[Reader-list] Hatred of Democracy : A Review

[Jeebesh]

A Review of Hatred of Democracy, by Jacques Rancière tr. Steve  
Corcoran London: Verso, 2006 (or. pub. 2005) Reviewed by Todd May

http://www.anarchiststudies.org/node/261

Jacques Rancière’s political writings have become essential reading  
for those wanting to extend contemporary political antiauthoritarian  
thought. Although his major political works, especiallyDisagreement,  
were published in the 1990’s, he has recently written a text that  
addresses contemporary political issues in an anarchist way. In fact,  
Rancière is the only major thinker in recent French thought who is  
willing to embrace the term anarchist. “Democracy,” he writes in  
Hatred of Democracy, “first of all means this: anarchic ‘government,’  
one based on nothing other than the absence of every title to  
govern” ( 41).

Democracy, Rancière writes, especially in Europe, seems to the elites  
to be threatened from two sides. First, it is threatened by a certain  
totalitarianism (whether the earlier Stalinist kind or the later  
religious fundamentalist kind). Second, it is threatened internally,  
by “democratic society,” which is co-extensive with individualist  
consumerism. “Democratic life” seems to contain a double bind. Either  
it is the anarchic participation of everyone in public life or rampant  
consumer individualism. Democracy, in a word, is threatened by the  
demos. They do not have the skills to participate in public life, and,  
relatedly, left to their own devices, they are about nothing more than  
personal consumption. The underlying idea is that individualism is  
good for the elites, who are capable of it, but not for the rest of  
us, who are driven only by endless needs.

How to explain, if democracy is passé, that the same criticisms are  
leveled against it now that were by Plato? In fact, the issue is not  
consumerism but politics. When Plato discusses the seven titles to  
occupy social positions in the Laws, the seventh one is “beloved of  
the gods.” This is, in effect, a matter of chance. Anyone can be  
beloved of the gods. This is democracy, that anarchy in which the  
right to govern is founded on the absence of any right to govern.  
Democracy is indeed a rupture with the order of filiation, but not in  
the name of unlimited consumption: rather, it is in the name of  
heterotopic governance, governance by divine chance, by lottery. If  
like must govern unlike, and each must govern all, that implies that  
there must be something more, a supplement, common to each who  
governs. It is the anarchic title of those who have no title. Politics  
is the foundation of the power to govern on the basis of an absence of  
foundation.

The scandal of democracy has always been that there is no principle  
justifying the actions of governments on the basis of human  
collectivity. “The term democracy, then, does not strictly speaking  
designate either a form of society or a form of government” (52). All  
societies are in essence oligarchical. Representational government is  
simply another form of oligarchy, designating certain people as  
entitled to rule others in the name of those others. Against this,  
democracy, Rancière argues, far from being a form of privatization of  
the kind bemoaned by those who criticize consumer society, is exactly  
the opposite: the attempt to expand the public realm. Historically,  
this has meant two things: to extend equality to marginalized subjects  
and to extend the public character to spaces thought the private  
domain of the rich. Democracy always involves a reconfiguration of the  
boundaries of the private and public, the universal and particular. It  
is precisely the role of governments to turn the democratic struggle  
to expand the public realm, the realm in which all participate, back  
into a private realm. They do this in part through an attempt to  
pacify people, and this pacification in turn is then used as a  
justification for not trusting people to participate in the public  
creation of their lives.

Rancière ends his critique on a sober but hopeful note. He writes,  
“egalitarian society is only ever the set of egalitarian relations  
that are traced here and now through singular and precarious acts.  
Democracy…is not borne along by any historical necessity and does not  
bear any…But among those who know how to share with anybody and  
everybody the equal power of intelligence, it can conversely inspire  
courage, and hence joy” (96-97).

In many of his writings, Rancière engages theoretical reflection with  
contemporary issues. Hatred of Democracy is inflected more toward the  
latter than the former. In it, he is engaged with a particular  
resistance to democracy, a resistance that comes from European elites  
but in which we can equally see the hand of American elites, from  
technocrats of a neoliberal stripe to fundamentalist Christians  
bemoaning the decline of American culture. The common theme that binds  
them is a denigration of those who would be the subject of politics,  
and the common goal is to remove power from their hands. Although  
oriented toward these topical issues, Rancière’s larger political  
view, alongside his passion for equality, remains intact. For  
Rancière, it has always been the case that a democratic politics lies  
in collective action that emerges from the presupposition of equality.  
In this text, he openly aligns that politics with the term anarchism  
and allows the historical resonance of that term to be heard behind  
the specific analyses he provides.