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Regimes

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Critical Theory and Political Modernity

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Abstract

At a more concrete level, the chapter explores the concept of political systems. It also discusses, what is necessary at this level, other developmental trends in other dimensions, which have a direct impact on modern political regimes. The elements of political regimes are identified, models for the analysis proposed and the sources of legitimacy detailed. Autocratic, oligarchic and democracy regimes are analysed, with special attention to the contemporary model of advanced liberal oligarchy, which may be displacing liberal democracy. Dahl, Linz, Santos and other contemporary writers have pride of place in the chapter. It ends with a critical discussion of the notion of ‘populism’, in particular, but not only, with reference to Laclau’s formulation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See David Held, Models of Democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), pp. 6–7. For the loose use of ideal-types in the study of political regimes, Gary Goertz, Social Science: A User’s Guide (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 83ff.

  2. 2.

    José Maurício Domingues, ‘Existential social questions, developmental trends and conceptual strategies’ (2015), in Emancipation and History: The Return of Social Theory (Leiden: Brill, 2017 and Chicago: Haymarket, 2018).

  3. 3.

    Wolfgang Streek, Gekaufte Ziet. Vertagte Krise des demokratischen Kapitalismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2013). For the 1920s–1940s Third International debates, see Nicos Poulantzas, Fascisme et dictadure (Paris: Seuil/Maspero, [1970] 1974).

  4. 4.

    Fernando Henrique Cardoso, ‘On the characterization of authoritarian regimes in Latin America’, in David Collier (ed.), The New Authoritarianism in Latin America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979). The debate within the organized left, to which Cardoso was not a part, revolved in large measure around this.

  5. 5.

    Achin Vanaik, The Furies of Indian Communalism: Religion, Modernity and Secularization (London and New York: Verso, 1997).

  6. 6.

    Colin Crouch, Post-democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 2004).

  7. 7.

    In this and the next item I partly draw upon, and further elaborate, ideas put forward in J. M. Domingues, ‘Political regimes and advanced liberal oligarchy’, Constellations (online first, 2018). Greater detail about the regime’s literature is also to be found there.

  8. 8.

    Poulantzas , op. cit., p. 80; Juan J. Linz, ‘An authoritarian regime: Spain’, in Erik Allardt and Stein Rokkan (eds), Mass Politics: Studies in Political Sociology (New York: Free Press, [1964] 1970); Totalitarianism and Authoritarian Regimes (Boulder, CO and London: Lynne Rienner, 2000). The political context of the publication of Linz’s works may partly explain why he did not stress the role of the police and of repression—the need to revise the notion of ‘totalitarianism’ as well as to distinguish it from the increasing number of sheer ‘authoritarian’ regimes.

  9. 9.

    See for instance Ruth Berins Collier and D. Collier, Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labour Movement and Regime Dynamics in Latin America (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, [1991] 2002), p. 789; Philipe C. Schmitter, ‘Still the century of corporatism?’, Review of Politics, 36 (1974); Eli Diniz, Voto e máquina política. Patronagem e clientelismo no Rio de Janeiro (São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1982); Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Militants and Citizens: The Politics of Participatory Democracy in Porto Alegre (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 18–21; J. M. Domingues, ‘Instituições formais, cidadania e solidariedade complexa’ (2006), in Aproximações à América Latina (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2007).

  10. 10.

    Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, [1942, 1944] 2009), pp. 533ff; Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), chap. 5. The latter is especially less radical regarding the supposed total demise of the ‘normative state’. The distinction was introduced, leaning more on the ‘prerogative state’, by Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941). A much more radical view of Nazism—asserting that it had moved beyond liberal capitalism and bourgeois domination, implicitly beyond modernity—was provided by Neumann’s critical theory colleague, Fridriech Pollock, ‘State capitalism: its possibilities and limitations’ (1941), in Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (eds), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Continuum, 1900).

  11. 11.

    Robert Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, [1960] 1963); Idem, Democracy and its Critics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989); Idem, On Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993); Linz, Totalitarianism and Authoritarian Regimes; J. J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition (Baltimore, MD, and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), chap. 3; Wanderley G. dos Santos, ‘Democracia em 3D’, Dados, vol. 41; Idem, ‘O sistema oligárquico representativo da Primeira República’, Dados, vol. 56 (2013); Larry Diamond, ‘Thinking about hybrid regimes’, Journal of Democracy, vol. 13 (2002).

  12. 12.

    Guillermo. O’Donnell and P. C. Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions (Baltimore, MD, and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); J. J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition (Baltimore, MD, and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

  13. 13.

    Karl Marx, Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, in K. Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, vol. 8 (Berlin: Dietz, [1852] 1960).

  14. 14.

    Partly deriving their views from Berlusconi’s Italy, this sort of issue is raised in Domenico Losurdo, Democrazia o Bonapartismo. Trionfo e decadenza del suffragio universale (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1993); Nadia Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

  15. 15.

