Witnessing the world conflagration that was the French Revolution, the French philosopher Joseph de Maistre lamented that “if there is an incontestable maxim, it is that in all seditions, insurrections, and revolutions, the people always begin by being right, and always end by being wrong.” Faced with serious political crises, many contemporary elites have come to believe that the people do not just end by being wrong but begin so. The voice of the people is no longer to be listened to but controlled, corrected, channelled, or outright suppressed.

The postwar liberal consensus of some eighty years standing is currently breaking down. There is a general sense of malaise and of the crumbling of old certainties. Many have begun to question the viability of democracy in the modern age. Democracy has indeed always had its critics. The ancients considered it a weak and inherently unstable regime, hovering perilously between anarchy and tyranny, and prey to ignorance, demagoguery, and the excesses of passion. It was generally disdained until the Age of Revolutions in the late eighteenth century. John Adams could still warn in 1814: “remember Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy yet, that did not commit suicide.” It was only over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that it gained its respectable sheen of representative government and liberal constitutionalism.

Even so, critics continued to charge that it undermined the common good and human excellence by instituting the rule of mediocrity. The great observer of American democracy Alexis de Tocqueville observed how democracies, in their overweening passion for equality, strive for formlessness, flattening all distinctions, all social ties and hierarchies—no matter how legitimate—into a uniform mass of individuals. Its contemporary critics argue that it leads to the tyranny of the majority, and is the tool of the selfish, the partisan, the wealthy, and the powerful. It cannot effectively deal with political externalities, with the rights of other peoples or of future generations, or with global challenges such as climate change. And, in developing countries, its introduction often exacerbates corruption, factionalism, and violence. Ultimately, it is more appropriate for small communities where decisions are made face to face than for the large, impersonal, bureaucratic complexes of modernity.

Many postliberal cures for our political failures have been suggested of late: progressive socialism, authoritarianism, hierarchical Nietzscheanisms and Darwinisms, various religious conservatisms, or mere inchoate reflexes of resentment and destruction. Theorists have also been drawn to the Chinese and Singaporean political models, which combine autocracy with rapid economic development. Since its liberalisation under Deng Xiaoping beginning in 1978, China has seen one of the most spectacular periods of economic growth in human history. The assumption of the 1990s that China would inevitably liberalise as it modernised has been proven false. Proponents now attribute its success to its non-democratic “meritocratic” model of governance. In China and Singapore, political leaders are selected through a long, rigorous process of examinations, performance evaluations, and gradual promotion through the ranks. In stark contrast to recent Western experiences of leadership, this seemingly ensures rule by the experienced and competent.

Inspired by their success, a particular school of political Confucianists have provided one of the more compelling recent theoretical challenges to democracy. Scholars such as Tongdong Bai, Daniel Bell, and Joseph Chan have attempted to draw on both early Confucian tradition and Western political theory. They advocate what one might (after James Hankins and Alisdair MacIntyre) call “virtue politics”—a rejection of pure democracy and egalitarian politics in favour of a hierarchy of “virtue” or intellectual and moral merit.

As Joseph Chan explains:

In the Confucian ideal society, the virtuous and competent are chosen to work for the common good; people conduct affairs in sincerity and faithfulness with the aim of cultivating harmony; rulers care for the people, and the people trust them and willingly submit to their rule; rulers ensure that there are sufficient resources for the people to lead a materially secure and ethical life; people look after not only their own family members but also others outside their family; and society gives special care and support to the unfortunate. Running through this ideal society is an ethic of public-spiritedness and mutual care, understood as an ethic of benevolence and righteousness, from which virtuous relationships spring and flourish.

Good governance, then, is not just about ensuring material welfare and security but must also be morally “perfectionist,” helping citizens achieve good ways of life, virtue, and excellence. Essential virtues such as humanity, righteousness, decorum, wisdom, and harmony, can be cultivated among the people through elite role modelling and the careful development of rites. Rites, in this Confucian sense, are established codes of behaviour, practice, and ceremony—things such as the correct decorum of a wedding or a funeral, or the simple considerateness of standing up on a train for those in more need of a seat. In such a perfectionist approach, government becomes for the people, but not by the people. For, as Confucius says, the multitude “can be made to follow, but not to know.”

