 | Tangentium |
All material on this site remains © the original authors: please see our submission guidelines for more information. If no author is shown material is © Drew Whitworth. For any reproduction beyond fair dealing, permission must be sought: e-mail drew@comp.leeds.ac.uk. ISSN number: 1746-4757 |
What's So Clever About Democracy?Ricardo BlaugPage 1 ¦ Page 2 ¦ Page 3 ¦ Page 4 ¦ Printer-friendly version Many theorists have concentrated on trying to counter the traditional charge against a more deliberative account of democracy: that it is utopian, that it has "no place", that it is unrealistic. They therefore offer a variety of institutional reforms which would allow fair deliberation to be fed more meaningfully into the decision-making processes of the state, so preserving the efficiency of its central representational structure. By giving deliberative democracy a "place", they hope to combine its increased legitimacy with political viability. In this way, a deeper democracy might realistically walk upon the earth. Yet there is one important way in which such theory remains profoundly utopian. For while they all seek an increase in deliberation at the periphery of the state, none address the problems encountered by participants in such deliberations. Democratic theorists have always plied their trade as designers of entire political orders. They have always sought to show how states could be both legitimate and efficient. The theorist, gazing out over the entire institutional landscape, diagnoses ills, and designs institutional treatments. From this elevated perspective, trying to deepen democracy becomes a problem of design, of finding forms which will allow for meaningful and fair participation. But most of us do not practice state craft. We do not, in fact, face the problem of reforming an entire political order. Instead, we live everyday lives, in our families and communities. We work, when we can, we belong to civic associations and occasionally, when we can overcome our pessimism, we engage in political activism. From the perspective of a participant in an everyday collective decision, democracy presents quite different problems. Here and now, democracy means fairness and efficiency in the decision-making process of an actual group. For all their calls for more deliberation, if you ask democratic theorists questions like: How can we do fair deliberation? How can we have more democracy, say, in our place of work? How can our decisions be both fair and efficient? you will be greeted by a loud silence. This is because they are busy elsewhere. Anxious not to be seen as utopian, they want to show democratic states how to run. Participants would be more impressed if we could learn, first, how to walk. What then can we say about democracy as it appears in the "participant's perspective?" We might start with Sheldon Wolin's suggestion ("Fugitive Democracy", Constellations 1/1, 1994, pp. 11-25). "Democracy," he states, "is not about where the political is located, but how it is experienced." According to Wolin, what's so clever about democracy is that it is something that happens to participants in a particular discussion, something immediate, something characterised not by a form for participation, nor by an institutional design, but precisely by a loss of form, and by a breach of design. If we push this insight, we can say that from the "participant's perspective", democracy is something that occasionally breaks out among particular people in particular situations. Suddenly we find we have risen above the power-saturated ways in which we normally interact, and that something quite different is taking place between us. Such a view draws us to inspect the characteristics of a break-out of democracy, to inspect the kind of assistance its participants might require and to sketch its history. In doing so, we begin to see that democratic breakouts confront recurrent problems, and may even have a discernible life-cycle. Historically, we can identify examples of their occurrence in the political clubs of revolutionary France, in the workers' societies of the 19th century, and during the Paris Commune. More recently, such breakouts have taken place in the women's movement, in the resistance to war in Vietnam and to nuclear power, in user groups challenging psychiatric service planning, and among striking miners' wives. There are many more examples that occur in everyday life, or are so shortlived as to never attract the attention of the media. The social psychologists, Moscovici and Doise, go so far as to suggest that almost all of us have had some experience of a breakout of democracy. (Conflict and Consensus: A General Theory of Collective Decisions, London, Sage, 1994.) The primary characteristic of this kind of democracy must be that of noise. Upon the discovery of a common preoccupation, all accounts note that speech becomes animated, and debate heated. Now, people are keen to be heard, they listen to others with interest, and concern is expressed to elicit all views. In so pooling its resources, the group now confronts the matter at hand in its full complexity. Because more heads are better than one, such deliberation increases the quality of decisions. As the breakout begins, all forms of existing authority are directly challenged. Indeed, a common starting point is the ejection of a leader widely seen to be working against the collective interest. But suspicions do not end here. As the women's movement found, the search for ways to deliberate fairly also reveals more subtle exclusionary practices, and leads people to greater awareness of the ways in which they are oppressed. In effect, during open discussion, people become politicised. In deliberation, participants broaden their tight focus on individual interests, first to seeing things from the point of view of others, and then to those interests the group has in common. As the group continues to meet, friendship, vitality and rapid learning all draw people in. Now, to use Rousseau's phrase, they "fly to the assemblies". (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract.) Against those who see controversy as threatening to democracy, what seems to drive these processes, and to give them their extraordinary energy, is that in a breakout of democracy, conflict works. It generates cohesion, it causes people to re-evaluate their preferences and needs, and it makes agreement possible. So there are disagreements, and these are often acted out in highly dramatic ways. Livy's history of early Rome has many good examples of such political drama, and it was precisely this energising conflice to which Machiavelli (in The Discourses) attributed the vitality of that republic. | |