Description

Write an essay of 6 to 8 pages (1,500–2,000 words) that responds to one (1) of the following questions. Please stay within the word length specified. Since the main purpose of the second assignment is to give you an opportunity to use and reflect upon the assigned readings, you are expected to use only the course materials.
Is liberal democracy an oxymoron? Be sure to marshal the theories and evidence available in the course materials on both sides of this question before giving a reasoned answer.

Is liberal democracy an oxymoron? Be sure to marshal the theories and evidence available in the course materials on both sides of this question before giving a reasoned answer.

Unit 5: Challenges to Liberal Democracy

Commentary
The Recent History of Liberal Democracy: From Postwar Social Consensus to Increasing Instability in the Mid- to Late-Twentieth Century
Textbook:
David Held, “From Postwar Stability to Political Crisis: The Polarization of Political Ideals” (pp. 185–201 only)

The allied victory in World War II marked the defeat of fascism and Nazism, but it did not mark the global triumph of either liberalism or democracy. That would have to wait until, at least, the collapse of communism in Europe nearly half a century later. Nevertheless, the postwar years in the advanced industrial societies of North America, Europe and Japan were characterised by a remarkable degree of social consensus. This is not to say there was no strong political or ideological conflict—far from it. The strength of communist political parties in France and Italy, and the influence of Marxism in British and European trade unionism, are only two examples of the depth of political and ideological disagreement over public policy. These conflicts took place on a canvas of steady economic growth, growing middle class affluence, and fundamental deference and loyalty to the basic institutions of constitutional democratic government.

Advertisment with an illustration of a human skull with open jaw and irises in the eye sockets offering three balls chained together to the figure of a small child who is being pushed forward by an arm and hand on her back. The three balls are labeled FLUORIDATED WATER, POLIO MONKEY SERUMS, AND MENTAL HYGIENE. The arm and hand are labeled UNINFORMED PUBLIC.
“At the Sign of the UNHOLY THREE,” a flier first issued in 1955 to promote mental hygiene as a communist goal to destroy the U.S.A. Keep America Committee, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The Heyday of the Welfare State
The three decades from 1945 to 1975 were characterised by strong economic growth in Western capitalist democracies, fuelled by a growing population, expanding liberalised trade within the capitalist world, and Keynesian macroeconomic policies calculated to secure full employment by maintaining aggregate demand. Voters were encouraged by an expanding economy to support an expanding welfare state, as well. Politics in these years usually concerned a kind and degree of welfarism and Keynesianism and the gradual pushing forward of opportunity for women, minorities, and the working class. But it rarely questioned the general direction of policy or the authority of the state to legislate on behalf of the vulnerable or less fortunate.

For social scientists and intellectuals whose formative years occurred during the first half of the twentieth century, the relative prosperity and social harmony of most liberal democracies after 1945 was deeply impressive. The preceding period had been one of extraordinary tumult in which the Great Depression, two world wars, and the Russian Revolution placed the future of liberal capitalist democracy very much in doubt. The postwar era was more stable, notwithstanding the ongoing friction and latent danger inherent in the Cold War between capitalism and communism. There was a tendency for division amid social scientists and intellectuals between (a) those who saw the old left–right battles within liberal democracies as dated relics that had been transcended, a view exemplified by the “End of Ideology” theorists Seymour Martin Lipset and Daniel Bell; and (b) those who still saw a need for radical critique and radical politics (such as the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, notably Herbert Marcuse).

Lipset simply argues that Marxism and socialism were losing their relevance, since the fundamental problems of the Industrial Revolution had been ameliorated by an extension of the franchise and, along with it, the expansion of the welfare state and the improvement of working conditions. As a consequence, politics was highly centrist, with political debates revolving around comparatively small differences in the degree of government ownership and planning (Held, 188). Bell, in his work The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (1960), suggests that the grand humanistic ideologies of liberalism, socialism, and conservatism that developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were being replaced by more parochial ideologies and the guidance of technocrats. Since piecemeal technological adjustments of the system were all that was needed in the foreseeable future, much ideological debate was, in Bell’s view, anachronistic.

The Frankfurt School of critical theory was a neo-Marxist reaction against traditional Marxism and Soviet communism, which nonetheless remained critical of capitalism and attempted to explain the unexpected development of capitalist societies in the twentieth century. One of its leading members, Herbert Marcuse, saw something pernicious in the growth of rationally administered bureaucracies in both the public and private sectors: a growing cult of efficiency and technique at the expense of a focus on the moral and political ends of public life (Held, 189). Yet, whatever the apparent validity of this critique of “depoliticisation” and “one dimensional society” in the mid-twentieth century, it shares with the “End of Ideology” thesis a common difficulty: that the conditions of consensus, compliance, integration, and political stability that it was concerned with analysing were, themselves, thrown into doubt by some of the events of the late twentieth century.

Perceived Crisis in the 1970s
The period of the 1970s saw many books and articles appear referring to either “ungovernability,” “decline,” or “crisis.” While there may have been a certain amount of over-reaction in some of these works, there is no doubt that the confidence and optimism of the postwar period was over and, with it, the end of an optimistic consensus about the basic institutions and policies of liberal democracies.

In addition to the political turmoil in the 1960s occasioned by rapid social change, student protests, and the conflict over the Vietnam War, the mid 1970s also brought to an abrupt end the rosy period of continuous economic growth, relatively high employment, and price stability—triggered, at least in the first instance, by the oil price shock of 1973. Not only did the country fall into recession, but stagflation” also occurred—i.e., simultaneous high inflation and high unemployment—which was not supposed to happen in Keynesian policy. Government deficits and high taxation were blamed by many on the right for this worsening economic performance, and many on the right also blamed this economic failure on democracy, itself, in the sense that competition between politicians to meet voters’ demands drive steadily rising government expenditures. Samuel Brittan describes the problem in terms of the “economic contradictions of democracy,” implying that unbridled democratic competition inevitably leads to overloaded government (Brittan 1975).

: Photo of two automobiles driving past a Texaco gas station. There is a large sign on the property that reads, OUR STATION HOURS ARE REDUCED DUE TO GAS SHORTAGE SORRY.
One of many service stations in the Portland area carrying signs reflecting the gasoline shortage. David Falconer, Photographer U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Theorists of overloaded government base their arguments on pluralist premises and liberal values (Held, 191–192). Rising expectations associated with economic growth lead to increased demands by various interest groups, along with a declining deference to authority; the fundamental dynamics of the welfare state are those of welfare dependency and demands for more public spending, as a large group of citizens comes to prefer transfers from the state to risk-taking in the private sector. This weakening of the private sector was seen as contributing to a “vicious circle” of ever greater dependence upon the state until it was broken by firm, decisive government determined to resist democratic pressures.

Neo-Marxist or critical theorists of the “legitimation crisis of the state” analyzed the same phenomena as fundamentally problems of capitalism. In this view, the periodic crises to which capitalism is prone necessitate increasing government intervention. When policy has trouble coping with fiscal stresses, inflation, etc., there is said to be a “crisis of rational administration” (Held, 194). Nevertheless, while it probably makes sense to see class and capitalism as fundamental elements of the analysis—and in this respect, the theories of Offe and Habermas are assumably more useful than those of classical pluralists—the focus on legitimation is likely misplaced. As Held notes, “There is widespread scepticism about conventional democratic politics. But there is also considerable doubt about alternatives to existing institutions, doubt which cannot simply be regarded as the legacy of Cold War attitudes discrediting certain socialist ideas in the eyes of many” (200). In other words, governments may have become less popular and authoritative, but that does not mean that liberal capitalist democracy has been thoroughly de-legitimised.

The New Right (Neo-Liberalism and Neo-Conservatism) and Legal Democracy
Textbook:
David Held, “From Postwar Stability to Political Crisis: The Polarization of Political Ideals” (pp. 201–209 only)

In 1971, conservative Republican, President Richard M. Nixon, famously stated that “we are all Keynesians now”—a reference to the fact that government policies since the Second World War to sustain full employment and moderate the business cycle had become the received wisdom in both of America’s major political parties. In that same year, liberal political philosopher John Rawls published his famous book A Theory of Justice, which defends the organisation of society, including democratic government, based on principles of distributive justice (Rawls 1971). However, this proved to be the high watermark of egalitarian “social” liberalism, both in political theory and in political practice.

Subsequent economic instability and growing disillusionment with the welfare state among large sections of the population created an audience more receptive to neo-conservative and neo-liberal ideas about the proper roles of the state and the market. The various forms of “New Right” ideology were led by Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek in the realm of economics; Robert Nozick and Leo Strauss in philosophy; William F. Buckley and Irving Kristol in journalism; and Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in politics. After the respective elections of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party government in Britain in 1979 and Ronald Reagan’s Republican presidency in the United States in 1980, conservative thinking became dominant in policy circles in many countries for well over a decade, and it appears to have had a lasting impact.