Human Nature and Political Philosophy

As many have pointed out, the radical progressive version of social justice has all the hallmarks of a religion.

QuilletteBo Winegard

These arguments—derived from the ancient Chinese texts of Confucius, Mencius, and Xun Zi— have startling parallels with the premodern Western tradition. From Plato and Aristotle onwards, Western thinkers have also argued for hierarchies of merit, for the critical importance of virtue for the common good, and that the purpose of politics is the fulfilment of our natural ends. Perhaps the archetypal version of this perfectionism is Plato’s rule of philosopher kings in The Republic—though the work itself argues that the idea is unworkable in practice. In his masterly recent book on the Italian Renaissance, James Hankins describes the Italian humanists as wanting “to rebuild Europe’s depleted reserves of good character, true piety, and practical wisdom” through “the revival of classical antiquity.” For them, “human beings in society had a natural desire for good rulers and would willingly obey those who ruled with justice and promoted the common good. Laws and their coercive enforcement were not sufficient to achieve the good life, bene vivere [to live well], the full flourishing of human nature.” Paraphrasing Thucydides, the humanists wrote that “Men, not walls, make the city.”

These humanists shared with the Ancient Greeks and the Chinese of the Spring and Autumn Period (770–476 BCE) analogous political crises and breakdowns in old certainties. The humanists and Chinese both went ad fontes—to the sources—to “the study and imitation of ancient authors” to help them grapple with the perennial questions of human existence. Confucius believed that “if you can revive the ancient and use it to understand the modern, then you’re worthy to be a teacher.” Indeed, as Shadi Bartsch writes in Plato Goes to China and Bruce Clark has recently argued, the commonalities between the premodern and Chinese traditions has led to intense contemporary Chinese interest in the Western classics and the works of the philosopher Leo Strauss. Together, these various nonmodern philosophies allow us to engage with deeply impressive thinkers, to explore the diverse but limited set of solutions available to all times and places, and help challenge the often unquestioned premises of our societies. We, after all, face the same questions they faced. They “impress us,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “with the conviction that one nature wrote and the same reads.”

Modern political thought began by rejecting these thinkers’ shared stress on the importance of character, virtue, and the good. In China, Han Fei Zi (ca. 280–233 BC), the greatest scholar of the Legalist school, also rejected what he saw as the naive idealism of Confucianism, in favour of strong institutions, which control the people through rewards and punishments. His views, however, remained tangential to the official Confucian philosophy of the Chinese state, well into the twentieth century. The equivalent Western views, by contrast, gradually became mainstream. From the time of Machiavelli onwards, Western political thought gradually deprioritised concerns about character in favour of a focus on the design of institutions and prioritised law over virtue. Thomas Hobbes, the great founder of the liberal tradition, argued that people are radically self-interested individuals who are in constant conflict with each other in a state of nature. For Hobbes, there is no transcendent good or order. In fact, people’s irreconcilable conceptions of the good are one of the major drivers of conflict. The only cure for conflict is therefore to establish a government through a social contract that recognises the one indisputable passion that we all share: the fear of death.

In liberal thought, then, politics became at its heart a matter of conflict and power mediated through artificial institutions. As Albert Hirschmann argued, modern political theorists discovered that carefully designed institutions could check unruly passion with passion, balance interest against interest. Social order emerges not from virtuous citizens but from effective laws and institutions and from regulated competition, as in the market. As liberalism evolved through the Enlightenment, “man” came to be seen as the being, according to Pierre Manent, “who is capable of obeying a law that he has imposed on himself,” and reason as “the faculty of commanding oneself, that is, autonomy or self-legislation.”

Social order emerges not from virtuous citizens but from effective laws and institutions and from regulated competition, as in the market.

