Review of Dominique Schnapper's book, by Gérard Grunberg - The Disillusionment of Democracy (Gallimard)

With the author's permission, we are republishing here this review which appeared in The Library of Telos July, 22th, 2024

Dominique Schnapper, in his recent work " The Disillusionment of Democracy », places at the centre of her questions the contemporary threats against our democratic regimes that are developing within them. These threats are produced according to her by the democratic dynamic itself and arise from the fragility of democratic construction. This construction is artificial insofar as « democracy is based on the creative utopia of a public space in which all citizens have the same dignity, the same political freedom and equality. The modern democratic order is a project to overthrow the spontaneous or « natural » social order, which is « naturally » hierarchical and unequal ». Thus, dissatisfaction and internal criticism are all the more lively as democracy, always unfinished, given its utopian character, is always tempted to become « ​​extreme ». « Since democratic dynamics do not have real limits, the unlimited desire for freedom and equality then risks coming into contradiction with the very spirit of democracy ». This is the author's fear that runs through her entire work: "Will the passion for equality be combined with freedom or with servitude?" Will "extreme" democracy sweep away democracy itself?

Universalism is the central value that underpins democracy. The citizen is a subject of law, defined as an abstract individual, without identification and without particular qualifications. However, it is precisely this abstract character that has been radically challenged for several decades by thoughts that criticize the absence of identification and particular qualifications of individual citizens in universalist thought. While this thought seeks to reconcile the recognition of particularisms with the universality of citizenship, accepting this tension as constitutive of the democratic question and attempting to manage it as best as possible, radical thought reverses the perspective and starts from the diversity of individuals analyzed from their situation in a universe structured by the opposition between dominant and dominated.

This reversal has been taking place for a long time in the feminist movement, with differentialism being opposed to universalism in the conception of the fight to be waged. Similarly, in the fight for civil rights, Martin Luther King's vision in the United States was called into question based on the observation, although questionable, that the melting pot was a total failure and that ethnic ties have definitively prevailed over civic ties. That the so-called universalism actually hides a white assimilationism. Intersectionalist thinking thus puts race back at the center of the analysis (blacks are racialized) and more generally all discrimination, white privilege being ultimately the target of the fight to be waged. Cultural relativism must prevail over universalist humanism. A vision that the author rejects as dangerous, believing that this very relativism must be "relativized", taking up Francis Wolf's idea according to which "the universal is indeed the horizon of all emancipation" while for the proponents of intersectionalist thinking universality would ultimately be only a kind of particularism.

This radical renewal of contemporary critical thinking leads to denouncing all forms of discrimination and calls for the convergence of struggles against white privilege in political systems characterized by male domination. For Dominique Schnapper, this is a "project of total social and intellectual revolution". The concept of structural or systemic racism is used to characterize European or European-origin democratic society. Every white male is racist, whether he is aware of it or not, and through the European colonization policy, this domination has spread throughout the world, as post-colonial studies seek to show. "Racialized" people must therefore be permanently "awakened" to track down all forms of discrimination (woke ideology). European colonization would ultimately be the essential factor in understanding European societies today.

For the author, this radical criticism feeds two temptations, both very dangerous: radical constructivism and the indistinction or indifferentiation of human beings, orders and values.

For the proponents of radical constructivism, everything is social construction. The masculine/feminine binary must be rejected. Individuals must be able to choose their sex freely, independently of any biological characteristic. Assigning a sex to an individual by authority is a totalitarian practice, a political discrimination. The absolute relativism advocated in this knowledge project leads to a confusion between the objective and the subjective. This is a radical critique of a scientific approach which, according to the author, aims at "autonomy, even relative, and defends the intention of objectivity of the knowledge project." This negation of any objectivity of science and the claimed rationality of the scientific project is at the heart of this radical thought. All science then becomes militant since it is a political fight to change social practices. Summarizing the social order to the sole opposition of dominants/dominated consists, according to the author, in denying the very complexity of social life. This highlights the dangers that “extreme democracy” poses to democracy.

Dominique Schnapper points out that this thought was born and developed in American universities, particularly the most prestigious. A significant proportion of students adhere to it, as recent events in these universities have shown. We could add that it is not only a conquest of minds but also of positions, that is to say of power itself in these American establishments. This radical thought has found fertile ground to develop there for an interesting reason that the author takes up and which finds its roots in the American puritan tradition. It would be a quasi-religious faith, a belief to which the students of these universities, from wealthy families, adhere. White privilege, for which they do penance, would thus take the place of original sin as an indelible stain.

Dominique Schnapper believes that the spread of this radical thinking risks precipitating the disintegration of democratic societies. "Driven by its own logic, democratic dynamics risk, through their excesses, coming to distort the project of emancipation inherent in the republican promise." For the democratic order to conform to its principle, the limits that are at its foundation must be respected: particularisms cannot be contradictory with the freedom and equality of all citizens, she states. "Under these conditions," she concludes, "will "extreme" democracies be able to continue to affirm the meaning of the most humane or most suitable political project, which, despite its shortcomings, modernity invented? Are they ready to fight to make it effective?"

The author has deliberately limited her remarks to the "internal demons" that threaten democracy. She only reminds us that it is also threatened by the will to power manifested by its external enemies who "condemning the supposed cowardice and weakness of democrats, want to bring down the civilization that dominated the world in recent centuries." However, what is striking in this postmodern thought born in the West and which radically criticizes Western civilization is that it is precisely totally Western-centric, as if this West had finally taken over the world and was ruling it, as if white privilege extended over the entire surface of the planet and that all forms of domination flowed from it. This thought then appears doubly limited. On the one hand, if we look at political regimes that escape the "domination" of the white male, let's take China for example, discrimination of all kinds, forms of domination exist there just as much and in our opinion much more to the extent that freedom does not exist there. This oversight considerably limits the scope of this thought. On the other hand, the colonialist and imperialist countries today are Russia and China and no longer the poor West, increasingly threatened by regimes that do not support the freedom it protects, however relative it may be. As a result, by weakening our political regimes through their radical criticism, they involuntarily contribute to their weakening, from which these powers intend to profit. It is also in this respect that this thought is dangerous.