John Dunn's History of Democracy and the Crisis

In his brilliant book on Democracy John Dunn offers a gloomy prognosis for the fate of representative democracy in economic depression. For Dunn Madisonian representative democracy carries off the amazing trick of uniting political equality with the growth of "opulence and distinctions" but "could scarcely work for long anywhere where distinction must be sustained through stagnant or diminishing wealth, and has been widely and understandably abandoned, often with little hesitation, in circumstances of this kind" (128). In such crises, such as the one we are now suffering, various exits and options become attractive. The option that captures most of Dunn's attention is the antithesis to Madisonian representative democracy. Egalitarian democracy, whose origin is found in Babeuf's response to Thermidor, aims to eliminate opulence and distinctions. Dunn's reflections on the prospects for democracy are carried out in the space between these two poles.

There is logically a third option, a democracy that proposes opulence but is hostile to distinctions (there is also a modern regime that is hostile to opulence and seeks distinctions but I cannot imagine any way to call such a regime democratic). That is not just a space on a logical grid but is the ground occupied by both Social Democracy and Christian Democracy.  For the purposes of this reflection the many differences between these two political traditions are less important than the strategy they share. Both traditions manage the chaos generated by the growth, or decline, of opulence by insuring the citizen against the loss of access to various public goods, to their capacity to act as a citizen. The term used very often in French public debate as a norm against which public policy can be judged, "inclusion", captures well the trajectory of this mode of thought and governance. Distinctions, which from this ground are understood as privileges, threaten democratic inclusion, opulence is neutral.

I have written at length on the emergence of Social Democracy from the wreckage of Jacobinism, and the relationship between the French Revolution and the possibilities of democracy is a generally well-worked theme, most recently in the work of Pierre Rosanvallon. I don't know of a similar body of work on Christian Democracy. Obviously these traditions don't exhaust the repertoire of the Atlantic political imaginary, but if Dunn is right about Madison's brainchild, then they will have to bear a heavy load in the resolution to our current difficulties.