Historical materialism 2019: In the 1930s Schmitt, amongst others, attempted to sever the self-evident synonymity between ‘democracy’ and ‘liberal parliamentarism’ (specifically, the procedural form of the individual secret ballot). Against parliamentarism, Schmitt advanced a ‘substantive’ theory of the people and a correlated conception of democratic participation as ‘acclamation’: the ‘accepting or rejecting shouts of the assembled crowd.’ Drawing on the historical and philosophical bases of these counterposed conceptions of democracy, I aim to demonstrate the proximate threat posed by ‘acclamation’ as the alternative (largely unacknowledged) 1 of 7 underlying naive rejections of representational democracy for a theory of community participation.
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