POLITICAL DEMOCRACY AND
SOCIAL HOMOGENEITY
Hermann Heller
Originally appeared as “Politische Demokratie und Soziale Homogenität,” in Hermann Heller, Probleme der Demokratie, I. Reihe, Politische Wissenschaft: Schriftenreihe der deutschen Hochschule für Politik in Berlin und des Instituts für auswärtige Politik in Hamburg 5 (Berlin: Walter Rothschild, 1928), 35–47. Reprinted in Hermann Heller, Gesammelte Schriften, II: Recht, Staat, Macht, 2nd ed., edited by Christoph Müller (Tübingen: Mohr, 1992), 421–33. Translated by David Dyzenhaus.
The question of what significance social homogeneity has for political democracy is inexhaustible. Here this question will be explored mainly by a clarification of basic concepts from a political (and thus not social, economic, or ethical) standpoint.
Like any other system of political domination, the democratic is also in essence a territorial decision of potentially universal extent. One rules politically when one makes the final decisions in regard to those acts that pertain to the unity of cooperation or when one engages significantly in the unity of territorial decision. The universality of the territorial decision is of course only a potential one. But if the unitary cooperation—the unity in the plurality that since Machiavelli has been called the state—is to be established, any question that pertains to the order uniting the social life of that territory is potentially subject to political decision. The judgment about the relevance of this or that social act for the unity of cooperation changes with the historical and social situation and location.
The unity of territorial decision makes the essence of the political comprehensible to us. It is the process of dialectical adjustment whereby the unending plurality and perplexity of diverse social acts are brought into an
We call the state the unity of those acts that constitute the institution of territorial decision. Hence, the basic problem of all politics is the following: how this unity of territorial decision is established and maintained, on the one hand, amid the plurality of those acts of will that constitute it, and, on the other hand, amid the plurality of surrounding territories with their domination. This universal unity of territorial decision is of necessity grounded in the “social-unsocial nature” of human beings—in both their essential characteristics of diversity and sociality. It is only in society that the human being, positioned between god and animal, becomes human; only in his unmistakable uniqueness does he come to and remain in spiritual-intellectual and physical existence. The universal, operative unity of a territorial decision, however it comes into existence, is thus the conditio sine qua non of the metaphysical, as well as the physical, survival of the human being.
Sociability, which is a fundamental presupposition of the earthly human condition, manifests itself above all as a natural fact that extends down to the animal world. In human society, individual diversity and particularization necessarily correlate, not solely with a community of a natural kind but also with an intellectual decision. While the incomprehensible orders of natural drives play a part, it is also (and above all) the hierarchical “superstructure” of the intellectual orders that gives coherence to the eternally antagonistic structure of human society. The common life of human beings is always a common life that is given order by the concrete human decisions of the will, whereby communities that grow on a naturalistic basis in no way prove themselves as the most stable. An example of an ideal power is that which for thousands of years has joined and divided human beings in the Catholic Church.
These decisions become political as soon as they concern the unity of territorial interchange and cooperation. Increasing civilization and division of labor in combination with an increasing range and complexity of social relationships heighten the necessity for willingly established orders and multiply the number of political decisions made from the center. It also widens therewith the activities of the political unity of decision working
All politics consists in the formation and maintenance of this unity. In an emergency situation, all politics must eventually answer an attack on this unity with the physical annihilation of the attacker.
Therein lies the correct core of Carl Schmitt's claim that the specific political distinction is the distinction between friend and enemy. Politics is fundamentally negated when there is no longer the readiness in an emergency situation to annihilate the one who mounts an internal or external attack on the political unity. A state abolishes itself if it forbids the use of deadly force in all circumstances, or fails to shoot when its representatives are under fire from within or without.
