Democratic Legitimacy: Plural Values and Political Power 9780773569485

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Democratic Legitimacy Plural Values and Political Power

In Democratic Legitimacy Frederick Barnard argues that political accountability is as important to the democratic ethic as political participation - and equally in need of reappraisal and invigoration. Unless its importance is recognized, accountability, like participation, will remain an idea that is easy to praise but difficult to incorporate into political life. Barnard demonstrates that in a democracy accountability is more than damage control and must be part of considerations in the political forum before decisions are made, not just after the fact when trying to assign blame. Barnard argues that Western democracy, if it is to continue to exist as a legitimate political system, must maintain the integrity of its application of performative principles. Consequently, if both social and political democracy are legitimate goals, limitations designed to curb excessive political power may also be applicable in containing excessive economic power. Barnard stresses that whatever steps are taken to augment civic reciprocity, the observance and self-imposition of publicly recognized standards is vital. Democratic Legitimacy will appeal to political scientists and philosophers, as well as specialists in democratic theory. FREDERICK M. BARNARD is professor emeritus of political science, University of Western Ontario. He is the author of numerous books on political thought, including Pluralism, Socialism, and Political Legitimacy.

McGiLL-QuEEN's STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF IDEAS Series Editor: Philip J. Cercone 1 Problems of Cartesianism Edited by Thomas M. Lennon, John M. Nicholas, and John W. Davis 2 The Development of the Idea of History in Antiquity Gerald A. Press 3 Claude Buffier and Thomas Reid Two Common-Sense Philosophers Louise Marcil-Lacoste 4 Schiller, Hegel, and Marx State, Society, and the Aesthetic Ideal of Ancient Greece Philip J. Kain 5 John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England Charles B. Schmitt 6 Beyond Liberty and Property The Process of SelfRecognition in EighteenthCentury Political Thought J.A.W. Gunn 7 John Toland: His Methods, Manners, and Mind Stephen H. Daniel 8 Coleridge and the Inspired Word Anthony John Harding

9 The Jena System, 1804-5: Logic and Metaphysics G.W.F. Hegel Translation edited by John W. Burbidge and George di Giovanni Introduction and notes by H.S. Harris 10 Consent, Coercion, and Limit The Medieval Origins of Parliamentary Democracy Arthur P. Monahan 11 Scottish Common Sense in Germany, 1768-1800 A Contribution to the History of Critical Philosophy Manfred Kuehn 12 Paine and Cobbett

The Transatlantic Connection David A. Wilson 13 Descartes and the Enlightenment Peter A. Schouls 14 Greek Scepticism Anti-Realist Trends in Ancient Thought Leo Groarke 15 The Irony of Theology and the Nature of Religious Thought Donald Wiebe

16 Form and Transformation A Study in the Philosophy of Plotinus Frederic M. Schroeder 17 From Personal Duties towards Personal Rights Late Medieval and Early Modern Political Thought 1300-1600 Arthur P. Monahan 18 The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi Translated and edited by George di Giovanni 19 Kierkegaard as Humanist Discovering My Self Arnold B. Come 20 Durkheim, Morals, and Modernity W. Watts Miller 21 The Career of Toleration John Locke, Jonas Proast, and After Richard Vernon 2 2 Dialectic of Love Platonism in Schiller's Aesthetics David Pugh 23 History and Memory in Ancient Greece Gordon Shrimpton

24 Kierkegaard as Theologian Recovering My Self Arnold B. Come 25 An Enlightenment Tory in Victorian Scotland The Career of Sir Archibald Alison Michael Michie 26 The Road to Egdon Heath The Aesthetics of the Great in Nature Richard Bevis 27 Jena Romanticism and Its Appropriation of Jakob Bohme Theosophy - Hagiography Literature Paolo Mayer 28 Enlightenment and Community Lessing, Abbt, Herder, and the Quest for a German Public Benjamin W. Redekop 29 Jacob Burckhardt and the Crisis of Modernity John R. Hinde 30 The Distant Relation Time and Identity in Spanish American Fiction Eoin S. Thomson

gi Mr Simson's Knotty Case Divinity, Politics, and Due Process in Early Eighteenth-Century Scotland Anne Skoczylas

32 Orthodoxy and Enlightenment George Campbell in the Eighteenth Century Jeffrey M. Suderman

33 Contemplation and Incarnation The Theology of MarieDominique Chenu Christophe F. Potworvwski

34 Democratic Legitimacy Plural Values and Political Power Frederick M. Barnard

Democratic Legitimacy Plural Values and Political Power FREDERICK M. BARNARD

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

McGill-Queen's University Press 2001 ISBN 0-7735-2232-8 Legal deposit third quarter 2001 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for its activities. It also acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for its publishing program.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Barnard, Frederick M., 1921- (McGill-Queen's Studies in the history of ideas; 34) Democratic legitimacy: plural values and political power Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7735—2232-8 i. Democracy. 2. Political participation. I. Title. ^423.62612 2001 321.8 02001—900482-6

Typeset in 10/12 Baskerville by True to Type

In memory of Stanley Howard Knowles (1908-1997), known as the Conscience of the Canadian House of Commons, to whom the procedural Tightness of parliamentary life was as important as the substantive Tightness of social life.

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Contents

Preface xi 1 Themes and Perspectives

3

2 Legitimacy and Democracy 26 3 Democracy and Autonomy 43 4 Autonomy, Civility, and Democratic Norms 62 5 Political Principles and Plural Ends 80 6 Market Values and Democratic Validation 98 7 Rationality and Accountability 8 Accountability and Participation 9 Critiques and Visions 162 10 Legitimacy and Limits 182 11 The Overall Argument Notes 215 Index 253

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Preface

My speculations about what turns norms into democratic norms first found their way into print in an article in Political Studies in December 1992. A number of readers subsequently urged me to enlarge on points raised in it, and that is how this book came to be written. Less directly, however, it is the offshoot of earlier and later preoccupations with questions of accountability, autonomy, legitimacy, participation, and rationality in politics. Among norms of democratic agency, accountability ranks paramount in this study. Indeed, I view it as the gravitational centre in the legitimation of democratic governance - a sort of authenticating decorum of its power as a political regime. The emphasis on accountability arguably implies a certain shift of focus from electoral to procedural sources of democratic normativeness, if not also from the close identification of democracy with political participation, however interpreted precisely. Arguably, too, such a shift may signal to "strong" democrats a denial of the oneness of rulers and ruled as the hallmark of "genuine democracy." On the other hand, once it is accepted that democratic authority is no less conditional than any other form of political authority, the need for governmental accounting seems inescapable. And not least so because inadequately recognizing the importance of political accountability could mean failing to do justice to the coercive dimension of democracy as a political system. To be sure, rendering account in a democracy calls for more than artful "damage control" after the event; the "more" consisting of the readiness to assume the burden of public responsibility before acting.

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Furthermore, if the ethic of democracy is exclusively associated with the majoritarian principle, the danger exists that values cherished in a plural society will get bypassed. "Limits" therefore enter the equation. There are overriding concerns that may need to be invoked if civic inclusiveness is to be safeguarded. By the same token, however, "plurality" itself may need to be bounded if pluralism is to remain civic pluralism, and society a society. And defining such boundaries surely calls for the existence of shared understandings for both centrifugal and centripetal pressures, ineluctably demanding forms of judicious blending and reciprocal standards that are generally accepted. Left unbalanced and unlimited, diffusion of segmental otherness may pose as much of a problem as enforced uniformity. It is crucial, therefore, to preserve or create an institutional framework capable of meshing autonomy with autonomies or, at any rate, of preventing one from swallowing the other. Similarly, although the essay insists on keeping in mind the political within the democratic, it does not view social democracy as the exact opposite of political democracy, or consider limitations that are applied to political power to be out of place in their application to economic power. To speak of limits and balancing is undoubtedly less exciting than to offer unequivocal solutions. Unfortunately, such solutions are not commonly to be had in politics, which therefore yields slender grounds for the peddling of some all-redemptive democratism. This may possibly be so because democracy, as a form of governance, entails two potentially conflicting traditions. One tradition, somewhat along the lines of Locke, emphasizes voluntarism and a minimal state, while the other tradition, more closely in keeping with Hobbes, emphasizes enforceable legalism and the authority of an effective state. Ultimately, it seems, the spectre of power cannot easily be shut out. In its overall approach, this book attempts to strike a balance in a twofold manner: it tries to combine "performative" criteria with "theoretical" criteria, and to integrate more or less recent writings with earlier insights.1 In its overall argument, it suggests in essence the upgrading of accountability and the lowering of expectations in the direction of communal oneness in a politics of discursive plurality. For it contends that, if the relations typifying civic solidarity differ from those that typify the economic market, the political realm is nonetheless a world apart from the fellowship of a consensual order or the intimacy of personal friendship. Cumulatively, it is a major plan of my argument to drive home this realization and, with it, to disclose the complexities that the idea of democratic Tightness involves, both as a politically performative concept and as an ethically normative principle.

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Toward this end, the argument mounts a number of critiques directed against drawing too close an analogy between moral and political consensus, between segmental and political participation, and between values of the market place and values of the political forum. Some of these critiques, I found, intriguingly converge with contemporary feminist theories, anxious as they are to transcend stereotypes within the liberal-communitarian debate or to dampen excessive confidence in resolving differences in the wake of "truly rational" discourse. While I have not wished to disguise the difficulties inherent in the subject and the challenges they pose, I have tried to keep the discussion free from unduly technical vocabulary liable to put off the nonspecialist interested in the world of political ideas and their (often tortuously problematic) translation into policy ends. The notes, though chiefly intended to acknowledge my debt to others, are also designed to here and there amplify points for those less familiar with the bewilderingly contestable aspects of democratic theory. Specialists, on the other hand, should find the book of use in disentangling overlapping claims and competing assumptions in support of political democracy as a form of governance and a normative order that seeks to come to terms with a growing craving for invigorated standards of civic reciprocity. Although far from attempting to supermoralize politics by stipulating overly lofty requirements liable to overtax the morally demandable within the public domain, the book nevertheless strives to counter the risk of exmoralizing it to an extent that could give rise to the belief that civic reciprocity can be had in the absence of a context of firmly entrenched standards of mutuality. Any democracy, therefore, that lays claim to being a political order that is also a socially just order, can no more dispense with norms of reciprocal equity than with norms of accountable integrity. Acknowledged sources aside, I have benefited from discussions I had with students and colleagues over the years, Among the latter, Jene Porter and Richard Vernon come foremost to mind. Furthermore, Isaiah Berlin and David Braybrooke, in conversation and by letter, have drawn my attention to questions and implications that otherwise would have remained unexplored. I am also grateful to Peter Greaves and Stanley Winters who, over a long friendship, have seen to it that I keep myself "generally informed," thereby helping me to illustrate this or that point in the argument. Yvonne and Randy Patch gave valuable advice, while Margot Barnard and Jane McWhinney tried to make sure that I did not take too much for granted. Whatever shortcomings remain, I have deeply appreciated the generous encourage-

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ment I have received from the editorial staff, and the comments made by the anonymous readers on an earlier draft. Finally, I should like to express my thanks to the Canada Council for Social Science and Humanities Research Fellowships and the award of a Research Time Stipend, the Humboldt Foundation for a Senior Research Fellowship, and the Department of Political Science, University of Western Ontario, for research grants in support of earlier research on themes of the book. I am grateful as well to the Humanities and Social Science Federation of Canada, with whose help of a grant this book has been published, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Dyer's Bay, Ontario, September 2000

Democratic Legitimacy

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1

Themes and Perspectives

Central to most enquiries into political obligation is the question of what makes it rightful to obey governments or, at any rate, to defer to their demands. Important though this question is, it is not always clear if the existence of obedience itself discloses legitimacy or whether legitimacy rests on additional sources of validation. As far as this study is concerned, the major question is not why subjects obey, accept, or consent to governmental rule, but rather how governmental rule is made rightful, both in its claim to authority and in its exercise of authority. More specifically still, it explores what it is that confers democratic Tightness, as an ethic sui generis, "democratic" being definitionally located, as a referential guide, within regimes known as liberal democracies. This introductory chapter is structured into three parts: the first deals with distinctions and assumptions; the second provides an overview of the book; and the final part indicates its overall approach. IDEAS IN POLITICS

In the main, I wish to suggest that the significance of operative ideas in politics lies not so much in their clarity or their distinctness as in their power to persuade - in their ability to move people to think, say, or do one thing rather than another. And whether or not ideas in general can be looked upon as the motor of history, there is about political ideas a dynamic quality that sets them apart from strictly philosophical concepts. Ideas in politics can no doubt be used to

4 Democratic Legitimacy

obscure issues in order to deceive, but such use provides no warrant for identifying ideas with mere ideologies (in the pejorative sense of this ambiguous term) or for dismissing them as pure rationalizations. I prefer to emphasize their capacity to serve as normatively authentic sources of validation as well as ordering principles in the use of political power. As such, they constitute "agency values," standards of conduct carrying meaning in their own right,1 involving normative judgements of what is or is not "done" in the pursuit of particular ends. Within the context of liberal democracy, for example, agency values include such standards as the acceptance of electoral results, or procedural principles such as those listed in chapter two. And it is chiefly in their light that in subsequent chapters I differentiate between liberal, nationalist, communitarian, and participationist expressions of democracy. But while taking liberal-grounded conceptions of democracy as a point of departure, this essay makes no foray into philosophical preoccupations with political liberalism as such. And while it focuses on democratic legitimacy as a normative issue, it does not equate normative principles with strictly moral principles.2 In essence, the normative principles involved are those that define a democratic government's right to rule, through which it also acknowledges the conditionality of its authority. Liberal-democratic regimes are presumed to be institutionally self-committed to the observance of these principles in the exercise of their electoral mandate. This, at heart, is Max Weber's idea of governmental "self-authentication," and it is principally this idea that forms the basis of my own approach to democratic legitimacy, whether or not it also corresponds in an extended sense to John Rawls's notion of self-imposed obligations.3 Implied are standards that have a certain self-sustaining continuity and are not simply derivable from given contexts. There are limits, therefore, to the extent to which they can undergo change without losing their original or "constitutive" meaning. If the winds of change are too fierce, they could threaten these constitutive meanings, so that discontinuities would arise that could deny the possibility of any longer thinking of any political culture as being one and the same. Whatever "refraction" ideas may need in order to serve as politically applicable and politically contestable principles, their adaptability, together with their validating force, could only go so far. Should liberaldemocratic ideas, for example, seek to meet demands for democratization in the direction of communitarianism, they could not wholly abandon their stand on individual rights (also against democratic governments) or their guardianship of plural values. For, although liberaldemocratic ideas do recognize the need to preserve societal oneness,

5 Themes and Perspectives

they cannot accept oneness as the only goal if they are to retain their identity as protectors of plurality and the right to be different. For comparable reasons, they cannot agree to redistributive measures beyond the point at which ideas for further democratization imply the termination of the right to private property or a revolutionary transformation of the range of political jurisdiction itself.4 The constitutive roots of political ideas will be defended all the more vigorously, the more indispensably they are perceived to typify the nature of a society's civic understandings and an individual member's self-location within the matrix of its institutions. Thus, justifications in terms of governmental conditionality would have a hollow ring indeed if liberal-democratic governments paid insufficient attention to the ideas of limited power and contingent authority in and through which they are defmitionally identified and upheld. By the same token, however, root ideas underlying radical conceptions of democracy clash with the doctrinal self-limitations of liberal democracy, since the latter are perceived as limits upon democracy itself. Perhaps this is why in most justifications of democracy limits are "rarely or never mentioned."5 The self-limiting ideas of liberal democracy undoubtedly are a problematic issue - a point to which the following pages repeatedly return - in that they give rise to the objection that, although they usefully serve as a justification for curbing governmental power, they at the same time negate the power of the popular will and thus fail to legitimate democracy in and for itself. The distinction I have just made between justifying and legitimizing is not without interest, incidentally, as an analytical distinction. All the more so, perhaps, because "justification" is often held to be synonymous with "legitimation." Of the two, justification has attracted principal attention, possibly because it permits appeal to a broader range of normative reasons. Legitimation of a political system or political decision is, by contrast, a narrower concept, in that it usually rests on sanctions that have no claim to universal normativeness. In this book I am for the most part concerned with the narrower concept and anxious not to confuse it with the broader concept of justification. Yet, although I find the interchangeable use of these concepts regrettable, I do agree that the distinction cannot invariably be insisted upon. Legitimating arguments do draw on moral sanctions, just as justifying arguments refer to institutional understandings entered into in the past, so that one could speak of a certain interplay between legitimating and justifying sources. Were this not so, changes, above all revolutionary changes, could scarcely be made intelligible, let alone justifiable. Political discourse itself could be seriously stymied if justifying

6 Democratic Legitimacy

arguments always had to be kept separate from legitimizing arguments. On the other hand, political analysis could be seriously impaired if the distinction were not to be heeded at all: in evaluating claims in support of democratic legitimation, we would find it so much harder to distinguish moral assertions of a general kind from specific sanctions that are publicly ascertainable as well as assessable with reference to politically-agreed-upon principles. General ideas that underpin the theory of ethical autonomy, for example, could be (and have been) invoked to justify liberal democracy. And, indeed, the merging of positive affirmation with negative restraint does invite taking justificatory arguments for legitimating arguments: governments, like individuals, legislate for themselves principles of right conduct. Yet, while the analogy proves highly illuminating for the light it sheds on political accounting - presenting it not merely as the empirical corollary of representative democracy but also as the logical parallel to moral accounting - it does contain problems, we shall observe, in its political application. ACCOUNTING IN POLITICS

At this point I should perhaps clarify my use of the term "accounting." Rousseau once said that the wicked are always a considerable embarrassment in this world as in the next.6 In a transferred sense this could be said also of political accounting, for reasons given are rarely unequivocal (if not outright untruthful), or, alternatively, may be invented after the event, not so much in order to deceive, as because the true reasons may be thought to lack credibility, or because they simply cannot be recalled. The need to render account may of course never arise - in this world, at any rate. The successful business tycoon, the skilful (or lucky) burglar, the well-entrenched despot: none of these is likely to be called upon to explain or justify whatever they were up to, and thus scarcely run the risk of being embarrassed. This point is perhaps more pertinent than it may seem, for liberal-democratic governments, too, may play fast and loose without having to face the embarrassment of being asked to render account, should citizens relent in their vigilance. Self-declared commitments by governments, even in democracies, cannot in themselves be banked upon to ensure their own accountability on a continuous basis or at all. Pointing out to governments their lapses and their attempts to get away with evasions or cover-ups will likely cause their embarrassment, as it may embarrass theorists of democracy for whom democratic governments, in embodying the collective will, can be fully trusted to honour their obligations. Upholding the oneness

