 151 lawyers and notaries, 96 journalists, 49 doctors, 87 entrepreneurs, and so forth. The data is from Del Vecchio and Pitrelli (2008).

 

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Vladimiro Giacché

Vladimiro Giacché received a MA and PhD cum laude in Philosophy from the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa. He is currently Head of Communication, Research and Strategic Marketing of Banca del Fucino S.p.A. He was also Chairman of Centro Europa Ricerche (2013–2020) and member of the Board of Directors of Banca Profilo (2016–2020). He is the author of many works on economic and philosophical matters, such as Finalità e soggettività. Forme del finalismo nella Scienza della logica di Hegel (1990), La fabbrica del falso. Strategie della menzogna nella politica contemporanea (2008, 3nd. 2016), Titanic Europa (2012; German ed. 2013), Anschluss. L’unificazione della Germania e il futuro dell’Europa (2013, 2nd ed. 2019; German ed. 2014; French and Spanish ed. 2015), Costituzione italiana contro trattati europei (2015), Lenins ökonomisches Denken nach der Oktoberrevolution (2018), Hegel. La dialettica (2020), Wirtschaft und Eigentum—Staat und Markt im heutigen China (2020). He edited Marx’s writings on crisis (K. Marx, Il capitalismo e la crisi [2009]) and Lenin’s economic writings from 1917 to 1923 (Lenin, Economia della rivoluzione [2017]).