Why Democracy?

Why Democracy?

This page intentionally left blank.

Why Democracy? Paul Fairfield

S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y O F N E W Y O R K P R E S S

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany ©2008 State University of New York Press, Albany All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.com Production by Ryan Morris Marketing by Michael Campochiaro Typesetting by Jack Donner, BookType Library of Congress of Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fairfield, Paul, 1966Why democracy? / Paul Fairfield. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–7914–7315–3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Democracy. I. Title. JC423 . F355 2007 321 . 8—dc22

2007005486 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Posing the Question

vii

CHAPTER 1

“The Fountainhead of Justice”?

1

CHAPTER 2

Democracy: Communitarian, Participatory, or Radical?

17

CHAPTER 3

Deliberative Democracy

35

CHAPTER 4

A Modest Phenomenology of Democratic Speech

53

CHAPTER 5

Why Democracy?

75

CHAPTER 6

Between the Market and the Forum

103

Conclusion and Prognosis

123

Notes Index

135 149

v

This page intentionally left blank.

INTRODUCTION

Posing the Question

P

olitical ideals that gain currency in a culture tend to become moribund with the passage of time and to suffer the fate of dogmas and dead metaphors: they lose the power they originally had to speak to us, to open up new pathways for thinking, and to inspire. As Friedrich Nietzsche so aptly observed, ideals tend to deteriorate into idols, bromides, and clichés with some regularity. No sooner does an ideal become dominant than its original power to orient thought diminishes and it is transformed, slowly and imperceptibly, into an orthodoxy as needful of critique as the dogmas that it once replaced. The democratic ideal may currently stand in this condition. In the older constitutional or liberal democracies of the West, the democratic idea, or ideal, has effectively silenced its competitors, so much so that the question posed in the title of this book now strikes us as peculiar, as a rhetorical question perhaps, one that is its own answer. Is it possible any longer to pose this question in an intellectually honest way — that is, where the answer is not self-evident, and where we could be in genuine doubt about the matter? It would genuinely seem that we are all democrats now. Political theorists of both the left and the right — from liberals to conservatives, feminists, socialists, Marxists, communitarians, critical theorists, and others—are united in this much at least, that political power in principle belongs to the people, the demos, rather than to something from which the will of the demos is ostensibly opposed: the will of unelected rulers, aristocracy, capital, patriarchy, colonial power, religious authority, or some other form of hegemony. It is not only political scientists and philosophers who consent in one fashion or another to the democratic vii

viii

Why Democracy?

idea but the general citizenry of the older democracies of Europe and North America, including persons of radically different political persuasions, of different cultures, religions, and languages. Indeed even authoritarian regimes and the great tyrants of the past century or two have claimed democracy as their ally, insisting that they were building a more perfect, a more authentic, democracy than the liberal democracies of the West which, they so often argued, were not genuinely democratic at all. We would be hard pressed indeed to find today an intelligent exponent of avowedly nondemocratic politics, all such persons being readily dismissible as cranks, fanatics, and possible terrorists. Democracy, it would seem, has won the day. The questions that remain for students of politics within the older democracies are now decidedly narrower in scope: in what ways should we qualify the democratic idea, as liberal or social democracy, radical or deliberative democracy; what institutional arrangements and public policies best approximate this idea; what theoretical model best allows us to articulate it; what is the proper scope of democracy, and so on. The idea itself, however, has ceased to be a question. It is rather the starting point of political reflection, a first principle or axiom. The question, Why democracy? is now a decidedly academic question in the ordinary sense of the term, one about which no one any longer is in serious doubt. Theorists, politicians, or activists calling openly for nondemocratic institutions today would have their arguments not refuted but ignored. The question for politics is how to make our institutions ever more democratic, egalitarian, and inclusive—not whether to, but how. If this is how matters stand in the older democracies, they stand decidedly otherwise in the emerging democracies of the world, in societies struggling to overcome the legacy of authoritarianism in its many forms, from communism to colonialism, military dictatorship, theocracy, or one-party rule. Societies struggling to negotiate the transition from parochial ways of thinking to modern, globalized culture and the market economy are struggling as well with democracy and human rights, with contemporary imperatives of change and adaptation to a “new world order” and the “new thinking” which so many are endeavoring to articulate. Why democracy? is not an academic question but an urgent one for the citizens of Russia and the former Soviet republics, many of whom remain unconvinced that the transition from communism to democracy has been all for the good. Nor is it a settled matter for the people of China, Afghanistan, and much of the Middle East. In such nations and many others it is a genuine and urgent question indeed, one for which the

Introduction

ix

answer is often very much in doubt: Why ought the reigns of power to be held by the general citizenry rather than by the most powerful party, the military, or religious authorities, by those persons who appear to many to be naturally suited for political power and who can be trusted to govern with wisdom and benevolence? Is not the democratic idea itself so much hegemony, an aggressive imposition of the Western world, the political face of globalization or even militarization? It would undoubtedly serve the interests of the powerful democracies of the West should the second and third worlds find their way toward Western-style democracy, but how exactly would it serve the interests of the latter societies themselves, and from their points of view rather than our own? In questioning the philosophical basis of democracy it is well to bear in mind the peoples of the world for whom this is not an academic question but an urgent and indeed dangerous one. There is, allow me to suggest, a common tendency in much of the contemporary literature of democratic theory to assume that the case for democracy has been made, convincingly and universally, that the reservations and criticisms that political philosophers have had regarding democracy from its inception in ancient Greece until very recent times have met with irrefutable replies. Let me suggest as well that there is a tendency in much of the literature, as unfortunate as the first, to preach to the converted, and the converted largely within one’s own theoretical camp. If liberal democrats most often address other liberal democrats about the nature and merits of liberal democracy and the shortcomings of its rivals, social democrats, deliberative, radical, communitarian, participatory, and other democrats respond largely in kind. Partly due to the nature of the scholarly enterprise, no doubt, but partly for other reasons, we typically address our arguments in the main to fellow travelers rather than to those of other schools or traditions, much less to any who may entertain serious misgivings about the democratic idea itself, those who take seriously the claims of theocracy or one-party rule, as so many in the world continue to do. The political point of view from which the following reflections are offered could be loosely described as liberal-democratic, albeit a liberalism that differs significantly from mainline utilitarian and contractarian approaches. Liberal democracy, rather desperately in my view, requires a fresh infusion of ideas, including a reminder of the originally radical and indeed revolutionary, emancipatory, and also participatory spirit of liberal politics. Historically, as liberal democracy made the gradual transition from a radical minority position to the political mainstream and eventually to become dominant in the democracies of the West it began

x

Why Democracy?

to suffer from the fate so common to popular ideals: it became, or is well on its way to becoming, something of an orthodoxy, moribund and in need of reinterpretation. At the same time, and not coincidentally, liberalism in most of its forms adopted aggregative, utilitarian, and contractarian methodologies which all assumed an essentially Hobbesian moral psychology, some directly and openly while others more tacitly. Liberalism in these forms has come under rightful criticism in recent decades and from several schools of thought, criticism that compels us to question anew the philosophical underpinnings of liberal democracy in general, including the democratic ideal itself.1 I shall offer here a concise and direct answer to our overriding question and return to the issue in later chapters. First, one of democracy’s most salient features is its capacity to articulate in political terms a plea or aspiration that is profoundly felt not only by citizens of the older democratic nations of the West but by persons of fundamentally differing orientations and circumstances, an aspiration that is at once political, ethical, and existential. This is the desire to stand to other persons in a relation of fundamental moral equality, where ostensible moral differences between persons (or indeed between nations and cultures) are decisively rejected and persons in general stand to one another as equals. This old idea may no longer inspire many of the citizens of modern, democratic societies in the way that it once did, however both for persons within these societies who understand themselves as marginalized and still more for citizens within nations around the world that are struggling with the transition from authoritarianism to democracy, it is an idea and an aspiration that is vital indeed. Second, it is often asserted that the present moment in history and the one into which we would appear to be headed is one of profound transformation and transition, into exactly what remains to be seen. Herein lies an important clue to both the spirit and ultimately the justification of democracy: from its ancient inception philosophers have remarked that among the more salient features of democracy is its capacity to manage transformation in its myriad forms. Theorists have long recognized the capacity of democratic institutions to cope effectively with changes in social conditions of various sorts as well as transformations in public policy and transitions of power from one administration to another. Among ancient writers, Aristotle and Cicero both noted the fundamental importance of governments effectively managing change in the sense of allowing for it while preventing revolution or violent change. As Cicero remarked, “there is no form of government less subject to revolution or

Introduction

xi

more stable” than democracy.2 Philosophers in the modern period as well have frequently emphasized the importance of peaceful and regular transformation within a constitutional order. Thus in the eighteenth century Alexander Hamilton observed in a passage that deserves to be quoted at length: “It is impossible to read the history of the petty republics of Greece and Italy without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the distractions with which they were continually agitated, and at the rapid succession of revolutions by which they were kept in a state of perpetual vibration between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy. If they exhibit occasional calms, these only serve as short- lived contrasts to the furious storms that are to succeed. If now and then intervals of felicity open themselves to view, we behold them with a mixture of regret, arising from the reflection that the pleasing scenes before us are soon to be overwhelmed by the tempestuous waves of sedition and party rage.”3 Much the same sentiment was expressed in the twentieth century by existential philosopher Karl Jaspers: “Hence, in democracy, government can be, and in fact is, changed, brought down, or reconstructed by constitutional means, without recourse to violence. Under free democratic conditions, it is impossible for the same men to remain permanently and uninterruptedly in the exercise of government.”4 While theorists have often emphasized democracy’s capacity for peaceful transformation, still more important perhaps is the frequency and regularity of such change. One need only consider those regimes of the past half century or so that have remained in power for much more than a decade to grasp the point: a wide assortment of communist governments under the likes of Kim Il Sung, Mao Zedong, Nicolae Ceaucescu, Josip Tito, Leonid Breznev, Deng Xiaoping, or Fidel Castro, the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos, Libya under Muammar alGaddafi, and Iraq under Saddam Hussein provide ample empirical support of Aristotle’s observation that “long possession begets tyranny,” and that therefore “the tenure of all offices, or of as many as possible, should be brief.”5 Democratic states, for all their shortcomings (about which I shall have more to say in due course), display at the very least the virtue of stability in removing the conditions that give rise to violent revolution while providing for periodic changes in administration and political leadership. Such changes decrease — if they cannot, unfortunately, eliminate—the likelihood of politicians remaining in office for so long that their memory of the ideas that brought them into power will be eclipsed by the desperation to remain in power at all costs. One of the weaknesses of democracy thus becomes a part of its strength: the fickle-

xii

Why Democracy?

ness of the electorate that sees voters change their political allegiance with some regularity ensures at the very least that no administration is permitted to remain in office for too long a time. If there is anything for which a democratic electorate has little tolerance it is the perception of arrogance on the part of political leaders who have become overly accustomed to power and who exhibit a sense of entitlement to remain indefinitely in the office they occupy. The capacity not only to cope with change but to embrace it is among the most fundamental points of distinction between democratic politics and its various alternatives. Visible in all forms of nondemocratic politics is a kind of absolutism for which all transformation, all spontaneity and vitality, all that resists centralized control, represents a threat to the established order. Whether the reigning absolute be a political or religious creed or merely the will of the rulers, all change that is not brought into existence by the absolute represents destabilization and disorder, and must therefore be curtailed. Utopian politics, for instance, requires—or indeed permits—neither transformation, compromise, nor even discussion. The truth having already been fully grasped, all that remains is to implement that truth in public policy. Utopia is invariably an ahistoric and static ideal; it is a shining city on a hill, where once the ideal has been realized, change can proceed only in the direction of imperfection. As Isaiah Berlin pointed out, “Nothing in [utopias] alters, for they have reached perfection: there is no need for novelty or change; no one can wish to alter a condition in which all natural human wishes are fulfilled. The assumption on which this is based is that men have a certain fixed, unaltering nature, certain universal, common, immutable goals. Once these goals are realized, human nature is wholly fulfilled.”6 Nondemocratic forms of governance—whether it be rule by a single party, the military, a dictator or committee of dictators — invariably operate on the premise of absolutism: that the truth about what is right and good is unitary, unchanging, and well understood by political authority, that disagreement and freedom itself lead to social disintegration and disorder. It could well be said of nondemocratic politics that its original gesture is not an affirmation of any kind, but a negation of what is dynamic, spontaneous, and unregulated in human thought and action, and that the absolute that it affirms is fundamentally a reaction and negation of some prior condition.7 Where democratic politics requires ongoing processes of discussion, negotiation, and compromise, authoritarianism requires none of these. The creed that it affirms stands above all discussion and all process. Plato’s republic affords a classical illustra-

Introduction

xiii

tion of the point: the indicators of a just state for Plato are not that its actions accord with the democratic process but that they stem from a knowledge of the Good, that unity and order prevail, and that each citizen takes up his or her appointed role in a unified order. The republic is thus a static and ahistoric ideal, no more subject to transformation than the Form of Justice itself. It is no accident, then, that nondemocratic rulers continually warn of disorder and chaos since the worldview of the absolutist is one not of processes or flexible distinctions but of rigid dichotomies: unity or disintegration, revolutionary or counterrevolutionary, order or chaos, truth or falsehood. Between utopian politics and democracy it is necessary to choose. The possibility of a happy synthesis or third way is negated by democracy’s implicit recognition that what is outside of change is outside the sphere of the human. Democratic politics is premised as well on a rejection of all creeds or absolute worldviews that transform aspirations into unquestionable truths—a refusal, that is, of a tendency seemingly universal to human thought to allow its convictions to harden into dogma that is henceforth beyond discussion. The moral passions of the democrat may be profound and heartfelt, but they are never so privileged epistemically as to command unanimity or transcend ongoing processes of dialogue. To the philosophical basis of democracy, then, belongs a sense of the fallibility, fragility, and contestational nature of political discourse, a discourse in which political principles have the status of interpretations rather than facts or infallible methods. If it is the nature of such interpretations to remain subject in principle to debate and conflict, the aim of democratic principles can never be to eliminate conflict but to cope with it, and where coping is best understood in terms of what it is not. Coping with conflict, be it interpretive or political, signifies not its suppression or elimination via argument, force, or manipulation. In no case does it connote a permanent arresting of disagreement through consensus, conclusive demonstration, or mere violence. Rather, it signifies the capacity to manage conflict reflectively by means of procedures and principles that are themselves interpretations. Democratic politics recognizes and affirms what authoritarianism expressly rejects: the idea that conflict, difference, and change are ineliminable from human experience in general and from politics in particular. Political “consensus,” where it exists, is at best an approximation and a contingency; unanimity is not to be expected in democratic societies or any other, but partial and limited agreements and overlappings of belief, agreements that when sufficiently extensive allow talk of “consensus” to

xiv

Why Democracy?

go more or less unchallenged even as we recognize that consensus seldom or never represents more than the majority view. Given the ineliminability of disagreement and conflict, one of democracy’s fundamental aims is to prevent conflict from escalating into violent confrontation or revolution. As several commentators have noted, democracy is a method of managing disagreements through peaceful means, hence of transforming enemies into opponents by means of the ballot box and other legal procedures. “The formal rules of democracy,” Norberto Bobbio writes, “have introduced for the first time into history techniques for coexistence designed to resolve social conflict without recourse to violence. Only when these rules are respected is the adversary no longer an enemy (to be destroyed), but an opponent who tomorrow may be in our shoes.”8 The same point is made by former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau: “Human groupings took a great step towards civilization when they agreed to justify their actions by counting heads instead of breaking them.”9 Without eliminating antagonism, democracy domesticates and transforms it through negotiation and compromise, majority decision, and the rule of law. It institutes a set of procedures that make it possible to conceive of justice as involving not only ends—particular actions and policies of government—but means as well—the manner, that is, in which policies are determined. This point is one to which I shall have occasion to return since among contemporary theories of democracy is one view, termed “participatory” or “strong” democracy, according to which democratic institutions do not merely cope with or manage conflict but, in the words of one of this theory’s principal representatives, “transform conflict into cooperation through citizen participation, public deliberation, and civic education.” Strong democracy “turns dissensus into an occasion for mutualism and private interest into an epistemological tool of public thinking.”10 While my ultimate aim in what follows is to answer the question, Why democracy? in such a way that its philosophical underpinnings might be better established than hitherto, another aim is to caution against a certain overenthusiasm for democracy that is widely visible at present, among both scholars and the general public. Whatever democracy is, it is not a universal panacea. It is no more capable of eliminating conflict from human affairs, or of creating strong mutualism or “community,” than any other conception of politics and perhaps even less so since, as I shall argue, democracy does not seek the eradication of conflict but “civility within conflict.”11 Expounding this view will involve a confrontation in what follows with “strong,” “radical,” “communitarian,” and “delibera-

Introduction

xv

tive” theories of democracy, all of which, I shall argue, express in one fashion or another a certain idealization if not misunderstanding of the democratic idea. Establishing the philosophical basis of democratic politics requires that we first understand what democracy itself is and from what it is distinguished. Recent scholarship divides democratic theory into two broad types: the empirical and the normative, the object of the first being to describe what in fact democracy is at a fundamental level of analysis (a type of theory usually attributed to political science), and the object of the second being to account for its philosophical rationale (a branch therefore of political philosophy). My focus is the latter, yet as is always the case in political philosophy or in the study of politics more generally (humanistic, scientific, or what have you), theorizing about a given object gets off to a bad start indeed when we misdescribe the object by means of categories, definitions, or models that violate the thing itself. Presently, democracy and its cognates are spoken of in common parlance not only in their explicitly political connotation—as a form of government—but in broader meanings that on the surface at least demonstrate no obvious connection to democracy as a theory of the state. “Democratic” and “undemocratic” are terms attributed not only to governments but to education, workplaces, families, art, or even personalities, and the list is far from complete. They have undergone much the same fate as many other terms of political and social criticism in taking on meanings far broader than their original or literal definitions. This is a source of frustration for those theorists who insist upon formal and analytic definitions of terms, yet happily I am not among them. Let us not look for narrow definitions of democracy or its cognates, “democratic” and “undemocratic,” an undertaking the purpose of which is less to clarify the term’s essential meaning (supposing such a thing to exist) than to exclude the rest, to simplify and inevitably to oversimplify. Instead let us begin from the premise that democracy is more or less what people say it is, a term far richer in significance than its literal meaning suggests. The literal meaning, of course, is rule (kratos) by the people (demos), in contrast to rule by the king, the aristocracy, the military, or some other small grouping. Abraham Lincoln famously interpreted the expression as government of the people, by the people, and for the people, an eloquent phrase certainly, and marginally broader than the literal. Yet this can only be the beginning of the story. Precisely who is intended by “the people” and who is not is a well-known problem. For the Greeks, the inventors of democracy, the people consisted of adult, nonslave, male

xvi

Why Democracy?

citizens of the city-state while in modern times, of course, the category has gradually broadened in meaning. In no democratic state, however, does “the people,” in the sense of the electorate, include the citizenry in its entirety. The demos, moreover, continues its association in many minds with the ethnos, or the bearers of a particular ethnic or cultural identity, a category that is never entirely coextensive with a given political jurisdiction. What manner of “rule” is intended by “rule by the people” presents another question for the literal definition along with the issue of the proper scope and limits of such rule. At the very least, democracy’s literal meaning establishes in approximate terms who is authorized, if not to rule directly, to select the legislators of a state according to stated procedures — principally majority rule. As Joseph Schumpeter correctly observes, rule by the people “does not mean and cannot mean that the people actually rule in any obvious sense of the terms ‘people’ and ‘rule.’ Democracy means only that the people have the opportunity of accepting or refusing the men who are to rule them.” Democracy, therefore, as “rule of the politician” is not an inaccurate interpretation.12 More precisely, it is the rule of elected politicians, the parties to which they belong, and above all the senior leadership of such parties (and all too often the particular interests that support them). Even here, however, on the question of democracy’s meaning (quite apart from the issue of its value), ample room for skepticism exists. While I shall not belabor the point, it may be questionable to what extent voters are free to decide upon either the laws that govern them or even the legislators themselves. In a two- or three-party system, for example, options are limited to say the least. Such a system, dominated as it is by career politicians, is a far cry from the classical ideal of citizens ruling and being ruled in turn. Far more so are the practices of holding nonbinding plebiscites and fashioning puppet parliaments common among autocratic regimes that for purposes of self-legitimation wish to characterize themselves as democratic. We must avoid prejudging the question of democracy’s justification by loading the definition this way or that, and avoid as well overly restrictive definitions that fail to do justice to the term’s interpretive richness. The sense of democracy with which I am concerned here is democracy as a philosophy of power, and specifically as a theory of the state, leaving aside other senses of the term and its cognates for purposes of analysis only (without therefore denying that other senses exist and ought to exist). In rough terms I shall speak of democratic states as those in which laws are created by elected representatives under conditions of free and open elections, equal voting rights,

Introduction

xvii

majority rule, and related principles. I shall speak of democracy neither as a guarantee against injustice, as shorthand for all good things, nor even as a good a priori. Indeed, the account that I offer in what follows lends support in a way to Winston Churchill’s assessment of democracy as “the worst form of government in the world, except for all the other forms.” Finally, a few prefatory remarks regarding the argument that follows. Implicit to our overriding question is the view that the philosophical—as distinct from the economic or narrowly pragmatic—case for democracy has still yet to be satisfactorily made. Political theorists have occasionally noted the inadequacy of traditional arguments for democracy and the need to overhaul its philosophical underpinnings. John Dewey already noted in 1942 that “[w]e have been satisfied with repeating generalities, which even as generalities are products of conditions of life and civilization that no longer exist. In consequence there is no mature, no well-developed, philosophy of democracy with which to confront totalitarian ideologies.”13 Gary Madison, more recently, writes: “Democracy may be an old idea, but I do not believe that it has ever been adequately conceptualized. It certainly cannot be denied that the idea still awaits a more ample translation into actual practice, even in the West. . . . The New World Order or the New Thinking that it seems everyone is talking about today calls for a new conceptualization of the values that this order is meant to embody, above all those of freedom and democracy.”14 I fully concur with these sentiments. Classical arguments that rest upon conceptions of the social contract or the general utility cannot do all the work that is required of them; their logical force does not match the conviction that so many now have or account for the democratic ideal’s apparent universality. Recent critiques of political foundationalism accentuate the point while putting in question what theoretical or conceptual resources are available in the effort to reconstruct democratic politics. Indeed, what is required is both the critique and reconstruction of democracy or a thoroughgoing critique of its philosophical underpinnings, in both the negative and positive senses of critique. Additionally, defenders of democracy as a theory of the state cannot be relieved of responsibility for the history of democratic practice, or the history of what has passed for democracy in the modern age. It will not do for democrats to adopt the refrain repeated frequently by many twentieth-century Marxists that the problem with actually existing socialism is that it constitutes a misunderstanding of what the Master actually meant. Theorists of socialism must account for the less than inspiring history of socialist practice, and in nations where the experiment was

xviii

Why Democracy?

repeated in endless variation. Proponents of democracy—which is to say all of us—must confront a similar question: if democracy is inherently good, is even unqualifiably good, then why are democratic governments so uninspired, inept even? A common reply is that actually existing democracies are not democratic enough, but whether democracy itself is the cure or the disease is far from self-evident. Perhaps it is neither. In any event, the question is both unavoidable and sobering for the democrat. It is a question that warns against a certain idealization, or even idolatry, of democracy that is becoming widely visible today. Principles of justice, including the most fundamental and heartfelt, are ill-served by theorists and others making exaggerated claims on their behalf or supposing that no limits exist to their proper sphere of application. If the endorsement of democracy in what follows appears to many lukewarm, it is due less to ambivalence than to the idealization I have noted. The democratic method of decision making is well justified within its sphere, yet this sphere is not unlimited; determining what that sphere is is contingent on democracy’s philosophical justification. The chapters that follow supply both a critique and reconstruction of the democratic idea. I begin with the critical project in chapters 1 through 3. These chapters examine current debates in democratic theory concerning the nature and normative grounds of democracy, and challenge as well certain popular conceptions which, I argue, tend toward an uncritical idealization of this principle. Chapters 4 through 6 carry through the reconstructive project. The aim of these chapters is to answer the question in the title of this book and elaborate as well upon several of the points touched on above. Making the theoretical case for democracy, I maintain, requires an examination both of common institutional tendencies and dynamics as well as the tendencies and dynamics of political speech itself. The case for democracy, on many accounts, depends directly upon a proper understanding and appreciation of political speech. We shall need to know, then, what mode of discourse is democratic discourse—what conditions, virtues, potentials, and limits belong to it — in order that the case for democracy may rest upon a sound phenomenological basis. Finally, the argument that follows will appear in some ways to pull in two conflicting directions. I regard this as an unavoidable consequence of an account that tries in the spirit of phenomenology to be faithful to the things themselves, where the things in question are democracy and the practices associated with it. A familiar distinction in legal discourse separates the letter of the law from its spirit, where the

Introduction

xix

two very often pull in analogously opposite directions but in a manner that jurists have learned to negotiate. Law, of course, is an interpretively rich and complex phenomenon, and so as well are normative ideals. It will not therefore be surprising if an analogous distinction may be drawn between the letter of democratic politics and the spirit, or between what the thing itself is as an actually existing political form and what it aspires to be or how it is spoken of as an imaginative possibility. Ideals are perfectly realized only in the imagination of theorists and ideologues, not in the real world of politics. The sizeable gap that inevitably exists between the two is a consequence in part of the ideal itself and its inherent practicability, in part of the very nature of social institutions and their limited capacity to translate any ideal into practical form, and in part of the human condition itself, which includes the well-known phenomena of idealization and falling short of the goal. Democracy, as I shall argue, dreams of being an ideal deliberation community, a radically egalitarian and fully rational conversation in which all participate in a spirit of friendship, in which no differences are marginalized and all voices are brought to the table. It aspires to all of this and more, but regarded in a less romantic light it accomplishes only some of this. Viewed in the full light of day, the deliberative ideal becomes a method of political accommodation and an unromantic one at that. An adequate account of democracy must notice the difference between “rule by the people” as a possibility and as an actuality, between the spirit and the letter, and recognize that it may be the former that we love more than the latter. The theorist of democracy must seek not to overcome the tension between the two, but to understand and preserve it, while the politician and activist must negotiate this distinction by means of practical judgment. Democratic citizenship itself requires us to be mindful of this tension and to be able to live with it. Taking responsibility, then, for the not always noble history of democratic practice means attending to this difference. The Master has not been misunderstood; the trouble is that there is no Master, but rather an ideal that is itself flawed, a spirit that frequently deteriorates into the letter, and an imaginative vision that must awkwardly touch down to the world of practices and institutions.

This page intentionally left blank.

CHAPTER 1

“The Fountainhead of Justice”?

M

odern philosophers are often fond of characterizing the present and recent past in terms broad enough to encompass what they regard as the distinguishing features of the age. It is an inexact undertaking to be sure, but important nonetheless to the task of historical self-understanding, one of the fundamental aims of philosophical reflection. Hence, early modern philosophers spoke of the Renaissance and the great Age of Reason and Enlightenment as capturing the spirit of the times. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries are often spoken of as an age of science and technology, one in which science, the scientific method, or their derivatives serve as arbiters of epistemic legitimacy and in a more general sense as definitive of the age. The contemporary period perpetuates the habit now long established of defining itself in contrasting terms with its predecessors; it is an age of postmodernity, one in which fundamental assumptions of human thought and expression are called into question in a manner still more thoroughgoing than in the age of the rationalists and the empiricists. The present age is an age of critique par excellence. The great prophets of our age—Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—are iconoclastic thinkers above all, debunkers of myth and illusion that for centuries had stood in the way of human knowledge and liberation. Following their lead, contemporary intellectuals are critics above all else — cultural, literary, and social critics, demythologizers and deconstructers of received habits of thought, whose characteristic stance is suspicion of all that passes for truth, reason, justice, or the absolute. In postmodernity, or at any rate the present, the fate of absolutes is not a happy one. One by one the great absolutes of the past have fallen 1

2

Why Democracy?

by the wayside due to the efforts not only of philosophers but of a wide array of intellectuals across the disciplines and artists searching for new avenues of expression. The fate of political ideals has mirrored that of many of the basic premises of modern art and science, of epistemology and metaphysics; they have been stripped of their sanctity and unmasked as historical contingencies at best and ideological obfuscations at worst. Both postmodernists and nonfoundationalists in general—including a wide assortment of neoaristotelians and neohegelians, hermeneuticists, critical theorists, feminists, pragmatists, and others—renounce the quest for ahistorical or metaphysical grounds for political values, often preferring to regard the legitimacy of such values as limited to the cultural tradition from which they emerge. The notion of human rights, for instance, is often regarded by postmodernists and many other nonfoundationalists as an invention of the modern West, and as such unfit for export or universal application. The doctrine of political universalism, and particularly liberal universalism, is regarded by an increasing number as a hegemonic or imperialistic imposition of values peculiar to the modern West upon other cultural traditions, identities, and particularities no less worthy of recognition than our own. On this view the principle of the universal rights of the individual is a thoroughly modern and indeed metaphysical fiction, one rooted in essentialist conceptions of the self, reason, and justice. The postmodern critique prizes particularity, difference, and community over abstract universality. It is a critique that is broadly commensurate with critiques of political foundationalism, of “rights talk,” individualism, globalization, and liberal values in general. It is no exaggeration to characterize the political thought of recent decades, or the major portion of it, as profoundly iconoclastic as one erstwhile absolute after another succumbs to critique from one quarter or another. The very idea, then, of a political absolute or orthodoxy is profoundly at odds with the spirit of our age. Yet one curious exception exists among political ideals of the present, a principle that passes veritably unchallenged among postmodern and numerous other contemporary schools of thought. This is, of course, the principle of democracy. Critiques abound of liberal democracy, social democracy, and the conduct of given democratic institutions, yet in each instance it is not democracy itself at which such critiques are directed but rather its qualifiers: liberalism, socialism, or the policies of this or that democratic government. The democratic ideal itself—the principle of rule by the people, or by their elected representatives — is one to which political theorists and the general public alike almost universally profess alle-

“The Fountainhead of Justice”?

3

giance. One is hard pressed indeed to find among contemporary theorists a nonbeliever in one or another form of the democratic ideal. One thinks of Nietzsche or perhaps Heidegger as exceptions, yet neither figure entirely fits the contemporary description of a political philosopher. (Moreover, while both of these figures have loomed large in the Continental traditions, their influence is in no way owing to their opposition to democracy, if indeed such opposition was genuine.) Even if philosophers of the modern age have often been ambivalent about democracy, remembering well the warnings of Plato and Aristotle, still one searches in vain for reputable political theorists who today defend avowedly nondemocratic conceptions of politics. Among the general public the same holds true, if indeed not more so. Despite widespread sentiments of alienation and disenchantment with actually existing democracy, the principle itself passes unchallenged among ordinary citizens and opinion makers alike. It is even spoken of in everyday parlance as if roughly synonymous with justice itself or a formula for all good things. Determining what justice requires is for many a simple matter of deciding upon the meaning of democracy in a given case, as if putting the matter to a vote were an all-purpose method of fashioning justice. Even the alienated, disenfranchised, and cynical direct their criticism at the behavior of avowedly democratic institutions rather than at the democratic idea or method, as if to suggest that the method itself were unquestionable. Social critics of both the left and the right regularly claim democracy as their ally, even to the point of running together the definition of democracy with whatever other political values they prize most — freedom or equality, for example, in whatever interpretations of these terms that they prefer. Even the most vociferous of such critics are rarely heard calling for less democracy but rather for more, even when the very conditions that they decry are expressly approved by a democratic majority. The reply most often heard is that the remedy to majority-approved injustices is a more genuine democracy, a more thoroughgoing, participatory, or inclusive democracy. This idealizing tendency is so common today that it barely requires demonstration. It suffices to illustrate the point, as the following passage accomplishes — a text that reflects the currently orthodox view of democratic politics: “There is a chance to imagine and put in place a new, postliberal form of democracy, one that is more egalitarian, participatory, and environmentally sensitive; a type of democracy that is feminist in inspiration and design, and committed to ending racial hierarchy and injustice. Postliberal democracy would aim to multiply and

4

Why Democracy?

enrich the opportunities for participation, extending them beyond the electoral arena to the administrative process, and to ‘private spheres’ such as the workplace and family. New linkages could be configured between social, economic, and political life — for example between work and family—allowing more diverse possibilities for human self-realization and, in particular, allowing new roles and possibilities for women. The economic order could be made more solidaristic and participatory. New, nonhierarchical relationships between ethnic, racial, and religious groups could be fashioned, building a celebration of cultural diversity into social and political institutions.”1 One wonders whether on this view there is anything that democracy cannot accomplish, any problem it cannot solve, any social ill it cannot set to rights. That a single principle could accomplish no less than to eliminate inequality in its various forms, end religious intolerance, racism, sexism, and ethnocentrism, liberate the family and the workplace, foster self-realization, and clean up the environment is optimistic to say the least, and oddly incongruous with the critical spirit of our times. A degree of idealism is visible as well in the historical narrative of democracy that is often recounted today. On this account, democracy had its inception in several city-states of ancient Greece, most notably Athens, beginning in the sixth century B.C.E. with the introduction of Solon’s reforms. Athenian democracy constitutes the origin of political civilization in the West and finds its first eloquent articulation in Pericles’ funeral oration, in which he celebrated the virtues of the fallen soldiers of the Peloponnesian War and of Athenian democracy more generally. According to Thucydides, Pericles applauded the constitution of Athens for entrusting power to the general citizenry rather than to a minority, for rewarding ability and virtue, protecting freedom and equality, and for the public-spiritedness of the Athenian state. This golden age of democracy witnessed the sudden development of Western thought from its primitive origins to the great philosophical systems of Plato and Aristotle, even if neither Plato, Aristotle, nor any other major theorist of that era provided democracy with an elaborate philosophical justification. Indeed, as every student of politics knows, Plato in The Republic rejected the democratic conception of politics with disdain. His critique was later modified in The Statesman and The Laws, wherein Plato’s concern shifted from the ideal state to the “second best,” or the best state that it is possible to attain in the imperfect realm of practice. In these later texts Plato defended, somewhat reluctantly, a synthesis of monarchic and democratic principles and conceded the legitimacy—or

“The Fountainhead of Justice”?

5

at least the practical necessity — of popular consent. Aristotle would articulate further the idea of a mixed constitution or combination of monarchy and popular rule while remaining wary of democracy in its unmixed form. Democracy itself, for Aristotle, was of course a “perversion” of constitutional government; while among the perversions it was less objectionable than tyranny and oligarchy it was a perversion just the same. The principle of popular sovereignty would later find articulation and defense in Cicero’s On the Commonwealth, however by this time Athenian-style democracy had been eclipsed. The republic and empire of Rome would hardly be characterizable as democratic by either Athenian or modern standards, nor of course would the long medieval period that followed. The origin of democracy in its modern form is traceable to some of the smaller city-states of Renaissance Italy. In the words of Robert Dahl, “Like an extinct species reemerging after a massive climatic change, popular rule began to reappear in many of the cities of northern Italy around 1100 c.e.”2 It was not until the eighteenth century, however, that the democratic nation-states emerged. Prior to that century virtually no theorist or writer of note professed a significant faith in democracy, nor did the terms “democracy” and “democrat” enjoy currency. While the modern democratic conception constitutes a critical appropriation of the thought and practice of the Greeks, and emerges by degrees in the writings of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu, it was not until Rousseau that the conception received explicit, if still qualified, endorsement. The philosophy of popular sovereignty underwent further modification in the writings of such nineteenth-century figures as Mill and Marx, however the philosophy did not gain orthodox status prior to the twentieth century. In both theory and practice, democracy as a political orthodoxy is a recent phenomenon. Prior to the twentieth century a preponderance of theorists, governments, and populations in virtually all times and places have defended explicitly nondemocratic conceptions of politics. Over the course of the past century — so the historical narrative goes—these nondemocratic conceptions gradually receded. One by one, colonial and imperial rule, military dictatorship, fascism, and authoritarian socialism faded from the scene, creating for many an appearance of world-historical inevitability for democratic principles. After 1989 in particular, with the decisive collapse of liberal democracy’s chief rival, it seemed not only that the world had at long last been made safe for democracy but that democracy represented the onward march of history

6

Why Democracy?

itself, the political face of modernity. The liberal progressivists of the nineteenth century had, after a fashion, been proven correct. Representative institutions, human rights, and the market (or mixed) economy were now destined by the laws of history to triumph over their authoritarian rivals. A degree of truth undoubtedly characterizes this now widely accepted narrative. Proponents of democracy will not fail to note the degree to which that philosophy’s alternatives have been convincingly discredited in recent decades, both in theory and in practice. Who will doubt that the world today is better for the collapse of political authoritarianism in much of Asia and Eastern Europe, Africa, South America, and parts of the Middle East? The hypothesis regarding historical inevitability, however, and the more widely accepted notion of progress are unduly optimistic both as empirical descriptions and as political prognoses. While it is true that authoritarian regimes the world over have for a century or two insisted on characterizing themselves as democratic, as if conceding ever more the exclusive legitimacy of the democratic philosophy, modern history, and ancient history still more, consistently reveal the fragility of democratic institutions, including within states in which the philosophy passes largely unchallenged. If the older democracies of Europe and North America continue to encounter charges from social critics that they are insufficiently democratic, or that their professed principles of popular sovereignty and democratic representation are facades of one kind or another, the same critique applies, and more obviously, to the people’s republics and other nonliberal democracies of recent times. Political commentators usually designate this latter group as pseudodemocracies, of course, and while there is undoubtedly some truth in this the point that warrants emphasis concerns the contingency and fragility of democracy. That its present condition as the universal guise of governments of sharply diverging types represents an achievement of sorts indicates nothing about the inevitability of that achievement. Apart from the moral claim and expressions of wishful thinking, heralding the universal collapse of authoritarianism is historically premature. As John Markoff has recently shown, the modern history of democracy is not one of unremitting progress but of a phenomenon that moves forward and backward in waves, one that has gained momentum since the 1970s and 1980s yet that itself constitutes a dramatic reversal of democracy’s fortunes in the middle decades of the twentieth century. At the present time we can say with no certainty whatever that authoritarian political forms are in their final stages of collapse or that democracy will repre-

“The Fountainhead of Justice”?