Liberalism increasingly focused on the principles of liberty and equality as the best means to decide between people’s equally valid subjective preferences, and combined this with belief in the indefinite progress of institutions. In his later writings, John Rawls—perhaps the most prominent political philosopher of the twentieth century—argues that, “the problem of political liberalism is: how is it possible that there may exist over time a stable and just society of free and equal citizens profoundly divided by reasonable religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines?” For him, the principles of the social contract, determined from behind a “veil of ignorance,” include an “overlapping consensus” between different groups’ beliefs, the need for the use of “public reasoning” in political decisions, and the importance of state neutrality.

Liberalism has proven an especially powerful political philosophy and has helped create some of the most effective political structures in human history. But the limitations of its philosophical assumptions are becoming increasingly hard to ignore. Liberalism tends to prioritise formal process, the “right” and the “reasonable,” over the substantive good or ends to be realised. In fact, it promotes scepticism as to the possibility of defining either the good or objective moral standards. As Stanley Rosen argued, in its reliance on “low but firm ground,” it lowers its sights away from human greatness. In cruder hands, this “can mean excessive tolerance towards alternative viewpoints, failure to rank-order, the incapacity to distinguish the high and low, the noble and base.” Its striving for a neutral domain leads to the rise of technocracy, to the belief that expertise and law can resolve all political problems, and undermines the idea of politics as the art of prudence.

Raymond Aron and the Art of Politics

For Aron, politics is the art of living together, the art of the possible, and requires an “acute awareness” of the limitations of our power to influence reality.

QuilletteAlan S. Rome

Liberalism also tends, as Patrick Deneen and Jonathan Anomaly and Felipe Nobre Faria have recently reiterated, to sap the roots of social trust and harmony that it relies upon to function. Simone Weil warned, “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul.” In Karl Marx’s famous phrasing,

Constant revolution in production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

The sense of vertigo—of being untethered from reality—that liberal modernity induces has only been exacerbated by recent technologies like social media and AI. In its denial of the good and the virtuous, in its attempt to overcome nature, liberalism ultimately severs our ground of being and prioritises systems over mankind.

The advocates of virtue politics allow us to see liberalism’s problems more clearly, but they largely fail to propose viable concrete alternatives. We ultimately cannot just replace liberal democracy with some form of virtuous meritocracy. Working out how to get more virtuous leaders is one of the most intractable perennial political problems. How exactly can we measure virtue and guarantee its rule? Virtue is elusive, unquantifiable, and difficult to recognise. It has never been clear how to design a political system that would guarantee the rule of the virtuous, a genuine aristocracy of the best, rather than just a self-interested oligarchy of the few. In 1813, Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams:

I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents … There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents; for with these it would belong to the first class. The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society … May we not even say that that form of government is the best which provides the most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government?

Yet, in practice, the natural and conventional social hierarchies are hopelessly entangled. As the Tang scholar Lu Zhi (754–805) lamented: “The most urgent matter for bringing about the Way is to get the right people. Yet identifying the right people is so difficult a task that even the sages found it problematic.” Only Plato’s philosopher kings could infallibly achieve this but, as he makes clear, besides being exceedingly rare, they would not actually want to rule. Mencius says a Sage King appears only once every five hundred years. The political Confucians, undaunted, recommend various hybrid models to select for virtue, varying from democratic reforms to outright autocracy anchored by the rule of law. They suggest plural voting schemes, civil examinations, or upper houses reserved for those with established experience or talents. Yet, as they concede, all of these are at best arbitrary proxies for virtue. Many would encourage the fierce focus and competitiveness of the education systems seen in many East Asian countries: a corrosion of childhood best avoided. Their better suggestions are essentially a call to return to the structure of the early American republic, but this structure has already been whittled down by democratic forces and would most likely shortly be so again.

