Salvador de Madariaga’s Organic Democracy and the Problem of Oligarchy

• In Event: Frustrations of Democracy: Historical Perspectives on Resisting Elite Domination

Abstract

Recent political theory scholarship has revealed how the dynamics of mass democracy can permit and even encourage the rise of oligarchic and plutocratic domination. In this paper, I draw from interwar Spanish political thought – specifically, the liberal intellectual and diplomat Salvador de Madariaga (1886-1978) – to examine one historical articulation of this problem. Arguably the most well-known Spanish intellectual in the English-speaking world during the twentieth century, Madariaga was a prominent defender of European integration and active participant in an array of international organizations, including the League of Nations and the Mont Pelerin Society. His most sustained work of political theory, though, focused on diagnosing the pathologies of interwar mass democracy, especially that of the Second Spanish Republic (1931-1936). For Madariaga, such regimes were plagued by the assumption that democracy could only be realized through universal suffrage and majority rule – a mixture he criticized as producing the conditions for oligarchic and plutocratic domination. As an alternative model, Madariaga proposed what he called ‘organic democracy’, which would structure representation in terms of territory and ‘function’ rather than vote counts alone. While many scholars have viewed Madariaga’s ‘organic democracy’ as a conservative or even reactionary conception, I argue that it is better understood as exemplifying mainstream Spanish liberalism and the Krausist tradition in particular. Nevertheless, by scrutinizing Madariaga’s ideas and their influence on Francoist ideology, I show how anti-oligarchic liberal impulses can inadvertently legitimate not just the revision of democracy, but also its wholesale elimination.

Author

• Alec Francis Dinnin, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt