L'Ethique Barbare

Beyond Our Democracy…

 

To learn from the failure of our democratic systems, we must first free ourselves from their deceptive narratives

 

Liberal democracies are currently revealing deep flaws at the very moment our collective capacity to think them through is eroding. This essay offers a critique — progressive and humanist — of democracy as it has become institutionalised in France: an analysis of constitutional architectures that concentrate power rather than limit it; a deconstruction of the myth of representative democracy, which confuses legality with legitimacy and opinion with truth; and finally, an exploration of pathways for refoundation — the primacy of values over procedures, informed citizen deliberation, reform of representation, and the grounding of decisions in knowledge.

Key arguments

 

 

In this first quarter of the twenty-first century, we are living through a critical moment for global society to learn the lessons of the failure of our modern democratic governance systems. Triggered by the profound climatic, ecological, energy and economic crises that had been brewing since the 1970s, we watch in stunned disbelief as an authoritarian earthquake deeply shakes the institutions of the international order and the foundations of the rule of law in most "developed" nations. This would therefore be a key moment to understand the mechanisms of constitutional engineering and political arrangements that failed to serve as effective bulwarks against the authoritarianism and arbitrariness they were supposed to protect us from.

Unfortunately, the moment also presents a historical paradox in the construction of global political thought. And herein lies a fatal paradox: this window of opportunity to learn from our mistakes opens at the very moment of a general degradation of the cognitive conditions necessary for collective deliberation, and of a structural epistemic contraction that prevents us from thinking society through.

Thus, the dreams of prosperous and just societies, in a gentle equilibrium of delicately instituted forces and powers, have now given way to a handful of dystopian trend scenarios from which we cannot detach ourselves; which we cannot rethink.

Yet rethinking the ideal organisation of our future societies is indispensable. But how does one think on the rubble of promises and scaffolding so carefully erected by our illustrious predecessors? What is desirable for a humanity now globalised, hyper-connected, that seems to totter between the abysses of energy collapse, ecological resource depletion and climate catastrophe, all under the uncertain shadow of an intrusive artificial superintelligence?

 

The present reflection — which draws enormously on constitutionalists and political philosophers far more enlightened than myself — carries biases that must be acknowledged. It assumes a progressive and humanist position and proposes — a taboo and perilous exercise — a critique of democracy as we have grown accustomed to accepting it. It ultimately proposes several avenues for improvement in the hope of motivating creative acts, capable of one day pulling our human societies out of the ruts that seem to be driving them, once again, toward greater barbarism.

 

I. The failure of constitutional architectures

Our political culture is steeped in the concept of separation of powers enshrined in Constitutions. This separation of the three powers of the State (the Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciary), which dates back to Montesquieu, aims in the ideal to establish a balance of power, a equilibrium between each of these powers, so that none may be tempted — or able — to become dominant and hegemonic. Yet what we are insufficiently aware of is that the very text of these Constitutions conceals the very concrete mechanisms by which this separation is violated. The case of the current French Constitution (1958), as well as that of the United States and several other countries, is revealing, and the reading of Eugénie Mérieau's short book, Constitution (Mérieau, 2025), is in this respect illuminating… and somewhat frightening about our political reality.

It is therefore not sufficiently understood that in France the Constitution grants enormous power to the Executive branch, and specifically to the President of the Republic. This Constitution of 1958 — tailored by Michel Debré for General de Gaulle — strongly constrains the freedom of legislative power through a "rationalised parliamentarism" that entrusts the essential legislative function to the executive and equips it with specific legal tools that allow it to control, or even bypass, Parliament (the National Assembly and the Senate). To control this legislative function, the Executive has at its disposal, among other things:

 

Democracy, you say?! As we can see, the Constitution of 1958 contains a magnificent toolkit for directing, or even blocking, any impulse toward parliamentary debate that the elected President might find inconvenient.

 

But rationalised parliamentarism is not the only source of power offered to the republican monarch by the constitution. It also grants him another crucial power: "strategic" appointment — of the Prime Minister, members of the Constitutional Council (to which we will return), and other senior civil servants. This means he can place his allies in positions of high responsibility, key to the structure of the State, to whom they will of course be indebted without fail.