7 Themes and Perspectives of governors and governed, they therefore dismiss civic watchfulness, together with its implied underlying distrust, as being plainly undemocratic, very much in contrast to Rousseau, on whom they profess to rely.7 Governmental accounting, however, makes sense only if political acts are traceable to identifiable agents. And establishing the locus of governmental accountability, embarrassing or not, may prove problematic when collectivities rather than single individuals assume authorship of agency - a point much stressed by Tocqueville. Yet, even if there is no question as to the authorship of any particular action, the capacity to account for it by citing reasons does presuppose that reasons inhere in what is done , since only in this immanent sense do reasons make rational accounting at all possible. Needless to say, reasons as such need not be good reasons, just as uttering any reasons as explanations need not provide justifications. Yet, whether as explanations or as justifications, reasons, in order to account for political actions, must make broadly intelligible sense; they must contain shared elements of meaning as well as recognizable relevance - they cannot, in other words, be wholly private whims or transparently obvious fancies. Although "accountability" and "responsibility" are often used interchangeably, responsibility may be thought of as the broader category, since it can be invoked whether or not agents are willing or able to account for their deeds. Governments, notably in democracies, whatever their reasons for acting, are generally held responsible for outcomes that were not necessarily envisaged in their rational scheme. In choosing their course of action, they are expected to assume the burden of their choice, regardless of their motives or intentions. In accounting for them, governments may succeed in making a good case for themselves by way of explanations and justifications, without being found any the less responsible for what they in fact managed to bring about. In the context of democratic politics, therefore, reasons, apart from credibility and persuasiveness, had better include a certain "reckoning with consequences." Clearly, in accounting, as in restitution, what has been done cannot be undone. One can make an act intelligible, perhaps even excusable, but one cannot truly "make good" again, despite the German use of Wiedergutmachung after Auschwitz Germany. Moral or legal responsibility, accordingly, transcends the scope and efficacy of accounting in terms of explanations or justifications. Like legitimation and justification, accountability and responsibility, though distinct, frequently coincide; politically, they become one. Another distinction sometimes made is that between pre-decision and post-decision processes of governmental accounting. Although

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most of the political accounting in mainstream democracies is retrospective in the train of decisions already taken, a fair degree of public deliberation preceding them is of some pertinence to post-decision accounting. Which is more "democratic"? This is a highly controversial question not easily resolved. Since unexpected contingencies such as luck play their part in producing outcomes (as they do in concealing mistakes, bungling, or worse), pre-decision accounting may be thought fairer in judging democratic governments, without necessarily being in itself more authentically democratic. For it may well be the case that, on occasions, pre-decision debate and lobbying could succeed in delaying or altogether preventing legislation and governmental action. Even issues that enjoy considerable support within the population could thus fail to reach the stage of policy-making and lawenactment, and consequently thwart the preferences of most people. In the United States, for example, even though more than 70 percent of the population is in favour of gun control, little or nothing has been governmentally achieved because a well-organized and well-connected minority has been able to use the institutional brakes of the system before any legislative policy gets under way. In this case, pre-decision "accounting" manages to bypass, if not altogether cripple, the wishes of the democratic majority. Focusing on pre-decision deliberation or intentions, therefore, while totally appropriate in moral accounting, is problematic in political accounting, unless it is presumed that, in a democracy, political attitudes favour prospective intentions to the virtual exclusion of their outcomes. Surely, to make such assumptions would be rather unrealistic since, willy-nilly, outcomes do in fact make or break the popularity of governments. At the same time, those favouring deliberative approaches to democracy rightly seek to put maximum emphasis on pre-decision accounting in order to strengthen civic control over governmental projects and, thereby, governmental spending.8 The question is whether there would in fact be massive involvement at the pre-decision level. In the final analysis, therefore, we may at the present stage have to suspend judgement about which form of accounting ought to be viewed as more democratic, and in what sense. The earliest reference to democratic accoutning that I am aware of is that found in Aristotle's Politics where, opting for representative democracy, Aristotle stipulates that "the persons elected will rule justly, because others will call them to account. Every man should be responsible to others, nor should any one be allowed to do just as he pleases; for where absolute freedom is allowed there is nothing to restrain the evil which is inherent in every man. But the principle of responsibility

9 Themes and Perspectives

secures that which is the greatest good in states; the right persons rule and are prevented from doing wrong, and the people have their due."9 Although Locke, implicitly, and Bentham, quite expressly, are better known than Rousseau to have stressed "the responsibility of the governors; or the right which a subject has of having the reasons publicly assigned and canvassed of every act of power that is exerted over him,"10 Rousseau was profoundly preoccupied with governmental accountability, as I shall show in a later chapter. Indeed, it was a major theme in all his political discourses as well as in Emile, and amounts to the admission of the need for an indirect system of democracy and a distinct organ of government. Supposing this need, it evidently does not follow that citizens should have no control, if, like Rousseau, they insist that the authorized should remain answerable to the authorizers. Once we agree, therefore, that to be viable politically, democracy has to be indirect democracy, governmental accountability, far from being superfluous or overrated, constitutes in fact the most crucial way of exercising civic control. To be sure, there are two features that markedly set apart Rousseau's vision of indirect democracy from typical mainstream expressions of it. One is that, despite the universality of voting, citizens have little control over the selection of those who are to represent them. The other feature concerns the mechanism of accountability itself, since it is indirect, in and through parliamentary or congressional representatives who, to boot, act under party constraints. Not surprisingly, both features rarely fail to be remarked upon by critics of representative democracy. SELF-RULE AND SELF-LIMITATION

The idea of the authorized being answerable to the authorizers is therefore more complex than one might be led to think. Some may go further and find it suspect, if not outright paradoxical, and wonder about the actual point of democracy. For, while on the one hand the idea is to serve as a reminder that governments are the servants of the people, it can, on the other, hardly conceal the fact that majoritarian authorization invests governments with enormous actual power. It is precisely because of this ambivalence, I feel, that so much depends on credible mechanisms of political accounting. Moreover, despite the difficulty in drawing too close an analogy between ethical autonomy and political autonomy, democratic regimes, by way of self-authentication, generally seek to sustain the belief that popular self-rule constitutes the institutional source of a recognizably normative order, and is not simply a vehicle for wielding political power. If so, proce-

io Democratic Legitimacy

dural practices must support citizens' shared convictions that, having authorized others to govern, they have not given up their essential autonomy in the assertion of their individual rights and freedoms and, collectively, their ultimate sovereignty. In effect, this demands two things: one, that democratic governments observe their own commitments to self-limitation in the exercise of their power; and, the other, that there be public channels for the expression of civic control over the choice and implementaiton of policy objectives; which amounts to saying that governmental self-commitments do not dispense with normative safeguards. Critics might (and do) point out that governmental self-restraint under liberal democracy draws on roots that precede claims in terms of ethical autonomy. By virtue of these roots of an earlier vintage, a sizeable area of private concerns and interests is to be safely protected against attempts of governmental encroachment. Whatever authority is bestowed on governments, the critics charge, is therefore artfully curbed in order to entrench the existing - and largely male-dominated - order of society.11 In other words, the restraints put on governments are in essence, as well as in design, restraints upon democracy itself, and what is given with one hand is duly taken away with the other. Later chapters will return to these criticisms, as also to the issue of translating ethical autonomy into political terms. Much of the criticism centres on the need to create democratized conditions able to generate values that favour communitarian modes of political thinking. Communitarian and liberal positions are accordingly seen as radically opposed, despite attempts that have been made ever since J.S. Mill to reconcile them.12 Although I do not presume to have succeeded in dispersing the clouds that have enveloped this debate, I shall try some sorting out as I go along. Just as pleas for further democratization of society assume different expressions, so conceptions of mainstream democracy have shades of meaning or nuances of interpretation to which generalized definitions fail to do justice. Some emphasize the majority principle, while others stress sensitivity to minority allegiances and interests; some put major weight on economic conditions, and others on formal political processes; then again some value participation as an end in itself, while others are more concerned with instrumental representation; and, whereas some focus on competition and maximum choice, others prefer consensual and deliberative forms of concerted action in the public realm. A number of chapters will touch on these contrasting interpretations and enquire into the extent to which they endorse or question core notions in the validation of liberal democracy.^

11 Themes and Perspectives

Demands for further democratization not infrequently come close to preferring what Robert Dahl has called "populist" democracy to a system of Madisonian or "polyarchal" democracy.14 Implicit in this preference is the belief that, since people on the whole know their own interests, they are the best judge of their own good. They may be wrong about their own good, but, presumably, they are likely to know more about it than others; for, it does not follow that if I do not fully understand my own good that others must understand it better. And it is this kind of reasoning that underpins claims to political participation as a legitimizing condition of the first order. For many "populist" participationists, therefore, it is the institutional recognition of public involvement as an entitlement, as a civic right, that critically determines what is and what is not acceptable as the authentic expression of democratic validation. This understanding of self-government as political participation has undeniably close conceptual links with the idea of autonomy in terms of self-determination. Just as individual self-determination has come to imply selfmastery - the self being in control of itself - so collective self-determination in the form of independent nationhood and political self-government is meant to bring together ruling with being ruled. The close linkage of participatory democracy with self-determination is likely, however, to prove problematic, in that it may obscure who is accountable to whom. If all participate equally in deciding what is to be done, then all, no doubt, are equally responsible for whatever has been brought about. What is not clear is whom they are responsible to. It is here, therefore, that the directional locus of accountability fades out of sight, and the analogy with ethical autonomy meets with difficulties. PROCEDURES AND AUTONOMIES

Chapters two and four, therefore, variously explore the question of whether politically procedural Tightness can be viewed as an analogue of morally credal Tightness, and whether, consequently, ethical concepts such as autonomy can properly be transplanted into political contexts. Both issues, in their interrelation, bear crucially, I believe, upon the approach taken toward bases of democratic legitimation. In chapter two I distinguish the right to rule, its rightful exercise, and its rightful outcome. I find Max Weber's conception of democratic legitimacy of considerable interest, in that it sharply sets apart electoral grounds of authentication from procedural grounds in order to establish normative bases of democratic "self-authentication."

12

Democratic Legitimacy

Fragmentary though it is, and not beyond criticism, Weber's thinking underlies a good deal of what I am saying regarding the conditionality of the right to rule. Resting this right, as he does, essentially on its legitimate exercise, I suggest something of a trade-off between electoral and procedural sources of democratic authentication. The way governments observe the norms designed to validate their conduct decisively discloses the procedural legitimacy of their rule. The central question I pose in this connection is whether or not norms sanctioning processes intended to authenticate democratic governance demand the convergence of political Tightness with universal moral Tightness. Finding that to demand such convergence unduly strains the principle of governmental self-authentication and indeed the principle of democratic Tightness itself, the second chapter maintains that, unlike individual self-legislation, as put forward by Rousseau and Kant, which rests on strictly moral principles, authenticating standards of self-imposed corporate integrity, which are applicable to democratic governments, are sustainable through the normative force of prudential principles. The critical condition here is that, for prudential principles to be democratically acceptable as public standards of political morality, they must themselves be the work of procedurally sanctioned forms of corporate self-ordering. While the idea of corporate integrity, as emphasized by Weber, is by no means the invention of democratic theory, it is nonetheless considered of vital importance in democratic practice within regimes in which the observance of procedural principles forms a basic condition of their legitimate authority. Chapter three, drawing attention to divergent assumptions in the application of "autonomy" to democracy, is largely intended to illustrate Weber's thesis about the possibility of highly disparate conceptions of democratic legitimacy and its sources of normative validation. It therefore probes the feasibility of autonomy, in its ethical rootmeaning, being transplantable into a democratic agency value. After discussing this root-meaning vis a vis the concept of paternalism, the chapter comes to question the identification of autonomy as the ikon of democratic self-government, in view of its inadequacies as an ordering principle in both the liberal and nationalist version of democracy. It concludes, therefore, that it is one thing to concede the compelling force of the analogy between political self-legislation and moral selflegislation but an entirely different thing to leave government selfauthentication and the probity of its accounting to the "good will" of governments alone. For the acceptance of the analogy in no way diminishes the necessity of keeping a watchful eye on the exercise of a government's authority. Hence, if governments need an autonomous

13 Themes and Perspectives

space to act in, citizens, too, need an autonomous space - what I call distance - to form their own judgement on the conduct of public concerns.15 In a real sense, therefore, both autonomies provide the essential basis for "discursive democracy" to acquire tangible meaning. All the same, whatever control or influence civic pressures and processes are able to exercise over governmental decisions, governments must, in the final analysis, act on their own and assume responsibility for so doing. Otherwise, they have nothing to account for and citizens have nothing to enquire into. Politically applied, therefore, "autonomy," "self-legislation," or "selfrule," are problematic concepts. This is perhaps so principally because their root-meaning is in truth not one single idea but the potentially conflict-ridden amalgam of at least two very different notions: one referring to the nation as a totality, the other to its constituent parts. Not surprisingly, this twofold meaning, one emphasizing unity, the other multiplicity, is liable to prove a source of tension. Contrary to those who view autonomy in its political sense, as virtually synonymous with democracy, the third chapter therefore finds that, despite its importance as an agency value - implying shaping things rather than being shaped by them -, autonomy suffers from serious defects in the absence of theoretical props such as (paternalistic) guidance, general (or national) will, or (popular) consent doctrines. Thus, while "self-legislation" admittedly is a political metaphor, in reality it has more symbolic than actual validity, rendering the parallel between moral and political self-legislation worryingly deceptive. In a slightly transferred sense, this deceptiveness, I shall suggest, is reflected in the discrepancy between the credal philosophy of liberal democracy and its politically parliamentary expression. For, in the latter, individuals are surely more shaped by things than shaping them. No doubt the discrepancy has a good deal to do with the mechanics of team-thinking and the intrusion of party discipline. At a deeper level, however, it is an instance of the more general predicament encountered in seeking to transplant moral categories from their sphere of individual application into that of political pursuits. The fourth chapter follows up on "autonomy" in terms of politics as a realm of potentially self-sustaining activity and of a comparably distinctive ethic of civility sui generis. Within this context, the chapter introduces the notion of "civic decorum" vis a vis strictly moral precepts, and stipulates prudential reciprocity as its underlying source. Since it contains an expressly instrumental ethic of how things are done in the sphere of civic relations and public conduct, it belies the alleged neutrality of procedural norms. In its content and function,

14 Democratic Legitimacy

therefore, the idea of civic decorum serves as a public standard of normative reciprocity, as an ethical force in and for itself. In light of the problematic ambiguity of the concept of autonomy, in its political application, the chapter postulates the thesis that the prudential principle of reciprocity, as put forward by Christian Thomasius, seems a preferable concept to choose as a normative guide, particularly for a democratic culture in need of combining the existence of plural values with a consciousness of civic belonging. For it is expressly intended to mediate between the multiplicity of ends characteristic of society at large, as it might also mediate between strictly political and broadly social understandings of democracy - a point followed up in the last two chapters. At the same time, the chapter acknowledges that, while distinctly political norms may do what no extra-political precepts can do as well, this particular competence has its limits, since there are clearly moral ends that are beyond the compass of their validation. PLURALISM AND POLITICS

Chapter five carries forward the idea of limits. Its main argument is that pluralism, to be political pluralism, cannot be unbounded; there must be certain standards that command shared observance, general ground rules that players willingly accept, regardless of their particular attachments, opinions, or interests. Implicit in it is a conception of politics that involves, first and foremost, a certain style of acting, an agreed manner of going about doing things despite positional divergences. As to the divergences themselves, the chapter suggests a "structural" distinction between contestation typifying philosophical disputes and contestation typifying political differences, by associating the former with questions of conceptual clarity as such, and the latter with differences over a concept's bearing on actual policy ends. Political opponents may thus be in total agreement about the meaning of a given concept and yet differ sharply about its specific relevance, practicality, or urgency. What they would be differing about, therefore, is the priority in the placing of a concept's implementational interpretation, and not questions of inherent meaning. And such political pluralism, I argue, can be every bit as intense and divisive as conflicts over meanings in philosophical disputes. This way of looking at political contestation, if correct, could arguably broaden the legitimating conditions of pluralist democracy, since these would no longer - as in orthodox liberal thinking - be contingent on clashing core values or doctrinal world views. Instead, they could emerge, in principle, in the absence of the economic and ideo-

15 Themes and Perspectives

logical presuppositions of existing liberal democracies and nonetheless meet such institutional requisites as free elections, the rule of law, and the existence of multiple parties and associations. A monistic philosophical doctrine, therefore, would need be no bar to political plurality, provided it gave scope for political differentiation. What, on this view, serves as a foundation of pluralist democracy is, apart from social diversity, the existence of a processual ethic which recognizes that values, even if widely shared, undergo refraction once they are to be applied to the implementation of political goals and the ranking of their priorities. That credal consensus does not necessarily guarantee political consensus, or even the absence of political contestation, is amply illustrated by the workings of party-political differentiation within mainstream democracies. The idea of "performative principles," I am suggesting, as well as helping to shed light on this asymmetry, implies also a radical critique of liberal variants of political pluralism that deny the possibility of political differentiation within a doctrinal "ism," by regarding such differences as merely divergences over (value-neutral) means. The chapter therefore seeks to make clear that, far from being purely ad hoc or value-neutral means, performative principles set, as it were, the normative boundaries to a regime's implementational ethic, to what is said, contested, or justified politically, at the stage of deciding what is to be done. The underlying argument maintains that it is at this stage that the currency of public discourse acquires its distinctly practical complexion, as it also discloses its measure of implementational morality. ECONOMIC MARKETS AND RATIONALITY

POLITICAL

With the emphasis on a distinctly political morality in mind, chapter six contrasts validating sources of political activity with validating sources of economic activity. While it does not deny surface similarities between economic and political forms of rivalry and competition or the possible existence of historic links between market economies and certain democratic freedoms, it is critical of viewing political democracy in terms of bargaining modes, cost-benefit analyses, or the rationality of business efficiency. In particular, it raises, therefore, the question of the relevance of capitalism to democracy, and notes with interest that versions of market socialism, while they accept, and indeed stress, ties between market economies and democracy, categorically deny the link between capitalism and democracy. Conceding that market socialism makes here an impor-

