Bernard Crick's Defence of Politics Against Democracy

As I write, a radical right political movement has captured the government of the United States and is busily dismantling liberal democracy there and the liberal international order in the rest of the world. To readers unfamiliar with the work of Bernard Crick, it might therefore seem strange in this moment to bring up a defence of politics against democracy, rather than of democracy against politics. But, as we shall see, what one means by these terms is essential. Crick’s In Defence of Politics is a classic work of British political studies¹. In my copy of the book (the 1964 revised Pelican edition - the second edition of the book), the book is compromised of an introduction on the nature of politics, five defences of politics against some threat, and a final chapter in praise of politics. Editions after the first include some version of a rallying cry as a footnote - mine is addressed to the Academic Professors of Politics.

Politics

I am focussing here on the second of the five defences, which is the defence of politics against democracy. To clarify the nature of Crick’s defence, it is important to understand what he means by “politics” and by “democracy”. Politics for Crick is:

the activity by which differeing interests within a given unit of rule are conciliated by giving them a share in power in proportion to their importance to the welfare and the survival of the whole community

In this definition Crick is drawing on his reading of Aristotle, and setting him against Plato. Plato characterises politics as aiming at unity², where Aristotle recognises that politics is an aggregation of many members of a community. Crick considers politics to be a solution to the “problem of diversity”, which is the problem of reconciling many groups with differing interests and preferences to coexist with one another in peace. It is one of many possible alternatives to the problem of diversity, of which others are tyranny (rule by one man) and oligrarchy (rule by a single group in its own interest). All of these others solves the problem of diversity through coercion and force: only in political rule are competing interests reconciled to one another. Politics therefore arises in response to the simultaneous existence of

… different groups, hence different interests and different traditions, within a territorial unit under a common rule.

Politics for Crick is an activity conducted by humans, rather than a set of principles or traditional habits requiring preservation. It is the specific activity which enables the possibility of pluralism and enables us to enjoy the variety of civilisation without descent into anarchy or the subsequent turn to tyranny. Not quite for the last time in the book, Crick compares politics to sex (one wonders if he enjoyed politics rather a lot, or sex not very much):

… one does not create it or decide to join in - one simply becomes more and more aware that one is involved in it as part of the human condition.

Crick favours political rule precisely because it is the form of rule which aims to rule through consent and consiliation, rather than through coercion. It does not require consensus, but rather arrives at a provisional consensus through the process of consilitation. Indeed, the idea that a consensus is required in the form of Rousseau’s General Will can even be destructive to the process of politics. Political rule, unlike others, allows for freedom precisely because it does not aim at unity:

… politics represents at least some tolerance of differing truths, some recognition that gobernment is possible, indeed best conducted, amid the open canvassing of rival interests.

Democracy

Democracy, Crick tells us, is among the most promiscuous³ of words, for

She is everybody’s mistress and yet somehow retains her magic even when a lover sees that her favours are being, in his light, illicitly shared by many another.

What he means by this is that the word “democracy” has taken on a range of meanings over time; including “majority rule”, the right of minority groups to speak out against the majority, a synonym for equality, the “will of the peoople”, rule by the poorest in the society, mob rule, or a political system placing constitutional limitations on a freely elected government. As we shall see, Crick considers the last of these - still one of the most common uses today and likely for the forseeable future - to be the most historically implausible use.

Given the wide range of meanings of the term, there is a correspondingly wide range of forms of rule which can be characterised as democratic. There is no requirement that a regime characterised as democratic necessarily be a free one. Crick’s core argument is that while it is true that sufficiently large societies require the consent of the governed, there is no reason why the governed cannot consent to tyranical or totalitarian rule. Totalitarian regimes make use of democracy in the sense of majority rule by manufacturing popularity through propaganda and fear, and by crushing internal opposition. To the extent that some or most support for totalitarian regimes is genuine, then they fit a minimalist conception of democracy. Democracy in Crick’s definition therefore not only stabilises and strengthens free regimes, but likewise strengthens unfree regimes⁴.