This presidential power of appointment includes, as we have just seen, the members of the Constitutional Council. This Council might appear to be the bulwark that would protect the people from any executive abuses of democratic principles. This Council, which one might assume to be composed of eminent specialist jurists elected by their peers, is in fact composed of political figures appointed by the President himself and the presidents of the assemblies. No legal competence is required to sit on it — which favours essentially political profiles. This explains, as we shall see, why constitutional jurisdiction, rather than acting as a safeguard, often ends up in reality serving as an alibi for the Executive's authoritarian excesses.

 

The accumulation of powers does not stop there: we have yet to mention states of exception and emergency! Indeed, the Constitution of the Fifth Republic and French law provide for several mechanisms allowing a shift to a regime that suspends normal democratic functioning in favour of an increased concentration of powers. Article 16 allows the President of the Republic to grant himself full powers, and this power can be exercised for an unlimited period and without any genuine safeguard. Its use is discretionary and solitary, since neither Parliament nor the Constitutional Council can realistically oppose it! Another measure, the declaration of a state of emergency (which does not originate in the Constitution of 1958), allows military and police authorities full latitude to act outside the ordinary legal framework, permitting measures such as administrative internment, collective punishment or, more recently, the banning of social media networks. Judges, whether constitutional or administrative, also fail here in their role as safeguards. The Constitutional Council very rarely censures exceptional measures, has authorised the proliferation of states of emergency, and has validated — sometimes with "laconic" rulings — laws restricting civil liberties (invoking "particular circumstances").

 

In summary, exceptional and emergency powers allow the executive to suspend classical liberal guarantees — in the name of preserving the State — often without the institutions supposedly protecting the Constitution being able or willing to intervene, shielding a President who becomes "untouchable" and politically unaccountable, while the separation of powers becomes a fiction.

The picture drawn by Eugénie Mérieau of constitutional architecture as protection against authoritarian drift is therefore truly alarming. As in authoritarian regimes, a large part of our French constitution is said to be "semantic": it stages power but does not limit it.

 

II. Representative democracy is not democracy

Democracy is claimed by all political actors: international organisations, states, political parties, public figures. Yet some of these same actors are actively working to empty it of meaning. Democracy has become a catch-all, obligatory term, a formula of convenience that even authoritarian, totalitarian and frankly anti-democratic regimes integrate into their official narrative. Behind this façade consensus lies a far darker reality: the classical definition of "government of the people by the people" is nothing but a mythological and deceptive formula. In reality, a people never governs itself; it is a space in which certain individuals govern others. The vote, far from being the pure act of sovereignty, can be described as a moment of "social war" in which one part of the population uses the institutional apparatus to attempt to impose its will on another.

This founding myth collapses when one examines the structural limitations of the representative model. Representative democracy is presented as the only viable form, marginalising models of direct democracy — which are, in principle, "more" democratic — as mere historical curiosities. Even the "iconic" reference to Athenian democracy must be demythologised: it did not prevent democracy from being reserved for a small portion of the population (free men) and did not prevent either slavery or systematic discrimination.

The central problem lies in the fetishism of the election: the system rests on the aggregation of spontaneous opinions, often formed by rumour, prejudice or media manipulation, without the methodical organisation of information circulation. Electoral participation is therefore fictitious; it gives citizens the illusion of power while exposing them to the risk of information manipulation.

This illusion of citizen power rests on a fallacious epistemic postulate: the absolute relativism of opinions. Institutional democracy considers that all opinions are equal and that no truth is superior to the result of a vote. This opens the door to the "right to lie", allowing political actors to spread fake news and manipulated statistics (consider immigration or security) to justify cruel policies. There is a gaping chasm between established scientific knowledge and the decisions taken by parliaments. Recent history is dotted with laws passed against the unanimous advice of learned and medical societies, proving that the system assumes that any elected official or citizen can have a valid opinion on all subjects, from climatology to geopolitics — which is absurd in light of the complexity of the issues at stake.

On the level of political mechanics, this system also inevitably produces a destructive polarisation. By reducing social questions to electorally arbitrable positions, majoritarian democracies transform debate into a permanent duel, destroying nuance and blocking all creative exploration of options. Through a mathematical mechanism of elimination of the field of possibilities, to the detriment of two opposing attractors, the political field grows impoverished and binary. We thus observe how the system shapes elites that thrive on opposition rather than mediation. Parliaments, supposedly the locus of deliberation, are transformed into theatres of inertia where party discipline and the obsession with re-election prevent any change of mind in the face of rational arguments.