    Yasha Mounk, The People versus Democracy: Why our Freedom is in Danger and How to Save it (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), especially Part I.

  16. 16.

    C. Tilly, Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Curiously, he refrained from applying this to his own country, the US.

  17. 17.

    The former is a better characterization than ‘sultanism’, such as discussed in H. E. Chehabi and J. J. Linz (eds), Sultanist Regimes (Baltimore, MR and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1998). The latter are discussed in G. O’Donnell, Modernization and Bureaucratic Authoritarianism: Studies in South American Politics (Berkeley, CA: University of California, Berkeley, Institute of International Studies, 1973); El Estado burocrático autoritario. Triunfos, derrotas y crisis (Buenos Aires: Editorial Belgrano, 1982).

  18. 18.

    J. M. Domingues, Global Modernity, Development, and Contemporary Civilization: Towards a Renewal of Critical Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 214–15.

  19. 19.

    James Chiriyankandath, ‘“Democracy” under the Raj: elections and separate representation in British India’ (1992), in Niraja Gopal Jayal (ed.), Democracy in India (New Delhi: Oxford, 2001); Mahmoodi Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Jeff Goodwin, No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Part 2; Fredrick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2005); Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the World Wars (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005).

  20. 20.

    See Carl Schmitt, Verfassungslehre (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot [1928] 1993), pp. 282–92.

  21. 21.

    Baiocchi, op. cit., p. 19.

  22. 22.

    Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Cambridge: Polity, 1985), pp. 301–03.

  23. 23.

    Santos, ops. cits.; D. Losurdo, Rivoluzione d’ottobre e democrazia nel mondo (Naples: La Scuola de Pitagoras, 2015). Evidently, recognition of this should be at odds with his neo-Stalinist instance.

  24. 24.

    In this regard close to so-called ‘defective democracy’—but essentially an oligarchy, with greater restriction of rights—such as introduced by Wolfgang Merkel, Systemtransformation. Eine Einführung in die Theorie und Empirie der Transformationforschung (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, [2000] 2010), pp. 30–39.

  25. 25.

    Especially Dahl, Polyarchy, pp. 2–5, 48–52; Democracy and its critics, pp. 107–18; Idem, On Political Equality (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 9–15, 51ff.

  26. 26.

    Idem, On Political Equality, chap. 6, 17–18. Note that formerly, in On Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), Dahl still believed that the matter for ‘developed democracies’ was to ‘perfect and deepen’ their features (p. 2), although recognizing that under capitalism and the inequalities it generated we could not go beyond polyarchy (p. 178).

  27. 27.

    Santos, ‘O sistema oligárquico representativo da Primeira República’.

  28. 28.

    Aristotle, Politics and The Constitution of Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 95–96. Evidently, democracy such as discussed here is not the corrupted version of isonomy.

  29. 29.

    For an opposite argument, Jeffrey A. Weeks, Oligarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

  30. 30.

    Guillermo O’Donnell, ‘Delegative democracy’, Journal of Democracy, vol. 5 (1994); Idem, ‘Illusions about consolidation’, Journal of Democracy, vol. 7 (1996).

  31. 31.

    See, for an amazing empirical study and harsh indictment of contemporary US political system, inequality standing out therein, Larry M. Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); for the growing strength of an increasingly powerful executive, with military influence, its own anti-democratic interpretations of law and opinion-pools-based politics, all militating against his former ‘constitutional triumphalism’, Bruce Ackerman, The Decline and Fall of the American Republic (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010); for the shadow security state with this engorged executive, Michael J. Glennon, National Security and Double Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

  32. 32.

    Herve Kempf, La Oligarchie ça suffit, vive la démocratie (Paris: Seuil, 2010); Jürgen Habermas, Im Sog der Technokratie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2013); Hauke Brunkhorst, Das doppelte Gesicht Europas. Zwischen Kapitalismus und Demokratie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2014).

  33. 33.

    See Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2001); Richard Sackwa, Putin: Russia’s Choice (New York and London: Routledge, 2004); Burak Gümü, Yunus Yoldar and Wolfgang Gieler (eds), Die neue Turkey (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2015); Banu Bargu, ‘Year one: reflections on Turkey’s second founding and the politics of division’, Critical Times, vol. 1 (2018).

  34. 34.

    Said Amir Arjomand, After Khomeini: Iran and his Successors (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Samy Smooha, ‘The model of ethnocracy: Israel as a Jewish democratic state’, Nations and Nationalism, vol. 8 (2002).

  35. 35.

    Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriβ der verstehenden Soziologie (Tübingen: J. C. B Mohr [Paul Siebeck], [1921–22] 1980), pp. 17, 124ff, 448, 548–50, 822; J. Habermas, Legitimationsprobleme in Spätkapitalismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973); Idem, Faktizität und Geltung, pp. 47–57, 169; David Easton, A Framework for Political Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), pp. 124–26.

  36. 36.

