European Journal zyxwvuts of Political Research 23: zyxwvu 121-133. 1993. zyxwv 0 zyxw 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands zyxw Democratic theory and individual autonomy An interpretation of Schumpeter’s doctrine of democracy EMILIO SANTORO European University Institute, Florence, Italy Abstract. Schumpeter argued that the norms of what he called the ‘classical’ theory were unrealisable within modern societies and offered what he believed to be a more realistic alterna- tive. However, his critics accuse him of confusing ‘is’ with ‘ought’. This paper seeks to save him from this criticism. It shows that Schumpeter’s attack on the classical model rested on a correct appraisal of the constraints on individual autonomous action within modern societies. Unlike the ‘competitive theory’ of Downs and others, Schurnpeter’s own alternative cannot be treated as a naive apologia for contemporary parliametary party democracy. He was well aware that such systems easily degenerate into oligopolies. Indeed he welcomed this development, viewing the party elections as means for moulding rather than responding to the people’s will. Neverthe- less, a series of procedural norms underlay his theory which are elucidated with reference to Wittgenstein’s account of language. Schumpeter’s attack on the classical theory of democracy is essentially di- rected, as I shall illustrate, against the idea that zyxw autonomous citizens are the source of political orientation. My thesis will be that, just for this very reason, Schumpeter’s theory of democracy cannot provide a basis for the ‘competitive model of democracy’ worked out by political scientists in the last forty years. In the second part of the essay (sections 3 and 4) I will maintain that, if we read Schumpeter’s passages in the chapter on ‘human nature in politics’ in the light of Wittgenstein’s argument against private language, as interpreted by Saul Kripke, we are able to make sense of Schumpeter’s theory of democ- racy as an attempt to construct a normative model of democracy without transcendental foundations. 1. What is ‘classical’ in the ‘classical doctrine’? I think that we must consider Schumpeter’s well known attack on what he calls the ‘classical doctrine of democracy’ as an attack on the ‘classical anthropological model of the democratic citizen’. It is known that Schumpeter bases his own theory of democracy on the defects of what he calls the ‘classical doctrine of democracy’. According to this doctrine the democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at