16 Democratic Legitimacy

tant and valid distinction, the chapter nonetheless expresses doubts about claims that socialist markets would render political mechanisms of control superfluous, since it is hard to see how overall equity is to be achieved in the absence of political mediation at levels of centrality. Market socialism has, however, intriguingly raised interest in the possibility of democratic regimes other than those self-professedly liberal qualifying as pluralist democracies. The proviso here is that market socialism - or any other form of pluralist socialism - does not see itself as plurality only, as the total opposite to any focus of centrality or unity. For if it does, if it rejects any form of oneness, it shows itself blind to political realities, since these demand unifying as well as diversifying principles.16 Besides, if capitalist markets have hitherto been unable to function without state intervention of one sort or another, it is not obvious why socialist markets should require less or no central control, especially if market socialism is to have any bite as a socialist theory. Although I grant that experience of market socialism has been very limited, I draw attention to the lessons learned so far, which simply do not point toward the dismantling of political organs, but rather lend force to the plea for the invigoration of control mechanisms capable of keeping a watchful eye on them. In critically examining market socialism as well as the underlying belief in fundamental analogies between market mechanisms and procedural democracy, the sixth chapter does not deny that democracy could profit from self-managing entities and the replacement of a fair amount of the bureaucratic paraphernalia of central government. Nonetheless it insists that purely economic or market provisions are unlikely candidates for the job of bringing about a further democratization of society or for yielding more authentic validating bases for its emergence. The difference between the market forum and the political forum is followed up in chapter seven. It explores the possibility of a form of rationality that could be viewed as a distinctly democratic variant of political rationality, and seeks to determine whether, since political contestation and democratic validation are essentially the realm of joint actions and collective decisions, rational accounting for these could be viewed as analogous to accounting for individual actions. In so doing, the chapter discusses a "modal" variant of rationality as well as such key issues as reasons for and reasons from, rational and structural constraints, and the distinction between reasons as beliefs and reasons as commitments. Modal rationality, to be sure, carries within itself the defects of its virtues and, with them, implicit limits to its applicability. In its use

17 Themes and Perspectives

within what I call "performative" principles, it certainly is no subsitute for strictly ethical norms, nor is it intended as such. Notions of what is true, right, or fair, taken in their intrinsic selves, are bound by no political regime or party interest; they are what they are because people find them worthy of pursuit, no matter whether they coincide or clash with this or that system. All that can be claimed for modal rationality, therefore, is its capacity to serve as a justifying tool for or against given policies, so that what critically matters is its use in the grounding of associational loyalties in the direction of positional Tightness, in contrast to a universal lightness, a Tightness of unquestionable truth that brooks no rival. Above all, the seventh chapter emphasizes the asymmetry between the impersonality of supply and demand in market transactions and the impersonality of modal reasons as a functional requirement of their use in the political forum. For, while market transactions are inherently anonymous, transactions in the political forum are expected to be traceable to identifiable persons as political agents. PARTICIPATION AND COMMUNITARIANISM

Chapters eight and nine enquire into the scope of political participation and question whether the democratic metaphor and the concept of "community" risk political over-extension. In demanding to have a more active share in forging reasons for public actions, as opposed to merely demanding to be told what they are, theorists of participatory democracy tend to attribute fatal defects of liberal democracy to its emphasis on the individual and the irreducibility of ultimate ends. The effect of both the individualism and the pluralism is said to be a blurring of things that people have in common, bringing about an eclipse of communal visions and an upsurge of conditions favouring private self-enclosure. While chapter nine goes into these criticisms as also into the question of replacing liberal democracy, chapter eight covers chiefly three issues. First, given that participation and accountability are integrally related in politics, it discusses their interrelationship. Second, given that "democratization" is not to be confined to the national realm but extended to participation at segmental levels, the chapter ponders the latter's relation to participation at the national level. This, indeed, is its central theme. Finally, it touches on deliberative approaches to political participation. Regarding the conceptual link between participation and accountability, there appear to be profound unclarities that, for the most part, are attributable to markedly different conceptions of political democ-

18 Democratic Legitimacy

racy itself. In one extreme, participation virtually amounts to codetermination within social and political concerns at all levels of organization. In the other extreme, however, participation, while not altogether denied legitimacy, is kept within strict limits, and its passivity viewed as a stabilizing force of democracy. Both extremes, I shall argue, make it difficult for political accountability to come into its own. Participation tantamount to co-determination clearly poses the problem of locating the source of responsibility; moreover, if all participate equally, there is neither distance nor scope for civic vigilance, both of which are essential for governmental accountability to have meaning. This raises the issue of participation in this full and active sense being sufficient as the qualifying basis of democratic legitimacy. Rousseau, generally acclaimed as the herald of participatory democracy, is highly instructive on this point, in that he suggests something in the nature of a reversal in the priority between participation and accountability, in order to ensure that governments use their power legitimately.17 The implications of this suggestion form a major theme throughout this book, tipping it in favour of maximum emphasis on accountability, on the disclosure of the rightful exercise of rule. On the other hand, if apathy is preferred to participation, goverments may indeed have little to worry about any time other than shortly before and during elections or when there are issues on which an institutional opposition, if strong enough, chooses to take a stand. Under such conditions, the practice of asking questions of a government as a matter of parliamentary routine may well atrophy through disuse. In debates about further democratization, the normative basis of group participation is often approvingly contrasted with interestgroup pluralism. What appears overlooked in these debates, I'll suggest, is that segmental participationism, no less than interest-group pluralism, is particularist. I wonder, therefore, how participationists come to view their theories as theories of political participation, and how far the degree to which they seek to extend the principles of democracy involves in fact an extension of the category of politics itself. Two possibilities will be discussed: that segmental participation is a form of political participation; and that the experience gained in particularist participation is readily transferable to participation at the level of national politics. And it is in line with both these possibilities that theories of deliberative democracy assume poignant relevance. Mention of them is therefore made in both chapters eight and nine, although it is in chapter ten that they form a major theme. In discussing critiques of liberal democracy, chapter nine focuses on the idea of replacing liberal democracy with some form of com-

19 Themes and Perspectives munal democracy, as suggested by theorists of communitarianism. Its central argument is that just as rationality in politics is other than rationality in philosophy, so political relations are other than communal relations. If, therefore, it is misleading to speak of political consensus as "Consensus on the Truth,"18 it is no less misconceived to extend the language and sentiment of communcal belonging - or personal friendship - to the civic realm of plural and competing ends. The obvious trouble is that if one attempts to transform "community" from personal choice into a political requirement, one destroys the former, since a requirement clearly is not the same as a choice - a sense of communal belonging can no more be instituted than love or friendship. It may well be true that liberal democracy erects barriers to the scope of civic mutuality; but it is not obvious that it does so to a greater extent than non-liberal forms of democracy that are anxious to replace it, or, for that matter, non-democratic forms. Liberal democracy certainly has its shortcomings, but remoteness is by no means peculiar to it. Under any political system, civic mutuality is bound to be uneven, simply because unevenness is for the most part the result of differential distances between individuals. Indeed, it is precisely such unevenness which, among citizens, is in need of political resolution. But, whatever mutuality is generable within political space is not, I am arguing, the fellowship of a community, but a relationship that is institutionally mediated and, in this sense, extraneous, impersonal, and, like politics itself, sui generis. DELIBERATIVE APPROACHES

Given that competing ends do not seem resolvable by "truly rational argument," communal thinking, or in and through the idea of "public reason,"19 chapter ten considers their mediation with the help of performative principles of "modal" rationality and shared standards of reciprocity, comparable in their form and operation to the function and working of "civic decorum." I concede, however, that positional differences may not be bridged, so that political consensus may fall short of unanimity. And whether or not deliberative approaches could succeed in bridging positional differences, and thus further maximal agreement, they might nonetheless critically assist in deepening general awareness of the need for qualifying limits and evolving procedural mechanisms, with the aim of coming to terms with the plurality of ends. Discussing deliberative strategies in this direction, the chapter speculates also on the desirability of introducing certain normative limits with a view to reducing excessive inequalities, on the one hand, and unmanageable "overload" on the other.

2o Democratic Legitimacy

Efforts by proponents of deliberative democracy seeking to create a clearer consciousness of what could be demanded of democracy, and what, by contrast, should not be taken for granted, might therefore help citizens to realize that the former needs guarding, while the latter needs exposing. And, in either case, they could thereby rouse a keener and more critical interest in the running of public concerns at a time of waning trust in professional politicians, as well as prompt the growth of civic bodies capable of exercising closer control not only over the professionals in politics but also over the less visible, but no less influential, professionals within government bureaucracies. Both the guarding and the exposing might then have the effect of opening windows that have been shut or have not even been known to exist, and letting in gusts of air able to act as a warning of greater storms ahead, which neither kind of professional could shrug off with impunity. Above all, in stressing the qualitative exercise of rule rather than the quantitative source of its emergence, deliberative approaches might lend support to the thesis that the right to rule hinges to a greater extent on an ongoing process than on the expression of an instant act of will. The concluding chapter returns to this thesis and to the idea of extending regulatory norms of democracy in order to promote social conditions that might nurture a stronger sense of shared citizenship and reciprocal affiliation by reducing economic differentials. As a more general theme, however, the concluding chapter voices doubts about the wisdom of direct transplants from strictly ethical contexts - as in the case of the root-meaning of "autonomy" - to broadly political contexts - a recurrent lament of the book. For such transplants court the danger of fudging political Tightness, which involves observance of distinctly procedural norms, with moral Tightness, which both prefigures and transcends procedural norms. And such fudging, I argue, could have the outcome of blurring or inadequately recognizing not only the difference between particularity and universality, but also that between civic mutuality and communal fellowship. It could also confuse contested ends of (overall) political concerns and consensual ends of (segmental) group concerns - to which I refer as "objects" and "purposes" respectively. And blurring these distinctions, I fear, may distort the criteria we apply to civic relations and, in turn, raise false expections about political legitimacy per se. While the final chapter concedes that it is easier to establish what democratic Tightness is not than to state what it is, it nonetheless asserts that the operative standards of what is or is not validly democratic should emerge in the course of political activity itself. Democratic right-

21 Themes and Perspectives

ness, in other words, ought to be autonomously self-generated in order to yield a distinctly political morality, in both the choice and the implementation of public ends. I therefore urge the separation of political metaphors from non-political metaphors, mediated forms of association from unmediated ones, and governmental accounting from moral accounting, if only to ward off imagined breakdowns of legitimacy, when the real trouble is the choice of terminology, a question of political language. THE OVERALL APPROACH

Finally, a word about methodological assumptions or, simply, the angle of viewing things. In a sense, the essay is of an inter-disciplinary nature. Although its main thrust is broadly normative, it somewhat bypasses the usual division between political theory and political science or, for that matter, the history of political thought.20 Above all, it questions the depth of the hiatus said to separate these contrasting approaches to the study of politics, notably in terms of "facts" and "values." For just as norms do not always refer to intrinsic values or moral ends, so facts are not invariably value-neutral. Admittedly, it is necessary to distinguish between what one finds and what one might wish to find, or to agree that reducing values to facts would be to commit what is known as the naturalistic fallacy. On the other hand, it by no means follows that values and facts could never form a seamless whole. Feminist theory, for example, points to facts about gender that demand recognition precisely because they entail important agency values typified by their utmost distinctiveness. Politics in general, notably in its democratic understanding, cannot dispense with taking factual implications into account, since these rarely are detachable from whatever end-values are aspired to. "Performative principles" draw their mix of normative and factual ingredients largely from this realization. No doubt, there are situations in which the only thing to do is dictated by intrinsic norms, regardless of any consequences. Such decisions, however, scarcely typify political decisions, which, as a rule, cannot ignore the political fallout of doing what strictly moral precepts would enjoin. Not infrequently, however, the factual itself yields pointers to certain operative values. To be told, for example, that x is a physician usually serves as an adequate explanation for why x is attending to night calls, by the implied reference to the professional agency values of medical practitioners. By the same token, women, in having particular genderbased concerns, wish these "facts" to be viewed as something requiring the recognition of certain integral principles and values. A good deal

22

Democratic Legitimacy

depends, therefore, on whether or not the values entailed in a given factual context can be considered so closely related to the facts themselves that their separate explanation is rendered otiose. An understanding of the norm is here derivative from an understanding of the factual situation itself. Moreover, contending choices frequently consist of clashes not so much between facts and values as between end-values themselves, such as between providing local employment and honouring general environmental commitments, or between reducing the national debt and maintaining a universal national health service. Clearly, this is but an instance of the problem most commonly facing politics, the problem of what I call "ranking." Ordering priorities, to be sure, is a balancing act that may not come off: ends get short-changed or dumped altogether, and the value-alternatives forgone are the true cost of policy choices, whatever they are. The point I wish to stress, however, is that we rarely are in a position to know what matters most in abstraction of a given context of claims. Both the blending of facts and values and the ranking of claims are political choices because they demand a form of judgement that, as Aristotle made clear, is decidedly practical And whether this form of judging, involving blending or ranking, occurs elusively, in subtle and fleeting ways, or as conscious acts of lengthy deliberation, it is not unlike the relationship that Kant projects between theory and practice. For the interlacing of normative axioms with "performative" principles in specific political contexts closely resembles Kant's linking of "principles of a fairly general nature" with practice, "the realization of a particular purpose" through "certain principles of procedure."21 Also, the fusion bears remarkably striking similarities to the interpenetration of science and philosophy that I put forward as the preferred approach to the study of politics. Contrary to widespread beliefs, the factually concrete is no more easily intelligible than the normatively abstract. We actually need philosophy in the application of science to what factually is, in order to conceptualize and evaluate the concrete, because it so happens that the concrete cannot for the most part be grasped, talked about, or acted upon in any other way.22 And it is precisely the concrete that we face when grappling with problems in politics and which, therefore, calls for the kind of blending between the theoretical and the practical that Kant recommends for the realization of purposive ends in the choice of performative means. Moreover, to think purposively in this sense is a direction of thinking that puts as much emphasis on the principled how as on the aspired what of political action, based as it is on the belief that the ethic of ends cannot be divorced from the ethic of means.

23 Themes and Perspectives

My overall line of approach runs, therefore, in two opposite directions, as it were. On the one hand it pleads for dimming the contrast between political philosophy and political science, while, on the other, it favours the recognition of the difference between discord in philosophy and discord in politics. This may sound starding at first; but we are really dealing with two distinct levels of pursuit. It is at the level of the study of politics that I urge the fusion, whereas at the level of the activity of politics I urge the separation. On closer analysis, therefore, the two opposite directions are in truth two very different arguments not unlike the difference between the rationality of knowledge and the rationality of opinion. At the level of politics as an activity, neither science nor philosophy seems to be a useful exemplar, because, if we consider the essence of political activity to consist of talk, discourse, speech, or "communication," the character of this activity, I argue, is uniquely different from any other.23 On this argument, a politics of knowledge as distinct from opinion is, as Plato and Aristotle keep telling us, a highly questionable undertaking. But even if a politics as knowledge were in principle attainable, it could hardly be a politics of democracy. For, short of a complete transformation of the meaning of both pursuits, of democracy as much as of politics, the kind of rational choice and the kind of rational accounting that a politics of democracy offers or demands differs radically from scientific or philosophic modes of argument, since these are not amenable, or intended to be amenable, to the judgement of political opinion or popular debate. The decisive criteria of acceptable "rationality" are simply not the same. Given this position, it will hardly come as a surprise that the thinking underlying this book is not greatly in sympathy with those who find it distressingly deplorable diat political leaders are not philosopherkings, or that discourse in politics is not up to discourse in science and philosophy. On the lines argued here, the failure of public debate to measure up to standards of epistemic or scientific claims to knowledge ought to give less cause for alarm than we are at times led to believe that is, if we can accept the thesis that political rationality is other than philosophical rationality and democratic discursiveness other than the drawing of syllogistic inferences, the precision of scientific formulations, or the display of impartial detachment. More is to be said on this, especially in connection with Habermasian thinking. This is admittedly a contentious issue; but I doubt that it will cease to be so, even if we find a ready supply of philosophers fit to be kings, or of kings fit to be philosophers. More fundamentally, I suggest, the choice of approach taken depends on which of essentially two opposing assumptions seems to be

24 Democratic Legitimacy

politically preferable. As indicated earlier, the two major alternatives are the assumptions of constitutive oneness and those of constitutive duality. The route of constitutive oneness implies the identity between rulers and ruled and, thereby, the sublimation of the "we/they" syndrome. This route could conceivably be defended as a sort of guarantee against the loss of civic solidarity within the latent divisiveness of institutional plurality. The route of constitutive duality, on the other hand, implies the otherness, and potential adversariness, of rulers and ruled, and might in turn be viewed, as is the case in this study, as a sort of guarantee against the loss of the conditionality of political authority in its right to govern. In essence, therefore, the second route is meant to ensure a credible degree of governmental accountability and a credible degree of civic vigilance. These two routes could serve as perspectives in judging what matters most in the validation of democratic rule, both as a form of political governance and as an order of civic mutuality. Yet, while implicit in the choice of the second route is a general plea for the demarcation and conditionality of legitimate authority, for it to be a democratic option, the recipe for limits must not obscure the overall aim of maximal collective inclusiveness. For, if majoritarianism is not the only condition of democratic legitimacy, it is a basic condition of democratic governance. The recipe for limits, in other words, is no magic formula; what it may do, however, is to draw attention to the need for boundary markers in the face of multiple strivings for competing ends. In turn, a consciousness of these could help toward discovering the kind of trade-offs a plural society requires in arriving at some consensus about shared objectives. And, if the past is anything to go by, agreeing to trade-offs calls for a sense of measure and an eye for proportions, in order to yield deliberative judgements that prove the better part of valour. For, clearly, what is involved is an evaluative process par excellence. Substantive rationality, for example, is undeniably to be valued; but democracy, to be genuinely discursive, may nonetheless have to make do with "modal" rationality in preference to an indisputable rationality that brooks no opposition. Sound fiscal policy, similarly, is a worthwhile end; but so is the salvaging of essential social services. Democracy is closer, therefore, the overall approach suggests, to a continuous challenge of competing claims than to the embodiment of a perfect equilibrium. As a result, it is almost by definition the realm of mediation, and can consequently hardly reject solutions out of hand merely because they are not ideal solutions. Modal rationality is a democratic option, accordingly, not because it is qualitatively superior to substantive rationality, but rather because it is preferable to

25 Themes and Perspectives

abandoning discursive processes altogether and, with them, the chance of finding solutions that promise to be achievable. Likewise, balancing fiscal solvency with public welfare is a democratic option, not because one may or may not be superior to the other, but because a trade-off is preferable to national bankruptcy, on the one hand, and to the inauguration of national meanness, on the other. From this it does not follow, to be sure, that trade-offs ought to be viewed as epitomizing political democracy; but merely that not infrequently they appear to offer if not the only, nevertheless the least awesome, alternative to its total demise.