7

sent political normalcy on a global basis in the decades to come. Given history’s well-documented propensity for repetition, the unbounded optimism of many democrats appears premature, particularly given recent events in Russia, Belarus, the Palestinian territories, Iran, Iraq, and some other nations.3 Both the quasi-historical optimism and moral confidence in democracy so widespread at present are remarkable facts, and the more remarkable for being so seldom observed. Given the evident lack of opposition to democracy today, one would expect not only that its philosophical underpinnings had been demonstrably established, but perhaps that such grounds articulate an inspired or elevated conception of politics and human affairs. Consider, however, a few of the premises from which democratic politics in its various forms stems. To begin with, it depends directly upon the truth of Lord Acton’s famous observation concerning the corruptive nature of power and the universal susceptibility of human beings toward its abuse. Philosophers of the modern period have frequently noted this point and regarded it as of the first importance in political reasoning. As Montesquieu expressed it, “constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go.”4 It is an observation that in different ways Hobbes and Nietzsche both formulated explicitly, the former in his hypothesis that the desire for power is fundamental and universal to the constitution of human beings, a disposition that permanently inclines social reality toward a state of war. Nietzsche radicalized the point in his doctrine of the will to power, a will that is ubiquitous in human affairs and which Nietzsche located not only at the level of politics but at the deepest levels of human psychology and social ontology. While the ideal of popular sovereignty does not stand or fall on the Hobbesian or Nietzschean doctrines, it does presuppose a more or less universal disposition of human beings toward the abuse of power. Specifically it presupposes, as Pierre Trudeau expressed it, that “at all times and under all systems there is a tendency for the few to use the state to enslave the many. For this . . . democracy appears to be the only possible remedy, since it is the system in which the citizen consents to be governed by a body of laws that the majority of citizens wanted.”5 Democratic optimism thus appears to be premised on a decidedly pessimistic view of human beings, one in which the disposition to tyrannize is more or less universal—particularly among the enthusiastic and committed — in which minorities abuse majorities when they possess the means, and in which majorities abuse minorities when no legal

8

Why Democracy?

constraint limits the scope of democratic decision making. Democratic politics presupposes as well that the classical question of the good life for human beings is philosophically and politically undecideable. The issue of what ethical values and life plans properly orient human life may be publicly debated, yet it cannot be conclusively resolved by means of either philosophical reflection or majority decision. A limited doctrine of ethical skepticism, then, prevents democratic majorities from imposing any and all values on the general population and compels legislators to exercise restraint in deciding which values among those approved by a majority will be politically implemented. Inspired politics has nothing whatever to do with legislative restraint, nor with any manner of ethical skepticism. On the contrary, inspired and radical politics knows exactly the values for which it stands and does not hesitate to fashion each of these as law. What is more, inspired politics boldly aims to eliminate conflict from human affairs while democracy, convinced of the unattainability of this goal, humbly seeks to keep conflict within bounds of civility and the rule of law. Could one not say, however, that democracy incorporates a share of idealism at the very least—evidenced, for example, in its profession of faith in the wisdom of the people, or in its confidence that the people’s elected representatives may be entrusted in the usual course of events to determine what is just? Apart from politicians on the campaign trail, the reply to this question that one most often hears is a categorical negative. In actual fact, “the people” as spoken of in democratic parlance refers not to the citizenry in its entirety but to a majority of the politically active. Neither historically nor at the present time does one find among those who have cared to register an opinion on the subject a significant number professing a genuine faith in the wisdom of majorities, whether in matters of truth or justice. In matters of truth, for instance, the standing of “public opinion” is most often regarded as an irrelevance; in any given field of inquiry, one commonly hears, individuals with specialized qualifications rather than the general public are those to whom we properly look to resolve questions of what is true and false. Are we to imagine, then, that the majority of persons, so ill-equipped to resolve questions of truth, should be singly knowledgeable in resolving questions of justice? Even the doctrinaire democrat is wary of basing a conception of politics on so flimsy a foundation. Among modern democracy’s early defenders one finds a universal note of suspicion toward the general public and an unmistakable ambivalence about entrusting power in its hands. Montesquieu, for one, remarked that where the “capacity of

“The Fountainhead of Justice”?

9

discussing public affairs” is concerned, “the people collectively are extremely unfit, which is one of the chief inconveniences of a democracy.”6 John Adams offered a similar assessment: “We may appeal to every page of history we have hitherto turned over, for proofs irrefragable, that the people, when they have been unchecked, have been as unjust, tyrannical, brutal, barbarous, and cruel as any king or senate possessed of uncontrollable power. The majority has eternally and without one exception usurped over the rights of the minority.”7 Even the philosopher who is most often regarded as the first unequivocal democrat—Rousseau—was hard pressed indeed to defend his famous assertion that the general will is always right, resorting to the intellectual gymnastics of separating the “general will” (which is always right) from the “will of all” (which is often mistaken). As one commentator points out, Rousseau — along with Mill and Marx, two other figures often regarded as unequivocal democrats—“expressed profound misgivings about democracy, was unconvinced by the achievement of Athens and doubted whether its political system was fit for export and adoption elsewhere. Democracy according to Rousseau was, strictly speaking, a form of government which had never, and could not ever have, existed, since it was ‘against the natural order,’ he asserted, ‘for the many to govern’ and ‘unimaginable that the people should remain continually assembled in dealing with the business of public affairs.’ He yielded to no ancient critic of democracy in his perception of its tendency towards ‘civil war’ and ‘internecine agitation,’ and no modern elite theorist has ever been more sceptical than he was of a form of government ‘so perfect that it is not fit for men.’ ”8 On democratic principles, of course, majority approval at the very least lends prima facie legitimacy to state action. For many indeed it is a sufficient condition of good law that it generates, or is capable of generating, such approval. Such a view seems rather clearly to presuppose no little faith in the wisdom of majorities, yet one is hard pressed today to identify any who hold this faith.9 If any such exist they would have to give an account of the disturbingly common phenomenon of majority-approved law that is by all accounts bad law. The prohibition laws of the 1920s provide a telling example of laws now universally regarded as absurd that were duly approved by a majority of the American electorate at the time. More recently, elections in some of the world’s newer democracies or near-democracies have done little to inspire confidence: the election in 2006 of a Hamas government in the Palestinian territories and the 2005 presidential election in Iran of

10

Why Democracy?

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad provide a couple of obvious cases in point. Other examples of democratic travesty are easily found, of course, and the sad reality they point out is that majority approval is very far from constituting even a rough guarantee of justice in law. Indeed, if we were to judge matters by their results, a reality sadder still is that we have no basis for claiming that democratic decisions are more likely to be reasonable or just than under some other arrangements. Do we know, for instance, that laws approved by a majority of voters will in most cases be more enlightened than laws approved, say, by a majority of economists, political scientists, or perhaps even philosophers? The question may be outlandish, but I suspect that most reading these pages are fully convinced that if by a fluke of nature they were to become dictator of their native country they would preside over a government far superior to what currently exists. On a more serious note, the following remark of Friedrich A. Hayek’s expresses a view commonly upheld on the question of whether in broad terms human civilization advances primarily due to the efforts of majorities or of minorities and individuals: “The conception that the efforts of all should be directed by the opinion of the majority or that a society is better according as it conforms more to the standards of the majority is in fact a reversal of the principle by which civilization has grown. Its general adoption would probably mean the stagnation, if not the decay, of civilization. Advance consists in the few convincing the many. New views must appear somewhere before they can become majority views. There is no experience of society which is not first the experience of a few individuals. . . . Though discussion is essential, it is not the main process by which people learn. Their views and desires are formed by individuals acting according to their own designs; and they profit from what others have learned in their individual experience.”10 Hayek’s sentiments do not express a thoroughgoing contempt for the masses that one so often encounters in the history of philosophical thought since the Greeks, although where critiques of democracy have found expression in history they have often assumed, or thinly veiled, such contempt. Among the main reasons that the prevailing sentiments toward democracy among political philosophers prior to the twentieth century ranged from ambivalence to hostility is surely the attitude expressed starkly by Plato and (more moderately) Aristotle, and in more muffled tones by philosophers of early modern times, of disdain for the mass of human beings. Plato’s view that democracy places power in the hands of the intellectually and morally unfit represents the dominant opinion through most of

“The Fountainhead of Justice”?

11

recorded history and is still visible in the writings even of many of popular sovereignty’s principal defenders. If Nietzsche is the last unapologetic spokesman for this view among major philosophers of the West, its traces remain visibly present in the political thought of the present day, as indeed in all areas of intellectual culture. Among prominent democratic theorists of the twentieth century, Joseph Schumpeter expresses perhaps the harshest view in this regard, writing that under democracy the average citizen “drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again.”11 One also encounters rather often the interesting phenomenon of the individual whose worldview manages to combine a fervent egalitarian political commitment with an unapologetic elitism in the sphere of art and culture, without noticing a tension in how the two views regard ordinary humanity. The more we examine the matter, the more numerous and formidable democracy’s shortcomings may be seen to be, rendering the present confidence and optimism regarding that doctrine stranger still. Consider, for instance, the many nonliberal democracies of the last century. Communist and many other illiberal regimes have been adamant in their claims to constitute not only democracies but more authentic, more perfect democracies than those of North America and Western Europe. Unless we resort to definitional fiat and refuse the claims of nonliberal states to constitute genuinely democratic forms of government — a move that looks like dogmatism—we shall have to grant that communism, to take the most historically significant case, is indeed a form of democratic rule. It is, as virtually all now agree, a highly imperfect form, yet to support this claim shall we need to argue that communist states are not, or are not “really,” democratic after all? The most telling critique of Soviet-style politics would appear to be not that it is undemocratic but that it is tyrannical—that it thwarts human rights on a massive scale even as it pursues a form of equality and implements an interpretation of rule by the people. Beyond this, communism is certainly vulnerable to critique on narrowly democratic lines — it is often and rightly remarked, for instance, that it represents not rule by the people but rule by the party elite—yet it is a critique that is ultimately less forceful than the critique from human rights. Were communist regimes duly elected, should we then withdraw the human rights objection? Moreover, liberal and constitutional democracies are not invulnerable to the charge that popular

12

Why Democracy?

sovereignty there as well is more an ideal than a reality, that in practice the power of political decision making belongs not to the people, or even to an electoral majority, but to a handful of party leaders and political elites, or indeed their funding sources. Were we to judge democracy by its results, should we then find a convincing basis for the consensus and optimism noted above? In the case of the far left democracies the verdict of 1989 appears telling enough. The experiment of the people’s republics effected such a colossal failure that documenting its full extent would fill volumes. In the case of the Western democracies, including what passes under the names of both liberal and social democracy, the verdict is mixed. If we do not find inspired politics in any such regimes, do we nevertheless find what one might more modestly call good government? If so, where exactly would one find it? Which nation or administration would one wish to hold up as a model? Indeed, it is often shocking how shortsighted and corrupt democratic politics and politicians can be, as we are so regularly reminded. Indications of alienation, mistrust of government, and political apathy are at disturbingly high levels while in the United States in particular, which proudly proclaims itself to all the world as a model of democracy, voter turnout levels for decades have averaged approximately 50 percent in presidential elections and still less in nonpresidential elections.12 While indications of this kind may not signal a full blown “legitimation crisis,” neither do they bode well for the present state of democracy in the West, as John Dewey already observed in 1932: “When only about one-half of the potential electorate exercises the right of franchise, there is not only a contradiction of the early assumption that democratic government would of necessity call out political interests in all citizens, but proof that in its present form it lacks vitality. When disinterested exhortation to rise to political responsibility, plus partisanship, plus vast expenses of well-organized party machines, fail to stir more than fifty per cent of the voting population to the attempt to influence governmental action, there is some serious flaw either in democratic policy or in the way in which it is expressed at the present time.”13 Democratic enthusiasts (among whom we can count Dewey himself) might wish to ponder a few additional facts. One is the caliber of persons who seek public office today and who rise successfully through party hierarchies. To put the matter delicately, the best and brightest minds of the present are not gravitating toward public service. A little less delicately, were we to heed Shakespeare’s advice regarding the disposition of lawyers, few public officeholders would remain. Classical

“The Fountainhead of Justice”?

13

conceptions of public service and of citizens ruling and being ruled in turn have been replaced by the phenomena of the career politician, the party system, the pollster, the lobbyist, and the ubiquitous marketing campaign. What explains the fact that with rather few exceptions those with bold new ideas, profound insight, advanced intellectual capacity, or simple “good judgment” (Aristotelian phronesis) do not become politicians? One reason is that such persons are more likely to be in the vanguard of societal opinion while those occupying the middle of the pack or even the rearguard of thought are more likely to win over a majority to their way of thinking.14 Unlike Madison and Mill, political theorists today do not become politicians, nor for the most part do those whose judgment and understanding exceed their rhetorical flair and agreeableness to the camera. The qualities of mind and disposition that one most often finds in political leaders include the propensity to flatter the multitudes, to be moderate and average in all matters, to stand in the center, and to be likeable and moderately entertaining. Another consideration that philosophers since Plato and Aristotle have frequently remarked upon is that while tyranny often involves the unjust treatment of majorities by a small number it may also involve the reverse. All forms of political rule that are unconstrained by the rule of law tend toward oppression, and not least when power is in the hands of the people themselves. As a method of political decision making, democracy’s principal task is to tell us who rules and by what means, yet unto itself it has little to say about what values or policies it recommends and, equally important, what its limits are. It is democracy’s qualifiers— liberal, social, and so on—that speak to these latter issues. Democracy itself is neutral with respect to the manner in which states deal with the matter of minority and individual rights. Against the democratic optimist who may wish to assert that electoral majorities may be relied upon to respect such rights we may appeal to no less an authority than history itself. As John Adams noted: “All kinds of experience show that great numbers of individuals do oppress great numbers of other individuals; that parties often, if not always, oppress other parties; and majorities almost universally minorities. All that this observation can mean then, consistently with any color of fact, is that the people will never unanimously agree to oppress themselves. But if one party agrees to oppress another, or the majority the minority, the people still oppress themselves, for one part of them oppresses another.”15 In the nineteenth century Alexis de Tocqueville would speak of the “tyranny of the majority” while Mill as well warned of the broad tendency within

14

Why Democracy?

democratic societies toward social conformity and the oppression of minorities. A prime concern of liberals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was precisely the fate of minorities in the face of powerful collectivities acting in the name of democracy. As Mill expressed it: “Society can and does execute its own mandates; and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”16 So far from constituting any kind of guarantee against injustice is democracy that we could well say, with Aristotle, that “the extreme form of democracy is tyranny.”17 At its limit, popular sovereignty is not only fully compatible with large-scale injustice but is likely to result in it in view of the tendency noted above of all types of collectivities and power holders to extend their reach until they encounter a limit. The argument regarding minority rights, of course, is far from new, extending well prior to Tocqueville and Mill. What is both new and remarkable is the habit of democracy’s more confident proponents of overlooking this problem as well as the related issue of what liberal democrats of the eighteenth century called the problem of faction or factionalism. Madison in particular characterized the formation of factions in The Federalist Papers as among the chief dangers of political societies in general, where a faction is understood as “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”18 Given the ineliminability from human affairs of disagreement regarding everything from religion to public policy to private interests, Madison argued that the optimal course for democratic states is to ensure constitutional protection for individual citizens as such, or apart from whether on any given issue they belong to a democratic majority or minority. The problem of factionalism bears particularly on arguments for state recognition and preference for private interests that cloak themselves as conceptions of the common good, arguments as commonplace in our own times as in Madison’s. Indeed, where the issues of factionalism and majoritarianism are concerned, democratic theorists of the eighteenth century (or some of them) are frequently less naive than their counterparts of the present day, many of whom appear to have forgotten certain elementary themes of

“The Fountainhead of Justice”?

15

which witnesses of the American and French revolutions were keenly aware. “So strong,” as Madison remarked, “is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities that where no substantial occasion presents itself the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.”19 For the authors of The Federalist Papers, the division of citizens into mutually antagonistic groupings, each of whose interests is alleged to represent the good of all, is not unique to a revolutionary era but rather constitutes the usual condition of politics, therefore one that states both democratic and nondemocratic must endeavor to remedy. John Dewey similarly noted that while “[f]actionalism was decried by all thinkers [of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries] as the chief enemy to political stability . . . [e]xtensive and consolidated factions under the name of parties are now not only a matter of course, but popular imagination can conceive of no other way by which officials may be selected and governmental affairs carried on.”20 If the remedy cannot lie in eliminating factions, it must lie in containing them or limiting their effects. Yet this is precisely what democracy on its own is unable to accomplish. It must appeal to principles of human rights or the rule of law which while typically associated with democratic politics are distinct principles nonetheless. As a method of decision making, democracy itself determines neither the scope nor the limits of majority rule, and is incapable accordingly of resolving the problems of factionalism and majoritarianism. How is it, then, that in an age that prizes with no little zeal the values of critique and suspicion the democratic ideal has managed to survive virtually unscathed the onslaught of deconstruction and debunking that have put a decisive end to all (other) absolutes and chastened whatever political values remain, despite the numerous flaws of popular sovereignty? How is it indeed that this ideal has not only withstood the onslaught but largely escaped it? Let me suggest by way of at least a partial reply that the failures and apparent collapse of political authoritarianism over the course of recent decades have created an appearance of world-historical victory for democracy. All the world loves a victor, particularly when its alternatives have been convincingly discredited. Beyond this, it is a common phenomenon for human thinking to mistake a means for an end, particularly in the case of a means that is effective and apparently without an alternative. Yet a mistake it remains. As Hayek notes, democracy is ill-served by defenders who would inflate it into an idol or transform it into an end in itself: “If it

16

Why Democracy?

is to survive, democracy must recognize that it is not the fountainhead of justice and that it needs to acknowledge a conception of justice which does not necessarily manifest itself in the popular view on every particular issue. The danger is that we mistake a means of securing justice for justice itself.”21 It is a common phenomenon as well to confuse an ideal for which we are striving with a present reality, a confusion that causes us to overlook the shortcomings of that reality. The ideal of rule of the people, by the people, and for the people has powerfully oriented political institutions in the West for a couple of centuries, and rightly so, however it is a distortion to imagine that what orients the conduct of political actors and legislatures must therefore have been successfully attained. The turn of mind that imagines this suffers not only from bad phenomenology but from a political idealism that is blind to the flaws of democratic politics and that overlooks the contingency and limits of that ideal. History (including recent history) provides an identical assessment of seekers after truth or enlightenment; those purporting to have attained the ideal are objects not of reverence but of fear, for we know all too well the course on which they will embark. My focus in this chapter has been on the tendency toward idealization that is often visible in contemporary political culture on the subject of democracy, on ways of thinking and speaking about democracy that we observe among activists and politicians, opinion makers, journalists, and the general public alike, and on the strangeness of this phenomenon. I now wish to turn toward a consideration of some recent work in democratic theory, wherein a similar phenomenon is observable at a higher level of discourse.

CHAPTER 2

Democracy Communitarian, Participatory, or Radical?

I

f the prevailing sentiments regarding democracy among political philosophers from the Greeks to the twentieth century ranged from ambivalence to hostility, the same can hardly be said of theorists of recent decades. Democratic theory, in both its empirical and normative forms, has received a great deal of attention from political scientists and philosophers since the 1970s. Notably absent from this literature is the ambivalence toward popular sovereignty that prevailed among theorists of prior times. Increasingly, an enthusiasm toward democracy not unlike that common among politicians, activists, journalists, and the general public characterizes many theorists of the subject as well. It is an enthusiasm that is common to theorists of both the left and the right, yet as has always been the case in the modern age such enthusiasm finds its most acute expression on the left or egalitarian side of the political spectrum. The sources of this commitment are not unlike those discussed in chapter 1 that characterize more generally the dominant view in contemporary political culture of the democratic ideal, however additional factors have led numerous theorists to see in that ideal a potential for radical political and social transformation. Principal among these are fundamental transformations in how power is conceived. Traditionally regarded as the possession of centralized institutions such as the state, the church, or capital, many now accentuate the altogether decentered and ubiquitous, even commonplace, nature of power. In the wake of Michel Foucault in particular, it has become routine for political theorists, particularly on the left, to speak of power as “capillary” in its operations, as a ubiquitous, multifarious, and ineluctable phenomenon 17

18

Why Democracy?

detectable in all forms of human association.1 In the modern world, they argue, it is the nature of power less to oppress in the fashion of political or religious authoritarianism than to constitute subjectivity itself as well as fields of knowledge and regimes of truth. If power now must be understood as disciplining and prescribing the course of human action and the collective life of populations the issues this view raises for political theory are many, including the broad question of what conception of justice or democracy is able to cope with power thus conceived. 2 If liberal democracy and social democracy, for instance, were designed to cope with political power in its narrower sense—the power essentially of government, capital, church, and aristocracy — what conception of democracy is capable of catching up with or reigning in power in this broader connotation? One response to this general problematic is to broaden radically the scope of democracy in social practices and institutions, a response that is generally critical of older liberal views that paid little attention to forms of power that greatly concern Foucault and a host of social critics working under his influence. “Where power was, there democracy shall be” is the axiom of what has come to be called “radical democracy” as well as “strong” and “participatory democracy,” each of which urges an extension of the democratic ideal beyond its limits within liberalism, extending it into multiple, if not all, areas of social life including most especially the economy. As one radical democrat puts it, “If democracy is to mean that the people rule, they must rule in all bodies into which society is organized. Democracy will continue to have very little staying power until the democratic movement has succeeded in establishing a democratic civil society and, in particular, in democratizing the world of work.”3 On the premise that relations of inequality prevail where democratic rule does not, radical democrats regard rule by the people as the best prospect for social justice in political and civil society alike. As “a politics of nonhierarchy and inclusion,” radical democracy seeks at once to eliminate domination from political and civil society and to secure the right of equal participation in various forms of decision making; it is oriented toward the common good while respectful of dissent, and inclined toward socialism while respectful of individual freedom.4 Radical democracy, accordingly, is at once a method of fashioning policy, a doctrine regarding the method’s proper scope, and a substantive set of policies that can be articulated theoretically. It can be confidently assumed that a radically democratic order will opt for a particular configuration of ethical-political values —

Democracy

19

specifically, egalitarianism and pluralism—provided that its deliberations are free of ideological mystification. This last point warrants emphasis. Proponents of the radical democratic view accentuate the internal connection between the forms of hegemony that they decry (racism, sexism, heterosexism, capitalist exploitation, environmental degradation, etc.) and nondemocratic decision making as well as between the common good and “the democratic practice of participating in institutional arrangements which accept differences.”5 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, the most prominent theorists of this school, articulate the radical democratic interpretation of hegemony and “the logic of democracy,” and the chasm that separates them, as follows: “the logic of democracy cannot be sufficient for the formulation of any hegemonic project. This is because the logic of democracy is simply the equivalential displacement of the egalitarian imaginary to ever more extensive social relations, and, as such, it is only a logic of the elimination of relations of subordination and of inequalities.” 6 We need little worry, it seems, about the prospect of democracy instituting new forms of domination since this is incompatible with the egalitarian and pluralist logic of democracy. It may be anticipated, then, as a point of principle that democratic arrangements—if genuinely and radically democratic—will be conducive to the interests of all. Laclau and Mouffe set out from the premise that while socialism is an essential ingredient of a genuinely democratic society, it is presently in the midst of a crisis. Classical Marxism’s guiding concepts of the working class, the Revolution, and of a postrevolutionary society that is presided over by a “perfectly unitary and homogeneous collective” will require urgent revisiting.7 The left’s best hope, they argue, is to replace such ideas with a radicalized conception of democratic pluralism, a more complex and philosophically nuanced view than the Marxism of old and that is particularly indebted to the analyses of power proffered by Foucault.8 The democratic revolution properly aims not merely at piecemeal social reforms but to eliminate oppression in its several and often hybrid forms. As one radical democrat puts it, “the democratic revolution [is] a subversive force that can be spread throughout the social in the form of an infinite series of contingent recitations.” Democratization is no mere effort to redress particular inequalities that exist within a polity or to include more persons in the political process; it is a “struggle” to eliminate every vestige of power within “the social” and to “institutionalize a radical democratic pluralist imaginary.” This form

20

Why Democracy?

of “resistance . . . aim[s] not only to oppose a specific instance of domination but to put an end to the entire structure of subordination itself.”9 While indebted to socialism, this conception of democracy has some roots in liberal thought as well. Laclau and Mouffe endeavor not to jettison liberal democracy root and branch but to transform the discourse of autonomy and human rights in an explicitly egalitarian direction. As they write, “Our thesis is that egalitarian discourses and discourses on rights play a fundamental role in the reconstruction of collective identities. At the beginning of this process in the French Revolution, the public space of citizenship was the exclusive domain of equality, while in the private sphere no questioning took place of existing social inequalities. However, as de Tocqueville clearly understood, once human beings accept the legitimacy of the principle of equality in one sphere they will attempt to extend it to every other sphere of life.”10 Elsewhere Mouffe writes that the goal of left politics “should be the extension and deepening of the democratic revolution initiated two hundred years ago” by liberalism rather than its wholesale rejection, as so many on the left prefer.11 The radicalization of democracy requires not only the struggle against capitalism and hegemony in its multiple forms but a plurality of “new social movements” of the left, and indeed a solidarity of egalitarian movements that would work together while retaining the autonomy of each. The apparently contradictory goals of unity and autonomy may be pursued together, Laclau and Mouffe argue, in a new “radical democratic pluralism.” Such pluralism they outline as follows: “Pluralism is radical only to the extent that each term of this plurality finds within itself the principle of its own validity, without this having to be sought in a transcendent or underlying positive ground for the hierarchy of meaning of them all and the source and guarantee of their legitimacy. And this radical pluralism is democratic to the extent that the autoconstitutivity of each one of its terms is the result of displacements of the egalitarian imaginary.”12 More radical and explicitly democratic than liberal conceptions of pluralism, Laclau and Mouffe’s views also part company with liberalism’s typically Hobbesian conception of the self. With communitarian critics of liberalism they hold that “a citizen cannot properly be conceived independently of her insertion in a political community,” and incorporate as well a strong conception of social obligations and the common good, yet while rejecting strongly organic notions of community.13 Where communitarians prefer to speak of democratic politics as — or as capable of becoming—a dialogue among friends, Laclau and Mouffe defend a more

Democracy

21

Foucauldian view regarding the ubiquity of power and the necessity of resistance and egalitarian struggle. The conception of pluralism that radical democrats put forward, however, includes important qualifications. “Radical democratic pluralism” embraces neither liberal neutrality nor forms of pluralism that seek the elimination of group antagonisms through strong conceptions of community or public deliberation. The very idea of replacing social antagonisms with “a universal rational consensus,” as Mouffe puts it, “is the real threat to democracy. Indeed, this can lead to violence being unrecognized and hidden behind appeals to ‘rationality,’ as is often the case in liberal thinking, which disguises the necessary frontiers and forms of exclusion behind pretenses of ‘neutrality.’”14 The more inclusive conception of pluralism that radical democrats prefer, however, is not without limitations. If difference is a positive good to be recognized and celebrated within a democratic order, it is good “only insofar as difference does not promote domination and inequality,” and where “domination” and “inequality” (not self-evident terms) are given a particular interpretation. Persons and social groups advocating political positions at odds with a radical conception of equality — a sizeable group of persons to be sure — are not differences to be respected but forces of hegemony to be combated, and by means that are seldom made explicit. Anna Marie Smith writes, for instance, that from a radical democratic pluralist perspective, “the right to self-determination for all social groups must be upheld,” then adds “except where the exercise of that right stops a traditionally disempowered group from achieving equality.” The fate of the conservative within such an order, or indeed the moderate liberal, seems an unhappy one. “Radical democratic pluralism would protect the principle of tolerance for democratic difference precisely by vigorously attacking each and every antidemocratic position”; this sounds eminently just until we consider how many persons currently defend what radical democrats consider to be antidemocratic positions — certainly a majority of the electorate in every democratic nation in the world — and precisely what forms such vigorous attacks would take.15 Radical democrats abandon the possibility of eliminating by democratic means the opposition of an “us” and a “them,” even while envisaging some semblance of social unity. As Mouffe puts it, the question for democratic politics “is not how to arrive at a consensus without exclusion. . . . Politics aims at the creation of unity in a context of conflict and diversity; it is always concerned with the creation of an ‘us’ by the determination of a ‘them.’ The novelty of

22

Why Democracy?

democratic politics is not the overcoming of this us/them opposition— which is an impossibility — but the different way in which it is established. The crucial issue is to establish this us/them discrimination in a way that is compatible with pluralist democracy.”16 Precisely what form such “exclusion” is to take and which actual persons and groups comprise the “them” are questions left disturbingly open. Explicit treatment of human rights questions (aside from equality) is somewhat rare among theorists of this school, yet the cause for worry increases in light of statements such as the following: “Radical democratic pluralism therefore requires the dismantling of the systems of rights that by their very nature block the democratic and egalitarian claims to justice by those who have been disempowered by those systems.”17 This statement from Anna Marie Smith fully accords with Mouffe’s view (which Smith cites with approval) that “some existing rights [which ones?] have been constituted on the very exclusion or subordination of the rights of other categories” of persons.18 The principle of equality itself receives a radical interpretation and entails “radical changes to the political system and massive redistributions in income, employment, access to education and access to health care” as well as measures in antiracism that “would not be simply thought in terms of ‘color-blindness’ but in terms of the structural reforms that are needed to redistribute power to those who have been traditionally disempowered,” including but not limited to affirmative action programs, similar measures in antisexism, antiheterosexism, and the rejection of capitalism.19 If on radical democratic views “we are now at a great distance from genuine democracy,” we gain a clue to what a genuine democratic order would look like by analyzing a variety of political movements of the left such as the feminist, antiracist, multicultural, peace, environmental, antinuclear, civil rights, anticapitalist and antiglobalization movements that stand opposed to the hegemony of the capitalist and patriarchal state.20 Such groups are looked to as models of democratic identity and will formation and of the egalitarian ethos more generally. Their collective deliberations are said to generate a thoroughgoing respect for differences and human equality without threatening individual freedom.21 A similar faith in these new social movements is found among “participatory,” “strong,” and deliberative democrats who share with their radical counterparts a commitment to increasing democratic participation in decision making on a system-wide basis. Participationists favor broadening the application of democratic procedures from voting

Democracy

23

in periodic elections to direct forms of decision making in all areas of social life, from direct participation in public policy formation to similar egalitarian participation in the administration of governmental and nongovernmental institutions, private enterprise, and family life. While not necessarily socialist in its political orientation, participatory democracy is inspired by an egalitarianism that directly opposes top-down decision making, including conventional forms of representative democracy and capitalist economics. Employee self-management, for instance, is often regarded by participationists as a just alternative to top-down corporate management structures. One participatory or strong democrat, invoking the Athenian model, speaks of this conception of politics as “politics in the participatory mode where conflict is resolved in the absence of an independent ground through a participatory process of ongoing, proximate self- legislation and the creation of a political community capable of transforming dependent, private individuals into free citizens and partial and private interests into public goods.” The same author defends “self-government by citizens rather than representative government in the name of citizens. Active citizens govern themselves directly here, not necessarily at every level and in every instance, but frequently enough and in particular when basic policies are being decided and when significant power is being deployed.”22 This view has its historical roots in the thought of such figures as Rousseau, Hegel, and T. H. Green, among others, each of whom explicitly regarded political legitimacy as founded upon a conception of the general will. On such views, justice is ultimately inseparable from the content of this will rather than constituting any higher law. The social body has its center in the state and by means of state action expresses its collective will. Government, as it were, is the social body writ large while democratic politics is a practice of collective self-determination. Thus in Rousseau’s account government “is a corporate body endowed with certain faculties,” chief of which is the general will.23 As mentioned in chapter 1, this will is not identical to what Rousseau called “the will of all” in that the latter signifies merely the common denominator of private, egoistic wills while the general will refers to the good of the public body as a unified entity. Since all persons participate in the social body, Rousseau maintained that minorities no less than majorities ought to conform to the general will and that failing to do so constitutes a violation of self-imposed law. What is more, since the state is a corporate entity, to which individual citizens are related as limbs to a body, it must command absolute authority and recognize no limits to

24

Why Democracy?

its will: “As nature gives each man absolute power over all his members, the social compact gives the body politic absolute power over all its members also; and it is this power which, under the direction of the general will, bears . . . the name of Sovereignty.”24 Rousseau qualified his much-remarked assertion that “the general will is always upright and always tends to the public advantage” as follows: “But it does not follow that the deliberations of the people always have the same rectitude. Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is; the people is never corrupted, but it is often deceived, and on such occasions only does it seem to will what is bad.”25 Following Rousseau (as well as Aristotle and Hegel), T. H. Green in the nineteenth century and Brand Blanshard in the twentieth (among others) identified the general will as the foundation of democratic politics and defended the primacy of the general will and community over individual rights. Likening society to an organism, Green explicitly rejected the notion of individual rights against the state or against the general will, all rights being instead “power[s] claimed and recognised as contributory to a common good. A right against society, in distinction from a right to be treated as a member of society, is a contradiction in terms.” Green drew the obvious conclusion: “No one therefore has a right to resist a law or ordinance of government, on the ground that it requires him to do what he does not like, and that he has not agreed to submit to the authority from which it proceeds: and if no one person, no number of persons. If the common interest requires it, no right can be alleged against it.”26 Blanshard followed suit in defending the notion of “a real or rational will which can be set over against our actual will.”27 The general or rational will “is the same in everyone” while its object “is that which an ideally competent reflection would show to be the greatest good attainable in the circumstances.”28 The aim and moral basis of the democratic state consist in furthering this common will, including in circumstances where minorities or individuals resist that will. More recently, the communitarian movement has appropriated from such thinkers a conception of democratic politics as again principally concerned with the general will or the common good, rejecting liberalism’s doctrine of the primacy of individual rights—where rights are conceived as constraints upon, and in their potential opposition to, the state and the majority will.29 As a politics of the common good, communitarianism opposes what it regards as the excesses and disintegrative effects of liberal individualism and substitutes a concentration on the

Democracy

25

norms of community life and the primacy of the communal will. Originating as a critique of liberal democracy, communitarianism in its various formulations seeks to replace individualistic conceptions of reason, persons, and politics with more nuanced views that accentuate the nonstrategic and dialogical nature of reason (particularly in its public forms), the social embeddedness of the self, and democratic politics as a search for solidarity rather than mutual accommodation. Liberal “rights talk,” communitarians argue, errs in overlooking or minimizing social obligations and in rejecting a stronger and more organic conception of the common good, where communitarians conceive of this in terms of the cultivation of moral norms and self-understandings that prevail within local communities and traditions. Statements such as the following, from Charles Taylor and Michael J. Sandel respectively, are representative of communitarian political sentiments in general: “I am arguing that the free individual of the West is only what he is by virtue of the whole society and civilization which brought him to be and which nourishes him; that our families can only form us up to this capacity and these aspirations because they are set in this civilization. . . . And I want to claim finally that all this creates a significant obligation to belong for whoever would affirm the value of this freedom.”30 “But we cannot regard ourselves as independent in this [liberal] way without great cost to those loyalties and convictions whose moral force consists partly in the fact that living by them is inseparable from understanding ourselves as the particular persons we are — as members of this family or community or nation or people, as bearers of this history, as sons and daughters of that revolution, as citizens of this republic. Allegiances such as these are more than values I happen to have or aims I ‘espouse at any given time.’ They go beyond the obligations I voluntarily incur and the ‘natural duties’ I owe to human beings as such. They allow that to some I owe more than justice requires or even permits, not by reason of agreements I have made but instead in virtue of those more or less enduring attachments and commitments which taken together partly define the person I am.”31 On communitarian views, democratic politics is a search for consensus that occurs by means of public dialogue, a practice in which obligations of social belonging and public spiritedness take precedence over egoistic calculations and strategic rationality. In general terms, then, much of contemporary democratic theory accentuates themes of public deliberation, inclusive and egalitarian participation, and the general will while favoring a broadening of the

26

Why Democracy?

scope of majority rule beyond its limits in older conceptions of liberal democracy. Deliberative, participatory, communitarian, and radical democrats each provide a gloss on these themes, with varying degrees of emphasis and interpretation and while reaching different conclusions at the level of public policy (when, that is, this level is approached). Conspicuously absent from most of these accounts is the ambivalence or suspicion toward democracy that so often characterized political theorists, including democrats themselves, prior to recent decades. Indeed, the proverbial pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction that new forms of democratic idealism are now plainly visible and constitute the theoretical counterpart of the popular idealism discussed in chapter 1. The oddness of this phenomenon in its popular form is a matter on which I have already remarked, however in its theoretical or scholarly form it is odder still given arguments well familiar to political theorists regarding the excesses of, and dangers inherent to, democratic rule, arguments extending from the Greeks through modern times. In much contemporary democratic theory it often appears as if such arguments had been convincingly disposed of. The optimism, and indeed idealism, that is frequently visible in the literatures of participatory, communitarian, and radical democracy is a striking phenomenon. Particularly striking is the radical democratic position for which the remedy to the problem of ubiquitous power is ubiquitous democracy. For these theorists, as we have seen, democracy is at once a method of decision making, a doctrine regarding the proper scope of this method, as well as a particular set of policies that can be anticipated theoretically. Egalitarianism and pluralism are two principles in particular that we can anticipate a radically democratic order will invariably uphold. Democracy being “a non-exclusive and non-hierarchizing order of things,” as one radical democrat expresses it, “it cannot be assumed a priori that democracy is simply a form of hegemony — of superordination and subordination.” 32 In democratic politics, however, nothing whatever can be assumed a priori—neither that majority rule will inevitably deteriorate into an unprincipled majoritarianism or what Alexis de Tocqueville called the “tyranny of the majority” nor that democratic rule will demonstrate a thoroughgoing respect for difference, equality, freedom, or anything else. Clearly, the substantive outcome of communicative processes, including the most democratic, cannot be known in advance. It is therefore odd that radical democracy should define itself a priori as “a politics of non-hierarchy and inclusion.” While this may well hold on the “input” side of

Democracy

27

democratic politics, as it were, there is no assurance that this will also hold on the “output” side where it matters most. We cannot assume that democratic majorities can be invariably relied upon to be respectful of minority rights, for example, or unpopular opinions. Here we can assume, or anticipate as a point of principle, nothing whatever. Our only guide in this matter is history itself, which shows democracy to have at best a mixed record on this subject. While a radically democratic order of the kind its advocates propose may never have existed in history, we have ample experience of the conduct of democratic majorities on a host of issues and in a great many circumstances, cultures, and periods. The historical record does little to confirm the optimism of radical democrats, on the contrary bearing out time and again the observation of John Adams that “the majority has eternally and without one exception usurped over the rights of the minority.” In the literature of radical democratic theory, it often appears as if the warnings of Adams, Madison, Tocqueville, and Mill could be dismissed as mere pessimism, that the prospect of an aggressive majoritarianism were entirely improbable or even a theoretical impossibility. It is surely not unduly pessimistic to worry about the fate of minorities and others in a democratic Iran or Iraq, for example, and in many other democracies both old and new. What Tocqueville and Mill in particular brought to our attention is that it is not only when the will of the people, or the majority, is denied that tyranny occurs but precisely when democracy itself is pushed to its limits. Mill famously warned in On Liberty of “an increasing inclination to stretch unduly the powers of society over the individual, both by the force of opinion and even by that of legislation.”33 The principles of equality and majority rule, when unchecked by other principles, are as likely to exacerbate injustice as to remedy it, or to create new forms of hegemony as objectionable as what preceded them. Tocqueville’s warning is of such fundamental importance in this connection that it warrants being quoted at length: “I am trying to imagine under what novel features despotism may appear in the world. In the first place, I see an innumerable multitude of men, alike and equal, constantly circling around in pursuit of the petty and banal pleasures with which they glut their souls. Each one of them, withdrawn into himself, is almost unaware of the fate of the rest. Mankind, for him, consists in his children and his personal friends. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, they are near enough, but he does not notice them. He touches them but feels nothing. He exists in and for himself, and though he still may have a family, one

28

Why Democracy?

can at least say that he has not got a fatherland. Over this kind of men stands an immense, protective power which is alone responsible for securing their enjoyment and watching over their fate. That power is absolute, thoughtful of detail, orderly, provident, and gentle. It would resemble parental authority if, fatherlike, it tried to prepare its charges for a man’s life, but on the contrary, it only tries to keep them in perpetual childhood. It likes to see the citizens enjoy themselves, provided that they think of nothing but enjoyment. It gladly works for their happiness but wants to be sole agent and judge thereof. It provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, makes rules for their testaments, and divides their inheritances. Why should it not entirely relieve them from the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living? Thus it daily makes the exercise of free choice less useful and rarer, restricts the activity of free will within a narrower compass, and little by little robs each citizen of the proper use of his own faculties. Equality has prepared men for all this, predisposing them to endure it and often even regard it as beneficial. Having thus taken each citizen in turn in its powerful grasp and shaped him to its will, government then extends its embrace to include the whole of society. It covers the whole of social life with a network of petty, complicated rules that are both minute and uniform, through which even men of the greatest originality and the most vigorous temperament cannot force their heads above the crowd. It does not break men’s will, but softens, bends, and guides it; it seldom enjoins, but often inhibits, action; it does not destroy anything, but prevents much being born; it is not at all tyrannical, but it hinders, restrains, enervates, stifles so much that in the end each nation is no more than a flock of timid and hard-working animals with the government as its shepherd.”34 If power is always problematic, it is most problematic when concentrated and unchecked, whether in the hands of a single authority or a democratic majority. Ostensibly, the end served by extending democratic rule to ever more areas of social life is to eliminate the hegemony therein, yet in so doing the end is potentially negated by the means. Far from eliminating or remedying the effects of power, the wholesale extension of democratic rule merely replaces certain forms of power with a form that is potentially more ominous still, one in which the dominant ideology, the most sizeable bloc or coalition, imposes its will without restraint and in the belief that it is fully within its rights in doing so. A majority does considerably more than fashion a democratic will or

Democracy

29

consensus; it imposes this will—which is a will to power—on all alike, often forcibly, and tolerates dissent only at its discretion. Once a majority decides in what virtue or the truth consists, often no limit exists on the instinct to impose this upon dissenters provided that its motive is beneficent. It is further open to question whether the new social movements favored by radical democrats constitute the altogether shining examples of democratic will formation that they are often touted as being. It is still more questionable whether a majority of their members may be anticipated to be invariably respectful of dissent, liberty, or even equality. While ostensibly emancipatory, the conduct of these movements can sometimes deteriorate into resentment politics, confirming Nietzsche’s view that the will to power springs eternal, not least among movements professing doctrines of equality and difference. If it is the complaint of radical democrats that their liberal counterparts “are blind to power relations,” the liberal reply is that the former may be equally blind to the power of unlimited majoritarianism.35 Augmenting the power of collectivities over individuals is rarely a formula for justice or emancipation, particularly when no limit is identified to the power of such groups. Radical democracy betrays a certain forgetfulness of history and of the darker side of democratic politics that was quite unthinkable for Greek and classical liberal thinkers for whom worries about the rising power of majorities were well founded indeed. Plato and Aristotle could hardly forget the trial and execution of Socrates, which in many ways represents the first test case of minority rights, most especially the right of dissent, in a democratic context. If Plato’s response was to reject democracy, the response of modern liberalism is to limit its scope by means of the rule of law, a system of inviolable rights, and the separation and balance of powers. In related ways, radical, participatory, and communitarian democrats each appeal to a conception of the general will that incorporates a false and potentially dangerous idealization. In the case of communitarianism, for instance, Habermas has noted that “it is too idealistic in that it makes the democratic process dependent on the virtues of citizens devoted to the public weal.”36 The communitarian model presupposes unsupportable assumptions about the shared values of a unified community and about democratic politics as an ethical and decidedly nonstrategic practice of collective will formation. Such views dramatically understate substantive differences with respect to both ends and means that invariably characterize all but the most small and homogeneous communities.

