Hyperdemocracy : When Democracy Exhausts the Resources of Its Own Survival

The European Democratic Model and Its Promise of Emancipation

Since the Second World War, the European democratic model has embodied a promise of emancipation. It protects individuals against arbitrary power, guarantees equality of rights and has extended rights for all by organising solidarity through the State, without which individuals would be left to face the uncertainties of life largely on their own. It has also developed mechanisms to correct inequalities, with the aim of promoting equality of opportunity and strengthening social cohesion. The welfare state, combined with the rule of law, represents one of the most advanced expressions of this model. It has delivered tremendous progress and rightly stands as one of the great political and social achievements of our time. For decades, economic development and social progress went hand in hand.

Gradually, however, and without sufficient awareness of the potentially damaging consequences, the balance that had made this model successful began to break down along two dimensions.

First, rights continued to expand without a corresponding development of duties and responsibilities. Second, the pursuit of equality was pushed ever further, increasingly seeking to equalise people’s circumstances and outcomes rather than their opportunities.

These two distinct but complementary trends have progressively generated an endogenous distortion of democracy: an entropy within our social model. I use the term entropy here in the sense in which it is employed in the social sciences, rather than in physics. It describes the endogenous dynamics of a system when those dynamics produce a gradual and cumulative decline in its effectiveness, progressively undermining its capacity to reproduce itself and potentially leading, in time, to its collapse.

The dynamics set in motion along these two dimensions will therefore ultimately exhaust the very resources on which the survival of our social model depends, unless we address them with determination.

This is what I call hyperdemocracy: a form of democracy that fails to recognise and manage its own limits and constraints, even though these are precisely what make it viable in the first place.

The pursuit of broader rights and greater equality rests on principles that are, in themselves, noble. But when these principles become disconnected from the actual workings of society and its economy—in the original sense of how a system functions and regulates itself—and when they are pursued beyond certain thresholds, they weaken the foundations of the system and thereby endanger its own survival.

In other words, a progressive aspiration, pursued without an awareness that its unlimited extension may paradoxically and inexorably produce the opposite of its intended effect, can ultimately lead to regression.

The Consequences of the Unlimited Expansion of Rights

As our democracies have continuously expanded rights, protections and mechanisms to correct inequalities, without corresponding obligations or responsibilities, they have also increased the expectations placed on public authorities. The State has become the natural recourse for an ever-growing range of individual and collective difficulties, as well as grievances and perceptions of injustice. In response, it has multiplied administrative arrangements, regulations and procedures.

This development is not simply the product of an administrative apparatus seeking to expand its own power. It stems from an accumulation of demands that are democratically legitimate and, considered individually, entirely understandable. Yet their cumulative effect, in the absence of an overarching vision or a broader assessment of their implications, can set in motion a dynamic that gradually escapes collective control.

The continuous expansion of public intervention progressively reduces society’s autonomy while simultaneously increasing the demand for State intervention. The process becomes self-sustaining.

The State and its administration expand because society asks them to solve an ever-growing number of problems. But once an administrative mechanism has been established, it develops a logic of its own. The administration builds up its expertise, procedures, operating requirements and institutional legitimacy—and acquires an incentive to grow further. The rules it produces generate new situations requiring regulation. A largely autonomous dynamic of expansion gradually takes hold.

The State enjoys a decisive advantage in this process: it can turn its interventions into binding rules and mobilise substantial resources to enforce them. It consequently becomes the principal organiser of society.

In the absence of an overarching vision and effective oversight, this dynamic generates over-administration, complexity and declining effectiveness. The problem cannot be measured simply by counting civil servants. It lies in the extension of administrative logic into an ever-wider range of social activities, with the machinery continually feeding its own expansion. The administration is no longer merely an instrument of political authority: it begins to escape political control and becomes the environment within which society itself must operate.

Yet even as this development undermines administrative effectiveness, it produces an even more pernicious vicious circle: the relationship between protection and responsibility.