But one must contest Carl Schmitt's view that the friend-enemy distinction is specifically political, a distinction to which all political acts and motives can be reduced. Besides the fact that it is epistemologically inadmissible to arrange this distinction among the categorical value-distinctions of good and bad, beautiful and ugly, useful and harmful, Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction is circular. For, without the adjective “political,” the distinction indicates nothing essentially political. “My friends are your friends, and your enemies should be my enemies,” can apply just as well to the political friend as to any other friend who shares convictions—childhood friend, business friend, and bosom friend. Carl Schmitt is blind to the sphere of unity-formation within the state as politics. Suppose that in fact all political activity could be reduced to the friend-enemy distinction, where the enemy means the one who “in some specially intensive sense is existentially something alien and strange,”[17] one who must be fended off and fought, if need be annihilated, for the protection of the form of life appropriate to its essence. It would follow that the establishment and existence of political unity would be something altogether unpolitical. Schmitt sees only the accomplished political status; but this is not something static; on the contrary it is something that daily has to be formed anew, un plébescite de tous les jours [a daily plebiscite].[18]
The dynamic process whereby the state becomes and maintains itself as the unity in the plurality of its limbs is politics in at least as meaningful a sense as the way in which the state maintains itself in external affairs. The word “politics” derives from polis, not from polemos [war], even though the common root of these terms remains significant. Equally, whether or not one regards it as possible or desirable, the civitas maxima [a supreme or world state] is at the least a theoretically unobjectionable supposition that does not contradict the human condition. In our case it serves to show that the political friend-enemy distinction is a category that is not required in all circumstances. By contrast, the unity of territorial decision would adequately characterize even the essence of the world-state. Hence, Schmitt's friend-enemy
Democracy means rule by the people. If the demos [people] is supposed to kratein [rule] it must under all circumstances form a unity through action and decision [Wirkungs-und Entscheidungseinheit]. That is, like any form of domination, democracy must exhibit a system for unifying wills for which the law of the small number is always valid. The specific nature of the democratic form of domination consists in the fact that its representatives are appointed collegially and have a magisterial and thus not sovereign position. Each democratic representative is directly or indirectly both to be summoned and dismissed by the people, directly or indirectly. Despite his power as representative to make autonomous decisions, he remains legally bound to the will of the people by means of a rationally posited order. The bond that characteristically links democratic representatives to the people is not a sociological or perhaps social-ethical one. Such a bond exists even for autocratic representatives. Indeed, there is no form of domination for which Spinoza's saying is not valid: oboedientia facit imperantem [obedience makes the ruler].[19] It is only in democracy that this bond is additionally a legal one and equipped with effective legal sanctions. In democracy, the methods of appointing representatives can be very different. The direct election of central organs developed in liberal democracies is not the only way of selecting democratic representatives. An election mediated by a council system also counts, when it is not merely the appointment of representatives of purely economic interests, bound by an imperative mandate. There are countless possibilities for the status of democratic representatives. Besides parliamentarism and a democratic council system, one can also call democratic the experimental forms of representation in American cities that do without parliament and councils and simply summon one or two representatives with the widest powers of decision, subject to recall [English in the original] at any time.
The appointment of representatives is the most important phase in the dynamic of the formation of political unity. The whole problematic of contemporary democracy resides in the fact that the democratic appointment of representatives is supposed to take place in a legal process from bottom to top. The contingencies of history determine how far down the bottom reaches, who should be part of the ruling people, and who is to be excluded by reason of age, sex, or differences in education and property.
It is the insight into the significance of the democratic appointment of representatives that first permits an understanding of the great, though much misunderstood and much maligned, significance of political parties in democracy. They are indispensable even in the council system as the essential factors in that system for unifying wills that we call the democratic
The significance of social homogeneity for democracy is also comprehended in the problem just outlined. Democracy is supposed to be a conscious process of the formation of political unity from bottom to top; all representation is supposed to remain legally dependent on the community's will. The people as a plurality is supposed consciously to form itself into the people as a unity. For the formation of political unity to be possible at all, there must exist a certain degree of social homogeneity. So long as there is belief in such homogeneity and the assumption that the possibility of arriving through discussion at political agreement with one's opponent exists and so long as can one debate with one's opponent and renounce suppression by physical force. Carl Schmitt is therefore very wide of the mark when he thinks he has hit the “spiritual center” of parliamentarism. For he, taken as he is by the irrational allure of the myth of force, defines the ratio of parliament as the belief in the public nature of discussion and in the discovery of truth through an unconstrained marketplace of ideas.[20] Such a justification may formerly have been welcomed by some rationalist apologists and even more by contemporary opponents of parliamentarism. In fact, intellectual history shows as the basis of parliamentarism the belief, not in public discussion as such, but in the existence of a common foundation for discussion and thus in the possibility of fair play [English in the original] for one's internal political opponent, in the relationship with whom one thinks one can exclude naked force and come to agreements. Only when this consciousness of homogeneity disappears does a party, which has until that time been one that debates, becomes a party that dictates.
It is thus the case that the degree to which it is possible to form a political unity depends on the extent of social homogeneity; likewise the degree to which it is possible to put in place a system of representation, and stabilizing the representatives' position. There is a certain degree of social homogeneity without which the democratic formation of unity is impossible. The democratic formation of unity ceases to exist when all politically relevant sections of the people no longer recognize themselves in any way in the political unity, when they are not able to identify themselves in any way with the symbols and representatives of state. In that moment the unity is cleaved, and civil war, dictatorship, and alien domination are in the cards. The difficult birth of the continental coalition governments, their short duration, as well as their lack of any far-reaching operative effect, are the most obvious symptoms of an insufficient social homogeneity and, therefore, most dangerous signs of the crisis of our democracies.