30

Why Democracy?

(Indeed, even here unanimity, or approximate unanimity, of judgments is hardly to be expected in modern societies, and such overlapping consensus as does exist typically occurs not at the level of public policy matters but at a deeper level of historical or cultural self-understanding which grossly underdetermines explicit policy issues.) The notion of community itself characterizes very imperfectly the actual functioning and dynamics of contemporary society, the complexity and scale of which increasingly render the idea of community as a unified entity a false idealization. Increasingly, the notion of community as it is spoken of in political discourse functions less as an empirical or phenomenological description of actually existing societies than as a rhetorical strategy for legitimating particular sets of values by minimizing real differences. Could not much the same be said of the general will itself? This notion’s intuitive legitimacy rests on the general will’s being a kind of collective counterpart to the individual will—the moral source and motivation of action carried out in its name. Just as individuals may within limits freely pursue whatever values or life plans stem from their particular wills, so may communities through their political institutions legislate in accordance with the general will, whatever this should be. Yet as Joseph Schumpeter has argued, the general will as it actually functions in a democratic order represents only the abstract “product and not the motive power for the political process.”37 Insofar as it exists at all, the general will makes its appearance only at the back end of the democratic process rather than at the front end as its operative principle or “motive power.” It is a designation awarded to whatever view emerges in legislative form, quite apart from whatever genuine consensus it expresses. What the general will is not is a particular set of values agreed upon— or that could be (counterfactually) agreed upon — by a unified social body that finds subsequent expression in state action. Nor is it any kind of reified entity underlying, or even opposing, “the will of all.” The true nature of the general will is glimpsed only in its actualizations in legislative decisions, wherein the generality of this concept tends to dissolve. It becomes visible most often as the partisan will of the largest faction, party, or coalition, as the view that is able by the force of argument, rhetoric, or sheer cunning to claim for itself the mantle of the general will. As it is employed in democratic parlance, it serves the rhetorical purpose of legitimating particular interests, most often the majority opinion but often enough minority views that wish to pass for the majority view, or even for consensus. The general will cannot but be

Democracy

31

the will of an identifiable set of persons, either a statistical majority or minority of the electorate on a given issue. Since the eighteenth century much of democratic theory has presupposed a holistic or organicist ontology for which “the people” constitute a distinct metaphysical entity endowed with agency and which is often awarded moral priority over individuals. In related ways each of the democratic theories we have examined in this chapter implies that “rule by the people” means rule by a more or less unified agent whose will it is the business of political, or indeed all, institutions to identify and implement. If this is particularly evident in communitarian accounts in which echoes of Rousseau and Hegel are frequently detectable, the same holds for accounts that give center stage to notions of public deliberation, participation, and will formation. Here as well, the common premise is that the social totality constitutes the fundamental agency of democratic politics and that individuality is derivative from, or a function of, this totality. Political philosophies invariably presuppose social ontologies of one kind or another, and it is frequently here that they encounter difficulties. (If theorists such as Rawls are often quick to deny this, or to insist that political philosophy is a “free-standing” enterprise of thought that assumes no controversial doctrines whatever regarding the self, reason, or the social totality, a possible reason for the denial is that it is precisely here that such accounts often run aground.) The difficulty with democratic theories that invoke strong notions of community, the general will, or public deliberation is that speaking of the general public as an agent in any sense is ontologically spurious. Agency necessarily presupposes consciousness, intentionality, and volition as minimal conditions of possibility, while in a more robust, normative sense it requires far more. Attributing any of these qualities to the social whole is sheer idealism, as is readily seen when we make our way back from the realm of counterfactuals and idealizations to the concrete world of human practices. What we encounter there are real differences and competing interests that strenuously resist assimilation into an artificial unity. We find individuals and their assorted projects, collective groupings composed of real persons with mixed motivations and judgments, institutions committed variously to a corporate or public mission or to institutional self-interest, and a mass of citizens alternately enthusiastic and apathetic. What we do not find is a unified will arising from the whole but rather a succession of political actors claiming to know it and to speak in its name.

32

Why Democracy?

While unique to neither the left nor the right, this form of idealism has been primarily visible on the left side of the political spectrum since the collapse of fascism, with certain forms of communitarianism and nationalism as prominent exceptions. Wherever such idealism prevails, political language is characterized by awkward displacements of significance from the domain of concrete particulars to one of abstract generality, a certain misplaced concreteness that is ordinarily motivated by political enthusiasm. Invariably some real phenomenon or phenomena are demoted in the order of morality and being as individual ends are displaced by the general will, private deliberation by public deliberation, particular identities by collective identity, and real persons by the nation, community, class, gender, or some other abstract entity. In each instance theoretical reflection abstracts from observable phenomena and transfers concreteness and political importance to an idealization over and above the phenomena. It becomes possible to speak of the abolition of private property as “social ownership and control of the means of production” and a vote of 50 percent plus one as the “general will.” Historically, political theorists have often proven inexpert in the study of social ontology (one thinks of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Bentham, Green, Mill, and Marx as examples) while ontologists have with equal frequency been illaudable political thinkers (Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger). The ontology of liberal democracy has rightly come under wholesale criticism in recent years for its mythical state of nature and associated notions of worldless subjectivity, rational choice, and natural rights. Often such critiques are proffered by the left, only to substitute false idealizations of their own. Political theory can make no headway for as long as it presupposes dubious ontologies, whether it be the strategic individualism of Hobbes or Bentham, the social organicism of Rousseau or Green, the idealism of Hegel or Marx, or their contemporary offspring. Against what existential philosopher Gabriel Marcel has called “the spirit of abstraction” (of which Marcel was himself an astute critic), I would urge as a point of methodology that our thinking about democracy, or politics more generally, take a turn toward the concrete and the particular, and to look with some skepticism upon idealizations for which are claimed a greater share of reality or moral importance than individual persons and the practices in which they engage. Since an advanced degree of political commitment so often makes for bad phenomenology, leading us to regard abstractions as “really real” over

Democracy

33

and above observable phenomena, let us place our democratic commitment itself in question in order that we may examine the real workings of democratic politics and the dynamics of political speech that is its lifeblood. This examination — which is my task in chapter 4— may afford a perspective from which to critique further the theory and practice of democratic politics as well as to pose anew the question of its philosophical justification.

This page intentionally left blank.

CHAPTER 3

Deliberative Democracy

T

he most influential normative theory of democracy to emerge over the last couple of decades goes under the name of deliberative democracy. This attractive theory takes several forms, the most noted of which find expression in the work of Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls, as well as various theorists working under their influence, although a sizeable literature has emerged in this field in recent years, much of which is not directly indebted to either figure.1 Habermas and Rawls, however, have led the effort to overhaul the normative foundations of democracy by rehabilitating the notion of public deliberation. In Habermas’s view, deliberative democracy articulates a conception of popular sovereignty according to which the ultimate grounds of legitimacy are the collective deliberations of the public, deliberations that are conceived in terms of a somewhat idealized set of procedures. Rawls’s formulation of deliberative democracy parts company with Habermas in key respects, being more directly indebted to the tradition of liberal constitutionalism and the social contract than Habermas’s proceduralist view. Other theorists have sought to avoid some of the more controversial premises of both the Habermasian and Rawlsian formulations, producing a burgeoning literature of distinct yet overlapping conceptions of deliberative democracy. The analysis that follows identifies a few of the more important such differences while providing a critical assessment of deliberative democracy generally, one that inevitably applies to some such conceptions more than others. Habermas’s recent work defends a conception of deliberative democracy that is intermediate between liberal and communitarian (or, as he 35

36

Why Democracy?

prefers, “civic republican”) views while again oriented toward the egalitarian end of the political spectrum. Emerging from the Frankfurt School tradition, Habermas’s approach to democratic theory is located within a larger frame of neomarxian (or postmarxian) critical theory and is consistent with Habermas’s earlier research, beginning in the 1960s, on such themes as the public sphere, the critique of ideology, communicative rationality, and discourse ethics. Briefly stated, Habermas’s model of deliberative democracy seeks to provide a rational basis for the democratic ideal by appealing to a conception of public deliberation. The conduct of such institutions is both legitimate and rational in the event that it represents the outcome of a somewhat idealized procedure of public reasoning. This procedure is reminiscent of Habermas’s earlier concept of an ideal speech situation, which he conceived as a hypothetical or counterfactual ideal of boundless, open-ended, and egalitarian communication oriented toward rational consensus, or a consensus based not on power but on an appeal to superior arguments and generalized interests. To count as rational, participation in democratic decision making—through voting, for instance—must be oriented not egoistically or strategically but by impartial processes of collective “opinion formation” and “will formation” that are generalizable in nature. In the background here is Habermas’s well-known distinction between strategic and communicative action and the modes of rationality proper to each. Strategic or instrumental rationality (the capacity to identify efficient means of realizing given individual ends) differs in important ways from communicative rationality which seeks understanding and consensus, is oriented solely by the “unforced force” of superior arguments, and is free of power, particularly in the form of ideology or “systematic distortion” of our linguistic and social practices.2 On Habermas’s procedural view, democratic deliberations are rational and legitimate in the event that they conform to certain standards of argumentation, such as the principle of universalization or “ideal role taking.” Habermas modifies the essentially Kantian idea of a universalization test into a transcendental-pragmatic theory of argumentation. As he writes: “Under the pragmatic presuppositions of an inclusive and noncoercive rational discourse among free and equal participants, everyone is required to take the perspective of everyone else, and thus project herself into the understandings of self and world of all others; from this interlocking of perspectives there emerges an ideally extended we-perspective from which all can test in common whether they wish to make a controversial norm the basis of their shared practice.” 3

Deliberative Democracy

37

According to Habermas’s conception of “public reason,” principles are valid if they could generate genuinely uncoerced consensus under conditions of rational discourse. This procedural view “can leave more questions open” to the democratic process than Rawls’s constitutional liberalism allows “because it entrusts more to the process of rational opinion and will formation” than do Rawlsian and other liberal democratic views. Habermas’s deliberative conception “leaves substantial questions that must be answered here and now to the more or less enlightened engagement of participants, which does not mean that philosophers may not also participate in the public debate, though in the role of intellectuals, not of experts.”4 (This last point regarding the role of philosophers as nonexperts becomes somewhat ambiguous, however, in the following statement from Habermas: “All contents, no matter how fundamental the action norm may be, must be made to depend on real discourses (or advocatory discourses conducted as substitutes for them). The moral theorist may take part in them as one of those concerned, perhaps even as an expert, but he cannot conduct such discourses by himself alone.”5 Whether the theorist is or is not an expert in such contexts, and if so then in what sense, is a matter that Habermas would do well to clarify.) As critical theorist Seyla Benhabib states, “According to the deliberative model of democracy, it is a necessary condition for attaining legitimacy and rationality with regard to collective decision-making processes in a polity, that the institutions of this polity are so arranged that what is considered in the common interest of all results from processes of collective deliberation conducted rationally and fairly among free and equal individuals.”6 Collective deliberation procedures require that political discussion be at once egalitarian, public and inclusive, free of coercion, rationally motivated, impartial, and occur in the form of argumentation or, as Habermas puts it, “through the regulated exchange of information and reasons among parties who introduce and critically test proposals.”7 Both Habermas and Rawls sharply distinguish rational consensus from merely factual agreement — the former alone having a claim to democratic legitimacy—while disagreeing about the conditions of such consensus. For Habermas, “[e]verything depends on the conditions of communication and the procedures that lend the institutionalized opinion- and will-formation their legitimating force.” Public reason, properly so called, constitutes an “ideal procedure for deliberation and decision making,” one comprising “rules of discourse and forms of argumentation that derive their normative content from the validity-

38

Why Democracy?

basis of action oriented to reaching understanding, and ultimately from the structure of linguistic communication.”8 While no few obstacles exist to democratic deliberation thus conceived, for Habermas such obstacles are merely empirical and accordingly, in principle at least, eliminable. The locations in which Habermas envisions such discourse coming to pass include “parliamentary bodies, on the one hand, and in the informal networks of the public sphere, on the other.” He continues: “Both within and outside parliamentary bodies geared to decision making, these subjectless modes of communication form arenas in which a more or less rational opinion- and will-formation concerning issues and problems affecting society as a whole can take place. Informal opinion-formation results in institutionalized election decisions and legislative decrees through which communicatively generated power is transformed into administratively utilizable power.”9 Accordingly, Habermas calls for a radical expansion of public fora of deliberation and informal networks of communication while applauding the “new social movements” which, he believes, often put this ideal into practice. John Rawls’s conception of deliberative democracy differs from Habermas’s view in important respects, among which is his rejection of Habermas’s procedural view in favor of a substantive conception of constitutional liberal democracy in the social contract tradition, one in which human rights serve as inviolable constraints on the democratic process.10 Rawls’s constitutionalist view is concisely stated in Political Liberalism as follows: “Our exercise of political power is fully proper only when it is exercised in accordance with a constitution, the essentials of which all citizens as free and equal may be reasonably expected to endorse in the light of principles and ideals acceptable to their common human reason.”11 The principles upon which our institutional arrangements are rationally founded are identified from the standpoint of Rawls’s “original position,” in which a veil of ignorance conceals from hypothetical rational deliberators information about their particular values, identities, capacities, and so on. This method enables moral agents to bracket private, partial, and non-universalizable values in favor of public, impartial, and generalizable ones. The principles thus generated are two: first, a liberal principle of equal freedom and, second, the “difference principle,” for which social and economic inequalities are acceptable only on the condition that they benefit the least advantaged.12 While instrumentally rational egoism is the modus operandi of Rawls’s deliberators, as it has long been for contractarian and utilitarian liberals,

Deliberative Democracy

39

the principles to which such parties rationally consent express a social democratic interpretation of constitutional liberalism. Rawls’s conception of public reason as it emerges in his later writings takes pluralism as its operative premise and expresses the view that “when, on a constitutional essential or matter of basic justice, all appropriate government officials act from and follow public reason, and when all reasonable citizens think of themselves ideally as if they were legislators following public reason, the legal enactment expressing the opinion of the majority is legitimate law.”13 Since under conditions of pluralism citizens cannot rationally appeal to what Rawls calls “comprehensive doctrines” regarding matters either philosophical, religious, or moral, they must in fashioning political judgments appeal to reasons of a specific kind. “When citizens deliberate,” or engage in public reason, “they exchange views and debate their supporting reasons concerning public political questions. They suppose that their political opinions may be revised by discussion with other citizens.” He goes on in the same context to specify three essential ingredients of deliberative democracy so conceived: “One is an idea of public reason [a rationality that ‘limits the reasons citizens may give in supporting their political opinions to reasons consistent with seeing other citizens as equals’]. . . . A second is a framework of constitutional democratic institutions that specifies the setting for deliberative legislative bodies. The third is the knowledge and desire on the part of citizens generally to follow public reason and to realize its ideal in their political conduct.”14 Citizens, then, engage in public reason or rational democratic deliberation when they fashion judgments within a framework of theoretically generated principles—those agreed to by the parties in the original position — and when such judgments can sincerely be expected to meet with the approval of all free and equal persons. The conditions of public reason, however, extend further than this. On Rawls’s “ideal conception,” public reason, in order to be designated properly as reason, must meet conditions common to all forms of reasoning, public and nonpublic alike; these include “the concept of judgment, principles of inference, and rules of evidence, and much else, otherwise they would not be ways of reasoning but perhaps rhetoric or means of persuasion. We are concerned with reason, not simply with discourse. A way of reasoning, then, must incorporate the fundamental concepts and principles of reason, and include standards of correctness and criteria of justification.”15 This ideal of rational deliberation oriented by theoretically generated principles and by values that all citizens of

40

Why Democracy?

pluralistic societies could hypothetically endorse applies, Rawls maintains, to citizens engaged in political action such as voting and advocacy, politicians and governmental officials, as well as (especially) the judiciary. Indeed, Rawls regards the United States Supreme Court as the paradigmatic deliberative institution.16 Public reason so conceived serves as a kind of gatekeeper for political arguments, or for what passes for arguments in ordinary political conversation, admitting only those that appeal to interests of a particular kind, that bracket a great deal, if not most, of what citizens ordinarily take into account in fashioning political judgments, including their identity, nonuniversalizable values, “comprehensive doctrines,” and self-interest. Although nominally deliberationist, Rawls’s method of public reasoning is a decidedly solitary operation of thought; no more interaction with real persons is required by Rawls’s methodology than was required by its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century forebears. It is an entirely hypothetical and monological thought experiment for which deliberation with other persons is not at all required. Indeed, if the outcome of such deliberation is to be a just and rational consensus, then dialogue with real persons—agonistic, rhetorical, and power laden as this invariably is—is likely to be an obstacle.17 More recently, Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson have defined deliberative democracy in the following, somewhat less monological, terms: “Most fundamentally, deliberative democracy affirms the need to justify decisions made by citizens and their representatives. Both are expected to justify the laws they would impose on one another. In a democracy, leaders should therefore give reasons for their decisions, and respond to the reasons that citizens give in return. But not all issues, all the time, require deliberation. Deliberative democracy makes room for other forms of decision making (including bargaining among groups, and secret operations ordered by executives), as long as the use of these forms themselves is justified at some point in a deliberative process. Its first and most important characteristic, then, is its reason-giving requirement. The reasons that deliberative democracy asks citizens and their representatives to give should appeal to principles [such as reciprocity, publicity, accountability, and equality, among others] that individuals who are trying to find fair terms of cooperation cannot reasonably reject.”18 On their account, deliberative democracy is best understood in contrast to aggregative conceptions of democracy,19 for which “preferences” are to be taken as given rather than in need of justification. On aggregative views, preferences are the primary material or basic units of

Deliberative Democracy

41

political calculation, the purpose of such calculation being the essentially utilitarian one of maximizing satisfaction in ways that are optimally efficient and fair. By contrast, “[t]he deliberative conception,” as Gutmann and Thompson express it, “considers the reasons that citizens and their representatives give for their expressed preferences. It asks for justifications.”20 Deliberative democracy requires that “free and equal citizens (and their representatives) justify decisions in a process in which they give one another reasons that are mutually acceptable and generally accessible, with the aim of reaching conclusions that are binding in the present on all citizens but open to challenge in the future.”21 While deliberative democrats “disagree about the value, status, aims, and scope of deliberation,” they agree that deliberative politics involves “work[ing] together in a more cooperative ‘first person plural’ spirit.”22 The concept of public deliberation itself, however, tends to receive relatively scant attention from a majority of deliberative democrats despite its obvious centrality to the theory itself. James Bohman, himself a deliberative democrat, remarks: “For all the talk of deliberation among democratic theorists, few tell us what it actually is. Too many proponents of deliberation [among whom he includes Habermas and Rawls] are satisfied with merely describing some very general procedural conditions and rules. Often it is thought to be sufficient to show that deliberation fulfills the requirements of political equality by maximizing the opportunities for deliberation and the number of citizens who take advantage of them. Although this is certainly true, there is little discussion of what makes deliberation public, what it can really accomplish, and when it is actually successful.”23 Gutmann and Thompson do offer examples of such deliberation, at any rate, which include the following. When the administration of George W. Bush announced its intention to invade Iraq and remove the government of Saddam Hussein by military means, it presented reasoned arguments for this policy aimed at both the American public and the international community. While such deliberations may have been “imperfect,” it remains that “[b]ecause the administration had given reasons (such as the threat of the weapons of mass destruction) for taking action, critics had more basis to continue to dispute the original decision, and to challenge the administration’s judgment. The imperfect deliberation that preceded the war prepared the ground for the less imperfect deliberation that followed. Thus even in an unfriendly environment, deliberative democracy makes an appearance, and with some effect. Both the advocates and the foes of the war acted as if they recognized an obligation to justify their views to their fellow citizens.

42

Why Democracy?

(That their motives were political or partisan is less important than that their actions were responsive to this obligation.)”24 While these authors regard deliberative democracy more as an “aspirational ideal” than a “description of current political reality,” it remains in their view an actually existing phenomenon, albeit one that regularly falls short of the ideal.25 As for the parties to public deliberation, views differ here as well. For some they are hypothetical, rational agents while for many other deliberationists they include not only ordinary citizens but politicians, and particularly the latter. Gutmann and Thompson write: “Most deliberative democrats . . . do not insist that ordinary citizens regularly take part in public deliberations, and most favor some form of representative democracy. On these versions of the theory, citizens rely on their representatives to do their deliberating for them.”26 Deliberative democrats are also not in full agreement regarding the proper scope or extent of public deliberation — whether it extends to international politics, for instance, or into the realm of commerce or other areas within civil, rather than political, society. While many share Habermas’s view that deliberation is primarily a demand to be made of political structures, others take a broader view. Gutmann and Thompson, for instance, “accept that most democratic decisions are made by representatives, but would encourage more of those forms of popular participation that increase the quality of deliberation or the fairness of representation. We also believe that some of the institutions of civil society as well as those of government should be more deliberative, and that deliberation should have a more prominent role in international politics.”27 Similarly, Joshua Cohen and Jane Mansbridge call for public deliberation within a wide variety of institutions in both political and civil society, including business enterprises, professions, unions, and even families.28 Thus Cohen advocates, among other things, “the existence of arenas in which citizens can propose issues for the political agenda and participate in debate about those issues. The extension of such arenas is a public good, and ought to be supported with public money.”29 John Dryzek’s interpretation of deliberative or, as he prefers, “discursive” democracy is directly indebted to critical theory while parting company with Habermas in several important respects. Deliberation Dryzek speaks of as “a social process . . . distinguished from other kinds of communication in that deliberators are amenable to changing their judgments, preferences, and views during the course of their interactions,” interactions that “involve persuasion rather than coercion, manipulation, or deception.” Dryzek opposes Rawlsian and Habermasian

Deliberative Democracy

43

conceptions of “public reason,” however, on the grounds that they impose overly restrictive conditions on deliberation. “A more tolerant position,” he maintains, “would allow argument, rhetoric, homour, emotion, testimony or storytelling, and gossip. The only condition for authentic deliberation is then the requirement that communication induce reflection upon preferences in non-coercive fashion.” What this rules out is “domination via the exercise of power, manipulation, indoctrination, propaganda, deception, expressions of mere self-interest, threats (of the sort that characterize bargaining), and attempts to impose ideological conformity.”30 Dryzek’s broadening of the parameters of deliberative discourse, particularly his inclusion of rhetoric (not to mention gossip), is unusual and “goes against deliberative democrats who believe that the only kind of valid communication is rational argument.” He cautions, however, that while these less formal modes of discourse must be admitted, they ought not be viewed as alternatives to formal argumentation but supplements to it, and that they must not be admitted uncritically.31 Dryzek laments the partial convergence that has recently taken place between deliberative democracy’s two principal sources—liberalism and critical theory—and faults Habermas in particular for conceding too much to the former.32 This partial convergence, Dryzek maintains, blunts the critical edge that is an essential element of discursive democracy. What democracy essentially requires is not constitutional liberalism but an open-ended contestation of discourses where the aim is to transform opinions and so affect change in the balance of power among such discourses as well as bringing about agreement. Where Dryzek, Habermas, Rawls, Gutmann and Thompson, and so many others agree is on the basic deliberationist ideal that policies must be fashioned in ways that are acceptable and justifiable to the people affected by them on an equal basis, as well as on the more general aim of fashioning a more orderly and tranquil public sphere. The following statements from Dryzek and Cohen, respectively, are representative: “Deliberation by definition specifies that individuals must communicate about collective decisions in terms that are capable of reflective acceptance on the part of those subject to the decision.”33 “The fundamental idea of democratic legitimacy is that the authorization to exercise state power must arise from the collective decisions of the members of a society who are governed by that power. More precisely . . . it arises from the discussions and decisions of members, as made within and expressed through social and political institutions designed to acknowledge their

44

Why Democracy?

collective authority.”34 In a similar way, Habermas, in his writings on both deliberative democracy and discourse ethics, often speaks of that to which persons could (hypothetically) agree, in a sense that is ambiguously intermediate between that to which they should rationally agree (according to the theorist, deliberating monologically) and that to which, as a matter of fact, they do agree. Of course, an aggregative or utilitarian theorist, or perhaps any political theorist, would maintain that policies justified by their method are “capable” of being accepted by all citizens. The language of “capability” or potentiality risks compromising or watering down the original ideal of deliberative politics, which is not that citizens (real persons) “could” accept a given policy but that they actually would and will. What does it add to solitary reflection of the kind in which Rawls engages in A Theory of Justice, or for that matter Hobbes in Leviathan, to say that real persons “could” agree to such policies? The question is whether they do agree or are likely to if given the chance to weigh in on the matter. A question this raises concerns the status of public reason or deliberation, and specifically whether this is asserted to be a real or ideal (actual or counterfactual) mode of discourse. While it has been customary for democratic theorists for well over a century to call for increased public deliberation and (real) participation in democratic politics—one thinks, for instance, of John Stuart Mill and especially John Dewey no less than Habermas and Rawls—it is a call that at the present time is often highly formalized and restricted to participation of a rather specific kind. In its Habermasian and Rawlsian formulations in particular, deliberative democracy makes large demands of political deliberators, including the bracketing of a great many beliefs, values, and attitudes that characterize our particularity as individuals and as members of a culture. What counts therefore as a potentially convincing reason in political deliberation is restricted to a rather narrow range of utterances relative to what typically passes for democratic argumentation. In most formulations it is limited to judgments that pass certain ideal procedures or argumentative rules which under real-world conditions are, to say the least, difficult to realize. The formalization and rationalization of the concept of public deliberation make it eminently questionable whether anything that currently passes, or has ever passed, for democracy is the genuine article. As Bohman remarks, the “ideal approach” of Habermas and Rawls “makes it difficult to connect normative political theory to the practices of actual democracies and to real possibilities for democratic reform.”35 The ideal approach makes it especially odd that Habermas and others

Deliberative Democracy

45

should look to either parliamentary institutions, new social movements, or “informal networks of the public sphere” as fora for public deliberation given the less than Spinozian rigor one typically observes in their deliberations, if indeed “deliberations” is a suitable term. If a degree of idealism and rationalism is detectable in the concept of public deliberation that is the centerpiece of deliberative democracy in its more influential formulations, it is owing to the numerous differences between the ideal of deliberation and democratic politics as it is, or could ever be, practiced under real-world conditions (and what other conditions are relevant?). Deliberation is an argumentative, well-ordered, formalistic, inclusive, and egalitarian form of discourse. It presupposes a common orientation toward generalizable interests, the renunciation of strategic action and particularity, a general understanding and acceptance of the rules of rational discourse, a commitment to justice that supercedes the will to power, and appropriate fora in which such deliberations may be carried out. From politicians it requires a renunciation of strategic action and of the usual antics of partisan politics. It requires as well an advanced degree of good will, tolerance and respect for all opinions and differences, and acceptance of the legitimacy and rationality of majority decisions with which one personally disagrees. The conditions of deliberation so conceived are still more stringent than deliberation in its ordinary connotations. Jury deliberation, for instance, places a great many demands upon individuals that are already more stringent than the demands and conditions of ordinary political participation. Deliberation in this form presupposes not only an appropriate institutional structure and commitment to egalitarian discourse but agreement with respect to ends, an absence of hidden or private agendas, knowledge of the relevant evidence, a capacity to discern degrees of relevance and to see through lawyerly sophistry, an advanced degree of disinterest, and so on. Even personal deliberation regarding how one ought to act in a given circumstance presupposes a level of knowledge and self-knowledge, a more or less stable set of values, an array of options and a knowledge of what these are, and a capacity for intelligent choice, among other things. Public deliberation requires many of the same conditions and far more. The idealism I have noted becomes visible when we consider the possibility of these conditions becoming translated into practice. It is perhaps not an accident that a deliberative democrat like Habermas should prefer to limit his focus to large questions of political epistemology rather than to matters more pragmatic given the obvious difficulty of applying

46

Why Democracy?

this formalized epistemology to the world of concrete institutions.36 Some of the more obvious difficulties with the deliberative model include the possibility of political discourse meeting conditions of strict impartiality, equality and inclusivity, rational argumentation, communicative action, or even good will or the priority of the will to justice over the will to power. Democratic discourse is no graduate seminar in political philosophy, and characterizing it as deliberation in the sense in which we have been speaking of it dramatically understates the deep conflicts and complexities that invariably belong to the realm of politics. Consider, for instance, the apparently minimal requirement of commitment to reasoned argumentation in a spirit of disinterest and good will. Do we expect this from speakers “deliberating” across ideological boundaries, or in many cases even within them? Do liberals and Marxists, for example, deliberate together in a spirit of dispassionate argumentation? What about feminists and religious conservatives, or Republicans and Democrats? Do they attend one another’s conferences, read one another’s literature, or even speak to each other rather than past each other? Might they? Habermas’s reply is that obstacles to genuine public deliberation are merely empirical, that there is therefore no necessity to them, and that potentially at least, or in principle, they are eliminable. The reply has optimism on its side, but it is the optimism of the rationalist and the utopian. I shall return to this point in Chapter 4, however the reply I would offer to deliberative democrats in general is that it is precisely because political speech and action, particularly when they occur on a mass scale, seldom resemble authentic deliberation that we have parliamentary legislatures — to create a quasiagent that can do (or at least mimic) what the general public cannot: deliberate. Even there, however, deliberation is not exactly what political representatives do when they engage each other in debate. Strategic action, political struggle, grandstanding, adolescent point scoring, and war by other means are often more accurate descriptions of parliamentary debate than deliberation, descriptions that apply equally to the new social movements to which Habermas and others look as exemplars of public deliberation. There as well, the mode of political utterance one frequently detects belongs to the struggle for power and strategic action masquerading as communicative action — the very phenomenon of which Habermas is often an astute critic. (It is intriguing that Habermas and many other deliberationists appeal only to social movements of the political left rather than the numerous conservative movements within contemporary civil society:

Deliberative Democracy

47

nationalists, antiabortionists, fundamentalists and other religious traditionalists, among others. One wonders whether deliberation occurs exclusively on the left.) Even Rawls’s hypothetical moral agents do not “deliberate” together so much as strategize and optimize from the standpoint of private advantage. There is little that is genuinely public about such reasoning; private gain remains the operative premise and fundamental orientation of this monological thought experiment. There is nothing new in this idealizing and rationalizing tendency of deliberative democrats. It is a tendency that is as old as the Western philosophical tradition itself, with deep roots in Plato’s celebrated critique of the Sophists and repeated in endless variation throughout the history of Western thought. At bottom it is the sentiment that if only we could sanitize language and get everyone to follow the rules then at last we could endorse what passes for truth or justice in such conversation. If only the Sophists would dispense with their rhetoric and their fees and engage in the true science of dialectic; if only we could wipe the slate of belief clean and begin the task of thinking on the basis of clear and distinct ideas; if only we could conceal from moral and political agents their nongeneralizable interests or their particularity itself—then at last reason would have its day. Deliberationists take up this tradition and call for greater public deliberation—provided such deliberations bracket partiality, private ends, particular identities, inequalities, the will to power, strategic action, ill will, desire, rhetoric, shared understandings, culture, and tradition. Then at last we could embrace whatever consensus such deliberations produce. Yet lo and behold: the demos will not follow the rules. Therefore we shall take flight to a realm of idealizations and counterfactuals; we shall distinguish what people agree to from what they “would” or “could” agree to if only they were rational and played by the rules. Thus is born the state of nature, the veil of ignorance, and the ideal speech situation wherein the Sophists are conclusively defeated and Plato’s dream is realized. Is it mere pessimism to suppose that much of what deliberative democrats would eliminate from democratic discourse is ineliminable and that obstacles to public deliberation so conceived are more than merely empirical or accidental features of politics as it is currently practiced, that such features are universal and perhaps ontological? If there is more than pessimism at work here, the remedy will not consist in creating more or better rules but in limiting the scope of democratic decision making. This is a conclusion that many theorists on the left strenuously resist given that in the aftermath of Marxism (at least its

48

Why Democracy?

orthodox forms) the last and best hope of left politics consists for many in broadening the scope of majority rule as far as possible, and particularly to economic matters. The stakes in this theoretical debate are accordingly rather higher and more political than the empirical issue of the nature of, and obstacles to, public deliberation might suggest. Let us examine more closely, then, some of the empirical obstacles that deliberationists identify (a matter to which I shall return in chapter 4). The list of such obstacles—and it is a long one—includes much or all of what constitutes our particularity as moral agents: our forms of life, tradition, nonuniversalizable values and attitudes, customary or shared judgments, as well as our private will and identity. It includes further everything associated with the will to power: the imperative to prevail, to exert influence, strategize, struggle, and desire. These are to be bracketed off from reflection through the application of deliberative procedures, as we have seen. Yet what if these obstacles to reflection are simultaneously its conditions of possibility? When one transposes oneself into “the moral point of view,” however formalistically conceived, is it not precisely oneself that is transposed? One is not, by means of procedures or techniques of reflection, divested of all standpoint and orientation but that afforded by the procedures themselves, any more than historical consciousness transports us into alien horizons incommensurable with our own time and place.37 Political deliberation is never without a fundamental orientation that conditions, attunes, predisposes, and limits reflection in particular ways, that uncovers and conceals social phenomena in nonneutral ways. One no more brackets one’s moral particularity in political reasoning than in Cartesian style, by means of the method of radical doubt, one wipes the epistemic slate clean and begins the course of ratiocination anew. Moreover, even if we were to succeed in bracketing from political reflection who we ourselves are, it would be far from obvious what relevance such reflection would have for us. Deliberationists like Habermas and Rawls would have us accomplish not only this but what Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power insists is equally impossible: to eliminate from deliberation all vestiges of strategic action and power seeking in its myriad forms. Even apart from that doctrine it is an unlikely proposition that we could eliminate from political discourse and action self-interest and the motivation to prevail or to have one’s way in a sense that is not of strict impartiality. What we routinely observe in the practice of democratic politics is not the primacy of communicative action or impartial collective “opinion and will formation” but their veritable antitheses: politicians as entrepreneurs, political

Deliberative Democracy

49

parties as agents of specific factions or voting blocs, and activism as an openly strategic mode of action whose modus operandi is closer to intimidation than egalitarian conversation. There is as much strategizing, sophistry, and sheer noise in democratic discourse as either public deliberation, impartial will formation, or even negotiation. Actually existing democracy is unkempt, not especially principled, and beholden to personality, and while there is nothing new or objectionable in wishing it radically otherwise, expecting it to become so—even as a counterfactual thought experiment—is a dream akin to the classless society or the peaceable kingdom. Conceiving of deliberative democracy as a reality, as capable of becoming one, or as a criterion of legitimacy does not bolster the democratic ideal but idolizes it and undermines it in the same gesture. If the fundamental idea of deliberative democracy is that politics ought not be a merely utilitarian or aggregative matter of tallying preferences but that we may justifiably expect political officeholders to justify policies to the people who are affected by them, and beyond this that we ought to maximize opportunities for discussion among officeholders and citizens alike (that, in Dryzek’s words, “democratic legitimacy [can] be seen in terms of the ability or opportunity to participate in effective deliberation on the part of those subject to collective decisions . . . [and thus] claims on behalf of or against such decisions have to be justified to these people in terms that, on reflection, they are capable of accepting”38), there is undoubtedly much in this idea that is plausible and attractive. In the end, however, one must decide whether one believes in the democratic process and in democratic discussion or one does not. What Plato and Aristotle realized but Habermas and Rawls may not is that democracy and rationalism do not mix. Democratic speech is a thing of this world; it cannot be made to follow the rules of Habermasian or Rawlsian argumentation, and “ideology” and “systematic distortion” remain permanent, ineliminable possibilities. If it is guarantees that we seek, we must either reject democracy (Plato and Aristotle), supplement it with a conception of constitutional justice (Rawls), or take flight into the transcendental (Habermas). Efforts to combine informal democratic discussion with rational (or rationalist) argumentation typically give rise to the following line of argument. First, the theorist proposes the need for public reasoning and deliberation, in contrast to simple aggregation or utilitarian preference tallying (an idea that is not of recent vintage, but that was first articulated by the Greeks). However, worries quickly ensue: what about hegemony, ideology, systematic distortion, irrationality, rhetoric, appeals

50

Why Democracy?

to emotion, or mere sophistry? The solution for many is to replace real discourse with ideal discourse. If the people themselves will not follow the rules of rational argumentation we shall invent hypothetical deliberators who will. If this maneuver is too idealistic or rationalistic, we shall reintroduce elements of real discourse, relax the rules somewhat, and speak no longer of what citizens rationally should or factually do agree to but of that to which they “could” or are “capable” of agreeing. 39 Thus Dryzek, Gutmann, and Thompson provide less austere conceptions of deliberation than Habermas and Rawls: “Deliberative democratic theory [Gutmann and Thompson write] . . . suggests that deliberation is generally the best way to arrive at just decisions, or, more accurately, the least unsatisfactory. . . . Those who are certain that justice is on their side should at least recognize that imposing this view on others requires a further step: trying to persuade those others that there are good reasons for this view.”40 This somewhat relaxed position is less vulnerable to charges of idealism or rationalism than what Habermas and Rawls propose, however it quickly takes on an appearance of banality. What originally made talk of “deliberation” philosophically interesting was precisely its idealism: democratic politics can be more than a merely aggregative affair of tallying unreflective preferences but can aspire to be a properly deliberative practice, like other forms of rational deliberation. What in practice this comes to is for the most part modest efforts in persuasion, yet when have legislators not done this? To take Gutmann and Thompson’s example, even the Bush administration—not an administration that is often given to high-level deliberation—gave reasons for invading Iraq; the trouble was that the reasons were thin rationalizations (something approximating a knee-jerk reaction and rationalization after the fact) for a position that was dogmatically held, good reason or no. If this is deliberative democracy in action, it is difficult to see how it represents an advance, or even to what it is opposed. Indeed, political rulers seldom refuse to give reasons for their policies or to engage in persuasion, whether they be democrats or not. The problem is that the reasons are often very bad reasons. Even Plato could (and did) argue that the citizens of his ideal republic, whatever their social class, “could” or have “reason to accept” being ruled by a philosopher-king. To be plausible, the theory of deliberative democracy must not lose touch with the practice that is actually existing political discourse. In much of the literature, as I have noted, a subtle shift occurs from the eminently sensible plea for deliberation or dialogue to idealized or rationalized conceptions of this, a shift from reason to rationalism. What is

Deliberative Democracy

51

impossible, if democracy is to be a thing of this world and not a philosopher’s fiction, is a rational epistemology or set of argumentative rules for political speech. In the end, one must decide whether one believes in ordinary forms of political conversation and in the democratic process or one does not. It is well and good to call for a higher level of discussion regarding politics—who could oppose this?—but something dubious happens when theorists begin to speak of “public deliberation” as an ideal, a slide from an aspiration—a bit of political eros or mythos—to an epistemology — to episteme or logos. Philosophers have always aspired to deliver us “from mythos to logos,” but in the case of democracy a bit of caution is in order. My suggestion here, which I shall expand upon later, is that should we wish to speak of democracy as a politics of deliberation, we ought to regard this more as an aspiration, perhaps as a trope or a bit of political eros, than as a normative ideal in the usual sense. Theorizing democracy may well serve not only the usual function of theory construction but an imaginative purpose as well, to allow us to aspire and to dream. What it must not do, however, is become otherworldly or lose touch with the practice of actually existing democracy. It must not in its imaginings lose sight of the fact that the democratic ideal must be applicable in practice if it is to be at all useful. If there is a sense in which democracy is indeed “to come,” as Jacques Derrida imaginatively puts it, it remains that it is also here and now; indeed it is, as Nietzsche would say, “human, all too human.”41 If regarded as a trope or a plea, a bit of political reverie perhaps, deliberative democracy is entirely unobjectionable — but of course this is not how the idea is generally presented. Were it so regarded, deliberative democracy may serve not only as a worthy ideal but indeed as a reminder of liberal democracy’s own animating spirit, in spite of the fact that in several of its formulations it is presented as an alternative to it. It may well serve to remind liberals of the originally revolutionary, emancipatory, and participatory spirit of liberal politics— that is, before liberalism emerged as the dominant political form of modernity and, rather quickly thereafter, became moribund. As such a reminder, or perhaps corrective, it provides a useful and attractive account of the democratic idea. Insofar, however, as deliberative democracy constitutes a rejection of constitutional liberalism, it is likely to place human rights on too contingent a basis. For as long as the rights of individuals and minorities, and indeed majorities, are subject to majority decision, rather than constituting “trumps” or inviolable constraints on democratic majorities, they are contingencies at best and, if history is any

52

Why Democracy?

guide, are likely to be sacrificed when competing considerations of national security or calculations of social utility seem to require it. Finally, the distinction between discourse and violence to which deliberative democrats draw our attention is both useful and important, and it is one to which I shall return in what follows. Deliberative democrats, as I shall argue, are correct in the assertion that between discourse and violence it is necessary to choose. Where some deliberationists err is in inflating this important distinction into a full-fledged dichotomy, one in which public deliberation is spoken of as an overly sanitized and potentially power-free mode of discourse. Democratic speech is too agonistic and rhetorical ever to satisfy the deliberationist ideal in its more influential formulations. Political discourse is invariably oriented toward rhetoric as much as it is toward public-spiritedness. Making this case requires some phenomenological investigation into the mode of speech of which we have been speaking, which is the task to which I now turn.