A modern society must protect its members. Illness, disability, unemployment, old age and life’s unforeseen setbacks all justify mechanisms of solidarity. Abandoning these protections would represent a regression in our model of society.

But the continual expansion of protection also affects behaviour.

When the community assumes responsibility for an ever-growing share of individual risks, each person’s sense of responsibility tends to weaken. This is generally not a deliberate choice.

The more the welfare state intervenes and expands, the more individuals come to rely on it. The weaker family and local solidarity become, the less individuals maintain their capacity to anticipate difficulties, organise themselves and take responsibility for their own circumstances. And the weaker these forms of local solidarity become, the greater the demand for State intervention. The circle closes.

Individuals gradually cease to be citizens who possess rights while accepting corresponding duties. Instead, they become increasingly dependent, developing a growing need for protection—until they begin to lose their autonomy and their capacity to cope with difficulties on their own.

This excessive protection, once it becomes a perceived necessity, also increases anxiety and therefore the demand for State intervention. Dependence gradually becomes the new norm, a new entitlement. Individuals increasingly see themselves as beneficiaries of public schemes, as claimants with a legitimate claim against the State—in other words, against society as a whole, and therefore against everyone, a connection they may no longer clearly perceive.

The problem, then, is not protection itself. It arises when State protection ceases to be a means of emancipation and becomes a permanent substitute for the capacity to protect oneself and act independently. The welfare state can then produce a paradoxical effect: dis-emancipation.

Tocqueville anticipated this tension. (1) In a society where individuals become increasingly equal yet increasingly separate, there is a risk that they will turn ever more readily to an administrative power expected to satisfy their needs, gradually surrendering much of their autonomy and sense of responsibility.

This pernicious dynamic deserves to be taken seriously. It benefits neither individuals nor society as a whole.

A Society Without Autonomy Is an Empty Social Fabric

The question of intermediary institutions becomes central here.

Democracy does not rest on only two poles, the individual and the State. It needs an intermediate sphere made up of associations, businesses, trade unions, mutual insurance organisations, local authorities, families and professional communities. These institutions make proximity possible, organise cooperation, build trust, make compromise possible and give individuals the opportunity to act together.

When the State mediates most interactions between the different elements of society, these spaces lose some of their autonomy. Horizontal solidarity gives way to a single form of vertical solidarity organised by the State. The social fabric risks becoming hollow.

The result is troubling: a society whose members no longer know how to organise among themselves inevitably becomes more dependent on the State.

Hannah Arendt’s thinking illuminates this issue from another angle. Political freedom cannot be reduced to the possession of individual rights. It presupposes a space in which citizens can act together, deliberate and build a common world. When collective life is progressively transferred to administrative mechanisms, the risk is not merely bureaucratic. It is political. Citizens may lose some of the spaces in which they exercise their freedom and capacity for action in concrete terms.

This is where the concept of autonomy takes on its full meaning. An autonomous society is not a society without a State, but one in which the State does not need to organise everything because individuals and groups possess sufficient capacity to organise themselves.

Institutional, Economic and Civic Entropy

Hyperdemocracy is not simply a hypertrophy of the State. It is a process of institutional, economic and civic entropy: a gradual accumulation of rules, procedures, administratively managed organisations and rights without corresponding obligations. This increases the system’s complexity while reducing its capacity to deliver the intended results effectively, ultimately undermining the very conditions required for its continued reproduction.

This entropy is difficult to perceive because it develops through successive additions. Every new rule appears reasonable. Every additional procedure seems justified. Every new scheme claims to address a need. Yet the sum of these measures eventually makes the system difficult to understand, insufficiently responsive and increasingly ineffective.

Society consequently devotes a growing share of its energy to managing its own complexity. By producing more rules and controls, and spending ever more time administering them, it produces less wealth, trust and social cohesion.