Indeed, all the suggestions have a whiff of utopian play-acting, shorn of the real historical concerns of flesh-and-blood people that give politics its meaning. None are viable in our current political climate; none would be acceptable to electorates nor implementable in any practicable political scheme. They could perhaps provide a model for constitutional design in developing countries. But Bai himself concedes that in the West these schemes would require either complete political collapse or have to be justified through noble lies. They would inevitably lead to their own problems, distortions, and unwanted second-order effects. There is never a single perfect solution—just a multitude of different compromises, all realising limited goods in ways more or less appropriate for different times and places.

But some solutions are better than others. As the philosopher John Gray has argued, “in recognizing that peace can be achieved in many kinds of regime, Hobbes was a truer liberal than those that came after him. The belief that a single form of rule is best for everyone is itself a kind of tyranny.” Proponents of virtue politics rightly note that we need an understanding of politics that goes beyond the simplistic dichotomy of good democratic regimes and bad non-democratic ones. As Christopher Blattman, Scott Gehlbach, and Zeyang Yu have pointed out, there is a wide range of authoritarian regimes, with differing levels of effectiveness and justice, many of which have had comparable rates of growth to democracies in recent history. An authoritarian regime with genuinely virtuous leadership would surely be preferable to many current democratic governments.

But the emergence of truly virtuous leaders is largely at the whim of fate. And the major flaw of virtue politics is its reliance on virtuous leaders to avoid unjust and unperfected outcomes. We must heed Aristotle’s warning that, while it is best to be ruled by one or a few of the virtuous, it is worst to be ruled by one or a few of the unvirtuous. The meritocratic autocracies of China and Singapore are unusual outliers, and not without their own limitations. Autocracy, especially in its sole-ruler variety, tends to abuse of power, arbitrariness, and corruption. Entrenched elites tend to ignore the will of the people. As Peter Turchin explains, the “iron law of oligarchy” means “that when an interest group acquires a lot of power, it inevitably starts using this power in self-interested ways.” At their worst, autocracies are capable of horrific violations of liberty and humanity. Dan Wang has detailed the terrible overreach of the Chinese state which, in its belief that it can solve all economic and social problems by fiat, implemented the inhumane One Child Policy and draconian Covid restrictions. With its increasing authoritarianism, assertive foreign policy, and slowing economy, the Chinese model of autocracy is losing its sheen.

All regimes suffer from abuses of power and from what theorists call the principal-agency problem, or the divergence of interests between the people and their representatives. But the “lower” type of regime which Aristotle refers to as politaeia and which might be translated as “constitutional republic,” guarantees a certain level of rule of law, just procedure, and freedom of expression. This type of regime—less virtuous but more stable—is seen in liberal democracies but predates them and is not reducible to them. Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson won the 2024 Nobel Prize for Economics by demonstrating the importance of open institutions for creating prosperous and secure societies. The rule of law is most fundamental for this flourishing, but democratic procedures at their best can also provide a peaceful means to resolve differences, force elites to earn popular legitimacy, and protect other goods and freedoms. Elections, as Abraham Lincoln argued, allow a crucial safety valve for at least some of the ambitious. And democratic freedoms provide a solution to limitations of government knowledge by providing dispersed networks of information and access to the wisdom of crowds.

Our societies are fragile spaces of order besieged by chaos. As the great philosopher Raymond Aron put it:

our societies, of which we justly critique the imperfections, today represent, by relationship to the majority of societies of the world, a happy exception. ... these societies which live by permanent debate on the order that should be, these societies that make power emerge out of peaceful and regulated conflict between groups and parties, are, without doubt, historically exceptional societies. I do not conclude that they are condemned to death. I no more conclude that all the societies of the rest of humanity have a vocation to organise their common life on our model. I say that we must never forget, in the measure that we love liberties or liberty itself, that we enjoy a privilege rare in history and rare in space. (My translation.)