CHAPTER 4

A Modest Phenomenology of Democratic Speech

A

s i have noted, political philosophy from its inception has endeavored to sanitize the language of politics in both its theoretical and practical forms, and is continuous in this respect with efforts in other areas of philosophical inquiry to separate carefully and decisively knowledge from opinion, rational speech from the irrational, emotive, or merely popular. Plato’s various critiques of the Sophists, the poets, and democratic politics mark the first large-scale efforts in the Western tradition to chasten, if not eradicate, forms of speech that fall short of the edifying and the true, efforts that are repeated in endless variation in the history of Western thought down to the present day. In the domain of politics the aspiration of philosophers has always been to domesticate epistemically the beast that is political speech, and most especially democratic speech. The warnings of Plato and Aristotle regarding the unruliness of a politics of the demos continue to ring in the ears of contemporary political theorists, including those professing an unwavering commitment to democracy (which is to say, all of us). Political thinkers of the present age are no less concerned to demarcate truth, or something closely resembling it, from the merely reasonable, probable, or persuasive to ordinary minds — for, as we are never permitted to forget, what an electoral majority deems persuasive may be so much ideology, systematic distortion, or manifest nonsense. Even political philosophers who have rejected foundationalism, undergone the linguistic turn, or even flirted with the postmodern typically share a profound and age-old disquiet in the face of the despised other of political philosophy: political rhetoric. 53

54

Why Democracy?

While rhetoric, as a matter of historical fact, belongs with politics and political philosophy from their beginnings, and while political theorists, wedded as they have long been to ideals of formal and rigorous argumentation, have more than occasionally strayed into the rhetorical domain, it remains among the fundamental aspirations of political theory to reject such an ill-reputed mode of speech as the rhetorical. It is no exaggeration, however, to characterize the entire history of political philosophy as one of repeated unfaithfulness to its own antirhetorical ideal, with rhetoric serving as the proverbial mistress that is invariably dismissed, yet only, and significantly (as novelists of old would say), “afterwards.” It is worth noting that the most devastating critic of the Athenian rhetoricians was himself among the most skilled of ancient writers in the art of rhetoric, employing the form of the dialogue, metaphor, and mythic prose with an artfulness that readers of Plato have never ceased to admire. Political theorists from Plato’s time to our own have been at once disdainful of rhetoric and skilled in its execution, never failing to have recourse to the dominant tropology of the times at strategic points in their argumentation. Yet the idea persists that we may and ought to aspire to a political philosophy, and possibly even a politics, that is free of rhetoric—and indeed not only this, but one that is free of ideology, domination, the will to power, strategic action, prejudice, partiality, particularity, and so on. Habermas is but one example of a contemporary political theorist in whose work this idea persists, wistfully imagining a day when political speech may be rid of all these distorting factors and more, and replaced with an ideal speech situation. Political speech would then constitute a thoroughly civilized, well-regulated, and impartial form of public deliberation wherein everyone followed the rules of rational argumentation and all empirical obstacles to the formation of a public will were overcome. As I began to suggest in chapter 3, however, perhaps such obstacles are not merely empirical but are instead ontological; perhaps indeed they are not obstacles at all, or not only this, but conditions of the possibility of political speech itself. As Benjamin Barber has noted, “at the heart of strong democracy [perhaps we could say democracy more generally] is talk,” meaning “every human interaction that involves language or linguistic symbols.”1 Whatever democratic politics is or ought to be, talk or speech belongs to its fundamental constitution. It is when the people rule that it becomes possible and necessary to converse publicly about what the law ought to be. Yet what mode of discourse is political discourse? What conditions,

A Modest Phenomenology of Democratic Speech

55

structures, or orientations characterize the “always already” of political utterance, and which belong to the unsaid but determinative in such utterance? It is not enough to call, as so many today do, for more extensive public deliberation, greater participation and inclusion in the democratic process only to misconceive that process or idealize it to the point where it does not, and cannot, resemble the actual practice of political speech. I propose, then, a modest phenomenology of democratic speech. To say this, however, is immediately to be confronted with the enormity of our task. An exhaustive phenomenological description of everything that might fairly count as democratic speech would have to include a broad range of phenomena from parliamentary debate to electioneering, political speeches proper, various forms of activism, social criticism, scholarly argumentation, and so on. The modest phenomenology I shall undertake will content itself with a broad and impressionistic account of this general phenomenon, highlighting themes that are at once fundamental and largely unremarked (and with due apology for any sacrifice in depth of analysis that the breadth I am seeking requires). My aims in doing so are both critical and reconstructive: the critical aim is to expose the unreality of democratic idealism in both its theoretical and popular manifestations, while the reconstructive aim is to sketch the outline of a democratic ontology in which speech holds center stage. If speech is the lifeblood of democratic politics, we shall misunderstand our own democratic commitment for as long as we misconceive the real workings, dynamics, and conditions of democratic speech. While I shall not deny Habermas’s assertion that political utterance invariably includes a claim to normative rightness (analogous to the claim to truth which, Habermas maintains, is invariably present in empirical and scientific discourse), and therefore contains a cognitive dimension that delivers political speech into the domain of rational argumentation, perhaps this does not express the whole truth. Indeed, Habermas himself would not claim that it does, yet as I have remarked in chapter 3 there is something dangerously unreal about bracketing off from reflection all accidental properties, as it were, of political speech, a maneuver that ostensibly permits us to examine the cognitive credentials of political claims. The premise of Habermas’s political epistemology is that it is possible to disentangle normative content from the rhetorical form in which it appears. Habermas is hardly alone in this view; indeed, the weight of tradition is so entirely on his side on this matter that one is hard pressed to identify notable exceptions in the history of political

56

Why Democracy?

philosophy before very recent times. Among nonphilosophers as well— among political scientists, activists, and politicians—the dominant view has long been that judgments about what ought to be may have their credentials inspected on the basis of empirical accuracy, precedent, and rhetoric-free argumentation. This view takes on comic proportions in parliamentary debate in which politicians decry in grandiloquent oratorical flights the “rhetoric” of their opponents. After well over a century of philosophical investigation on both sides of the Atlantic into the fundamental intimacy of thought and language, and an increasing appreciation in several traditions of language as a living and eminently human—indeed, “all too human”—phenomenon, one might have expected that theories of democracy in which language so centrally figures would have gained a more adequate appreciation of the living character of political language and thought. The phenomenon that is language, as we now know, is far broader than any mere formalism of rules or structural necessities. Martin Heidegger and HansGeorg Gadamer in particular have taught us to see language as comparable to a worldview, a universal medium through and within which phenomena in general come into view and, precisely as living language, as an unending process of question and answer, assertion and reply, and dialogical reciprocity. Language is, accordingly, forever in motion; it is a conversation that we join in mid stream and that, while oriented toward consensus, never reaches a condition of finality. As Nietzsche and many of his postmodern heirs have also impressed upon us, and sometimes overdramatized, human language is not the altogether orchestrated and well-regulated affair that deliberative democrats and others describe it as being or capable of becoming. In democratic speech we encounter not only oases of genuine public deliberation but struggle, desire, domination, will to power, mythology, resentment, communicative incompetence, lunacy, bombast, and sheer noise. All of this is no less of the essence of democratic speech than its nobler aspect and is found everywhere that democratic institutions exist or have ever existed. Consider, to take but one instance, what invariably happens to political discussion as it is oriented toward the masses, as befits the major portion of such discussion within contemporary mass society. Here I am reminded of Sigmund Freud’s hypothesis regarding group psychology and its universal tendency toward regression. Is there not a linguistic counterpart to this phenomenon which even those untrained in the art of suspicion may readily see? Consider some of the conditions of ordinary dialogue that are more or less held in abeyance in the usual course of

A Modest Phenomenology of Democratic Speech

57

democratic speech aimed at a mass public: a degree of consensus between speakers, or one that is found with relative ease; a common language and horizon of understanding within which agreements and disagreements alike become meaningful; relative ease in orienting discussion toward a communicative rather than strategic orientation; agreed upon terms of description and evaluative standards; a shared sense of the problem or question before us; an inclination to speak to each other rather than past each other for the purpose of impressing a mass audience; dialogical responsibility (meaning the obligation to respond directly to the claims of one’s interlocutor rather than skirt it for a strategic purpose); a degree of good will; and the capacity to listen. What manner of idealism is possible for a discourse in which even the elementary art of listening is in short supply, where listening involves not merely the strategic posture of registering another’s claim as a necessary prelude to destroying it but an openness to the possibility, however improbable, of learning? If the deliberationist’s reply is that this darker side of political speech is merely an empirical obstacle that may be removed through the careful application of technique, it is perhaps more than pessimism that gives us pause here. How plausible is it, for instance, to regard as a mere contingency the will to power within political discourse? What are the prospects of effectively subordinating this will to the will to justice or impartiality? In the wake of Nietzsche, Foucault, or even Hobbes, this proposition appears unlikely. Nietzsche regarded the will to power, correctly in my view, as no accidental property of human psychology but as belonging fundamentally to the ontological condition of human existence. More fundamentally, desire — not only the desire to heed the common good but to bring others around to one’s way of thinking— belongs to the basic orientation of political (likely all) speech. Desire invariably plays the same role in democratic discussion that it does within Freudian (and all) psychology: no matter what subterranean networks that civilization and repression force it to negotiate, it will inevitably reach the surface. If rationalist efforts to discipline political speech are correct in drawing attention to its cognitive import, they are mistaken in overlooking, or regarding as a contingency, its essential affectivity. Not only the affectivity of democratic speech but its fundamentally rhetorical character are routinely regarded by deliberationists and other democratic optimists as unfortunate accompaniments of argumentation proper, and therefore eradicable in principle. Again the weight of

58

Why Democracy?

tradition is on their side, yet what do we invariably find as we scratch the surface of democratic argumentation? The first item we encounter is a narrative structure, a trope that immediately announces our entry into the rhetorical domain. It is an “historical” narrative—one, moreover, of dubious accuracy: democracy, we are told, had its origin in a golden age at the dawn of Western civilization, an age that was followed by two inglorious millennia of dormancy before its celebrated rebirth in the modern period and final triumph of 1989. Democracy also belongs within a still larger narrative frame: a metanarrative of emancipation and progressive equality encompassing everything from biblical mythology to the modern Enlightenment to the various emancipatory movements of the twentieth century. Democracy legitimates itself not only by means of principled argumentation but by recounting history in a particular way, locating itself within a world-historical saga that contains an unmistakable teleological dimension. Would we wish to say, then, that the narrative quality of democracy, or its rhetorical tropology more generally, is extraneous to the matter of its philosophical justification? The more general question is whether the narrative and rhetorical qualities of political speech are mere contingencies or whether they do not rather belong to its essence or fundamental structure. If we look at political debate outside the academic setting, the second alternative appears more plausible. What ultimately explains the mass appeal, bordering on superstition, of democracy today? Is it the principled argumentation such as we might expect to find it in an undergraduate course in political philosophy that has won over the general population to democratic politics? Evidently not, not least of which because the classical philosophical argumentation for democracy has often been weak or ambivalent, and more importantly because the general public is not much interested in the arguments of philosophers. How, then, do we explain that certain ways of speaking about politics (or about anything for that matter) catch on while others do not, whether it be within popular or expert cultures? What accounts, for example, for the mass appeal of a popular political writer such as Ayn Rand? Is it that her premises are true and that her conclusions follow logically from these? Certainly not. It is that she casts her reader in the role of hero, standing alone and triumphant in a vilified world. We observe something similar among the more successful politicians; their ways of speaking do not convince so much as catch on, take hold of the imagination, or capture the spirit of the times (which may include venting rage). They do so, moreover, by means of slogans, quips, narratives, metaphors,

A Modest Phenomenology of Democratic Speech

59

images, and passions that add up to what is called a “vision,” invariably one that casts the voting public in a favorable light. It is thus that we may explain the phenomenal success of democracy: neither by its theoretical grounds nor by its practical results, but by its direct connection with deeper existential self-understandings, aspirations, meanings, and passions that are widely prevalent. Democracy expresses above all a passion for equality that is at once ancient and modern, Western and universal. It disdains privilege, hierarchy, authoritarianism, and asymmetry in human affairs, and in a time when much of the world is occupied with emancipation from one arbitrary power or another. This account, of course, is unlikely to satisfy the political philosopher. One can count on political philosophers of various schools to reply that while it may be true that where the general public is concerned rhetoric is the heart and soul of democratic speech, philosophers expect to be convinced through what Habermas calls “the unforced force of the best argument,” where argumentation is essentially a methodological and formalistic operation of thought having no structural connection to rhetoric. It is not only foundationalists who will assert this but political theorists of several traditions, from utilitarians to Kantians, contractarians, game theorists, critical theorists, and others. Indeed philosophers generally, since Plato’s disputation with the Sophists, have been accustomed to separating categorically the search for truth from the mere art of persuasion. As Stanley Fish writes: “The quarrel that Plato was already calling ‘old’ in the fifth century before Christ . . . , the quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric, survives every sea change in the history of Western thought, continually presenting us with the (skewed) choice between the plain unvarnished truth straightforwardly presented and the powerful but insidious appeal of ‘fine language,’ language that has transgressed the limits of representation and substituted its own forms for the forms of reality. . . . [T]he history of Western thought could be written as the history of this quarrel. . . . [T]he debate continues to this very day and . . . its terms are exactly those one finds in the dialogues of Plato and the orations of the sophists.”2 The dichotomy of philosophy and rhetoric is so ubiquitous in Western thought, and the elevation of the former over the latter so complete, that for centuries rhetoric has passed among philosophers as a term of abuse, a rough definitional equivalent of overwrought prose, sensationalism, and above all deception. The sentiments expressed in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment exemplify dominant philosophical attitudes both ancient and modern toward

60

Why Democracy?

rhetoric: “Rhetoric, in so far as this means the art of persuasion, i.e. of deceiving by a beautiful show (ars oratoria), and not mere elegance of speech (eloquence and style), is a dialectic which borrows from poetry only so much as is needful to win minds to the side of the orator before they have formed a judgment and to deprive them of their freedom; it cannot therefore be recommended either for the law courts or for the pulpit. . . . Readiness and accuracy in speaking (which taken together constitute rhetoric) belong to beautiful art, but the art of the orator (ars oratoria), the art of availing oneself of the weaknesses of men for one’s own designs (whether these be well meant or even actually good does not matter), is worthy of no respect.”3 That the choice between philosophy and rhetoric is, as Fish points out, skewed appears to be entailed by the intimacy of language and thought that the linguistic and hermeneutic turns in contemporary philosophy have brought to our attention. If philosophers increasingly speak of a reciprocity or mutual dependency of thought and language, theory and practice, reason and desire, it should come as no surprise should we speak, as some now do, of the fundamentally rhetorical nature of philosophy itself. “The new rhetoric,” as it has come to be called (owing to a book of that title by Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca),4 challenges the age-old separation of philosophy as a discipline whose object is truth and whose means are deductive and inductive reasoning, and rhetoric whose object is linguistic forms and their applications in written prose and public speaking. The new rhetoric affirms the productive philosophical significance of language and linguistic imagination, including the fundamental significance of metaphor and narrative in various fields of philosophical reflection. As language has assumed an increasingly visible presence in contemporary philosophy, and its relation to thought, understanding, and reason better conceived, the discipline of rhetoric as well has come to understand its own profound connection to reason and truth. As one commentator remarks: “The important transformations that have occurred in these two disciplines [philosophy and rhetoric] could perhaps be best characterized in terms of the classical distinction between res and verba. What has occurred in philosophy is, so to speak, a broadening-out in its conception of reality (and, accordingly, of truth) in such a way as to include language in the very definition of reality and truth themselves. . . . [T]his development is aptly summed up in Gadamer’s famous statement: ‘Being that can be understood is language.’ In a parallel fashion, the treatment of language in rhetoric has been broadened out such that it is no longer restricted to a matter of

A Modest Phenomenology of Democratic Speech

61

mere stylistics but has taken for its object ‘truth’ itself (and, accordingly, reality as well)—if by ‘truth’ one understands the various ‘truth claims’ that people, of whatever sort and in whatever circumstances, make about what they take to be ‘reality.’ The development here involves, in the words of Calvin Schrag, ‘a move from a rhetoric of expression to a rhetoric of truth.’ ”5 Contemporary philosophy and rhetoric alike have gained a more fundamental realization of the intimacy of word and object, the inseparability of form and content, and the legitimacy of what Gadamer calls “the probable, the eikos (verisimilar), and that which is convincing to the ordinary reason against the claim of science to accept as true only what can be demonstrated and tested!”6 The decline of foundationalism has entailed broadening the scope of rational speech to include not only that which admits of proof but what is reasonable and convincing within argumentation or persuasive speech broadly conceived. This encompassing of the rhetorical domain within philosophy, or overlapping and interpenetration of themes between these two formerly separate disciplines, is a consequence not only of the failure of foundationalism but of the phenomenological stance that accentuates the situated, perspectival, and dialogical nature of reason while also accenting in the study of politics (in Perelman’s words) “the manner in which the most diverse authors in all fields do in fact reason about values.”7 Well prior to the phenomenology of the twentieth century, of course, philosophy was already well aware that the basis of rational thought, or a sizeable portion of it, cannot itself be rationally demonstrated. Aristotle, for example, well knew that the basic premises of logic do not admit of logical demonstration. It is precisely, then, in the domain of first principles and invention that the positive significance of rhetoric—not only its ineradicability, but its ubiquity and methodological primacy—may best be seen. Consider, for instance, the fundamental significance of metaphor and narrative in both political and philosophical discourse more generally. Important advances in thought never fail to invoke a novel tropology that logically precedes and structures argumentation, argumentation that unfolds within a vocabulary or interpretive framework that is itself a product of linguistic imagination and rhetorical invention. Metaphor and narrative are pretheoretic constructions that gain acceptance not through demonstrative reasoning but by inventively synthesizing disparate items of human experience in ways that illuminate that experience in a more evocative, profound, or at any rate different way. Much

62

Why Democracy?

of what passes for philosophical advance and radicality consists precisely in the rejection of metaphors and narratives that have become hackneyed and the substitution of novel constructions that differently structure our worldview and allow something new to be said. This is readily seen in the history of political discourse where novel argumentative strategies arrive on the coattails of metaphor, narrative, and other rhetorical devices that make it possible to conceive social reality in a new light. Classical liberal writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, invoked a new and powerful tropology of enlightenment and liberation together with Romantic conceptions of nature and human origins and a host of economic metaphors. Underlying argumentation concerning the terms of the social contract (itself a metaphor) or the requirements of collective utility was a profound transformation in how human beings were beginning to be conceived in the modern age. A medieval worldview was gradually eclipsed by one in which the human being comes to stand in the world in the role of sovereign individuality, in political life as a free and equal citizen and existentially as the occupant of a terrestrial and scientifically knowable world. This transformation in worldview itself involved far more than explicit argumentation—political or metaphysical—but the introduction of evocative images, labels, metaphors, historical narratives, and meanings that contributed fundamentally to the structure of our human world. A new context of rhetorically charged self-understanding and existential significance gave meaning to political disputes regarding individual freedom and the powers of the state. Contemporary illustrations are provided by the new social movements of the left: here again political argumentation concerning rights, gender, race, or the environment is structured by what is called the “egalitarian imaginary” or tropes that in combination express a worldview of equality within which the political realm is preorganized. What force such argumentation carries is largely a function of the persuasiveness or evocative power of the egalitarian imaginary itself and the ability of an author to summon this and bring it to bear in a given area of political dispute. In party politics the phenomenon is still more readily observed. The persuasive force of many an argument here turns upon the capacity of politicians to assign a vocabulary of liberalism or conservatism to a particular set of policies or, more crudely, to affix a label upon one’s opponent or oneself. At present, for example, many an argument in the United States, if not entire elections, turn upon the ability of a party or candidate to characterize its own position as conservative and to cast its

A Modest Phenomenology of Democratic Speech

63

opponent in the role of vilified liberal. Labels, slogans, and metaphors have long constituted the principal battleground in the contest of political “visions,” some of the more evocative and hotly contested at present being “identity,” “community,” “family,” and “war.” This last term, for example, has long served as a bearer of meanings far broader than its literal connotation suggests, particularly in the American setting with its succession of “wars” on poverty, drugs, and terrorism. This rhetorical device has proven singularly successful in legitimating state action, mobilizing populations, and silencing dissent through the power of the word — a word, moreover, that accomplishes far more than merely describing a state of affairs, but that situates a given policy within an historical context, summons an established and culturally ingrained idea, conjures up images of valor, glory, and nostalgic scenes of victory, and casts the general public in the role of vicarious warrior and crusader for the good. As a trope, war invites favorable comparisons of a present action with the triumphs of the past, victories of independence and liberation that are fundamental to the self-understanding of a nation. It is no accident, then, that this word is regularly invoked by politicians. One can imagine the response of public opinion had Ronald Reagan declared “prohibition” on drugs or if George W. Bush had declared a “police action” on terrorism. Another rhetorical vocabulary that has proven successful in recent years accentuates themes of community, collective identity, and recognition, a tropology that again fundamentally structures much recent democratic argumentation. Political debate then turns upon competing interpretations of identity, and where identity is held to be some more or less stable item that we are called upon to recognize. As partisans, of course, political actors do far more than recognize identity in the sense of correctly identifying its political or metaphysical constitution; they construct, conjure, and confer identity as a mechanism of legitimation. Identity is invoked as a strategy of political persuasion, alternately unifying and dividing populations, delimiting boundaries, and in the usual course of things demonizing an imagined other. As tropes, identity and community evoke meanings, aspirations, and nostalgic histories that belong more essentially to the realm of affection and desire than reason narrowly conceived. To this, many a political theorist will reply that this is precisely what is wrong with democracy—that as it is customarily practiced it degenerates into a war of words in which the weaker argument is made to appear the stronger by the force of personality, emotionally charged

64

Why Democracy?

speech, and sheer guile, a judgment that some of the examples just cited appear to confirm. Yet even as the voice of Plato continues to ring in our ears I would urge that we suspend the normative claim for the moment in the interest of phenomenology. The question of what democratic speech is—and is invariably—possesses methodological primacy over what it ought to be. This is my methodological claim. My phenomenological claim is that while democratic speech in its disreputable forms is indeed rhetorical through and through, it is no less so in its reputable and theoretical forms. To demonstrate this we need not make the case that political philosophy as a discipline is nothing “more,” or nothing else, than a literary exercise in the sense of mere stylistics, one in which content disappears into form while the business of theory construction and application is essentially one of psychological appeasement or mere trickery. While there may be more than a grain of truth in this as well, I shall not make that case here, but instead continue to highlight the rhetorical dimension of democratic speech and political argumentation proper. A part of the persuasiveness of such argumentation is the capacity of a theory or theorist to introduce a compelling account of human history. As Ronald Carpenter has correctly remarked, “History can persuade.”8 It does so, in political contexts, by recounting historical and quasi-historical events in a fashion that selectively highlights and conceals, and that configures the whole in a way that allows certain particulars to stand out as politically salient while downplaying or excluding others. It is the selectivity of the operation that constitutes not only its interpretive artfulness but its persuasiveness to a politically non-neutral audience, an audience that is invariably disposed to hear certain themes, and to hear them treated in a certain style, tone, and vocabulary. “[T]heorists are at their most persuasive,” Joshua Foa Dienstag observes, “and readings of their works are richest, when the historical element in their thought is foregrounded.”9 The function of historical narration here is neither to entertain nor to pander to an audience’s prejudices but rather to situate, in the specific sense of emplot, a judgment within a temporal frame that is true to the experience and understanding of an audience, or that accords with an audience’s historical horizon and self-understanding as well as its aspirations. The ubiquity not only of rhetoric in general but of this specific form of it in political argumentation is unsurprising since, in the words of Louis Mink, “story-telling is the most ubiquitous of human activities, and in any culture it is the form of complex discourse

A Modest Phenomenology of Democratic Speech

65

that is earliest accessible to children and by which they are largely acculturated.”10 The persuasiveness, for instance, of feminist politics is in part a function of the historical narrative of gender inequality that it recounts, one comprising stories of oppression progressively overcome through political struggle and aspirations of an equality to come. By contrast, religious conservatives recount history in light of aspirations of their own and persuade by emplotting events and judgments in a fashion that rings true for a given audience. If feminists and conservatives seldom produce converts on the other side it is due not only to deficiencies in the logical force of their arguments but to the fact that the arguments themselves are embedded in conflicting historical frames, frames that are constituted by selectively recounted events, memories, and roles. That one does not win over an audience to one’s political philosophy by narrating history in a way that violates what one’s audience knows or strongly believes illustrates a more general rhetorical principle, first articulated by Aristotle, which is that when attempting to persuade “we must . . . take into account the nature of our particular audience,”11 and so tailor our message to what it is disposed to hear. This fundamental principle of rhetoric has been well understood since ancient times and dutifully heeded by authors and orators ever since, not least by those professing a blanket disdain for rhetoric. Adjusting or “pitching” a discourse to a specific audience is a mechanism of persuasion less objectionable on the face of it than most of what traditionally goes under the name of rhetoric, yet that it represents a discovery of that discipline is indubitable. So as well is what Aristotle called the “proof from character,” meaning the persuasiveness that stems from the credibility of an author as evidenced by such factors as scholarly credentials, reputation, previous publications, and the number of footnotes he or she is able to marshal. While the proof from character or credibility — which, of course, is not a proof at all — is far from unproblematic, there is no denying the rhetorical imperative that behooves every writer and speaker to gain credibility with an audience by arguing within accepted terms of discourse or by changing these terms for reasons that are stated or that an audience can be expected to see. One thinks, for instance, of certain popular writers of philosophy (among whom Ayn Rand is again not a bad example) who quickly alienate a large portion of their readership through their lack of philosophical learning, as evidenced for example by the inability to interpret accurately an opponent’s position before

66

Why Democracy?

attempting to discredit it. Contrast this with the experience of reading an author of obvious and broad erudition and the anticipation that perhaps we have something to learn from his or her text. Gadamer has noted that “the ubiquity of rhetoric, indeed, is unlimited,”12 a remark that is not to be taken as disparaging or a comment on the frailty of human reason but in the true spirit of phenomenology. In the realm of politics it is an observation that is especially difficult to deny, yet deny it, heatedly and in one voice, is what political philosophy has done since its inception. I have cited Kant in this connection above, and the point is equally well illustrated by John Locke, who wrote in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (in a chapter entitled “Of the Abuse of Words”): “Since wit and fancy finds easier entertainment in the world than dry truth and real knowledge, figurative speeches and allusion in language will hardly be admitted as an imperfection or abuse of it. I confess, in discourses where we seek rather pleasure and delight, than information and improvement, such ornaments as are borrowed from them can scarce pass for faults. But yet, if we would speak of things as they are, we must allow that all the art of rhetoric, besides order and clearness, all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheats.”13 One might expect to find, then, when we turn to Locke’s political writings a methodological and stylistic purity that forswears rhetorical strategies entirely, and of course we find nothing of the kind. While Locke’s commentators have been slow to observe this, concentrating solely on the arguments as we find them set out in the Second Treatise of Government and lesser texts, Locke employed an impressive array of tropes and rhetorical devices that lend both structure, meaning, and force to his argumentation. Locke was not only an abstract moralist but a revolutionary and an historian, or quasi-historian. It is no mere accident of style that in demonstrating the philosophical basis of the state Locke provided his readers precisely with an historical tale of origins in the primeval forests of “America” or its mythical European counterpart. Political legitimacy, as it was for Hobbes before him and countless others after him, was for Locke a direct entailment not merely of what rational citizens rationally consent to but of what at the origin of civilization they did consent to (actually or hypothetically), terms that bind the present and the future no less than the past. Locke’s text persuades by emplotting historical events in a narrative that at once casts the reader in the role of sovereign individuality (sovereign morally,

A Modest Phenomenology of Democratic Speech

67

politically, ontologically, epistemologically, and metaphysically), recounts human origins in a manner consistent with, but independent of, Genesis—thereby providing a secular alternative to the biblical account of Robert Filmer that stops short of rejecting that account root and branch—and looks forward to a day of liberation when the king is at last put in his place and freedom and equality, and property rights, prevail. Dienstag offers a similar reading: “It is not usually thought that Locke’s efforts in the Second Treatise constitute an attempt to write a new history or to create new memories intended to supplant the existing ones of political authority. My argument is that the Second Treatise provides its readers with an alternative to traditional histories of royal rule. It supplies a rival vocabulary and plot with which to constitute history. It challenges the prevailing account of the past with its own. As a result, its readers understand the present as a point in a different narrative—a sequence of events with a different direction. And direction here means both trajectory and injunction. This new history has the effect of changing its readers’ understanding of their historical position — of changing, in effect, who they are. It lends historical, as well as moral, justification to the overthrow of an arbitrary and tyrannical ruler. The State of Nature is not meant merely as a physical incarnation of political ideals but as a representation of a past more ‘true’ than the alternatives—and specifically truer than the ersatz biblical history that Filmer presented.”14 Complementing the narrative structure of Locke’s account is a vocabulary of metaphors, images, roles, and quasi-memories in which economic themes prevail. The force of the social contract narrative is in no small measure a function of the evocative power of the tropology of contracts, money, and labor that Locke ingeniously transferred from the realm of the economic to the political—ingeniously because seamlessly and in such a way that we are led to overlook its essentially metaphorical character and must be reminded even today that economics and politics are distinct spheres that only in some respects overlap. Locke’s moral agents—and readers—are a new and decidedly modern type of human being: in a word, sovereign, beholden no longer to arbitrary power or the authority of tradition, capable of choosing values and beliefs independently and making its way in the world in a condition of radical freedom. A large part of the persuasiveness of the Second Treatise to a liberal audience stems directly from the characteristically modern self-understanding that lends it meaning and force. It is no accident that many nonliberals of the present reject not only Locke’s

68

Why Democracy?

argumentation but the metaphors, historical narrative, self-understanding, and existential aspirations that underlie it. Locke’s contemporary offspring—contractarians such as John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and David Gauthier—take up Locke’s political problematic and urge us to do the same, yet what is unspecified in the argumentation of such authors is why we ought to take up this particular problematic. It is only given a certain rhetorical, and philosophically undecideable, selfunderstanding that the contractarian problematic becomes meaningful. Why should we play the contractarian’s game? is the more fundamental question, we who are not animated by its tacit self-conception and unimpressed with its economistic tropology. A contemporary political theorist no less disdainful of rhetoric than Locke or Kant is Habermas. Hardly a literary figure, or noted stylist, Habermas appears to personify the anti-rhetorical ideal, the pure technician and scientist. Here at last, it seems, is a political theorist faithful to the ideal of argumentation that is free not only of rhetorical artifice but of distortion, ideology, manipulation, and passion, the cold voice of reason itself. Habermas himself encourages this reading by dwelling on the cognitive, argumentative, and formalistic dimension of political discourse and warning of the corruptive power of language and the danger of “systematically distorted communication.” And yet what we find in Habermas’s political writings is once again a narrative, not to be sure the classical liberal tale of the state of nature and the social contract, but an “historical” narrative more powerful still. This is what Paul Ricoeur has called the narrative or tradition of emancipation, “that of liberating acts, of the Exodus and the Resurrection,” and extending into the modern period of Enlightenment, liberal politics, Marxism, feminism, and other ways of thinking that understand themselves as emancipatory. “Perhaps,” as Ricoeur notes, “there would be no more interest in emancipation, no more anticipation of freedom, if the Exodus and the Resurrection were effaced from the memory of mankind.”15 If Habermas, as a secular thinker, would be loath to situate his critical theory of society in a narrative stemming from the Old Testament, it remains that the rhetorical force and meaning of the emancipation critical theory promises stem not only from an ethical-political narrative but from the oldest such narrative in the history of the West. Consider as well the basic problematic that animates Habermas’s entire project: We the masses of the late modern capitalist West are victims of ideology; our practices and consciousness are products of

A Modest Phenomenology of Democratic Speech

69

domination of which we are largely unaware; yet we must not fear, for there is a path to enlightenment; enlightenment brings emancipation, and by the grace of good fortune there are certain individuals who are sufficiently enlightened as to show the rest of us the way. If Habermas does not tell us that we have nothing to lose but our chains, he does what is more persuasive still: invoke the name of the one who did, and at a time when it was still possible to say such things. If today the oratorical flights of The Communist Manifesto no longer persuade, then what does is summoning the name of its author—in measured tones, of course, and preferably in highly technical prose. This strategy allows us to appropriate Marx’s conclusions, or some of them, without the somewhat problematic argumentation on which they are based. This leads me to a further observation regarding Habermas as rhetorician. Readers of that author never fail to note the highly technical and jargon-laden character of Habermas’s prose, including (significantly) in contexts where the demands of clarity and precision do not seem to require it. Within expert cultures, of course, highly technical forms of expression are often requirements of the field itself; one cannot articulate a scientific hypothesis, for instance, without speaking the language of science or one of its specialized tributaries. Yet perhaps there is more to the story than this. As every student of philosophy knows (and not only them), technical jargon translates directly into credibility and authority, just as opaqueness creates for many readers an intoxicating air of mystery and profundity. This is a modern form of Aristotle’s proof from character—where, that is, an advanced degree of technicality is not a requirement of precision or rigor but is rather an author’s chosen manner of expression. If Habermas’s research appears nonrhetorical, even antirhetorical, this is not only an illusion but a widespread and singularly successful one within expert cultures. Because of rhetoric’s long-suffering reputation within these cultures in particular, the rhetoric that gains purchase is the one that is able to hide itself behind a guise of pure technique or the language of fact. Arthur Danto has noted: “It may in fact be that, even in the most objective sort of writing, rhetoric is unavoidable. It may be that the very use of objective sorts of writing is rhetorical in its own right, its rhetorical purpose being to assure the reader that these are but the facts, speaking for themselves.”16 In the present age of science it is scientific vocabularies that accomplish this most successfully, followed by vocabularies that can be made to appear scientific, analytical, rigorously technical, jargon laden, and value

70

Why Democracy?

neutral. Since Hobbes heralded the arrival in the seventeenth century of a politics that henceforth was to be wedded to modern science, the rhetorical power of this new authority has been summoned by a long line of political writers of various traditions and orientations, including Habermas himself. In each case we are given to believe, often tacitly or indirectly, that a particular configuration of policies or values receives the confirmation of scientific knowledge. Habermas, for instance, maintains that his own conception of politics is empirically corroborated by Lawrence Kohlberg’s ostensibly scientific investigations in the field of moral developmental psychology. What he does not tell us is why political philosophy requires such confirmation. As a rhetorical matter the answer is clear: in an age when science is universally regarded as the highest arbiter of knowledge in most any domain, credibility and respectability proceed from an author’s ability to invoke convincingly the name of science and to affix it to his or her political position while making it appear that it is merely the facts revealing themselves to our disinterested gaze. I have suggested that the explanation of the overwhelming support that democracy currently enjoys consists less in the formal merits of its justificatory argumentation or its practical results than in the effectiveness of its dominant metaphors, narratives, aspirations, meanings, and self-understanding which together constitute a tropology more evocative and formidable than its rivals. It is a tropology of equality above all else—of antihierarchy, antiprivilege, and antiauthoritarianism—one in which human relations both ethical and political are symmetrically structured in principle, if not always in fact, and every person counts for no more or less than one. Democracy is not only a set of institutional arrangements in which the majority rules but an historical saga of the overcoming of injustice in the specific form of hierarchy, a saga that defines the present in quite specific terms within a larger framework of past and future, a narrative of progress and overcoming, and which implies an audience of the equitable and the virtuous. Democracy may also be seen as the political manifestation of the larger postmodern tropology of difference, divergence, otherness, and disruption of all monolithic sameness, finality, and convergence, a tropology that again conceives of our existential condition and self-understanding in very specific ways while appealing as well to imagination and desire no less than the intellect. If democratic speech is invariably rhetorical, it succeeds not merely by “appealing to the emotions” in the sense that has long aroused the contempt of philosophers (a maneuver that amounts

A Modest Phenomenology of Democratic Speech

71

to sophistry rather than rhetoric), but by displacing rival vocabularies and connecting directly to existential themes, aspirations, and meanings. It succeeds through its capacity to “say something” that resounds with a given audience, something that is “telling” or that “speaks to us”—which always means that it speaks to us as the people we are, who we take ourselves to be, or more telling still, who we aspire to be. It is in this sense that rhetoric is not a contingency but a condition of the possibility of democratic speech.17 I should like to end this chapter with a few observations regarding the present condition of democratic speech in its rhetorical dimension. It is frequently remarked by social critics on the left (Habermas in particular) that the capitalist or liberal democracies of the West are in the midst of a “legitimation crisis.” If there is anything to be said for this view, the causes may lie less in the domain of political economy than in political tropology as I have been speaking of it—in the realm, that is, of the narratives and metaphors by which we live as political agents, the dominant vocabularies and ways of speaking about social reality that underlie and structure democratic argumentation. If, as Richard Kearney notes, “the old Master Narratives — of Judaeo-Christian redemption, Revolutionary Liberation or Enlightenment Progress—are for many no longer engaging Western imagination and belief,”18 this is not something in itself to be regretted, yet what may be is the condition of democratic speech as we presently find it — in which fundamental concepts and metaphors that assumed their present forms in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries today appear hackneyed or anachronistic while vocabularies of more recent vintage ring somewhat hollow. If there was an age when notions of “community,” “the common good,” “the public interest,” or “the general will” possessed genuine significance—as expressions that stood in historically meaningful opposition to the will of the king, the church, or the aristocracy—the same cannot be said at the present time, when “community” is in the first instance an expression of nostalgic yearning and “the public interest is,” as one commentator remarks, “the rhetorical device [in the bad sense] for getting one’s way in politics.”19 Metaphors and tropes generally tend to have a limited lease on life and become hackneyed expressions that lose their relevance and begin to conceal more than they reveal with advanced age, and it is little wonder that political vocabularies of ancient or early modern origin have lost much of their evocative power or have deteriorated into clichés. If it belongs to the present either to appropriate creatively and critically the political vocabularies of the past or to

72

Why Democracy?

renounce them creatively and critically, it is an obligation that may not be satisfactorily met at present. If many of the old political gods have fled, they have left behind a social universe that is somewhat depleted of significance, where old notions of the general will, the common good, community, or democracy itself have been largely stripped of their meanings and serve primarily as verbal strategies. Vocabularies of more recent origin have not fared much better in this regard. Metaphors of economic, technological, or even military origin currently dominate much of political discussion as well as the broader culture. When moral agents are consumers — of utility, public goods, etc.—social reality is a mechanism, and politics is a technique, democracy is in the lamentable condition of being unable to speak about itself in meaningful terms and deteriorates into functionality and resource management. If the politics that is absorbed into technique and expertise may at long last signify the death of political rhetoric, it may also represent the death of democracy itself, for as Norberto Bobbio correctly observes: “Technocracy and democracy are antithetical: if the expert plays a leading role in industrial society he cannot be considered as just any citizen. The hypothesis which underlies democracy is that all are in a position to make decisions about everything. The technocracy claims, on the contrary, that the only ones called on to make decisions are the few who have the relevant expertise. In the time of absolute states . . . the common people had to be kept at bay from the arcana imperii because they were considered too ignorant. Now the common people are certainly less ignorant. But are not the problems to be resolved, problems like the struggle against inflation, securing full employment, ensuring the fair distribution of incomes, becoming increasingly complicated? Do not these problems, by their very nature, require scientific and technical knowledge which are no less arcane for the man or woman in the street (no matter how well educated)?”20 Political theorists ought to worry not only when the theoretical grounds of democratic politics are weak but when the rhetorical vocabularies that allow us to speak of democracy in meaningful terms are themselves impoverished and begin to close off possibilities of novel argumentation and social criticism. If the political narrative of emancipation to which democracy belongs has not yet run its course, as I believe it has not, it stands nonetheless in a precarious condition when economic and technological tropes structure our understanding of equality or human freedom. It is the nature of democracy, as a nonutopian or even antiutopian idea, to exist in a condition of

A Modest Phenomenology of Democratic Speech

73

dynamic tension, one in which real differences confront each other in the public domain and such “consensus” as is ever reached is limited, provisional, and usually temporary. The one thing needful for democracy today is to articulate itself anew in a rhetorical vocabulary that neither masks nor apologizes for the disorderly, agonistic, unkempt, and fundamentally unstable character of democratic politics.

This page intentionally left blank.

CHAPTER 5

Why Democracy?

I

s this a rhetorical question? Rhetorical, that is, in the bad sense: a question that is not a question, or the question that is its own answer. Has modern culture perhaps reached a point where this is no longer a meaningful question, even a possible question, given the apparent collapse of democracy’s alternatives? In an age when tyrants, fundamentalists, and hyper-traditionalists themselves proclaim a commitment to democracy, however disingenuously, is there anyone left who could pose this question in an intellectually honest way, where the answer is not self-evident and we are not merely seeking confirmation for what we already firmly believe and will continue to believe regardless of where our line of questioning may lead? At the Vatican even the devil himself has an advocate — a paid employee, mind you, of the Roman church, but an advocate just the same. Yet apart from outright fanatics, avowedly nondemocratic politics appears to have no advocate today, no articulate spokesperson who is able or inclined to state unapologetically why the demos should not rule but be ruled by a smallish subset of persons who cannot be removed by electoral means. In the best tradition of devil’s advocacy, then, I shall myself take up this role, to the point at least of posing the question that is the title of this chapter and this book: Why democracy indeed? The question is as large as it is difficult, not least because of the numerous other questions and presuppositions that it contains, many of which I cannot address here. These include the very possibility of the question and the point of view of the questioner. Like the devil’s advocate again, this questioner stands within a tradition—not perhaps that of the universal church but the very tradition of democracy from which 75

76

Why Democracy?

I am seeking some degree of critical distance. It will not, however, be a radical distance but a necessarily limited and partial one. As I have argued elsewhere, it is the business of social criticism not to sever all connection with the practices and traditions in which one always already stands but to achieve a degree of distance that is sufficient for purposes of critical appraisal.1 Another question concerns the kind of justification that is sought: Is it a foundation, in the sense that philosophers speak of it, that we are seeking, a demonstration based upon an epistemological or metaphysical account that has the status of a first principle or selfevident truth? Or is it a more modest justification that we seek, one that is not guaranteed to convince all persons or rise to the level of proof, but that is rhetorically (in the good sense) persuasive, reasonable, or at least plausible? Since critics of foundationalism have convincingly disposed of the first option, it is justificatory argumentation of the second kind that I shall seek, argumentation that attempts to provide a reasoned defense of our democratic commitment without the stronger claim to ahistorical foundations. Among the premises implicit to our main question is that the theoretical case for democracy has still yet to be satisfactorily made, that is, the philosophical case as distinct from the economic or narrowly pragmatic. It is a familiar premise in much recent democratic theory (normative, more so than empirical, theory) that we must overhaul the philosophical basis of democracy, that traditional arguments based upon conceptions of the social contract or the general utility will no longer suffice, if indeed they ever did. It is not that all such arguments are erroneous—surely they are not—but that they cannot do all the work that is required of them, that their logical force does not keep pace with the conviction that so many today have or account for its apparent universality. The traditional arguments are familiar: democratic governments tend to produce social conditions that are at once relatively free, peaceful, prosperous, and equal; democratic societies are self-governing and well ordered, in comparison at least with authoritarian states wherein the fate of persons is dependent upon the whims of their rulers. There is considerable validity in such arguments, yet they indicate tendencies only, as utilitarian arguments most often do—tendencies that permit exceptions and which in many cases may be mere accidents of history. It is frequently asserted, for instance, that modern constitutional democracies do not go to war with each other or degenerate into civil war, or not often. This too is true, yet is it the fact that they are democratic that explains this or might the values of popular sovereignty and peace be

Why Democracy?

77

likewise dependent upon some underlying condition that may be as much sociological, economic, historical, or even religious as political? Moreover, such arguments face considerable difficulties when we compare their abstract formulations with actually existing democracy, as I have remarked. As well, the traditional arguments typically depend upon comparisons with democracy’s rivals, as Churchill’s claim illustrates. While not a bad argumentative strategy, we usually expect of a normative ideal a more elaborate justification than this. “At least it is better than X” is not much of a justification of anything, much less one that is able to capture both the imagination and the allegiance of much of the world. The philosophical case for democracy must do better than this. It must provide a reasoned defense that overlooks neither democracy’s flaws nor its considerable rhetorical appeal and imaginative potential. Utilitarian arguments are unimaginative almost by necessity, resting as they long have upon a conception of human beings as simple preference maximizers existentially adrift in space. The attractiveness of any normative ideal means its attractiveness to existing individuals, situated selves who find their way in the world through understanding and self-understanding, language, practice, and imagination, and who exist in the mode not merely of actuality but, as the philosophers of existence taught us to see, of possibility and aspiration. The worthiness of an ideal consists not only in its practical advantages but in its conduciveness to that for which we individually or collectively aspire, that which transcends what we merely are or need, but that speaks to a higher purpose. More specifically, the philosophical case for democracy requires an examination of tendencies and dynamics not only of institutions but of democratic speech, particularly in its imaginative and rhetorical dimension. It must recognize that “rule by the people” is not a definition but an aspiration, a trope, and the beginning of a narrative that includes while extending beyond the political narrowly conceived. I have suggested that the popular success of democracy owes less to existing theoretical justifications or practical results than to its imaginative significance and connection with aspirations located in waters deeper than those usually plumbed by political theorists. Let me continue this line of thought by suggesting that when we debate the merits of democracy we are debating not only, and not primarily, the legitimacy of a principle but the meaning of a symbol. Not only is the language of democracy rife with metaphors, narratives, and other tropes, but democracy itself, as the word circulates within ordinary language, has taken

78

Why Democracy?

on an imaginative connotation far broader than its literal meaning as a theory of the state. Literally, democracy is a method of fashioning political decisions, yet it has become far more than this; it now stands the world over as a symbol and an aspiration both political and extrapolitical. Understanding the democratic, or any normative, ideal requires that we conceive of it as more than the conclusion of a syllogism but in its larger, rhetorical and imaginative, even mythical, significance, and its significance for real persons of varying descriptions and circumstances. As Richard Kearney has pointed out: “Every society participates in a socio-political imaginaire. This represents the ensemble of mythic or symbolic discourses which serve to motivate and guide its citizens.”2 It is a discourse that provides orientation and historical self-understanding, that defines what people have in common and what separates them, that delimits boundaries of sameness and difference, and that defines a nation’s place in the world. It is also a discourse that deteriorates into orthodoxy when its guiding symbols are not occasionally reinterpreted or when their symbolic character is lost sight of. Perhaps it is in this very condition that the democratic ideal presently finds itself. Answering the question, Why democracy? then takes us into the realm of both political reasoning and political poetics, two intimately related if not altogether identical domains, for it is upon the latter that the former explicitly draws and has always drawn (albeit usually unwittingly). If rhetoric and poetics are the proverbial mistresses of political philosophy it is about time that both be given their due. In terms of the history of the past century, the two dominant vocabularies have gone under the names of “liberal democracy” and “people’s democracy.” The first, in historical terms, won, leaving its competing interpretations to battle among themselves for preeminence. If the question, Why democracy? remains meaningful it must mean why this interpretation of democracy rather than a different one, why this tropology rather than another? If economic metaphors, for instance, prevail and human freedom means in the first instance the freedom to consume, and equality means equal access to goods, democracy itself becomes taken up in an economy of exchange relations and mutual back scratching; the public sphere becomes a supermarket of political consumers and a battleground of interest groups. In this condition it is little wonder that communitarians and others have come to bemoan the present condition of liberal-democratic “rights talk” given the crass note on which much of this talk proceeds, a note of entitlement, quasi-economic competition, and greed.

Why Democracy?

79

I have suggested that the one thing needful for democratic politics is to articulate itself anew, where this entails not radically severing ties with tradition but creatively reinterpreting it. To this end I shall divide my larger question into two more pointed ones. First, how ought we to interpret democracy as a symbol? What moral-political tropology allows us to speak of democracy in less superficial ways and to restore its potential for human liberation? This is a political question, yet one with a clearly hermeneutic and rhetorical dimension. The second question is more narrowly political: What institutional framework gives appropriate expression to the aspiration for democracy, where this includes a recognition of its justificatory rationale, its scope, and its limits? On the first question I must regretfully agree with Joseph Schumpeter’s unimaginative but empirically accurate analysis of democracy as a method of generating political decisions by granting power to elites by electoral means.3 On this assessment the essence of democratic citizenship is the right to vote in occasional elections. This in a nutshell is what democracy is—or, better, what it merely is. (I shall return to this point below.) As is so often the case with things human, however, there is far more to the story of democracy than what it merely is as an actuality. There is what it takes itself to be, how it is understood and spoken of, and what it is as a possibility. There is, in a word, its imaginative dimension. It is here, I contend, that the promise and the rationale of democracy are largely found. In pursuing this question further, however, a special difficulty arises. It is a difficulty not unlike that which Nietzsche faced in his efforts to overcome what he regarded as the defining crisis of nineteenth-century Europe and symbolized as “the death of God.” For Nietzsche, the collapse of ancient worldviews had given rise to the problem of nihilism, a profound and multifaceted crisis of modern culture. The gods of old had fled, or died, and left behind a culture that was existentially adrift. Nietzsche’s task therefore became at once to hasten the departure of ancient mythologies while also fashioning a countermythology to take their place, one in which his celebrated notions of the overman, the will to power, amor fati, and the eternal return occupy a central position. It is as both demythologizer and remythologizer that Nietzsche wrote, with both aims undertaken as self-conscious acts of reflection. However, as Nietzsche was also well aware, our aspirations and philosophical ideas themselves ultimately arise less from reflective acts than from the depths of the self (or “life”), from the realm of the Dionysian and the instinctual, for which reason Nietzsche insisted on regarding ideas as

80

Why Democracy?

expressions of an underlying, existential or “physiological,” condition. The special difficulty this creates shows itself when we undertake such imaginative reconstruction or remythologization as an act of reflection. The self-consciousness and restraint of philosophical reflection acts as an inhibiting force upon the Dionysian and the instinctive, of which the imaginative and mythical are expressions. How, then, is remythologization possible, particularly in an age of scientific and philosophical skepticism? The answer, I suspect, will come not from political theory construction in its more conventional varieties — utilitarian, contractarian, Marxist, and so on—but from the deeper regions of culture and the self to which Nietzsche so effectively drew our attention. This is the realm of the imaginative, of the instinctive or Dionysian, of our personal and collective aspirations for the future, and of our historical and moral self-understanding. It is here that the theorist of democracy must look no less, and indeed more, than our calculations of utility, our public management of goods, and our “moral intuitions.” Such a theorist is above all an interpreter of the culture in which he or she stands, and perhaps (if there is such a thing) of global culture—one who attends to a culture’s characteristic expressions and aspirations in their various forms. When we attend carefully, then, to the language of democracy— its guiding concepts, its symbols and catchwords — what is clearly audible is a hope and an aspiration. Beneath democracy’s disparate institutional forms and interpretations is a yearning for equality that is deeper than politics and that transcends it. This is an aspiration that is at once modern and ancient, Western and universal, political and apolitical. Democracy expresses the aspiration for a certain moral standing among one’s fellows, one of personal nonsubordination. It articulates a certain defiance, a refusal of submission, and a protest against indignity. Popular sovereignty and egalitarianism are but political manifestations of an underlying imperative of escape from servitude, bondage, and suffering that is needless and unequally shared. It is an aspiration best described as existential since it speaks to our fundamental being-in-the-world and not only what institutions accord with our “intuitions” or rational selfinterest. Democratic politics is, as Nietzsche remarked, fundamentally a revolt against slavery, a nay-saying gesture against an historical succession of powers, and the aspiration of suffering humanity to stand in the world no longer on a basis of moral inequality and indignity. (Nietzsche, of course, was very far from admiring this “slave revolt” in morality and politics, on the contrary accounting it a form of nihilism that, he held,

Why Democracy?

81

was symptomatic of a culture in decline. For our part, we may share Nietzsche’s analysis of democracy, at least in part, without drawing the negative conclusion that he did. Nietzsche was a lover of hierarchy in a great many ways, a turn of mind that for him is indicative of a higher form of human life. He was therefore almost constitutionally opposed to rule by the people since in his hierarchical worldview the multitudes appear as ill-fitted to political rule as they had been for Plato.) If we are all democrats now it is not because we have beheld the wonders of popular sovereignty and majority rule but because we have seen through the distortions and rationalizations that for centuries have masked abuses of human beings on the part of powers too numerous to list. This aspiration for equal standing was already identified by Aristotle, when he described the tenet “that all should count equally” as “the recognized principle of democratic justice.”4 It is observable as well from the guiding concepts of democratic language, a vocabulary that speaks of freedom and emancipation (as Plato already noted in the Republic), resistance and struggle, deliberation and dialogue, enfranchisement and disenfranchisement, progress and revolution. Its postmodern form speaks of alterity and difference, voices and voicelessness, hegemony and marginalization, participation and inclusion. The aspiration these notions evoke is at once political, ethical, and existential, and while its most impassioned expression has long come from the oppressed it is as close to being a universal phenomenon as any normative ideal. If, as Alain Touraine writes, “democracy is not merely a set of institutions,” but “primarily a demand and a hope,”5 its object is both formal—legal and political—equality as well as a broader cultural ethos or way of life that incorporates a philosophy and a practice that abolishes class divisions in their various forms. Democracy is, as Jean Bethke Elshtain puts it, “a spirit, a way of responding, a way of conducting oneself,” not “simply a set of procedures, a constitution.”6 This is an observation that Tocqueville already made in the 1830s when he spoke of democracy as the antithesis of aristocracy, but it was perhaps John Dewey who most aptly articulated the point. As he wrote, “democracy is much broader than a special political form, a method of conducting government, of making laws and carrying on governmental administration by means of popular suffrage and elected officers. It is that of course. But it is something broader and deeper than that. . . . The keynote of democracy as a way of life may be expressed, it seems to me, as the necessity for the participation of every mature human being in formation of the values that regulate the living of men together:—which

82

Why Democracy?

is necessary from the standpoint of both the general social welfare and the full development of human beings as individuals.”7 In principle at least, the democratic society is the classless society, one that refuses hierarchical structures and awards formal recognition to the equality of persons, and where this signifies less an equality of economic condition than moral, legal, and political equality. Postmodern discourse has perpetuated this way of thinking while bringing out more explicitly its aesthetic or imaginative dimension, sometimes to good effect and sometimes to excess. Its guiding concepts of contingency, incommensurability, otherness, difference, disruption, decentering, and divergence have certainly dramatized the egalitarian ethos—and often overdramatized it—while also reimagining its significance and potential in fruitful ways. If there had been any question of the contemporary relevance of emancipatory rhetoric postmodernists, in association with feminists and other social movements of the left, have replied (after a fashion) in the affirmative and in a manner that has sought to eliminate from such discourse all vestiges of metaphysical and totalizing thought. Thus Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Emmanuel Levinas, and other postmoderns speak of “différance,” “le différend,” and “the Other” (invariably in the upper case) in ways that express an aspiration for an equality more thoroughgoing and philosophically defensible than its historical predecessors. The writings of such authors insist in related ways on experiences of difference and resistance to all totalizing sameness and exclusion. Postmodernism adopts a self-consciously radical posture vis-à-vis philosophical modernism and premodernism in general, particularly their age-old proclivities for essentialism, dichotomous thinking, and marginalization. It defends the rights of “marginalized identities,” “heterogeneous voices,” and “small narratives” in the face of “dominant cultures,” “hypostasized powers,” and “metanarratives,” to use the current idiom. While postmodernists typically heed Lyotard’s injunction in The Postmodern Condition and elsewhere to dispense with metanarratives, of which the great worldhistorical saga of emancipation certainly qualifies as one, postmodern thought is almost invariably emancipatory in its fundamental orientation, albeit often at a subterranean level. Such, indeed, is the power of this narrative that even where in its grand form it is greeted with skepticism, it continues to operate, often covertly, and in a manner that may be still more thoroughgoing than when it is directly appealed to as an ideal. If postmodern thought challenges us to reconceive ethical and political relations in ways that avoid demonizing the other who defies the self,

Why Democracy?

83

who resists one’s own being or will, it is a more recent phenomenon to venture rather far in the opposite direction and to elevate the other and the different to a position in which it is effectively safe from the appropriations of the self. A variety of postmodern writers over the past few decades have put forward conceptions of justice that feature a new appreciation of the other, and that resist a certain prejudice that is commonplace in the Western tradition. “This prejudice,” as Kearney writes, “is called the ‘ontology of Sameness’ by Levinas, and ‘logocentrism’ by Derrida. Both share the view—one canvassed by a wide variety of continental thinkers—that justice demands a redressing of the balance so as to arrive at a more ethical appreciation of otherness. Such an appreciation reminds us that the human stranger before us always escapes our egological schemas and defies our efforts to treat him/her as a scapegoat ‘alien’ or, at best, an alter ego. Openness to the Other beyond the Same is called justice. For Levinas this relation to otherness establishes an infinite responsibility; for Derrida it establishes a summons to absolute hospitality.”8 If many have now taken this postmodern turn, what may now call for critique is the opposite error of elevating the other to a position in which it is now excessively transcendent. As Kearney has recently suggested, theorizing justice now requires a “double critique”: “This double critique requires a delicate balance. On one hand, if others become too transcendent, they disappear off our radar screen and we lose all contact. We then not only stop seeing them directly but even stop seeing them indirectly as this or that other. . . . On the other hand, if others become too immanent, they become equally exempt from ethical relation. In this instance, they become indistinguishable from our own totalizing selves.”9 He proposes therefore a mediation between self and other, sameness and difference, in which “the other is neither absolutely transcendent nor absolutely immanent, but somewhere between the two.”10 This eminently sane view is appropriately dialectical without falling back into yet another form of totalizing thought. While laudable in its intention, then, the politics of postmodernity can also deteriorate into an orthodoxy all its own, including a new form of essentialism. Given the radicality of the postmodern critique of essentialism it is surprising that some postmodern thought itself appears to allow through the back door what with great fanfare it turned out the front—a new variety of essentialist thinking featuring a worldview of collective identities, each of fixed essence, engaged in open confrontation, “resisting” each other, demanding recognition, and all too often claiming the status of a victim. 11 Each insists upon its alterity and

84

Why Democracy?

incommensurability, its right to resistance and recognition, yet too often in a fashion that resembles mere posturing or, worse, that is premised on an apartheid of collective and seemingly given identities turned inward upon themselves and not necessarily well disposed to their own others. In the cultural and identity politics that postmodernism has helped to usher onto the scene it is not always evident whether such identities are as committed to recognition or equal freedom for others as for themselves. While the discourse of difference has helped reimagine the egalitarian ethos that is so fundamental to democracy, and in ways that have helped restore the saying power of democratic language—its capacity, that is, to speak to the hearts and minds of a great many persons, many of whom experience themselves as marginalized—it is also a discourse that is prone to needless hyperbole. Difference (also alterity or the “Other”) is not an absolute, neither politically nor ontologically. It is neither a categorical imperative nor a first principle of our being, but the expression of an aspiration for equal standing in the world, an equality that is genuinely shared only when difference does not become a creed or orthodoxy unto itself. There are some indications that the discourse of identity, difference, and so on is beginning to wear thin, at least as an articulation of egalitarianism. Respect for differences is indeed fundamental to democratic culture, but overdramatizing the point or dressing it up in the language of radicality can undermine the very aspiration for equality that it seeks to articulate. At the worst of times, as Sheldon Wolin points out, it even raises the specter of nationalism: “Postmodern cultural politics follows in the footsteps of nationalism in insisting upon boundaries that establish differences . . . but proclaims identities as well. Here, too, the political becomes associated with purification or, more precisely, a reversal in which the stigma of impurity as well as the badge of purity are switched so that the pariah or victimized group is now pure, even innocent, while the dominant group is impure. Politics centers around the unmasking of the various disguises of oppression regardless of whether the alleged act has occurred yesterday, or in the distant past, or in an ancient text of philosophy, a nursery fable, a textbook, a modern novel, or a Senate confirmation hearing.”12 Collective self-identity, as I have argued elsewhere,13 can congeal or become introverted in ways that spell trouble for genuine democracy, producing a politics of quasi-nationalistic identity communities engaged in invidious comparisons and endless recriminations. Such discourse can also deteriorate into the trivial, as for example when the question of equality turns upon the matter of the relative speed

Why Democracy?

85

at which a given identity group is climbing the corporate ladder. In newly emerging democracies, by contrast (as the recent “revolution” of sorts in Ukraine illustrates), the rhetoric of resistance and emancipation continues to have real meaning in a way that it once had in older democracies as well and might have again. To postmodernism, democratic theory is indebted for the realization of the extent to which difference dwells within all unity, including the unity of the democratic body politic. It owes a debt of gratitude as well for postmodern efforts to inject some imagination into old notions of toleration and equality that from time to time must be thought anew. Thanks to the postmoderns we are all now habituated to looking with suspicion upon all talk of unity and consensus, and to keeping our ears attuned to different voices in whatever form in which they announce themselves. Indeed, we have grown acutely aware of the imperative of recognition of difference and otherness, yet however fundamental such an imperative is there are also countervailing imperatives that are no less vital to the life of democratic culture. These include fashioning unity within difference — a unity, to be sure, that has been chastened and deconstructed, that is nonessentialist and nontotalizing, that is mindful of its contingency and internal differences, but that remains a search for unity. Historically, egalitarian discourse has always been attuned to that which disparate persons hold in common, a shared humanity by virtue of which we are all entitled to equal treatment. How this shared humanity has been philosophically conceptualized is questionable to say the least. The notion of common humanity has traditionally assumed an ahistorical, metaphysical form, and in that form postmodernism is correct to reject it. It remains, however, that the identification, perhaps the construction, of some manner of unity within difference belongs necessarily to the struggle for democracy, even as we recognize simultaneously the difference within all unity. This tension between unity and difference in many ways defines the democratic ethos, and without necessarily sliding back into traditional metaphysics. When the struggles for both unity and difference are not recognized political life deteriorates into one of two opposite extremes: the first makes an absolute of solidarity or community while the second makes an absolute of difference, incommensurability, and otherness; on one side universalist orthodoxy and on the other an orthodoxy, a narcissism, of particularity. The problem is neither universality nor particularity but the turn of mind that construes either as a sufficient ideal. For the rhetoric of emancipation to be truly meaningful, rather than deteriorate

86

Why Democracy?

into a verbal strategy by which certain groups engage in resentment politics, it must admit of general application that reconciles abstract universality with legitimate demands of particularity. As Touraine states, “Democratic culture . . . rejects with equal force both the obsession with identity that confines everyone within a community, reduces social life to a space of tolerance, and thus paves the way to segregation, sectarianism, and holy wars; and the Jacobin spirit, which, in the name of its universalism, condemns and rejects the diversity of private beliefs, loyalties, and memories. Democratic culture can be defined as an attempt to reconcile unity and diversity, liberty and integration.”14 The aspiration for equality or emancipation is short-circuited when it is not generalized, a principle of which Hegel was well aware when he insisted that the freedom one demands for oneself be universalized to become the freedom of all, that the liberation that is not universalized is ultimately self-cancelling. Democracy has come to stand as the symbol not only of an equality more thoroughgoing than hitherto but of a necessarily universal equality as well, one wherein public differences are resolved by means of discussion rather than violence. The distinction between discussion and violence is central to this and many other accounts of democracy and is worth dwelling upon. Deliberative democrats are correct in asserting that between discourse and violence it is necessary to choose. Where they err is in inflating the distinction into a full-fledged dichotomy, one wherein public deliberation is a sanitized, well-regulated, and potentially power-free enterprise modeled on Socratic inquiry. Such inquiry affords a fine model for scholarly research and perhaps university-level education, yet it is hardly suited to politics in large, complex societies, and perhaps in any. As I have argued, democratic speech in real-world conditions is far too agonistic and rhetorical ever to satisfy the deliberationist ideal. Political actors neither are nor will become disinterested inquirers, impartial maximizers, or any other variety of discursive tea-totaller. Their words and deeds are oriented toward the art of persuasion, bringing others around rhetorically to one’s way of thinking, and seeing one’s own values reflected in public institutions as much as it is toward public-spiritedness. Indeed, public-spiritedness or civic-mindedness itself, where it is not a philosopher’s dream but an achievable ideal, is inherently confrontational and implicated in the will to power. Deliberationists like Habermas and Rawls are caught in a bind: they are proponents of informal networks of public discussion of which as rationalists they

Why Democracy?

87

must take a very dim view. They are democrats who do not believe in democracy, or any democracy that could ever exist on earth. There is a communicative rationality, however, that can renounce the more brutal forms of the will to power without becoming yet another form of rationalism, a discursive practice that is rhetorical, agonistic, and far from utopian (even antiutopian), but that is symmetrically structured and operates within the bounds of law. The conception of rationality of which democracy now stands as a symbol is the reason that is inherent to ordinary communication, including that which does not conform to technical, problem-solving, or utility-maximizing paradigms of thought but that draws upon ordinary capacities of practical judgment, social criticism, persuasion, reason giving, and negotiation. This is a nonformalist and nonmethodological reason the principal features of which are openness to communication and learning, a willingness to offer and receive criticism and to test its convictions against opposing values. It is a fundamentally undogmatic practice of identifying compelling arguments and fashioning reasoned, if limited, agreements, one in which no speaker enjoys special authority or insight into the truth about justice, and in which all alike share the burden of expressing judgments and defending them in the face of competing views. Communicative reason takes differences very seriously indeed, even as it remains oriented toward fashioning some manner of common ground, some overlapping consensus and temporary compromises with which we can live. It is a rationality that is at once rhetorical, critical, civic minded, power seeking, partial, and undogmatic. Above all, it is one that is prepared to negotiate, to compromise, and to lose as often as it wins. What communicative rationality is not is an ideal procedure whose outcome can be safely guaranteed, a political epistemology in the tradition of the social contract, the categorical imperative, utilitarianism, or dialectical materialism. It is closer to a symbol and an aspiration than a method, one that transforms enemies into discussional adversaries, monsters into opponents, and that applies the epithet of terrorism to the tactic of advancing political causes by nondiscursive, that is, violent, means. In politics violence is the only ultimate alternative to open discussion, and if it is objected that it is present in such discussion as well, perhaps in nascent form, one would be hard pressed to disagree. Yet it is all that we have and all for which we can reasonably hope. As Bonnie Honig states: “To take difference—and not just identity—seriously in democratic theory is to affirm the inescapability of conflict and the

88

Why Democracy?

ineradicability of resistance to the political and moral projects of ordering subjects, institutions, and values. . . . It is to give up on the dream of a place called home, a place free of power, conflict, and struggle, a place—an identity, a form of life, a group vision—unmarked or unriven by difference and untouched by the power brought to bear upon it by the identities that strive to ground themselves in its place.”15 The communicative reason of which democracy now stands as a symbol recognizes otherness while mediating between self and other by the only means available to it: open-ended discussion. Democratic rights of free speech, assembly, and belief in combination with equal voting rights and majority rule serve to mediate differences in ways that avoid both an excessively solidaristic politics, in which internal differences are minimized or denied, as well as varieties of identity politics for which the claim of difference resembles a call to arms or a retreat into segregation. The mediation that democratic politics undertakes achieves neither the solidarity of communitarianism nor the veritable warfare of identity and difference politics in their less moderate forms. It preserves and negotiates tensions of sameness and difference, unity and diversity, self and other, in a logic of back and forth which, in a dialectical and pragmatic spirit, resists all finality. It is fully appropriate that, as Wolin observes, “historically modern democracy and ancient Athenian democracy all emerged in combination with revolution. In each case (the fifth century B.C.E., the 1640s, 1776, and 1989) revolution inspired the creation of democratic ideas and radically enlarged the circle of political participants to include the active involvement of social classes hitherto excluded or marginal.” 16 It is appropriate for the reason that the democratic ideal is inherently dynamic and far more given to embracing change than resisting it. “Democracy was born,” Wolin continues, “in transgressive acts, for the demos could not participate in power without shattering the class, status, and value systems by which it was excluded.”17 This dynamic, transgressive, and processual nature of democracy is fundamental to both its practical and rhetorical success and stands in stark opposition to authoritarian and utopian politics that insist on arresting change once the goal has been realized. The democratic ideal puts a premium on institutional renewal, the proliferation of viewpoints, and the clash of values. It replaces totality with participation in processes, where the latter neither determine the conduct of individuals nor are determined by them, or where they are equally determined and determining. The rationality of democracy is thus profoundly dialectical; it is the logic of the back and

Why Democracy?

89

forth, the both/and, and the neither/nor. Philosophers since the Greeks have not been incorrect to warn of the dangers of this logic, yet as Friedrich Hölderlin was fond of saying (and as Martin Heidegger was fond of repeating), “But where danger is, grows the saving power also.”18 The danger that is so well symbolized by democracy is the danger that is posed by plurality, disorder, rhetoric, and open confrontation, and the history of the West is the history of efforts toward its general abolition. Yet there is a sense in which its abolition would abolish a vital dimension of the human condition itself, for it is our very condition in the world to resist totalizing unity, sameness, and stasis even as we struggle in other moments to attain something like them. It is against neither unity nor difference that democracy stands, but the fetishizing of either. Popular sovereignty is an improbable ideal for the reason that normative ideals have traditionally posited substantive end-states of one kind or another toward which humanity may pursue a direct path. From Plato’s ideal Republic to the classless society, political thinkers have proffered one ideal conception after another, many of them premised on equality, yet an equality that is less a process than a static condition, one characterized by a certain distribution of powers and social goods, in which the right and the good are known and roles, assigned on their basis, are discoverable by all. A philosophical defense of democracy, however, must articulate and defend its essential dynamism, its communicative vitality and rhetorical nature, its strategizing and will to power, its qualified unities and differences, its many flaws and its liberating potential. It is an entirely improbable ideal that prizes processes over end-states and that is mindful yet unapologetic of its flaws. However, it is also a profoundly human ideal, and in a way that cannot be said of its alternatives. Democratic politics is a noble yet fragile achievement, noble for what as a symbol and an ethos it aspires to be and uninspiring in what it merely is. It dreams of being a Habermasian conversational community or ideal speech situation while in reality it ushers in a host of power seekers and pretenders; it aspires to fashion a society without class divisions, yet only in a formal or legalistic sense does it succeed; it recounts stories of emancipation while remaining woefully incapable of remedying the most widespread and longstanding social ills; it was born of revolution yet remains as close to the political center as is humanly possible, daring not take a risk, but preferring instead to heed whatever prescriptions emanate from economic, bureaucratic, and technical imperatives. There is a sense, then, in which the fate of democracy is the fate of mortal humanity itself. It falls invariably short of what it understands

90

Why Democracy?

itself to be, the manner in which it recounts its own history, and most of all, what it aspires to be. It is the autobiographer who cannot resist flattering its subject. Yet so too are we, the authors and subjects of democracy, and a happy marriage it is. Such perhaps is the human condition, that even our ideals are flawed, that even as we try our utmost to clean democracy up, we cannot, and must embrace or despise the whole. The theorist of democracy, to dramatize the point only slightly, is the Old Testament prophet of our time, prodding mortal humanity into behaving itself by means political, ethical, or epistemological, and despairing of the result. If popular sovereignty is an improbable ideal it is due as well to the egalitarian ethos from which it emerges. Equality is an uninspiring ideal almost by necessity, calling to mind notions of cultural leveling, envy, and resentment of the kind that Nietzsche so effectively exposed and which are perhaps still more prevalent today than during his time. As normative ideals go, equality is rather pale, dull even, and except for the most subjugated it is uninspired. Yet in the wake of the century now past perhaps this is a key to its success. We have had enough of inspired politics with its visions of glory, its shining paths, and its genocide. Its remnants are nationalism, fundamentalism, and particularistic retreatism, yet if politics in the grand style must lead here, then perhaps we had better make do with a politics of civility and equal freedom. Indeed, if it is inspiration and strong mutualism that we seek, we would do well to find this in private life and leave politics alone. Above all, we must abandon once and for all the notion that by political means conflict might be eliminated from human affairs and that the business of politics is to transform categorically the clash of viewpoints into enduring consensus. The aim of political life can never be to eliminate conflict but to domesticate and civilize it, to turn enemies into adversaries by both political and imaginative means. Imaginatively, this necessitates rhetorical processes that transform terrorists and moral monsters into fellow discussants, hence incorporating these “different voices” within the political language community in ways that make it possible to examine and critique their claims rather than abolish them. It is most often the marginals and exiles who resort to nondiscursive tactics, yet even the fanatical more often prefer to participate in the political process, wherein their arguments may be freely advanced and freely disposed of, than to throw bombs from the sidelines. If terrorism is understood in communicative terms as the refusal to speak—the refusal, that is, to advance political causes through argumentation rather than

Why Democracy?

91

violence—it is a tactic that might less frequently be opted for if one had a right to speak.19 In philosophical hermeneutics it is the conflict of interpretations that is the ground of human understanding. It is where ideas clash and different viewpoints are brought into dialogue that insight emerges and that indefensible claims are refuted. Hermeneutic dialogue is not a model for democratic speech (were that it were otherwise, yet let us not wait for the day), however in this respect the two are not fundamentally different. Fanaticism, for instance, is defeated not through censorship but by allowing it to state its case before tribunals of public opinion and electoral competition, contests at which it does not always fail but in which its victories are usually short-lived. In democratic discourse the confrontation of viewpoints is thus both the problem and the solution, the Alpha and Omega of political life. The justification of democracy therefore depends in part on its capacity to preserve differences and negotiate tensions without allowing these to get out of hand. The practice of holding elections, to take the most obvious example, is conducive to social peace insofar as it constitutes a search for the widest possible agreement on issues, insofar as all citizens possess equal participation rights and minority views may gain a hearing and potentially become the majority view.20 It is conducive to peace as well in providing for regular and relatively well-ordered transitions. Theorists of democracy have long noted its capacity for peaceful transitions of power and for removing many of the conditions that give rise to violent revolution. It provides for periodic changes in government which effectively prevent a given majority or group of political elites from remaining in power for too long a period. Democratic states tend also to be relatively effective in coping with societal changes of various kinds, from transformations in moral attitudes to the ebb and flow of the marketplace. Unthreatened by change, democracy provides for this while preventing it from taking violent form and removing (or attempting to remove) conditions that would make revolution an attractive option or the only perceived alternative to the status quo. It is not only the peacefulness of political change that is a key to democracy’s success but, perhaps more importantly, its frequency. It is characteristic of institutions, political and apolitical, to require periodic changes in personnel and ideas in order to prevent the onset of stagnation that seems an invariable tendency of institutions of all varieties. That power corrupts we know from every page of recorded history—

92

Why Democracy?

and all power, both great and minute. But corruption also comes in the form of forgetfulness of an institution’s founding mission and raison d’être. With the passage of time, parochialism, routinization, inefficiency, and administrative self-interest have been known to set in within institutions of all varieties, requiring occasional shake-ups the purpose of which is to reinstate a mindfulness of the ends for which an institution was designed. (Indeed, one might speculate that in the history of most any institution one can discern a three-stage life cycle, from the birth of an idea and its organizational embodiment to stagnation to its eventual decline and fall. If in the beginning one finds the genesis of an idea that gives rise to an organization the raison d’être of which is to carry the idea into practice, an idea articulated explicitly as a mission that is typically well understood by an organization’s founders and employees, the second stage sees a gradual shift from commitment to mission to a preoccupation with personal interests unrelated to, and frequently at odds with, that mission. The institution’s raison d’être now goes without saying, and in this unsaid condition recedes to the background. As ends fade from the scene, means take their place and increasingly take on the appearance of ends in themselves. As preoccupations with employment security, remuneration, reputation, and advancement consume an increasing share of the institution’s energies, the result is its general enervation and decline. The institution’s ostensible beneficiaries decline in importance together with its founding mission, while one may begin to question whether the institution exists to serve clients or vice versa. The idea dawns that the institution now exists in order to serve itself. Stage three sees the forces at work in stage two reach their natural conclusion. Its mission having been all but eclipsed, the institution is now dominated by politics, petty egoism, and factionalism, and in time ossifies and eventually collapses. Bureaucracies, for instance, appear to spend a majority of their years in this stagnant condition, a possible reason why bureaucracies of all kinds seldom enjoy a particularly favorable reputation.21) Governments are the most liable of all institutions to stagnation and corruption since it is here that power intermingles with factionalism and vanity on a grand scale and the imperative to remain in office far outweighs any commitment to implement the policies for which they were elected. That democratic governments are replaced by peaceful means is as important as that they are replaced—often. The philosophical case for democracy rests as well on a certain skepticism regarding the capacity of political authority to know the good. When the Greeks posed the ethical question, What is the good? they were

Why Democracy?