Entropy also has a financial dimension. As rights and protections expand without corresponding duties and responsibilities, and as local forms of solidarity—within families, geographical communities, professional groups and elsewhere—gradually weaken, hyperdemocracy leads to an unchecked increase in public spending and debt.

The entropy is economic when taxation, complexity and the constraints arising from overregulation and over-administration weigh on work, investment, competitiveness, initiative and the attractiveness of employment.

It is civic when citizens gradually cease to feel responsible for matters that concern others or the collective good, having grown accustomed to delegating that responsibility to public authorities, which have progressively disintermediated them from one another.

It is civic, too, when citizens, confronted with declining public-service effectiveness despite very high levels of public spending and compulsory levies, and with ever-increasing debt, gradually lose confidence in politicians and institutions, in one another and even in themselves. This unease is already widespread in French society.

Ultimately, hyperdemocracy produces a major nexus of contradictions.

As the welfare state becomes increasingly paternalistic and promises ever-broader protection, it is bound to disappoint more and more people, both because its effectiveness declines and because the resources required to fulfil its promises cannot be found.

It generates permanent dissatisfaction and anxiety, partly as a consequence of the loss of autonomy and the erosion of personal responsibility that this dependence creates. It isolates individuals from one another by weakening the intermediary structures that connect them.

Finally, to sustain this model, it demands ever-higher public spending and compulsory levies. These, in turn, constrain the economic dynamism needed to make the model sustainable and contribute to an uncontrolled rise in public debt relative to GDP.

The Consequences of an Insatiable Pursuit of Equality

If the unlimited expansion of rights without corresponding duties is one of the defining sources of hyperdemocratic entropy, the same is true of equality when it ceases to mean equality of rights and opportunity and instead seeks to correct indefinitely inequalities of circumstances and outcomes.

Equality before the law and equality of opportunity are fundamental principles that have brought about decisive advances in civilisation. They free individuals from the constraints of inherited privilege and enable them to shape their own lives. Correcting excessive inequalities of wealth contributes to this objective and helps sustain the social cohesion on which society depends. The ultimate aim is a more harmonious form of social development.

But no democratic imperative can justify equalising people’s circumstances and outcomes without limit without risking serious damage to the economic and social model and, ultimately, to democracy itself.

A dynamic society is necessarily a society of differences. Individuals differ in their talents, tastes, efforts, choices, willingness to take risks and ambitions. These differences are not realities that must be corrected. They are, moreover, among the sources of prosperity and progress.

Systematically seeking to eliminate every difference in circumstances gradually turns every difference into a suspect inequality and every inequality into a problem requiring public intervention.

As the distinction between inequality and difference disappears, every asymmetry becomes suspect. Success may increasingly be interpreted not as the product of merit, hard work, responsibility or personal choice, but as the result of privilege or morally questionable behaviour. Hierarchy becomes domination. Authority raises suspicions of potential violence. Selection is accused of exclusion.

Hyperdemocracy then ceases merely to correct injustices. It tends to seek to correct differences themselves.

This may be described as a dynamic of indifferentiation, which in practice leads towards a post-democratic form of indifferentiation. A society that can no longer tolerate individuals, groups or institutions occupying different positions without immediately suspecting injustice becomes progressively incapable of recognising the legitimacy of authority. The same applies to excellence, merit and selection.

The legitimate effort to identify discrimination and abuse then becomes a single, systematic interpretative framework for social relations, in which every difference triggers a search for hidden domination or systemic inequality that must be corrected.

This dynamic carries political risks.

History shows that ideologies which have sought to remake society from the ground up, erasing the past in order to create a “new man”, have had to resort to increasingly total forms of coercion to impose their model on a human reality that resisted it.

The pursuit of equality and justice becomes dangerous when it ceases to acknowledge that the human condition has limits that no political organisation can abolish.

As Tocqueville had already observed, this quest for “total” equality threatens freedom and fuels destructive passions such as jealousy. (2) In contemporary societies, the unlimited drive towards equalisation risks leading to societies with increasingly totalitarian tendencies.