We know that behind this voting machine lies a political oligarchy that draws its legitimacy from citizens' votes but that has very little accountability, since the only possible sanction is non-re-election. This oligarchy is strongly linked to the business world; clientelism, the accumulation of mandates and directorships within large corporations ("revolving door") — which allow networks built in public service to be monetised — are systemic. The socio-professional statistics of elected representatives demonstrate that this "representative" class shares nothing substantial with its electoral base: origins, trajectories, class interests. The people are supposed to be sovereign, but they are so only in the interval between two elections… and only to choose among predefined options filtered through the distorting mirrors of media outlets owned by financial powers. The rest of the time, sovereignty is alienated and the citizen once again becomes a subject.

Finally, it is worth interrogating the ethical dimension of this system — this "dark soul of democracy" — according to Geoffroy de Lagasnerie (Lagasnerie de, 2026) — which is often left unspoken. Under the pretext of respecting the "will of the majority", democracy allows the legal installation of regimes or measures that trample fundamental rights. Unconditional adherence to the right to vote, without ethical limits, could mask a desire to continue inflicting suffering on others through the ballot box ("my vote, your body"). The legitimisation of the unacceptable becomes the norm.

In summary, representative democracy appears as a formal framework that, by privileging number over reason and opinion over truth, ends up becoming an instrument in the service of conservatism and state violence. If representation is deficient, if the separation of powers is a fiction, and if the people are excluded from real decision-making, then democracy cannot survive as a mere electoral formality. It must once again become a practice, a continuous process of deliberation and control, or it will disappear in favour of more brutal forms of governance.

 

This picture, dark as it is, is not an indictment of the democratic idea itself. It is, on the contrary, an act of fidelity toward it. For it is precisely because the democratic promise carries something irreducibly just — the equal dignity of every individual, the refusal of arbitrariness, the possibility of a freely consented collective life — that its betrayal by the institutional forms claiming to embody it is so grave. Confusing democracy with its current simulacra is not a trivial error: it is the very condition of their perpetuation.

We must therefore carefully distinguish two things that the dominant discourse labours to fuse: the democratic value — which remains an indispensable moral and political compass — and the procedural arrangements that are presented as its obligatory and definitive realisation. This confusion is the true intellectual deadlock of our era. As long as it persists, any critique of the electoral representative system will be immediately reframed as an attack on democracy itself, and any call for alternative forms of collective government will be presented as a slippery slope toward authoritarianism. Yet the precise opposite is true: it is the refusal to think beyond the existing model that opens the way to authoritarian regimes, leaving unanswered the legitimate frustration of peoples who observe that their votes change nothing.

The question that then arises is not: "should we defend democracy?"; it is: "which democracy, and by what real means?". If representation is deficient, if the separation of powers is largely fictitious, if the citizen is sovereign only in the brief interval of a vote among predefined options, then democracy cannot survive as a mere electoral formality. It must once again become a practice — a continuous process of deliberation, control and exigence —, or it will disappear definitively in favour of more brutal forms of governance, which will know how to exploit to the fullest the flaws we refuse to name.

It is to this necessity of concretely rethinking the architectures of legitimate power, beyond inherited mythologies, that we will now turn.

 

Part III — Methods of the new civic construction

3.1 — Breaking free from procedural fetishism: the primacy of values

The first necessary shift is conceptual, and perhaps the most difficult to make, as it touches on deeply ingrained habits of thought. Political modernity has progressively substituted the question "how do we decide?" for the question "what do we decide for?". By placing procedure at the heart of legitimacy, it believed it was guarding against arbitrariness; it in reality opened the door to electoral demagoguery, to the manipulation of opinions, to a possible tyranny of the majority, and to the legalisation of injustice.

It is time to reverse this hierarchy. Fundamental values — the equal dignity of every human being, protection against all forms of physical or psychological violence, freedom of conscience and expression, the rights of future generations and the rights of the environment — cannot be the object of a vote. They are its precondition. A majority vote that instituted an unjustly discriminatory measure would not transform that unjust measure into a legitimate one. The ballot produces legality, which is not the same thing. Confusing the two is one of the great mystifications of contemporary constitutionalism.

This implies, first of all, a debate on the nature of these same values and fundamental rights, making it possible to establish a broad consensus within the population. We are far from starting from scratch on this front: there already exists a rich tradition of thought built from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, which would need to be revisited in light of the ethical stakes of the Anthropocene.