93

seeking an answer that was at once philosophically demonstrable as well as general or universal. The good was a substantive conception of human life, one held to be nobler than other conceptions and that was proper to a rational being. Whether the good was one or many, an immutable Form or a variable quality, was knowable in principle — knowable in the first instance by the philosopher and, at least indirectly, by political authority (or where the two happily coincided, as with Plato’s philosopher-king, by both simultaneously). Liberal democracy rejects this idea, albeit in a qualified way. It favors more specifically the neutrality of the state with respect to substantive conceptions of the good life—when, that is, such conceptions are controversial and competing. It maintains that competent citizens will often disagree about the values and aims that properly orient human life, and that this ought not be viewed with anxiety or regret. Disagreement about what constitutes the good life is not, as it was for the Greeks, evidence of the failure of rational discussion but its usual and fully appropriate outcome. Differently constituted persons or collectivities uphold different values as a natural consequence of identities, self-understandings, ways of life, and ego ideals that are often philosophically undecideable and politically even more so. The neutrality thesis, as it has come to be called, is the political implication not of complete moral relativism but of tolerance and pluralism with respect to the ends that human beings pursue. The neutral state serves more in the role of referee than active participant in the search for the good, all but reversing the Platonic view of political authority as having a knowledge of the good that is unavailable in principle to a large majority of persons, the appetitive and spirited natures in whom reason is inadequately realized. Liberal democracy presupposes not perfect neutrality in the sense of a complete abstraction from all substantive commitments regarding the good, including any that may genuinely be shared not only by the majority but by all competent citizens of a given state. Imperfect or relative neutrality suffices here—one that pronounces no verdict on controversial ideals or ends that are contested by persons not readily dismissible as pathological or morally obtuse. Relative neutrality need not abstract from noncontroversial ends, although in modern constitutional democracies these may be few in number. If Plato and Aristotle were skeptical of the wisdom and virtue of ordinary humanity—a sentiment that seemed to undermine the democratic ideal—the modern democrat either rejects this skepticism or, more plausibly, shares it, yet while reserving a similar suspicion for political power, especially perpetual power. “Democratic political forms,” as Dewey

94

Why Democracy?

expressed it, “. . . rest back upon the idea that no man [including the philosopher-king] or limited set of men is wise enough or good enough to rule others without their consent.”22 The “without their consent” qualification is important, of course. For liberal democracy, while no one possesses privileged insight into the values or way of life that is proper to human beings, everyone possesses sufficient capacities to decide for themselves how they will live—capacities, at any rate, not grossly inferior to those of elected politicians. What Dewey called “the democratic faith” is that human intelligence “is sufficiently general so that each individual has something to contribute whose value can be assessed only as it enters into the pooled intelligence constituted by the contributions of all,” rather than judging a given contribution against an absolute standard.23 The democratic faith, I would add, is not a faith in the wisdom of majorities, but a belief in the possibility of creating by means of democratic procedures a semblance of equality and social peace. If democratic majorities cannot be expected to know the good, neither can anyone else; yet everyone may participate in processes in which questions of justice, civility, and mutual accommodation may be decided on a common basis. Popular sovereignty, then, expresses the idea that the persons who are affected by political institutions must have a say in how such institutions are constituted. If Plato was correct in maintaining (in the Laws) that democracy and monarchy are the two ultimate types of government, all others representing some combination of these, it is because political power must emanate either from the top down or from the bottom up, monarchy being the exemplar of the former and democracy of the latter. For most of human history, of course, power has been understood essentially on Plato’s model—as centralized in the hands of a political ruler or rulers, and as cascading down upon the people, a power that justifies itself on the grounds of superior knowledge or virtue, divine right, or some similar mythology. When liberal democrats of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries began dismantling these myths, they proposed that inequalities between human beings required moral justification, that power differentials were not natural givens, and that authority was illegitimate in the absence of voluntary recognition from below. The democratic idea became that in order for political power to be rational and legitimate, it must rest upon the consent of the governed, therefore that the people themselves are the rightful source of power. Responsible government was the only form of political rule that carried the principle of popular consent directly into practice, albeit in a fashion that was far from unproblematic. Expressed as a principle, government by consent of

Why Democracy?

95

the citizens readily conjures up notions of consensus, the democratic will (understood as a unified entity of some sort), and public deliberation, yet as I have argued, democratic politics as it exists or could ever exist realizes these notions only in the imaginations of theorists and ideologues. Popular consent only ever means the consent of a majority of the politically active, or their representatives, given the limited options available to them on a given issue. The rest is idealization and falsification. Yet beneath the mythology is an idea that has withstood challenges both theoretical and pragmatic with remarkable success: that those on whom the law comes to bear have a rightful say as to its content, and that when they do not, human equality is an illusion. I opened this chapter by posing directly the question, Why democracy? and suggesting that we divide this rather large question in two. First, if democracy has come to stand the world over as not only a philosophy of the state but a symbol, then what is the meaning of this symbol, and what moral-political vocabulary or tropology allows us to speak of democracy in a way that is less superficial than utilitarian and economic vocabularies? Second, what institutional framework best accords with the democratic philosophy, a question that includes the issue of democracy’s appropriate scope and limits? On the first question I have argued that democracy has come to symbolize a certain moral standing of the person among his or her fellows, an aspiration to stand to our fellow human beings in a relation of nonsubordination and equal dignity. It symbolizes an aspiration, and indeed a demand, that is at once political, ethical, and existential, bearing as it does upon a great many aspects of social life. It finds expression in a rhetoric of emancipation and the struggle for equal freedom, in vocabularies of difference and the search for unity within difference, of discourse over violence, and of communicative reason over the dogmatism of the philosopher-king. Democracy signifies as well the domestication of conflict, the transformation of enemies and demonized others into discussional adversaries and moral equals, a politics therefore of civility, not utopia, and of process, not stasis. I have also cautioned against a tendency widely visible today to fetishize this symbol. Should the democratic idea become yet another utopian dream, as it now risks becoming, it will effectively hoist itself on its own petard, it being the very nature of that idea to oppose in the most fundamental way the dogmatic utopianism on which all nondemocratic political forms are predicated. Our second question is no less formidable than the first, especially given the unlikelihood of identifying a universally applicable model of

96

Why Democracy?

democratic institutions. How ought we give institutional expression to what is essentially an existential aspiration? The question in this form virtually defies an answer, or any answer that could do justice to the aspiration itself. Under real-world conditions, aspirations and noble sentiments of all kinds tend to come up short; between what fires the imagination and what is attained by mortals there is invariably some space, a fact that applies to political ideals of all kinds. Democracy, no less than equality, liberty, peace, or even civility always remain regulative ideals, values that orient political life while remaining to some degree on the horizon of the possible, or “to come” as Derrida would say. Their realization in practice is not unlike an artistic performance in the sense that it is an interpretation, one that is imperfect, incomplete, never above criticism, and also highly variable. Just as a musical composition may be performed in a great many ways while remaining performances of a single work, the principle of democracy may generate various institutional arrangements, no one of which captures, much less captures exclusively, the essence of the democratic idea. Fashioning democratic institutions, like all efforts to apply the ideal of human equality (or any other) is an act of interpretation, and where no single interpretation is uniquely and supremely authoritative. Whether, for instance, the American or British model of democracy more perfectly captures the meaning of popular sovereignty is as philosophically resolvable, or unresolvable, as whether Glenn Gould’s 1950 or 1980 recording of the Goldberg Variations by Bach better represents the work itself. Like normative principles generally, democracy is neither comprehended clearly and distinctly nor fully determined apart from the contexts in which it is instantiated. Yet in the same manner that a respectable performance of Bach, or a plausible reading of Plato, may be distinguished from a plainly implausible one, we may well conclude that what goes under the names of liberal democracy and social democracy provide manifestly superior renderings of “rule of the people” than the people’s republics or people’s democracies of the twentieth century. If political theorists are unable to identify necessary and sufficient conditions for institutions to qualify as democratic, we may still distinguish better from worse, plausible from implausible, interpretations or applications of the democratic ideal. Liberal and social democracy, then, both provide renderings of popular sovereignty that are plausible and coherent at the very least, that give rise to fruitful debate about the meaning of that ideal as it bears upon this or that question of public policy, and in a fashion that Soviet-style politics clearly does not.

Why Democracy?

97

If democracy is without an essence that we could state in altogether precise terms, still less one that we could work up into a blueprint for designing institutions, it does permit at the very least an approximate formulation. As previously mentioned, Joseph Schumpeter provides as adequate an empirical analysis as any. Democracy, for Schumpeter, is essentially a method: “The democratic method,” he writes, “is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.” It is a method of decision making that grants power to political elites by means of free and open elections. If the people indeed rule under democratic arrangements, such rule is indirect and limited to selecting persons who will fashion laws on their behalf and which apply to all. Since genuine unanimity is unattainable, the consent of the governed can amount to nothing more than procedures of public participation and majority rule. If democracy is understood in imaginative terms as an aspiration for equality, in empirical terms it is best described as a set of procedures by which such equality may be recognized. At the heart of democratic politics, then, is a tension analogous to that between the letter and the spirit of the law, an enduring and altogether ineliminable tension between “rule of the people” as a trope, an imaginative possibility, and an aspiration on one hand and an actually existing political form on the other. Schumpeter has described the latter while overlooking the former, and in a way not uncommon for reductionist models. Democracy’s “realistic” face can well be described as a “competition for political leadership” in which, in his words, “the role of the people is to produce a government, or else an intermediate body which in turn will produce a national executive or government.” This account is more faithful to the phenomena than theories that are “centered in the proposition that ‘the people’ hold a definite and rational opinion about every individual question and that they give effect to this opinion—in a democracy—by choosing ‘representatives’ who will see to it that that opinion is carried out.”24 While Schumpeter’s account is not invulnerable to criticism even on empirical grounds, it does in my view capture the letter of democracy more convincingly than its rivals and while leaving aside its spirit.25 The appropriate scope of democratic procedures is contingent upon their justification. As I have argued, democracy is far from constituting an all-purpose method of fashioning justice or even equality, and is applicable only within its rightful domain. This is an issue that many democratic enthusiasts overlook in their efforts to broaden radically the

98

Why Democracy?

scope of this method into ever more areas of political and civil society, particularly the economy. I have suggested that these efforts presuppose an undue, virtually antiplatonic optimism about the wisdom and virtue of majorities. It is not only the ancient warnings of Plato and Aristotle that radical democrats fail to heed but the modern warnings of the American founders, Tocqueville, Mill, and so on, that an unchecked, or inadequately checked, democracy will often create a tyranny of the majority or, at any rate, provides no legal guarantee against it. Such warnings suppose that injustice comes in more than a single form—the denial of equality—and that it occurs not only where legitimate imperatives are put out of play but where they exceed their reach, are misapplied, or override other principles that may be salient on a given issue. Equality is not the only value that we prize, nor is it always salient. Important though it is, it does not trump all other ethical and political considerations in cases where the demand for equality (or an interpretation of that demand) conflicts with claims to freedom, with human rights in general, or with other principles. Power is always problematic and requires justification everywhere that it exists, whether it be concentrated in the hands of minorities or majorities, whether it be the power of individuals or anonymous systems. Yet it is most problematic when it is unconstrained by powers or values of a countervailing sort. This applies no less to the power of democratic majorities—or, often enough, vehement minorities that are able to win over or subdue majorities—than to any other body. As I have argued, the radical extension of majority rule into ever more areas of social life may well succeed only in replacing one form of hegemony with another, one in which a majority violates human rights (a minority’s or even its own) with a clear conscience, since it has been legitimated electorally. Do we need more democracy, as many of its more ardent defenders maintain? In a sense, perhaps we do. At the very least we must resist the current trend toward the colonization of politics by expertise (scientific, technical, administrative, medical, psychiatric, etc.) and by an array of bureaucratic, military, and economic imperatives. When politics becomes subordinated to or diminished by such imperatives, decision making ceases to be political, but instead becomes a technical matter of resource management, social engineering, applying expert knowledge, and managing the apparatus rather than the art by which members of a society seek mutual accommodation. The idea of public service is undermined when elected politicians become servants less of their constituents than of corporate or military establishments, instruments of private

Why Democracy?

99

donors or special interests, or mere administrators of the machinery of state. In this sense, perhaps more democracy is exactly what we need. More precisely, what is necessary is to prevent the diminution of the scope of democratic politics, not to enlarge its scope in a radical or wholesale way. If the philosophical justification of democracy bears most essentially on the aspiration for equality, however that aspiration is conceived, then democracy’s proper domain is limited to the realm of social life in which such equality is the salient political value. To suppose that domain to be unlimited—to be applicable throughout the domain of “the social” or within civil society no less than political society, as many now urge—has every appearance of dogmatism or fetishism and ignores that however much we may value political equality there are other values no less important. Social peace, civility, and freedom, for example, all require strict limits on democracy; they especially require constitutional safeguards against potentially overbearing majorities since this is among the principal threats to each. If talk of “strong” or “radical” democracy often appears innocuous today it is because in the older constitutional democracies of the West legal guarantees against unlimited majoritarianism are relatively well entrenched. Constitutional provisions such as the American Bill of Rights or the Canadian Charter of Rights render inviolable basic liberties that we are accustomed to associate with democratic rule, but that remain distinct principles. Democracy and freedom, for instance, are distinct in their abstract meanings and practical entailments alike, even if they are profoundly linked both historically and logically. If the historical connection is sufficiently evident, the logical connection as well is strong; as Pierre Trudeau well remarked, democracy and freedom are mutually supporting and are threatened by the same conditions: “Both liberty and democracy, in order to exist, require the other. Neither can survive, moreover, without some ability to defend itself against those who would destroy it. The threat is not always, indeed it is seldom, from external sources. It comes on one occasion from the criminal, on another from the wealthy; at one time it will be the intransigence of the bureaucracy, on another the cleverness of politicians. Democracy and liberty must face sometimes the hysteria of a mob and at other times the calculated plans of a handful of conspirators. They are constantly under the attack of the bigoted and stupid; on occasion they need protection from the overrighteous and the super-patriotic. If anything be certain, it is that the continued vitality of neither liberty nor democracy can be assumed.”26 Yet assume it—the continued vitality

100

Why Democracy?

of liberty in particular — is precisely what the radical democratic program does. In rather doctrinaire fashion, it assumes that a democratic order can be relied upon, or even assumed as an a priori point of principle, to be self-limiting, to pose no threat to the rights of minorities and individuals, and to be invariably respectful of differences. If talk of radical democracy, then, appears innocuous, it would cease to be so were it to succeed in supplanting the liberal democracy to which in important respects it stands opposed. Mill was correct in remarking that the question of how we may limit the power of majorities over individuals is not only an important question for modern politics but indeed “the principal question in human affairs.” “There is a limit,” Mill wrote, “to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.”27 For Mill, it is liberty, or human rights more generally, that constitutes this limit, a position broadly shared by liberal democrats. On the liberal view, if it is not possible (as it surely never is) to ensure that majorities will invariably respect human rights in the absence of explicit constraints on their power, and if we take such rights seriously, we will insist that majority power be limited by constitutional and other legal means, roughly in the manner proposed by Mill. Such rights, however, are not merely utilitarian expedients but essential preconditions of a just society, or inviolable constraints on how persons may be treated by social institutions or by other persons. The remedy, then, to the dangers that have been inherent to democratic politics from its ancient beginnings to the present day, and which philosophers from Plato to Mill have continually warned against, is neither to abolish democracy nor to strive vainly for means of sanitizing, rationalizing, or idealizing it in the fashion of deliberationists and others, but to apply to democracy a certain policy of containment. Within its sphere, that of political decision making, the democratic method is sovereign and must so remain, yet as imperative as it is that citizens possess equal rights of political participation, it is no less imperative that they possess equal freedom and civil liberties that limit the power of majorities and their institutions. Illiberal democracy — the democracy that transforms equality from an important political value to a first principle, and perhaps the only such principle—commits the same error as extreme libertarianism; this is to fetishize a single value at the expense of all others, the consequences of which are foreseeable. Old

Why Democracy?

101

liberal-democratic principles may not inspire the passions in the way they once did within the constitutional democracies of the West, but in the larger, global civilization that is now emerging, liberal democracy and human rights may and often do; they serve as expressions of an aspiration to stand to one’s fellows, and to fellow nations and cultures, no longer in a condition of inequality and servitude.

This page intentionally left blank.

CHAPTER 6

Between the Market and the Forum

T

he democratic idea is that the people — the demos— must rule, that the only legitimate and rational form of government is one in which laws are fashioned by elected representatives in accordance with equal participation rights, free and open elections, majority rule, and related principles of democratic governance. The idea arises from the conviction that no one — no autocrat, aristocracy, or party—knows the true nature of justice or, at any rate, that they do not know it more perfectly than the people themselves; it rests as well on the premise that even if such knowledge were possessed by some body of personages, this would not justify granting power to such a body if this violated the principles of human equality and popular consent. Those on whom laws bear, democrats maintain, have a rightful say as to their content. Stripped down to essentials, and oversimplifying considerably, this is the idea that animates democratic politics. The business of political theory is to make this seemingly straightforward idea explicit, to examine its fundamental constitution and philosophical underpinnings, and if possible to provide a model in terms of which democratic institutions can be understood and appraised. It does not go without saying, however, that the democratic idea can or need be modeled philosophically—modeled, that is, without committing a certain interpretive violence that forces the idea into a categorial framework that is unduly narrow, in so doing misunderstanding its meaning and spirit. Theoretical models often bring to light an important dimension of a complex phenomenon, however the reductionist claim that so often accompanies such models is always dubious. I have offered some reasons for doubting the deliberationist model of democracy in 103

104

Why Democracy?

particular—one of the more fashionable models of the last thirty years or so — not because it is outlandish but, on the contrary, because it succeeds in some measure in capturing the ultimate significance of this ideal. Democracy as a public forum wherein all views may be aired, different voices may be brought to the table, competing ideas may be openly debated, and in which no one is excluded from the political process for reason of their views or personal characteristics, captures in important measure the animating spirit of popular sovereignty. It is for good reason that deliberative democrats from Habermas to Rawls have received a great deal of attention in recent decades since the model of democracy as forum comes as close as any to capturing the spirit, if not the letter, of democratic politics. I have suggested that the model is imperfect, however, and that if the shortcomings it demonstrates cannot be removed then we shall need to speak of democracy in a way that surpasses the deliberative and other theoretical models. The two principal models that have emerged in the contemporary literature may be summed up as, first, democracy as market and, second, democracy as forum. What the two have in common is an accent on the inherent rationality of democratic politics: this method of political rule, on both accounts, is better able than its rivals to bring reason to bear on politics. This is, no doubt, a worthy aspiration, yet beyond this everything remains open to question. What is particularly questionable, I shall argue, is the tendency, as old as the Western philosophical tradition itself, to transform “reason” into rationalism in one or another variety. This age-old tendency in philosophy is so entrenched in thought that it is often taken, or mistaken, as the characteristic stance, perhaps even the essence, of philosophy itself: to “supply its [morality’s] principle,” as Kant so modestly put it in the preface to his Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, as if the formalist model that was to follow were a mere “correct[ion]” or supplement to the ancient question of the good life for human beings—a supplement, moreover, quite natural and appropriate to rational beings.1 It is in order to “supply its principle” that rationalist thought from Plato to Rawls has always sought to clean up, sanitize, and legitimate what passes for reasoned utterance, to pronounce the definitive verdict upon such discourse. Supplying democracy’s principle means supplying a method, a decision procedure, or formal rules by which to separate authoritatively political opinion from political knowledge, interpretation from some cognitive state displaying greater formal and methodological rigor. The question of democracy then becomes an epistemological one: How do we know that majority-approved measures

Between the Market and the Forum

105

are in fact just? What makes them just? If the answer cannot be that they partake of the Form of Justice itself, then perhaps we can formulate a political epistemology, a method or standpoint from which to answer these questions with epistemic authority. Thus is born the state of nature and its recent offspring: the original position, the ideal speech situation, the democratic forum made rational. Supposing there were a democratic rationality—that there were something in the nature of democracy that leads us to characterize it as rational, as intimately acquainted with reason itself or with the act of reasoning — what would such a rationality be? To characterize it as democratic we would have to maintain that in some way or other it embodies the “will of the people.” This much appears evident. But what of the other part: rationality? What is this—a method, a formalized technique, an epistemology? Is it governed by decision procedures, by necessary and sufficient conditions? Is it a procedural notion, and if so, are these procedures formal or informal, monological or dialogical, where the latter connotes a genuine reliance on actually existing communicative practice rather than an idealized abstraction, while the former (the monological) is such an idealized abstraction, one that could in principle be performed by the individual alone, in the manner of the Cartesian meditator? Is “public deliberation” really required behind the veil of ignorance; who, or what, is behind this veil anyway—real persons engaged in real dialogue or hypothetical persons whose deliberations are equally hypothetical? Could the deliberations of counterfactual moral agents be anything but hypothetical, counterfactual, a priori? In the beginning — or, at least, in A Theory of Justice—Rawls’s rational choosers are straightforward abstractions, idealized agents fundamentally akin to the Hobbesian-Lockean-Benthamite self, the moral counterpart to the Cartesian ego, worldless subjectivity. In time Rawls’s choosers become public deliberators, as a limited and, one suspects, grudging concession to the critics of worldless subjectivity. However, are such “deliberations,” or operations of rational thought, genuinely public? Could they not be performed by the individual alone in his or her thought, and if so, in what sense are they still public or democratic? Historically, there is a tendency, as common among ancient as among modern thinkers, to transform almost imperceptibly, and by a seemingly inevitable operation of thought, “reason” into rationalism, including the reason that is inherent to democracy itself. The practice of reasoning— of ordinary reason giving, justifying, criticizing, questioning, persuading, dialogical toing and froing—is transformed in the hands of philosophers

106

Why Democracy?

into a dogma — a method or an epistemology, ideally one that might include a guarantee. Socrates the gadfly of the Athenian marketplace, the great poser of questions and professor of his own ignorance becomes Socrates the Platonist, the philosopher of the Forms, whose ignorance succumbs to death by a thousand qualifications. The Socratic dialogues of Plato’s youth become the nondialogues, the treatises disguised as dialogues, of later years. The pattern is repeated so often in the Western tradition that it begins to look like the fundamental movement of spirit itself, as Hegel would say, the great world-historical, and by all means rational, directionality of thought as such. Thus, in political thought the idea that our institutional arrangements should be subject to general discussion and public approval—an eminently reasonable idea, contested by none today—shades into highly contestable forms of ideality, on the grounds that we must know whether the outcome of such discussion is rational, thus relieving the anxiety bequeathed to us by Plato and Aristotle, and confirmed by history, that the demos is as ill-equipped for political rule as for the pursuit of wisdom. We can and must know this since reason is, after all, our human essence. Democracy is rational, and we ourselves are rational, but in what sense? What is the model? The answer that has long dominated political theory and the social sciences is provided by the instrumental model of rationality: to be practically rational is nothing more or less than to be efficient in the maximization of utilities. The rational individual, as Rawls puts it, “knows the general features of his wants and ends both present and future, and he is able to estimate the relative intensity of his desires, and to decide if necessary what he really wants. Moreover, he can envisage the alternatives open to him and establish a coherent ordering of them.”2 Rawls’s instrumental conception of rationality is essentially Hobbesian; the rational agent is the prudent maximizer of utility. While reason is defined in the Leviathan as “nothing but reckoning (that is, adding and subtracting) of the consequences of general names agreed upon for the marking and signifying of our thoughts,” moral or practical rationality for Hobbes takes on a specifically prudential connotation. If the Greeks first taught us to speak of human beings as rational by nature, as bearers of the logos—and where our rationality was ultimately inseparable from our sociability, our communicability—this ancient idea is now rendered in decidedly narrower terms. The practically rational agent is a planner, a strategic maximizer, a calculator of private advantage, one whose location in a lifeworld is decidedly contingent and who enters into social relations as a consumer enters a shopping mall. If it remains that the

Between the Market and the Forum

107

“capacity for rationality,” as Robert Nozick remarks, “continue[s] to give humanity some special status,” one that “sets us apart” from the brutes, it is the same status as the Hobbesian “appetitive machine” relative to other species that populate the state of nature. The instrumental model of rationality first articulated in the political and economic theory of the Enlightenment, while not without critics, remains dominant today, so much so in fact that in many circles the following remark of Nozick’s passes unchallenged: “The instrumental theory of rationality does not seem to stand in need of justification, whereas every other theory does. Every other theory must produce reasons for holding that what it demarcates is indeed rationality. Instrumental rationality is the base state. The question is whether it is the whole of rationality.”3 Why such confidence, one may ask? It is highly atypical of philosophers to assert of a given theory that it “does not seem to stand in need of justification,” particularly when “every other theory does.” (If this indeed passes among Nozick’s readers, might I perhaps assert the same on behalf of a few theories that are close to my own heart?) The answer to the confidence question is supplied by David Gauthier: “[T]he maximizing conception of rationality is almost universally accepted and employed in the social sciences. . . . [I]t lies at the core of economic theory, and is generalized in decision and game theory. Its lesser prominence in political, sociological, and psychological theory reflects more the lesser concern with rationality among many practitioners of those disciplines, than adherence to an alternative conception.”4 Another surprising statement — not least, I would imagine, for political theorists, sociologists, and psychologists. The dominant theory of instrumental rationality can be confidently presupposed in some circles because it is the dominant theory, hardly the kind of argument that a Gauthier, a Nozick, or a Rawls would typically put forward. Nor is the following remark of Nozick’s, from a book interestingly titled The Nature of Rationality: “It is natural to think of rationality as a goal-directed process. (This applies to both rationality of action and rationality of belief.) The stereotype of behavior in traditional societies is that people act a certain way because things have always been done that way. In contrast, rational behavior is aimed at achieving the goals, desires, and ends that people have.”5 It is “natural,” then, to think of reason in this narrowly circumscribed, rationalistic way since a tradition of long standing deems it so or, at any rate, it is the dominant theory. Unconvinced by this argument (or, more accurately, assumption) are proponents of discursive or communicative rationality, among whom Habermas is perhaps the most prominent. One of that theorist’s long-

108

Why Democracy?

standing concerns has been the need to detect critically the potential for “systematic distortion” in social and discursive practices, or to unmask ideological obfuscation that conceals from persons the reality of their plight in an oppressive social order. If rationality and legitimacy are to prevail, Habermas argues, we must have genuinely democratic institutions, ones fashioned by means of uninhibited public debate. This is surely an attractive idea, when stated in plain, pretheoretical terms at any rate. This tale of two rationalities—the instrumental and the communicative—has given rise to a dichotomy of democratic models between which a growing literature asks us to choose: democratic politics as market or as forum. On the first view, political actors engage in a kind of public competition, not unlike the behavior of consumers (the less political ones) in the marketplace. Insofar as they are rational, choices are made from the standpoint of private advantage and optimize whatever utilities are subjectively preferred. On the rational choice model, political behavior is essentially market behavior: calculated, strategic, and self-interested. This model certainly has realism on its side, as well as a keen appreciation of conflict, difference, and the plurality of interests that exists within contemporary societies. Its major liability is that it reduces the concept of citizenship to simple consumption; the fundamental orientation of political actors remains Hobbesian, with a crudely economic accent. It appears to give up completely on the possibility of nonstrategic political action and communication, a move that takes us well beyond realism and into a moral psychology of crude egoism. While this model retains a notion of the common good, it is a common good that represents nothing more than a kind of grudging peace treaty between hostile factions. Can the practice of political accommodation and the meaning of citizenship and the common good be reduced to this model, however rational (or rationalistic) it appears? Is political action always and only strategic? A negative answer leads us into the vicinity of the deliberationists, for whom democratic politics is a politics of the forum, not the market, and democratic rationality is communicative, not instrumental. This model owes more to Rousseau and Marx than Hobbes and Bentham. What it lacks in realism it would make up for in idealism, and with some considerable plausibility. It is eminently sensible to speak of democracy as a common effort to resolve differences of opinion through persuasion rather than force, as a search for unity within difference and for a conception of the common good that transcends mere bartering. It is here that we find the intuitive core of the deliberative model:

Between the Market and the Forum

109

democratic politics as discursive, potentially harmonious, peaceful, egalitarian, and free. Where it begins to appear fanciful is when this intuitive core, or basic idea, is articulated in a theoretical vocabulary of “will formation” and “opinion formation,” as Habermas would say, of “achieving common ends” by citizens and legislators “tak[ing] counsel together” as a fundamentally harmonious collective.6 It appears equally fanciful when Rawls speaks in his later work of a “well-ordered constitutional democracy,” a “deliberative democracy” in which citizens “exchange views and debate their supporting reasons concerning public political questions.”7 It is a fine-sounding idea, surely. What democrat does not long for election campaigns in which politicians argue—actually argue, using premises that are more or less evident, careful reasoning, and generating well-justified conclusions—about issues of public policy, in which citizens debate the same issues in a spirit of disinterested inquiry and Socratic conversation, with an open mind and an unwavering commitment to justice? If only it were so. For deliberationists it may well be so, but—and herein lies the issue — only if certain conditions are met. Deliberationists disagree in part about what these conditions are, but where they agree is upon the possibility and the imperative of genuine public deliberation. One recent effort to identify the conditions or rules of such deliberation is set out in a volume of social scientific studies titled Intergroup Dialogue: Deliberative Democracy in School, College, Community, and Workplace.8 After posing the question, “What is intergroup dialogue?” the volume’s editors provide a concise definition: “Intergroup dialogue is a form of democratic practice, engagement, problem solving, and education involving face-to-face, focused, facilitated, and confidential discussions occurring over time between two or more groups of people defined by their different social identities.”9 Again, a fine-sounding idea, yet if the implausibility of it is not already evident from the definition, it becomes so when the conditions of such dialogue are made explicit. They include, but are not limited to, the following: “dialogue is a process, not an event,” one that “takes place over time”; it is “about relationship building and thoughtful engagement about difficult issues”; it “requires an extended commitment,” takes place “face-to-face” and “in an atmosphere of confidentiality”; public deliberation “focuses on both intergroup conflict and community building,” and is “led by skilled facilitators”; it is not about competition but “inquiry and understanding and the integration of content and process,” and “involves talking” while “often lead[ing] to action.”10 An original idealism regarding dialogue

110

Why Democracy?

quickly shades into a utopian rationalism, as evidenced by the long list of conditions that such dialogue must meet for it to be properly democratic and rational. The same drama that affected Plato plays out among deliberationists: Plato the student of Socrates, the lover of dialogue and of the back-and-forth logic of question and answer, statement and reply, metamorphoses into Plato the dogmatic metaphysician, rationalist, and passionate adversary of democracy. It is a drama in which dialogue plays a starring role, and in the end succumbs to its opposite. What do the above-mentioned conditions (or similar conditions) of public dialogue amount to but a new Form of Justice, conditions about as attainable as the Form itself? A recent work in the field of “evaluation” characterizes deliberation similarly as “fundamentally a cognitive process, grounded in reasons, evidence, and principles of valid argument, an important subset of which are the methodological canons of evaluation. In many instances the authority of evaluators, based on their special expertise, plays a critical role in a deliberative democracy.”11 No attention is given here to the glaring tension between egalitarian dialogue and “special expertise”; if special expertise is available, what need is there for dialogue? Dialogue, whatever it is in its details, is a process in which we presuppose that the truth is not already known—hence the need to speak, listen, and learn. Where special expertise exists, the purpose of discussion can only be to enlighten, “educate,” or perhaps pontificate. Another illustration comes from religious studies, in a collection optimistically titled Religions in Dialogue: From Theocracy to Democracy, in which the volume’s editors and contributors hold out the promise of genuine, interfaith dialogue, notwithstanding a few thousand years of enmity, misunderstanding, and war in the great world-historical competition for souls and quite possibly power. As the book’s editors write: “At the beginning of the third millennium, what is needed is a renovation of all education—from the cradle to the grave—through dialogue and critical thinking. It has become increasingly clear that one of the greatest challenges facing contemporary cultures and all levels of comprehension is coping creatively with the powerful forces that arise when diverse world-views and perspectives encounter one another. The most chronic, intractable and devastating problems facing cultures today centre on the breakdown of human relations in the collision of world-views and differences in all aspects of our lives.”12 If difference is the problem, or its source (as for the editors it is), dialogue is the solution — where this means “conversation between two or more persons with differing views,

Between the Market and the Forum

111

the primary purpose of which is for each participant to learn from the other so that he or she can change and grow.” They continue: “We enter into dialogue primarily so that we can learn, change and grow, not so that we can force change on the other.”13 The call for interfaith dialogue has been frequently heard in recent years, not least from the late Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, yet how often is this a genuine occurrence? When, where, and between whom does it take place? When in history has a religious community or tradition converted another community on the basis of well-reasoned argumentation alone, without manipulation, fraud, or simple violence? Does a Buddhist “learn” from a Baptist, a Catholic from a Confucian? What of revelation or enlightenment? Does one who is in possession of it, or is well along in the process, learn from one who is not? Does a Chosen People learn from an unchosen one? Perhaps a degree of strategizing and proselytizing is visible in much recent talk of interfaith dialogue. Returning now to political theory, we find the same sentiment expressed in various ways, of which the following are representative: “Broadly defined, deliberative democracy refers to the idea that legitimate lawmaking issues from the public deliberation of citizens. As a normative account of legitimacy, deliberative democracy evokes ideals of rational legislation, participatory politics, and civic self-governance. In short, it presents an ideal of political autonomy based on the practical reasoning of citizens.”14 Again: “[D]emocracy must involve discussion on an equal and inclusive basis. This discussion should deepen participant knowledge of issues and awareness of the interests of others, and help to instil the confidence to play an active part in public affairs. Deliberative democracy looks to transform people’s (possibly ill-informed) preferences through open and inclusive discussion, not merely to design electoral procedures to reflect them.”15 The rational outcome of such discussion is famously identified by Rawls, and includes the following (liberal) principles: “First, a list of certain basic rights, liberties, and opportunities (such as those familiar from constitutional regimes); Second, an assignment of special priority to those rights, liberties, and opportunities, especially with respect to the claims of the general good and perfectionist values; and Third, measures ensuring for all citizens adequate all-purpose means to make effective use of their freedoms.”16 The trouble here is that if we could anticipate by means of theoretical reflection the rational outcome of public deliberation—what we would agree to if we were fully rational—what need is there for deliberation? If we have a method, dialogue can only be a means of bringing others

112

Why Democracy?

around to a predetermined conclusion, not listening and learning but enlightening and informing. A basic choice confronts the deliberative and all varieties of democrat: to believe in dialogue or not to. Those who do not substitute a monologue of rationalist methodology, be it utilitarian, deontological, contractarian, decision theoretical, or critical theoretical (in its Habermasian form at any rate). The categorical imperative, the utilitarian calculus, the social contract, the veil of ignorance, and the transcendental conditions of communicative action are one and all exercises of ostensibly rational thought that in principle do not require an interlocutor. They may be performed in an armchair, as a blackboard exercise, or in a Cartesian poêle, even if something termed deliberation is tacked onto the end in the fashion of a nonbinding plebiscite. If we require democracy at all, it is because of the limits of such methods. It is precisely when the Form of Justice is unknown that we are compelled to speak to each other and to take seriously the claims that others make. What exactly does the bearer of theoretical expertise have to learn from the layperson? Why listen at all unless one is in a position of not knowing, of having a will to knowledge that outstrips the sum of one’s existing knowledge? If the original social contractarians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw no need for public deliberation—the terms of the contract, after all, were formulable theoretically — why would Rawls add this qualification, unless as a concession to the philosophical fashions of the day? If Kant as well saw no need for this—the categorical imperative again is a method one can follow simply by consulting one’s rational will—why does Habermas, the Kantian moralist, tack on a new, deliberationist imperative? Is this a rhetorical strategy, an effort to latch onto a fashionable idea? The dialogical idea itself receives its most adequate formulation (adequate philosophically and phenomenologically) in the work of such nonformalist philosophers as Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, who likewise insist on the profound difference between dialogue and monologue, where the former connotes a back-and-forth movement of question and answer, assertion and reply, in a spirit of fallibility and openness.17 So conceived, dialogue is the social counterpart of Aristotelian phronesis or practical judgment; it draws upon the competencies of ordinary speakers without following formal methods. It generates consensus and solidarity on occasion, yet one that remains invariably open to contest and possibly radical revision. The dialogue,

Between the Market and the Forum

113

then, that is wedded to rationalism is a dialogue in name only, a disguised form of monologue. The deliberationist model of democracy as forum, as I have argued, is excessively idealistic both as an empirical description of actually existing democracy and as a normative ideal. The principal shortcoming of this model is the antithesis of that mentioned above concerning the market model: if the fundamental orientation of citizens is not merely strategic or competitive, nor is it (in fact or capable of becoming) wholly the opposite, an ideal speech situation or original position in which disinterested inquiry might take place. Under real-world conditions, public debate invariably contains a seamy underside of nondeliberation, dogmatic ideology, knee-jerk thinking, recalcitrance, and bombast. It is found not only among ordinary citizens discussing the issues of the day, but among political leaders no less. As we are occasionally reminded, presidents themselves often do less deliberating than reacting, strategizing, marketing their policies and themselves, going off half-cocked, and so on. When political actors genuinely deliberate, they most often do so among like-minded people or ideological fellow travelers only. Even here, their deliberations are inseparable from persuasion, interpretation, and practical judgment as well as their darker side: issuing demands, power seeking, and aggressive self-assertion. If evidence of this is required at all, consider the transparently self-serving voting patterns that consistently divide populations along class and other lines unrelated to justice, or the often-repeated question of incumbent politicians, first posed by Ronald Reagan, whether one is “better off ” today than one was four years ago, where “one” means the individual or their family and “better off ” is measured in terms of dollars and cents. Is it “deliberation” to calculate which party is likely to offer one the shrewdest deal, or to vote with one’s wallet, or one’s religion? Perhaps there is a way of splitting the difference between the market and forum models, of finding a way of speaking about democracy that embraces the intuitive elements of both while fashioning a higher synthesis, in dialectical fashion. Perhaps there is a space between the two that is empirically and phenomenologically sound while also true to the spirit of democracy as a normative ideal. The democratic idea, articulated philosophically, ought to embrace the realism of the market model while rejecting the reductionism of political action to strategic maximizing; it ought also to embrace the dialogical spirit of the forum model yet without its rationalist and utopian excesses. I have suggested that the most adequate way of conceiving democracy is as a kind of symbol—a

114

Why Democracy?

