The Limits of Democracy
The project of this book
One evening of riots after a match, a capital burns, cities are vandalized, the common good is destroyed gratuitously. A crowd is not a whole people, but one question remains: how can a society entrust the same political power to those who respect common rules and to those who trample them?
To understand, one needs something other than indignation: a magnifying glass, memory and patience.
The filter and the switch
This essay can be summed up in two words: the filter and the switch. Every regime succeeds or perishes according to whether it can bring competent leaders to power — that is the filter — and remove the bad ones without bloodshed — that is the switch. Without a filter, democracy slides toward mediocrity, then toward mediocracy; without a switch, authority slides toward tyranny.
But a more serious question runs through this book: can one, in the sacred name of democracy, accept that a nation collapse by the choice of its own voters? Is democracy a principle of common life, or a suicidal pact by which a people should allow itself to be destroyed provided that its destruction has been voted for?
A journey through twenty-five centuries
To answer, this book travels through twenty-five centuries: Athens condemning Socrates, Rome and its reversible dictatorship, the China of the mandarins, Venice, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Weimar, Singapore and contemporary China. France serves as a specimen under the microscope because it shows to the naked eye symptoms that other democracies bear under other names: public impotence, administrative millefeuille, political mediocrity, loss of civic culture, a State that is weak when it should be firm, intrusive when it should be simple.
From this journey arises a question our age refuses to face: when a country can no longer reform itself through ordinary channels, must one exclude on principle the exceptional man, elected or not, capable of deciding what paralyzed institutions can no longer resolve? History answers that this path exists. But it is legitimate on one condition only: never to confuse recovery with confiscation of power.
Neither the crowd nor the iron fist
This book celebrates neither the crowd nor the iron fist. It rejects two lies: the one that sanctifies the vote even when it leads to shipwreck, and the one that dreams of a savior dispensing citizens from becoming adults again. For a nation is truly saved only when it regains the means to choose the best, and to dismiss them when they cease to serve.
David Salvan, a French author, signs here an essay that combines historical rigor and philosophical audacity, and lays the foundations for an institutional refoundation of contemporary democracies.