Fareed Zakaria on the Tension Between Democracy and Liberty

In earlier posts, I've expressed my scepticism about the possibilities for any system of government that Americans would recognize as democratic emerging from the social upheaval of the nations in the Middle East and North Africa. Fareed Zakaria's 2003 book The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad raises interesting questions about democracy and democratization, asking, in particular, if there is a tension between democracy and freedom  that requires a delicate balance.

The idea that democracy and freedom are not the same thing is a fairly old one. The French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville, author of the 1835 book Democracy in America, was interested in the question of why American democracy had not led to dictatorship, as it had in his native country. Part of de Tocqueville’s answer was that effective democracy must rest on an existing social and legal system that is consistent with popular rule and that prevents majorities from becoming tyrannical. Fareed Zakaria restates this line of reasoning in contemporary terms, and he extends it by arguing that even in relatively successful democratic nations, such as the United States, there can be too much democracy.

Fareed Zakaria

Zakaria identifies the present period in history as a democratic age. He points out that more nations than ever before create governments by popular vote and that the support of the people has become the only basis of political legitimacy in much of the world. The age is also democratic because the broad masses of people have more cultural and economic power than in previous times, as well as more political power.  The word “democracy” has acquired the connotation of something that is always good and always desirable and that will always tend to produce free and just societies. Our news media suggest, for example, that the problems of former Communist societies or of authoritarian nations can be cured if only sufficient democratization can be achieved.

As Zakaria sees it, democracy is not the universal solution. He is not opposed to popular rule, but he does see difficulties with the direct rule of the people. Democracy, he maintains, only maintains individual liberty and works properly when it works within a regulated system of elected representatives with limited, legally defined powers.  Further, protections of individual liberty must generally be created first in order to establish a workable liberal democracy.

He begins to support his argument with a quick and rather breathless look back at the history of human liberty. He argues that liberty in the Western world does not spring from Greek democracy but from the split between the Eastern and Western parts of the Roman Empire, which eventually freed the Roman popes from imperial control and made the popes competitors with the secular rulers of Europe. Liberty, then, began in the space created by the struggle between church and state.  Other struggles, between kings and nobility and between the Catholic Church and Protestantism, expanded this space. Conflict limited the powers of central authorities and this led to greater personal freedom.  Capitalism pushed the cause of individual liberty further by eroding the powers of monarchies and feudal aristocracies and by putting in place a system based on individual and property rights.  While this history might seem peculiar to Western Europe and North America, Zakaria asserts that it contains a pattern that may be applied elsewhere. However, he contends societies must first achieve economic liberalization, with strong protections for property rights, and only afterwards move toward popular rule.

There are at least two conditions for the development of liberal democracy in Zakaria’s view. A country must not only have attained a decent standard of living, it must have attained this through trade and industry and not through the sale of abundant natural resources. In fact, natural resources may often be a disguised disadvantage for nation, an easy source of riches that prevents the development of an active and involved middle class. In addition, a nation must have a strong government that can enforce the laws and regulations necessary to protect the property rights and freedoms needed for efficient markets. Zakaria disagrees with those who see government land reform as denial of property rights. Instead, he maintains that land reform moves the ownership of land away from feudal landlords, who merely hold titles, and to those who actually work the land. This can set the stage for industrialization.

Zakaria devotes a chapter to the problem of democracy in the Islamic lands of the Middle East. This chapter will probably draw the attention of many readers because of the American occupation of Iraq and stated U.S. Government intentions to establish democracy in that nation. The author maintains that the general absence of liberal democracy in the Middle East is not a consequence of a cultural contradiction between Islam and liberty. It is also not a consequence of property, since many of the region’s problems are results of sudden wealth, particularly in the form of oil.  Islamic fundamentalism, as a challenge to liberal democracy, has been caused by the failure of the political institutions of the region to face rapid social and economic changes.  Zakaria’s prescriptions are economic and political reform. Among the economic reforms, he would seek to lessen the region’s dependence on oil as a source of unearned wealth. He offers the example of the African oil-producing nation of Chad, which was required by the World Bank to deposit its oil revenues in an offshore bank and spend all but a fraction on investments and building up national infrastructure. Without the source of money, the government will have to encourage its citizens to engage in constructive and profitable activities in order to provide tax revenues. The major political reform he recommends is the encouragement of constitutionalism. He identifies this as systems of checks and balances that will prevent any part of a government or society from gaining excessive power over other parts. Zakaria does not say who should enact these reforms or how people in the West can or should nudge the Middle East toward capitalism and constitutionalism.

