Democracy and Dictatorship (Pre-Recorded)

Session Submission Type: In-Person Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Can democracies ever be dictatorial? And can dictatorships ever be authentically democratic? For a long time, political scientists and theorists could safely answer ‘no’ to both questions. Democracies, if not beset by pathological imbalances, were necessarily accompanied by rule of law and impartial lawmaking; dictatorships might counterfeit aspects of popular sovereignty or rule of law, but could not genuinely lay claim to democratic features.

But the ‘populist’ decade of 2010-2020 has thrown the limits of this view into sharp relief. Rather than purely anti-democratic, new variants of dictatorship often termed ‘populist’ seemed to draw confidently on the repertoire of democracy, mobilizing concepts such as ‘people’, ‘popular sovereignty’, and ‘collective agency’ to serve defiantly non-liberal ends. Meanwhile, established democracies, in, e.g., France and the United States, have become attracted to increasingly sweeping visions of executive and “emergency” power. This shift has destabilized an opposition that looked solid only a few decades before.

Academics have not remained passive t in the face of this development. Intellectually, the crises of democracy have occasioned a renaissance for thinkers such as Carl Schmitt—whose theories of democratic dictatorship never shared the irenic presupposition of the 1990s—as well as leading scholars to take a closer look at the relevance of French Bonapartism and Jacobin democracy for the present day. In the present, the extreme measures taken by democracies in response to Covid has pushed the question of a ‘democratic dictatorship’ even more urgently to the fore.

This panel revisits the possible relationship between ‘democracy’ and ‘dictatorship’ from a variety of historical angles. To do so, it draws on resources from both political theory and the history of political thought, uniting scholars in both fields. In keeping with this year’s APSA theme on ‘Anti-pluralism’, it touches on contemporary topics such as populism, the nature of democratic representation, emergency powers, and plebiscitary presidencies, offering a comprehensive snapshot of the current debate.

Adam Lebovitz (Trinity Hall, Cambridge) will present a paper on the specter of dictatorship that hovered over American politics during the so-called “critical period” between 1781 and 1787, showing how often constitutional projects proposed in the years before the Philadelphia Convention made provision for this magistracy, and presenting a new thesis to explain its sudden disappearance from the American political imagination. Margarete Tiessen (Technische Universität Chemnitz) will present a paper on Hermann Heller’s neglected 1933 essay “Authoritarian Liberalism,” arguing that it speaks to a widespread interest on the left and center of Weimar in presidential dictatorship as a bulwark against the Nazi threat. Sam Zeitlin (Corpus Christi, Cambridge) will offer a new look at Carl Schmitt’s postwar Dialogues (1954-58), texts which are typically neglected or misinterpreted in Schmitt scholarship, and which point to the survival of the most extreme elements of Nazi ideology in his thinking even after his official rehabilitation. Finally, Anton Jäger (Université Libre de Bruxelles) will look at the original nineteenth-century American Populist movement’s engagement with the French historiography on Napoleon and Caesar, whose dictatorial variants of democracy seemed to offer alternatives to the gridlock of liberal interest politics in Gilded Age America.

There is every reason to believe that “Democracy and Dictatorship” will not only illuminate these under-examined episodes in the history of political thought, but will also prompt new conversations on the ways in which collective self-rule and individual self-expression can come apart. Consistent with the conference theme of “Promoting Pluralism”, it will generate vigorous debate in the Q&A, and will stimulate new research by political scientists, legal scholars, and political theorists concerning what is sure to remain a central problem of democratic theory in coming years.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• Heller’s Concept of ‘Authoritarian Liberalism’ Revisited - Margarete Tiessen, University of Technology Chemnitz

• The American Dictatorship, 1781-1787 - Adam Lebovitz, Trinity Hall, Cambridge

• Populism and Caesarism - Anton Jäger, Cambridge University

Chairs

• Adam Lebovitz Trinity Hall, Cambridge

• Samuel Garrett Zeitlin Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge

Discussant

• Tae-Yeoun Keum University of California, Santa Barbara