2 Legitimacy and Democracy

The concept of legitimacy as a political concept is inherently complex in that it involves at least three distinguishable components: the electoral (constitutional) right to rule; the procedural (normative) rightfulness in the exercise of rule; and the substantive (teleological) rightness in the ends of rule. Each of these components is in truth a separate issue that entails problems of its own. And while, in a democracy, each is contestable in terms of ordering and justifying principles, the basis of contestation is dissisimilar in content and degree, as this and the following three chapters demonstrate. The present chapter focuses on the electoral and procedural components, in their bearing on the idea of democratic "self-authentication." In some sense it is true that legitimacy comes into question above all when it is threatened, just as we worry about fleas only when they make us itch.1 From this it does not follow, however, that legitimacy needs to be safeguarded only when it is under attack. By watching it at all times, we may come closer to learning what to guard against - corruption, loss of public trust, decline in a sense of direction - and, conversely, how to sustain it. Supposing we grant all that, one may still ask why there is so much more talk about legitimacy in our times than there was in earlier periods, and wonder if this change is simply the result of a more critical society - a society that demands and expects a great deal more of governments and their ways of conducting public business. Admittedly, speculation about the reasons for the existence of governments and submission to their authority goes back to the origins of political philosophy; still, the term "legitimacy" is relatively

27 Legitimacy and Democracy

new.2 And it seems that only with the emergence of what may be described as an ideologically moral style of public thinking, largely influenced by the European Enlightenment, does the need appear to have arisen for governments to acknowledge their accountability for public actions and to render proof of their legitimacy. Even then, however, a number of theorists favoured a predominantly "sociological" orientation, which purported to explain why people accept and submit to governmental rule. Not infrequently, evidence of compliance was seen as proof of the legitimacy of a regime - an inference that has been hotly challenged by political philosophers ever since.3 Rousseau was among the first to question the adequacy of consent, let alone tacit consent. And, while not denying the need for governmental authority, he insisted that its rightful exercise required popular agreement in place of elitist direction or command. Max Weber, the most quoted name on questions of legitimacy, likewise found mere passive compliance inadequate as a basis or criterion for a regime's right to rule, since such compliance could "rest on considerations varying over a wide range from case to case." He did concede, however, that compliance could be grounded in reflection and not necessarily be attributable to sheer habit, fear, or manipulative pressures.4 PROCEDURAL AND SUBSTANTIVE LEGITIMACY

Approaches to political legitimacy may be divided into two types: those that stress the source and nature of the process validating a regime, and those that stress its content or purposive direction. Distinguishing between the sanctioning source and the justifying content broadly, albeit not perfectly, conforms to the distinction between procedural and substantive legitimacy. Although it is indebted to Rousseau's discussion of the General Will and to Rawls's analysis of perfect and imperfect procedural justice,5 the distinction between procedural and substantive legitimacy departs decisively from both; for it implies no symmetry between process and outcome - doing a thing rightly does not make it the right thing to do. Procedural legitimacy defines the quality that makes "getting there" politically right, insofar as it involves the observance of norms that specify what is and what is not done in the process of arriving at a policy or implementing it. Yet, however correct the procedures, procedural correctness in itself fails to disclose the quality of the policy or to guarantee the attainment of its intended outcome. A substantive approach, on the other hand, requires us to examine what is done not so much with reference to due process, as in the light of criteria that

28 Democratic Legitimacy

are generally accepted as intrinsically self-sustaining, regardless of constitutional provisions or the outcome of elections. A crude analogy from arithmetic can help here. How we solve a problem, quickly or slowly, using our fingers or not, has no substantive importance as long as the answer comes out right. A procedural approach, by contrast, focuses on the how as a matter of cardinal importance: are the credentials of those who make public decisions in order? are their actions adequately accounted for? Have questions of competence and jurisdiction been fully examined? Is there enough consultation? Is conflict of interest avoided? Are votes properly counted? These are the sorts of queries that arise when we probe legitimacy in a procedural way; they are "agency values," which serve as standards for what is "done," but clearly they do not demonstrate the rightness of a decision in the same sense as a substantive approach does.6 Both approaches contain their difficulties. A procedural approach could be criticized for making light of what should demand recognition, regardless of the procedures applied. A substantive approach, though it courts less obvious risks, could, if applied to mediating processes, carry with it dangers of comparable seriousness. For, by looking upon procedures not merely as ways of embarking on a problem - ways of formulating the issues that are involved - but rather as a sure path to finding correct solutions, criteria of Tightness are invoked that have nothing whatsoever in common with the contingency of norms that govern procedural processes, the casting of the ballot, or the pressure of conflicting demands. Instead of doing things according to stipulated methods for reaching consensus, things would be decided by norms that exist antecedently in quite a different manner, in that they rest on independent criteria of Tightness. Unlike procedural validation, which accepts no transcendent standards of Tightness other than those processually sanctioned, substantive rightness is unconditional and wholly self-sustaining. To be sure, any normative standards require a certain continuity in order to function as standards, but within a democracy of discursively rival claims, they cannot be antecedently presumed like axioms in geometry or transcendent maxims in theology. For, were they to be considered axiomatic, they would fail to be reconcilable with democratic openness to contestation. This is not to deny that there are democracies that promote the authoritarian imposition of supra-political norms or of religious or ideological theorems, so that in place of contestable standards, they appeal to dogmas, whose Tightness is beyond conditionality and dispute. In general, political legitimacy can be said to involve at least three levels of reference, which relate to the who, the how, and the where of

29 Legitimacy and Democracy government. These levels, taken together, might guard against "democratic" authorization of such supra-political regimes. For what usually happens in such cases is that the regime focuses solely on one of the three levels at the expense of the other two. Nationalist variants of democracy, for example, place greatest emphasis on the third level the where of government - thus tending either to disregard the first two levels - who should properly rule and in what manner - or to view them as entailments of the third, virtually collapsing three levels into one. Principally for this reason, it appears, liberal democrats are somewhat ambivalent (as I shall observe in chapter three) in their attitude toward doctrines of national self-determination that put prime emphasis on cultural-ethnic considerations. For they consider legitimacy to be contingent on the who and how of political rule, as judged by persons as individuals rather than as components of ethnic cultures. Ethnicity may serve to determine a state's political boundaries; but, unless it is tempered by considerations of the other two levels concerning the who and how of government, it is unlikely to render political legitimacy any the less problematic. Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes may have correctly defined the where of their governments; but they are deceived in believing that this in one stroke also resolves the question of who rules and how. Although the critical concern of this chapter is democratic legitimacy and its compatibility with the principle of governmental self-authentication, and not legitimacy as such, two recent studies, Rodney Barker's Political Legitimacy and the State and David Beetham's The Legitimation of Power, are worth noting here for their closely argued coverage of the contentious legitimacy debate. Moreover, in their different ways, they also put forward cogent alternatives to sociological approaches that are repugnant to political philosophers. Not surprisingly, any such enterprise cannot refrain from taking positions on Max Weber's thinking on legitimacy. Nor is it surprising that we are particularly interested in their interpretation of Weber's views on democratic legitimation - he indeed was the first to use the phrase - and of his apprehensions about the possible effect of democratic legitimation on the integrity of governmental self-authentication. Barker articulates this concern rather deftly when he says that legitimacy is best demonstrated "when it justifies the actions of governors rather than when it explains the subjection of subjects."7 Implicit in this statement is the belief that governments themselves are the principal guardians of their own legitimacy - and the principal causes of its erosion. At the same time Barker makes it clear that it is a mistake to regard legitimacy as a necessary condition for effective government or the survival of a regime. Thus, while "compliance" may be necessary

go

Democratic Legitimacy

for effective government, it is not enough for legitimate government; the two are not interdependent but separate issues. The disjunction is particularly apposite if compliance is viewed rather mechanically, like "the response of one billiard ball to another,"8 for the discontinuity between effective government and legitimate government would then indeed become highly plausible. It is not quite clear, though, which of the three categories of government that Barker discusses - sui generis, neutral, or partisan - is more likely to exemplify legitimacy than effectiveness, although Barker expresses doubts about the possibility of partisan governments' being able to qualify for acceptance as legitimate authorities.9 Of the three categories, the one potentially pertinent to my line of argument in support of governmental self-authentication is the first, the conception of government as a sphere of activity sui generis, with a code of public conduct of its own. For what principally is at issue is a quasi-autonomous space in which governments can act within the context of set procedural norms and specific electoral mandates. If no such space is granted, in however circumscribed a form, then, I wish to contend, there is little grounds on which governments can be held to account. To insist on such a space as a condition of public scrutiny and the working of political accountability is not, however, to imply governmental neutrality, even if neutrality were at all conceivable within democracies characterized by the operation of political parties. At the same time, if "autonomy" is not the same as "neutrality," neither can government sui generis be identified with partisan government, since any partisanship would discredit its claim to have the interests of all citizens at heart, regardless of their party allegiance. And, whether or not such claims can be taken wholly seriously, it may well be true that if legitimacy is nothing but mere rhetoric, "it cannot operate as such - someone has to be convinced by the claims of legitimacy."10 C O N T R O V E R S Y O V E R WEBER'S THEORY

What, however, is precisely claimed when we invoke "legitimacy"? Like Weber, I wish to maintain that normative criteria other than those recognized as intrinsically moral can be invoked to justify or validate claims to legitimacy. Unfortunately, this position is at times identified with merely invoking a belief vn. legitimacy, that is, with a purely psychological fact, and not with a claim in need of normative justification. I say "unfortunately" since I believe this to be far too sweeping a verdict. Surely, it is one thing to be reluctant to view political morality through the prism of individual morality, but quite another thing to deduce

31 Legitimacy and Democracy

from this reluctance the adoption of a completely non-normative positivism, indistinguishable from fence-sitting, value neutrality, or a disguised defence of the status quo. Charges of this order have of course been levelled against Weber himself. I think they misperceive their target, and it is one of several virtues of Barker's study that it endorses this view as a misperception and makes clear that speculating about a writer's motives for taking up a position is not the same thing as trying to come to grips with the position itself. David Beetham, for example, argues in Max Weber and the Theory of Modern Politics that because Weber was motivated by anti-democratic sentiments he could not accept the concept of popular sovereignty as other than a fiction. Therefore, he had to think of popular rule as a mere cloak, designed to provide an aura of legitimacy to an outstanding individual whose qualities were really self-sustaining in themselves.11 By the same token, Beetham, in The Legitimation of Power, despite acknowledging Weber's standing as a social scientist, nonetheless regards his influence on approaches to legitimacy as an "almost unqualified disaster."12 He takes this position because he deems Weber's definition of legitimacy to have been fundamentally flawed in that it treats legitimacy as though it were a mere belief, a Legitimatsglaube, a thing without substance. In particular, Beetham says, Weber misses the moral component, the notion of Tightness as a self-authenticating value, irreducible to beliefs or attitudes. He feels convinced, therefore, that this amoral manner of viewing legitimacy could only lead social scientists to "become sceptical about the possibility of any rational grounding for normative ideas or value systems."13 He cites S.M. Lipset as an example of social scientists who have "in typically Weberian vein" defined the legitimacy of a political system as its capacity "to engender and maintain the belief that the existing political institutions are the most appropriate ones for the society."14 Beetham considers approaches of this kind as little different from public relations campaigns, leading one to believe, for example, that the collapse of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989 "lay in a deficiency of public relations, rather than in anything actually wrong with the system of rule itself."15 What is of particular interest in Beetham's account of Weber's theory of legitimacy is that, in addition to faulting it for its "amorality," he accuses it of having encouraged a "bad social science."16 For the Weberan definition "leaves the social scientist with no adequate means of explaining why people acknowledge the legitimacy of power at one time or place and not another."17 It is of particular interest because it attributes the inadequacy to a misrepresentation of the relation between legitimacy and people's beliefs. What matters instead,

32

Democratic Legitimacy

Beetham points out, is not beliefs in legitimacy as such, but their ability to justify legitimacy. In his own words, what is involved "is a question of congruence, or lack of it, between a given system of power and the beliefs, values and expectations that provide its justification."18 Beetham is making a useful distinction here. However, the notion of 'congruence" between systems of power and their justification in terms of prevailing beliefs and values begs more questions than it is meant to clarify. For one thing, what is a "system of power" but an abstraction of an amalgam of historical accidents, habits of thinking, acts of domination, contractual arrangements, mutual understandings, organizational and financial ingenuity, and so on, whose mere existence more often than not serves its own justification, if not also as the embodiment of its values and beliefs? For another, the formulation is too general to be of any use as a diagnostic tool in the concerns that Weber had with governmental authority and its mode of legitimation. In these concerns, Weber never supposed or suggested that what people believe about the acceptability of a regime confers legitimacy or provides a sufficient grounding for it. There would be a problem if Weber has postulated a causal, justificatory, or analytic link between legitimacy and obedience or belief in legitimacy. He did not do that; indeed he said the opposite.19 The closest he comes to what Beetham accuses him of is to regard a measure of voluntary submission as an indication of the belief, however motivated, that the exercise of a government's authority is legitimately founded. But this, surely, is a world apart from stating that voluntary submission is (or ought to be) a defining characteristic of legitimate governance. Furthermore, I doubt that Weber would have found an thing startling or objectionable in Beetham's stress on "multidimensionality," that is, in his contention that diverse factors contribute to legitimacy at different levels. Weber's comparative method amply discloses that he was by no means unaware of contextual diversity or of the different kinds of motives that enter into the acceptance or recognition of authority. Similarly, it is not easy to see why or how Weber's "misleading strategy" is at odds with Beetham's own distinction between a "properly social-scientific judgement" and the "normative-philosophical project."20 For, if Weber offered no morally prescriptive doctrine of what ought to be done, neither did he furnish a factually pragmatic report of things as they are or are perceived to be. What, in essence, he sought to establish was an analytical taxonomy, setting out the perimeters of legitimating grounds and their modes of justification. It could at times be taken as a warning, but not as a "report." Nonetheless, Beetham does well to inform social scientists that, when they declare a given "power relationship" legitimate, they are

33 Legitimacy and Democracy

making a judgement and not a report "about people's belief in legitimacy."21 Likewise, his recommendation to narrow the gap between science and philosophy, particularly in the study of legitimacy - "a concept of common interest to social scientists and political philosophers" - can only be welcomed.22 Beetham righdy wonders whether political philosophers are obviously in so much stronger a position to have firm benchmarks for rightfulness than social scientists. Recognizing the possibility of different meanings of political legitimacy, he also correctly questions its reduction to any single interpretation in procedural or substantive terms. If, for example, the "general will," in view of its intrinsic Tightness, is put forward as the sole legitimizer of political action, it soon emerges that both the manner of arriving at the general will and the nature of its inherent quality are meta-political abstractions or at best highly problematic stipulations that have very little to do with actual processes of procedural democracy. For these know of no general will that is "always right," and right in intrinsically substantive terms. Political Tightness within democratic politics hardly ever commands this degree of moral unanimity.23

"CONGRUENCE" It is all the more surprising, therefore, that Beetham insists on the congruence of "beliefs, values and expectations" as the necessary condition of democratic legitimation. Surely, democratic procedures cannot presume such congruence, nor can they, by themselves, determine it. Whatever congruence exists or emerges is not a necessary condition of democratic legitimacy but a mere potentiality, the workings of mediative processes, whose substantive outcome cannot be precisely known or foreseen. However desirable the convergence of political rightfulness with moral rightfulness may be, it is not a necessary function of democratic procedures. For their task is not to produce such an integral oneness, nor indeed to resolve divergences in "beliefs, values and expectations." Instead, what procedural democracy principally calls for is the observance of ordering rules - regardless of particular opinions, beliefs, or interests - to prevent plurality from turning into chaos and war-like strife. But the legitimating quality of ordering norms, designed to produce a measure of reciprocal civility, is not the same thing as the justifying quality of moral norms. I doubt, however, that Beetham could have so monistic a conception of democratic legitimacy in mind as a condition of its coming about, since such a conception would most unlikely be the work of procedural politics under democracy. For what procedural politics yields, first and foremost, is a space for communication, a space that keeps alive

34 Democratic Legitimacy

the meaning and purpose of human language. And, whether or not communication produces consensus has in truth little to do with the legitimacy of the activity itself and its conformity to agreed-upon rules of conduct. I am not suggesting that Beetham would dispute all this; but his emphasis on "congruence" of core values does raise the spectre of overblown expectations regarding the degree to which the sharing of fundamental beliefs necessarily entails a comparable sharing of political thought and political practices or the ranking of political ends.24 Besides, there is always the possibility of a gap between having the tools designed for a particular job and achieving the results desired. In working toward consensus, there is a potential indeterminacy between activity and outcome, so that the legitimacy of democratic processes can be attributed only to the fact that they are applied and, secondly, that they are applied in the way they are meant to be applied, and not to the substantive ends produced. Anything one might say about systemic congruence as a legitimating condition of procedural democracy would therefore have to lie in the manner in which the purpose of norms and their observance coincide. For it is the extent of this coincidence that most critically defines the procedural ethic of a regime and best demonstrates its honouring of procedural commitments, its ongoing determination to match the nominal existence of ordering principles with their operational reality. At the same time it should be borne in mind that procedural commitments refer to the general manner of governmental self-authentication as such rather than to the specific manner of validating democratic governments. For guarding procedural norms in the conduct of public concerns is clearly neither the invention nor the monopoly of democratic systems. Far from being a response to electoral pressures, the idea that governments act on a self-generated corporate sense in honouring principles of governmental conduct as a duty to themselves was, in point of fact, Weber's core idea of legitimate government, and one he saw possible under liberal democracy but imperilled under radical democracy. To be sure, speaking of self-authentication as a duty to oneself seems an odd formulation in the vocabulary of law. For, how can one legally enjoin oneself to act toward oneself in a certain way? And yet, not making much sense to a lawyer does not stop the idea from carrying meaning in morals and human conduct generally. A government, on this idea, sees in the observance of procedural rules an act of self-definition, a constitutive part of its existence as a rightful institution. Now, although uncertain whether democratic governments self-evidently qualify for being legitimate on these grounds, Weber was far less

