Hello friends.
This week we are exploring the ideas of Joseph Schumpeter. Since September, ardent Philosophantasy reader Varun has been patiently waiting for this installment. Let’s philosophize!
Joseph Alois Schumpeter was, by profession, an economist and not a political theorist or jurist of any kind. Schumpeter served as Finance Minister for post-WW1 German Austria, before coming over to the United States to teach at Harvard University. His 1942 seminal work, titled Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (hereby abbreviated as CSD) discusses lots of ideas about capitalism and describes the process of creative destruction with respect to a capitalist economy’s pattern of constant innovation.
I am a big fan of this part of CSD. I think Schumpeter is pretty astute in his description of capitalism and how it will eventually cause its own destruction. Long-time friends of mine might recall that I have preached the same story in the schoolyard since the ye olden days. However, I’d like to shelve the economics discussion for a later time. CSD’s most scintillating and polemical discourse relates to the political, not the economic. Varun, “down for some fresh democracy hot and spicy,” has requested that we explore the Schumpeterian criticism of democratic theory.
I will spend a thousand words or so in this post trying to explain Schumpeter’s criticism of the major elements of participatory democracy. The next time you read Philosophantasy (in 2023 :o), we can revisit Schumpeter and delve more deeply into the alternate modality he imagines to measure democratic effectiveness.
In one sentence, what does Schumpeter argue about democracies? Any democracy based on ideals like representation or participation probably sucks.
In CSD, Schumpeter argues against what he labels the “classical doctrine” of democracy, as described by 18th-century thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau. As he understands it, the democratic method is an “institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions which realizes the common good by making people itself decide issues through the election of individuals who are to assemble in order to carry out its will” (CSD 250). In layman’s terms, Schumpeter thinks the major consideration of democracy, classically defined, is the political decision-making made by the representatives elected by the people. Through electoral processes, democracies are able to aggregate individual political preferences. This aggregation produces a “common good” that elected officials are then charged with representing in legislative contexts. His characterization of the “classical doctrine of democracy” is in reference to the Rousseauian idea that the object of a state is to produce and effectuate the “volonté générale” of the people. In English, that means “general will.”
Hope that makes some sense. Schumpeter isn’t redefining or making any super revelatory observations about the classical doctrine, so we can understand the democracy he goes on to criticize as representative in character. He then offers two criticisms of this doctrine.
First, the classical definition assumes that there is a common good that we can all agree on and arrive at, which can then be measured in an electoral fashion. Schumpeter thinks not. Even though individuals may express general likes and dislikes about politics and the public sphere, this hardly constitutes a “will.” Individual interests vary to a degree that there can not be a “uniquely determined common good that all people could agree on or be made to agree on by rational argument” (251). Additionally, even if we could agree on a common good, it’s unlikely we would agree on the means of achieving it. Ideals like health are agreeable, though people still widely disagree on practices like vaccination and vasectomy.
The second Schumpeterian criticism is that even if the general will existed, it would not be the cause of the political process, but rather, the effect. Schumpeter considers that citizens often yield to “irrational prejudice and impulse” and that ordinary voters are susceptible to the influence of political leadership and mass media (262). In effect, because human nature is so tractable, the political process creates general will by exerting influence over preferences and choices, not vice versa. In order for a common good to be reliable, citizens have to independently and effectively make rational choices, discern facts from impressions, and accurately formulate opinions about politics.
I think it’s worth noting that this second objection is particularly prescient, considering the state of politics in democracies like the United States. I am skeptical that even well-read voting-age Americans can satisfactorily fulfill the responsibility to make rational choice when it comes to the formation of a general will. Put it this way. Despite this skepticism, I am sympathetic to the ordinary voter here. Why would an ordinary person have clear and articulate views on complex issues? There is quite literally no credible context in which those views would be called upon or tested. In a mass electoral democracy, you are typically asked binarily who to vote for on a ballot.
Taken together, a classical interpretation would align well with our traditional, “AP US Government” understanding of a democratic system. Advocates of this doctrine would promise rule of people through electoral decisions, trusting that the choices in representatives the citizen body makes at the ballot box would reflect the policies, perspectives, preferences, and priorities of that body. Or, indirect governance BY the people, in a bit more familiar language. According to this understanding, the selection of the representatives (democratic practice) is relegated to a secondary role to the actual deciding of issues.
Schumpeter, distrustful of the electorate’s ability and dubious over mass participation in politics, proposes that these priorities be flipped. He’d assert that the actual decision-making and policies passed or defeated by an elected legislature are less important than the kind of competition for leadership that he believes ought to define democracy. In his own words from CSD, democracy is the “institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote” (269). Under this framework, called “competitive elitism” people are the commodity competed over by those seeking power. What makes democracy meaningful is that competition amongst rival politicians, whereas the classical doctrine holds more representational ideals (the idea that people can control laws) supreme.