Held neatly sums up the varied and multifaceted body of thought and practice of the contemporary conservative political movement: “At root, the New Right has been concerned to advance the cause of ‘liberalism’ against ‘democracy’ by limiting the democratic use of state power” (201). While arguments for the need to tame the democratic element of liberal democracy take many forms, probably the clearest and most elaborate discussion of the relationship between individual liberty, democracy, and the state belongs to Friedrich Hayek, whose books The Road to Serfdom (1944) and Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973) are the locus classici of libertarian thinking. Hayek sees two dangers in the dynamics of “mass democracies”: (a) the tyranny of the majority, stemming in part from the mistaken view that democracy is an end in itself; and (b) the progressive displacement of the rule of the majority by its agents.

Hayek makes it clear that if democracy means “the unrestricted will of the majority,” then he is not a democrat (Held, 204–205). Democracy’s value is secondary and instrumental: “liberalism is the doctrine about what the law ought to be, democracy a doctrine about the manner of determining what will be the law” (Hayek 1960, 103). Democracy is a “utilitarian device” to help safeguard the “life, liberty, and estate” of individuals. Hayek’s vision is essentially Lockean, although it is developed through the eyes of a twentieth century economist and philosopher in a couple of interesting ways:

in his critique of planning and social legislation, which is based on a logical and compelling observation about the limits of knowledge on the needs, preferences, and ends of the people we regulate; and
in his conception of natural or grown law, or nomos, which is an emergent property of social interaction, as distinct from legislation, or “thesis,” which is properly confined to the administration of non-coercive government services, or to occasional acts of legislature needed in order to straighten out flaws in the nomos.
In Hayek’s Legal Democracy (Held, 207, model VII), legislation should be confined to measures that allow a free market system to operate.

As Held observes, the New Right has been highly successful in promoting its project of “rolling back” the state by mobilising disaffection with government and cynicism about politics, particularly in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in most liberal democracies. It remains to be seen, however, whether the New Right will succeed in establishing Hayek’s vision of Legal Democracy. Canada’s leading Hayekian thinker, Brian Lee Crowley, certainly thinks so. His recent book, Fearful Symmetry: The Fall and Rise of Canada’s Founding Values (2009) argues that such a development would really only be a rediscovery and return to values of individual responsibility, limited government, and the rule of law that prevailed in Canada before 1960—the classical liberal or bourgeois values that “built the country.” He even predicts that this will actually happen, dubbing the values of the coming era the “New Traditionalism.”

The alternative view, put forward by David Held (208–209) is that such a return to old-style classical liberalism could leave too many crucial national and international inequalities and environmental issues beyond the reach of the state. As neo-Marxists and feminists have long noted, full capacity to develop one’s own tastes, talents, preferences, and ends requires more attention to the conditions of freedom (material and cultural resources) than are found in classical liberalism (or neo-liberalism). The two dominant issues at the time of writing this course—the financial crisis and recession of 2008–2011 and the climate change crisis—certainly do not seem more amenable to solution by a limited state dedicated to allowing all individuals maximum liberty to pursue their own ends. Indeed, the myth of the self-regulating market has undoubtedly contributed to our economic woes. The huge externalities, social costs, and collective action problems associated with climate change and environmental pollution appear to have been caused primarily by economic individualism, not by misguided government planning. While it is also true that market mechanisms will have an important role to play in solving these problems, we cannot tie the hands of democratic citizens with respect to issues like these without carrying very large risks.

Aerial photo of a ship floating on water that is polluted with oil
British Pertroleum Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Gulf of Mexico, 2010. © Kris Krug / Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA.

The New Left and Participatory Democracy
Textbook:
David Held, “From Postwar Stability to Political Crisis: The Polarization of Political Ideals” (pp. 209–216 only)

Around the same time that the New Right gained popularity in the 1970s, left-wing conceptions of democracy were also being reformulated in the wake of 1960s radicalism, neo-Marxist, post-Marxist and critical theories, and the various antiwar, post-colonial, feminist, environmental, and civil rights movements. In a broader sense, left democratic theory in the 1970s laid claim to the ideal of active citizenship that had animated the ancient Greeks, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx, but which had been greeted with scepticism by liberals such as Benjamin Constant and James Madison on the grounds that the scale of large commercial societies in the modern era made such a model unworkable.

David Held rightly holds up two New Left thinkers, Carole Pateman and C. B. Macpherson, as the leading theorists of contemporary “participatory democracy” (Held, 215, model VIII). Both Pateman and Macpherson start with an exploration of the perceived weaknesses of the standard or classical liberal models of democracy. Like Marxists, they question the value of formally guaranteed civil and political rights in the absence of the material, social and cultural conditions that need to be met if those rights are to be genuinely enjoyed. But unlike Marxists, they disagree that the institutions of representative and competitive multi-party democracy can be dismissed as being “bourgeois” and replaced with industrial democracy or workers’ self-management. The failures (indeed, horrors) of Soviet-style communism, along with the growing acknowledgement of the limitations of “social engineering” in general, caused the New Left to re-conceive participatory democracy as a strategy for making parliament, state bureaucracies, and political parties more accountable, and for supplementing representative democracy by opening up the workplace, the family, and the environment to new forms of accountability.

Photo of 13 or more people demonstrating outdoors. They hold placards that read, KICK BIG POLLUTERS OUT.
Demonstrators at COP21, United Nations Climate Change Conference, 2015. © Young Friends of the Earth Europe / Flickr, CC BY-SA.

This strategy of improving liberal models of democracy through immanent critique is most obvious, and most schematic, in C. B. Macpherson’s books The Real World of Democracy (1965), Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (1973); and The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (1977)—three books that obviously influence the structure and content of Held’s Models of Democracy. Macpherson finds in John Stuart Mill elements of “developmental democracy,” which point beyond the “protective” model of James Mill and Jeremy Bentham. Macpherson acknowledges, like Mill, that face-to-face discussion of all issues by all citizens is impossible in a large modern society, and that there will likely always be major differences of interest around which parties will form, necessitating a competitive party system. However, he also argues that the party system, itself, could be reorganised in a less hierarchical and more participatory way, with more use of direct democracy and with workplace and community organisations acting as a complement to, and check on, parliamentary bodies (Held, 212).

Pateman is also willing to make concessions to the theorists of competitive elitism, such as Schumpeter and Weber. She recognises that the size of the modern nation state militates against active and meaningful ongoing participation by every citizen (Held, 213). Nevertheless, the opportunity for extensive opportunities for participation in the workplace and in local communities should, Pateman reasons, radically improve the context of national politics, particularly if structures of national and local participation are kept open to revision and experimentation (Held, 214–215). This is a hopeful, yet still somewhat pragmatic, vision.

Nevertheless, participatory democracy is still vulnerable to criticism. If the models of Macpherson and Pateman are attractive because they build on the “developmental” picture of citizens as users and exercisers of their abilities, they may also slip into the error of leaving too much to be negotiated in the “ebb and flow of democratic negotiation” (Held, 216)—in other words, politics. Perhaps New Right thinkers are correct to see an unavoidable conflict between the values of liberty, social justice, and democratic process, and to regard the talk about participatory democracy as reflecting the Marxist longing for the transcendence of conflict and the achievement of social harmony while, in practice, serving merely as a pretext for imposing some citizens’ visions of justice on others. Certainly, such a critique may touch a nerve insofar as the New Left, generally, and Macpherson, particularly, do stem from a neo-Marxist tradition. After considering the implications of the collapse of communism (and the decline of Marxism as an influential body of thought), as well as other possible bases for radical critique we turn, in Unit 6, to the subject of deliberative democracy, which shares several themes in common with participatory democracy, without most of its intellectual and political baggage.

The Collapse of Communism
David Held, “From Postwar Stability to Political Crisis: The Polarization of Political Ideals” (pp. 217–230 only)

The demise of the Soviet Union and other European communist regimes in the late 1980s and early 1990s signalled the triumph of liberal capitalism and liberal democracy as the world’s dominant forms of economic and political organisation. This sense of triumphalism may well prove to have been premature, in view of the emergence of an authoritarian China as the world’s next superpower and the virulence of radical Islam. However, it was warranted in the sense that the biggest ideological challenge to liberal democracy since the Second World War had been defeated, and liberal capitalism became firmly established as a global system.

Photo taken outdoors of a large crowd of people, some standing on a cement wall, before a large public monument. A number of placards have been posted on the wall.
The fall of the Berlin Wall, November 1989. © antaldaniel / Flickr, CC BY.

In one sense, these historic events should have made little difference to radical democratic theory as it was espoused by New Left thinkers, because they had long since parted ways with official Marxist doctrine. There can be little doubt that socialism has been placed on the defensive in the realm of theory as well as the realm of practice. “Democratic socialism” has not been a powerful rallying cry for East Europeans, nor has workers’ self-management, once an interesting feature of Yugoslav socialism. The periodic strength of communist parties in East European democracies, when it occurs, is typically little more than a manifestation of resistance to economic change, fuelled by a fear of rising prices or foreign influence. Ethnic nationalism has proven to be a far more potent ideology than “social democracy” in virtually all former communist regimes.

