Two Concepts of Democracy - Ratzinger and Lefort on the Temporality of Democratic Politics

In a situation in which all parties declare themselves democratic, the mere fact of being a democrat ceases to be politically significant. What becomes more important, instead, is thespecific conception of democracy that is upheld and acted upon. This point was already made very clearly by Carl Schmitt in 1923: One can say that today, faced with the expansion of democratic thought, an identity with the will of the people has become so common a premise that it has ceased to be politically interesting, and that the conflict only concerns the means of identification.Of course, the reference to Carl Schmitt should also alert us to the fact that this kind of democratic consensus can never be definitively taken for granted. A situation in which democratic principles are called into question can always emerge – as it did in fact emerge in Germany very soon after Schmitt wrote these words. In such a situation, democratic allegiances clearly become politically significant once again. This, however, does not detract from the fact that the historical situation in which we find ourselves at present appears to be similar to the one described by Schmitt in at least one respect: since the collapse of the ‘Soviet’ regimes at the beginning of the 1990s, the democratic principle has come to be accepted across the political spectrum as the unbreachable normative horizon of politics itself. In Schmittian terms, this means that the will of the ‘people’ is now almost universally recognized as the supreme principle of political legitimacy. The implication is that all parties wishing to exercise a measure of political power are forced to claim some sort of identification with it.Of course, as Schmitt himself was also keen to point out, the fact that this identification with the ‘people’ becomes politically necessary does not entirely foreclose the space for political differences to emerge, and be fought out. Since the ‘people’ itself is an abstract entity, that can never be fully identified in practice, the key political question becomes that of how this identification is made. In the most immediate sense, this is politically pertinent because it determines who, amongst the competing political parties, may advance the most legitimate claim at representing the ‘people’, and therefore exercise political power. In a deeper sense, however, the question of how the identification with the ‘people’ is made is also politically significant because it concerns what it means to represent them in the first place. This is a large part of what is at stake in the contemporary political struggles: not just the competition for office, but also the specific conception of democracy within which this competition is assumed to take place. To the extent that the term ‘democracy’ is an internally contestable term, a certain exercise in self-definition therefore becomes an essential component of democratic politics itself.In the following paper, I want to contribute to this exercise by contrasting the respective conceptions of democracy of two authors who have much more solid democratic credentials than Carl Schmitt: Josef Ratzinger and Claude Lefort. The specific lens I intend to use to compare these two authors’ works is that of temporality: the way in which their respective conceptions of democracy affect the construction and mobilization of time in the political realm. The reasons for this very specific approach are both principled and utilitarian. First of all, I think that the dimension of temporality is under-studied in contemporary political theory. While no serious political theorist, or actor, would probably deny that the dimension of temporality is an essential component of all concrete political struggles, very few existing studies focus on this aspect in particular. It is therefore worthwhile to open an interrogation on the way in which the dimension of temporality comes into play in the contemporary debates over the specific nature of democracy.In addition, I think that the lens of temporality may prove particularly useful for the specific comparison I intend to focus on here because, at a superficial glance, Ratzinger’s and Lefort’s respective conceptions of democracy may appear to display a number of key characteristics in common. For example, both are developed in opposition to a theory of ‘totalitarianism’, both emphasize the co-substantiality of democracy with the notion of ‘human rights’, and both insist on the irreducibly ‘historical’ nature of these rights themselves. In order to discern the profound differences between them it is therefore necessary to move beyond the level of these outward formulations. My wager is that focusing on the dimension of temporality will enable this, bringing the political stakes of the conceptual differences between them into clear relief.Ultimately, my argument will be that Ratzinger subordinates the dynamic dimension of democracy to a set of normative reference points, assumed to correspond to some absolute, and therefore essentially static, ‘truths’. This implies that everything crucial about Ratzinger’s conception of democracy can ultimately be understood synchronically. On the other hand, Lefort situates the diachronic dimension at the very heart of the democratic endeavor. For him, this corresponds to the institutionalization of a reflexive search for a political foundation that is ultimately lacking. Accordingly, democracy acquires a much more ‘open’ dynamic structure to the extent that it is a political experiment to be carried out within the framework of an irreducible indeterminacy. On this basis, I will suggest that Lefort’s conception of democracy is more appropriate to a context in which a definitive consensus on the content of universal ‘truths’ is lacking.