Rancière on the hatred of democracy

Jacques Rancière

La Haine de la Democratie

This is a relatively small book - 106 pages. Very readable and clear - propelled by a commitment to the value of equality of 'no matter who to no matter who'. Rancière is critical of those who hate democracy, those who seem to want to blame a series of apparent social maladies on it. The book starts of with a list of them - the young woman who has France holding it's breath with her story of a sexual attack, the adolescents who refuse to lift their veil at French schools, the social security deficit, the revision of the bac curriculum so that out go Racine and Corneille but in come Montesquieu, Voltaire and Baudelaire, street protesters wanting to keep the retirement system maintained, the development of reality tv, homosexual marriages and artificial insemination.

Over in the anglo speaking world we have seen a number of similar causes - the phrase dumbing down, the general hatred of media studies by the errr . . . media, Big Brother, the 50% university target - all of this blamed on democracy - at least this is what Rancière exposes in his account of the use of it as a term of abuse especially in the work of a section of French intellectuals.

But democracy as a term of abuse is not new. Rancière argues that hatred of democracy is as old as democracy itself. Indeed the term was first of all an insult, used by those who saw in it the ruin of all legitimate order through the innumerable government of the multitude. (p.7 LHDLD)

Yet this hatred is evident in the countries around the world which declare themselves to be democracies. The people who criticise the USA for its affirmative action are the same people who have applauded the USA when it travels the globe dishing out democracy at the end of a barrel of a gun. (p. 9)

The new articulation of this hatred of democracy is worrying. The new version of the hatred of democracy goes like this:

1. democratic government is bad when it lets itself be corrupted by democratic society which wants all differences respected and equality.

2. so a good democracy is the one which suppresses this kind of (catastrophic) democratic civilisation.

Rancière wants his book to follow up the consequences of this hatred but also much more positively to restore to the term democracy, its cutting edge.