A correct understanding of this situation (let alone an appreciation of it or change in it) is today made endlessly difficult by the twin-brothers of a substanceless form of thought: the utopian idealism that rests simply on
But social homogeneity can never mean the abolition of the necessarily antagonistic social structure. The peaceful community free of conflict and the society without domination can be meaningful as prophetic promises. But as a political aim this way of bringing a community of saints to earth, shared by Ernst Michel, denatures the religious as well as the political sphere. Social homogeneity is always a social-psychological state in which the inevitably present oppositions and conflicts of interest appear constrained by a consciousness and sense of the “we,” by a community will that actualizes itself. This relative equalization of the social consciousness has the resources to work through huge antithetical tensions, and to digest huge religious, political, economic, and other antagonisms. One cannot say definitively how this “we-consciousness” is produced and destroyed. All attempts to find the impulse for this consciousness in a single sphere of life have failed and must fail. All that we can rightly know is that in each epoch a correspondence between social being and consciousness—in other words, a societal form—emerges. It is always the sphere in which the consciousness of the epoch is most at home that is also decisive for social homogeneity.
In modern Europe, where since the Renaissance ontology has been thisworldly, the most important factors of social psychological equalization have been common speech and a common culture and political history. The contemporary zeitgeist, whether it assumes an idealist or materialist air, knows in truth nothing but the naturalistic sphere of reality. The intellectual “superstructure” dissipates into a derivative, into a powerless ideology and fiction above the economic, sexual, or racial—modes of being that have to an increasing extent been decisive for social homogeneity. In so far as it exposes the positivistic and historicist superstitions, this ideological lesson is quite healthy for human hubris.
However, in politics an awful question is raising its Medusa's head—the question of how one can affirm today's democracy in the midst of these huge class and racial conflicts. Democracy's existence is dependent to a much greater degree than any other political form on the success of social equalization. One can understand why today both the left and the right maintain that it is impossible to take a democratic path in forming political unity. The neo-Machiavellism of a disillusioned bourgeoisie wants, in the spirit of Vilfredo Pareto, to use democratic, nationalist, and socialist, in short all “ideologies” only as arcana imperii [mysteries of power] in order dictatorially to maintain itself in power amid the eternal “cycle of elites.” In Germany, too, monarchism is, at least for the younger generation, exclusively a disguise for the yearning for the “strong man” who acts and does not
To be sure, the last centuries have brought about civil homogeneity. There no longer exist slaves in the legal sense, people who enjoy no freedom under the law and no liberty of action and whose exclusion from the state was taken for granted in the ancient democracies. Every individual, and not just every citizen, enjoys the formally equal protection of person, family, and property. And this is also how formal-legal political homogeneity is brought about: Each citizen is guaranteed the formally equal right of participation in forming political unity and the formally equal right of qualification for official positions. But even this “step forward in the consciousness of freedom,” as we might say with Hegel, is one that today threatens the formation of democratic unity.
For this consciousness of freedom is, on the one hand, consciousness of social inequality, and consciousness of political power, on the other. The latter cannot be permanently suppressed by force, but so far has by no means the resources to independently direct culture and form political unity. The social-psychological equalization of consciousness cannot be had without a fundamental change in the economy and a profound revolution in consciousness. Is the democratic political form capable of enduring until then, given the facts of the social class struggle? In and of itself, the class struggle, which grows out of an economic basis, must in no way break democracy apart. But once the proletariat believes that the democratic equality of its over-powerful opponent condemns the democratic form of class struggle to hopelessness, it resorts to dictatorship.
The insight of the ruling classes, or rather of the intellectuals in these classes, is decisive for whether that belief takes hold among the proletariat. It is pointless to find comfort for oneself or for others in the ethic of the democratic form. To be sure, political democracy wants to preserve the equal opportunity of each member of the state to influence the formation of political unity by summoning representatives. But social disparity can make summum jus [supreme right] into summa injuria [supreme wrong]. Without social homogeneity, the most radical formal equality becomes the most radical inequality, and formal democracy becomes the dictatorship of the ruling class.