Although Zakaria has a high opinion of the United States, he sees the tension between liberalism and democracy in this nation, as well as in the developing world.  He cites evidence that Americans had become increasingly alienated from their political system and distrustful of it, in spite of generally rising prosperity.  His explanation, as one might expect, is that the United States had become too democratic. After 1970, Congress democratized itself by moving decision-making power away from closed congressional committees and into open committees, making government more responsive. This responsiveness meant that legislators would have to answer to their most active and informed observers, who were the lobbyists and special interests. Finance reforms, which sought to limit politicians’ reliance on a few large donors and broaden small contributions, ultimately increased the power of fund raisers and made raising money the main activity of political campaigns. Zakaria finds one of the most destructive forms of excessive democratization in the referendum system, which exists in several states, but which has received the most attention in California. The referendum system allows those who gather enough signatures to place specific issues before the voters, rather than have those issues decided by elected legislators.  California’s referendum system, according to Zakaria, crippled the state’s economic and political system by placing most of its budget outside the control of its legislators.

 Zakaria’s prescription for the United States is to accept less democracy and to delegate more authority. He points out that public opinion polls identify three public institutions as particularly worthy of respect. These are the Supreme Court, the armed services, and the Federal Reserve System. The first and the third are appointed decision makers with decidedly undemocratic powers. The second is a hierarchy of authority that operates on entirely different principles from most of American society. He does not, I think, give sufficient attention to the problems posed by too much undemocratic, uncontrolled authority. Appointed judges may become unelected rulers and the Federal Reserve may become a mechanism for economic cronyism.

Zakaria may  put too much faith in the ability or willingness of authoritarian governments to create the economic and political foundations for democratic societies. He cites Chile as an example of an authoritarian nation that became a relatively successful democracy.  It is true that Chile did achieve a fairly high level of economic prosperity under the government of General Augosto Pinochet and that it did establish a stable elected government after Pinochet’s rule. Chile had a long democratic tradition before Pinochet seized power, though, and it could be argued that this tradition formed the basis for the current government.

Russia and China provide Zakaria with one of his favorite comparisons. Russia, according to his argument, democratized first and only after that attempted to liberalize its economic system. China, on the other hand, has kept power firmly in the hands of the Communist Party, while creating a capitalist economy. China stands a good chance of becoming a workable democracy, while Russia is economically troubled and has been under two presidents (Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin) who have used democratic political institutions to increase their own power. There are several problems with this comparison. First, it compares what Russia is with what Zakaria believes that China might become. The future is notoriously difficult to predict, and it may well be that Russia will be a prosperous democracy in a decade and China will find it difficult to move beyond party rule. Second, one might reasonably maintain that Russia’s problems have little to do with a rush to democratization in the post-Soviet era.  These problems could be seen as the historical consequences of a backward empire suddenly plunged into rapid industrialization in the late nineteenth century, torn apart by revolution and civil war in the early twentieth, and subjected to brutal mismanagement under Stalin and his heirs.  Third, by the early twenty-first century, the Chinese economy showed some signs of stalling, while Russia began to recover from the economic chaos of the 1990's.

Although one may question Zakaria on these and other issues, the book makes some extremely valuable points.  Democracy may not be an unqualified good.  The rule of the majority does not necessarily lead to harmony and respect for minority rights. A stable and lasting democracy cannot be founded simply by holding elections. Political systems are not products of ideals, but products of concrete social and economic conditions.

Locating Political Orientations

I’ve never found the “left-right” description of political orientations a particularly accurate way to describe actual perspectives and positions.  This spatial metaphor may have made some sense just after the French Revolution, when members of the National Assembly placed supporters of king and religion on the right of the assembly president and advocates of revolution on the left, but even then this linear distinction became a self-fulfilling prophecy by pushing the varied viewpoints into a predetermined dichotomy. This way of thinking about philosophies and allegiances results in groupings that may be accidentally linked at the present point in history, but that logically combine the incompatible. For  example, what do classical liberals, who believe in minimal government interference with individual interactions, have in common with classical advocates of state power, such as Joseph de Maistre, or with proponents of military nationalism, or even with moderate traditionalist classical conservatives, such as Edmund Burke? Why would Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini fall on the extreme “right” while Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse Tung fall on the other side when all four have so much in common?  The left-right image lies behind Corey Robin’s recent cartoonish characterization of the history of political thought as a struggle between supporters of status quo power and privilege and democratizing champions of liberation.

I suggest that a better way to think about political positions might be to conceive of them as falling within a triangle, depending on the degree to which the positions involve statism, traditionalism, and individualism.             

