 | 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 As we saw, democratic breakouts are subject to significant pressures on their time and resources. Their survival turns on their ability to make gains in efficiency, and these can necessitate the restriction of fairness. Democratic fora therefore, often face the need to compromise their fairness in order to make gains in efficiency. A good example of such a trade-off is presented by Livy in his account of the reaction of the Roman populace to an invasion by a barbarian tribe. After a lengthy debate, they decide that they will only survive the invasion if they limit their own participation and focus their energies behind a dictator. Their choice is Cincinnatus, an elderly General, who is tired of public life and has no interest in power. That night, they go, in their thousands, and in the driving rain, to Cincinnatus' farm outside the city. There they plead with him as he works in his field. Eventually he agrees to be their dictator. The office of dictator, though often used by the Roman Republic in times of crisis, was limited in law to a duration of six months. Cincinnatus was successful in his leadership, and under him, the army expelled the invaders. After the six months, he returned to his farm. What this example shows is that participants require extraordinarily good judgment if they are to survive as a democratic entity. They must be able to recognise the need for a gain in efficiency, agree to a reduction in their own participation and remain vigilant so as to ensure that the resulting trade-off does not become permanent. A democratic breakout, having won fairness, faces a bewildering array of such trade-offs. They will need to agree, in advance, to methods of decision-making which do not involve the whole group, to temporary hierarchies, to reliance on a particular person's skills and generally, to a number of practices which are, in fact, unfair. What we are considering with such trade-offs is the addition of a second block, an additional level of structure, a minimal increase in formalised procedure. While fairness is difficult enough to maintain even without the need for efficiency gains, it becomes even more so when we try to manage and control this second block. As we saw, even minimal reliance on proxies and bureaucratic procedures can be hard to reverse, and they always threaten to permanently damage the deliberative capacities of the group. Nevertheless, where trade-offs for efficiency are fully and fairly deliberated, where they are kept under constant scrutiny, where their effects upon the ongoing deliberative capacities of the group are carefully monitored, they can be both legitimate and effectively managed. Now we can see the wisdom of the ancient Athenian belief that good collective judgments were those which preserved the capacity to make good collective judgments. Provided their effect on the deliberative capacities of the group is kepy clearly in view then, it is conceivable that the basic block of a democratic breakout might, via a trade-off for efficiency, receive a second block of structure, and still retain its fairness. Beyond this, however, the preservation of fairness becomes inconceivable. You simply cannot, as the designing theorists would suggest, stack blocks on top of one another all the way up to the level of the state. For above the second block, the texture of deliberation is completely changed. Here, face-to-face interaction is replaced by the politics of proxy, by bureaucratisation and ossification of procedure, by institutionalised mechanisms geared solely to efficiency. Above the second block, and sometimes even within it, fairness is not only lost, it is also forgotten. How, then, could there ever be such a thing as a democratic state? In the liberal democracies, we live with significant trade-offs of participation for efficiency. But, again, it is not the presence of unfair practices that signals illegitimacy. It is the lack of deliberative agreement to such trade-offs. Where no serious effort is made by the state, or even by a major political party, to seek meaningful deliberative input into the making of collective decisions, then such trade-offs must be seen as illegitimate. And, of course, even if a state did seek such input it could only do so by attempting to provide institutional forms which, as we have seen, are not conducive to fairness as it is experienced by participants. We must conclude, therefore, that newly democratic states have joined a club which is not democratic. It is for this reason that they are disappointed, it is for this reason that they find themselves in (our) brave new world of political silence and sparkling fences. States cannot claim any contact with the basic building block of democratic legitimacy and, as a description of a state, democracy is an idea that does not, and cannot, walk upon the earth. This, though, is not to remove all possibility for a deepening of democracy. Historically, participatory rights are not given by decent states. They are taken by emerging oppressed groups. Only as groups learn to operate their own procedure with fairness and efficiency, only as they find ways to network with other such groups while retaining their democratic core, can they begin to challenge the existing structures of power. Yet it is precisely when we begin to consider the possibility of such a challenge that we reveal the extraordinary lack of knowledge we have accumulated over our history regarding what it actually means to rule ourselves. We know so little about how to behave fairly in groups, how we might nurture and network democratic breakouts and thus begin a genuinely democratic movement. When suitably humbled by this lack of knowledge, the question of how we might deepen democracy escapes from the hands of the designing theorist and becomes one that participants can only ask themselves. Do we want to be autonomous citizens? Do we want to have fun, to make noise, to act on our growing mistrust? Or do we merely want to watch as those forces which work against democracy increasingly colonise our lives and perhaps even destroy us completely? At present, we have few citizens. Liberal democracy does not produce them. For the most part there is apathy, cynicism, extraordinary hardship and also, possibly, impending infrastructural breakdown. Yet, where a political system relies for its stability on systematic depoliticisation and on the exhaustion of utopian energies, it is always vulnerable. There is much dry wood. And there are many breakouts of democracy. The idea that any authority's claim to being morally right is, and can only ever be, based on consent, has always been an idea that has threatened to grow out of control. There is little question that citizens are learning. They may even be learning too fast. Deepening our democarcy could, therefore, become something mroe than an unlikely possibility. Rousseau understood this. "Once you have citizens," he said, "you have all you need." That's what's so clever about democracy. | |