Crick explicitly expresses distaste for the use of “democracy” to mean “mixed government” in (his reading of) the Aristotlean sense of the term (a “polity”), combining both aristocratic and democratic principles. The aristocratic principle is a recognition of the importance of experience, skill, and knowledge to good governance, and a rejection of opinion alone. Reconciling it to the democratic principle requires however that governance be subjected to the consent of the governed. In Crick’s account, Aristotle

saw [Democracy] as a necessary element in polity or mixed-government, but alone it was destructive of the political community.

Here is the crux of Crick’s defence of politics against democracy. It is the Tocquevillian idea that unconstrained majority rule can become its own form of tyranny. Insofar as politics is the concilitation of different interests and preferences, then majorities are capable of obliviating politics. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue, a small degree of countermajoritarianism is crucial for Liberal Democracy⁵, and likewise so for what Crick calls politics.

Liberal Democracy

The contrast of democracy against politics is a theme that Crick returns to in later works. In CITIZENSHIP: THE POLITICAL AND THE DEMOCRATIC⁶, a 2007 article published on his thinking on the introduction of Citizenship as a topic in the National Curriculum (an introduction in which Crick played a large role), Crick explicitly returns to his view expressed in In Defence of Politics that “democracy” can mean too many things to too many people. He acknowledges the fact that, while it is easy enough to advocate for the appeal for political rule against totalitarianism, he had failed to consider seriously enough the breakdown of political rule.

Further into the article, Crick recognises that the most common contemporary meaning of democracy is a fusion of power resting in the people and the idea of legally guaranteed rights, he argues that these remain separate ideas which can come apart in practice. Crick constrats what he calls the civic republican theory of the modern state, where the maintenance of free institutions “depends on high levels of popular participation in public affairs”, and the liberal theory of the modern state, where “competitive elections create governemnts that can modify and uphold a legal order under which individuals can lead their lives with as little interference as possible frolm the state and minimal public obligations”.

Crick’s main concern in the article is of course regarding citizenship education and the specific conditions of democracy in Britain at the time in which he is writing. But, while the two theories of the modern state do seem somewhat distinct, I am unsure that his ideas are as dinstinct from liberalism as he would have us believe. In his history of liberalism Edmund Fawcett argues that conflict is also the core organising idea of the liberal political tradition, with liberals variously attempting either to harness conflict for productive ends in their most hopeful moments, or otherwise attempting to mitigate its consequences⁷. The emphasis on the inevitability and irreducability of human conflict is therefore a common component of both Crick’s thought and of liberal thought.

Likewise, the specific defence of “liberal democracy” as a reconciliation of a liberal regime of rights with the need for the mass consent of the governed is precisely the mixed system of government Crick defends. The “liberal” qualifier makes explicit what we mean by “democracy” and avoids the kind of definitional issues Crick was concerned about. I think this is a fairly strong argument in favour of retaining attention on “liberal democracy” rather than “politics” - not least because Crick’s definition of politics is probably no less contentious than the definition of “democracy” which he dislikes.

Nonetheless, Crick is a deeply relevant thinker to our present moment. It’s striking the extent to which his defence of politics anticipates, for instance, Cas Mudde’s definition of populism. This definition, which has a remarkable degree of consensus among political scientists (a typically disagreeable group) as “a thin-centred ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups: the pure people and the corrupt elite, which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people”⁸. The important thing to stress about populism is that it is both highly political but also highly anti-political. Populist rhetoric goes beyond disagreement and into the deligitimisation of disagreement.

If, as Crick has it, politics is a means of solving the problem of diversity in human societies through conciliation, then populism is a rejection of that conciliation which nonetheless appeals to democracy by claiming to be the voice to the “pure” people. As Mudde has noted, though we often speak of populism, populism in practice is almost exclusively a phenomenon of the radical right⁹. If the far right rejects liberal democracy, the radical right rejects the specifically “liberal” part of the equation. Of course, without liberal protections it is questionable as to what extent free and fair elections can occur (c.f. democratic backsliding under Orban and now Trump). It is to Crick’s credit that he was prescient about the possibility of this detachment, even if I think that “liberal democracy” is a more useful term than “politics” when defining what it is we wish to defend against Trump and other autocratic politicians.

Footnotes