 As a formal political philosophy, individualism may be the most recent of these. We often think of individualism as appearing in the late eighteenth century in the works of John Locke and others. To various extents, individualistic thinking appears in the thinking of Thomas Jefferson, later anarcho-capitalists such as Benjamin Tucker, and classical liberals such as John Stuart Mill. As a political tendency, though, individualism is probably as old as human societies. Thomas Mayor, for example, has recently characterized hunters-gatherers, participants in the most ancient type of human order, as “the original libertarians,” and most anthropologists would agree that hunting and gathering societies display a high degree of individual voluntarism.  I’d define as individualism, then, emphasis on the control of individuals over their own lives and actions.

Traditionalism is an emphasis on social institutions passed down over time. The oldest and most fundamental of these institutions is the family, and traditionalist politics generally place family relations at their center. But other kinds of relationships based on immediate personal ties or religious affiliations may also constitute traditional institutions. Not surprisingly, these relationships are often conceived of as family-like relations.

Statist orientations place formal governmental bodies in the position of deciding and directing the  lives of those in their control. While it might at first appear that statism is incompatible with the other two, or that the other two are mutually incompatible), in fact approaches to political life tend to combine the three to some extent. A divine right monarchy, for example, can be located somewhere in the upper part of the triangle, containing elements of statism and traditionalism and located between the two. The sociologist Robert Nisbet argued that the modern centralized state results from the disintegration of traditional social institutions, producing atomized individuals under a powerful government. So, we would probably place modern corporatist polities close to the statism-individualism line, with the more authoritarian corporatist states closer to the angle of statism. The welfare state, with its proliferation of government-guaranteed individual entitlements, would also be a form of statist-individualism, somewhere near this part of the triangle. Nisbet’s biographer Brad Lowell Stone has characterized Nisbet’s own political approach as an anti-statist libertarian communitarianism, stressing traditional social institutions and relationships.  This kind of political thought or a political commitment of this type would be located near the traditionalism-individualism line, probably somewhat closer to the traditionalism angle. 

These placements within the figure are, of course, impressionistic.  One could, though, come up with indexes of all three tendencies and place political theories, parties, movements, and actions inside this space based on three sets of scores.            

                   

The Origins of Political Order, by Francis Fukuyama

A few months ago, I heard Francis Fukuyama speak about his new book, The Origins of Political Order. Although Fukuyama was (to be honest) not as well prepared for his talk as he should have been, I found his ideas interesting, and recently found time to read this work, which attempts to trace the historical development of political order up to the time of the French Revolution. Fukuyama intends to follow this with a second volume on political order in late modernity.

Inspired by the work of the late Samuel Huntington, Fukuyma argues that modernization theories of development are mistaken in portraying political, social, and economic as interconnected stages of a single trajectory of progress. In the Marxist version of modernization, for example, economic development in the form of evolving means of production shapes social development by creating classes and class conflict and this, in turn, produces the political organization of society. In the version of modernization traditionally favored by the American foreign aid establishment, economic development results in widespread prosperity and a strong middle class, Fukuyama maintains that the social, economic, and political parts of life are indeed interconnected and affect each other, but that each can unfold according to its own logic and that there is no predetermined pattern of relations among them. Moreover, over the course of the book, he argues that what we now think of as modernization was the way in which the now dominant western model of development occurred. Further, he claims that the western model had much earlier sources than the industrial revolution.

Fukuyama begins with human nature. All human beings know some kind of social and political order because cooperation is essential to human nature. The most powerful impulse to cooperation is based on kinship, which dominated both band-level and tribal societies. Cooperation also results from “reciprocal altruism,” or people giving held to others in the expectation of receiving help. In discussing the bases of human cooperation, Fukuyama draws on extensive anthropological reading. War was the primary cause of the rise of early states, although geography played a part in the ability of those states to extend their control.

The state was a form of political order that existed apart from and to some extent in logical opposition to kinship loyalty, which Fukuyama terms “patrimonialism.” The earliest and in many ways most highly organized state arose in China. The strong state in China managed to break down family and reciprocal ties to a greater extent than other locations. This meant that China developed a strong state, characterized by powerful centralized government and an impersonal bureaucracy, and had a relatively weak society. China also, according to Fukuyama, never developed a guiding rule of law, or a set of abstract principles to which everyone, including the emperor, would be subject. Thus, China became a society with a strong state with weak counterbalancing social institutions and little rule of law to limit the actions of the state in matters such as personal freedoms or property rights, an essential component of a market economy. Even if one questions Fukuyama’s interpretation of Chinese history, he does manage to provide an very clear and intelligible summary of Chinese history.

