Notes on Democracy was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1926, and it is Mencken at his most deliberately offensive — a book designed to outrage the democratic pieties of America in the same way that his literary criticism outraged its aesthetic pieties.
Mencken’s argument is that democracy does not produce good government because the majority of people are incapable of governing — they are ignorant, sentimental, easily manipulated, and hostile to anyone who is smarter, more talented, or more successful than themselves. Democratic politics, in his analysis, is a mechanism for ensuring that the worst people rise to the top: the demagogue who tells the mob what it wants to hear defeats the honest man who tells it what it needs to know.
The book is organized in three sections: “Democratic Man” (a portrait of the average voter as a creature of appetites and superstitions), “The Democratic State” (an analysis of how democratic institutions reward mediocrity and punish excellence), and “Democracy and Liberty” (an argument that democracy and liberty are antithetical — the majority uses its power to suppress the minority, and the minority that matters most is the minority of talent).
Mencken’s anti-democratic position is not fascist or authoritarian — he despises dictators as much as demagogues — but aristocratic in the old sense: he believes that civilization is created by a small number of exceptional individuals and that the function of government should be to protect them, not to empower the masses who would destroy them.
Collecting Notes on Democracy
First edition (Knopf, New York, 1926): Blue cloth, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $100–$300
- Without jacket: $25–$60