In virtue of their superiority in the economy and in everything that concerns civilization, the rulers have adequate means in hand to change political democracy into its exact opposite by means of their direct and
Should the proletariat become aware of this discrepancy, then it realizes also that not only all the wheels of industry but also the wheels of state will stand still once its strong arm wills it. In that case, it will respect the democratic form of the class struggle only on two conditions. First, the democratic form ensures the proletariat any prospect for success and, second, the proletariat can discern an intellectual and ethical foundation as well as a historical necessity for the contemporary condition of domination. Of course, this also depends on the degree of insight of the proletariat. But it depends incomparably more on the extent of the intellectual and ethical abilities of the rulers and their constituency. The statesman who does not honestly try to make his political decisions transcend class prejudices, the judge who does not constantly attempt to balance the value judgments of all classes in order to avoid a justice tied to one of them—they and all other authorities of the state will represent to the proletarian the naked class-state that has no power to obligate him, but, as a mere instrument of repression, is worthy only of being fought. In such a situation not only the economic condition of both classes but also their intellectual and ethical consciousness will confront each other heterogeneously as entities without any means of mediation. The bourgeois will no longer appear to the proletarian as the same kind of being. The proletarian will confront the dictatorship of the bourgeois class-state with his ideal of the proletarian class dictatorship.
The danger in which the economic disparity between the classes places political democracy can for a time, but in no way permanently, be weakened by a homogeneity of common conventions, something that has been brought about to a certain degree in Switzerland and the United States. Equality of conventions can somewhat reduce the awareness of economic inequalities. Conversely, the more strongly economic differences are emphasized in the ordinary modes of greeting and clothing, the greater the number of social circles and groups who publicly underline their caste distinction by means of their presentability at court, their capacity to become officers, to be members of a corps, and so on; the more closely the conventional steps in upbringing and education are linked with title, rank, and name, the more strictly public accommodations are allocated on distinct lines—whether in the street car or in church—the greater will be the consciousness of the
Finally, that even anthropological homogeneity can be a presupposition of political democracy is demonstrated by the American Negro question. The right to take part in the full electoral process, which was ensured for the Negro after the Civil War, was again taken away. And the altogether honest solemnity that the citizen of the United States lends to universal human rights does not hinder him in the slightest from excluding the Negro from democracy with the same sense of self-evidence as it seemed to Plato that slaves self-evidently are excluded from democracy. To be sure, the Negro question is not just an anthropological one. But it would be wrong to regard it as exclusively economic. In contrast, the European worker question is and will remain, so long as the question is one of our conscious conduct, in the first place an economic one. And nothing is more characteristic of the social disparity that threatens our democracy, nor of the readiness of the ruling class to engage in class struggle, than the attempt to recast the economic disparity into an anthropological one, and to separate the proletariat as inferior in blood from the ones who possess—the aim of which is to justify on the basis of blood the demand that those who possess are to be those who rule. It seems in fact to be the case: Quos deos perdere vult, dementat prius [whom the gods will destroy, they first drive mad]. Suppose the proletariat were not only economically heterogeneous with the ruling class and distinguished from it not only by mutable relationships of property and education but also by immutable blood. Then what kind of solidarity should make the proletariat concede to the ruling class's democratic equality?!
For a hundred years bourgeois circles were used to conceiving the national cultural community as an adequate factor for integration into the state. I will not be suspected of underestimating the national cultural com-munity's power in forming a state.[21] But I must just as forcefully emphasize that it is impossible to have a cultural community without a certain degree of social homogeneity. The bourgeois hope that the proletariat's share in the national culture would prove sufficient to keep the propertyless classes within the process of forming democratic unity is in great part a naive selfdeception. There is some truth to what Othmar Spann says: “Only insofar as participation in the spiritual community reaches, can the true national distinction, and also the true … belonging to a nation, go; beyond that it is just a community of interests.”[22]
But if the political conscience is satisfied with Spann and refers to the given cultural incompetence of the “masses,”[23] it confuses mass with class, and desires to maintain that its own class is superior to the other on account of its spiritual nature. In principle, this kind of legitimation of the class-state has the same political effect as the above-mentioned theory of the racial distinction of classes. It must also end by dissolving ultimate ties and starting
Finally, one should say something about the following crucial issue. To-day's deficiency of economic, cultural, and conventional homogeneity cannot be remedied by using a religious we-consciousness to integrate with the class opponent as children of one and the same God. However, this religious homogeneity, as little as it can be influenced by our will, is of the greatest significance for political democracy. For there exist today large circles among the bourgeoisie who recommend the use of religion as the medium by which one can achieve the aim of forming political unity. Not only in France does there exist an atheistic Catholicism that would like to provide a religion for the people while maintaining for itself a theory of domination empty of belief. In Germany we know the type of scholar who now does penance for his prerevolutionary academic socialism by praising the good Lord as a social sedative. Besides the fact that the exploitation of religion as an instrument of politics is blasphemous, its recommendation in itself signifies as well a grandiose political stupidity: one notes and is annoyed.
In Dostoevski's The Devils, Schatoff makes this pregnant remark: “Who has no people, also has no god.” Even though one can rationally construct out of the “myth of the nation” a religious “myth,” one cannot thereby create either a real people or a real God.