Fukuyama examines the interconnections of state, social institutions, and law in other societies, notably South Asia and the Ottoman Empire. His most intriguing claims, though, concern why Europe became the place where democracy and the market economy arose.  In Fukuyama’s view, the Church was crucial to the emergence of the state and to the balancing of state power by the rule of law in Christendom. The Church initially weakened the dominance of kinship ties by introducing a universalizing system of belief. Then, especially after the Gregorian Reforms of the late eleventh century, the Church became a state-like institution that maintained a system of abstract law over and above secular states and gave secular states legitimacy based in rule of law. Thus, according to Fukuyama, the idea that all leaders are answerable to a higher principle, including the principle of popular sovereignty, has its origins in the development of the Christian religion.

In the last part of the book, Fukuyama shifts to looking at how political development, understood as the interconnections of state building, rule of law, and popular accountability, related to economic growth and social mobilization within Europe.  Ideas about legitimacy shaped all of these interconnections in the different countries. He gives France and Spain as examples of “weak absolutism,” or highly centralized states based on patrimonial connections with non-state social institutions. He suggests that the contemporary political problems of Latin America stem from the Spanish patrimonial heritage. The creation of successful democracy in parts of northern Europe, England, and the United States as the political legacy of England, came from circumstances that produced a strong state, strong counterbalancing social institutions, and strong rule of law. He maintains, in response to libertarians, that a strong state has been essential to the protection of rights fundamental to development, such as property rights, but that the state must operate under law and be accountable to citizens.

Before forming a definitive opinion about Fukuyama’s arguments, I think we will need to wait for the second and conclusive volume. This is an impressive synthesis of materials from world history and other disciplines.  I found his claims about the role of religion as a force in society particularly appealing, although Fukuyama does tend to slip back and forth between talking about religion as an institution and religion as a system of ideas without always being clear about how these are connected. In talking about the state, he never really defines what he means by a “strong state.” In the case of China, a strong state is one that can do pretty much whatever its leaders want. But in the case of the west, identifying a strong state as one that can enforce property rights seems questionable: this seems to me exactly the kind of state that Robert Nozick identified as minimal. The implication that a strong state is a geographically extensive, powerfully centralized state also seems to raise questions, since it confuses the efficiency of a government, the degree of intrusiveness of government in individual and social concerns, and the expanse of territory owing allegiance to the state.

The Market, Equality, and Abstraction

The primitive equality of humanity asserted by Rousseau and Marx seems to have been more than a philosophical speculation or golden age myth.   Without individual ownership of property, and no differentiation of labor beyond gender differentiation, humans in foraging, hunter gatherer bands had no systematic basis for systematically distinguishing among individual men or individual women.  Some may have been more persuasive or more powerful than others, but whatever prestige people held characterized them as personalities, not as social statuses.  Only the advent of settled village life brought the need for regularity and predictability in relations that brought well-defined leadership into existence.

Differentiated societies and the unequal statuses inherent in differentiated societies posed two options regarding the identification of individuals with their statuses. Either each human being was identical with his or her position in a society or each was in some sense distinct from the social position happened to occupy.  In its most radical state, the first option was total immanence. If statuses are positions in a system of social relations, then being completely identified with a status means being completely a part of the social world. The extreme of the second option was total transcendence. If one’s true self is not one’s place in society, then every individual is ultimately apart from the realm of extant social relations.

Caste systems have expressed one level of social immanence. According to the classic work of Georges Dumézil, still widely accepted today, the early Indo-European speaking peoples divided their societies into three fundamental categories of humans: priests, warriors, and herder-cultivators.  These three categories may still survive in three of the major Hindu castes of  brahmans, ksatriyas, and vaisyas.. The Hindu example may suggest to us that even in the immanence of a caste system there may be some transcendent level at which humans are equal.  If people can move from one caste to another through metempsychosis, then there must be some part of them that is not identical with caste. This is a theoretical transcendence, though, and it reinforces rather than undermines inequality.  Another way of putting this coexistence of transcendence and immanence in social life is that people may be seen as completely in the social order while they maintain an ultimate self that is completely outside of the social order.

