Is democracy in the rocks?: the danger of demarchy

Liberal democracy, popular democracy, and Christian democracy all presume that a political system is democratic in virtue of it being the ‘rule of the people' or ‘government by the people’: it is 'the people' who are sovereign. Yet Friedrich Hayek (1982) and those contemporary political thinkers who draw on his theoretical writings, challenge this conceptual presumption. Instead, they propose a novel understanding of democracy – ¬ demarchy – that does without the sovereign power of the people. The demarchic model of democracy is one that is organized to serve not the sovereign power of the people but the needs of the market. The function of political organizations and democratic institutions, such as parliaments, governments, and courts, are subject to the requirements, directions, and results of impersonal and spontaneous markets, which are not themselves subject to direct human interference or intervention. Human beings themselves are to be regarded, politically, as individual Robinson Crusoes: each one entirely free, private, and separate. The citizens of such a demarchic democracy expect, require, and consent to their representatives – the demarchs – to be solely guided by serving the rationale and needs of the market when in engaging in legislation. Furthermore, according to this Hayekian-informed conception of a demarchic democracy, the aggregate opinion will inevitably fit with these market orientated priorities. Thus the 'general opinion' of the people will be one and the same as views and commitments of the demarchs. A key consequence of this model is that it is impossible for 'general opinion' to be at odds with any demarchic legislation. There is no conceptual space for any dissenting collective 'public opinion' that might challenge the general opinion (that everything must serve the spontaneous market forces). Thus the very idea of demarchic democracy as a democracy is, in fact, internally contradictory. By prioritising the freedoms of the individual and the market, and eliminating any conception of political society that might contain these alongside other non-market-focussed commitments, priorities, and values, demarchy offers a road to authoritarianism. I argue that this theoretical model is being actualised, and being (mis)used as a theoretical justification for this actualisation, in the countries of European Union. Yet demarchy is not only incoherent as a form of democracy it risks destroying liberal democracy. In order to prevent our ordinary conception of democracy hitting the rocks, we must acknowledge the conceptual and practical problems with demarchy and revisit what is meant by – and what we aspire to with – “the sovereignty of the people”. Demarchy is throwing 'the people' overboard to prevent a shipwreck – yet this is the very action that will cause it.