Indifferentiation: The Risk of Renewed Mimetic Violence and the Threat to Prosperity and Democracy

Furthermore, as René Girard has shown, when the differences that structure social relations disappear, mimetic competition for the same goods, status and recognition can intensify to the point of unleashing a spiral of mimetic violence and fuelling the search for scapegoats.

Indifferentiation, far from fostering harmony, can thus produce new forms of violence and intolerance, while identifying new scapegoats.

A living democracy cannot accept inherited privilege or discrimination. But neither can it, without taking substantial risks, regard every difference as an injustice to be rectified.

It must accept that equality of rights and opportunity can lead to differences in circumstances, life trajectories and outcomes. This is, indeed, one of the conditions for freedom, lasting democracy and a dynamic society.

It is also here that the question of equality connects directly with economic growth.

An economy progresses because a sufficient number of people take risks, start businesses, innovate, invest, and create new products and companies. Some succeed; others fail. Some sectors disappear while others emerge. This continuous differentiation is not a flaw in the economic and social model. It is one of its driving forces.

This is precisely what Schumpeter’s theory of growth explains. Progress does not result from an ever more perfect distribution of a fixed stock of wealth. It arises from innovation and creative destruction.

People must therefore have an incentive to take risks, experiment and succeed. A society that rewards success gives people a reason to take risks. A society that accepts failure allows experimentation.

Conversely, when differences in outcomes are systematically neutralised, the expected return on effort, investment, risk-taking and innovation diminishes, potentially to the point of disappearing.

This is not merely a matter of financial incentives. The desire to build businesses, achieve success, surpass oneself and earn social recognition also contributes to economic dynamism.

Innovation inherently creates temporary differences in circumstances, before competition and further innovation gradually reduce them.

It is therefore impossible to pursue simultaneously a society that constantly equalises outcomes and an economy that generates growth and rising living standards.

The unlimited pursuit of equality of circumstances consequently attacks the very engine of income growth from which the redistribution it seeks to achieve must ultimately draw its resources.

It can gradually produce a society that is less differentiated, less entrepreneurial and less willing to take risks—and therefore less capable of generating the wealth required to finance its social model.

This does not, of course, mean that every inequality is justified or that all redistribution is harmful.

A market economy requires the rule of law, social protection and redistribution, including measures to correct certain inequalities. Well-designed redistribution can benefit both economic growth and social cohesion.

But there is an essential difference between correcting inequalities that undermine equality of opportunity or lead to economically inefficient outcomes, and seeking to eliminate differences that arise from individual choices, efforts and life trajectories.

The first approach emancipates individuals; the second can ultimately constrain them.

For if every difference in outcome is treated as an inequality that must be corrected, the demand for correction can never be satisfied. Since individuals do not share the same preferences, abilities, behaviour or aspirations, equalising outcomes is, by its very nature, an unlimited objective.

Genuine equality, understood as a democratic value, must therefore be conceived differently. It means guaranteeing equality of rights, pursuing a deliberate policy of equality of opportunity, and enabling everyone to shape their own life trajectory.

It must accept that freedom necessarily produces differences in circumstances and outcomes.

Social justice does not mean making everyone’s destiny identical. It means preventing, as far as possible, people’s destinies from being predetermined and enabling everyone to improve their circumstances.

This is therefore a second manifestation of the entropy generated by hyperdemocracy. As with the indefinite expansion of rights, it ultimately consumes the resources and undermines the mechanisms on which its own reproduction depends.

By seeking ever more extensively to correct the outcomes of economic activity, it progressively weakens—and may ultimately destroy—the very economic dynamism on which those outcomes depend.

The French Case

France provides a revealing illustration of the phenomenon described above. (3)

Our country has built an ambitious and protective social model. It has delivered considerable progress and remains an essential component of social cohesion.