35 Legitimacy and Democracy

apprehensive about democracies in which conditionally of governmental power was firmly entrenched. Nor was he unaware of democracies in which the principle of governmental self-authentication was closely associated with a tradition that expects individuals to render account to themselves for whatever they say or do. It is a tradition possibly traceable to that religious belief which puts paramount emphasis on individual conscience, or the reflective self seeking to be able to live with the actual self- a belief that knows no higher appeal than the self contemplating itself in the image of God. Weber was of course perfectly familiar with this tradition, as he was with its social and economic implications. But, whether or not political accountability is traceable to this religious tradition, the idea of governmental self-authentication, although not the offspring of modern democracy, has become closely identified with it. What is more, liberal-democratic self-authentication intriguingly demonstrates that procedural norms of an essentially regulatory character can simultaneously act as quasi-ethical maxims with a marked degree of universality. For, despite historical variations, certain regulatory norms are taken to be authoritatively binding not merely on this or that liberal-democratic regime, but on liberal democracy anywhere, largely typifying what it has come to mean. No regime, for example, that fails to heed the norm that no party should use law to entrench its rule permanently, can claim liberal-democratic principles as its legitimating sanctions. Norms designed as ordering devices of procedural conduct can, accordingly, go beyond the how of ruling in particular contexts and define qualifying standards that embody general agency values of political governance tout court. Constituting the critical indicator of a regime's instrumental morality, ordering rules nevertheless derive their procedural Tightness from normative sources that, as chapter four elaborates, are distinct from strictly moral reasoning. In combining peformative guides with evaluative principles sui generis, procedural standards contain a certain integral ethic of their own. And it is from the angle of such an integral "value rationality" that I want to approach Weber's discussion of democratic legitimacy. DEMOCRACY AND INTEGRITY

In this much-criticized part of his theory of authority and legitimacy, Weber expresses doubts about the compatibility between the demands of a procedural ethic of government and the demands of a highly participatory interpretation of "democracy."25 In voicing these doubts, Weber was, I feel, no more anti-democratic than liberal democrats are

36 Democratic Legitimacy

in their misgivings over certain forms of radicalization that they suspect threaten the survival of values underlying the ethic of procedural democracy. What seems principally involved, therefore, is not opposition to democracy as such, but rather a question of its representative expression. Radical democrats show little enthusiasm for representative government and are at best ambivalent about it. But this is not the only issue on which liberal democrats and radical democrats do not see eye to eye. Liberal democrats fear that certain forms of participatory democracy could cripple accountable government, impair individual rights, endanger the plurality of ends, and, thereby, seriously undermine fundamental principles of liberal-democratic self-authentication. Weber had closely similar fears: he dreaded the impact that radicalization would have on standards of legitimacy and, thereby, on the integral oneness of what is done and the way it is done. Seeing the roots of modern democracy in the emergence of a new form of public judgement opposed to arbitrary rule, Weber associated this emergence initially with the growing power of the nobility vis a vis the crown and, subsequently, with the rise of the bourgeoisie and an independent bureaucracy. Cumulatively, this combination of disparate countervailing forces to absolutist rule had, in his view, a levelling influence, insofar as privileges of birth had to give way to economic status and professional merit. These developments, which for him included putting an ever more principled restraint upon governmental authority, Weber felt to be threatened by the alliance of charismatic leadership, strict internal party discipline, and the growing importance of slick electoral campaigns. The course these changes were taking indicated to him a move towards "plebiscitary" democracy and a fundamental shift of emphasis in the legitimating grounds for political rule. Instead of civic allegiance occurring as a consequence of legitimacy, it now formed the basis of legitimacy. Implicit in this shift, Weber maintained, was a change of attitude towards government itself. Both its value and its scope began to be judged more positively, with a corresponding rise in people's expectations of politics as a whole.26 Under these changed circumstances, principled limitations upon governmental power came to be perceived as deliberate constraints upon the will of the nation at large. Governmental self-authentication in terms of procedurally circumscribed jurisdiction increasingly appeared to be incongruent with the majoritarian principle of democratic validation. This principle, Weber felt, if unqualifiedly applied to forms of plebiscitary democracy, could destroy a defining characteristic of liberal-procedural democracy, in that it could deny the rightful existence of any rival party.27 Claiming to act as the expression of the

37 Legitimacy and Democracy

people's collective will, the party in power could conceivably put an end to the possibility of an electoral alternative. One tradition of democracy would cancel out the tradition of another. What Weber clearly feared most was that the electoral-majoritarian authentication of the right to rule would obliterate the procedurally rightful exercise of rule as the qualifying basis of democratic legitimacy. So, whatever we make of Weber's notion of Fuhrerdemokratie or his idea of charismatic authority, and whether or not we think either or both fuzzy,28 his thinking on procedural democracy versus electoral democracy accurately contrasts radically divergent approaches to democratic authentication, implying vastly different evaluational and structural criteria in the assessment of democratic statehood. To Weber the shift from the rightful exercise of rule to the emphasis on the electoral basis of rule meant a fundamental alteration in the constitutional foundation of democracy, liable to bring about a severe crisis of political legitimacy. In such a crisis the only hope for avoiding a total break of political continuity lay for him in a surviving bureaucracy's ability to salvage the norms of procedural legitimacy a last-ditch effort to save whatever could be saved.29 Whether or not, therefore, "charisma" can be applied to men like Lenin or Hitler (Beetham's examples) is to me less worrisome than their regime's identification with Fuhrerdemokratie, since neither leader exposed himself to free elections after coming to power. Applied to them, the term is indeed very odd. For Weber, then, the emergence of the shift of democratic validation, which made it wholly contingent on electoral grounds of popular acceptance, marked the beginning of the end of procedural democracy.30 Weber deplored the replacement of politics by bureaucracy, but he considered it the only alternative, in situations of emergency, to wilful arbitrariness. Hence he opposed extending the elective principle to the bureaucracy. "Elective officials whose legitimacy is derived from the confidence of those subject to their authority" are in no position to be the bearers of a self-authenticating ethic of public conduct.31 For, once their career rests wholly on their popularity and they thus become indistinguishable from party functionaries, civil servants have little incentive to observe procedural norms for which, they correctly assume, popular support is frequently lacking. Like democratic politicians, they therefore are in no doubt that what matters first and foremost is to gain the backing of numbers, since no principle counts more weightily as an authenticating source than the majoritarian principle. In and through it, bureaucrats, like politicians, acquire the mandate to carry out whatever measure they see fit, be it "to enact, recognize, or repeal laws," on the basis of their electoral platform.32

38 Democratic Legitimacy

Legitimacy has become a matter of electoral success; it alone confers rightfulness on public agency, for it alone sanctions whatever policies are to be brought into being. The absence of self-imposed procedural checks, Weber feared, could turn a democracy into a concealed type of one-party dictatorship. Concealed, because the leadership would still adhere to the democratic idea of being "dependent on the will of those over whom it exercises authority," when, in fact, leadership had become personal leadership, under which a leader claimed to enjoy "the devotion and trust that his political followers have in him personally.33 And, as history has shown, the road from personal leadership to political dictatorship could be an exceedingly short one. Nevertheless, Weber did allow for exceptions, given "collegiality or the separation of powers," citing as examples of the former the British prime minister in relation to his cabinet and the Swiss Federal Council of rotating leadership and, of the latter, the United States and, much earlier, the Roman magistracy.34 Democracies could therefore exemplify the third of Weber's ideal types of authority, the rational-legal, provided they conformed to a system operated on set procedural lines. What worried Weber, however, was the likelihood that procedural democracy would give in to pressures that were brought to bear in conjunction with "democratization," and would thus inevitably invite its replacement by a Fuhrerdemokratie. A surrender of this magnitude meant for Weber a total transformation of democracy together with a redefinition of "leadership." Under the guise of "populist" democracy, any institutional control of leadership would go by the board once procedural norms failed to be observed.35 Especially in the absence of established liberal-democratic traditions, as in the Germany of Weber's own times, the dangers of arbitrary rule and the emergence of a servile cult of leaders seemed very real indeed.36 Even in democracies in which the principle of governmental selflimitation was safeguarded to the extent of preventing the foreclosing of electoral alternatives, there was the constant risk, Weber feared, that "rationality" would be sacrificed to the obsession with being re-elected. Politicians would frequently act irresponsibly, making spectacular promises that they knew they could not keep and which, more often than not, they even had no intention of keeping once they were elected.37 Weber was not the first to call attention to the corruptive latency in democratic regimes or the propensity of democracies to turn into dictatorships; Plato had done this well enough before him. What Weber was anxious to make clear, however, was the possibility of very different interpretations of democratic legitimacy as well as the

39 Legitimacy and Democracy

danger of regarding all interpretations as providing equal assurance for the maintenance of governmental probity and political responsibility. So, whether or not he was exaggerating the phenomenon of charisma, Weber sought to establish that once governments are unable or unwilling to observe procedural norms that regulate their conduct - and to observe them most scrupulously - neither politics nor law were safe from wilful arbitrariness. Weber was by no means unaware of experiments in "deliberative," direct, or socialist, democracy, or what he called corporate government, that is, attempts to eliminate or minimize the command structure in politics. He lists such measures as limited terms of office, immediate recall, strict accountability, and so on, and mentions also small-scale forms of democracy such as the North American town meeting and the practices of the smaller Swiss cantons.38 What he emphatically denied, however, was the possibility of any intelligible expression of legitimacy if governments and laws simply and solely view themselves as the "servants of the people." Weber recounts an encounter with American workers of English origin. Why, he asked them, did they "allow themselves to be governed by party henchmen who were so often open to corruption." They replied that they preferred politicians that ordinary labourers could look down upon with contempt to professional administrators who would lord it over them since they would be in awe of them.39 From this Weber concluded that, if disdain for politicians was a condition of democracy, then disdain may soon lead to disenchantment with all politics. Perhaps he was overly apprehensive of sham democracy, but he was surely on solid ground in voicing scepticism over the prospects of any democracy that made electoral success the sole basis of its legitimacy or, calling itself "revolutionary democracy," made change its defining hallmark. Similarly - though it is less germane to our central concern here - Weber correctly anticipated that, in the absence of appropriate provisions and legal safeguards, state socialism would sooner bring about added bureaucratic power than added social power or political equality.40 ELECTORAL AND PROCEDURAL DEMOCRACY

Like Hannah Arendt some decades later, Weber insisted that politics should confine itself to that sphere in which it could act. By overextending itself, trying to be the servant of the people in all things, politics escalates the demands made on governments, arousing illusory expectations that ultimately lead to its own demise.41 What ensues is utter disenchantment with both politics and the heavy hand of bureau-

40 Democratic Legitimacy

cratic humdrum, together with a chronic loss of civic trust. In essence, Weber's thinking amounts to a warning that all is not what it seems. Revolutionary democracy may transform the state but fail to democratize society, since to bring about the latter requires a certain continuity in standards of doing things. By the same token, while spectacular electoral promises may harvest electoral success, they at the same time invite the erosion of governmental integrity and democratic responsibility and, by promoting the proliferation of particularist demands, the erosion of common citizenship. Neither a revolutionary ethic, therefore, nor massive electoral successes, can ensure the emergence of a political culture of democracy. Finally, no politicians or governments can be solely the servants of the people, if they are to guard their ethic of ruling regardless of lobbying pressures. For if governments are stripped of every scope for self-directing agency, the idea of their "selfauthentication" is emptied of meaning. The coverage I have given to Weber's thinking on democratic legitimation is merited, I believe, not only because it frequently is sadly misperceived but also, if not chiefly, because of its emphasis on governmental self-commitments. For, what this emphasis arguably implies is that adherence to standards of procedural probity is not simply a matter of electoral calculations. And this implication, apart from underpinning my present argument in support of democratic integrity, also significantly prefigures contemporary thinking by proponents of deliberative approaches to political democracy. Not that Weber held that procedural standards ought to be unchangeable. All he sought to drive home was the recognition that standards cannot command validity in the absence of a measure of continuity, which, in turn, demands a certain independence of ordering norms from electoral outcomes. Electoral outcomes, to be sure, are of the essence in deciding who governs, but the how of government is a no less integral part of its authentication. And it is the importance of this how that Weber made abundantly clear. Likewise, he left little doubt that maintaining a measure of performative continuity required a degree of governmental autonomy. Even in a democracy, in his view, there must be a space, sui generis, in which governments can act, just as there must be the existence of others, equally autonomous, to whom governments can render account. This, too, presumably, was part and parcel of Weber's idea of balancing electoral and procedural forms of authentication. I share this idea, even though I cannot profess any ready answers to the question of what constitutes an appropriate balance between electoral and procedural modalities. I do think, however, that a certain degree of procedural autonomy and procedural continuity, indispens-

41 Legitimacy and Democracy ably essential for the possibility of governmental self-authentication, should be reconcilable with democratic legitimation through the ballot box. I shall be returning to this point in subsequent chapters, notably in the last two chapters, by suggesting what amounts to a switch in the priority of electoral and procedural sources of democratic rightfulness in their validating importance. As for Weber, although he feared that further democratization might involve state socialism, he did not rule out democratization through more intense participation in social and economic enterprises. He certainly would have found no fault with the Webbs, who thought active participation in cooperatives a most excellent instrument in keeping interest away from central government affairs which they, like Weber, felt had better be left to the professional politician.42 And they thought this way for very much the same reason as Weber although they viewed themselves as socialists; namely, that they considered most people were not ready to take an active share in political participation. Only, tmlike Weber, who thought of state socialism as an imminent possibility, the Webbs considered it a "purely academic ideal like Plato's republic," insisting that "no such change can come for many centuries." "No ten percent of us are fit for a Socialist state yet," wrote Sidney Webb in i886.43 Extending participatory democracy, accordingly, need not mean extending political democracy. Neither does it necessarily mean the emergence of socialism as a political order. But whether it does or not is of lesser concern to this chapter. For the concern it shares with Weber is not the question of socialism but the question of whether or not governmental self-authentication ought to be viewed as a validating requirement of democracy, by integrating its right to rule with its rightful exercise. For the most part, therefore, I have sought in the present chapter to establish whether democratic self-authentication, thus conceived, demands close congruence between itself and general values and beliefs. In denying such an assumption, I have argued that, just as agreement on moral Tightness entails no necessary agreement on political Tightness (a major theme of chapter four), so the sharing of fundamental values or general beliefs is no warrant for arriving at political consensus about their political appropriateness.44 Instead, without stipulating an overall congruence of value-preferences, I have opted in favour of blending procedural normativeness with electoral choices - not because doing so promised to result in the convergence of procedural and substantive Tightness or the cessation of rival legitimating claims, but simply because it might lend authenticity to the idea of democratically self-generated legitimacy and thereby

42

Democratic Legitimacy

strengthen faith in the possibility of self-sustaining standards of political morality. While rejecting Beetham's theory that it is the function of democratic procedures to produce an overarching oneness of "beliefs, values and expectations," this chapter has strongly advocated instrumental normativeness by arguing that any conception of democratic Tightness critically rests on the workings of procedural probity, in tandem with whatever substantive ends are pursued. The most significant upshot of our discussion of legitimacy and democracy is perhaps, therefore, the recognition that there is more to procedural norms than procedures. This sounds platitudinous, but I doubt that it is; for there is an ethic involved in the how of politics that needs guarding if democracy is to be seen as a road that in itself comprises normative principles of political morality, and not purely its destination, its aspired ends. Hence, far from viewing procedural norms as value-free, in chapters three to seven I shall attempt to shed light on essentially two questions: To what extent do regulatory modes of ordering political activity relate to justificatory modes of normative validation? And second: What is the role of prudentially grounded principles of reasoning - as opposed to strictly moral and strictly legal precepts - in the creation and operation of distinctly democratic standards of political agency? Answers to these questions, taken together, involve, I shall suggest, a problematic tension between viewing political legitimacy always as legitimacy in context - as most social and political scientists do - and the idea - favoured by many political philosophers - that standards of political legitimacy must command general normative validity regardless of particular contexts. The resolution of the possible tension between legitimacy-in-context and the observance of firm procedural standards appears to have been the critical assumption underlying Weber's envisaged parallel between a self-sustaining procedural ethic in political pursuits and a self-sustaining professional ethic in non-political pursuits.

3 Democracy and Autonomy

Among conceptual justifications of democratic self-authentication, "autonomy" has been paramount, especially since the concept acquired its highly ethical complexion in the writings of Rousseau and Kant. In the form of national self-determination, moreover, autonomy has figured no less prominently in modern understandings of self-government, particularly since Johann Herder's emphasis on nationality. In attempting to exemplify Weber's point about the diversity of legitimating claims in support of democratic rightfulness this chapter probes the validity of "autonomy" as a political sanction within two of its democratic applications, one associated with liberal democracy, the other with nationalist expressions of democracy. I shall argue: that, while the applications overlap, they also differ significantly enough to make their legitimating continuity doubtful; and that, in either conception, the translation of autonomy from an ethical idea into a political idea renders its use problematic as a normative foundation of democracy. TWO C O N C E P T S OF A U T O N O M Y

Although nationalism and democracy have not always shown themselves to be congenial partners, the notion of national self-determination has generally found acceptance in democratic understandings of modern statehood. What distinguishes liberal-democratic understandings from other claimants to self-government, however, is the cluster of values defining the normative self-authentication of democratic gover-

44 Democratic Legitimacy

nance. These commonly include an emphasis on individual rights, the affirmation, if not the exaltation, of diversity, and, not least, the limitation of governmental power. While the "external" characteristics, which comprise the image of a public self, refer to the nation as a whole qua autonomy in the singular, the "internal" characteristics refer to the realm of autonomies in the plural, to the constituent parts of the whole, whose activites are governed by individual or associative concerns as perceived by themselves. At issue, therefore, is the nature of the merger between autonomies in the plural and autonomy in the singular. Some may see this issue as tantamount to the question of a relationship between liberalism and democracy itself. Although I return to this question in subsequent chapters, it may not be too wide of the mark to say for the present that, since there are no clearcut borderlines separating democracy from liberalism, it is somewhat idle to speculate whether liberalism has absorbed democracy to a greater extent than democracy has succeeded in permeating liberalism, for neither concept has ever had a single uncontested meaning. Liberalism, for example, hardly ever just meant laissez faire and ruthless competition, nor did democracy mean only direct participation in government and the administration of law. Moreover, in the historic interplay of liberalism and democracy, social, economic, and political ends were rarely far apart. Nonetheless, within their eventual marriage, the liberal spouse could be said to have extolled diversity above unity, and to have shown greater sensitivity for individual freedom than for individual equality, while the democratic spouse has been more forceful in asserting the collective rights of people and the need, as well as the justice, of a more equitable distribution of wealth, education, and welfare. Similarly, liberal pressures were more in the direction of curbing state power or refusing to extend it, whereas democratic pressures pushed in the opposite direction. Regarding the conflicting pulls within liberal democracy and, in particular, the tension-ridden merger of "autonomy" and "autonomies," Rousseau's distinction between the general will and the will of all seems, albeit in a qualified sense, a pithy formulation of what at heart is a potential antagonism between the public and the private - between what people want when thinking of themselves as parts of a larger whole, the whole of a public self, and what they want when thinking of themselves primarily as individual selves. Coupled with these latently clashing self-understandings in personal terms, there is the comparably conflicting existence, in political terms, of a corporate "will" that combines freedom with control, symbolizing ethical voluntarism as well as legal compulsion, personal choice as well as collective regulation. The

