Translated from German with the help of AI. The original is the authoritative version.
The reserved, even skeptical attitude liberal circles regularly hold toward majoritarian rule rests on a pre-political and narrowly drawn understanding of freedom. What gets missed: representative, majoritarian-democratic forms of rule are probably the only ones that can reconcile the actual conditions of modern social life with the idea of the widest possible self-determination.
If this issue is supposed to be about the relation between liberalism and authoritarianism, an article that engages with democratic rule may at first seem surprising. On second look, however, the topic is in the right place. Not a few voices, especially liberal ones in politics and society, see the authoritarian danger slumbering even, or precisely, in democratic orders.
On a basic, rather conceptual level it should first be pointed out that in democratic orders too one rules and is ruled: democratically legitimated rule is also an exercise of power. The more specific question is therefore what distinguishes democratic rule — here understood in a rather minimalist sense as majoritarian — from other forms, and what it shares with them. On the latter point, there is a widely held liberal position that can be described as the worry, or even fear, of the „tyranny of the majority”, which in the end equates majoritarian rule with other, including authoritarian, forms of rule by emphasising the element of being ruled by others. Where elsewhere an authoritarian clique or a dictatorial leader rules over people at will and limits individual freedoms arbitrarily, on this reading something similar happens in democratic systems through a distant, unreasonable, and possibly misguided mass: the majority. The individual, always threatened in its dignity and freedom, faces both nearly helplessly.
The ideal of consensus
These and similar grounds for a fundamental skepticism toward the majority are, with a view to the political shifts in the Western world in the past ten to fifteen years, not implausible. Turns toward authoritarian promises happened, and continue to happen, not through violent seizures of power against parliamentary majorities but through them, on the basis of corresponding election results, hence with the electorate and grounded in democratic legitimacy. The reservations toward the majority seem quite justified at present.
Skepticism toward democratic rule can in liberal circles always draw on a solid theoretical foundation. The well-known classical-liberal idea of the human state of nature — always to be understood as a normative conception, not a historical-empirical finding — describes the human being as endowed by nature with certain rights, the protection of which is the central justification for entering into the social contract and thus the political community. Into the stage of society, which also and centrally includes the institution of a ruling power, only those enter who consent. From the perspective of individual freedom this is probably normatively consistent. Especially consequential, however, is the fact that in some liberal theories this ideal conception is at times carried over into the exercise of rule within already constituted communities. Especially clearly one finds this in Murray Rothbard, who in general holds only consensual decisions to be admissible and compatible with individual freedom, and who proposes for every single person, at any time, even an individual „right of secession” allowing exit from any state community one no longer wants to belong to.
Theoretical conceptions of this kind are found in pure form only at the edges of the liberal political spectrum. But very regularly one can hear voices in the political space whose argumentative structure and whose tone let the sketched fundamental critique of majority rule shine through. Almost every political question gets turned into a constitutional and fundamental-rights question and so regularly reformulated from an individualist perspective. Majoritarian (parliamentary) decisions then as such are always in need of justification, the individual freedom position always set against them. This has many-layered reasons, which in Germany have not least to do with the especially influential Federal Constitutional Court and, for example, its extensive case law on fundamental rights since the early Federal Republic. Liberals especially are quick to switch from the language of politics into that of law and the individual defensive position (that this need not be a necessary consequence of liberal basic positions Nikolai Ott and Alexander Schwitteck recently brought out).
Kelsen’s democracy as self-rule and compromise
Against this admittedly somewhat broad-brush defensive posture toward (parliamentary) majorities, one might now set a republican critique that sees freedom realised only in participation in self-government and advocates the priority of the public matter over other spheres of life. But the skepticism toward majority decision, always felt as potentially tyrannical, also loses sight of a convincing liberal grounding of majoritarian democracy that need not fundamentally question the individualist premises of its critics: Hans Kelsen recognised almost a hundred years ago that precisely majoritarian rule in large societies, in which a consensus of all cannot be reached, can also be grounded plausibly from a thought of individual political freedom: the majority decision corresponds, on a theoretical level with equal weight of all votes, to the individual preference of as many people as possible, and so allows them at least self-rule.
If one does not want to give up the achievements and (above all the individual!) possibilities for development in modern, division-of-labour societies, in practice some form of delegation of rule to a smaller group is necessary; for Kelsen a representative, parliamentary form of government built on proportional election is therefore the appropriate institutional arrangement. In such a parliament, which will usually be one of different currents and parties, the theoretical grounding of the majority principle as the expression of the greatest possible political freedom continues to hold. Because a majority there has to be formed out of different currents, the majority principle in parliament in practice above all promotes mutual understanding and mutual influence among the different political forces, among minorities and majorities. A free election, especially with proportional representation, rarely produces a completely homogeneous majority and instead makes compromise- and coalition-building necessary.
This does not mean that every political compromise is a good one, or that every majority decision must be accepted uncritically because of its grounding in individual political freedom. In the end, what matters is always political substance and programme. But what should remain with liberals is an affirmative basic attitude toward parliamentary majority rule as a mode of political decision-making.
Possibility and necessity of liberal politics
A classical-liberal understanding of freedom can therefore also produce a more positive attitude toward majoritarian democracy, and let it appear not merely as another form of being ruled by others, to be limited as far as possible.
This also opens a different perspective on democratic politics and its sometimes complex procedures. It can no longer be understood as standing only against the idea of self-determination, but also as its concrete shaping, in which one is called to participate. For this, liberal basic convictions, for example about the human being and his natural rights, need not be given up. One only has to recognise at the same time that such rights do not appear and fix themselves by themselves in our political reality, but that their validity and effect emerge from political disputes, compromises, and decisions, not least those taken in parliaments. For pre-politically rooted liberal basic convictions, transferred to this context, what William Temple (Archbishop of Canterbury, 1942-1944) is reported to have once said about the Church holds: „I believe in one holy Catholic and apostolic Church, and I very much regret that it does not exist.”
At this point we can close with a pragmatic thought: anyone who wants to bring certain liberal ideals into political reality and to pursue liberal politics effectively needs, in democratic orders, support from majorities. Those are better won when one does not, from the outset, treat them as a necessary evil.