Francis Fukuyama, a former Department of State official and academic, wrote several articles and a book that connects a theme from Friedrich Hegel’s philosophy of history with these epochal events. The End of History and the Last Man (1992) is the focal point of debate about the theoretical significance of communism’s demise. Fukuyama argues, pace Hegel, that history proceeds in a series of stages, each embodying distinctive views about the basic principles of underlying social order, culminating in a final stage dominated by ideals with universal appeal—the one that we have now reached.

Fukuyama is confident that the “end of history,” or end of ideological struggle, has been reached—the recent pre-eminence of liberal capitalism and of the United States as its leading exemplar serving as proof—because only liberal democracy, along with market capitalism, represents a system of “universal significance” or “world historical significance” (Held, 221). Neither religious nor nationalist challengers to liberal democracy articulate beliefs that are useful as universal bases for legitimacy. Instead, they are expressions of identities that are not universal, however much they might aspire to be. While these social forces and new variants of old ideologies may hold sway at times in the developing world, they will never represent new systematic ideas of social justice that could displace or supersede liberalism.

From the perspective of democratic theory, one senses an affinity between Fukuyama and the views of Weber, Schumpeter and Hayek—all theorists, in different ways, of minimal, competitive-elitist, and legal democracy. Politics in the “post-historical” period sees the replacement of idealism with “economic management and the solving of technical problems in the pursuit of consumer satisfaction” (Held, 221–222). Democracy has been tamed in the sense that it is subordinated to liberalism; one finds a rationale here for the declining voter turnouts observed in almost all Western democracies in recent years. Yet one of the major criticisms of Fukuyama is precisely that he does not deeply explore the tensions between the liberal and democratic components of liberal democracy.

Eastern Europe has become the classic textbook case illustrating the difficulties of countries facing simultaneous transitions to democracy and capitalism. Many in post-communist countries have cast envious eyes at the “Asian tigers” who used authoritarian governments to develop their export-oriented economies before moving to multi-party constitutional democracies, or at China, which is experiencing enormous, rapid economic growth and the development of a large middle class without electoral backlash from the “losers” in the process—the uneducated peasantry, seniors on fixed incomes, state bureaucrats, and so on. Elections in post-communist countries are frequently a tug-of-war between the groups that are differentially affected by the processes of economic adjustment. In the eyes of those who want to speed the transition to a dynamic capitalism, it is democracy that is the obstacle; to others, it is liberal capitalism that has been given a black eye. Both groups suffer from the lack of well-developed cultural traditions and legal institutions that underpin a stable and successful capitalism—cultures and traditions that Western countries have built up through trial and error over centuries.

Photo of factories with smokestacks emitting smoke into the hazy atmosphere in the background
Pollution in China. JungleNews (own work), CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

While peculiar to post-communist countries, the example of simultaneous transition may in fact raise a more general question for all of us: do increasing inequalities of wealth and power threaten the stability or legitimacy of liberal democracy? Or, being at the “end of history,” are we to accept inequality because there is no longer a systemic alternative? However, the contrary argument may still have considerable force—that is, the decline of traditional morality is depleting a source of legitimacy for modern states, and a kind of social justice may be needed to take its place.

There may still be room for a Marxist critique of liberal democracy, as Held’s discussion of Alex Callinicos and other contemporary neo-Marxists suggests (Held, 225–230). Most progressive thinkers today see other dimensions of conflict and exploitation besides class relations—ethnic and gender conflict, for example, as well as environmental exploitation—as playing equal or greater roles in the formation and structuring of politics. The importance of democracy is that it provides a common frame (or meta-value) that can encompass and mediate between competing values and narratives (Held, 261). This is a different and much nuanced view of democracy compared to Fukuyama’s, which simply sees it as an undifferentiated adjunct to liberalism.

Even if Fukuyama turns out be largely correct and “we are all liberals now,” we can take some comfort in the knowledge that there is still room for meaningful differences in values and for most of the models of democracy discussed in this course.

Introduction to Chantal Mouffe’s Democratic Paradox
Textbook:
Chantal Mouffe, “Introduction: The Democratic Paradox”

For radical thinkers like Chantal Mouffe, talk of the “end of history” is an ideological expression of the current hegemony of neo-liberalism. Now that the very idea of an alternative order has been discredited, the stabilisation between the conflicting logics of democracy and liberalism is especially strong and durable; “the old democratic principle that ‘power should be exercised by the people’ emerges again, but this time within a symbolic framework informed by the liberal discourse, with its strong emphasis on the value of individual liberty and on human rights” (Mouffe, 2). Nevertheless, Mouffe insists that even under present conditions it remains true that the tension between liberalism and democracy “can never be overcome but only negotiated in different ways” (5). The core democratic values of equality and popular sovereignty, as well as the core liberal values of individual liberty, property and human rights, are different, incommensurable, and ultimately never fully reconcilable. To reach this conclusion, Mouffe draws upon three great thinkers, Carl Schmitt, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Jacques Derrida.

From Schmitt, Mouffe takes the idea that the logic of politics always entails an antagonism between “us” and “them,” and the logic of democratic politics requires the (sometimes arbitrary) drawing of a frontier between these two groups. Moreover, Schmitt is a critic of liberal parliamentary democracy precisely because politics, which necessitates the specification of friends and enemies, makes “liberal democracy” an unstable compound. Mouffe effectively uses Schmitt’s analysis to criticise the persistent failure of liberal–democratic theorists to recognise the paradox of liberal democracy, as well as their persistent tendency to theorise “rational consensus.”

From Wittgenstein, Mouffe finds a very important contribution to a “non-rationalist approach to political theory.” Wittgenstein’s view is that agreement is found through “participation in common forms of life,” not through rational argumentation. According to Mouffe (11–12), his conception of rule following allows for a more diverse and truly pluralistic approach to democratic values and democratic politics.

Derrida’s “deconstructive” approach is also useful to Mouffe in showing the centrality of the “us/them” distinction in the constitution of collective political identities. In particular, Mouffe relies upon Derrida’s concept of the constitutive outside—a content that not merely negates another content (as “us/them” does), but that indicates “the radical undecidability of the tension of its constitution”—i.e., when an “us/them” relation is transformed into an antagonistic one (Mouffe, 12–13).

Each of these strands is woven into an argument for what Mouffe calls agonistic pluralism—one that accepts that conflict and division are inherent to politics. “To imagine that pluralist democracy could ever be perfectly instantiated is to transform it into a self-refuting ideal, since the condition of possibility of a pluralist democracy is at the same time the condition of impossibility of its perfect implementation” (16). Recognition of this paradox is what sets agonistic pluralism apart from most leading liberal democratic theories.

Democracy, Power and “The Political”
Textbook:
Chantal Mouffe, “Democracy, Power and ‘The Political’”

Postmodernism is a term that has a wide variety of uses and meanings, but in the context of political theory it generally refers to the critique of Enlightenment universalism and rationalism. Mouffe is a postmodernist because she criticises Enlightenment claims to rationality and universal truth. In particular, she is concerned with criticising the view that the democratic ideal is essentially a rationalistic, universalistic Enlightenment project, as many modern liberal democratic theorists believe.

Mouffe sees modern liberal democracy differently. Like other postmodern theorists, she points to the idea that “truth is created, rather than discovered” as a basis for a robust theory of democracy, and not as a threat to its supposedly “rational” foundations. Furthermore, she asserts that what most distinguishes modern democracy from ancient forms is not the scale of modern society—the factor that Madison Constant and many others emphasise—but, rather, its pluralism. By this, she does not simply refer to the fact of pluralism. [Liberal theorists such as John Rawls place great emphasis upon different interests and different conceptions of the good, for which a neutral state is needed as an arbiter.] Instead, Mouffe intends pluralism as the symbolic acceptance of conflict and division as an ineradicable feature of free and democratic society.

Whereas liberal theorists typically view the social fact of pluralism as an obstacle to be overcome through rational procedures designed to minimise the importance of differences, Mouffe’s conceptual pluralism celebrates and seeks to assign positive status to differences, questioning any resort to unanimity and homogeneity in democratic theory. At the same time, she admits that a democratic politics that “aims at challenging a wide range of relations of subordination” needs to recognise limits to pluralism. Derrida’s famous method of deconstruction aims at showing that the meaning of all texts is essentially undecidable (i.e., not susceptible to a single interpretation). The influence of this postmodern and post-structuralist approach on political and legal theory has been considerable, but it has been accused of encouraging extreme relativism. “Pluralism without limits,” “free play,” or “valorizing all differences,” in the language of postmodern theory, prevents us from seeing how some differences should exist—i.e., those that can affirm identity without subordinating, dominating or exploiting others’ identities—while other differences, constructed as relations of subordination, should not exist. Ironically, such an extreme postmodernism shares in the “typical liberal illusion” of a pluralism “without antagonism”; it is a theory missing the dimension of the political (Mouffe, 20).

