Understand the concept of totalitarian democracy and how it can manifest itself today Estadão

When Jacob Talmon (19161980) when asked what an intellectual was, he was quick to reply: “It’s someone who doesn’t sleep at night, and not for the reasons you might think.” The reason for the nightmare had a name: “totalitarian democracy”. This disturbing concept was popularized by Talmon in his most famous book, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, which was published in 1956 and caused a significant stir among thinkers at the time.

The term was not unique to Talmon. It had previously been used by Frenchman Bertrand De Jouvenel in his 1948 classic On Power, but both that book and its author had antisocial credentials (De Jouvenel was critical of liberal democracy and the envy of his peers because he was a lover of none other than Colette, the piquant bestselling author of the time). None of this deterred the reception of Talmon’s analysis, for he was a passionate advocate of liberalism, and it was only many years later that the scholar turned his affections to another beauty of thought—in this case, the young literary critic Susan Sontag.

Essayist Susan Sontag, one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century Photo: Companhia das Letras

What The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy showed, however, was a new kind of political thinking emerging in the decades after World War II. world war. Jacob Talmon, a contemporary of scholars such as Leo Strauss (Natural Law and History, 1948) and Eric Voegelin (The New Science of Politics, 1952), recognized this Christian despite being a Jew who loved the traditional forms of his religion ( or “Messianic,” according to his terminology) became the sort of form that structured 20thcentury political imagination, particularly the emergence of totalitarian ideologies such as socialism, communism, and Nazism.

At that time it was believed that politics was governed exclusively by rational and perfect laws in a wellordered system, a clear influence of the French Enlightenment. Hitler and Mussolini showed that this was not the case as it always was. Political discourse is often fueled by irrationalism and stirs up the junk that lies underground in society. The function of the true statesman, be it a politician or a world artist (as was the case with Edmund Burke and Winston Churchill in England, Alexis de Tocqueville in France and Joaquim Nabuco in Brazil) is to articulate this subrationality and make it part of our everyday vocabulary, never to control but to temporarily master.

In this sense, the use of the term “totalitarian democracy” seems to be a contradiction in terms. After all, this socalled “democracy” has always been considered a space of consensus and harmony and “totalitarianism” would be exactly the opposite in all these qualities. What the hell do these two words have in common?

The most famous painting about the French Revolution is by Eugène Delacroix, he gives a woman the protagonist of the revolution Photo: Acervo Esstadão

For Talmon, the phenomenon of “totalitarian democracy” begins in the historical events that are the publication of the works of JeanJacques Rousseau and the hecatomb of the French Revolution between 1750 and 1789. In these thirtynine years, there is a split between two types of democratic systems of government: the liberal and the totalitarian, which in modernity have developed practically simultaneously.

Both claim that they fight for freedom, but differ in the way they conquer it. Liberal democracy is characterized by a policy of trial and error that recognizes what Michael Oakeshott called the “unpredictable dynamics of human behavior” and knows that the primary function of institutions is to preserve that property above all else, itself when the representative in office seems to have power utterly inadequate to us. Totalitarian democracy, on the other hand, is based on the understanding that there is only one and exclusive definition of what would be truth in the political universe. In this way, trial and error is abandoned in favor of a political messianism that posits a predetermined, perfect, topdown scheme. The other strata of existence are abolished and subordinated to ideological politics conducted at the lowest possible level and the “representatives” of liberal democracy become the “chosen ones” who think they know how to run a society down to the last detail is.

The consequences of this schism were no more and no less than the holocausts of the 20th century, with the attempts of liberal democracy in Weimar Germany and moderate socialism in Menshevik Russia to open space for the real genocides committed by Hitler and by Lenin and Stalin perpetrated against them all of humanity (particularly the Jewish people, making Talmon’s nightmare a decidedly personal one).

Despite the categorical separation between the two types of democracies, the thinker had no illusions and realized that if liberalism did not contain the apocalyptic imagination within the confines of its institutions and its proponents, the politics of trial and error would quickly be replaced by it of a perfect system and totalitarianism would be fully embedded in what was formerly known as the “free world”. The only way to exercise this restraint would be through a proper understanding of the religious phenomenon. To deny this would be the common point shared by both liberal and totalitarian democracy.

Talmon has a widely held belief that democratic politics can only be reasonably healthy when it occurs through institutional representation: the vote.

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Nevertheless, in Talmon’s analytical panorama which was supplemented by two further volumes, Political Messianism (1960) and The Myth of Nation and Vision of Revolution (1981), thus forming an ambitious trilogy there is a misunderstanding between what causes and what would be a consequence within the particular dynamic of social life. As much as he is an impeccable expert on the subject, Talmon has a widely held belief that democratic politics can only be reasonably sound when it is done through institutional representation and, therefore, through that tiny but powerful tool called “voting.”

By the time Jacob Talmon began his studies, however, he was immersed in an atmosphere of research that prioritized the ultimate goal of democracy. In this sense, especially in a world where dictatorships swarmed across the planet (particularly in Latin America with Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay and in the Slavic countries dominated by the Soviet Union), the election was fundamental because it was the last Barrier to protect any citizen’s rights. However, as Joshua Ober and Paul Cartridge’s studies of the beginnings of democracy in ancient Greece show, it was never the final decision, but the process of how it happened. in the assembly along with its main actors.

Painting by classical French painter JacquesLouis David depicting the death of the philosopher Socrates Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art

In other words, democracy is based on the dynamics of human information and cognition before voting. It is no coincidence that among the Greeks the most important members were never soldiers or statesmen, but poets, philosophers and sophists. It was they who created the discourse that made it possible to use people’s power fairly (and not egalitarianly, as they think today). However, this perspective changes completely when, thanks to the studies carried out over the last sixty years, we discover that true democracy did not begin with Greece, but with a very specific tribe. Yes, we are talking about Israel.

According to Eric Voegelin in Ordem e História and Os Guinness in A Carta Magna da Humanidade (recently published in Brazil by Vida Nova), the Israelites were acutely aware of their private and public relationship with the Hebrew God, especially after the revelation of the Ten Commandments, whose rules were intended to prove to the faithful that all were part of a covenant, a contract initiated as a contract in private relationships that would later become “a union of people, families, and tribes in a religiously sanctioned political entity.” This is the beginning of de facto and de jure democracy, according to Brazilian thinker Mario Vieira de Mello, as everyone feels equal within the norms of berith, watched over and cared for by a god who guarantees order and peace (the shalom) if the Yahwist (worshipers of Yahweh) keep to the established rules. In this particular case, the Covenant is a contract that, for Voegelin, demonstrates a people’s primal and natural calling to rule the rest of humanity.

Democracy arises from this organic tension between knowing reality as it is and knowing reality as man imagines it. It is a process that, like the creation of a world (the Genesis), molds the chaos of our perceptions into a fabricated order, but perfectable and malleable, that gives us the freedom to understand the society we are in “tacit knowledge” (in the sense of Michael Polanyi), which surpasses every statistic claiming to belittle politics.

Jacob Talmon was a genuine intellectual who defied this dangerous reductionism and with a foresight worthy of a Hebrew prophet. The nightmare that plagued his sleepless nights “totalitarian democracy” is the betrayal of everything the Sinai Alliance gave us and what we now call civilization. The threat is still there, haunting us. It remains to be seen whether we will have the courage to fight it.

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