45 Democracy and Autonomy

result is a political configuration that comprises bodi governmental power and governmental self-restraint, a discretionary space for governmental action and the self-imposed obligation by governments to render account. The attempted reconciliation of these latent opposites exemplifies both the strength and the vulnerability of liberal democracy as a political regime. There is in this attempt a curious intimation of puppets possessed of their own strings. Critics might suspect that the strings not only determine where voluntarism ends and compulsion begins, but that they also serve as fences of private enclosures designed to prevent the encroachment upon individual rights and freedoms. As such, fences are to combine protection of the private realm with penalties for the trespasser. Yet, while liberal democrats uphold authority to punish the intruder who lacks respect for fences, they at the same time distrust authority with a built-in distaste and profound aversion for its hidden delusions of grandeur and paternalistic pretensions. Underlying both the distrust and the distaste is the fear that unrestrained authority would stop the expression of free choice. As a result, its critics charge, there is a marked degree of ambivalence about state interference: clearly some intervention is welcomed, but only provided it is circumspect and does not threaten the credal and economic infrastructure on which liberal democracy rests. COMMUNITARIANISM AND LIBERALISM

Not surprisingly, to an increasing number of people the intimate linking of self-government with self-restraint appeared as an inadequate, if not misguided, expression of autonomy and the principle of national self-determination. Especially ethno-cultural communities that had been denied separate political existence saw the inner dynamic of self-government in a more positively assertive role of the state, and hence had little sympathy for the emphasis on limited governmental authority and "negative freedom." Once states coincided with territories inhabited by individuals sharing certain characteristics like language, race, customs, or religious practices, they were to be trusted to serve the common good. In contrast to mere "state machines," they were to be thought natural since they drew on their own roots, and legitimate, since they were ruled by a public self that was identical with their dominant population. Self-determination qua self-government and conscious self-creation thus coalesced in, and was exemplified by, the nation-state - a state no longer a mere piece of real estate owned and controlled by foreign masters.1 Admittedly, not all states that invoked the principle of national self-determination viewed

46 Democratic Legitimacy

the principle in wholly ethnic terms or drew so close an analogy between the public and the private or between nation and nature. Yet hardly anyone questioned the principle in itself, and, indeed, for virtually all modern states, nationality has come to loom as a crucial justification of their autonomous existence.2 Similarly, while not all nationalists demanding a "purified" ethnic state have been democrats, and not all democrats have associated the area of popular self-legislation with a single ethnicity, the rise of modern democracy has generally been paralleled by the transition from the state-nation - in which the nation grew out of the domain of the prince - into the self-generated nation-state,3 that is, into an area characterized by certain communal homogeneities, such as language, customs, or religion, so that national jurisdiction coincided with such an area. In the course of this transition a further change occurred. National-democratic self-determination frequently signalled a shift from ideological individualism to ideological communitarianism. Not unexpectedly, this shift confronted existing liberal democracies as a challenge; if individual autonomy were derivable from national autonomy, a person could be autonomous only as a member of a particular community. Univeralism, centred on the individual per se of whatever stripe or colour, would have to make way for a selectivism determined by particular characteristics that certain communities share, and by means of which they exclude others. The convergence of the whole and the parts in effect meant that what was good for the nation as a whole must be equally good for its individual members; their rights and freedoms were integrally tied up with those of the whole as a homogeneous entity. In a sense, this merging of individual and collective consciousness points in the direction of resolving the problem of two moralities, which Machiavelli so acutely brought to the notice of a pre-democratic and pre-nationalist age. For now it is a person's collective allegiance that determines what is right, and not standards universally ascribed to a pre-political or pre-national stage. In another sense, however, the fusion of the personal and the political can only confound the core meaning of human autonomy, indeed, of what it is to be a person. For claims made on behalf of individual persons are now part and parcel of claims made on behalf of the nation; the public self, not the private self, is the basic unit of autonomy.4 If the source of citizenship is in principle universalist within liberal democracy, it, together with individual rights and freedoms, is now exclusively contingent on some form of communitarian belonging. Any other application of the idea of national self-determination is dismissed as altogether spurious, in that it is devoid of the spirit and will of a people.

47 Democracy and Autonomy

In view of these contrasting conceptions of autonomy and democracy, the continuity between the two variants discussed is open to doubt, so that a meeting of minds between individualist understandings of democracy and citizenship and communitarian understandings seems somewhat elusive. Communal particularity and individual universality may defy blending; the source and the content of rightfulness in each are too different, both as regards the right to rule and the rightfulness of ruling. Attempts have nonetheless been made to show that there is no inexorable or unbridgeable gulf between communitarianism and liberal understandings of democracy.5 I shall be returning to this question in chapter nine, but there can be little doubt that the idea of ethnic-cultural or Vb^-traditional validation of democracy is inherentiy different from the political idea of procedural validation.6 Clearly, ethnicity is not the result of political association but its condition. Language, parentage, race: these rest on natural, traditional, or cultural antecedents; they do not follow from processes of mediation or collective deliberation. Ethnicity, too, is an exclusionary category, the very opposite of inclusionary universality, although "community" itself is not necessarily exclusionary. Finally, ethnicity implies a sort of consecration, a rendering of something beyond everyday thinking, acting, or bargaining; one does not strike deals over ancestral origins. Rather predictably, ethno-communitarian democracy aroused apprehensions among those accustomed to think of democracy in liberal terms. To them it constituted a threat to individual choice and the existence of an open society. To nationalist democrats, on the other hand, it meant that "the people" had come into their own and had arrived as a totality, as a communitarian force to be reckoned with. No longer an inert mass, a politically and culturally dumb mob, ordinary folk were now hailed as eminently eligible for political participation and political office and also as the most creative source of a nation's heritage and culture. A oneness that created uneasiness in established democracies, was therefore welcomed by nationalists as a felicitous marriage between politics and culture, as the most perfect union between ethnic affirmation and autonomous self-creation - a synthesis that seriously calls into question a distinction often made between cultural communities and political communities.7 Whereas liberal democrats could not resist the suspicion that the integrated political community of nationalist democracy meant that, in order to be part of a whole, people had to deny their individual distinctiveness - that, in order to be citizens, they had to cease being individual selves in any recognizable sense - nationalist democrats perceived in it the dawn of a new, extended or communal form of selfhood. In this new

48 Democratic Legitimacy

form, the public self penetrated the consciousness and will of private selves to the extent that each no longer faced the other as an alien or hostile force. Although both conceptions of democracy roughly converge in maintaining the idea of autonomy as political self-mastery in the operative area of its jurisdiction, the quality of autonomy is different in each case. For, in the liberal conception, society is viewed as a network in which relations are essentially contingent on choice and the mediation of agreement. Members forming the whole are conceived of not as particles that make up a physical mass but as inherently discrete units. Within the nationalist conception, on the other hand, members forming the whole are not contingendy related but necessarily related; they are what they are because of the whole to which they belong. To be sure, any nation-state rests on shared identifications, on certain notions of solidarity. But while in the liberal case the basis of solidarity is mediated by political processes arising out of the exercise of choice, in the nationalist case it is largely a matter not of choice but of existential fact, like the origins of birth or the colour of skin. Here there is no question of what one identifies with; for existential facts are builtin characteristics, unchangeable givens. Civic identification in the liberal variant of democracy is no such predictable given. National unity is neither built-in nor in any suprapolitical sense prefigured, for the process of civic identification has to precede it; and, when it does, it merely generates unity, it does not guarantee it; outcomes are neither assured nor permanent. Whatever structural whole thus contingently emerges is not a substantive whole but rather something in the nature of an ensemble, composed of multiple parts that, to a degree, are autonomies in their own right, capable of staking diverse and potentially conflicting claims. If common identifications arise, therefore, they are not constitutive; individuals perceive a sense of belonging not directly or derivatively because they come from certain ancestors, are alike or resemble each other, use the same grammar, sing the same songs, or share the same jokes. Indeed, politically, grounds for identification can be known only in and through distincly processual activities, for they alone disclose what is common. In contrast to shared communal traits and sentiments, there is nothing spontaneous or "natural" about the discovery of shared reasons, the foundation of civic association. As Rousseau astutely observes, for every two people whose reasons coincide, there are perhaps a hundred thousand whose reasons are totally at odds.8 It follows that, while communal sentiments and cultural affinities possibly reinforce civic relations, they do not define them. Nor do civic relations derive from communal relations; whatever agreement emerges is not consensually

49 Democracy and Autonomy

predetermined, but rather follows in the wake of a modus operandi in which a cluster of demands contestingly presses for recognition, understanding, and support. The basis of integration, in short, is radically at variance. NATIONALISM AND PATRIOTISM

Yet, despite the gulf separating the discussed interpretations of democratic legitimation and political autonomy, noted proponents of nationalism have succeeded in finding a middle ground between these contrasting positions as, for example, Herder, Michelet, or Mazzini. Efforts in this direction have been made also by those seeking to revive the idea of patriotism, although it is not always clear if patriotism is to be disconnected from merely aggressive forms of nationalism or from nationalism as such. Some, unhappy with the stridency of nationalism, have decidedly opted for the second alternative, and have shifted emphasis from nationality to citizenship, a la Tocqueville's American "patriotism," without, however, wishing to go quite so far as to dissociate patriotism from cultural sentiments altogether as, for example, Jiirgen Habermas has done in his "constitutional patriotism" (Verfassungspatriotismus) .9 For Habermas, patriotism is a wholly rational quality, implying people's conscious commitment to their state's constitution. Moreover, implicit in Habermas's proposal is the attempt to divorce communitarianism from particularist exclusiveness. Unlike nationalism, constitutional patriotism therefore keeps the political image of a community of citizens separate from the pre-political image of a community of language, religion, race, or ethnically grounded culture. In contrast to Rousseau - also anxious to rehabilitate the concept of patriotism -, Habermas, burdened by the aberrations of Germany's Holocaust-producing nationalism, wants to believe that patriotism could serve as an alternative to nationalism as a civic bond if it were stripped of its customary overtones of irrationality. If love of country is for Rousseau the most intense feeling of intimacy a person could have, "a hundred times more ardent and delightful than love of a mistress,"10 it is for Habermas a vastly more sober affair of "calm passions," if not of pure reason. Another recent writer, though at one with Habermas in espousing a patriotism without nationalism, nonetheless opts for a somewhat less rational theory of civic commitment and democratic legitimation. Maurizio Viroli, in For Love of Country,11 stresses the principle of reciprocity (although he does not himself use the term); modern citizens, he says, "can love their republic, if the republic loves them" by protecting their liberty, by encouraging their civic participation, and by

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helping them cope with daily hardships, regardless of their ethnic origin.12 Interestingly, Viroli runs together what Rousseau, thinking about patriotism and citizenship, presents as two potentially separate sources of civic commitment.13 It is interesting, too, that Viroli is motivated not only by a historical-conceptual concern but also by an ideological-political purpose designed to provide an antidote to nationalism, in that its aim is to find a basis for democratic legitimacy other than that derived from nationalist-conservative thinking. In essence, Viroli is anxious to put forward a socialist alternative to enable what he calls the democratic left to counter the nationalism of the right. Although "republican patriotism" (his brand of patriotism) is to share with nationalism non-rational sentiments such as love and passion, it is to instil into people above all, in place of an ethnic culture, a "culture of liberty, an interest in the republic, a love of the common good."14 Viroli, following other socialist thinkers, feels that not enough importance has been given to the force of patriotism as a non-conservative option in the legitimation of democratic citizenship. He wants to make sure, therefore, that the democratic left will fight nationalism "on its own ground" and not "flee the battleground."15 Patriotism is to make up for lost opportunities. The point of these comparative observations regarding sources of democratic legitimation is to call attention to the rather uncertain meaning of "autonomy" in the liberal-individualist, nationalist-communitarian, or republican-patriotic conception of democracy. In its original understanding, autonomy principally refers of course to individual self-government, as opposed to direction by or subjection to the will of others. It rests on the belief that acceptance of such direction throughout adult life detracts from the self as a person. The ethical meaning of autonomy, moreover, acquired its special sense from being other than uninhibited freedom or boundless will. An action stemming from mere impulse is neither autonomous nor rationally accountable. Hence, in order to be either, an action requires freedom and will, not as impulses, but as reflective judgements and reasoned choices. But this is not all; for the full meaning of "autonomy," at least since Rousseau and Kant, implies more than reflection and rationality, in that it enshrines an objective and generalizable principle or maxim that we impose on ourselves. Autonomy thus combines two distinct components of choosing: one, defined by its subjective source, the other, by its objective content. Wghave to choose, and what-we choose must be accountable in rationally intelligible and normatively valid terms. Undeniably, neither source nor content can be abstracted from certain contextual givens. This is as true of the liberal variant of

51 Democracy and Autonomy

democracy as of the nationalist variant, although it arguably receives express recognition only in the latter, in view of its particular emphasis on communal-traditional embeddedness. All the same, for the present I merely want to record the obvious: namely, that in either variant individuals cannot be divorced from the conditions that circumscribe their awareness of the scope of their sense of autonomy or of the range of accountable agency. And even though the very idea of accountability would be an entirely vacuous notion if our personal self-understanding were not that of self-directing agents, we cannot really view this self-understanding in absolute terms. Indeed, it may in truth amount to no more than an act of faith, as Kant was honest enough to concede. But, act of faith or not, the question that imposes itself here is about the political significance of this personal self-understanding, about its bearing upon the stipulated link between the idea of autonomous government and the idea of accountable government. It is the inter-causality between autonomy and accountability, therefore, which is of particular interest. A distinction made earlier between "responsibility" and "accountability" is perhaps relevant here, albeit in a negative sense, in that the distinction generally loses force in democratic governance. For, in this context, we noted, the understandings of the two notions in effect coalesce. If there is a widely felt gap between political accountability and social responsibility, therefore, it poses the question of the role of government in bridging this gap. And this question in turn provokes the issue of the compatibility between the idea of autonomous government and the idea of paternalist government. Are autonomy and paternalism reconcilable? AUTONOMY AND PATERNALISM

Some attribute the gap between political accountability and social responsibility in liberal democracies to a lack of democratic will, others to serious structural defects, and still others to misperceptions of individualism as much as of pluralism. But whatever the diagnosed source, the commonly suggested remedy points in the direction of governmental intervention, with a view to forging an improved balance between individual self-direction and social altruism. Ideally, the aim seems to be to create something akin to what, when discussing Rousseau's recipe, I describe as "extended selfhood." The idea is that, by combining reasons of the heart with reasons of interest, people would come to enlarge their horizon so as to recognize the world they share with others. To this end, governments anxious to guard against jeopardizing the democratic content of their society's normative order

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Democratic Legitimacy

should guide public consciousness toward accepting a form of socially oriented autonomy.16 Clearly, the evidence of unbridled freedom is hard to ignore or whisk away; even at its best, freedom, however justly valued, may need to be tempered with other goods. All this, I feel, must be granted. There is a risk of reductionism, however, if creating the conditions for a deeper sense of social responsibility is itself taken for a move toward bolstering autonomous choice - as few have made more forcibly clear than Isaiah Berlin.17 Putting maximal emphasis on making the socially best choices may well augment the chances of democratic rightfulness; yet, at the same time, it may render the act of choosing indistinguishable from the object itself. For what now matters above all is no longer that we choose but what we choose. As a result, we mask the relation between the autonomy of the act and the responsibility for taking it; and we envelop in fog not only the essential basis of individual accountability but also the extent to which a collectivity can validate its claim to accountable self-government without some form of paternalist guidance, be it toward promoting social responsibility or any other worthwhile goal. Now, it is one thing if anti-democrats maintain that the bulk of humanity needs to be led and mastered; it is, however, an entirely different thing if democrats themselves, or those professing belief in selfgovernment, distrust the people and their judgement - not unlike Rousseau proclaiming that the people cannot be relied upon not to harm itself by repealing good laws or enacting bad ones.18 This fatal admission that the people, if left to themselves, might harm themselves, leaves few options other than those of some form of elitism, paternalist manipulation, or ideological moral pressure. Some democrats may seek the escape route of a Rousseauian "legislator," by instituting temporary "teachers" who would lead and advise without having any permanent executive power. Ultimately, however, democrats have to face the fact that one cannot proclaim the people's freedom to make their own choices and expect them to choose what they ought to choose - as Plato tells us.19 If people cannot be trusted not to make a mess of things, they can hardly be expected at all times to combine self-choosing with right-acting, or even to know how to go about it. A "civil religion" of a highly politicized type of education could perhaps hide the extent of supra-democratic interference by making people internalize the discipline imposed on them. In this event, however, it is hard to see how the opposition of self-government and paternalism can carry recognizable force any longer. To be sure, just as liberals like J.S. Mill allow that self-regarding actions may need to be curbed without denying the paramountcy of

53 Democracy and Autonomy

the principle of autonomy, so democrats might argue that interventions designed to promote the common good could never violate the principle of popular self-government. What is intriguing, therefore, is the implied assumption that somehow autonomy and paternalism are not inherently discrepant; people may be interfered with to ensure that the ends they choose conform with their true freedom, their true will or interest, or their true well-being. Far from usurping self-government, such intervention in fact helps a nation toward its putative self-determination, its capacity for independence. During this maturing stage, both the individual and the community need guidance. As Rousseau put it, individuals must be taught to will the good they see, and collectivities must be taught to recognize the good they crave.20 But, if liberals, nationalists, and radical democrats all agree that people need guidance and shaping, it does look as though the belief in political self-rule is suspiciously illusory. It could be argued, however, that once we hold the belief in self-government to be no more than an illusion, we are forced almost to the same conclusion about the European Enlightenment as a whole, on which the belief has fed. Politically, its message entailed the principle that obedience to governments should be based on consent and born of reasoned processes of thought, instead of being the work of fear, blind faith, or cringing servility. And even those who declined to see in this message the inference that people should themselves rule felt that the people ought to be given reasons for why they should submit to any will other than their own. Either way, governmental tutelage was to be eschewed. Governments are not to treat their subjects as though they were kindergarten children; as adults, citizens have a right to know what is demanded of them, and also why. Each of these beliefs found its way into the mainstream of democratic aspirations. Admittedly, there were outspoken liberals - or those who might be described as such - who welcomed and helped to shape Enlightenment thinking yet showed little enthusiasm for the implementation of democratic ideas. Locke and Kant, for example, though they agreed that most subjects ought to be granted the ability to reason for themselves, were far from certain that "the people" are or ought to be the sole or supreme source of all power and authority in the public realm. Thus, although they were foremost among those denouncing paternalism, they reveal, on closer examination, no lack of ambivalence in their anti-paternalism. Neither Locke nor Kant hesitated to demand competent political leadership or needed much pressing to concede that, if left to themselves, people often did not know what was best for them to want or to have. They made it clear that there was a place for regulations that were designed to protect

