German Democracy and the Docta Ignorantia

The project Demokratie leben! (Living Democracy!), which has existed since 2015, receives enormous and substantial funding from the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs—that is, from the German taxpayer. In 2026 alone, the sum amounted to approximately 190 million euros. 

For nearly as long as the project has existed, the patriotic opposition has accused it of a glaring lack of transparency, of functioning as covert state financing for political activity, and even of allowing funds to flow into networks that include violence-prone extremist groups. The latter accusation has now been confirmed: in no fewer than 34 cases involving organizations that are grantees of the program, authorities have acknowledged the existence of “findings relevant to the protection of the constitution.”

It would be of profound interest to examine these ‘constitutional protection findings’ in greater detail. For we know full well that when the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, with its distinctly left-leaning eye, classifies left-wing organizations under the category of “findings relevant to the protection of the constitution,” this is unlikely to refer merely to the communal reading of Marx and Engels beneath an apple tree.

Yet it is by no means only left-wing extremist violence—undeniably a massive problem in itself — that renders the entire framing of Demokratie leben! problematic. 

Democracy is supposed to be beautiful, kind, diverse, anxiety-reducing, social, transgender, or ‘woke.’ Democracy is to belong to those who define it as such. Democracy is to be everything. Democracy can be everything. Democracy is allegedly paradise on earth. 

This, or something very like it, is the view held by many self-proclaimed democrats within today’s centre-left spectrum.

It is curious, however, that democracy can in fact be none of these things. 

Democracy is a form of state. It is an organizational form (Carl Schmitt) and may also be understood as a set of “rules of the game” (again, Carl Schmitt). Has anyone ever described a board game—whether Risk or chess—as diverse, kind, transgender, or woke? Anyone who made such a claim would at the very least be regarded as eccentric. Yet this analogy, in my view, is entirely apt. Rules are rules. Whether one actually adheres to rules and order is, of course, another question. In contrast to the average leftist, the rightist would answer this question in the affirmative.

Is democracy therefore merely a structure? Yes—it is a structure that can guarantee the greatest possible degree of freedom and justice among all forms of state. This does not mean, however, that democracy constitutes a personification of Greek eudaimonia (flourishing) or Roman Iustitia. One might dismiss this deliberate overcharging as childish play and decline to take it seriously. This essay urgently warns against taking that path. For the infantilization of democracy and its ideological overburdening ultimately make the actual, sober concept of democracy and its corresponding form of state appear cold and austere once one realizes that democracy is neither a god nor something divine, nor a substitute for religion.

Life itself is often not democratic at all. Decisions about one’s workplace are frequently made not by a committee but by a single superior. Nor is democracy a universal tool applicable to every conceivable situation. Nevertheless, the consequences of democracy—the genuine and enforceable claim to a right sui generis—may be regarded as the most outstanding, if not the consummate culmination of European civilization and culture.

Yet—and herein lies the difficult point—democracy means the explicit articulation, interpretation, and application of one’s own political opinion within clear boundaries. It is precisely these boundaries that deserve emphasis. For they represent a deliberate restraint in thought itself. One might, borrowing from Nicholas of Cusa but stripping the term of its original context, speak of docta ignorantia —learned ignorance—a conscious recognition of oneself as a deficient being. This is meant here in a sense quite different from that of Arnold Gehlen. It is not about the channeling of instinctual surplus that makes institutions necessary. Within democracy and its reinterpretation, one is constantly thrown back not only upon the weakness of the entire system (the worst form of government except for all the others) but also upon this personal limitation.

This boundary—the refusal to absolutize one’s opinions, decisions, and intentions through democratic means—is intimately connected with another vital component of democracy: freedom of opinion (German Constitution: Article 5, Paragraph 1 of the Basic Law) and freedom of science and research (German Constitution: Article 5, Paragraph 3, Sentence 1 of the Basic Law). 

One might well ask about their inherent connection. Just as human dignity in Article 1 of the German Constitution is not only the most important provision but also functions as a system of checks and balances protecting against the “tyranny of the majority,” a similar relationship exists here. The boundary inherent in the democratic system correlates, I contend, with the awareness of non-absolute knowledge in science—an awareness that itself underpins the freedom of scientific inquiry. In other words: because everything in science can, at least in principle, be questioned at any time, much remains relative. This very claim to relativity reflects our own fallibility and the frailty of our opinions, decisions, and courses of action. For whoever believes he knows with one hundred percent certainty falls into genuine fanaticism and radicalism. 

This is precisely what occurred in Marxist dictatorships, which, as Carl Schmitt incisively observed, were prefigured in Jacobinism. The absolute shatters the democratic boundary and replaces tentative exploration with dogmatic coercion. Ultimately, theory—understood here as the realm of the possible—saves democracy.

This boundary, this kind of rule of the game, demands that one never absolutize one’s own political opinion. It means neither enforcing it through violence nor through intense hatred of the political opponent, but rather truly enduring dissenting views and leaving the final decision to the true sovereign—the people—at the ballot box. 

The established parties in Germany have forgotten how to refrain from asserting their own claims at all costs. This is regrettable, for a strange correlation has emerged over time: the more incessantly ‘democracy’ is invoked, the less it is actually lived or practiced in its authentic form.

Statesmen of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s—even those of the 1990s—did not speak of democracy in constant, mantra-like, inflationary fashion. For these genuine statesmen, democracy was a self-evident organizational form or set of rules that one naturally accepted. They accepted it because they knew perfectly well that only democracy makes a genuine concept of law possible: namely, that even the legislator remains bound by the constitution, and that the norma normans—the norm that norms—is the idea of the rule of law, guarded and protected by the Constitutional Court as its custodian.

These men also knew exactly what happens when democracy and its guarantee of law collapse, giving way to pseudo-law or the perversion of law, in which public and private law become virtually indistinguishable, and the legal order retains only one characteristic: coercion. The legal order and its enforcement then degenerate into a pure coercive order devoid of right, enforced with extreme brutality.

To take democracy seriously means never to absolutize one’s own political opinion.

To truly live democracy means to accept boundaries and rules of the game.

To live democracy means to take democracy seriously as a rule, an organizational form, and/or a set of rules of the game, and to align one’s own political actions accordingly.

To truly live democracy means to understand oneself politically as a deficient being—that is, as a being that can be profoundly mistaken or deceived.