Mouffe’s radical and plural democracy does not claim to achieve perfect harmony in social relations, nor does it eliminate domination. Indeed, “the real threat to democracy” comes from attempts to negate the ineradicable character of antagonism by invoking “rational consensus” that is actually undemocratic because it allows a limited social actor to represent his or her particularity as the totality. John Rawls’s liberal theory of justice, even in its later, more moderate formulation (Political Liberalism, 1993) is held up by Mouffe as an example of this error.

The famous “original position” spelled out in Rawls’s earlier work, A Theory of Justice, asks what rules and procedures would be chosen by rational individuals behind a “veil of ignorance”—i.e., where every citizen is made unaware of his/her particular circumstances and particular conceptions of the “good life.” This device forces these individuals to “proceed from the shared conceptions of society and person required in applying the ideals and principles of practical reason” (Mouffe, 27). The result is an “overlapping consensus” about the status and content of rights and liberties that is deeper and wider than the bare “constitutional essentials,” such as “one person, one vote.” There must be consensus about what a “reasonable” conception of justice is. Rawls naturally reasons that this conception is his notion of justice as fairness—and its two principles of justice, guaranteeing equal liberty and an equitable distribution of primary goods—that is the basis of a well-ordered society.

Mouffe argues that Rawls attempts to do precisely what a truly democratic perspective cannot do: eliminate the elements of “undecidability” that are present in human relations and, with it, the dimensions of power, antagonism and repression that are the essence of politics. Exclusions of those who disagree with the principles of justice are justified by declaring that those principles are the product of “the free exercise of practical reason,” independent of power relations. “Thanks to this legerdemain, rationality and morality provide the key to solving ‘the paradox of liberalism’: how to eliminate its adversaries while remaining neutral” (31).

Students may wonder whether post-structuralist theory makes Mouffe’s argument difficult to read. One probably does not need the ideas of the constitutive outside or undecidability to agree with her conclusion (32): to conceive of the project of democratic theory as the achievement of a “reconciled” society that has transcended power relations is likely both illusory and dangerous to democracy, itself.

Post-structuralism in Mouffe’s hands is helpful because it shows that a non-coercive and non-exclusive “consensus,” ostensibly reached by means of rational argument, is a conceptual impossibility. This, in turn, “protects pluralist democracy against any attempts at closure” (33) and advances the intriguing suggestion that a vital approach to democratic theory is one that strives to make power and exclusion more visible, thereby expanding—rather than contracting—the scope for antagonism and adversarial contest. This critical or “radical pluralist” perspective is a valuable one to keep in mind as we consider the merits of any democratic theory.

Photo of protestors in a city street several of whom hold placards that read, I’m Tired, Build Prisons on the Moon, Me, Where’s Waldo, God Loves the Delicious Taste of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, I Have a Sign, Silly hats Only, God hates Flags, and God Hates Kittens
Signs in counter-protest at a Hillsboro West Baptist Church demonstration. © Rubin Starset / Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA.

Introduction to Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberal Democracy
Textbook:
Chantal Mouffe, “Carl Schmitt and the Paradox of Liberal Democracy” (pp. 36–45 only)

Some contemporary political theorists, such as David Held, Richard Falk, and Jurgen Habermas, celebrate the prospect of global “cosmopolitan citizenship”; others, such as David Miller or Michael Walzer, are suspicious of the ideal of cosmopolitan citizenship. This is either because it represents an unattainable ideal that can only fail to ground a robust foundation for citizenship, or because it actually represents the triumph of either liberalism over democracy, or some form of cultural imperialism that wraps itself in the language of universality (Linklater 2002, 317–320). This debate, which we explore later in the course, stimulates interest in another, earlier thinker, Carl Schmitt (1888–1985).

Schmitt’s book, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1926), argues that the combination of liberalism and democracy is not viable, because it represents conflicting logic. Democracy, according to Schmitt, requires “homogeneity”—a population of citizen–equals who are treated alike because they are equal in respect of matter constitutive of a demos (people). They must also be clearly demarcated from those who are outside of the demos. The logic of democracy implies a moment of closure, the drawing of a frontier between “us” and “them.” “This cannot be avoided, even in a liberal–democratic model; it can only be negotiated differently. But this in turn can be done only if this closure, and the paradox it implies, are acknowledged” (Mouffe, 43). The democratic logic is one of inclusion and exclusion; its values are those of equality and unity of the demos. The liberal logic of universal equality and humanity is at odds with it.

According to Mouffe, the incapacity of liberalism to conceptualise this frontier is one of Schmitt’s most crucial insights. However, agreeing with this insight does not mean accepting his conclusion that the conflict will lead to the destruction of liberal democracy. Instead, there is a “tension”: no perfect equilibrium is possible between the two logics of liberalism and democracy—even in a future world order. Thus, liberal–democratic politics comprises a process of negotiation and re-negotiation. Mouffe’s appreciation of this constitutive paradox forms the basis of her critique of deliberative democracy, which we revisit in Unit 6.

Unit 6: Deliberative Democracy

Commentary
What is Deliberative Democracy?
Textbooks:
David Held, “Deliberative Democracy and the Defence of the Public Realm” (pp. 230–238 only)

Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, “What Deliberative Democracy Means”

Deliberative democracy is defined by James Bohman as “any one of a family of views according to which the public deliberation of free and equal citizens is the core of legitimate political decision-making and self governance” (Bohman 1998 cited in Held, 237). Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, the leading American proponents of deliberative democracy, define it as

a form of government in which 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. (Gutmann and Thompson, 7)

At first blush, these images of citizens participating actively and thoughtfully in public life may seem to be little more than the practical overlap between previously discussed models of developmental, direct and participatory democracy. In fact, however, the model of deliberative democracy is based on extensive reflection upon the limitations of these previous models. It shifts the focus of attention away from the extent to which people are entitled to participate and the areas life where democracy might be extended, and away from the mere tallying of preferences, to the quality of participation and decision-making.

Photo taken in a large auditorium with a gallery with many people seated on the main floor and standing in the gallery. A man sits at a large video camera on a mobile tripod in the aisle.
West Hartford, CT health care reform town hall meeting, 2009. Sage Ross (own work), CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

According to this theory, a model of democracy is to be judged by the extent to which it is characterised by reasoned discussion and principled justification, and by whether those processes of deliberation take place in a reciprocal, public, and accountable way. Unlike the classical ideal of the ancient city-state, deliberative democracy is not about small scale democracy finding consensus; rather, it is about reasoned disagreement in complex and often divided modern societies. As the philosopher Joshua Cohen stresses, there is “no merit” in the claim that direct democracy best institutionalises the ideals of deliberative democracy (Held, 237).

Instead, the key objective of deliberative democracy is “the transformation of private preferences via a process of deliberation into positions that can withstand public scrutiny and test” (Held, 237). It can do this by (a) pooling knowledge and making people more aware of their interdependencies; (b) exposing how certain viewpoints are linked to sectional interests; and (c) in Jon Elster’s words, replacing “the language of interest with the language of reason” (Elster 1989 cited in Held 238). Under perfect conditions, such as the famous condition of “undistorted communication” theorised by Jurgen Habermas, “no force except that of the better argument is exercised.” Deliberative institutions should strive to achieve free deliberation among “equal” citizens—i.e., “equal” enough that the distorting influences of unequal power, wealth, and opportunity are not determinative of political outcomes. Rather, reasoned arguments are.

Impartialism and the Role of Reason in Deliberative Democracy
Textbook:
David Held, “Deliberative Democracy and the Defence of the Public Realm” (pp. 238–246 only)

What counts as sound public reasoning in deliberative democracy? David Held identifies a position he calls impartialism in the work of analytical philosophers such as Brian Barry, John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas, Onora O’Neill, and Seyla Benhabib. These theorists specify moral standpoints in a way that can be “universally shared”—i.e., in a way that meets the test of not privileging any individual, group, or culture. “At issue is the establishment of principles and rules that nobody, motivated to establish an uncoerced and informed agreement, could reasonably discard” (Held, 240).

Impartialist reasoning aims at achieving a particular kind of legitimacy—not legitimacy based on tradition or acceptance of existing asymmetries of power, socio-economic inequalities, or prejudices—based on “rightness” (i.e., what people consider as right and worthy of respect after deliberation). For example, views and arguments that are subjected to impartialist reasoning can be exposed as being one-sided or not easily generalised to everyone, regardless of their social position. These positions can then be rejected in favour of more inclusive and universally acceptable ones. The latter “anticipated agreement” may start out as an impartialist proposal; hopefully, it will also meet the test of actual acceptance by the relevant community.

Critics of impartialism have deep reservations about whether real communities should accept the abstract formulations of rationalist philosophers. Like Chantal Mouffe in her criticism of Rawls, they are suspicious that too much liberal individualism and male/Western values are contained in ostensibly “right” or “universal” reasons, and are being used to mask or obscure fundamental and ineradicable conflicts in society. They argue for forms of deliberative procedure that are “closer to the ground,” aimed at improving deliberation under non-ideal conditions, instead of trying to reason about those found in Habermas’s “ideal speech situation” or behind Rawls’s “veil of ignorance.”

Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson stress that we cannot avoid moral conflict in politics. However, they do favour imposing an obligation on citizens to seek justifications that are acceptable to all, and to minimise unnecessary conflict wherever possible—what they have termed the economy of moral disagreement (Held, 243). James Tully also warns against the dangers of a single model of deliberative reasoning and, therefore, focuses less than Gutmann and Thompson on finding common ground and more on discovering and appreciating culturally diverse forms of reasoning and justification. Another critic of impartialism among deliberative democrats is the late feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young; like Tully, she prefers to promote a politics of inclusion by promoting difference, not repressing it (244).

Impartialists reply to these criticisms by stressing that, notwithstanding the importance of recognizing difference, it is nonetheless necessary to insist that not all forms of public reasoning are equally valid. Democratic deliberation should not degenerate into an orgy of cultural relativism; the rightful basis of action (i.e., the course that other reasonable people would endorse under similar circumstances) must be clearly distinguished from either self-interested strategy or the mere assertion of identity.

Varieties of Deliberative Democracy
Textbooks:
David Held, “Deliberative Democracy and the Defence of the Public Realm” (pp. 246–252 only)

Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, “What Deliberative Democracy Means” (pp. 21–39 only)

Students searching for interesting research topics may wish to look into emerging developments in deliberative democracy on both the theoretical and practical levels. Students with a philosophical bent may wish to investigate further some of the work of the aforementioned theorists, as well as that of several others who, but for lack of space, would be assigned as readings in this course. Those with a more empirical bent may wish to know in what institutional settings we can find experiments in deliberative democracy working, and where the most promising institutional settings for extending deliberative practices are to be found.

Institutions of Deliberative Democracy
David Held makes the important point that deliberative democracy “is not an all or nothing affair; . . . the task is to find ways of increasing the deliberative element in modern democracies” (246). Many ways of doing this have been suggested, and most have been at least tried in practice. Deliberative polls (i.e., comparing the unreflective pre-deliberation views of a random sample of the population with their post-deliberation views) were championed by philosopher James Fishkin and others on the grounds that well publicised deliberative polls would stimulate the general public to consider their own views more carefully. Fishkin and Bruce Ackerman suggest “deliberative days” be built into the electoral process as a way of engaging as many people as possible in the reflective process of political judgement; one wonders how effective such an institution would have been during the recent US health care debate, given the polarisation of views and the nature of the media in that country. Held notes that citizen juries have been used successfully to advise governments in the US (249), as well as, of course, some promising Internet initiatives such as openDemocracy.net in the UK (Held, 250).

Held’s brief survey of institutions of deliberative democracy, which focuses primarily on the United States and to a lesser extent Britain, should be supplemented by reflection on the Canadian context. Canadian experience with deliberative assemblies certainly echoes the findings concerning deliberative polling that deliberation results in the significant transformation of the preferences of those involved. On the other hand, “there is less evidence that publicizing the results of deliberative polls has a positive effect on the mass of voters” (248). The 1991 Charlottetown Accord, which involved several regional consultative fora that gathered input into the Accord, was decisively rejected in a nation-wide referendum; the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly on electoral reform narrowly missed the 60 per cent threshold in 2005, and then it was thoroughly rejected in 2009; and the recommendation of the 2007 Ontario Citizens Assembly was also decisively rejected (Warren and Pearse 2008; Pilon 2009).

What each of these cases illustrates is that the articulation is rather poor between deliberative democracy locally and direct democracy among the wider public (e.g., referenda and plebiscites). This may just reflect the nature of the topics discussed and, perhaps, this gap could be closed using some additional institutional innovations. But the problem may also reflect a mistaken theoretical assumption: that there is a close affinity between deliberative democracy and direct democracy. This has not been borne out, either by careful conceptual analysis or by actual democratic practice.

Varieties of Deliberative Theory
In addition to the distinction between impartialists and their critics discussed in the previous section, deliberative democrats disagree about the value, status, aims, and scope of deliberation. On the instrumental view, deliberation is only valuable to the extent that it enables citizens to make justifiable decisions. Since the object is to discover or know the most justifiable decision, this is sometimes called the epistemic view. On the expressive view, the value comes from the process of sharing and debating viewpoints in a thoughtful and respectful manner. Of course, to the extent that one is persuaded that there is a unique right answer justifying a policy decision, one is likely inclined toward an instrumental view but, as Gutmann and Thompson point out, the decisions of government bind people other than the decision-makers, themselves, and the cooperation of those people is often necessary for implementation. That is why it is important to listen to them and to respect their views. Instrumental and expressive views are, in fact, complementary.

Gutmann and Thompson also argue that debates about the status of theory principles as either procedural or substantive also obscure a complementarity. Those arguing for the priority of a purely procedural theory, which places no limit on the content of the laws, fail to see that their principles are no less contestable, and no more fundamental, than those of substantive theorists. If majority rule is the preferred decision-making procedure, it must be for moral reasons—e.g., the equality of individuals. Moreover, debates about how procedural principles are to be interpreted and applied are often as controversial as debates about substantive principles. Instead, the provisional status of both procedural and substantive principles of deliberative democracy must be recognised and open to revision.

How should the ultimate aims of deliberative democracy be characterised? Here, the disagreement may be, in fact, more intractable. Gutmann and Thompson favour a liberal pluralist conception, which, although it strives to achieve as much agreement as possible, does not pursue the “comprehensive common good” of consensus democracy. By economizing on moral disagreement, they hope to reduce conflict but, of course, they do not eliminate it; the examples of abortion and homosexual unions (pp. 28–29) illustrate that even here, deliberation does encourage people to find a certain amount of common ground without forcing them to give up their core moral commitments.

See this article by Mark Crawford, the Course Coordinator, in the Vancouver Sun: Opinion: Deliberative Polling a Route to Electoral Reform.

Regarding scope, many deliberative democrats regard the institutions of the liberal state (constitutional assemblies, legislatures, courts, commissions of inquiry) as the most significant venues for deliberation. Certainly, the state is the most fundamental venue in that the public sphere only takes shape in the presence of the state, and even in civil society—the world of so-called “private associations.” The state plays a crucial role in defining, organizing, or obstructing the representation of interests. It is often assumed that group actors seeking democratic (i.e., discursive or deliberative) advance will prefer entry into the state, given the official status and opportunities for influence that state structures present.

Even pluralist “inclusion” democrats often assume that this is the best path, or that there is even a universal best mix of action in civil society and action through the state. John Dryzek reminds us that pressures for greater democracy almost always originate from opposition in civil society. He suggests that the choice of inclusion through the state should be based upon the twin considerations of whether (a) the group’s defining interests are directly connected to state imperatives; and (b) the group’s discursive capacities within civil society are not unduly depleted (Dryzek 2000, 81–88).

The other big “scope” issue for deliberative democrats concerns that of transnational democracy. While it is common for democratic theorists to limit their discussions of mutual justification and obligation to citizens of a single state, where the value of reciprocity stems from having common rights and duties of citizenship, foreigners become “moral constituents” to the extent that they are significantly affected by citizens’ decisions (Gutmann and Thompson, 37–38). To the extent that citizens accept the burden of justification to those who are significantly affected by such decisions, some degree of international public accountability is called for on the part of both domestic governments and multinational corporations.

Two of the best known formulations of deliberative democracy internationally are James Bohman’s Democracy across Borders: From Demos to Demoi (2007); and John Dryzek’s Deliberative Global Politics (2006). After surveying the weaknesses of various “current cosmopolitan and transnational theories” in developing an adequate account of international democracy, Bohman stresses the need for a dynamic theory of democratization for multiple peoples (demoi). In his view, the purpose of a transnational constitutionalism “is to create just such a reflexive, deliberative, and dispersed order” (Bohman, 156).

Dryzek promotes a robust transnational civil society, operating through multiple contending global discourses, as a primary agency through which institutions of deliberation are made accountable to all of those affected by their decisions:

The main difference between the international system and the political systems inside sovereign states is the relative informality and variety of governance mechanisms in the former, which is why discourses play a comparatively greater role in producing and coordinating outcomes than in domestic politics. (Dryzek 2006, 161)

Both Bohman and Dryzek offer stimulating accounts of the potential for international deliberative democracy.

Critiques of Deliberative Democracy
Textbooks:
Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, “What Deliberative Democracy Means” (pp. 40–56 only)

Chantal Mouffe, “Carl Schmitt and the Paradox of Liberal Democracy” (pp. 45–57 only)

There are now at least four book–length collections of papers about democratic deliberation, as well as numerous articles and book chapters. As Gutmann and Thompson point out, criticisms are of two general kinds: (a) those that call into question the value of deliberation, itself; and (b) those that accept the value of deliberation, but question its feasibility. In this section we discuss Gutmann and Thompson’s reply to their critics in Why Deliberative Democracy? and we look closely at the more radical perspectives of John Dryzek and Chantal Mouffe.