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people or to maintain a climate of order and security and ensure the continuity of social and economic life. Locke certainly saw no paternalism in passing or submitting to laws that regulate industry and trade or "hedge us in only from bogs and precipices."21 Kant, in turn, showed little reluctance to recommend appropriate "civic constraints" to counteract anarchy as well as despotism and servility.28 What is more, this ambivalence about autonomy and paternalism did not draw the line between non-democrats and democrats. The modern welfare state has few opponents whose dislike of it is based in their thinking it non-democratic or anti-democratic. Indeed, democrats usually defend it as something which it is in the people's interest to maintain, and they find nothing undemocratic about people freely opting for measures that will protect their well-being. A good while before the coming of the welfare state, Tocqueville reported that many people in America, who thought of themselves as out-and-out democrats and constantly upheld liberty and self-government, at the same time expected governments to be stronger in order to lead and have power enough to protect the nation. "Our contemporaries are ever a prey to two conflicting passions: they feel the need for guidance and they long to stay free. Unable to wipe out these contradictory instincts, they try to satisfy them both together ... They think they have done enough to guarantee personal freedom when it is the government of the state that they have handed it over."23 There is, however, no contradiction or conflict for those among nationalist democrats who think in terms of an integral oneness created by ethnicity. For them the people and their governments form a single autonomous entity. They see nothing wrong, therefore, in letting governments decide what is best for them all to do or to have the distinction between autonomy and paternalism has lost its meaning. It has been aufgehoben, in the dialectic of nationalist consummation. It seems, therefore, that neither liberal democrats nor nationalist democrats, however defined, hesitate to blur the distinction between paternalism and self-government. Nor is this surprising, for is it not the highest duty of government, if not the essence of political morality itself, to protect its citizens and promote their general well-being?24 Besides, there may be no other way of coming to terms with social realities, which demand that values other than the individual self-determination of persons matter and claim recognition. So, provided opportunities for individual self-development and self-expression are not deliberately excluded by manipulative moulding in some hidden form of governmental coercion, no harm is done and no problems, presumably, surface for people to worry about - even less so, it may be

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argued, if people on the whole are in favour of governmental measures that promote their welfare. Moreover, not every form of intervention and not all acts of paternalism amount to political intervention. Parents and teachers surely are supposed to do whatever is in their power to guide children and correct them, such interference being deemed in the best interest of those interfered with. Why not draw an analogy, therefore, between parents and goverments, or between children and citizens? Are not governments in the best position within a democracy to know what people want, prefer, or need? In point of fact, it is exactly this analogy that opponents of paternalism have been typically questioning.25 It was unacceptable to them that governments claimed the right to act on behalf of their subjects in deciding what is or is not in their best interest. On the other hand, once we assume that there is an authentic or real will as distinct from impulse or fancy, forms of moulding might very well be taken for mere aids to our putative will, helping us to attain what we would certainly wish to attain, were we possessed of an unclouded judgement or, to speak with Kant, of an enlarged mentality.26 Perhaps certain types of interference could then be looked upon as means toward the fuller realization of self-government, toward autonomy and democracy, thereby elevating them to a plateau of moral virtue. However, would we still be speaking about political self-government, autonomy, or democracy? The root of the problem lies, as I indicated earlier, in wanting to set people free and simultaneously to protect, enlighten, and moralize them. There is every likelihood that paternalistic intervention would succeed in protecting people; it is less obvious that it would liberate them. By introducing laws designed to serve my "true" interests, governments may indeed do the best for me. By acting in accordance with a law that forbids the sale of heroin, I avert the chance of becoming a drug addict, and a possible prey to vice. Such a law prevents me from being a threat to others, just as it possibly prevents others from becoming a threat to me. Clearly, the passing of such laws protects my health and likewise the well-being of those who depend on me, in preventing me from entering a life of crime and imprisonment. However, if I don't have the slightest intention of becoming a heroin user, the law does nothing for me; it neither liberates me nor protects me. Only if I crave heroin, or tobacco, or alcohol is there a chance for paternalistic laws to protect me; they do little, however, to set me free - they do not promote my personal liberty, they interfere with it. Merging autonomy with virtue, with so-called moral freedom, manifestly highlights right-acting rather than free-acting, promoting a hypothetically objective lightness, rather than what seems right to you

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or me. Such inner merging no doubt creates the appearance of compatibility between autonomy and paternalism, but it also clouds the distinction between spontaneity and conformity. While it loads choosing for oneself with moral imperatives - however admirable in themselves - it empties choice of its own distinctive meaning, of what sets it apart from heteronomy, from other-directed conduct. Moreover, the meshing of choice with virtue is apt to make it difficult to say when paternalist interference is helping to promote autonomy and democratic self-government and when it is crippling or destroying both perhaps even killing them with kindness. Acts of coercive pressure, if highly moralized, can clearly be more easily disguised and softened. It is interesting, therefore, that Rousseau tried to get around this issue by seeking, not so much to reconcile autonomy with paternalism, as to join liberty with law through an act of collective will, although he himself viewed such an attempt as comparable to the squaring of a circle.27 And yet Rousseau's underlying idea, the idea of combining freedom with social responsibility by means of political processes of consensual agreement, is not at all an unrealistic move. For one thing, it discloses that, since rightful choices cannot be relied upon in their morally autonomous purity within the realm of politics and society, legal sanctions cannot easily be dispensed with - as even Kant, we shall note, came to realize. For another, linking liberty with law acts as a reminder that self-choosing frequently affects others, as it itself is affected by others. Some blurring of boundaries between freedom and law, "self-ness" and otherness, self-choosing and rightacting, seems unavoidable. People act within a context of others, whose salutary and corruptive influences leave their mark on the laws we have and the choices we make. From this contextual perspective, individual defects, or inadequacies in our relations with others failure of nerve or weakness of will - are but the work of "embeddedness," of all that antecedes us and surrounds us. Individual conduct, though not simply the product of contextual forces, is nonetheless, as Communitarian philosophers keep reminding us, the expression of a selfness that is not an entirely self-created selfness. We do not, and cannot, altogether choose the ground we stand on; benchmarks of right conduct are not born within us but are things into which we are born, standards we learn to accept as being as necessary as the air we breathe, in order to make life in society at all possible. And if a measure of paternalism helps to establish essential norms of social reciprocity, is it not beneficial? Thus, while blurring the difference between autonomy and paternalism undeniably carries with it the danger of causing autonomy to

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seem illusory, it also carries a warning. It cautions against thinking of autonomy in wholly absolute terms, and hence counsels a certain circumspection in regard to accountability as much as to autonomy, in that accountability can then hardly be expected to encompass the whole gamut of hypothetically possible choices. Qualifications, in other words, cannot evidently be escaped or dispensed with. But if this urges a lowering of claims on behalf of both, it does not of necessity erode the working of their inter-causality altogether.

THE POLITICAL INADEQUACY OF "AUTONOMY" Clearly, without presuming a potential degree of autonomous action, we would be totally unable to draw any lines between making things happen and being made to do things. Similarly, without a measure of inter-causality between autonomy and accountability it would make little sense to demand or expect governments to account for their actions. It follows that to sustain the demand for accountable democracy in turn demands the operation of a degree of inter-causality or, at a minimum, a widely shared belief in the possibility of its existence, even if this belief calls for a trade-off between ethical autonomy and political reality. Certainly, neither autonomy nor accountability can be left unbalanced, just as validating democracy cannot bracket out the need for fusing autonomy with some other support, be it paternalist guidance of one sort or another, or some form of consent, natural right, or national will principle. Despite understandable misgivings about this need, autonomy, in its ethical purity, has so far proved incapable of serving as a legitimizing concept for political democracy, of the liberal or the communitarian version. The trouble is that, while self-legislation as a defining characteristic of autonomy has every appearance of a political metaphor, it in truth only doubtfully carries politically meaningful implications. Drawing parallels between individual and political self-legislation is therefore more deceptive than real, even though its seeming plausibility makes it all the more beguiling. Yet, it simply does not follow that acting on maxims that one accepts for oneself as an essential requirement of ethical autonomy necessarily satisfies essential requirements of political autonomy. For, why should individuals who impose obligations on themselves hold these to be pertinent to, let alone binding upon, others? Conversely, why should individuals accept for themselves the self-created obligations of others? In view of these asymmetries, it is not altogether surprising that Kant, one of the staunchest proponents of individual autonomy, feels impelled to concede that "civic con-

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straints" cannot be escaped in political society. Purely moral maxims cannot by themselves adequately ensure appropriate civic relations in the absence of legal sanctions. That freedom be combined with enforceable law is therefore now deemed necessary so as to counteract anarchic egoism, on the one hand, and servility of submission (Unterwurfigkeit), on the other.28 This, too, might possibly involve paternalist guidance, although such "legal" paternalism could be viewed as selfliquidating, as designed to promote the ascent of political autonomy, in contrast to the "degrading" paternalism that Tocqueville laments, under which self-government is insidiously eroded, in that people's wills are "softened, bent, and guided," to an extent that signals the descent of political autonomy.29 What, in essence matters most, therefore, is that, if there is governmental guidance, such guidance does not assume the form of underhand manipulation. In practical terms this means that governments must observe the limits of legitimate leadership and citizens must guard their civic freedoms. But, however we look at it, some supporting framework seems necessary in order to make autonomy work as a politically validating principle of democracy. In its application to civil society, it manifestly demands "freedom under the law," as Kant put it, and similarly Rousseau before him, and neither made any secret of the fact that he had enforceable law in mind. And enforceable law, surely, is something other than spontaneous freedom. By regulating freedom (or freedoms), laws quite possibly enhance values no less desirable than freedom, but such values are plainly external to and distinct from the possession of liberty. Put slightly differently, to obey a law may or may not have anything to do with collective consensual acceptance; but to obey or submit to a law because one has helped to make it is a special kind of action, and not a special kind of freedom. Rousseau, in advancing this causal idea of autonomy, wittingly or unwittingly managed to fudge the distinction by investing freedom in society with morality, thereby making what he called moral freedom a constituent of autonomous civic consciousness. At the same time, however, Rousseau left little doubt that it was not law as such which conferred legitimacy but its genesis, the nature and form of joint deliberation itself. In view of this, it might not be wrong to say that ultimately "autonomy is not the condition of democracy" but rather that "democracy is the condition of autonomy."30 In this way of thinking, democratic validation hinges less on moral freedom or freedom under the law, and a great deal more on political activity itself, on its degree of openness, integrity, and rule-governed reciprocity. And it is chiefly for this reason that the previous chapter put as much emphasis on regulatory norms as important clues to a democracy's procedural self-authentication,

59 Democracy and Autonomy

and that the present chapter sought to cast light on the intercausality between autonomy and accountability as the indication of a democracy's groping for a distinctive ethic of political Tightness. From this perspective, therefore, the manner of a government's exercise of authority could disclose the extent of interplay of conflict between what is done and how it is done. Simultaneously, it could also make more recognizably transparent the manner in which autonomy in the singular, defining societal unity, combines with autonomy in the plural, defining societal manifoldness. The danger of opaqueness in these directions needs little elaboration in an age of regimes that have paid scant regard to the morality of means or the plurality of ends. Liberal democracy is certainly not free from dubious stretches of political agency, but at least it makes no claim to the possession of a civic culture that renders it immune to internal tensions, such as those between competing loyalties of attachment or interest or those arising from the uneasy fusion of freedom and coercion. And, whether or not it is because it has refrained from making such claims, it has shown remarkable adaptability and an extraordinary resilience to multiple challenges and strains. In combination, these properites have probably enabled it to bring about the transfer of political power in ways other regimes have failed to acquire, thereby staving off excessive or frequent discontinuities. The inner dynamic of liberal democracy in the direction of normative self-authentication with respect to both the right to rule and its rightful exercise is not, however, without chinks in its armour. For, if autonomy is essentially a matter of individual self-direction, little evidence of it is to be found in its parliamentary form. Hitherto, at any rate, parliamentary representation has been channelled through political parties, and the control these parties exert hampers the individual self-direction of the people's representatives, frequently to the point of raising doubts about their being identifiably distinct persons at all, particularly within an institutional space that should be theirs to claim par excellence. In a real sense, therefore, this lack of representational authenticity must regrettably be viewed as the thin end of the wedge not only of liberal-democratic legitimacy but of the legitimacy of any democracy operating on the belief in strict party discipline. For it certainly clouds avowals on behalf of the paramountcy of autonomy as an overarching value. I know of no account which more vividly describes this impairment of autonomy, this brake upon the individual activity of democratic representatives, than that of Anthony Trollope, one of the most acute observers of parliamentary life in the nineteenth century. Although Trollope allows that, in principle, a certain meshing of party discipline

6o Democratic Legitimacy

and individual initiative should be workable in politics, he nonetheless finds that experience suggests otherwise. Hence he portrays the individual politician as a person who cannot help being "shaped and fashioned" by the party to which he belongs and to which he largely owes his election to parliament. Inevitably, politicians are "formed into tools" for whatever purpose the party sees fit, be it to build up or to pull down. Even stones of the strongest calibre, Trollope adds, whether they like it or not, are "quickly worn down to the shape and smoothness of rounded pebbles."31 In order to meet the demands of party discipline, individual members of parliament may therefore have to sacrifice their independence and their personal convictions, rid themselves of scruples and feelings, and, for the most part, give up the idea that they can speak and vote according to their own judgement and conscience. Eventually the pressure toward submission affects their thinking as much as their overt actions. Loyalty, service to the party, seems to transcend everything else, so that for members of parliament or, indeed, ministers of government, to be agents in their own right, personally accountably for their public acts, appears a most doubtful likelihood. In personal terms, this cannot fail to be a frustrating realization, demanding the swallowing of much pride as well as the hardening of skin, if not a fair measure of profound self-deception, in order to persevere. Individual self-direction, let alone the kind of autonomous agency that sets apart the great statesman, clearly is not easy to envisage. It is something most politicans merely dream of, says Trollope, as they "put on their harness," but something they rarely achieve as they succumb to becoming smooth, rounded pebbles.32 As a result, the meaning of autonomy (no less than of accountability) is sadly obscured and undermined, if not altogether distorted, in party-parliamentary democracy. The inner dynamic of liberal democracy evidently draws a line between institutional plurality and individual plurality within its parliamentary workings. Perhaps the one rules out the other; if parties are to be political forces that effectively compete for power, they can scarcely dispense with internal discipline. This, it is true, need not go so far as to reduce individual members to abject servants of the party or enable party leaders to assume dictatorial powers. At the same time, it would border on wishful thinking or sheer naivete to deny that such hazards do exist, particularly in parties that operate on the electoral list system. Yet, whatever the disposition of party leaders or the nature of the electoral system, there is bound to be tension between the idea of effective power for a party and the idea of effective autonomy for its individual members. It follows that, without invoking so extreme an

61 Democracy and Autonomy

image as that of democratic representatives being mere party pawns or voting machines - considering that constituency and committee work take up an important part of their activities - a good deal may need to be done before we can tenably dismiss Trollope's account as overdrawn or altogether obsolete. I shall later return to Trollope's observations, but there seems little reason to believe that, since he wrote, parliamentary democracy has changed so drastically that individual representatives now more frequently shape policies than they are shaped by them. This said, it may be asked to what extent politicians as members of democratic parliaments can view themselves as jointly autonomous, as being collectively masters in their own home. This is the question I address in the next chapter.

