Why Representative Democracy Is Obsolete

This article was originally published by Ulrich F. at The Mises Institute. 

If we were to identify the most sacrosanct dogma of Western modernity—the one that no one questions—it would undoubtedly be representative democracy. We automatically assume that it is the best form of government that humanity has ever invented—a sort of “end of history” method of governance and the ultimate political achievement.

Representative Democracy Is Not Democratic

The first problem is conceptual and fatal: Representative democracy is simply not democratic. One person cannot perfectly represent another’s freedom, desires, needs, or individuality. Consider an individual representing 100,000 others, as is the case in France. By its very nature, democratic representation negates the individual. It prevents them from expressing themselves directly and forces them to delegate their sovereignty to an intermediary whose interests cannot be their own—or, if they are, only temporarily and speculatively.

Democracy is just one method of selecting leaders. However, it is insufficient for defending individual freedom. Representative democracy rests on the idea of majority rule—the notion that one person can be “represented” by another without losing their identity—but this idea has no scientific or moral basis. It is merely an arbitrary form of government, which is why democracy can become tyrannical. —Pascal Salin, Libéralisme

In Liberalism, Pascal Salin argues that the majority rule on which this system is based—“as if one man could be represented by another man without losing his identity”—is a conceptual aberration that is indefensible to the liberal. Although majority rule is preferable to dictatorship, it nonetheless constitutes a regression in individual freedom.

Democratic representation must therefore be viewed through the lens of the arbitrary compromises it entails: relinquishing individual sovereignty and failing to represent the true diversity of opinions. Representative democracy is merely a technique of government, and like other centralized, mass forms of government, it is imperfect and simply varies in the degree to which it is imperfect compared to more mass-oriented, collectivist forms of government.

A Structurally-Irresponsible System

Responsibility is linked to free will. It is a personal relationship, not a position or status within an organization, which is supposed to possess reason and will. Therefore, we are not responsible for something, someone, or an institution, but rather, we are responsible toward someone.—Pascal Salin, Libéralisme

Remaining within Salin’s line of thought, he identified another significant limitation of representative democracy: the dilution or absence of identifiable, accountable parties. In liberal thought, freedom is inseparable from responsibility. Responsibility compels the individual to align their actions with their environment and reality; otherwise, they will suffer the consequences. Thus, in a free society founded on individual responsibility, an individual who cannot be held accountable for the negative consequences of their actions—whether for themselves or for others—has not acted freely. Since society is composed of individuals, it is important to remember that we are always accountable to someone, never to an abstract entity. Hayek wrote,

Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences of his actions and will receive praise or blame for them. Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.

We therefore understand that, in a functional society, the goal is always to link freedom and responsibility, something the mass, delegated, and representative democratic model does not allow. The democracy of an anonymous mass, coupled with elected officials—“representatives of the nation” (and thus, of no one)—dilutes responsibility while erasing individual freedom. We regularly see this in the news: in the republic, no one is responsible for anything, and investigations aimed at determining who is responsible are rampant. This is not a temporary malfunction of the democratic system as we know it in the West. Rather, it is the system’s very conceptual logic.

A Technological Anachronism

The representative model is not only philosophically questionable; it is also a relic of the past. What is presented as the most advanced form of political organization is, in reality, the least-worst of the technical solutions devised by 18th- and 19th-century societies to make mass democracy functional. That was a world where the speed of communication was still constrained by distance, where populations were relatively immobile, and where it was physically impossible to envisage large-scale direct voting. Those constraints no longer exist.

Today, communities of interest are emerging that are no longer limited to people who share the same territory. Technology allows individuals with shared values, economic activities, or preferences to form political communities. This spontaneous reconfiguration of the political landscape renders geographically-based representative democracy increasingly obsolete. This is not because some ideology has declared it obsolete, but because individuals may now have more in common with people living hundreds of miles away than with their neighbors. Geographic representation—a relic of a time when people traveled by horseback—cannot account for this new reality, and never will. The rise of network states and digital nomadism is proof enough of that. James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg write in The Sovereign Individual,

Citizenship is obsolete. To optimize your lifetime earnings and become a Sovereign Individual, you will need to become a customer of a government or protection service rather than a citizen. Instead of paying whatever tax burden is imposed upon you by grasping politicians, you must place yourself in a position to negotiate a private tax treaty that obliges you to pay no more for services of government than they are actually worth to you…. Mass democracy and the concept of citizenship flourished as the nation state grew. They will falter as the nation state falters, causing every bit as much dismay in Washington as the erosion of chivalry caused in the court of the duke of Burgundy five hundred years ago.

Let’s be clear, the technological argument alone does not mean centralized mass democracy is viable; it only shows it is obsolete. In fact, a large-scale digital direct democracy could accelerate and exacerbate attacks on property, individuals, and civil liberties. As Hayek explained, more aggregated information does not necessarily lead to better collective decisions because information and human action do not work that way. Therefore, the challenge is not to digitize mass democracy but to use new technologies to fragment it into smaller, more viable political units.

Those who wish to maintain the current model know full well that it is an obsolete method of governance whose sole advantage is filtering and stifling the direct expression of every citizen.

The Free Market as True Democracy

There is, however, one form of democracy that has never suffered from these structural flaws—a form in which every vote is counted (for, against, and abstentions)—without delegation and without intermediaries: the free market. By consuming or refraining from consuming, each individual directly influences how capital is allocated and how entrepreneurs serve the needs of the population. Unable to escape the law of profits and losses, entrepreneurs have no choice but to submit to these daily referendums.

Mises, in Human Action, provides the definitive formulation: in political democracy, only votes cast for the majority candidate influence the course of events; in the market, no vote is cast in vain. The minority is represented there just as much as the majority, and freedom is inseparable from responsibility. Mass democracy is structurally incapable of guaranteeing this link between freedom and responsibility. Mass democracy promises the expression of the general will but produces the tyranny of fleeting majorities.

This reality plays out daily in the free market and can be extrapolated to society as a whole. Just as individuals use their money to decide which goods to purchase, they also choose—through their behavior and voluntary associations—which spontaneous institutions to embrace in their own lives. Pascal Salin writes,

It is a mistake to claim that certain human activities—which we will call economic activities—can be isolated from the rest. From this perspective, there is no such thing as economics per se, but rather a science of human action—what Austrian economists call praxeology.

It is Chesterton’s “democracy of the dead”—that living tradition in which the sedimented choices of past generations constitute a vote that no majority elected today should be able to invalidate—and Carlyle’s ongoing quest for truth. He refused to subject reality to a vote and thus create a “consensual truth” contrary to truth itself. Rather than thinking that “everything is political,” the liberal believes that everything is economic, in the sense that we apply the rules of human action and choice to all aspects of our lives. In other words, accounting economics is merely a variant of the human choices and actions that characterize our lives.

Truly representative democracy is therefore to be found right here, in the daily choices we make as individuals, which—taken as a whole—have a lasting influence on the collective. Political representation—a product of positive law—is merely an imperfect palliative that clashes head-on with liberal, individualist, and humanist ethics, and which no longer invokes the law to protect private property but rather to orchestrate its plunder.