Democracy and the Intelligentsia

Micah Mattix

Charles Kurzman, Democracy Denied, 1905–1915: Intellectuals and the Fate of Democracy, Harvard University Press, November 2008. 405 pages, $49.95

When I was a teaching assistant at one of Switzerland’s cantonal universities, one of my colleagues once told his students that they, as the intellectual elite of the country, were responsible for protecting Switzerland’s liberal democracy against dangerous attacks on individual freedom from the extreme right. The face of that extreme right was Christoph Blocher, who became a member of the Swiss Federal Council in 2004, and who took a number of public positions that encouraged xenophobia and racism. As my colleague spoke, however, he seemed to lump religious conservatives with Blocher as potential enemies of liberal democracies worldwide. The reasoning, it seems, was that religious conservatives too worked to limit individual freedom, in particular with respect to moral issues such as gay rights and abortion.

There are at least two assumptions that underlie my colleague’s call to his students. The first is that religious conservatives, given their belief in a single God who has communicated his moral code to us and who demands our compliance, are necessarily against pluralism and always work to undermine it. This, of course, is not a new idea. While it remains popular today, it has been skillfully debunked, at least with respect to Christianity, by the example and work of a number of recent scholars, including George Marsden and Mark Noll, who show that while orthodox Christianity rejects, or should reject, epistemological pluralism, the teachings of Christ call for the tolerance of other worldviews.

The second is that the intellectual elite, which for my colleague meant secular intellectuals, have both a moral obligation and the power to sustain liberal democracies. This too is not a new idea, and it too remains popular today, as can be seen from the numerous books in the past eight years calling on academics to rise up and fulfill this self-ordained role as the stalwart defenders of democracy.

In his fascinating new book, Democracy Denied, 1905–1915: Intellectuals and the Fate of Democracy, Charles Kurzman traces the role that self-identified intellectuals played in the democratic revolutions in Russia, Iran, the Ottoman Empire, Portugal, Mexico, and China between 1905 and 1911 and shows that the relationship between intellectuals and democracy is somewhat more complex than it is often presented. What is interesting is that while these intellectuals were surprisingly successful in establishing these democracies in a relatively short period of time, they were far less successful in maintaining them. All of them failed within a few years—the longest lasting was Portugal, where Parliament, which was established in 1911, was subjugated a mere fifteen years later in 1926.

While the cause of these surprising declines was multiple, Kurzman concludes that there were at least two common contributing factors in each case. The first was the tension between the elitist, Comtean positivism that the intellectuals espoused and the democratic populism that was used to forge an alliance with the working class and the bourgeoisie. The intellectuals claimed that because of their education and lack of self-interest, they had the right to rule, and were able to convince the working class and the bourgeoisie to vote them into office following the democratic revolutions. The realization following their election that they were not, in fact, devoid of self-interest, coupled with the lack of social reforms that were considered most important to the working class, led to the dissolution of this alliance.

The second was the perceived weakness of the fledgling democracies themselves, as the alliances the intellectuals formed came under strain due to broken promises. This perceived weakness perpetuated further loss of support, in particular with the established democracies of France, the United States, and the United Kingdom, which, in the end, sealed their failures. Thus, according to Kurzman, the success of new democracies has less to do with the presence or influence of secular intellectuals and more to do with expectations. “Once a new democracy is established, its chief dilemma,” Kurzman writes, “is to overcome expectations of failure. When democracy appears fragile, fewer people commit to its defense, and antidemocratic movements become bolder and bolder.”

While the term “intellectual” has a number of meanings today, at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, Kurzman argues, it had a specific definition. Due to both the Dreyfus Affair in France in the 1890s and the writings of Auguste Comte (1798–1857), the term “les intellectuels” came to be used by those who wished to distinguish themselves from the clergy and the working class, on the one hand, and the bourgeoisie, on the other. They held “advanced” degrees, which in most countries meant an undergraduate degree, and believed in the power of science to solve all of mankind’s problems. Furthermore, they claimed to lack self-interest and came to believe that it was their destiny to lead their respective countries in political and social reforms that would transform the world. In this sense, they understood themselves to be the “new aristocracy,” entitled to lead not because of divine prerogative but because of their education.