    Paula Diehl, Das Symbolische, das Imaginäre und die Demokratie. Eine Theorie politischer Representation (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2015), pp. 106ff.

  37. 37.

    Peter Sloterdijk, Kritik der zynischen Vernunft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), vol. 2, pp. 442–43.

  38. 38.

    This is also the basis for the inappropriate and strange definition of fascist regimes as ‘authoritarian democracy’ by Dylan J. Riley, The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain, and Romania 1870–1945 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), pp. 3–6.

  39. 39.

    Poulantzas , op. cit., pp. 370–73; Nicanor Zavaleta Mercado, ‘Notas sobre fascismo, dictadura y coyuntura de disolución’ (1979) and ‘Cuatro conceptos de la democracia’ (1981), in El Estado en América Latina (Cochabamba y La Paz: Los amigos del libro, 1990), pp. 6, 81.

  40. 40.

    Yves Cohen, Le Siècle des chefs. Une histoire transnacionale du commandement et de l’autorité (1890–1940) (Paris: Amsterdam, 2013).

  41. 41.

    C. Schmitt, Legalität und Legitmität (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot [1932] 1998).

  42. 42.

    From a phenomenological angle, one could argue that we might at least assess movements according to the degree of their challenge to the closure of the political space and their seemingly anti-liberal stance, as well as their personalist/organicist perspectives and demagogic discourse, in terms of a concept of populism. See P. Diehl, ‘Die Complexität des Populismus. Ein Plädoyer für ein mehrdimensionales und graduelles Konzept’, Totalitarismus und Demokratie, vol. 8 (2001). This still suffers, however, from the same problems criticized in what follows. Resentment would partake the same phenomenological ground. See Filipe Carreira da Silva and Mónica Brito Vieira, ‘Populism as a logic of political action’, European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 21 (2018).

  43. 43.

    Gino Germani, Política y sociedad en una época de transición. De la sociedad tradicional a la sociedad de masas. (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1965); Idem, Authoritarianism, Fascism, National Populism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1978); Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London and New York: Verso, 2005). For ‘agonism’, Chantall Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London and New York: Verso, 2006). A more flexible view, based on an understanding of Peronism as a symbolically composite constellation, was propounded early in E. Laclau, ‘Towards a theory of populism’, in Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (London: New Left Books, 1977).

  44. 44.

    Urbinati , op. cit., chaps 3–4; Andrew Arato, ‘Political theology and populism’, Social Research, vol. 80 (2013); A. Arato and Jean Cohen, ‘Populism, civil society and religion’, Constellations, vol. 24 (2017). In a more Gramscian contribution, inspired in Laclau’s early work, as well as committed to socialism, talk of ‘authoritarian populism’ harks back to the Thatcher phenomenon in 1970s–1980s Britain. Stuart Hall, Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left: The Hard Road to Renewal (London: Verso and Marxism Today, 1988).

  45. 45.

    For an overview of the debate in Latin America, including her own interpretation, see Maristella Svampa, Debates latinoamericanos. Indianismo, desarrollo, dependencia y populismo (Buenos Aires: Edhasa, 2016), chaps. 4 in Parts 1 and 2. Further, more general analysis is found in Yves Mény and Yves Surel (eds), Democracies and the Populist Challenge (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002); Francisco Panizza (ed.), Populism and the Mirror of Democracy (London and New York: Verso, 2005). I have discussed these issues in J. M. Domingues, ‘The imaginary and politics in modernity. The trajectory of Peronism’ (2016), in Emancipation and History.

  46. 46.

    Federico Finchelstein, From Fascism to Populism in History (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017).

  47. 47.

    See for instance Charles Debbasch, ‘Le Parti unique a l’épreuve du pouvoir. Les experiences maghrebines et africaines’, Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord (Paris: Edition du CNRS, 1965); Aristide R. Zolberg, Creating Political Order: The Party-States of West Africa (Chicago: Rand McNally & Co., 1966); Tunteng Kiven, ‘Toward a theory of one-party government in Africa’, Cahier d’Estudes Africaines, vol. 13 (1973).

  48. 48.

    R. Dahl, How Democratic is the American Constitution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, [2002] 2003), pp. 29–30; Ferenc Féher, The Frozen Revolution: An Essay on Jacobinism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1983), pp. 58–67.

  49. 49.

    Diehl, Das Symbolische, das Imaginäre und die Demokratie, pp. 70–73 and chaps. 3–6. She draws upon Schmitt to make her conceptual and normative point against personification and embodiment in modernity—against him, in fact. C. Schmitt, Römischer Katholizismus und politischer Form (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, [1923] 2008). This sort of issue is dealt with rather negatively as ‘descriptive representation’ and ‘symbolic representation’ in Hanna F. Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972). Richer in this regard and empirically laden is J. C. Alexander, The Performance of Politics: Obamas’ Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

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    José Maurício Domingues

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Domingues, J.M. (2019). Regimes. In: Critical Theory and Political Modernity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02001-9_8

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