San enemy would rather have chosen another. But a communist of all people, a classical philologist by profession, wrote a book about the history of popular rule, in it he squinted at the Federal Republic of Germany and allegedly mixed up the facts, in order to publish all of this with CH Beck in a series called “Building Europe”. want, which a group of publishers brought out in parallel in several countries for the purpose of promoting pan-European empowerment.
scope for dissent
In 2005, in a small expert concert, the historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler raised the most serious allegations against Luciano Canfora’s “A Brief History of Democracy”. However, the unlikely defensive alliance between the FAZ and the monthly magazine “Konkret” that replicated this attack showed scope for justified dissent (and poor translation quality). Eventually the work was published in German somewhere else, namely by PapyRossa in Cologne. Canfora himself judged his opponents in a cheerful polemic called “The Eye of Zeus” with ancient serenity: “The tone of their treatise seems not very measured.”
What made the man offensive was not necessarily his political point of view, he is quite a traditional “Jacobin” (Georg Fülberth). But when it comes to platitudes that are popular in the German world of experts and opinions, such as that socialism in the Lenin style had to perish quickly due to a lack of democracy and freedom, analogous to natural law, Canfora refuses not out of ideology, but because old and newer sources have revealed to him that major political Entities that were less free or democratic than the Soviet Union, but lasted far longer than the latter. He is therefore particularly interested in temporary incompatibilities between beautiful political goals such as “freedom” and “democracy”.
The freedoms of Athenian full citizens or medieval nobility (but also the modern freedom of trade or contract) liked and might like the beneficiaries, but were and are also possible conditions of democracy-resistant “inequality societies” (Fülberth). Worse: As much as socialized intellectual achievements produce socially more stable results than the much-vaunted “compliance” on the one hand, it is not at all clear that the result of a vote among idiots deserves more respect than a reasonable order. Canfora avoids retrospective European post-colonial self-incriminations, which tend to be self-appeasers, where they only morally condemn the violence of the colonial powers and do not discuss it genealogically.
What is called “backward” also existed in Europe: tribes, estates, sects. Such was never abolished by referendum. The suppression of the Vendée uprising was not a talk show. And where world market and armament competitions are taking place today, where the highest possible regional productivity using the latest technology is the only guarantee that entire continents do not become or remain reservoirs of cheap raw materials and workers, barriers against political destabilization in catching-up countries cannot present a pretty picture.
“Democracy,” Canfora said, “has been postponed to other eras and will be reconceived by other people. Maybe not from Europeans anymore.” Such sentences must offend them more than the stupidest pessimism. But Canfora, who turns eighty on Pentecost Sunday, has learned to live well and to write with injured people.
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