On face, this alternate theory of democracy might seem pretty unaccountable. Does Schumpeter seriously expect us to ignore the political actions of the individuals we elect, insofar as those individuals are compliant with the requisite levels of competition in their ascent to leadership? Next time, we’ll explore the limits, constraints, and conditions that Schumpeter goes on to stipulate must be placed on a democracy in order to achieve his model of competitive elitism.
Dearest Zachary,
I have diligently scrolled through our class’ blogs on a biweekly basis, fervently searching for blogs that pique my interest. As a fellow intellectual, I have sincerely appreciated each and every one of your philosophatntastic blogs, yes as a resident fool, I often struggled to make it through the introductory paragraphs and yielded to your verbose offensive. That ends today. I have finally gathered the necessary courage to attempt a Zach Wu blog, and I request your patience as I brave the new territory that is your unequalled writing. But I digress.
I fondly remember your anti-capitalist diatribes in our formative educational years. At the time, I bristled at your apparently communistic propaganda, but the years since then have come with a greater awareness in such economic discussions. Such enlightenment has even allowed me to select a post-secondary concentration in the field of economics so that I might continue exploring the concepts you outline from CSD. I am additionally deeply engrossed in the political spheres that intersect with economic discussion. So for now I will cease my nostalgic revelry and walk with you (and Varun) down this path towards the faults of democracy.
What I most appreciate in your analysis is that you succinctly categorize what is undoubtedly a lengthy, decidedly academic text into a dichotomy I can more clearly understand. At the risk of being overly reductive, I’ll do my best to further summarize your thoughts. Consider it a confirmation of my comprehensioadsn rather than a criticism of your ability to summarize.
On the first proverbial hand, we naturally contain the classical doctrine. As you so elegantly put it, democracy puts political decision-making in the hands of representatives elected by the people. We can of course agree that a direct democracy fails in multiple regards; while it might have succeeded for the Athenians who we studied even before ye olden days, asking 300 million people to frequently cast their votes for a modern society’s public policy is, simply put, impossible. Instead, you suggest that our republican system of government allows for elected representatives to legislate based on the general will. I appreciate your callback to the days of AP Euro, and I have no doubt that Ms. Welsh would beam at the notion of her students employing Rousseauian ideals in their vernacular to enlighten their peers. But the crux of this hardly merits the lengthy treatment we’ve given it; in short, elected representatives legislate based on the general will of the people.
And yet that notion is nothing if not debatable. The criticisms you reference are simply undeniable. A general will is immeasurable, and the philosophy that suggests such a theory is as idealistic as your example of health. Yes, our health system needs improvement. But the devil is in the details, and Satan is diabolical in such cases. Furthermore, by noting that “human nature is so tractable”, you delicately state a harsher reality: the vast majority of humans are plagued by idiocy and dependency on their surroundings to define their opinions. The rational man is absent from America, and in his place is, as you note, the average Fox News fan. The one concern I would raise in this case would be that this problem is largely unsolvable. Evaluating the electorate over some metric to determine their rationality leads to wide-spread disenfranchisement, because in our nation’s current state, the solution to this irrationality would be stripping off voting rights 100% of the time before American politicians thought to educate their citizens. Our graduation requirement to study US government and politics can only take you so far. But no matter how uneducated a voter might be, I strongly believe their right to participate in American society must not be infringed. They may not choose representatives in the same rational manner that you or I might employ, but their binary ballot vote is nevertheless critical to the fabric of our society. In the end, this process might relegate legislation to a subservient role to the selection of legislator as you say, but when we simplify a direct democracy into a republic, this sacrifice is necessary.
The second hand has at last arrived, and on it lies a worthy opponent to our classical doctrine. I’m fascinated by Schumpeter’s alternative explanation to democracy, and I do believe that our nation’s current democracy falls victim to this competition of rival leaders compared to political decisions. In America, our political experiment is defined by the leadup to the November elections, but the general public’s interest in congressional semantics often dissipates following inaugural proceedings in the following January. It’s so difficult to see a direct relationship between the votes we cast in November and the legislation signed by our president, and this schism is what I assume defines Schumpeter’s criticism. To the average voter, the people come before the policy.
I do have my own criticism of this theory before I close this comment, that being the stunning lack in rivalry between candidates. The commodity in our elections is not necessarily the people’s vote, but rather pure wealth. Campaigns are not won, they’re financed. Fundraising and advertisements reigh supreme over political ideology and the like. And of course when you factor in gerrymandering and voter suppression, the American version of democracy fails to live up to either perspective offered by Shumpter. But this largely misses the point of what you suggest; America’s stumbles are insignificant missteps in the grand debate of democracy.
The debate between classical doctrine and competitive elitism is neither defined nor answered by our republic, and it certainly requires further development on your part to answer this question. On a preliminary basis, I would suggest that a candidate is typically held accountable to their political actions in spite of their competitive nature; the electorate only has so much tolerance for their representative’s actions, and at the risk of contradiction I posit that Trump and his supporters fit the bill. But I’ll have to wait for your next blog to find out.
Thank you, Zach, for a truly great read.