If I had read Joseph Schumpeter two years ago I would have completely disagreed with him. I would have described him as being an arrogant, pessimist, and elitist man who sees human beings as irrational and primitive beings. I would have said that such a skeptical critique of democracy is not helpful and that the idealism behind Dahl’s procedural definition, even though unattainable, is much more constructive because it produces incentives to improve our systems.
Today, my point of view is slightly different because of the traumatizing experience we recently had in Switzerland. In November 2009, the Swiss people voted against the construction of minarets. This vote is a complete discrimination against the Muslim society and goes against the agreements that Switzerland has with the European Court of Human rights and more generally International Convention on Human Rights.
(To know more you can read this New York Times article, it is concise and summarizes the issue:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/30/world/europe/30swiss.html )
This vote completely dismantled my faith and my idealism about what democracy really is. First, I realized that emotions, and most of all fear could have disastrous effects on freedoms. As Alexis de Tocqueville aptly pointed out, a big risk for democracies is that the people abandon freedom in order to keep their well being (or what they think their well-being is). Second, I realized how the people could be manipulated and their opinion “manufactured” by elites. Wrong statistics and associations between violence and foreigners are being used by right-wing parties to convince the Swiss population that their well being is threatened by a small and specific portion of foreign people.
Joseph Schumpeter is of course very radical in his way of describing the irrationality of the people, however, his fear is very realistic in a sense and leads us to think about ways in which the ‘will’ of the people should not be taken as being authentic and rational. This fear already existed for the Greeks who saw the people as wanting things that are not good for them and for the city.
Those fears underline a very deep problem about democracy: is the decision of the majority always acceptable? Is it legitimate to act against individual liberties because it is the rule of democracy to be governed by the ‘will of the people’? What are the limits of this will? Can we really trust the people as being the ‘Guardians of liberty’ as Machiavelli saw them?