Moreover, income inequality after redistribution has remained broadly stable in France over the past twenty-five years. Inequality is moderate by developed-country standards, broadly in line with the European average and considerably lower than in the United States, for example.

Yet France has allowed the endogenous distortions of the system—that is, hyperdemocracy—to develop without sufficient self-regulation.

The result is a system that has become extraordinarily complex and costly, and particularly difficult to reform, thereby undermining the resources needed to sustain it.

France has progressively devoted an exceptionally large share of its wealth to public spending and compulsory levies. Yet this expenditure has not translated into economic and social performance commensurate with the resources mobilised.

Potential growth is weak. The competitiveness of French businesses has deteriorated over the past thirty years. Employment rates remain insufficient. Public services are becoming less effective, while public debt has risen sharply and budgetary room for manoeuvre has narrowed considerably.

The problem is therefore not simply that spending is too high. It is that the internal dynamics of the model generate ever more rules, expenditure and administration without producing enough growth, employment and productivity to justify and finance them sustainably.

This is where the sustainability of the welfare state is at stake.

A social system can protect a society over the long term only if that society generates sufficient wealth, employment and trust to finance the protection it provides.

Debt allows the moment of truth to be postponed, but it cannot eliminate it. More than that, by buying time, debt makes the eventual reckoning more acute and the resolution of the problem considerably more difficult.

Debt therefore postpones the constraint while dangerously exacerbating it.

Rights, Duties and Equality

Hyperdemocracy can thus be understood through our relationship with rights, duties and equality.

A modern democracy must never abandon fundamental rights. But rights cannot be sustainably separated from duties.

A right creates, in practice, an obligation for the community—and therefore a duty for everyone. To overlook this is to adopt a form of one-sided thinking.

Likewise, protection requires funding, solidarity requires contributions, and public services require resources.

The point is not to reduce rights, but to place them within a framework of reciprocal responsibilities and a shared understanding of their implications.

Nor is the objective to turn away from the emancipatory value of equality. It is to avoid confusing equality of circumstances and outcomes with equality of rights and opportunity, which form the foundation of a democratic society.

Finally, moving beyond hyperdemocracy does not in any way mean giving free rein to laissez-faire.

Criticising an omnipresent State does not imply advocating a minimal State. It means advocating a State that is strong in its essential functions and protective in fulfilling its fundamental responsibilities, while recognising the limits and constraints it must impose on itself to allow society—that is, individuals acting both independently and collectively—to remain responsible and capable of taking action.

This is, fundamentally, the logic of a social market economy.

The State guarantees the rule of law, protects the most vulnerable, finances essential public goods, invests in education, research and infrastructure, corrects market failures and ensures fair competition.

But it does not substitute itself for society.

The State must conceive of its own role in terms of enabling a society that is cohesive, responsible and autonomous. A social market economy is also one in which society develops the vitality and dynamism needed to sustain prosperity and raise living standards for all, as far as possible.

This requires a return to the principle of subsidiarity.

What individuals, social groups or professional communities can do should not be done by the State. What society can provide should not be administered by the public authorities. What can be decided effectively at a local level should not be imposed uniformly from the centre.

Subsidiarity is not a doctrine of State withdrawal. It is a principle for allocating responsibilities appropriately.

This requires room for autonomous intermediary institutions to develop and regain their vitality: associations, trade unions, businesses, local authorities and citizens capable of organising and acting for themselves.

This is, in fact, a condition of State effectiveness.

A Democracy That Reflects on Itself and Regulates Itself

The decisive question, ultimately, is this: can democracy correct its own endogenous dynamics and recognise its limits and constraints with clear eyes? Can it regulate itself?

Democracy—in this context, its institutionally organised system of representation—must be able to evaluate public policies, abolish regulations, reconsider expenditure and reform forms of protection that produce perverse effects.

It must therefore equip itself to assess potential consequences before legislating or regulating, experiment before generalising, and evaluate effectiveness after implementation, making improvements where necessary.