Philosopher Stanley Fish has argued that Gutmann and Thompson (and, by extension, all deliberative democrats) want to have it both ways: they want to combine the tradition of liberalism, that seeks to minimise and manage conflict through a neutral and tolerant state, with the tradition of liberalism, that seeks to build a better society populated by better citizens. To achieve this task, Gutmann and Thompson need a device for excluding certain points of view and certain types of people: “If doctrines [like racial discrimination or religious intolerance] are welcomed into conversation, they may shut it down; if the door is closed to them, liberalism will seem to be exercising the peremptory authority it routinely condemns” (Fish 1999, 89). “Mutual respect” is a seemingly reasonable criterion for inclusion, but not as obvious or objective as it might first appear: if the bar is set too low, positions are admitted simply because they are controversial; if the bar is set too high, positions are excluded simply because they are controversial.

Gutmann and Thompson admit that Fish and other critics have a point when they argue that (a) the demand for justification assumes a shared understanding of what counts as a good reason; and (b) because such a shared understanding is actually thin or non-existent, deliberation can be used cynically as a cover for power politics. Is deliberative democracy just a disingenuous way of presenting personal preferences in the guise of morally objective reasons? Gutmann and Thompson argue that such scepticism is ultimately self-defeating: “If Fish acknowledges that racial inferiority is not as defensible as civic equality, then his critique undermines itself” (Gutmann and Thompson, 47). Furthermore, they argue that one of the best antidotes for the misuse of deliberation is deliberation, itself. Deliberation can be used to unmask, as well as to assert, specious claims to “truth,” even if morality is neither objective nor easily discovered. Progress can be made, even if it is only the clarification of both options and criteria for choice.

As for practical objections, the argument exists that socioeconomic inequalities or educational disadvantages serve to marginalise certain groups, or that deliberative standards of reason are unfair to people with other standards (e.g., religious, traditional, non-Western). Gutmann and Thompson aver that deliberation has been shown to be no more biased in practice than other forms of democracy, because it need not force a definitive resolution of all issues. The only requirement is that participants appeal to basic principles that anyone trying to find fair terms of cooperation can agree upon. Gutmann and Thompson use the example of respect for human life and relief of human suffering in the case of stem cell research, illustrating that it should be possible to narrow the range of disagreement, devise common recommendations, and find respectful ways of continuing the discussion. In fact, the President’s Commission on Bioethics managed to do so in 2002 (52–53). Deliberation can sometimes exacerbate and polarise conflict, and it can dredge up latent issues instead of letting “sleeping dogs lie.” However, deliberation, itself, is rarely the root cause of conflict (55).

Some of the most telling criticisms of deliberative democracy come from otherwise sympathetic critical theorists who decry the limits of liberal constitutionalism and proceduralism. Among these critics are “discourse” democrats such as John Dryzek or “difference” democrats and postmodern radical pluralists like Iris Marion Young, Chantal Mouffe and William Connolly. Gutmann and Thompson argue that the disposition to seek mutually justifiable reasons requires the specification of principles of reciprocity, publicity and accountability governing different aspects of the reason-giving process. They also rule out arguments that deny basic liberty, political equality, and human integrity. Dryzek argues that the specification of publicity as a precondition for entry into deliberation is unnecessary, for there are mechanisms internal to deliberation that promote publicity. Indeed, this line of argument applies to all of their principles:

In short, deliberation itself possesses substantial endogenous domain restriction mechanisms, such that there is in general no need to introduce the kinds of pre-specified restrictions on the kinds of arguments that can be introduced favoured by authors such as Gutmann and Thompson. Political equality, human integrity, reciprocity, publicity, and accountability are undeniably important values, but the best way for people to learn these values is through the practice of deliberation, rather than through being told (even if it is by Ivy League professors) that they must abide by these principles before they can enter the forum. (Dryzek 2000, 47)

An interesting question is whether Mouffe’s critique extends beyond the exclusionary tendencies of “rational consensus” theorists like Habermas and Rawls to include all or most deliberative democrats. Certainly, Mouffe values the way that Schmitt identifies the paradox of democracy: there is a necessary division between “us” and “them,” a unity that constitutes the political, one that is threatened by the pluralism of liberal democracy. The necessary democratic logic of drawing a line between us and them militates against the “consensus without exclusion” implied by Rawls or Habermas.

But Mouffe also says that Schmitt’s theory must be modified in order to recognise that the identity of “the people” is not already given but, rather, is constructed. It must been seen as “the result of the political process of hegemonic articulation” (56). Hence, we need pluralism in the fixing of an identity—and in the definition of the common good—of the demos. Mouffe calls this the “double movement” of inclusion–exclusion (57). This might be consistent with a kind of deliberative democracy, but not the kind of “economizing of disagreement” and minimization of conflict that Gutmann and Thompson or other liberal–constitutionalist theorists of democracy envisage.

The “Deliberative Turn” in Democratic Theory
Textbooks:
David Held, “Deliberative Democracy and the Defence of the Public Realm” (pp. 252–255 only)

Chantal Mouffe, “For an Agonistic Model of Democracy” (pp. 83–98 only)

Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, “What Deliberative Democracy Means” (pp. 56–63 only)

We have seen that deliberative democracy can embrace both difference and consensus; the “public sphere” and state institutions; and transnational and local or domestic politics. By asking citizens to consider what is justifiable to people who reasonably disagree with them, democratic theory and practice moves beyond mere aggregation of preferences, or even mere participation. It is not a model wherein all citizens decide every issue. The aim is to supplement representation, not replace it, and the problem of authenticity posed by modern mass democracy remains. However, it is refreshing to see a renewed focus on deliberation not only in theory, but also in practice.

Most criticisms of deliberative democracy alert us to possible dangers of closure, exclusion, or deliberative bias and, if properly heeded, may actually improve deliberative practices. Gutmann and Thompson put forward proposals to develop elements of

reciprocity, governing the kinds of reasons that should be given;
publicity, concerning the forum in which they should be given; and
accountability, the agents to whom and by whom reasons should be given.
These proposals may unduly limit the parameters of deliberative practice and should be considered provisional. However, they are also helpful to citizens in many contexts.

A larger and more difficult question that John Dryzek asks but, perhaps, Chantal Mouffe most forcefully by asks is whether deliberative democracy effectively serves to reconcile democracy with liberalism, and whether that is a good thing. According to Mouffe, its chief aim is “to reach forms of agreement that would satisfy both rationality (understood as defence of liberal rights) and democratic legitimacy (as represented by popular sovereignty)” (83). Mouffe neatly uses the Rawls–Habermas debate to point out how they tell the truth about each other:

Indeed, Rawls’s conception is not as independent of comprehensive views as he believes, and Habermas cannot be as purely proceduralist as he claims. That both are unable to separate the public from the private or the procedural from the substantial as clearly as they declare is very telling. What this reveals is the impossibility of achieving what each of them, albeit in different ways, is really aiming at, that is, circumscribing a domain that would not be subject to the pluralism of values and where a consensus without exclusion could be established. (91)

Mouffe is probably right to say that such attempts to fix the meaning of liberal democracy “once and for all” are doomed, and that the task of democratic theory in the future should be to “face the challenge that recognition of the pluralism of values entails” (93). But deliberative democracy, broadly defined, can help as well as hinder us in this task.

Commentary
The Theoretical Aims of Chantal Mouffe and James Tully
Textbooks:
Chantal Mouffe, “For an Agonistic Model of Democracy” (pp. 98–105 only)

James Tully, “Public Philosophy and Civic Freedom: A Guide to the Two Volumes” and “Public Philosophy as a Critical Activity”

We have seen that Chantal Mouffe is drawn to the ideas of Carl Schmitt, notwithstanding his view of the unity of the state as a “given” and his political conservatism. The principal reason is Schmitt’s clarity about liberalism’s evasion of politics. “In a very systematic fashion liberal thought evades or ignores state and politics and moves instead in a typical always recurring polarity of two heterogeneous spheres, namely ethics and economics” (Schmitt 1996, 70). These evasions are very clearly represented in democratic theory by aggregative and economic conceptions of democracy (e.g., Schumpeter, Downs), on the one hand, and rights-based rationalism (Habermas, Rawls and, perhaps, Gutmann and Thompson), on the other. Instead of collapsing politics into either economics or ethics, Mouffe seeks a democratic model that grasps the specificity of the political, i.e., an approach that “places the question of power and antagonism at its very centre.”

Photo of two men shaking hands. An armed guard in uniform stands in the foreground. The men shaking hands both have their left hands on the other man’s shoulder; one man is speaking and the other appears to have a smiling but determined expression on his face.
US President Donald Trump meeting Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the White House, February 2017. Office of the President of the United States, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Mouffe calls her alternative to aggregative and deliberative models agonistic pluralism (101). It recognises the specificity of the “political” and sees “politics” as the ensemble of practices, discourses, and institutions (“order”) that is always potentially conflictual. Politics aims at the creation of a provisional “unity” in a context of unavoidable conflict and diversity, the creation of an “us” by the determination of a “them.” The aim of democratic politics is to construct the “them” in a way that is no longer perceived as an enemy to be destroyed, but as an adversary—a legitimate enemy. In other words, the aim of agonistic pluralism is to transform Schmitt’s antagonism, which is the struggle between enemies, into agonism, which is the struggle between adversaries. By revealing that a consensus without exclusion is impossible, and that an attempt to do so through rational means is a dangerous illusion, agonistic pluralism makes an important contribution to democratic theory.