What is striking, Kurzman remarks, is that the intellectuals were able to forge alliances with members of the working class, and even members of the bourgeoisie that, in turn, brought them to power. While the intellectuals lacked both the numbers and the military might to successfully overthrow their respective autocracies, they drew on long-standing grievances among the working class and established themselves as proponents of civil liberties, public education, and modernization. Kurzman shows that the intellectuals were able to convince the working class and the bourgeoisie to support them as the heads of pro-democracy movements both because of their expert scientific knowledge, which would provide them with a blueprint for the needed social reforms, and their supposed lack of self-interest. Based on this established hegemony, they were able to build further alliances, in particular with the military and established foreign democracies such as France, the United Kingdom, and the United States that, in turn, provided them with the necessary numbers and muscle to overthrow, sometimes with surprising speed, the ruling monarchs and aristocrats of their respective countries.

Following these revolutions, the intellectuals were voted into office in large numbers. However, while they had claimed to lack self-interest, it quickly became apparent that this was not the case. Kurzman writes:

They had interests just like any other class. They may not have been workers or owners, but they had to make a living too, as writers, teachers, lawyers, and so on. Two narratives emerged in the nineteenth century about the material interests of the intellectuals. The first, generally marshaled by rightists, involved the overproduction of intellectuals. In this view, expanding educational opportunities were churning out graduates faster than jobs emerged to employ them, creating a mass of anomic, overeducated rabble-rousers. [. . .] A second narrative, more congenial to intellectuals themselves, concerned the working conditions of the intellectuals. The bureaucratization of science and academia led intellectuals to fear a loss of guild autonomy through “proletarianization.”

Whatever the root of the intellectuals’ self-interests, the priorities of their legislative platforms after they were voted into power revealed these self-interests, and, in turn, proved to be beginning of their respective rapid failures. Kurzman writes:

The priorities of the newly empowered intellectuals were remarkably similar among the six new democracies. First, the intellectuals sought to solidify their power—demanding greater rights for parliament, as in Russia, Iran, and the Ottoman Empire, or rebuilding the state administration in their own image, as in the Ottoman Empire, Portugal, Mexico, and some provinces of China. Second, the intellectuals sought to reproduce themselves, proposing educational initiatives that focused on expanding high schools and universities. Third, they favored policies to promote intellectual professions, such as freedom of the press for journalists, judicial reforms for modern-educated lawyers, and public health projects for medical doctors. Fourth, the intellectuals sought to raise taxes to remake society along positivist lines. In sum, intellectuals sought to rule in their own class interest.

Dissatisfaction with these platform priorities, increasing crime and disorder and “uncertain systems of justice and administration” caused the intellectuals to lose the support of the working class, generally considered essential for democratic reforms, and, therefore, quickly undermined their position of power.

So, to return to my colleague’s assumption: are intellectuals, in particular secular intellectuals, the stewards of liberal democracies? Clearly, they are. However, not any more than any other group. Furthermore, one of the implications of Kurzman’s work is that secularization and democracy are not inextricably linked. Certain strands of secular thought, in particular the elitist positivism of Auguste Comte, make for a strange bedfellow of democracy’s inherent populism. Indeed, what logical basis would there have been for the intellectuals to do what would have been, in the end, a very Christian thing and serve the needs of their constituents first and their own second? If they had been able to predict that their own survival was linked to such a move, they surely would have done so. However, it is difficult to make such predictions, which, in turn, must compete with other seemingly satisfactory solutions that demand fewer personal sacrifices.

In the end, Kurzman concludes, a democracy’s success depends on expectations. If an established democracy is perceived as being strong, “new democracies,” Kurzman argues, “would never fall.” If not, they will always fail.  

Micah Mattix is a Lecturer in the English Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Reviews, Arts and Culture, Faiths and Worldviews, Global Culture, Wed 26 Nov 2008