Stating the Thermo-Entropic Limits of Substantive Democracy

Abstract

This article first offers a criticism of the theory of neoliberal democracy, not because of its philosophical assumptions, but because of the unreasonable claims it presupposes about thermodynamics. This paper then outlines a dissipative, systems-theoretical view of democracy based on thermodynamic analysis of the viability of democratic social structure within the system of capital. The paper claim that democracy confronts the challenges of any system: it must fight off its tendency to decay (entropy) across perturbations in its environment by drawing inputs of matter, energy, and information from energy pools in its environment in order to reproduce its social structure as an output. The two ultimate limits to any viable democratic social structure include 1) ecological, physical environments (this is indeed an ultimate limit for any system) and 2) the overcoming of the structural parameters required for the reproduction of capital (e.g., capital’s expansionary profit motive, the exploitation of human labor, particularly in the Global South and
periphery), which any democracy must be structurally opposed to, in principle. Here it is argued that a rich, substantive form of democracy is thermodynamically impossible within the system of capital because it cannot provide the substantive (vs. merely formal) equality that is a generative condition for any democracy, no matter the scale of analysis.