But while preserving these rare goods, we also must concede that liberal values and institutions are currently struggling and insufficient for our problems. No institution can be a perfect guarantee against the encroachments of self-interest and tyranny. Institutions and freedoms are dependent on the character of the citizenry and on a deeper culture of shared ends and values. As Aristotle said, “it is peculiar to man as compared to the other animals that he alone has a perception of good and bad and just and unjust and the other things of this sort; and community in these things is what makes a household and a city.” As even good Rawlsian thinkers, like Alexander Lefebvre, have conceded, state neutrality is neither possible nor desirable. The core principles of liberalism—freedom and equality—are not substantive goods by themselves and not sufficient for the good life. We need a return to a more robust, metaphysically thicker understanding of human nature and the good. What exactly this looks like must be for each society to decide for themselves.

Many liberal thinkers worry that such perfectionist governance must necessarily be coercive or restrictive. But this would not be the case with a pluralist, moderate perfectionism that recognises, following John Finnis, that human goods are multiple, incommensurate, and not fully realisable in our finite lives, and that we therefore require a level of autonomy to commit to the combination of them most meaningful to each of us. As Chan argues, “moderate perfectionism does not seek to give a consistent ranking of values and virtues or to assign them relative weight: none is regarded as primary or ultimate.” There is a critical difference between a political system formally built around meritocracy and one which merely encourages meritorious governance. We can cultivate virtue from the grass roots in education, culture, and community and hope that it flows upwards. Few people may reach the heights of sagehood but that does not mean we should abandon the standard. Gongsun Chou once asked Mencius, “The Way is indeed lofty and beautiful, but to attempt it is like trying to climb up to Heaven which seems beyond one’s reach. Why not substitute for it something which men have some hopes of attaining so as to encourage them constantly to make the effort?” Mencius replied that “a great craftsman does not put aside the plumbline for the benefit of the clumsy carpenter.”

As Ralph Waldo Emerson warned, “the state must follow and not lead the character and progress of the citizen … the form of government which prevails is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it.” James Madison similarly believed that for a republic to thrive, “the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom ... So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them.” This virtue must include such principles as reasonability, justice, openness, and humility. Without denying the reality of the good, it must also include reasonable doubt, the recognition of the complexity of the world and of our inability to peer into the heart of things, and of the diverse possible answers to our problems.

Such virtue might allow the elites to recognise the great irony of proposing solutions that involve further denying the voice of the people, when our current political crisis is in large part due to elite complacency and irresponsibility. We do not suffer from a current lack of meritocratic elites but from their excess. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have pointed out the populist backlash has been partly provoked by a Western elite too convinced of its own virtue and expertise, while incapable or unwilling to deliver solutions to people’s suffering. Democracies are not exempt from the iron law of oligarchy. Our societies are facing a new class war between the generally urban, educated, cosmopolitan elite and the generally uneducated poor from regions left behind by recent developments. According to Turchin,

Together with popular immiseration, elite overproduction, and the intraelite conflicts that it has engendered, has gradually undermined our civic cohesiveness, the sense of national cooperation without which states quickly rot from within. Growing social fragility has manifested itself in collapsing levels of trust in state institutions and unraveling social norms governing public discourse and the functioning of democratic institutions.

As Michael Sandel has argued, what has been particularly provoking to supporters of populist movements is not so much growing inequality but the elites’ sense of their own virtue and their self-righteous disdain for the uneducated, whom they consider to be on the wrong side of history. Over the last few generations, our societies have grown a thicket of laws, rights, institutions, and regulations that have placed the most fraught and fundamental issues of human society beyond political contestation. The belief that politics has been solved once and for all has placed power into the hands of often-complacent experts who are indifferent to the needs and desires of the people. The result has been increasing dysfunction, resentment, polarisation, and the collapse of the legitimacy of the system.

No viable solution can involve an even greater denial of the popular will. Instead, it must foster genuine pursuit of the common good through public deliberation, mutual respect, and compromise. It must try to cultivate human excellence and civic virtues so that the people can know the good and the elites can be open to it. This may be utopian in our current political climate. But before we abandon democracy, perhaps we should try it.