James Tully’s stated aim is “to establish pedagogical relationships of reciprocal elucidation between academic research and the civic activities of fellow citizens” (3). He calls this style of theory public philosophy, the purpose of which is “to throw a critical light on the field of practices in which civic struggles take place and the practices of civic freedom available to change them” (3). The reason this philosophy is distinctive is that it eschews the traditional approach of theorising in a manner that is detached from the relationships of normativity and power in which citizens find themselves. It is described as being “in a new key” in that Tully combines “historical studies and a reciprocal civic relationship” in his own unique style (9); implicitly, he invites us to do the same.

In Chapter 1, “Public philosophy as a Critical Activity,” Tully describes the four defining characteristics of his “practical, critical, and historical approach.” First, there is a focus on what Tully calls “practices of governance.” Whether these are defined narrowly to refer to formal institutions and practices of government or, more broadly, to working, cultural or environmental activities, study must proceed from two different perspectives: from forms of government put into place and, in response, from practices of freedom put into practice by governed agents. These practices of governance are also practices of subjectification—i.e., the assignment, internalisation, and negotiation of practical identities and roles into what Tully calls an intersubjective relation of power or governance.” The three possible practices of freedom include

“acting otherwise” within the rules of the game in which individuals cooperate;
entering into available procedures of negotiation, deliberation, and reform with the aim of modifying the practice; or
confronting, which leads either to subtle modification of a relation of governance or its transformation.
Second, there is an aim to avoid formulating a general political theory in response to practices of governance and to simply disclose the historically contingent range of possibilities to which they give rise. This is done in two methodological steps that Tully calls surveys. The first is a survey of the “language games in which the problem and the rival practical and theoretical solutions are articulated” (26). This is a practical or ethical activity of giving reasons why a term should or should not be used in a particular case; it is not the discovery of a general and comprehensive rule to be applied in every case. A general theory can clarify the practical exchange of reasons over the problematic practice of governance by citizens, but it cannot be an exclusive source of answers. The second step is a survey of the concrete practices (relations of governance and practices of freedom) being fought over. These might include means by which structures of governance are held in place, such as agenda setting, economic control of information, and so on.

Third, there is an historical survey of the origins of the languages and practices being surveyed—a genealogy, to use Friedrich Nietzsche’s term—that enables participants to free themselves from the conditions of possibility (“problematisations and practices”). As examples, Tully mentions Marx, Foucault, Charles Taylor, Quentin Skinner, and Mary Wollstonecraft as providing useful and illuminating problematisations of practices of governance (35–36).

Fourth, public philosophy is defined as a critical activity, “an ongoing communicative relationship with citizens,” that does not develop a general theory of justice and apply it but, rather, re-orients to freedom before justice. “The questions of politics are approached as questions of freedom” (38). Political theory becomes a permanent critical ethos of testing the practices in which we are governed.

Therefore, one can see considerable overlap in the theoretical aims of Mouffe and Tully. Both find inspiration in their thinking about democracy in Ludwig Wittgenstein, who addresses in a profound way the human craving for certainty about truth. In their different ways, they both seek to ensure that practices of governance in which we act together do not become “a rationalist consensus on universalist principles” (Mouffe, 73) or “closed structures of domination under settled forms of justice” (Tully, 38).

Why Wittgenstein?
Textbook:
Chantal Mouffe, “Wittgenstein, Political Theory and Democracy”

Photo of a man’s head and torso in three-quarter profile facing right
Moritz Nähr. Ludwig Wittgenstein. 1930. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s reputation as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century rests largely on the insights contained in his last work, Philosophical Investigations (1953). This work is unique in that it does not identify a philosophical problem to be solved, and then advance a theory that solves the problem. Instead, it engages in a dialogue about the difficulties of language and meaning. Wittgenstein argues that definitions are not simply “given” by what they ostensibly stand for but, rather, emerge from what he terms, forms of life meaning, roughly, the culture and society in which they are used. Therefore, in order to see how language works, we have to see how it functions in a specific social situation.

It is Hanna Pitkin who, in her book Wittgenstein and Justice (1972), first makes a convincing argument that Wittgenstein is particularly helpful in thinking about democracy because he stresses the particular case and the plurality and contradiction of meanings that emerge from social practices, and he exposes the human craving for certainty that lies behind much theoretical writing. Mouffe points out that the contextualist writing of communitarian political thinkers like Michael Walzer and pragmatic philosophers like Richard Rorty is clearly influenced by Wittgenstein in its challenges to universalist–rationalist political theories. “Liberal democratic principles can only be defended as being constitutive of our form of life, and we should not try to ground our commitment to them on something supposedly safer,” i.e., rational arguments for the legitimacy of democratic institutions (Mouffe, 66).

Mouffe, following Stanley Cavell, sees Wittgenstein’s philosophy as exemplifying not a quest for certainty, but for responsibility. Although a particular decision represents a provisional exclusion, it does not represent a definitive closure based on reason and, so, the conversation on justice must be left forever open. Mouffe sees an important point of convergence between Wittgenstein’s and Derrida’s accounts of undecidability (77), just as Tully sees as a great complementarity between Wittgenstein’s and Foucault’s critiques of the way societies control and discipline their populations by sanctioning various knowledge claims (Tully, 19, 24).

Note, however, that Wittgenstein does not always lead to the same agonistic pluralism or public philosophy as Mouffe and Tully. Some thinkers, such as Richard Rorty, Peter Winch and, arguably H. L. A. Hart in Concept of Law, use Wittgenstein’s insights in order to avoid the mistake of “raising theory on the back of definition” or searching for a rational foundation for their views. But they then tend to read into current social practices a consensus that contains rules to be followed (Mouffe, 66–67, 72–74). Of course, theorists like Rawls and Habermas can also gain some footing to use this approach to ground arguments for procedural consensus and, yet, this is not good enough for radical democrats, who stress that “procedures always involve substantial ethical commitments” (Mouffe, 69).

Wittgenstein versus Habermas
Textbook:
James Tully, “Situated Creatively: Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy” (pp. 39–62 only)

Photo of a man’s head and torso
Wolfram Huke. Jurgen Habermas. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.< cite>

Jurgen Habermas has developed what is probably the most famous and influential “critical theory” in the world—his theory of communicative action—that he builds around central ideas of communicative rationality and discourse ethics. He characterises deliberative democracy as a procedural theory based on constitutional law: if the procedures enable communicative power by displacing and constraining other powers, then the outcomes should be more legitimate, more rational, and more ethical than any other possible political arrangement (Warren 2002, 189).

James Tully sees this as a prime example of a “form of critical reflection on the background conditions of possibility of human action that transcend the situated world of everyday activities of citizens and public philosophers” (40). Tully argues that no practice of critical reflection can, or must, play this foundational role Yet, Habermas’s “picture” of how we come to a free and rational agreement is persuasive. Relations of communication are as basic as relations of production were in an earlier, Marxist version of Critical Theory: the implicit universal rules of speech–acts are that they are normatively “right,” truthful, and sincere. Therefore, these implicit claims can be rendered explicit as standards of validity by actual procedures. After all, this is not an arbitrarily constructed ideal, but one that is inherent in the nature of language.

Tully acknowledges that Habermas’s validational form of critical reflection is a valuable practice. But as a practice, it, too, is embedded in a form of life; as Wittgenstein says, “if the true is what is grounded, then the ground is not true, nor yet false” (Wittgenstein 1974 cited in Tully, 51). The trivial example of the sincerity of Habermas’s claim, “I am Habermas,” is trivial precisely because social practice has made it reasonable to accept such claims without much question. According to Tully, Habermas draws an

overly sharp distinction . . . between the reflective grounding of speech–acts in argumentation and the mere de facto acceptance of habitual practices . . . Between the Charybdis of unconditional reflection and the Scylla of the dead weight of custom lies the vast landscape where our critically reflective games of freedom have their home, which Wittgenstein opens up and explores. (52, emphasis added)

This is not to reject Habermas’s theory entirely. Rather, it is to temper its universalist claims and see it as one form of conditional reflection among many. It is useful as a way of clarifying possible procedures for validating norms (Tully, 62).

Why Foucault?
Textbook:
James Tully, “To Think and Act Differently: Comparing Critical Ethos and Critical Theory” (pp. 71–83 only)

Photo of a man’s head and torso; he rests is head in his left hand while leaning on a desk
Michel Foucault. AFP/Getty Images. © Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Michel Foucault could be described as either a philosophical historian or historical philosopher; his primary objective is to provide a critique of the way modern societies control and discipline their populations by producing and validating knowledge–claims. His most famous books, including The Order of Things (1966),Madness and Civilization (1961), The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), and Discipline and Punish (1975)examine the practices and epistemes (sets of ideas that determine acceptable knowledge) that constitute regimes of power in the schools, workplaces, hospitals, courts, and institutions of society.

