ABSTRACT
Cynicism about the pretensions of liberal democracy did not of course originate with Pareto. It was a commonplace of Marxism, for example, that power followed property, and that the conditions of electoral competition in parliamentary ‘democracies’ were fundamentally distorted by bourgeois ownership of the media and meeting places, and by the role of money in political campaigns. Parliaments, in any case, were dismissed as mere ‘talking shops’, with real power residing in the boardrooms of the big banks and capitalist enterprises. Whatever the constitutional niceties, liberal democracy was, as Lenin inimitably put it, ‘a dictatorship of the filthy and self-seeking exploiters who are sucking the blood of the people’.1 But it was thinkers on the right of the political spectrum who first denounced the alleged fraudulence of emergent democratic institutions. Indeed, some of them tried to demystify mass democracy even before it arose. Frightened by the radical ambitions of the French Revolution, conservatives such as Burke, de Maistre, and (later) Hegel argued that universal suffrage would inevitably bring about rule by a tiny elite of demagogues, adept at manipulating the apathy and ignorance of the people. Even Alexis de Tocqueville, essentially a liberal who was sympathetic to democratic aspirations, warned of a similarly perverse outcome – though he thought that the tyranny of an unbridled majority was more likely than the tyranny of a demagogic few. Democracy, he wrote, forces us to contemplate ‘a new physiognomy of servitude’, scarcely less oppressive than the absolute monarchies of the past.2 With the gradual expansion of the franchise, anti-democratic thinkers intensified their onslaught, combining fear of the newly empowered masses with a firm conviction that these same masses would – as if driven by an iron law – submit to a dictatorial elite of panderers and
confidence tricksters, who would be the real rulers in our so-called democracies.3
