What’s Wrong with Militant Democracy?

This article proposes a critique of “militant democracy,” defined as the legal restriction of democratic freedoms for the purpose of insulating democratic regimes from the threat of being overthrown by legal means. The argument we advance is that this conceptual framework is inadequate for addressing the problem it is meant to solve, since restricting the freedom of its supposed “enemies” may make democracy more prone to authoritarian abuse, rather than less, in the long run. To demonstrate this, we first turn to the theory of militant democracy, both in its earliest articulations by Karl Loewenstein and Carl Schmitt, and in the more recent theoretical literature on this topic. In the second part, we show that the inherent arbitrariness of militant democracy has been reflected in a concrete expansion in the range of targets to which the logic of militant democracy has been applied: from fascism during the inter-war years, to communism during the Cold War, up to several forms of religious practice in the present day.