It must also measure not only the immediate benefits of a new rule, but the additional complexity it imposes on the system.

Before creating a new right or introducing a new scheme, it should ask a few simple questions:

Who will pay for it? Who will administer it? What level of effectiveness can reasonably be expected? Which responsibilities will be transferred? What will be the effects on the autonomy of individuals and society as a whole? What unintended consequences might arise?

Democracy’s capacity to critically examine its own institutions and modes of operation is a condition of political freedom and health.

It is also essential to maintaining citizens’ trust—and therefore to preserving democracy’s capacity to reform itself.

A democracy that can no longer reform itself gradually becomes a democracy that is merely endured, rather than actively shaped by its citizens. It ultimately weakens itself to the point of endangering its own survival.

Moving beyond hyperdemocracy does not mean abandoning equality of rights, equality of opportunity or social protection. It means restoring a balance between protection and responsibility, solidarity and autonomy, rights and duties, equality and freedom, and the State and society. (3)

A sustainable democracy must protect individuals against risks they cannot bear alone. But it must also leave them the space they need to address the risks they can manage themselves.

It must guarantee rights without overlooking the duties that properly accompany them.

It must provide essential forms of solidarity without replacing local solidarity or individual responsibility.

It must establish the rules that are indispensable without multiplying those that stifle initiative.

And it must promise only what it can deliver.

For a democracy that does not recognise its limits ultimately breeds disappointment and a loss of trust.

A democracy that no longer trusts its own society ends up making that society dependent on the State.

A democracy that no longer knows how to accompany rights with the necessary duties ultimately undermines those very rights.

A society that can no longer reform itself generates the entropy that weakens it and sets it on a path of decline.

Finally, a society that, in the name of equality, becomes intolerant of all differences, including those that are legitimate and necessary, ultimately puts democracy itself at risk.

Notes

(1) Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America.

“I see an innumerable multitude of men, all alike and equal, who turn endlessly in pursuit of the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. […] Above them rises an immense and protective power, which alone undertakes to secure their enjoyment and watch over their fate. It is absolute, meticulous, regular, far-sighted and gentle. It would resemble paternal authority if, like that authority, its purpose were to prepare men for adulthood; but, on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them irrevocably in childhood. It is pleased when citizens enjoy themselves, provided they think of nothing but enjoyment. It willingly works for their happiness, but it wants to be its sole agent and arbiter. It provides for their security, anticipates and meets their needs, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates and divides their inheritances. What could it not take away from them entirely, if only it could spare them the trouble of thinking and the burden of living?

“In this way, every day it makes the exercise of free will less useful and less frequent; it confines the scope of individual initiative to an ever narrower space and gradually deprives each citizen even of the use of himself. Equality has prepared men for all these things: it has disposed them to endure them and often even to regard them as a benefit. Having thus taken each individual in turn into its powerful hands and moulded him as it pleases, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole. It covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, minute and uniform rules, through which even the most original minds and the strongest spirits cannot find their way to rise above the crowd. It does not break men’s wills, but softens, bends and guides them. It rarely compels people to act, but constantly obstructs action. It does not destroy; it prevents things from being born. It does not tyrannise; it constrains, compresses, enervates, extinguishes and dulls, until each nation is reduced to nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

Note: This English rendering of Tocqueville’s passage is provided as a translation of the French quotation supplied in the original article.

(2) Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America.

“I believe that democratic peoples have a natural taste for freedom; but they have an ardent, insatiable, eternal and invincible passion for equality. They want equality in freedom, and, if they cannot obtain it, they still want equality in slavery. They will endure poverty, servitude and barbarism […]”

Note: This English rendering follows the French quotation supplied in the original article.

*(3) Olivier Klein, Dette, réformes et démocratie : comment sortir du cercle vicieux français [Debt, Reform and Democracy: How to Break Out of France’s Vicious Circle], Décryptage Éditions, May 2026.

Professor of Economics at HEC Paris