symbol that (as symbols will) defies formal modeling. Empirically, democracy is a method of political accommodation and not much else besides: a configuration of institutions that gives practical meaning to the democratic ethos of equality and human rights. More fundamentally, democracy is this ethos itself: a way of life, an animating spirit, also a plea, an aspiration, a bit of moral-political eros. As John Dewey expressed it: “the democratic ideal . . . expresses a postulate in the sense of a demand to be realized: That each individual shall have the opportunity for release, expression, fulfillment, of his distinctive capacities, and that the outcome shall further the establishment of a fund of shared values. Like every true ideal, it signifies something to be done rather than something already given, something ready-made.”18 Democracy stands the world over as a symbol of antihierarchy, antiprivilege, and antiauthoritarianism, of the equal standing of human beings among their fellows, and an equality that reaches to the very depths of our agency and humanity. When Kant famously separated the dignity of human beings— a dignity that does not permit of degrees — from mere value, he was capturing after a fashion this very idea. That idea is that it is intolerable— intolerable politically, legally, ethically, and existentially—that human beings should matter differently, that social relations must be structured in ways that make it evident to the person that he or she counts for no more or less than one. Dewey, as well, noted that fundamental to the spirit of democracy is “the fact that each individual counts as one and one only on an equality with others, so that the final social will comes about as the cooperative expression of the ideas of many people.”19 Democracy symbolizes as well an ethos in which differences are resolved, or coped with, through discourse rather than violence. Discourse is the heart and soul of democracy, in a connotation that is intermediate between a well-orchestrated, angelic consensus, or a communitarian love-in, on one side, and an affair of mutually indifferent, strategic maximizing of preferences on the other. Democratic speech is rhetorical, interpretive, critical, and agonistic through and through—as well as highly vulnerable in times of war or threats to “national security,” when it is needed most.20 It is a means of managing, without eliminating, conflict, of fashioning civility within conflict, and of preventing differences of opinion or identity from escalating into violent confrontation. At times it succeeds only as a measure of political damage control, of containing lasting conflict within bounds of legalistic civility while at others it expresses a genuine search for social unity and common purpose. “[T]he drama of democracy,” as Jean Bethke Elshtain writes, “is about

Between the Market and the Forum

115

permanent contestation between conservation and change, between tradition and transformation.” It is a drama that “now echoes round the world,” in “the rhetoric of protestors, dissidents, and new citizens,” and one that is “cast in the idiom of freedom.”21 The democratic drama plays itself out in a state of dynamic tension between unity and diversity, solidarity and contestation, conservation and reform, neither approximating nor anticipating a condition of finality or utopian harmony. It is noteworthy that even philosophers of such diametrically opposed positions as Paul Ricoeur and Robert Nozick can agree that, in the latter’s words, “we live in a rich symbolic world, partly cultural and partly of our own individual creation,” and that “we thereby escape or expand the limits of our situations.”22 As Ricoeur expresses it: “Beyond or beneath the self-understanding of a society there is an opaque kernel which cannot be reduced to empirical norms or laws. This kernel cannot be explained in terms of some transparent model because it is constitutive of a culture before it can be expressed and reflected in specific representations or ideas. It is only if we try to grasp this kernel that we can discover the foundational mythopoetic nucleus of a society. By analyzing itself in terms of such a foundational nucleus (or social imaginary) a society comes to a truer understanding of itself; it begins to critically acknowledge its own symbolizing identity.”23 As occupants of a “rich symbolic world,” our plea, our multifaceted desire, for equal freedom and dignity is expressed not as a raw feeling but through the mediation of symbolic structures, imaginative and rhetorical tropes that together compose a vocabulary expressing who we understand ourselves to be and, more importantly, who we aspire to become. Our symbols are less utilities than self-understandings, moral passions, yearnings, and affections. This “social imaginary” or “foundational mythopoetic nucleus of a society,” it is important to note, is not an altogether stable core or uncontested consensus. It is more the nature of a language or rhetorical tropology, a pretheoretical structuring of social reality with reference to which agreements are identified and disagreements may be negotiated. Such negotiations may be protracted or brief, difficult or straightforward, but under democratic conditions it is expected that they will be peaceful and premised on equal rights. The aim of such negotiations is to preserve and to “hold in fruitful tension the ‘I’ of the self, the ‘us’ and ‘ours’ of the family, and the ‘we citizens’ of the wider democratic civic world.”24 It is neither to reduce the other to the same nor vice versa, but to preserve and negotiate the tension between the two—to “recognize

116

Why Democracy?

differences” while searching for some limited and negotiated unity, and in a spirit of mutual accommodation if not good will. Just possibly, democracy also serves as a symbol of an emerging global civilization, one in which authoritarian power politics might finally be defeated. While we must avoid the language of triumphalism here, or world-historical prophecy, the possibility of a global civilization — in Gadamer’s words, “a humanity that knows itself as humanity”25—may finally be a genuine one. If it is (and I would emphasize the conditional), then a civilization that is truly global will necessarily take root in a “foundational mythopoetic” and rhetorical framework of democracy, in the richest sense of the term—as an ethos and a plea, not merely a set of institutional arrangements. As with any civilization, a genuinely global civilization requires a commonality of moral passions, some partial solidarity with respect both to that upon which members of different cultures freely agree and to how disagreements can be peacefully resolved. It requires much the same respect for differences and search for unity in difference that characterizes democratic politics on a smaller scale, the same prizing of discourse over violent confrontation. If democratic values are to constitute a new universalism it will be a universalism that is not an American or Western imposition, but a spontaneously emergent solidarity of cause and aspiration. As Fred Dallmayr writes: “Once universalism is seen no longer as a hegemonic tool nor as a target of abuse, it becomes clear that the path to the global city can proceed only from the ground up, that is, through the labor of crosscultural interaction, critical engagement, and reciprocal learning. This travail necessarily has to start from local traditions and historically sedimented practices and beliefs; by moving from this core and opening themselves up to cross- cultural interrogation and testing, local traditions are likely to shed their dogmatic crust and become available again as rich resources of human and social transformation.”26 While Dallmayr’s optimism here may be overdone, as a conditional proposition — if global dialogue and global democracy, then global civilization—the idea has some merit, leaving out the prophecy and the idealism. (I shall return to this theme in the concluding chapter.) The temptation toward idealism and triumphalism is great at times, particularly in the aftermath of the cold war and the decline of authoritarianism in many parts of the world today. It is certainly understandable that after a century in which world wars, genocide, totalitarianism, and the threat of total annihilation loomed large, certain political thinkers would wish to leap to triumphalist conclusions and excessively optimistic

Between the Market and the Forum

117

prognoses regarding a democratic, dialogical, and global civilization. Hope springs eternal, yet we would be unwise to fall into historical forgetfulness; democracy has been ebbing and flowing for a few centuries now and continues to be a fragile, precarious experiment in many parts of the world (Iraq, Iran, Russia, Afghanistan, and many other nations), while in the older democracies of the West it is not without profound difficulties. Its capacity in the Western industrialized world to alleviate numerous social ills has been mediocre, while the two- or three-party systems to which it gives rise put into serious question how free we are to choose our laws and our legislators. Political apathy continues to be widespread and would appear even to be on the increase, particularly among younger voters. Why is it that after a couple of centuries of popular self-rule so few citizens are able to see themselves and their aspirations reflected in their institutions and that alienation and apathy are commonplace? Whatever the explanation for these and other shortcomings with or symptoms of democracy today, it must give us serious pause that about half choose to opt out of the political process, what sort of characters choose to offer themselves as political candidates, are elected, and so on. It is not an inspiring picture, all things considered, and sometimes reaches deplorable lows, as recent elections in the Palestinian territories, Iran, and numerous other nations evidence. Among the tasks of the political theorist is to attend carefully to social indicators of this kind, particularly the less tangible indicators and symptoms which, while often defying our understanding, are nonetheless profoundly revealing about the state of contemporary democracy. Were the political process and our institutions functioning as they ought to, we would not expect to find voter turnout rates of 50 percent, nor would talk of apathy, alienation, and malaise be on everyone’s lips today. We would not find political discussion polarized into hostile camps seemingly devoid of good will, or talk of the common good to be a ruse or veil for the self-interest of powerful voting blocs. Political theorists must interpret such phenomena and listen for what they say about the condition in which democracy currently finds itself and where it may be headed. We must keep our ears attuned as well to the catchwords and dominant tropes of the day, since they invariably signify something profound about our “foundational mythopoetic nucleus,” our “social imaginary” and aspirations, and the extent to which these aspirations are being realized. It indicates a great deal, for example, that words like “respect” and “empowerment” should resonate so deeply for so many, especially among groups that understand themselves as marginalized, or

118

Why Democracy?

that vocabularies of “difference” and “alterity” have become the fashion. What these catchwords signify is a plea, also a protest and a demand, that the democratic promise of equality be more convincingly realized, that equal rights be more today than a legal formality but a meaningful and basic ingredient of citizenship.27 What is required is less that such concepts be “analyzed” as so many bits of linguistic matter than that they be listened to, interpreted carefully for what they express regarding how social reality is presently constituted and experienced. Human rights, respect, equality, freedom, and so on express in a nutshell how we wish to be seen and treated as citizens, and what we wish our society to become. It also reveals the failings of our institutions when a value like simple respect should become such an insistent plea—on the premise, presumably, that such respect is not presently shown or experienced by the many persons continually calling for it. When the language of difference resonates so profoundly among so many, this signifies that the forces of social conformity, homogeneity, and parochialism have become dangerously prevalent, and that the pendulum of unity and difference has swung too far in one direction. Political theorists must attend carefully to these catchwords and symbols, these protests and desires, and to the political erotic more generally, and distinguish merely fashionable discourse from that which possesses deeper and more lasting significance, as the symbolism of democracy certainly does. What we must not do, however, is idolize any such symbols or transform them into an orthodoxy, a creed, or yet another form of rationalism. We must avoid taking our symbols and tropes with such seriousness that we idealize or transcendentalize them beyond the bounds of the practical or judicious, as some talk of deliberative democracy does. If democracy is the only game in town we had better make our peace with it, dress it up a little, remythologize it, or at least sugarcoat it, but we must never idealize it. Even symbols have their limits, their proper scope and bounds, including the most heartfelt and seemingly timeless. The political trope that is transformed into an idol or an orthodoxy shares a fate similar to what Ricoeur has called “dead” metaphors: after providing an initial illumination that opens up new ways of speaking and understanding, they begin to “die” or to close off possibilities of novel utterance or criticism. The same symbols that “give rise to thought” in their youth can close it down when believed in as truths or absolutes. Ideals, as Nietzsche was fond of saying, have a tendency to become idols, as much in need of critique as the orthodoxy or falsehoods that they once replaced. We idolize or fetishize dialogue

Between the Market and the Forum

119

when we fantasize about an ideal speech situation, a deliberative forum, or a townhall meeting—as if it were possible to return to an eighteenthcentury scale of political life via television, or as if the townhall meeting of yore was ever a perfect exemplar of public conversation. We similarly idolize impartiality when we imagine a veil of ignorance behind which stands the entire human race or, more likely, a race of rational choosers barely recognizable as the political agents we are or could ever be. So as well do we idolize the marketplace when we envision social and political life in general on a model of competition and consumerism. What both the market and forum models point out is the impossibility of translating or reducing democratic politics to something that it manifestly is not. If the aim of theoretical models is to explain, understand, and ultimately critique or prescribe, they inevitably fail when they substitute, as they so often do, political enthusiasm for sound phenomenology. If democracy today represents a plea, an aspiration, or a set of these, what likelihood is there that any set of institutions could effectively bring such aspirations into being “on the ground,” as the current expression has it? Political institutions, particularly in the mass societies of our time, are overwhelmingly large, bureaucratic, impersonal, even inhuman entities. Lumbering elephants of inefficiency, chronically resistant to change, what are the prospects of such institutions effectively realizing not only our political but our ethical and existential aspirations? It is a heavy burden for mere institutions to bring about “respect” or “recognition of difference,” if we mean by these expressions something more meaningful or substantial than equality before the law, equal rights, or similar, all too often legalistic, measures. The ethos, perhaps even the eros, of democracy concerns the plea for equality in its myriad forms while the actual practice of democracy concerns mere mechanisms of institutional decision making, and neither the mechanisms nor the institutions are ever quite up to the tasks assigned to them. We require a connecting link between democracy’s imaginative dimension—its dominant aspirations, narratives, and metaphors—and its pragmatic aspect—institutions and laws — for without this link we shall (continue to) find an alienating disconnection between the rhetoric of democracy and the practice.28 It is no small irony that at the very point in history that democracy, or the idea of it, has triumphed over authoritarianism in so much of the world, our capacity to speak of democracy is in serious jeopardy. In the older democracies, at any rate, the meaning of democratic citizenship, political participation, civic-mindedness, and public service appear more ambiguous than ever, if indeed they have not lost their significations

120

Why Democracy?

altogether. Were a president today to pose for the first time John F. Kennedy’s question, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” rather than the now standard “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” (i.e., what has the government done for you lately?), we would likely hear the former question as a sham, a hoax, an anachronism, or at best a pleasing naivety. How presumptuous, we would likely think; surely the questioner has something up his or her sleeve, perhaps a desire to co-opt us into some nefarious scheme. How did it come to pass that our democratic ideals have been usurped, at least in part, by an orientation of suspicion, alienation, and greed? How is it that Kennedy’s question was replaced by Reagan’s question or, stranger still, that we might pose both questions without noticing a moral dissonance? How did the practice of voting with one’s wallet, or with one’s religion or aggressive ideology, go from an injustice to a given? Allow me to suggest that the answer lies in a certain change in the fundamental orientation of political action and political agents, one made possible by an analogous change in the orientation of democratic speech, alterations decades if not centuries in the making. What most troubles democracy today — a problem that becomes manifest in the form of political alienation, apathy, and crass egoism—is a certain way in which we have become disposed as citizens. It is an orientation or disposition of action, certainly, but more fundamentally it is an orientation of language. That democratic speech is agonistic may be a given, a phenomenological constant of political speech and action, yet that it is antagonistic is neither a constant nor a necessary fact about it. The antagonism of so much political discourse today, while not wholly new, is wholly new in its presumption of rationality or even self-evidence. When rational speech is effectively reduced to the calculative or strategic, whether conceived in utilitarian, contractarian, quasi-economic, or purely egoistic terms, political action can be nothing but a means to an end, where the means is rational provided only that it constitutes the most efficient or shortest route to a desired end and where the end itself is a matter of subjective preference. The primacy of instrumental, meansend thinking is problematic and ultimately dangerous not only because it lowers the level of political discourse from the search for justice to getting what I, or we, want, that it polarizes citizens into antagonistic factions of rich and poor, conservative and liberal, and so on—factions that hold not only incompatible but undiscussable “preferences”—but because it subtly undermines the democratic idea itself in its symbolic,

Between the Market and the Forum

121

imaginative dimension. The paradigm of instrumental rationality represents the death of the symbol, which must henceforth be translated or reduced to the status of either a subjective desire, about which reason must remain silent, or a more or less efficient strategy, a means to an end beyond itself. A symbol is neither a means nor an end, but occupies a position in linguistic space that is in a sense intermediate between the two while in another sense superior to both. A symbol, as Ricoeur has remarked, “gives rise to thought”; it opens a path for interpretation and discussion without prescribing a method by which such discussion must be authoritatively adjudicated. It is not divorced from argumentation, so long as this term is understood broadly to include the practice of offering reasons and criticism, expressing pleas and aspirations, and interpreting and applying such principles as freedom and equality, human rights, and so on—ideas that are themselves more of the nature of symbols than principles in the sense of decision procedures. Rhetorical discourse quite obviously includes argumentation, both in this broad connotation and in the narrower sense recognized by analytic philosophy, yet what is imperative is that such argumentation not only produce sound reasons but connect with the imaginative dimension that underlies and sustains it. Political argumentation is not arithmetic, and it is the error of utilitarian, contractarian, decision-theoretic, and other rationalist approaches to insist on reducing the practice of offering reasons to a method, banishing all other political utterance to the realm of the “emotive” or irrational. I would suggest, then, that among the reasons for the widespread apathy, alienation, and general malaise regarding actually existing democracy, uneasily coupled with an enthusiasm for the democratic idea itself, is that the primacy of instrumentally rational discourse itself disposes citizens and states alike to “optimize” and “rationalize” in ways that little resemble authentic participation in the democratic process. The spirit or ethos of democracy is a fragile construction, and dispiritedness sets in when its imaginative and rhetorical underpinnings wither away on the grounds of their ostensible irrationality or arationality. If democratic discourse is deteriorating, as so many allege, it is not due to the “breakdown” of “traditional values,” the breakdown of “community,” “the family,” “marriage,” or some similar cause, but because we are all consumers now—consumers of “public goods,” ever anxious to receive our rightful share of the pie of social utility, and if possible a little more. Our comportment as citizens is becoming as strategic as strategic rationality itself; we are forgetting, if indeed we ever knew, what it means to participate as citizens in processes that we do not altogether control, or

122

Why Democracy?

not as individuals. If we are losing sight of what it means to be a citizen, or a “good citizen,” it is because we are losing sight of what it means to participate in democratic processes that are controlled by everyone and no one. Our ways of speaking about politics have become dangerously one-dimensional; increasingly politics is about getting what we want rather than seeking accommodation or fashioning a just society. The language of “participation” conforms to neither the market nor the forum models (although it is closer to the latter), but involves hazzarding judgments and cultivating “a sense of responsibility for one’s society,”29 listening and occasionally learning, seeing an issue from another’s point of view and demonstrating some reversibility of perspective. It involves a willingness to lose as many battles as one wins, and often more, as well as a relinquishing of control over democratic outcomes. Because participation bears more on processes than outcomes, we require conceptions of democratic participation as submitting views on the public record and letting the chips fall where they may, not demanding that they fall in line with the greatest happiness of the greatest number, an a priori consensus or some other ideal conception of a just end-state. The idealized end-state of society is the sine qua non of utopianism and, as I have argued, between utopianism and democracy it is necessary to choose.

Conclusion and Prognosis

I

n the era of globalization that is now emerging, what is the prognosis for democracy if its lifeblood is, as I have argued, a conception of political speech inhibited by neither authoritarian institutions nor rationalist philosophy? It is under conditions of popular sovereignty alone that something vaguely resembling dialogue becomes both a political possibility and a necessity, since under these conditions the demos are compelled to seek means of accommodation without recourse to authority, be it political or epistemic. If free speech is the lifeblood of democracy then the fate and the prognosis of the latter are that of the former. By way of a conclusion, then, I shall offer a few reflections on the current state of democracy and on its prognosis within the global civilization that, as we continually hear, is fast emerging. If globalization in a word names the direction in which civilization is increasingly, and perhaps inescapably, headed, what are the prospects of political authoritarianism in its remaining vestiges at long last dying out, as certain democratic enthusiasts and triumphalists proclaim? Has the world indeed been made safe for democracy, or has the enthusiasm that followed upon the collapse of Soviet-style politics and certain other authoritarian regimes been overstated? What is the prognosis as well of democracy in the older nation-states of the West? Is this old idea still capable of capturing the imagination in the way that it once did and continues to do within many emerging democracies, or is it destined to deteriorate, like so many ideals, into an idol or dogma as needful of replacement as the medieval political forms that it once replaced? If the world today appears in many respects to be teetering on the edge of an abyss — evidenced by continued environmental degradation, 123

124

Why Democracy?

violence, ignorance, greed, and other social maladies that appear utterly recalcitrant—there remain grounds for optimism regarding the capacity of human intelligence to bring about some semblance of dialogical rapprochement, even if it will never approximate the well-orchestrated, rationalized conception of this dreamed of by deliberationists. Among the philosophical conceptions of dialogue currently on offer, the hermeneutical and rhetorical conception articulated by Gadamer and other hermeneutical philosophers is, in my view, far and away the most adequate phenomenologically. It is a conception of dialogue as a dialectical, back-and-forth process in which a fundamental reciprocity between interlocutors prevails, a reciprocity that Gadamer likens to the back-andforth structure of play. In the play of dialogue, no speaker enjoys special knowledge or expertise that in principle is unavailable to the others. It is a process in which all are free to participate on the basis of a common language and horizon of understanding, a process that is oriented toward reaching consensus upon particular areas of disagreement yet without appeal to formal procedures or methods. Since no speaker enjoys epistemic privilege or special advantage, opposing judgments must be taken seriously—viewed in their possible legitimacy—rather than authoritatively pronounced upon. For Gadamer, the dialogical process is not governed by methods of rational inference or transcendental conditions of rational utterance, but calls upon ordinary capacities of critical discernment and practical judgment, interpretation and the creative interchange of question and answer, assertion and reply. “Coming to an understanding” in dialogue, Gadamer writes, “is a life process in which a community of life is lived out. To that extent, coming to an understanding through human conversation is no different from the understanding that occurs between animals. But human language must be thought of as a special and unique life process since, in linguistic communication, ‘world’ is disclosed. Reaching an understanding in language places a subject matter before those communicating like a disputed object set between them. Thus the world is the common ground, trodden by none and recognized by all, uniting all who talk to one another.” 1 Gadamer’s account of language as the practice of dialogue, and of dialogue as at once a hermeneutical, rhetorical, agonistic, and world-disclosing practice stands in stark contrast to rationalistic conceptions of public deliberation, and is certainly less vulnerable than the latter to the charge of utopianism; yet even the hermeneutical conception is not one that we should expect to see realized in democratic discourse—a discourse, as I have argued, that is invariably

Conclusion and Prognosis

125

strategic and bombastic as well as rhetorical in a less objectionable sense. If communicative reason, conceived along more Gadamerian than Habermasian lines, is the antidote to much of what presently ails the world, what are the prospects of dialogue in a globalized world? What conditions make it a genuine possibility and what conditions stand against it? The conditions that stand against dialogue so conceived are the same conditions that have long stood in the way of democracy; they include aggressive ideology and dogmatism in their myriad forms, parochialism, ignorance, need, oppression, political instability, bigotry, nationalistic and ethnic retreatism, and lamentable educational institutions, to name a few. Against these conditions stand the conversational virtues—openmindedness, the willingness to listen and learn, to exchange opinions and judgments with a semblance of good will, a bit of Aristotelian phronesis—along with a free press, human rights, institutions of civil society, a degree of prosperity, passable educational institutions, and decent or at least moderate government. Were we to wish such conditions to become realized in practice, still more on a global scale, the prognosis would not be favorable, at least in the short or medium term. As one hermeneutical philosopher expresses it, “[f]rom a Gadamerian point of view, the imperative is rather to work toward developing, alongside the globalization of technological or instrumental reason and on an equally global scale, another and higher form of reason: hermeneutical reason, i.e., communicative rationality, dialogue, or ‘conversation.’ ”2 It is a noble sentiment, and certainly less utopian than that proffered by deliberationists, yet even if we assert boldly that only dialogue will save us now, the questions remain: Will it? Might it? What forces or institutions are presently making the world safe for dialogue, what superpower or coalition of nations is occupied with dialogical exchange or mutual, intercultural interrogation on a massive scale? Will governments take upon themselves this task? the United Nations? multinational corporations? nongovernmental organizations? or even the universities? What are the processes and mechanisms that could bring this ideal into being? The only certainty in this matter is that it will not be technological or economic imperatives alone that will usher in an era of global democracy or global dialogue since the latter emerge, when they emerge at all, only from an ethos or a fundamental orientation that favors civility over creeds and getting along over getting what we want. Of its own accord, globalization is a force neither for nor against democracy and dialogue. We can begin to get a handle on these questions by recognizing in the

126

Why Democracy?

first place that globalization—understood as a complex set of imperatives pointing away from parochialism and isolationist particularism, and toward interdependencies simultaneously technological, economic, political, and cultural, facilitated by new technologies along with greater ease in communication, travel, and commerce—is an historical fact, as unstoppable as technology itself. Lamenting this fact in the manner of certain critics of globalization serves as little purpose as closing, or demanding the closing of, the door after the horse has left the barn. If history is indeed marching onward, we had better debate its direction and course than fight a rearguard action destined for futility. We must reject the dichotomy of antiglobalization or universalist triumphalism, a polarity that is driven by ideology and singularly unhelpful in coming to critical terms with the issues before us, namely, to determine in broad terms how the various processes and imperatives of globalization may promote rather than hinder the democratic idea. For all that globalization, in its economic and technological dimensions, may bring about “a standardization of production and consumer tastes — a process,” as Dallmayr remarks, “accompanied widely by a standardization of opinions and worldviews,”3 for all as well that it threatens to assimilate particular traditions and cultural identities into a homogeneous configuration according to terms dictated by the West, its happier side evidences, just possibly, the emerging “consciousness of solidarity of a humanity that slowly begins to know itself as humanity,”4 as Gadamer has noted. Vaclav Havel expresses a roughly equivalent sentiment: “If humanity is to survive and avoid new catastrophes, then the global political order has to be accompanied by a sincere and mutual respect among the various spheres of civilization, culture, nations, or continents, and by honest efforts on their part to seek and find the values or basic moral imperatives they have in common, and to build them into the foundation of their coexistence in this globally connected world.”5 Indeed, as far back as the eighteenth century, Kant had already remarked: “The peoples of the earth have thus entered in varying degrees into a universal community, and it has developed to the point where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere.”6 This happy, and premature, prognosis—far more premature for Kant than for us—brings into view the two faces of globalization, at once optimistic and menacing, emancipatory and enslaving in approximately equal measure. Simultaneously a force for economic development and exploitation, prosperity and crass consumerism, at a cultural level as well the movement toward inter- or transnationalism represents an important advance for

Conclusion and Prognosis

127

heterogeneity and “difference,” for removing backwardness and the more ominous forms of identity politics at the same time that it threatens to usher in new forms of hegemony. Recognizing the historical inevitability of globalization, together with its considerable moral ambiguity, affords the premise from which the issue of the fate of the democratic idea may be addressed. For that idea to continue to bear fruit, rather than serve as a cover for ideologies of the left or the right, dialogical rapprochement between cultures would need to become a reality, and a reality “on the ground” rather than an idealized and counterfactual abstraction. Real discourse across boundaries of nationality, culture, identity, and ideology is at long last a genuine possibility. For the first time in history, as we all know, it is not only possible but common for injustices occurring in specific locations in the world to be immediately known to, and to affect, the entire globe, as Kant somewhat hastily prophesied over two centuries ago. The free flow of information has made this possible, and there is no going back to a time when large-scale injustices could be effectively hidden from the outside world. However, a genuine “dialogue of civilizations,” were it to materialize, would entail far more than the efficient exchange of information that technology has made possible. Dialogue is far more than information exchange; where it is genuine it puts in question the standpoint and self-certainty of the speaker, it involves as much, or more, listening than speaking, a disposition to take seriously what one’s fellow discussants stand for, a rejection of doctrinaire ideology, and the capacity to learn from perspectives not one’s own. It calls upon all alike to “test their prejudices,” as Gadamer would say, to risk one’s point of view in confrontation with others and to renounce it should it fail to survive such confrontation. The dialogical ideal has achieved considerable resonance of late, as evidenced by its eager reception among a wide variety of political perspectives and current ubiquity in ordinary speech, political and apolitical. A worthy ideal it is, yet no sooner is the idea fashioned than it is conscripted by ideologues, bridled by rationalists, or transformed into an idol. A case in point, alluded to in chapter 6, is the ideal of interreligious dialogue, as appropriate an illustration of cross-cultural dialogue as one could find. If the great dialogue of civilizations or cultures is to be a genuine possibility, it ought to be so in an area of discourse such as this, one that chiefly concerns ideas rather than money or politics. The idea of interfaith dialogue has indeed become something of a fashion in recent decades, and no doubt for the good. As one scholar

128

Why Democracy?

in this field writes: “In the past it was possible, indeed, unavoidable, for most human beings to live out their lives in isolation from the vast majority of their fellows, without even having a faint awareness of, let alone interest in, their very existence. . . . Put briefly, until the edge of the present era, humans lived in the age of monologue. That age is now passing. We are now poised at the entrance to the age of dialogue.”7 A rousing sentiment to be sure; now at last, after millennia of ignorance of or hostility toward religions not our own, humankind is embarking upon a cooperative inquiry into the true religion. What a triumph for the spirit of inter-cultural dialogue—except that we must add a few qualifications: it is only “members of the Abrahamic religions, Jews, Christians, and Muslims” who are parties to such dialogue since they alone “share much theological common ground,” thus excluding the religious traditions of the East, among others;8 the participants in such dialogue are not the general membership of these groups but their specialized envoys; and, finally, the likelihood of finding true consensus or of certain groups seeing the light, followed by the mass conversion of populations is perhaps not great. Indeed, as the editors of Religions in Dialogue write: “Incredibly, it took these 25 years of dialogue to develop a one-page draft—just eleven sentences—to outline the Rules of Conduct and Religious Dimension of Interfaith Dialogue.”9 One wonders how many years of dialogue it might take to ascertain whether Jesus is the Christ. The dialogical ideal is more frequently invoked, of course, in contemporary political discourse, one example of which is the “townhall meeting” phenomenon alluded to above, visible especially during American election campaigns. Here the idea is to revive the eighteenthcentury practice of political officeholders and candidates meeting face to face with the public and engaging in small-scale conversation about issues of common concern. No pretension to internationality characterizes these events, yet in the pluralistic and multicultural societies of our times at least an element of intergroup and intercultural dialogue is a frequent theme. Optimistic sentiments of bringing people together across boundaries of race, ethnicity, class, culture, religion, and ideology are regularly expressed by candidates for public office, and once again who will doubt that this is all for the good? However, belying these sentiments are the dangerous polarization of contemporary politics, the showquality of these staged events, particularly those organized by major media outlets, the blatant manner in which politicians strategize, distort, and aim their message at specific voting blocs rather than the citizenry as a whole. Who can recall the last time a presidential candidate, for

Conclusion and Prognosis

129

instance, “learned” from his esteemed interlocutor during such an encounter or “debate,” or even entertained the possibility of this? The point is to win votes and, as often as not, to make the weaker argument appear the stronger, as Socrates’ accusers would have said. The apparent silliness of dialogue, or what passes for it, in such contexts makes it entirely understandable that public deliberationists would wish to call such matters to some semblance of rational order, yet as I have argued the prospects of this bearing fruit are dim indeed. Does this entail, then, that the prognosis for dialogue itself, and for democracy, are bleak? Perhaps not. The idea of dialogue has as much to do with our orientation toward ideas — our own and others’— and toward our fellow citizens as it does with the actual conduct of political discourse. As a normative ideal, dialogue suggests a decidedly nondogmatic posture, an openness to having our beliefs challenged and to the possibility of changing our minds should someone offer a persuasive argument. Communicatively rational dialogue, as I conceive of it, requires no strict adherence to rationalist methodology but a capacity to listen to others’ views and to entertain as a genuine possibility that we may have something to learn from them or even that we ourselves may be mistaken. If the beginning of wisdom is the recognition of the possibility that we—that I myself—may be fundamentally in error, then it is open-mindedness and the rest of the intellectual virtues that will bring this to pass, a turn of mind that rejects ideological self-certainty even as it seeks to defend its own convictions. This is precisely the spirit of dialogue and democracy alike, that citizens cultivate a degree of open-mindedness regarding their own values, that even as they hold their beliefs and ideals with some resoluteness they do not abandon the spirit of fallibilism that so many profess and so few apply. The democratic ethos is one in which heartfelt convictions are confronted with their respective “others,” in which all self-certainty and self-interest are called to account in the face of their rivals, and in which ideals run the risk of being exposed as the idols and falsehoods that they so often are. Dialogical openness is its operative premise, yet after centuries of philosophers and others proclaiming the virtue of calling our convictions into question it remains a practice at which few excel.10 Dallmayr is entirely correct that “the path to the global city can proceed only from the ground up, that is, through the labor of cross-cultural interaction, critical engagement, and reciprocal learning,” a practice that “necessarily has to start from local traditions and historically sedimented practices and beliefs.” He is correct as well that “by moving from this

130

Why Democracy?

core and opening themselves up to cross-cultural interrogation and testing, local traditions are likely to shed their dogmatic crust and become available again as rich resources of human and social transformation.”11 John Dewey expressed similar sentiments, albeit on a smaller scale, in 1939: “When I think of the conditions under which men and women are living in many foreign countries today, fear of espionage, with danger hanging over the meeting of friends for friendly conversation in private gatherings, I am inclined to believe that the heart and final guarantee of democracy is in free gatherings of neighbors on the street corner to discuss back and forth what is read in uncensored news of the day, and in gatherings of friends in the living rooms of houses and apartments to converse freely with one another. Intolerance, abuse, calling of names because of differences of opinion about religion or politics or business, as well as because of differences of race, color, wealth or degree of culture are treason to the democratic way of life. For everything which bars freedom and fullness of communication sets up barriers that divide human beings into sets and cliques, into antagonistic sects and factions, and thereby undermines the democratic way of life.”12 Dialogical rapprochement or the “social intelligence” of which Dewey spoke is the heart and soul of democracy, yet it is as frail an achievement as it is necessary, as vulnerable to strident ideology or sheer self-interest as it has ever been. Many find grounds for optimism in new technologies that greatly facilitate communication and information exchange across national, cultural, and other boundaries. The internet in particular is often touted as a veritable heyday for dialogue, and in certain respects it may well be. Where else could individuals at opposite ends of the earth meet to exchange information about developments in the struggle of the Zapatistas against the Mexican government, or share a mutual interest in African poetry or the antique furniture of Quebec? For every collectivity imaginable, every social movement, cultural organization, identity community, or band of eccentrics there is not one but a dozen websites, all “linked” and “plugged in,” “cross-referenced” and at our service. As a medium of expression and information, the internet is of far-reaching importance indeed and can succeed in enlarging horizons on a global scale in a way that no other medium can. Where it is less effective is in bringing about the kind of dialogical interchange described above, the dynamic back-and-forth movement of question and answer that captures the true spirit of dialogue. Conversation via computers and information technology is second-rate, low-level conversation under the best of

Conclusion and Prognosis

131

circumstances, even if it is a far sight better than isolation, enforced silence, or speaking only to one’s kind. There is a qualitative difference between the efficient exchange of information on the one hand and mutual interrogation, learning, the broadening of horizons, and the tearing down of barriers to understanding and self-understanding on the other. If critical self-scrutiny and an openness to challenge and be challenged in turn, across barriers of geography, culture, or worldview, is what will save us now, it will unlikely occur via technology. True dialogue requires face-to-face encounter with our interlocutor, most especially when our interlocutor’s message is one we do not particularly wish to hear. The prognosis for dialogue of this kind is decidedly mixed, with about as much room for optimism as pessimism. Where it is successful it proceeds, as Gadamer, Dallmayr, and other hermeneutical philosophers have pointed out, from a starting point of consensus, a shared language and commitment to the dialogical process, and engages one’s “others” in a conversation that is at once uninhibited and rhetorical, cooperative and confrontational. Under the right conditions it enlarges horizons, defeats parochialism, or even reconciles warring factions, transforming enemies into dialogical adversaries, and tearing down barriers that divide citizens or cultures into mutually hostile camps. While a great age of dialogue or deliberative rapprochement is not yet upon us, signs that it may be on the way are frequently evident today and do afford grounds for optimism, even as the obstacles to its realization remain very much in evidence. The obstacles, or symptoms of its nonappearance, include high levels of political alienation and apathy, low voter turnout, widespread mistrust of public officeholders and institutions, political polarization, and a rigid two-party system, all of which work toward quelling any new idea that may wish to announce itself. Further obstacles include the very language of democracy itself, a vocabulary overgrown with hackneyed expressions, dead metaphors, and verbal strategies designed in the main to discredit opposing ideas rather than propose better alternatives. Perhaps most disturbing of all is the increasingly visible phenomenon of nonparticipation in public affairs or the retreat from participation to spectatorship over the whole course of political events. Any process that would transform citizens into spectators or consumers requires urgent reversal, yet what could be more difficult than to transform by means of mere political theory our basic orientation as citizens? Political theorists typically view their role as proposing solutions to policy questions or seeing to their philosophical

132

Why Democracy?

underpinnings, but when the problem concerns the fundamental orientation or comportment of citizens toward public affairs the resources of mainstream political theory often fail us, if indeed they do not contribute to the problem. After a couple of centuries of talk of rational selfinterest, contractarian strategizing, and utilitarian maximizing, perhaps it is little wonder that so many today regard public life entirely through the lens of entitlement, aggressive consumption, or simple greed. Hobbesian individuals by nature we are not, but we can become this when the political languages we speak are oriented more toward strategic optimizing than public participation. It is well and good when governments endeavor to provide citizens with the laws and institutions that they actually want — as opposed to those that they supposedly should want or that some authority thinks best for them—but when our very disposition and mode of citizenship becomes subtly transformed into one of consumption and entitlement, of getting what we want (whatever that may be, and on the assumption of value subjectivism) rather than getting along, then is not a certain dispiritedness or malaise a predictable consequence? We are at risk today of forgetting what it means to participate, as citizens, in processes that we do not altogether control, of losing sight of democratic participation as involving the submission of ideas, not “preferences” or “demands,” on the public record and watching them succeed or fail depending not on how ardently we prefer them but on whether we are able to convince others of their merit. Empirically, democratic politics is essentially concerned with procedures that are controlled by all and none, yet it is this very relinquishment of control over outcomes that is becoming dangerously foreign to our political orientation today. Control over outcomes, in politics as in so many areas of life, is precisely what we want and have become accustomed to expect, as if the role of consumer or spectator were the only roles still possible for us in our social dealings in general, and where the choice is essentially between active consumption (in the form of aggressively imposing our will) or passive consumption (waiting, as spectators, for the state to meet our needs or even to decide what these are). If there is one thing needful for democracy in an age of globalization it is that the vocabulary of dialogue, difference, and otherness not go the way of so many old ideals and harden into dogmas, creeds, and dead metaphors which, in gaining currency, begin to conceal more than they reveal or to remedy one set of injustices only to usher in a new set. The fate of the democratic idea is inseparable from, indeed is contingent upon, dialogue in both its theoretical and practical dimensions. If the

Conclusion and Prognosis

133

theory of dialogue must take its cue from actually existing discourse, rather than become yet another rationalist dream, so as well must the practice of political discourse remain mindful of the principles that make it the practice that it is — principles of openness, reasonableness, and reciprocity that distinguish genuine dialogue from its counterfeit forms. The logic of dialogue and democracy alike is a logic of participation in processes dominated by none and in which outcomes are determined by procedures in which all may participate but that none control. The practices of dialogue and democracy are alike imperfect, rhetorical, agonistic, and more than occasionally antagonistic, yet they remain the best hope we have for mutual accommodation and understanding, even as both defy our best efforts at sanitation and rationalization. The present disenchantment with democracy is directed far less at the idea itself than at the conduct of democratic institutions and officeholders. Indeed the idea itself, as I have discussed, continues to inspire a surprising optimism, if not idealism, which combines awkwardly with a pessimism for democracy’s actually existing forms. It is the idea that we love; the thing itself we could take or leave. But there is hope for democracy nonetheless, and not only for the idea or the imaginative aspiration that it represents. If the actual practice is less than inspired, it remains the best available option—more likely, the only one—and, at any rate, after the inspired, ideologically driven politics of the century now mercifully past, perhaps a somewhat milder politics of civility is the best for which we can hope. For the idea to succeed, however, it requires that we limber up what is an essentially eighteenth-century vocabulary—the vocabulary of popular sovereignty, responsible government, the common good, political and civil liberty—or that we creatively reinterpret this old idea in a manner that speaks to the present historical moment. Vocabularies of public deliberation, Socratic citizenship, difference and radical alterity constitute valiant efforts in this connection, even as they threaten to create new orthodoxies of rationalism or identity politics in the process. The tropology of dialogue — understood precisely as a rhetorical tropology, an imaginative interpretation, and an ethical-existential aspiration rather than a method, an epistemology, or a present or quickly attainable reality—currently represents the best hope for the democratic idea, and it might be hoped that it too will not degenerate into a creed as it gains currency. If a semblance of global solidarity is to be found, it will more likely be found in the realm of the symbolic rather than the institutional or the doctrinal. It is here that the aspirations of the older democracies connect most fruitfully with nations still struggling with the

134

Why Democracy?

legacies of colonialism or authoritarianism, aspirations for equal freedom and dignity, for tolerance and emancipation from some arbitrary power or another. It would be a solidarity of process rather than end-states, a commitment to procedures by which to resolve disagreements more than substantive consensus on “values” or policy questions. Meaningful dialogue, or even simple negation, begins when a common language is found, 13 when substantive differences are framed by a common interpretation or symbolic vocabulary in which all sides can express themselves. It is then that a dialogue that transcends the particularity of nations, cultures, identities, or ideologies becomes a real possibility, a dialogue that, we may still hope, might overcome the parochialism and dogmatism that remain commonplace today and to which globalization poses a profound challenge. Whether democracy in time will supplant the forms of political authoritarianism that remain entrenched in so many nations of the world today, and whether it will succeed or fail in the older constitutional democracies of the West in overcoming malaise and cynicism, depends not only, and not primarily, on the actions of political leaders and institutions but on the continued imaginative appeal of the democratic idea itself. For this idea, and ideal, to succeed, we shall finally have to reconcile ourselves with the idea of dialogical rapprochement, nondogmatism, and reasonableness, with a language of civic participation, process, and procedure, and with a political orientation that makes it as possible to lose graciously as to succeed in getting our way.

