“Political state in which sovereignty belongs to the totality of citizens, without distinction of birth, wealth or capacity” (Lalande, emphasis added). This means that power belongs to all (not necessarily at the same time nor in every domain); strictly speaking, one should then speak of panarchy. The problem lies in the exercise of this sovereignty.
Recent history has assimilated representative government and democracy, although the modern founders (England, United States, France) explicitly opposed them. Democracy is neither the power of the majority nor the totalitarianism of a minority: the latter corresponds to today’s plutocracies and elitocracies. One should instead speak of diacracy (shared power) in order to recover the original meaning of “democracy.”
More specifically
The term has undergone a semantic drift: from collective self-government it has become a legitimizing label for systems that are, in fact, deeply oligarchic. Election, conceived by liberal thinkers as an aristocratic mechanism (selection of the “best”), gradually replaced sortition, regarded by the Ancients as the properly democratic instrument. More, Montesquieu and Rousseau already warned against reducing the general will to mere electoral arithmetic.
Authentic democracy implies deliberation and subsidiarity: decisions must be made at the level closest to those concerned. It also requires institutions safeguarding fundamental rights, for an unchecked majority can oppress just as a tyrannical minority does.
Finally, democracy presupposes civic virtue. Without political education and concern for the common good, popular sovereignty degenerates into media spectacle, clientelism, and the governance of passions. Diacracy, understood as the distribution and articulation of power among groups, intermediate bodies, and local communities, would better meet the original need for equilibrium. It would restore to citizens not only a right to vote but a real capacity to act.
Further reading:
– Aristotle, Politics
– Rousseau, The Social Contract
– Tocqueville, Democracy in America
– Bernard Manin, Principles of Representative Government
– Pierre Rosanvallon, Counter-Democracy
– Bruno Bérard, La démocratie du futur. Le partage du pouvoir (Paris, L’Harmattan, 2022); not yet translated.