 

This then implies radically rethinking the function of constitutional review bodies. As we have seen, the Constitutional Council as it currently exists is an organ largely captive to the political power that appoints it. The solution is not to reinforce it in its current form, but to transform it in its very nature. Provisional bodies, for example, constituted by sortition from colleges of competences — jurists specialising in fundamental rights, representatives of the civil societies concerned, experts in the relevant domains — could exercise this guardian-of-values function in a far more independent manner. Their non-permanent character would free them from the logic of careers and allegiances; their plural composition would serve as immunity against capture by any particular interest.

3.2 — Democratising deliberation

The second necessary transformation concerns the quality of the deliberative process itself. The current representative system organises a democracy of opinion: it aggregates pre-existing preferences, formed outside any framework for pooling knowledge and reasoned confrontation of viewpoints. What it does not do — and what any democracy worthy of the name should do — is "organise the conditions for the formation of an informed collective will".

Experience shows how citizens' conventions — which bring together platforms of randomly selected citizens to formulate reform proposals built after an intensive information phase conducted by experts — make it possible to break with the model of spontaneous opinion and electoral polarisation, and to build consensual policies. Thus, allied with a detailed information strategy, sortition, far from being an ancient curiosity, is the tool that best meets this requirement (Van Reybrouck, 2014). Used not to govern but to deliberate on fundamental questions, it presents virtues that elections cannot offer: it produces assemblies statistically representative of real social diversity, it removes participants from partisan and media pressures, and it places ordinary citizens before the complexity of the issues at hand with the time and resources necessary to form an informed judgement. The experiences of citizens' assemblies in Texas — which paved the way for an ambitious wind energy policy in a state that is nonetheless an oil producer — or of the Citizens' Convention for the Climate in France (despite its lack of uptake by the Executive), have demonstrated that such deliberation is not only possible, but often of an argumentative quality superior to that of professional parliaments.

Citizens' initiative referendums (CIR), or popular initiative referendums — a popular proposal in France since the Yellow Vests movement — constitute another lever that can greatly enrich democracy by allowing a portion of the population to bring a subject onto the collective agenda. This is a process of direct democracy that allows citizens gathering a number of signatures fixed by law to refer a matter to the population by referendum without the agreement of Parliament or the Executive being required. These initiatives also show their limits, notably the risk of drift toward the tyranny of majorities over minorities — which only the primacy of the fundamental values discussed above can ward off. The tool is not neutral: everything depends on the safeguards within which it operates.

3.3 — Reforming representation from within

Without waiting for a global constitutional refoundation — the political conditions for which are not in place —, several structural reforms of representation could significantly reduce the pathologies described in the preceding sections.

The imperative and revocable mandate is without doubt the most radical of these. It involves obliging elected representatives to respect the programme and positions for which they were effectively mandated, and to be accountable during their term — not only at its conclusion. Revocability is not an extremist idea: it is the logical precondition of genuine representation. Yet Article 27 of the Constitution prohibits the imperative mandate for members of Parliament, stipulating that "any imperative mandate is null and void" and that Parliament members' voting rights are personal. This means that elected officials enjoy great freedom of action without being bound to strictly respect the directives of their voters. That an elected official can, once in office, systematically betray their commitments without any sanction other than non-re-election — often hypothetical and distant — is a glaring democratic anomaly that our political culture has simply normalised.

Positive discrimination mechanisms — parity quotas, representation of working classes, young people, minorities — are not infringements of formal equality: they are its necessary correction in the face of the systematic selection biases of the electoral system. The socio-professional statistics of elected assemblies are, in this regard, damning. Representing the people without resembling it is a contradiction in terms that only a deliberate reform of candidacy and financing mechanisms can resolve.

Finally, the strict prohibition of the revolving door and of the accumulation of public mandates and private interests must cease to be a pious wish and become a constitutional constraint with real sanctions. The porousness between the political class and the business world is not a marginal dysfunction of the system: it is, as we have seen, one of its structural features.

3.4 — The epistemic question: governing with knowledge

There remains a dimension that procedural reforms, however necessary, cannot alone resolve: the question of the relationship between political decision-making and knowledge. We have evoked the gaping chasm that separates established scientific consensus from the decisions taken in parliaments. This chasm cannot be bridged by the sole virtue of better representation: it demands specific institutional mechanisms.

