Hello, I'm Catherine Carr, producer of Talking Politics.

This week's episode of History of Ideas brought to you in partnership with the London

Review of Books is about a famous critic of democracy, who is also one of its most important

defenders. David explains how Joseph Schumpeter's seeming cynicism about politics also provides

the basis for taking democracy seriously.

If one of the starting questions we're thinking about modern politics is what is democracy,

there are quite an astonishing range of different kinds of answers. I talked about one kind of

answer last week, Carl Schmitz, but really there's a vast spectrum that runs all the way from

extremely idealized, elevated notions of democracy as a kind of ultimate goal or good,

seeking what's in everyone's interest or allowing people to rule themselves in a way that's

both noble and productive, all the way through to extremely cynical answers that say that democracy,

particularly modern, representative democracy is a kind of scam or sham. It's just a performance,

it's a way of the people with power holding on to power while pretending to let the people decide,

as the saying goes, if voting change anything they would make it illegal. From idealism to cynicism,

Schmitz actually I think is much closer to the idealized end than the cynical end,

but the person I'm talking about today, Joseph Schumpeter, is often thought of one of the more

cynical definers of characterizers of modern representative democracy and indeed in his book

capitalism, socialism and democracy, pubges 1942, he gave a celebrated account of what democracy is,

that for many readers was extremely disheartening. He's a kind of debunker and often therefore assumed

to be a cynical debunker. What did he say democracy was? Well, I'll talk a lot more about it today,

but in essence he says it is a kind of show, if not quite a sham, it's essentially manipulative,

it's politicians trying to persuade people to vote for things that the politicians have constructed

...