In the canonical tradition of Europe, the dual existence of hierarchical social order and abstract, transcendent egalitarian individualism appears throughout the philosophical and religious traditions of Mediterranean antiquity.   Epicureanism, for example, taught that individuals should strive for a state of eudaimonia, or well-being, by pursuing the state of ataraxia, or freedom from trouble and anxiety.  While it did not challenge the social hierarchy directly, Epicureanism did encourage withdrawal from political and administrative involvement and it offered a private egalitarian alternative to public hierarchy by admitting people from all walks of life on the same basis as adherents.  The Stoics posited moral virtue as the path to eudaimonia and argued that each individual, regardless of social position, could pursue virtue. When the Stoic Epictetus was a slave, his capacity for the pursuit of virtue was the same as the later Stoic Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Being a slave or an emperor was accidental. In their true natures, or ultimate selves, both were equal in the pursuit of virtue. The idea of “nature” was the way in which both Epicureans and Stoics expressed their extra-social egalitarianism, since for both living in accordance with nature was the way in which people could live in a manner consistent with their true natures. The idea would become important for views about individual egalitarianism in early modern European, since it would be reinterpreted as natural law, but the concept of natural law was not just an inheritance from antiquity. It was an old idea that became useful and relevant for the interpretation of a new situation.

Out of the decay of the political and social order of the Roman Empire medieval corporatism had emerged. Christendom maintained the old extra-social, transcendent egalitarianism within a rigidly hierarchical system, in which each individual in the saeculum wholly identified with location, family, guild, and status. The old sociology of the three orders reappeared as the unchanging division into oratores, bellatores, and laborares. Within their all-encompassing statuses, people did not have rights, but privileges; literally, private laws that applied to them as members of corporate bodies.

It is difficult to trace the original causes of the breakdown in worldly hierarchy, but this breakdown clearly accompanied a development of enormous importance for the emergence of modernity: the rise of banking and investment between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries. Loaning money at interest encouraged entrepreneurial activities and stimulated the search for more efficient production of goods and spread of information. Finance, in other words, set the stage for the first Industrial Revolution, the beginning of which is conventionally dated about 1750.

One consequence of that revolution was the breakdown of the corporate order, and its replacement by what Thomas Carlyle, in widely used phrase, called the “Cash Nexus.” Relations between people in a market system became defined less by invariant positions and more by free-floating exchanges. As Bruce Mazlish argued in A New Science, the modern discipline of sociology grew out of responses to the transition to the Cash Nexus, either by “lamenters,” who bemoaned the loss of the old ties, or by “breakers,” who saw the old ties as chains and celebrated the liberation of individuals by the marketplace.

In my view, one of the most notable consequences of the rise of the free market system was the “immanentization” of the transcendent equality of individuals. By treating individuals as interchangeable units of production, the market abstracted them from their corporate settings. Previously, each one had a soul in another realm apart from present activities. In the fluidity of the market, no one could be wholly identified with present activities; each private individual existed apart from all socially defining connections. This, I think, was the root of our modern idea of rights: we share in universal rights to the extent we can be considered as pure abstractions, utterly outside our nets of social connections. John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice, pushed this assumption of individual rights as properties of abstract human entities to what I consider a strange extreme, essentially arguing that a just society would be one based entirely on individual rights and that individual rights can be identified by imaginatively stripping social beings of all their social traits and relationships.

Behind individual rights, then, lies the market economy. People have entered the realm of abstract rights and left the realm of immanent status to the extent that they have entered the market. Within the United States, the debate over abolition of slavery, was an argument about the replacement of a racial caste order by the Cash Nexus of a labor market (John C. Calhoun, then, was a “lamenter,” like Wordsworth).  Similarly, the women’s rights movement has proceeded with women’s movement out of the status relations of the home and into the labor market as abstract sexless entities. Census data show that only 15 percent of women aged 16 and over participated in the American labor force in 1870, but that this grew to just over a quarter of American women by 1910.  The urban setting of the new industrial America, shrinking families, and movement into the public sphere of the market economy meant that the complete identification of women with women’s roles began to weaken. In the minds of a growing number of Americans, women were becoming abstract beings whose rights and social roles entailed participation in an impersonal, rationalized society.

Like most Americans, I’m deeply attached to the idea of individual, equal rights. As Mazlish’s lamenters realized, though, the same abstraction that frees us can also leave us lost. The quest for authenticity from Rousseau to modern identity politics has been a desperate response to being reduced to abstractions. Further, human beings never really function as completely abstract, independent beings. What they can do even in the Cash Nexus of the marketplace depends on their upbringings and their social networks, so that there is always an element of caste within the market. Too great an attachment to the ideal of complete abstract equality, ironically, can produce heavy handed governmental efforts to “level the playing field” by searching for strategies to dissolve all benefits of social connection, and the further government pursues these kinds of strategies, the more it exercises control and undermines the independent equality of rights. “Starting from unlimited freedom,” proclaimed Dostoevsky’s Shigalov, “I arrive at unlimited despotism.”