Majority Rule and Democratic Violence: Tocqueville and Ambedkar

• In Event: Democracy and Unequal Power: Causes, Consequences, and Solutions

Abstract

Contemporary democratic theory has largely ignored violence besides elite conflict, or assumed that the successful operation of democracy would itself render violence futile. In this paper I examine two theories of democratic violence situated at different temporal stages in the spread of democracy: the prospective stage in B. R. Ambedkar’s writings on caste and democracy in India; and the expansive stage in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and reconstruct and compare their critiques of majority rule and its relationship to political violence. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville describes violence as a consequence of the spread of equality. In his description of the “moral empire of the majority”, Tocqueville suggests that the experience of equality as majority rule legitimates domination, and stifles dissent. In his chapter on the Three Races, Tocqueville describes violence against Native Americans as the inevitable fallout from democracy’s in-built tendency towards expansion, while violence against slaves and freed Black persons is motivated by the recognition that their assertion of equality would lead to vengeful violence against Whites, the current or erstwhile oppressors. Against interpretations that read these observations discreetly, I argue that Tocqueville offers a helpful, but incomplete, explanation of when majority rule may legitimate political violence. Ambedkar offers a different critique of majority rule wherein he underscores that ossified identities, specifically of caste and religion, prevent elections from acquiring the uncertainty required to protect minorities. Ambedkar also describes how gratuitous violence and the spectacle of humiliation uphold and perpetuate inequalities of status through his reading of ancient Indian history. Under conditions of democratic competition, these practices acquire different forms and have different consequences, but they do not disappear. I argue that majority rule, as a societal phenomenon rather than strictly as a decision-rule, can justify violence through two mechanisms, permanence and conformism. Permanence, as in Ambedkar’s account of caste and religion, and implicitly in Tocqueville’s account of race, empties political procedures of majority-making of their uncertainty and posits a potentially disastrous combination of ascriptivism and minority status. Conformism, or the intrinsic desire to be counted among the many, and pluralistic ignorance, wherein individuals misinterpret the extent of numerical support for political positions, insulate majoritarian violence against criticism. In closing, the paper discusses Tocqueville and Ambedkar’s speculations for the prospects of associative democracy that would protect against majoritarian tyranny.

Author

• Vatsal Naresh, Yale University