NOTES

Introduction 1. I have addressed some related issues regarding the philosophical basis of liberal democracy in a couple of previous books, including Public/Private (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005) and Moral Selfhood in the Liberal Tradition: The Politics of Individuality (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). 2. Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Commonwealth, trans. George Sabine and Stanley Smith (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1929), 136. 3. Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers, Number IX (New York: Penguin, 1987), 118. 4. Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History, trans. Michael Bullock (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 161. 5. Aristotle, Politics, 1308a21 and 1317b25. In The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941). 6. Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity (New York: Vintage, 1992), 20–21. 7. For Nietzsche, one of the key points of distinction between moralities of nobility and moralities of nihilism is precisely that while the former have as their original or founding impulse an affirmation—of life, of self, of terrestrial existence—the latter are founded upon a negation of the same. Perhaps a similar observation of what distinguishes democratic from nondemocratic politics is in order. 8. Norberto Bobbio, The Future of Democracy: A Defence of the Rules of the Game, trans. Roger Griffin (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), 42. 9. Pierre Elliott Trudeau, The Essential Trudeau, ed. Ron Graham (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1998), 59. Karl Popper similarly distinguishes democratic from nondemocratic governments by reference to the former as “governments of which we can get rid without bloodshed” and the latter as “governments which the ruled cannot get rid of except by way of a successful revolution — that is to say, in most cases, not at all.” Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 1: The Spell of Plato (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 124.

135

136

Notes to Chapter 1

10. Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 135 and 151. 11. Gary B. Madison, The Political Economy of Civil Society and Human Rights (London: Routledge, 1998), 116. 12. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1976), 284–85. 13. John Dewey, “William James and the World Today,” The Later Works, vol. 15: 1942–1948, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 6. 14. Gary B. Madison, The Politics of Postmodernity: Essays in Applied Hermeneutics (Boston: Kluwer, 2001), 169.

Chapter 1. “The Fountainhead of Justice”? 1. Karl Klare, “Legal Theory and Democratic Reconstruction: Reflections on 1989” in A Fourth Way? eds. G. S. Alexander and G. Skapska (New York: Routledge, 1994), 310. 2. Robert Dahl, On Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 15. 3. In 1944, John Dewey noted the similar prematurity of the democratic triumphalism common at the turn of the twentieth century: “I believe that an outline of the things we need most to think about and to plan for may be derived from noting where the beliefs and hopes and methods of men say fifty years ago, or in the nineties, went astray. Politically it was the common belief that the future of democracy was practically assured; that it was certain that the course of events in no very long time would overthrow despotic rulers in all countries. There was also the expectation that the cause of peace among nations was reasonably assured; that war was bound to disappear, along with other relics of barbarism, because of advance in civilization.” John Dewey, “Between Two Worlds,” The Later Works, vol. 17: 1885–1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 452–53. 4. Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Thomas Nugent (New York: Hafner, 1949), 150. 5. Trudeau, The Essential Trudeau, 58. 6. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 154. 7. John Adams, The Political Writings of John Adams, ed. George A. Peek (Indianapolis: Bobbs- Merrill, 1954), 149. 8. Robert Wokler, “Democracy’s Mythical Ordeals: The Procrustean and Promethean Paths to Popular Self-Rule” in Democracy and Democratization, eds. Geraint Parry and Michael Moran (London: Routledge, 1994), 28. 9. Even John Dewey, democratic optimist that he was, remarked that “[t]he ground of democratic ideas and practices is faith in the potentialities of individuals, faith in the capacity for positive developments if proper conditions are provided.” Dewey, “Time and Individuality,” The Later Works, vol. 14:

Notes to Chapter 2

10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

137

1939–1941, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 113. Dewey’s faith is not in the wisdom of democratic majorities or individuals but in their “potentialities,” and only “if proper conditions are provided,” conditions that, on Dewey’s view, were far from being met when he wrote these words. Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 110. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1976), 262. Benjamin Barber expresses this frequently encountered view as follows: “America has always carried a special responsibility for freedom in the West— a last best hope of our civilization’s democratic aspirations.” Barber, Strong Democracy, xvi. John Dewey, Ethics, The Later Works, vol. 7: 1932, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 351. As Hayek writes: “The successful politician owes his power to the fact that he moves within the accepted framework of thought, that he thinks and talks conventionally. It would be almost a contradiction in terms for a politician to be a leader in the field of ideas. His task in a democracy is to find out what the opinions held by the largest number are, not to give currency to new opinions which may become the majority view in some distant future.” Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 112. Adams, Political Writings, 146. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (New York: Norton, 1975), 6. Aristotle, Politics, 1312b5. James Madison, The Federalist Papers, Number X, 123. Ibid., 124. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, The Later Works, vol. 2: 1925–1927, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 309–10. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 117.

Chapter 2. Democracy: Communitarian, Participatory, or Radical? 1. See especially Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979); The History of Sexuality, 3 volumes, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1987–1990); Power/Knowledge, ed. and trans. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1972). 2. As Torben Bech Dyrberg writes: “Once power is no longer conceived as an external relation taking place between two pre-constituted identities but as shaping the identities themselves, democratic politics appears under a new light. Indeed, if relations of power are constitutive of the social, the main question of democratic politics cannot any more be how to eliminate power but,

138

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

Notes to Chapter 2 instead, how to constitute relations of power that are compatible with democratic values.” Torben Bech Dyrberg, The Circular Structure of Power: Politics, Identity, Community (New York: Verso, 1997), xi. C. Douglas Lummis, Radical Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 141. Dyrberg, The Circular Structure of Power, 184. Ibid., 19. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (New York: Verso, 1985), 188. Ibid., 2. As Mouffe writes: “But if we accept that relations of power are constitutive of the social, then the main question for democratic politics is not how to eliminate power but how to constitute forms of power more compatible with democratic values. Coming to terms with the constitutive nature of power implies relinquishing the ideal of a democratic society as the realization of a perfect harmony or transparency.” Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000), 100. Anna Marie Smith, Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary (New York: Routledge, 1998). Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, “Post-Marxism without Apologies,” in New Reflections of the Revolution of Our Thought (London: Verso, 1990), 128. Chantal Mouffe, “Preface: Democratic Politics Today,” in Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community, ed. C. Mouffe (London: Verso, 1992), 1. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 167. Mouffe, “Preface: Democratic Politics Today,” 4. Speaking of the common good, radical democrat Torben Bech Dyrberg writes: “In this situation it might seem meaningless, anachronistic or hopelessly idealistic to speak of the common good and the public interest. The point is, however, not only that these terms are deeply ingrained in various democratic traditions concerned with political justice. They are . . . inherent in the very political structure of Western democracies, where political authorities are assigned the task of making and implementing collectively binding decisions in the name of popular sovereignty.” Dyrberg, The Circular Structure of Power, 184. Chantal Mouffe, “Democracy, Power, and the ‘Political,’ ” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 248. Smith, Laclau and Mouffe, 119, 146. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 101. Smith, Laclau and Mouffe, 149–50. Chantal Mouffe, “Democratic Citizenship and the Political Community,” in Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Verso, 1992), 236. Smith, Laclau and Mouffe, 149, 150. Ibid., 34–35.

Notes to Chapter 3

139

21. As it turns out, however, this respect for differences is qualified to what a democratic community deems acceptable. As Dyrberg writes: “A politically acceptable difference is an action, practice, value, utterance, rule or a form of life that is publicly reasonable vis-à-vis the ethico-political horizons of a political community. This definition is, admittedly, circular but it is an unavoidable circularity, and from a democratic point of view it is even decisive. The reason is that a ‘linear’ definition would hardly be able to avoid references to a substantial definition of the common good, where a number of virtues or base values would be defined as acceptable whilst others would be disqualified.” Dyrberg, The Circular Structure of Power, 199. 22. Barber, Strong Democracy, 132 and 151. Other participatory democrats of note include C. B. Macpherson, Carole Pateman, Nicos Poulantzas, David Held, Carol Gould, and Steven Lukes, among others. 23. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. G.D.H. Cole (New York: Knopf, 1993), 230. 24. Ibid., 203–204. 25. Ibid., 202. 26. T. H. Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation and Other Writings, eds. Paul Harris and John Morrow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 79–80. 27. Brand Blanshard, Reason and Goodness (London: Allen and Unwin, 1961), 395–96. 28. Ibid., 398 and 397. 29. Among the more prominent communitarians are Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael J. Sandel, Michael Walzer, David Ingram, Amitai Etzioni, and Mary Ann Glendon. 30. Charles Taylor, “Atomism,” in Communitarianism and Individualism, eds. Shlomo Avineri and Avner de-Shalit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 45. 31. Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 179. 32. Dyrberg, The Circular Structure of Power, 12. 33. Mill, On Liberty, 15. 34. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, volume 2, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 666–67. 35. Mouffe, “Democratic Citizenship and the Political Community,” 236. 36. Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, 244. 37. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 263.

Chapter 3. Deliberative Democracy 1. In addition to Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls, some of the more notable theorists include Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, John Dryzek, Ian Shapiro, Jon Elster, Robert Goodin, Iris Marion Young, James Bohman, Seyla

140

2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Notes to Chapter 3 Benhabib, Joshua Cohen, and James Fishkin, among numerous others. An excellent introduction to the field and its history may be found in the editors’ introduction to Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, eds. James Bohman and William Rehg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997). See especially Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 volumes, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1984 and 1987). Jürgen Habermas, “Reconciliation Through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawls’s Political Liberalism,” The Journal of Philosophy 92, 3 (March 1995): 117. Also see Habermas’s Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. C. Lenhardt and S. W. Nicholsen (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990); Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics, trans. Ciarin Cronin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993); Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge: Polity, 1996); The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, trans. Ciarin Cronin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998). Habermas, “Reconciliation through the Public Use of Reason,” 131. Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, 94. Seyla Benhabib, “Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy,” in Democracy and Difference, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 69. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 305. Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, 245–46. On this point see Habermas, “Popular Sovereignty as Procedure” in Between Facts and Norms, 463–90. Ibid., 248–49. See especially John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1971); Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); and Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). Rawls, Political Liberalism, 137. Rawls formulates the difference principle in A Theory of Justice as follows: “Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity” (83). His first principle of equal liberty reads as follows: “Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others” (60). Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” in Collected Papers, 578. Ibid., 580. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 213, 220. Ibid., 231. Referring to Rawls, Chantal Mouffe observes: “Conflicts, antagonisms, relations of power disappear and the field of politics is reduced to a rational process of negotiation among private interests under the constraints of morality.” Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993), 113.

Notes to Chapter 3

141

18. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 3. 19. See, for instance, Joshua Cohen, “Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy,” in Democracy and Difference, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); also see Jack Knight and James Johnson, “Aggregation and Deliberation: On the Possibility of Democratic Legitimacy,” Political Theory 22 (May 1994). 20. Gutmann and Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy? 13. 21. Ibid., 7. 22. Ibid., 121, 20. 23. James Bohman, Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, and Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 24–25. Ricardo Blaug also notes: “A plethora of new work in deliberative democracy has stressed the importance of deliberative fora, describing them in a variety of ways. Whether they be in the form of secondary associations, autonomous public spheres operating at the periphery of the state, functional demarchies, deliberative opinion polls, New Social Movements, discursive fora, or subaltern counterpublics, few theorists give adequate attention to what actually takes place within such fora. Empirical work on such fora has therefore been thin on the ground.” Ricardo Blaug, Democracy, Real and Ideal: Discourse Ethics and Radical Politics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 131. 24. Gutmann and Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy? 2–3. 25. Ibid., 37. 26. Ibid., 30. 27. Ibid., 29–30. 28. See Jane Mansbridge, “Everyday Talk in the Deliberative System,” in Deliberative Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement, ed. Stephen Macedo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 29. Joshua Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” in Democracy, ed. David Estlund (New York: Blackwell, 2001), 102. 30. John S. Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1–2. Also see Dryzek, Discursive Democracy: Politics, Policy, and Political Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 31. Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond, 4–5. 32. As Dryzek writes, “critical theory has lost its way to the extent it has embraced liberalism, thus highlighting the need to retrieve a truly critical deliberative democracy. Ibid., 20. 33. Ibid., 11. 34. Cohen, “Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy,” 95. Lynn Sanders notes that “[d]eliberation also connotes thoughtfulness. Appeals to deliberation amount to demands for a certain kind of discourse in democratic political settings: reasonable, foresighted, steady, and oriented to a common, not sectarian, problem.” Lynn Sanders, “Against Deliberation,” Political Theory 25, 3 (June 1997): 356.

142

Notes to Chapter 4

35. Bohman, Public Deliberation, ix. 36. As Blaug observes, “Habermas posits a normative counterfactual ideal of complete participation, and he fully intends this to help us with the more empirical problem of how a political order might be made more democratic. Yet though he is able to highlight the importance of the public sphere and to call for the increase in deliberative fora in order to deepen democracy, he never really confronts questions regarding the actual functioning of such fora. Indeed, his most recent work moves rather in the opposite direction, concentrating on the ‘macro’ questions of the normative basis of law and constitutional practices.” Blaug, Democracy: Real and Ideal, xiv. 37. Regarding the latter point, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, second revised edition, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall (New York, Crossroad, 1989). 38. Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond, 1. 39. Another example is Joshua Cohen, who argues that under deliberative democracy citizens must be not only free and equal but reasonable, in the sense that “they aim to defend and criticize institutions and programs in terms of considerations that others, as free and equal, have reason to accept, given the fact of reasonable pluralism.” Joshua Cohen, “Democracy and Liberty” in Deliberative Democracy, ed. Jon Elster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 194 (italics in the original). 40. Gutmann and Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy? 41. 41. See especially Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997) and Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). Derrida’s “democracy to come” has rightfully begun to receive attention, although I shall not pursue the issue here. See the spring 2007 issue of Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy (vol. 11, no. 1) for some informative essays on this theme.

Chapter 4. A Modest Phenomenology of Democratic Speech 1. Barber, Strong Democracy, 173. 2. Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 478, 484–85. 3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), sec. 53, 171–72. 4. Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, trans. J. Wilkonson and P. Weaver (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969). 5. Madison, The Politics of Postmodernity, 106. Madison here cites Gadamer, Truth and Method, 474 and Calvin O. Schrag, Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 187.

Notes to Chapter 5

143

6. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Ideology-Critique,” trans. G. B. Hess and Richard E. Palmer, in Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time, eds. Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 318. 7. Chaim Perelman, The New Rhetoric and the Humanities: Essays on Rhetoric and Its Application (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1979), 9. 8. Ronald H. Carpenter, History as Rhetoric: Style, Narrative, and Persuasion (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), 1. 9. Joshua Foa Dienstag, Dancing in Chains: Narrative and Memory in Political Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 3. 10. Louis Mink, “Narrative Form as Cognitive Instrument” in The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding, eds. Robert Canary and Henry Kozicki (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 133. 11. Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1367b7, trans. W. Rhys Roberts, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941). 12. Gadamer, “Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Ideology-Critique,” 318. 13. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (New York: Prometheus, 1995), 411. 14. Dienstag, Dancing in Chains, 52. 15. Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 99–100. 16. Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 166. 17. We can thus fully agree with Nietzsche’s remark in Daybreak: “It is not enough to prove something, one has also to seduce or elevate people to it.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), Book IV, sec. 330, p. 162. 18. Richard Kearney, On Stories (New York: Routledge, 2002), 125. 19. Dyrberg, The Circular Structure of Power, 217. 20. Bobbio, The Future of Democracy, 37.

Chapter 5. Why Democracy? 1. Paul Fairfield, The Ways of Power: Hermeneutics, Ethics, and Social Criticism (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2002). 2. Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: From Husserl to Lyotard (London: Harper Collins, 1991), 158. 3. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 269. 4. Aristotle, Politics, 1318a5–6. Plato as well observed in the Republic that the demand for freedom is democracy’s most characteristic demand. 5. Alain Touraine, What Is Democracy? trans. David MacEy (Boulder: Westview, 1997), 190.

144

Notes to Chapter 5

6. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Democracy on Trial (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1998), 81. 7. John Dewey, “Democracy and Educational Administration,” The Later Works, 11: 1935–1937, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 217–18. 8. Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (New York: Routledge, 2003), 66. 9. Ibid., 11. 10. Ibid., 79. 11. As Étienne Balibar remarks, “Now it has become a political strategy for groups which are either a minority, oppressed, or discriminated against—or claim to be—to present themselves as victims of genocide, or immemorial injustice, and try, either in the recent or remote past, to base their claims for equal rights, but also for symbolic and sometimes material redress, on the fact that they have been victims. It is a perverse consequence of the recognition of the official definition of certain notions of genocide and crimes against humanity. The Armenians want their genocide to be officially recognized as the Jewish genocide has been recognized; heirs of the African slaves want recognition from the Western ex-colonial powers, or the states which benefited from slavery in a manner that is very difficult to evaluate. . . . Consequently we have the problem of competition: each and every community finds a narrative that requires official acknowledgement and that will allow the community to acquire the status of victimhood. Many of us object to this as a very perverse way of practicing politics.” Diane Enns, “A Conversation with Étienne Balibar” in Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 9, 2 (Fall 2005). 12. Sheldon Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 32. 13. Gary B. Madison, Paul Fairfield, and Ingrid Harris, Is There a Canadian Philosophy? Reflections on the Canadian Identity (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2000). 14. Touraine, What Is Democracy? 15–16. 15. Bonnie Honig, “Difference, Dilemmas, and the Politics of Home” in Democracy and Difference, 258. 16. Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” 37. 17. Ibid., 37. 18. From “Patmos.” See Friedrich Hölderlin Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), 462–63. Also see Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1993), 333. 19. See James Mensch’s brief but insightful analysis of terrorism in “Benito Cerino: Freud and the Breakdown of Politics,” Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy vol. 7, no. 2 (Fall 2003). 20. Gary Madison states concisely the hermeneutical distinction between dialogue and violence, and the virtues appropriate to the former, as follows: “The values

Notes to Chapter 5

145

hermeneutics defends are those that are implicit in, or are the normative implicates (or enabling conditions) of, the actual practice of communicative understanding (dialogue). Since communicative rationality is itself a universal trait of human being, the norms implicit therein can, themselves, rightly be said to be universal. What are these norms or values? They are those having to do with respect for the freedom and dignity of one’s conversational partners (hermeneutical ethics is an ‘ethics of recognition’): tolerance, reasonableness, the attempt to work out mutual agreements and to come to mutual understandings by means of discourse (dialogue or ‘conversation’) rather than by means of force.” Gary B. Madison, The Politics of Postmodernity: Essays in Applied Hermeneutics (London: Kluwer, 2001), 41. See as well Madison, The Logic of Liberty (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 209–13, and my Moral Selfhood in the Liberal Tradition: The Politics of Individuality (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), chapter 5, and The Ways of Power: Hermeneutics, Ethics, and Social Criticism (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2002), chapter 5. 21. One thinks, for instance, of Nikolai Gogol’s and Franz Kafka’s brilliant satirical descriptions of bureaucracy and civil servants as familiar cases in point. As much as we may acknowledge the necessity of bureaucracies, we tend to regard our dealings with them as among the nuisances of modern life. Standing in line, filling out forms, answering questions, and skimming pages of useless information are everyday experiences we do our best to endure even as we tell ourselves that there must be a better way, that the forms and the rules must exist for a reason even if for the life of us we cannot see what it is. It is not merely the cantankerous among us who experience bureaucracy in this way; indeed, I suspect it is only the dull-witted who do not. If the observation is familiar, the reasons behind it are far less so. Bureaucracy’s ultimate purpose, in the case of the civil service, for instance, is to administer goods or services to the general public in a manner that is fair and efficient. This purpose is generally well understood in the early days of the institution’s existence, yet in time ends become taken for granted and are often replaced by a large and impersonal network of means, techniques, procedures, and rules which, now quasi-ends, are inflexibly applied without regard to their consequences for beneficiaries. A certain rigidity accompanies the specialization, rationalization, standardization, and routinization of functions, a rigidity that is the characteristic disposition of instrumental reason. As one critic of bureaucracy long ago observed, “one notes brazen favoritism in superiors, base servility in subalterns and, in superiors and subalterns both, a tendency to exchange for favors of any sort such influence as their positions put at their disposal.” The same author continues: “Another defect common to bureaucracies, even when their moral level is high, is a disposition to believe in their own infallibility. Bureaucrats are by nature exceedingly loath to accept criticisms and suggestions from persons who are not of their calling, and even from those who are.” Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class, trans. Hannah Kahn (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939), 408–409. This phenomenon is especially notable, of course, within governmental institutions, wherein even elected politicians atop the hierarchy of authority often resemble less leaders

146

22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

Notes to Chapter 6 than bureaucrats themselves or officials merely managing the apparatus of state, dependent on the very bureaucracy for which they are responsible. Dewey, “Democracy and Educational Administration,” 218. Ibid., 220. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 269. Some of the more interesting criticisms of Schumpeter’s account are articulated by Carole Pateman in Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) and by Robert Dahl in Democracy and its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). Trudeau, The Essential Trudeau, 55. Mill, On Liberty, 8–9.

Chapter 6. Between the Market and the Forum 1. Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 1. 2. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 418. 3. Robert Nozick, The Nature of Rationality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), xi, 133. 4. David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 8. 5. Nozick, The Nature of Rationality, 64. 6. James Bohman and William Rehg, eds. Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), xiv, x. 7. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 138. The following remarks from a deliberative democrat working under the influence of Habermas express in stark terms the idealism of which I have been speaking. During what this author calls a “democratic breakout,” “speech becomes animated, and debate heated. This sudden increase in discussion follows upon the discovery of a common preoccupation. Now, people are keen to be heard, they listen to others with interest, and concern is expressed to elicit all views. Exclusionary tactics are directly challenged, as are attempts to distort the needs and interests of others. Whatever the common interest under discussion, all salient facts are actively explored, and the group, now pooling its cognitive resources, confronts the matter at hand in its full complexity. . . . [P]articipants in deliberation broaden their tight focus on individual interests, first to seeing things from the point of view of others, and then to those interests the group has in common. As the group continues to meet, friendship, vitality, and rapid learning all draw people in. . . . [I]n a breakout of democracy, conflict works. It generates cohesion, it causes people to reevaluate their preferences and needs, and it brings about consensus.” Blaug, Democracy, Real and Ideal, 136–37.

Notes to Chapter 6

147

8. David Schoem and Sylvia Hurtado, eds. Intergroup Dialogue: Deliberative Democracy in School, College, Community, and Workplace (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). 9. Ibid., 6. 10. Ibid., 6–14. 11. Katherine Ryan and Lizanne DeStefano, eds., Evaluation as a Democratic Process: Promoting Inclusion, Dialogue, and Deliberation. New Directions for Evaluation, no. 85. Spring 2000 (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers), 8. 12. Alan Race and Ingrid Shafer, eds. Religions in Dialogue: From Theocracy to Democracy (Burlington: Ashgate, 2002), 15. 13. Ibid., 8. 14. Bohman and Rehg, Deliberative Democracy, ix. 15. Michael Savard, Democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), 121. 16. Rawls, The Law of Peoples, 141. 17. See especially Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, and Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. 18. John Dewey, Ethics, The Later Works, vol. 7: 1932, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 350. 19. John Dewey, “Democracy and Education in the World of Today,” The Later Works, vol. 13: 1938–1939, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 296. 20. As Dewey writes, “Why is it, apart from our tradition of violence, that liberty of expression is tolerated and even lauded when social affairs seem to be going in a quiet fashion, and yet is so readily destroyed whenever matters grow more critical?” John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action, The Later Works vol. 11: 1935–1937, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 47. The same author notes in 1951: “Given the present state of affairs both at home and in connection with other states, the way and degree in which we use or fail to use freedom of inquiry and public communication may well be the criterion by which in the end the genuineness of our democracy will be decided in all issues.” John Dewey, “Contribution to Democracy in a World of Tensions,” The Later Works vol. 16: 1949–1952, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 403–404. 21. Elshtain, Democracy on Trial, 140. 22. Nozick, The Nature of Rationality, 32. 23. Paul Ricoeur, “Myth as the Bearer of Possible Worlds” in Debates in Continental Philosophy: Conversations with Contemporary Thinkers, ed. Richard Kearney (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 7. 24. Elshtain, Democracy on Trial, 132. 25. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 86. 26. Fred Dallmayr, Achieving Our World: Toward a Global and Plural Democracy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 28. 27. As Dewey notes, “By reading the characteristic features of any man’s castles in the air you can make a shrewd guess as to his underlying desires which are frus-

148

Notes to Conclusion and Prognosis

trated. What is difficulty and disappointment in real life becomes conspicuous achievement and triumph in revery; what is negative in fact will be positive in the image drawn by fancy; what is vexation in conduct will be compensated for in high relief in idealizing imagination.” John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, The Middle Works vol. 12: 1920, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 140. This applies no less to ethicalpolitical aspirations such as “community,” “solidarity,” or simple “respect.” 28. How is it, one may ask, that the rhetoric of democracy can be so inspired while the practice is so—not? The answer may have to do with the absence or erosion of this connecting link. 29. Elshtain, Democracy on Trial, 28.

Conclusion and Prognosis 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

Gadamer, Truth and Method, 446. Gary B. Madison, “Gadamer’s Legacy,” Symposium 6, 2 (Fall 2002): 138. Dallmayr, Achieving Our World, 3. Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science, 86. Vaclav Havel, “A Farewell to Politics,” New York Review of Books 49, 16 (Oct. 24, 2002): 4. Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” in Kant’s Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 107–108. Race and Shafer, Religions in Dialogue, 7. Ibid., 3. Ibid., xvii. It may be a practice at which few philosophers excel as well. If philosophy is indeed what we so often say it is, and tell our students it is—an operation of thought that calls into question our own (not just others’) most heartfelt convictions and subjects them to severe critical scrutiny — then one might expect philosophers to excel at this practice. I have seen little evidence that philosophers of today are any better at this than nonphilosophers. Dallmayr, Achieving Our World, 28. John Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” The Later Works, vol. 14: 1939–1941, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 227–28. See Gadamer, Truth and Method.

INDEX

Adams, John, 9, 13, 27, 136n7, 137n15 Aristotle, x, xi, 3, 4, 5, 10, 13, 14, 24, 29, 49, 53, 61, 65, 69, 81, 93, 98, 106, 112, 125, 135n5, 137n17, 143n4, 143n11 aspirations, political, xiii, xix, 51, 59, 68, 70, 71, 77, 78, 79, 84, 87, 89, 95, 96, 114, 115, 117, 119. See also symbols authoritarianism, xii, xiii, xvi, 1–2, 5–6, 11, 15, 59, 76, 88, 116, 117, 123, 134

Churchill, Winston, xvii, 77 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, x, 5, 135n2 civility, 8, 90, 95, 96, 99, 114, 133 Cohen, Joshua, 42, 43, 140n1, 141n19, 141n29, 141n34, 142n39 common good, 14, 20, 24–25, 71, 72, 108, 117, 133 communitarianism, xiv–xv, 20, 24–25, 26, 29, 30, 31, 32, 78, 88, 90 community, 30, 31, 32, 63, 71, 72, 85 conflict, xiii, xiv, 8, 14–15, 46, 90, 91, 95, 114 conformity, 13–14, 118 consensus, xiii–xiv, 73, 90, 97, 112 critical theory, 36, 42, 59

Balibar, Étienne, 144n11 Barber, Benjamin, 54, 136n10, 137n12, 139n22, 142n1 Benhabib, Seyla, 37, 139n1 Bentham, Jeremy, 32, 108 Berlin, Isaiah, xii, 135n6 Blanshard, Brand, 24, 139n27, 139n28 Blaug, Ricardo, 141n23, 142n36, 146n7 Bobbio, Norberto, xiv, 72, 135n8, 143n20 Bohman, James, 41, 44, 139n1, 141n23, 142n35, 146n6, 147n14

Dahl, Robert, 5, 136n2, 146n25 Dallmayr, Fred, 116, 126, 129–130, 131, 147n26, 148n3, 148n11 Danto, Arthur, 69, 143n16 deliberative democracy, xiv–xv, 22, 26, 35–52, 56, 57, 86, 103–104, 108–113, 118 democracy: arguments for, x–xi, xiv, xvii, 8, 76–101; criticisms of, xi, xviii, 8–9, 10, 11, 12–13, 16; emerging, viii, ix, x, 9–10, 85, 101; history of, 4–6, 58, 88; idealism toward, xiv–xv, xviii, 2–4, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 16, 17, 26, 45–46, 49, 55, 95;

Carpenter, Ronald, 64, 143n8 change, x–xii, xiii, 88, 91, 92

149

150

Why Democracy?

democracy (continued) limits of, xviii, 13, 14, 15, 18, 29, 47–48, 95–96, 97–100. See also democratic ideal democratic ideal, vii, xv, xvi, 2–3, 7, 13, 15–16, 33, 70, 71, 77–78, 79, 80, 82, 88, 89, 90, 93, 94, 96, 103, 119, 126, 132, 134. See also democracy Derrida, Jacques, 51, 82, 83, 96, 142n41 DeStefano, Lizanne, 147n11 Dewey, John, xvii, 12, 15, 44, 81–82, 93–94, 114, 130, 136n13, 136n3, 136n9, 137n13, 137n20, 146n22–23, 147n18–20, 147n27, 148n12 dialogue, xiii, 50, 56–57, 81, 87, 88, 91, 109–113, 118–119, 123–134, 144n7. See also hermeneutics Dienstag, Joshua Foa, 64, 67, 143n9, 143n14 difference, xiii, 2, 21, 29, 70, 73, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87–88, 89, 91, 93, 110, 114, 115, 116, 118, 127, 132, 133 dogmatism, xiii, 87, 125 Dryzek, John, 42–43, 49, 50, 139n1, 141n30–33, 142n38 Dyrberg, Torben Bech, 137n2, 137n4, 137n5, 138n13, 139n21, 139n32, 143n19 economic metaphors, 62, 67, 68, 72, 78. See also metaphor elections, xvi, 79, 91, 97 Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 81, 114, 144n6, 147n21, 147n24, 148n29 Elster, Jon, 139n1 equality and egalitarianism, x, 3, 11, 17, 22, 26, 27, 29, 58, 59, 62, 65, 70, 72, 78, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 89, 90, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 103, 114, 118, 121

emancipation, 29, 58, 59, 62, 68, 72, 79, 81, 82, 85, 86, 89, 95, 134. See also freedom Etzioni, Amitai, 139n29 factionalism, 14–15 Fairfield, Paul, 135n1, 143n1, 144n13, 145n20 feminism, 65, 68, 82 Fish, Stanley, 59, 60, 142n2 Fishkin, James, 140n1 Foucault, Michel, 17–18, 19, 21, 57, 137n1 foundationalism, xvii, 2, 53, 61, 76, 79 freedom, 3, 38, 78, 81, 86, 90, 95, 96, 99, 100, 115, 118, 121, 133. See also emancipation Freud, Sigmund, 1, 56 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 56, 60, 61, 66, 112, 116, 124, 125, 126, 127, 131, 142n37, 142n5, 143n6, 143n12, 147n17, 147n25, 148n1, 148n4, 148n13 Gauthier, David, 68, 107, 146n4 general will, 9, 23–24, 29–31, 32, 71, 72. See also common good Glendon, Mary Ann, 139n29 globalization, ix, 2, 7, 101, 116, 123, 125–127, 129–130, 134 Gogol, Nikolai, 145n21 Goodin, Robert, 139n1 Gould, Carol, 139n22 Green, T. H., 23, 24, 32, 139n26 Gutmann, Amy, 40–41, 42, 43, 50, 139n1, 141n18, 141n20–22, 141n24–27, 142n40 Habermas, Jürgen, 29, 35–38, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45–46, 48, 49, 54, 55, 59, 68–69, 70, 71, 86–87, 89, 107–108, 109, 139n36, 140n2–9 Hamilton, Alexander, xi, 135n3 Havel, Vaclav, 126, 148n5

Index Hayek, Friedrich A., 10, 15–16, 137n10, 137n14, 137n21 Hegel, G. W. F. , 23, 24, 31, 32, 86 Heidegger, Martin, 3, 32, 56, 89, 144n18 Held, David, 139n22 hermeneutics, 91, 124, 125, 131. See also dialogue history, 64, 65, 66, 70 Hobbes, Thomas, x, 5, 7, 32, 44, 57, 66, 70, 106, 107, 108 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 89, 144n18 Honig, Bonnie, 87–88, 144n15 human rights,2,11,13,15,24,29,32, 38,51,98,100,101,114,118,121,125 Hurtado, Sylvia, 147n8–10 ideals, vii, xix, 16, 51, 96, 118 identity, xvi, 32, 63, 83, 84, 86, 88, 114, 127 imagination, 51, 58, 60, 61, 62, 70, 77, 78, 80, 90, 121. See also metaphor, narrative, and symbols individuality, 31, 62, 66–67 Ingram, David, 139n29 Jaspers, Karl, xi, 135n4 Johnson, James, 141n19 justice, xiv, 3, 8, 16, 18, 23, 29, 83, 103, 122 Kafka, Franz, 145n21 Kant, Immanuel, 36, 59–60, 66, 104, 112, 114, 126, 127, 142n3, 146n1, 148n6 Kearney, Richard, 71, 78, 83, 143n18, 143n2, 144n8–10 Klare, Karl, 136n1 Knight, Jack, 141n19 Kohlberg, Lawrence, 70 Laclau, Ernesto, 19, 20, 21, 22, 138n6, 138n7, 138n10, 138n12 language, 56, 60, 61, 77, 120, 132, 134 Levinas, Emmanuel, 82, 83

151

liberal democracy, ix, x, 2, 11–12, 14, 18, 29, 32, 51, 62, 71, 78, 93, 94, 96, 100, 101 Lincoln, Abraham, xv Locke, John, 5, 32, 66–67, 143n13 Lord Acton, 7 Lukes, Steven, 139n22 Lummis, C. Douglas, 138n3 Lyotard, Jean-François, 82 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 5 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 139n29 Macpherson, C. B., 139n22 Madison, Gary B., xvii, 60, 136n11, 136n14, 142n5, 144n13, 144n20, 148n2 Madison, James, 13, 14, 15, 27, 137n18, 137n19 majoritarianism, 9, 13, 14, 15, 26, 27, 98 majority rule, xiv, xvi, xvii, 9, 10, 26, 27, 28–29, 48, 70, 88, 97, 100, 103 Mansbridge, Jane, 42, 141n28 Marcel, Gabriel, 32 Markoff, John, 6 Marx and Marxism, xvii–xviii, 5, 9, 11, 19, 32, 48, 68, 69, 80, 87, 89, 108 Mensch, James, 144n19 metaphor, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 67, 71, 77. See also economic metaphors; imagination; narrative; symbols Mill, John Stuart, 5, 9, 13, 14, 27, 32, 44, 98, 100, 137n16, 139n33, 146n27 Mink, Louis, 64–65, 143n10 Montesquieu, Baron de, 5, 7, 8–9, 136n4, 136n6 Mosca, Gaetano, 145n21 Mouffe, Chantal, 19, 20, 21, 22, 138n6, 138n7, 138n8, 138n10, 138n11, 138n12, 138n13, 138n14, 138n16, 138n18, 139n35, 140n17 narrative, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 68, 70, 71, 77. See also imagination; metaphor; symbols

152

Why Democracy?

nationalism, 32, 84, 90 neutral state, 93 new social movements, 20, 22, 29, 45, 46–47, 62, 82 Nietzsche, Friedrich, vii, 1, 3, 7, 11, 29, 32, 48, 51, 56, 57, 79–81, 90, 118, 135n7, 143n17 Nozick, Robert, 68, 107, 115, 146n3, 146n5, 147n22 Olbrechts-Tyteca, Lucie, 60, 142n4 participation, political, 88, 119–120, 121–122, 131–133, 134 participatory democracy, xiv–xv, 3, 18, 22–23, 26, 29, 31, 98, 99 Pateman, Carole, 139n22, 146n25 peace, xi, xiv, 76–77, 91, 94, 96, 99 people (demos), xv–xvi, 8, 31 Perelman, Chaim, 60, 61, 142n4, 143n7 Plato, xii–xiii, 3, 4, 10–11, 13, 29, 47, 49, 50, 53, 54, 59, 64, 81, 89, 93, 94, 98, 104, 106, 110 pluralism, 19, 20, 21, 26 political speech, xviii, 50, 53–73, 77, 86, 91, 120, 123. See also reason Poulantzas, Nicos, 139n22 postmodernism, 1, 2, 17–18, 56, 70, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85 power, 17–18, 28, 91–92, 93, 94, 98 public deliberation, 25, 31, 32, 35, 36, 37–38, 39, 41, 42, 43–45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 55, 56, 81, 86, 91, 95, 105, 109–113, 129, 133 Race, Alan, 147n12–13, 148n7–9 radical democracy, xiv–xv, 18–22, 26, 27, 29, 98, 99, 100 Rand, Ayn, 58, 65–66 Rawls, John, 31, 35, 37, 38–40, 41, 43, 44, 47, 48, 49, 68, 86–87, 104, 106, 109, 111, 112, 140n10–16, 146n2, 146n7, 147n16

reason, 32, 36, 37–38, 39, 44, 47, 50–51, 53, 60, 61, 66, 87, 88, 104–108, 120–121, 125, 129. See also political speech recognition, 63, 83, 84, 85 Rehg, William, 146n6, 147n14 rhetoric, 30, 43, 52, 53–73, 77, 86, 87, 89, 90, 115, 121 Ricoeur, Paul, 68, 112, 115, 118, 121, 143n15, 147n17, 147n23 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 5, 9, 23–24, 31, 32, 108, 139n23, 139n24, 139n25 rule of law, xiv, 8, 13, 15, 29 Ryan, Katherine, 147n11 Sandel, Michael, 25, 139n29, 139n31 Sanders, Lynn, 141n34 Savard, Michael, 147n15 Schoem, David, 147n8–10 Schrag, Calvin, 61, 142n5 Schumpeter, Joseph, xvi, 11, 30, 79, 97, 136n12, 137n11, 139n37, 143n3, 146n24 science-technology, 69–70, 72, 98, 130–131 Shafer, Ingrid, 147n12–13, 148n7–9 Shapiro, Ian, 139n1 Smith, Anna Marie, 21, 22, 138n9, 138n15, 138n17, 138n19, 138n20 social democracy, xvii–xviii, 12, 18, 19, 78, 96 social ontology, 7, 31, 32, 55 strong democracy. See participatory democracy symbols, 51, 62, 71, 72, 77, 79, 80, 86, 87, 95, 97, 113–114, 115, 117, 118, 121, 133, 134. See also aspirations; imagination; metaphor; narrative Taylor, Charles, 25, 139n29, 139n30 terrorism, viii, 63, 87, 90–91, 144n19 theory, political, 32, 51, 54, 72, 77, 80, 103, 117, 118, 119, 131–132

Index Thompson, Dennis, 40–41, 42, 43, 50, 139n1, 141n18, 141n20–22, 141n24–27, 142n40 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 13, 14, 26, 27–28, 81, 98, 139n34 Touraine, Alain, 81, 86, 143n5, 144n14 tropes. See symbols Trudeau, Pierre E., xiv, 7, 99, 135n9, 136n5, 146n26 unity, 85, 88, 89, 95, 114, 115, 116, 118 utilitarianism, x, 59, 72, 76, 77, 79, 87, 88, 108, 121

153

utopian politics, xii, xiii, 72, 87, 95, 115, 122 violence and discourse, 52, 86, 87, 90–91, 95, 114 voter turnout, 12, 117, 131 Walzer, Michael, 139n29 Wolin, Sheldon, 84, 88, 144n12, 144n16–17 Wokler, Robert, 136n8 Young, Iris Marion, 139n1

This page intentionally left blank.