OVO

Plato was the theorist of an aristocratic form of absolute government. As the fundamental problem of political theory, he posed the following questions: ‘Who should rule? Who is to govern the state? The many, the mob, the masses, or the few, the elect, the elite?’

Once the question ‘Who should rule?’ is accepted as fundamental, then obviously there can be only one reasonable answer: not those who do not know, but those who do know, the sages; not the mob, but the few best. That is Plato’s theory of the rule by the best, of aristocracy.

It is somewhat odd that great theorists of democracy and great adversaries of this Platonic theory – such as Rousseau – adopted Plato’s statement of the problem instead of rejecting it as inadequate, for it is quite clear that the fundamental question in political theory is not the one Plato formulated. The question is not ‘Who should rule? or ‘Who is to have power? but ‘How much power should be granted to the government?’ or perhaps more precisely, ‘How can we develop our political institutions in  such a manner that even incompetent and dishonest rulers cannot do too much harm?’ In other words, the fundamental problem of political theory is the problem of checks and balances, of institutions by which political power, its arbitrariness and its abuse can be controlled and tamed.

I do not doubt that the kind of democracy in which we in the West believe is no more than a state in which power is in this sense, limited and controlled. For the kind of democracy in which we believe is by no means an ideal state; we know perfectly well that much happens that should not happen. It is childish to strive after ideals in politics, and any reasonable mature man in the West knows that ‘All political action consists in choosing  the lesser evil’ (to quote the Viennese poet Karl Kraus).

For us there are only two types of government: those in which the governed can get rid of their rulers without bloodshed, and those in which the governed can, if at all, get rid of their rulers only by bloodshed. The first of these types of government we call democracy, the second tyranny or dictatorship. But the names do not really matter here, only the facts do.

We in the West believe in democracy only in this sober sense: as the least evil form of government. This is also how the man described it who has done more than anyone to save democracy and the West: ‘Democracy is the worst form of government,’ Winston Churchill said once, ‘except of course all those other forms of government that have been tried from time to time.’

Thus we believe in democracy, but not because it is the rule of the people. Neither you nor I rule; on the contrary, both you and and I are being ruled, and sometimes more than we like. Yet we believe in democracy as the form of government which is compatible with peace and effective political opposition, and therefore with political freedom.

I have mentioned above the unfortunate fact that Plato’s misleading question ‘Who is to rule?’ was never clearly rejected by the philosophers of politics. Rousseau asked the same question, but give the opposite answer: ‘The will of the people shall rule – the will of the many, not of the few;’ a dangerous answer indeed, since it leads to the mythological deification of ‘The People’ and ‘The Will of the People.’ Marx too asks, quite in Plato’s vein: ‘Who shall rule, the capitalists or the proletarians?’ And he too gave the answer; ‘The many; not the few; the proletarians should rule, not the capitalists.’

Contrary to Rousseau and to Marx we see in the majority decision of a vote or of an election only a method of producing decision without bloodshed, and with the least possible restriction of freedom. Of course, majorities often arrive at mistaken decisions, and we must insist that minorities have rights and freedoms which no majority decision can overrule.

What I have said may support my suggestion that the fashionable terms ‘mass’, ‘elite’ and ‘uprising of the masses’ originate from the ideologies of Platonism and Marxism.

Just as Rousseau and Marx simply inverted the Platonic answer, so some opponents of Marx inverted the Marxist answer: they want to counteract the ‘revolt of the masses’ by a ‘revolt of the elite’, thereby reverting to the Platonic answer and the claim of the elite to rule. But this whole approach is mistaken. God save us from that anti-Marxism which simply inverts Marxism: we know it only too well; even Communism is no worse than the anti-Marxist ‘elite’ which ruled Italy, Germany and Japan and which it took a global war to remove.

Lecture in Zurich 1958 at invitation of Albert Hunold. From In Search of a Better World. Routledge 1984