This first requires acknowledging that not all opinions are equal — which is not anti-democratic but simply honest. Freedom of opinion is a fundamental right; it does not confer equal epistemic validity on every opinion. A parliament has the right to decide on a climate policy; it does not have the right to deny the physical data upon which the evaluation of its consequences rests. Instituting a right for competent scientific communities to refer matters to assemblies, creating obligations to provide motivated responses to contradictory expert opinions, making public and accessible the expert work that informs each legislative decision: these measures do not restrict democracy — they elevate it.

The fight against institutional disinformation — that which is produced or tolerated by power actors themselves, and amplified by media whose concentration in the hands of a few financial interests has been carefully documented — is a prerequisite for any authentic democratic deliberation. A democracy that does not protect its citizens against organised cognitive manipulation is not an incomplete democracy: it is a democracy that has abdicated.

This very incomplete list of proposals does not constitute a programme; numerous practical experiences of profoundly democratic construction (such as participatory budgeting) have been tested around the world and must inform our thinking. Equally to be considered are the multiple possibilities offered by information technologies and artificial intelligence — of course equipped with their necessary safeguards and guarantees of citizen sovereignty — which can assist human dialogue and deliberation. These proposals must be appreciated in their totality and are intended to sketch a direction, a set of principles from which a democratic refoundation can — and must — be reimagined. Of course, implementing these radical measures — viewed from the current institutional status quo — would, needless to say, encounter considerable resistance, precisely from the actors who benefit from the system as it exists. But the obstacle does not exempt us from thought. It is precisely because the path is difficult that it is necessary to map it with precision. That is what these pages have attempted to contribute.

 

In lieu of conclusion: the road ahead…

Let us return to the paradox posed at the outset. We are living, we said, through a historically rare moment: one in which the failures of our democratic architectures are visible enough to finally be named, analysed, understood. A window of learning. But this window opens precisely when the cognitive conditions necessary for this collective learning are most degraded — fragmented by information overload, short-circuited by disinformation, exhausted by acceleration. The moment when we would most need to think together is the one in which thinking together is most difficult.

This paradox is not inevitable. It is itself the product of a system that has an interest in its own perpetuation — and therefore in the inability of its subjects to think it through. The epistemic contraction we are experiencing is not merely a consequence of crises; it is, in part, a policy. To recognise this is already to begin to free oneself from it.

We all have the capacity to think. But we do not think — at least not enough, not freely enough, not collectively enough. The obstacle is not intelligence: it is habit, the comfort of inherited narratives, the fear of what one would find if one truly looked. To truly look is to accept that the institutions we call democracies carry within them the seeds of their own betrayal. It is to accept that the vote, alone, saves nothing. It is to accept, finally, that rethinking democracy is not an option reserved for calm times — it is an urgency of times of crisis.

The road ahead is not mapped. None of the proposals sketched in these pages is a ready-made solution; none will be sufficient on its own. But the absence of an immediate solution is not a reason to abandon thought — on the contrary, it is its most compelling justification. The societies that have navigated their deepest crises have not been those that had the best answers prepared in advance: they have been those that knew how, at the right moment, to ask the right questions.

Let us ask them.

 

 

References

Branco, Juan, 2019.- Crépuscule. Au diable vauvert publ., Paris, 112 p. Download here

Éthique Barbare (l'), 2025. - The Rise of the Right Wing Through an IAD Framework, Blog l'Éthique Barbare - here

Éthique Barbare (l'), 2025. - Comment nos démocraties représentatives génèrent la violence, Blog l'Éthique Barbare - here

Éthique Barbare (l'), 2025. - La démocratie à l'ère de la contraction épistémique, Blog l'Éthique Barbare - here

Éthique Barbare (l'), 2025. - Pourquoi l'accélération menace la participation — et comment construire une technologie institutionnelle du temps, Blog l'Éthique Barbare - here

Lagasnerie de, Geoffroy, 2026.- L'âme noire de la démocratie, Flammarion publ., 208 p. See at Flammarion - here

Mérieau, Eugénie, 2025.- Constitution, Anamosa publ., 108 p. See at Anamosa - here

Van Reybrouck, David, 2014.- Against Elections, Actes Sud Publ. See at Actes Sud - here

 

 

The idea is human. The writing is shared. The exact proportion remains deliberately unspecified.

 

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