Probably the most important units of analysis in his work are the subject and the discourse. Human beings in modern societies have been made “subjects” through exercises of power stipulating norms for human behaviour, and the human sciences (medicine, psychiatry, law, psychology, criminology, and so on) have played a major role not only in making humans subjects of study, but also subjects of law and state. They have established and legitimated standards of “normality,” such as “sanity,” “deviance,” the “normal child,” etc. Foucault offers histories of the different modes by which humans have been made subjects. Underlying these epistemes and practices is a picture of Man that is an invention of the Enlightenment.

Foucault (who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Immanuel Kant) sees the great “turn” in modern philosophy occurring when Kant questions whether ideas represent—or do something other than represent—their objects (Gutting 2008) Foucault is “neo-Kantian” in seeing that representations (thoughts or ideas) can originate (i.e., they can “be constituted”) in something other than the objects to which they refer. Foucault is definitely not Kantian, however, because he rejects Kant’s suggestion that these representations are the product of the mind—a special epistemic realm of “transcendental subjectivity.” Instead, he looks to realms of practice and systems of power/knowledge as the sources of our ideas and categories of thought. His aim is to attack the edifice of Western metaphysics, thereby giving free play to difference, local and specific knowledge, and contingency. Such a project is politically emancipatory, although it, of course, cannot be metaphysically “grounded” without falling into self-contradiction. “For Foucault, to act as a grand theorist is to commit the undignified folly of speaking for others—of prescribing to them the law of their being. It is to offer a new orthodoxy, and thus a new tyranny” (Philp 1985, 68).

The usefulness of Foucault to Tully’s enterprise of doing “public philosophy in a new key” is apparent. Foucault’s conception of a discourse refers to the sets of rules governing the “validity” of statements and the classification of objects of analysis and how they are organised into a system of possibility for knowledge. He thus situates, relativises, and replaces traditional units of analysis such as the “text,” the “theory” and the “research programme.” His method is to ask what rules permit certain statements or truth–claims to be made—e.g., systems of classifying animals discussed in The Order of Things or the classification of psychiatric illnesses in Madness and Civilization—and to display their contingency, their constructedness, and how they have been shaped (at least to some extent) by power. This creates a space in which subjects can start to understand and modify their own discourses and practices.

Tully describes Foucault’s method in more detail in the section of Chapter 3 entitled, “Two Philosophies of Critical Reflection on Limits in the Present: What They Have in Common.” Like Wittgenstein or Habermas, Foucault agrees that there is no a priori form of the human subject and, consequently, any form of the subject must be analyzed with reference to processes of socialisation or constitution (74). Like Habermas, Foucault believes that humans can develop the capacities to question and contest the processes of subjectivisation. Foucault’s approach is to analyze the practical system in which we identify ourselves in terms of (a) relations of power; (b) pragmatics of knowledge “validity” (“games of truth”); and (c) ethical practices of subjectivisation (Tully, 78–80).

These three axes cannot be reduced to one another or treated in isolation; their historical analysis can inform a reciprocal relation between critique and activity, a critical ethos: “the specific intellectual as a citizen [can] circulate his or her genealogical knowledge in the public and local discussions of and struggles around the form of subjectivity from which the historical study began, and to participate in democratic will formation” (Tully, 81). A genealogy is context transgressing, both in the sense that it “re-problematises” practices and in the sense that it modifies existing relations of power or ethics (83).

Foucault versus Habermas
Textbook:
James Tully, “To Think and Act Differently: Comparing Critical Ethos and Critical Theory” (pp. 83–131 only)

The aim of Habermas’s approach is not just to understand and modify limits to subjectivity, but also to rationally determine which limits are necessary, universal, and obligatory. This is the aim of his universal theory of communicative action, communicative rationality, and discourse ethics.

Foucault’s approach aims to enable us to think and act differently by means of critical histories that exhibit the singularity, contingency and arbitrary constraints of our forms of subjectivity. Habermas’s approach aims to discover a universal form of the subject, the decentred subject, implicit in our forms of subjectivity by means of universal pragmatics and developmental logic, and to use it as a regulative idea to evaluate existing practices. (Tully, 93)

In sections 5 through 8 of Chapter 3, James Tully discusses in detail Foucault’s four objections to Habermas’s approach, and provides the reasons he prefers the Foucauldian way. First, as the quotation above indicates, Foucault argues that Habermas’s theory is less critical, because he legitimates rather than questions the “decentred subject.” In other words, he legitimates the constructed and somewhat incoherent modern view of the self and identity as a site of power and struggle, as opposed to the traditional view of the individual in society as a unified and coherent “given.” Thus, there is a form of the subject that Habermas takes for granted and it is assumed to be universal. Tests to determine which features of this decentred subjectivity really are universal and which are contingent could be devised through inventing different forms of subjectivity as objects of comparison, as Wittgenstein and analytical philosophers do. Tests could also be devised through the historical study of different forms of subjectivity, as Foucault and the Cambridge School do (Tully, 99). Moreover, the most “abstract” theories very often fail to provide sufficient protection against the most disastrous political choices—as the support in the 1930s for Nazism by several prominent philosophers of varying stripes indicates (101–102).

Second, Foucault demonstrates the greater reasonableness of his approach by showing that some of the allegedly non-contingent presuppositions of Habermas’s communicative rationality are actually historically contingent and the product of arbitrary constraints. Foucault does not deny that there may well be some universal rules common to all games of truth, but we do not yet have a “complete and peremptory definition” of what those games are (108). Habermas structures the debate (or problematises it, in Foucault’s terms) with three forms of reason, namely cognitive–instrumental, moral–practical, and aesthetic–expressive. These forms of argumentation are based on a metaphysical account of the most important reality: one in which there are “human beings engaged in communicative action in their lifeworld” (Rawls 1995 cited in Tully, 111). While Foucault accepts the legitimacy of such a project—unlike John Rawls who says that it is unreasonable to expect agreement on such a comprehensive doctrine and promotes, instead, his minimalist project of the overlapping consensus—he sees it as just one reasonable project among many.

Third, Foucault’s detailed genealogies of the juridical subject in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality furnish the basis of a critique of the universal pretensions of Western juridical theory. “While juridical theories focus on the justification and universalisation of rights, they fail to describe the systems of knowledge, power and ethics through which we acquire, exercise and contest the validity of rights through strategies of freedom” (Tully, 118). This is clearly an objection to Habermas’s conception of the decentred subject, as well, since Habermas reformulates and defends the Enlightenment tradition of the juridical form of the subject: “deontological, formal, cognitive and universal” (Tully, 113).

The word discipline in Discipline and Punish refers to a form of knowledge organised around a statistical norm of behaviour and the form of power relations concerned with monitoring or enforcing processes of normalisation. The abilities to think and behave in ways presupposed by the exercise of rights and duties of juridical subjects are acquired through processes of discipline in schools, workplaces, prisons, courts, and so on (Tully, 116). Crucially, Foucault observes that the great Enlightenment hope has not transpired—the hope that the development of human capabilities to communicate and coordinate would lead straightforwardly to greater freedom and autonomy. He sees, instead, the growth of a paradox: “the growth of capabilities has led to the intensification of power relations” (118). The flaw in Habermas is that he participates in the Enlightenment tradition of viewing capacities and autonomy in abstraction from these practical systems of power, yielding a misleading picture of unambiguous liberation.

Fourth, it can be argued that Habermas’s approach to questions of freedom and power is utopian, whereas Foucault’s is not. Undistorted communication and ideal speech in Habermasian theory provide an ideal of freedom against which relations of power can be evaluated. For Foucault, this ideal is just another instance of the juridical tendency to conceive of autonomous subjects outside the context of power relations. This is not only utopian; there is no place in the real world where humans can communicate or dispute norms without putting into play relations of power. Foucault alleges that the reason Habermas and many other contemporary moral and political philosophers are driven to build theory on a utopian foundation is that power is conceived of as an “evil” from which we must free ourselves. What is needed, instead, is recognition that we can “be free and rational within the relations of power that constitute us” (Tully, 121). Knowledge, communication, and freedom should always be understood in the context of relations of power.

Democratic will–formation is described by Foucault in his later writing as the constitution of a community of discussion and action in the course of contestation: “the analysis, elaboration, and bringing into question of power relations and the ‘agonism’ between power relations and the intransitivity of freedom is a permanent political task inherent in all social existence” (Tully, 127–128). Consensus cannot operate as a “regulative” principle, but only as a “critical idea,” one heuristic form of reflection among others. It is useful insofar as it is sometimes important to know what degree of non-consensuality is implied or necessitated by a given power relation if that power is to be properly scrutinised and questioned (129).