Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred.

• Jurisdiction: United States
• Date: 22 March 2005
• Author: Bauer, Bob
• Published date: 22 March 2005
• Author: Bauer, Bob

Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred John Lukacs New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005, 256 pp.

John Lukacs's new book, Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred, returns to themes and views well-known from his many previous works of history and historical reflection. He affirms that we have arrived at the end of an age, when "democracy" was rising fast but not yet dominant, and have embarked on a new one in which popular sovereignty, as "populism," increasingly rules the world.

This book of reflections is written in short bursts of chapters, 35 in all. The writing is taut; the observations are crisp, tart, often more suggestive than fully elaborated. There is not a dull moment in it. Lukacs has always made his own way in the writing of history, and in Democracy and Populism, while reworking themes well-established in other works, he displays the sharp style and independence of thought that has distinguished his career. Although a conservative, Lukacs is a hard critic of George W. Bush and has little use for the brand of democracy that he believes to be ascendant.

Lukacs is not simply cranky, hurling barbs in all directions. He does not suffer fools gladly, and when he has run into them, he announces the discovery. Over the course of his work, he has proclaimed Frances Fukayama, the well-recognized author of The End of History, to be a "fool," and has denounced the celebrated political philosopher Hannah Arendt as "muddled and dishonest." This bluntness is not a pose. Lukacs has thought for a long time, and hard, on the questions he writes about, and he reacts with instinctive disdain for those whose own work falls far short of his own high standards of scholarship and careful reflection.

The politics of our day does not sit well with him. He fears that we face "the prospect of a modern democratic society in which the corruption of words and speech ... may be governed by the manipulators of popular majorities, in which opposition parties and papers are permitted to exist, but their impression and influence hardly matter since their voices are weak" (p. 223). The source of this problem, which he views as so dire that he raises the specter of a new barbarism, is the triumph of populist politics--governance in the name of "the people"--expressed in various combinations of nationalism and socialism. Democracy has run wild--popular majorities dictate the general direction of affairs, impassioned by visions of tribal supremacy and a vicious...