Ideology as surplus power: A democratic republican take on realist legitimacy

The republican definition of liberty as nondomination affords a vantage point from which to critique the application of liberal noninterference as an ‘ideological weapon’. Exploiting compatibility between normative republicanism and methodological realism, a republican realist critique of ideology as surplus power is proposed. The value of this approach is demonstrated in three vignettes. Shown to be ideological in a sense that is damaging to democracy are widely held beliefs that university admissions are conducted according to a meritocratic criterion; that elected representatives harmonize sectional interests in accordance with some neutral view of the national interest; and, most importantly, that a libertarian ‘nightwatchman’ role is all that anyone can legitimately expect a modern state to play. If as democratic republicans contend, politics is an artificially constituted concession that weaker citizens obtain from stronger citizens, thus inadvertently legitimating the latter’s authority, ideological (mis)representation is the furtive reinsertion of coercive power, domination, back into relations between weak and strong. Ideological surplus power is the power to dominate, to exercise arbitrary, uncontrolled power. As do those who celebrate meritocracy and depoliticize the national interest, libertarian ideologists draw attention away from the essentially political questions of who legitimately possesses authority, who decides how it is constituted, and to whom it is applied.