Antidemocratic or Antiparliamentarian Rhetoric? Public Intellectuals in Favour of Metaxas' Dictatorship

This paper focuses on the Greek case of Metaxas' regime and attempts a first examination of its antiparliamentarian discourse. Utilizing the methodological elaborations of the Cambridge School, I analyze the antiparliamentarian rhetoric of intellectuals who supported the regime and their contribution to the legitimization of its power. I will endorse that the arguments they developed did not reject the "democratic principle" per se but the function of the democracy as it worked in the previous bourgeois regimes. Following their arguments, the parliamentarian democracy was expressing the interests of the upper classes excluding the masses from an energetic participation to the realm of politics. From this perspective, their argumentation is not so much antidemocratic – as most of the literature argues - but antiparliamentarian because its target is the institution of the parliament per se.