4 Autonomy, Civility, and Democratic Norms

Does the idea of politics as a self-sustaining realm imply the absence of regulative norms and thereby invite a regime of irresponsibility? Or, conversely, does the autonomy of politics demand strict moral concepts to qualify as a normative order? In negating both questions, I postulate two theses: that a normative order of politics and civic life can rest on principles that are other than strictly moral or legal, for the most part, if not exclusively so; and that democracy, as autonomous self-government, requires for its authenticating norms precepts that have been generated by its own procedural activity rather than having been imposed by extra-political authorities. A civic ETHIC: " R I G H T F U L D E C O R U M " Machiavelli could be charged with having failed to disclose the true nature and purpose of politics by reducing politics to what politicians do and confining himself to the description of their activity - and, if he was prescriptive at all, with having been so merely on matters of tactics and strategy. Perhaps there is some substance to this charge, but even if there is, it can hardly detract from the fact that Machiavelli was one of the first of modern thinkers to assert the autonomy of the political realm. For he made amply clear that politics, however limited it was in its scope, was nonetheless in its source and content a world of its own, a world of plurality and inescapable contingency to whose problems there were neither simple nor single answers. Whereas we might think of ethics and religion in terms of categorical, uncondi-

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tional, one-and-only answers, we could never think that way of politics. This audacious and ingenious recognition of conditionality and plurality undoubtedly prompted Machiavelli to call for standards in politics that were peculiarly its own. This advance toward a distinctly political normativeness was most closely followed up, after Machiavelli, by Grotius and Pufendorf in a direction that, more than Hobbes or Locke, encouraged the revival of a notion specifically designed to serve as a normative category alongside the intrinsic precepts of ethics and the compulsory precepts of law.1 This notion is the concept of decorum. Whether or not it was built on ideas of the Stoics, in particular those of Panaetius of Rhodes (i85-c.no BCE), the form in which it came to serve as a distinctly political category was first put forward, as far as I know, in Cicero's last work, De Officiis. In it Cicero distinguishes between the unfailingly right conduct of the truly wise man and the conditionally right conduct of those performing duties in the service of the public, which essentially grows out of the customs that help determine our feeling for right and wrong.2 The Tightness of the wise man relates to all final goods, while the customary Tightness regulates the practice of life in all its dimensions.3 But when he actually tries to define decorum, Cicero has difficulty setting it apart from the moral honestum. He says that he finds it "indiscernible from honestum; for whatever is graceful is virtuous and whatever is virtuous is graceful." Nonetheless he feels that, although it may be difficult, if not impossible, to formally draw clean lines of distinction, there is a difference "more easy to conceive than to express" between what is virtuous and what is graceful, between honestum and decorum.^ Mostly he speaks of decorum as fittingness, the appropriateness of actions and words, both in their timing and their relatedness to a situation.5 Stimulated by Grotius and Pufendorf to pursue further this idea of a distinctly political normativeness was a now little-known thinker and political jurist, Christian Thomasius (1655-1728). Although (justly) overshadowed by Hobbes and Locke, Thomasius nonetheless, on this issue - the question of a distinctly political morality - transcended the doctrinal heritage on which he had drawn. Underlying his search for an ethic sui generis was the idea that politics was something uniquely distinct, and quite different from both ethics and law. Like Cicero and Machiavelli, Thomasius distinguishes between political virtue and any other kind of virtue, but the grounds upon which he does so are interestingly different. Unlike Cicero and Machiavelli, more than contrasting the private with the public, Thomasius opposes two social contexts: the ethical community and the political society. Political society, although it may

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comprise intrinsic morality, "surviving sparks of reasonable love," nonetheless is not sustained by it.6 Its sources of cohesion, varied though they are, consist largely of prudential elements, of a mutuality based on reasons of reciprocity.7 And, while the unity of an ethical community is for the most part traceable to shared beliefs in a single and absolute truth, the consensual unity of political society derives chiefly from contingent understandings within a sphere marked by a plurality of truths, each in competition with the other. Moreover, the oneness of a community, being wholly credal, can dispense with coercion, whereas the contingent oneness of society evolves in an area of life that can call upon legal sanctions to ensure "judicious compliance."8 Though not unaware that the characteristics of "community" and "society" overlap in reality, Thomasius is determined to keep them analytically apart in order not to run together the norms of civic life with the norms of communal life. Citizenship and fraternity are each governed, he insists, by a radically different mode of rational justification. Intrinsic moral sentiments, like love, have a rationale in need of no further justification, in that their purposes are self-contained: their ends are within themselves, they are their own reason. Political goals, though hardly ever purely instrumental, are not intrinsic in this sense. Almost by definition, they require rational justification, relating means to ends or ends to means, and this kind of justification is challengeable in a way in which the rationality of intrinsic love or truth is not.9 In contrast to ethics and religion, whose values would be annihilated were they made subject to compulsion, politics, Thomasius concedes, could not prevail without recourse to legal sanctions. At the same time, however, he plays down the legal dimension of political legitimacy. Analytically separating structure from ethos, Thomasius distinguishes formal sources of political obligations from informal sources of civic mutuality such as shared standards of reciprocity. And it is through this emphasis on common standards as the source of a politically mediated ethos of civic belonging that his pioneering theory of "rightful decorum" acquires its importance as a theory of plurality. Perhaps it was the combination of an uncertain faith in the inherited doctrine of Natural Law and a profound aversion to a politics dominated by juridical law that fired Thomasius's search for an in-between ethic that was neither strictly moral nor strictly legal. In "decorum" he saw a sort of hybrid between "sound" (prudential) reason and a quasi-aesthetic sense of fittingness. Political dissensus, he therefore argued, was closer to disagreement over what was appropriate than over what was or was not in conformity with "truth."10

65 Autonomy, Civility, and Democratic Norms

Thomasius's opting for a somewhat toned-down moralism springs as much from a quest for a truly political morality as from a distrust of supra- or extra-political authorities, lest these undermine the autonomy of the political realm. Thomasius made no secret of his intense dissatisfaction with "theological" politics, which involved the conflation of church and state, and it was arguably above all this polemical motive that impelled him to transform decorum from being simply a conventional gloss, a mere veneer of gracefulness, into an indispensable requirement of civic mutuality and political association. In its absence, he maintained, public life would have to depend on communal fraternity or the mechanics of fear. Acknowledging Cicero as his great precursor, Thomasius, in actual fact, went an impressive distance beyond him, by proclaiming decorum a vital component of political rightfulness. Any philosophy not recognizing this, he bluntly declared, was "nothing but empty pedantry."11 RATIONALITY, RECIPROCITY, AND ACCOUNTABILITY

In keeping with this essay's emphasis on democracy as simultaneously a political and a normative order, Thomasius's political interpretation of decorum is here accorded major importance. Viewing decorum as something inherently distinct from both morals and law, Thomasius raises it to operational centrality among sources of political legitimacy. He associates with it three basic components: rationality, mutuality, and accountability. Rationality is presented as a potentially universal capacity in its practical application, provided the mind is kept free of "prejudice" spawned by "authorities." Practical judgement, unclouded by prejudice, is identified with "sound reason," which no government is justified in suppressing by demanding blind submission.12 Although it is the work of prudential rationality, sound reason is put forward as an adequate basis for an ethic of reciprocity, capable of serving as a practical guide in the pursuit of civic mutuality: 'You treat others as you would expect them to treat you."13 Accountability (Rechenschafi), the third component of decorum, is the pivotal link between rationality and mutuality. Both the founding of a state and the legitimacy of the sovereign are made contingent on the institutional commitment to render account, to give reasons for public deeds.14 Indeed, accountability is the most recurrent concept in Thomasius's approach to politics; it is the key to what he means by speaking of a normatively rightful (rechtmdssiges) decorum as the basis of civic association and as the paramount rationale of an autonomously anchored political morality.15

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Significantly, viewing all three components of decorum as instances of a decidedly practical judgement - and here Thomasius not only builds on Cicero but also remarkably anticipates Kant - he seeks to inject into his theory the express requirement of taste, of a gut-feeling for "what is done," which he associates with a far broader quasi-cultural and quasiethical quality than simply the art or knowledge of ruling per se. And it is not hard to see why such a broader conception of practical judgement cum taste is vital for Thomasius's approach to politics, since decorum is pressed into service not simply as a modus operandi of professional politicians or magistrates but as the normatively pervasive basis of political society as a whole. Thomasius himself refers to its sphere of application as the "politics of life."16 There is, on his own showing, no other ethic that can effectively do the work of keeping people together as citizens. The alternative would have to be the reign of honestum - in which case politics would really be redundant - or the reign of justum - in which case politics would function only through constant dread of punishment. Decorum, by principally invoking prudential deliberation and the sensibility of taste, and not strictly moral or legal reasoning, is to bear witness to the fact that "humans are neither saints nor beasts."17 It is to appeal and apply to what is rather than to what might be, and is not intended to replace the moral honestum or the legal justum. Nor is it held to provide a blueprint for an ideal politics. All it seems to aim at is to ensure that ordinary folk view each other as fellow-citizens and that governments bear in mind that people are generally able to judge whether their interests and wellbeing are taken care of. What J.S. Mill, some two hundred years later remarked (in Representative Government) could therefore roughly be said of Thomasius's thinking about decorum, in that Mill looked upon political rights less as guarantees that every man and woman should partake in government, than as safeguards that they be taken into account and not wantonly misgoverned. Thus seen, decorum qua governmental responsibility was to serve as the critical authentication of political power. Nonetheless, to find civic decorum resting essentially on prudential reasons may give rise to the objection that Thomasius gives rather short shrift to more elevated motives in politics. If so, it should be borne in mind that prudential considerations and a sense of situational appropriateness are not untypical components of political judgement in a world of practical and competing ends, nor are they out of place within regimes that lay claim to being democratic. Political actors in democratic regimes in which accountability is taken seriously cannot lightly ignore that what they say and do is commonly judged not by the nobility of their motives but by the actual outcomes

67 Autonomy, Civility, and Democratic Norms

they help to bring about. Such reckoning with consequences, however, we noted, is not necessarily devoid of normative considerations. Caring about outcomes may not qualify as strictly moral thinking (especially in Kantian understandings of morality), but this does not render it coldly pragmatic, opportunistic, or value-neutral. It merely helps to underscore that political accountability is not the same as moral accountability. But, apart from entailing a high degree of consequentialist implications, political accountability also presupposes a high degree of communicative intelligibility, if its rationale is to serve its function as a component of normative civility. And the underlying assumption here is that people are generally capable of understanding reasons when they are given, and by "people" Thomasius significantly means women as much as men, since he thinks them equally capable of using and comprehending reasons as of profiting from higher education and professional training.18 All the same, pervasive rational intelligibility is not all there is to communicative action in the service of political accountability. What matters equally is people's ability to form their own judgement. Almost sounding like a precursor of the theorist Michael Oakeshott, Thomasius speaks of bridging two distinct sources of understanding: an understanding born of academic study, and an understanding drawn from experience. In this bridging, learning to apply one's experience to practical action assumes primacy. "An ounce of individual judgement is more highly to be valued than a pound of memorized booklearning."^ Since perceptiveness and familiarity with human conduct are as important as logical reasoning, Thomasius is concerned no less about the blunting of sensibilities than he is about the perversion of reason. As in Vice's philosophy of history, humans are assumed to understand the world they themselves have made because they are able to gain an insight into their own selves and the selves of others that is denied them in the rest of nature.20 Knowing that "others are humans like us," and not trees or birds, makes it possible for us to grasp what needs and sensibilities prompt humans to act.21 In the final analysis, therefore, the concept of "normative civic decorum" rests on a theory of reciprocity in which human rationality and human sensibility play equally necessary roles in the prudential motivation of human conduct. In combination, they are the bedrock of Thomasius's autonomous category of civility, with its own self-sustaining ethos. So understood, civility is not the path to political morality, but is itself its core manifestation which, though prudential in motivation, has nonetheless its justifying validity within itself. And it is Thomasius's express insistence on such a self-sustaining ethic of civil-

68 Democratic Legitimacy ity that confers on this philosophy of decorum its special and highly novel meaning within the traditional trinity of honestum, justum, and decorum. Thomasius, it is true, did not link his theory of normative civility and governmental accountability with an articulated doctrine of popular representation. He did, however, more than hint at the need to broaden political participation by losing no opportunity of pronouncing that the majority of folk consisted not of fools or morons, but of selves who had grounds for thinking that reasons ought to be forthcoming for why they should do as they were being told. Thus, without transforming the inherited structure of government, Thomasius succeeded in revolutionizing the thrust of arguments in support of "selfgovernment" that were to be heard in the wake of his writings and teaching.22 Such, indeed, was their immediate impact, that Frederick II of Prussia, on coming to the throne, formally endorsed the principle of accountable rule. Yet, despite this immediate impact, in political coinage, Thomasius's main influence was largely cultural and intellectual rather than narrowly political.23 Nevertheless, in its groping for legitimating sanctions in support of an autonomously self-sustaining sphere of politics, whose normative source is for the most part neither strictly moral nor strictly legal, as well as in its decisive separation of the unmediated fellowship of communitarian association from the mediated citizenship of political association, Thomasius's seminal conception of "rightful decorum" compellingly merits revival.

NORMS: REGULATORY AND JUSTIFICATORY FUNCTIONS At this point, and in connection with Thomasius's prudential theory of reciprocity, the concepts of "norm" and "normativeness" - words of profound unclarity - demand elaboration,24 and not least because they combine in their connotation value-neutral descriptive meanings with prescriptive meanings, if not quasi-ethical imperatives. If sociologists are credited with being less opaque in their use of these concepts than political theorists, it is perhaps because they tend to apply them for the most part as value-free descriptive or classifying tools. They usually refer to them as customary modes of behaviour or customary standards governing specific social roles. Even then, however, their reason for thus applying them may not be as value-free as it would seem. Notably in contexts in which some persons are giving orders to others, norms serve to militate against arbitrariness, thereby setting apart proper procedures from improper ones, and thus help to dis-

6g Autonomy, Civility, and Democratic Norms

tinguish sheer power from legitimate authority. Although many of these understandings are shared by political theorists, they are not perhaps quite so rigorously kept distinct or quite so self-consciously spelled out. Regardless of the difference in usage or emphasis between political theory and sociological theory, however, there can be little doubt that in the political application of norms their meanings often bewilderingly multiply. It would seem therefore advisable to stipulate their precise use, although there is something worryingly enigmatic about "norms" when they are confined in this way, mainly because they refer as much to conventional do's and don'ts as to formally written rules regarding how things are done and why. Furthermore, both as customary ways of conduct and as formal or legal precepts, norms frequently combine, if they do not conflate, the roles of judges and juries, and not least so in discussions about political legitimacy. For what it is worth, it might therefore help to make an analytical distinction between norms that broadly serve as devices to control procedural democracy and norms designed to serve as substantive sanctions. The former are to ensure probity in the conduct of public business and provide guidelines for mutual civility in a sphere in which opinions and interests frequently clash; substantive norms, on the other hand, serve as justificatory sanctions in regard to content of policies. While the existence of either kind of norms does not prevent or rule out lying in politics, it does help to make its discovery more likely. Besides, in the absence of procedural and substantive norms, making political accountability work would prove an even more problematic task than it already is. Admittedly, neither governmental accountability nor public civility is, we noted, the discovery of democracy. Even so, each has become closely associated with forms of democratic governance in which rulegoverned procedures are viewed as indices of the rightful exercise of political authority. The issue to be raised, however, is whether or not procedural rules themselves ought to be the work of political processes rather than being apodictically prefigured by precepts stemming from sources outside the political system. For this issue seems to me a question that directly bears as much on the particular subject of democratic authentication as on the general subject of an autonomous politics. Failure to make a fundamental distinction between politically derived sanctions and extra-political sanctions could, I feel, obscure the democratic status of a norm's validating authority and, thereby, the difference between politically contingent Tightness and intrinsically necessary Tightness. To obscure this difference is to risk losing sight of the danger that intrinsic Tightness may defy discursive challenge and thus

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fall short of meeting the requirement of democratic contestation. Moreover, if imposed from outside, norms have their originating locale in a realm other than that identifiable with recognizably political institutions and political processes. The crucial question to be asked, therefore, is whether norms whose source of validation is remote or altogether divorced from the challenging vortex of processual activity within political democracies can claim to be democratically legitimate. What I am maintaining is that any regime whose norms are established by precepts and authorities outside the modus operandi of procedural democracy has its effective scope for democratic authentication severely narrowed, if not altogether preordained. For, instead of political norms guiding the democratic conduct of public business, political norms are themselves guided by extra-political norms, that is, by norms, whose object or sphere of application has little or nothing to do with typically political or democratic concerns. So fundamental a norm of procedural democracy, for example, as that which enjoins that no single party use law to entrench itself permanently is not one to be found among general moral precepts or articles of doctrinal persuasions. What seems critically required, therefore, is a degree of constitutive autonomy for politically sanctioned norms, by reason of which a democratically elected and democratically answerable body itself, and not some extra-political authority, determines what is or is not done in the name of the people at large. Democratic authentication, on this argument, demands a measure of relativity and contingency by virtue of which political norms are the work, and the visible work - for appearance counts a great deal in democratic politics -, not of some pre-existing Tightness, but rather of an ongoing process of weighing priorities in and through the verve of public opinion, the casting of votes, or the intensity of dissent. Whatever lightness democratic norms therefore possess derives, for the most part, not from this or that intrinsic quality, or from their alleged coherence with prior axioms of a given religion, doctrine, or philosophy, but from modalities of validation within political activity itself, with all its variability and endemic uncertainty.25 Of course, if principles in politics were like principles in mechanical engineering, they would be as readily applicable to practical policy as engineering blueprints are to building a bridge. Things could then be decided by top political engineers, with no need of going through endless quests in search of consensus, by way of commissions of enquiry, opinion polls, referendums, phone-ins, the sounding (and lobbying) of interest groups, or the bother of public meetings, electoral contests, and checks of parliamentary confi-

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dence. All the tissues that make up the infrastructure of a democracy and help to give meaning to its sense of public involvement could plainly be dispensed with. Yet it is precisely by means of processes of this kind, by acts of public awareness and shared deliberation, that the weights of normative validation are put on the scales of democratic judgement. How this is done, or perceived to be done, how regularly and how openly, largely determines whether or not politics is seen as evolving from within, as something recognizably self-creative or self-generating and, in this autonomously self-governing sense, authentically democratic. If, by contrast, political norms are essentially premised on the supremacy of some extra-political doctrine or authority, such norms indicate what I would call a "category reversal" of that democratic idea, according to which political actors (or citizens) directly or indirectly validate the norms that define and regulate their political existence as members of a nation. If it is objected that popular choice itself might demand the supremacy of extra-political authorities - religious or secular - then, surely, such an option, if generalized, runs counter to the very meaning of democracy as s^government; it in essence and reality denies what, defmitionally, it seeks to affirm. To say this is not to repudiate rules or precepts borrowed from extrapolitical systems of belief. It is simply to lend point to the argument in favour of politics as an autonomous, albeit delimited, sphere of jurisdiction; it is to uphold the idea that a democratic order of society is not the contrivance of some antecedently self-validating authority or dogma, but instead the mediated coming together of views by those who diversely press public claims, ground them, challenge them, or conditionally accept them. This is not mindless "pragmatism," a blissful disregard for principled argument, or, for that matter, disdain, let alone indifference, toward non-political norms. At heart it is a judicious reminder of what political legitimation is not, in that its normativeness is not something derivable from prepolitical theorems in the manner in which logical inferences are derivable from given premises. What this means, in effect, is that in the authentication of democracy there must be a space for non-derived political activity as such.26 DEMOCRATIC NORMS AND MORAL PRINCIPLES

How democratic norms in politics relate, or should relate, to other norms, notably to moral principles, is undoubtedly an important question, and one that has troubled political thinkers from their first reflections on the normativeness of politics and the state. Almost

72

Democratic Legitimacy

invariably, their central worry has been the wielding of governmental power, and their preoccupation has been finding means to set limits on this power. Undeniably, too, it was this anxiety that caused them to make political norms subservient to overarching supra-political principles and their presumed universality. None of this is surprising, for the reasons underlying this line of thinking are not easily disposed of, especially in an age that has witnessed the horros of morally uncontrolled power. The rationale of political philosophers anxious to curb governmental power is therefore by no means in question. What is at issue is the nature of the (unintended) implications traceable to this line of thinking. Three of these implications strike me as particularly puzzling and, potentially, ominous. The first of these implications is the danger of assimilating practical problems in politics to doctrinal problems in theology, philosophy, or science, invoking either transempirical truths that are beyond questioning or matters that are in principle resolvable through logical analysis or empirical testing. In either case, there is a tendency to reduce a political problem to an epiphenomemon, that is, to a spurious problem which, at bottom, is a religious problem or a problem of method, organization, or management of some sort, in the hope that trained specialists in these fields would know what to do or advise what ought to be done. Indeed, they would be the only ones capable of resolving any problem. Unfortunately, this belief in the reducibility of political problems is frequently coupled with a sense of fervent selfrighteousness: highly moral justifications are given in pursuit of solutions whose truth is beyond challenge. As history has shown, those acting on so elevated a plateau of moral and scientific certainty are capable of the most fiendish acts of public brutality in silencing dissent.27 The second, though related, implication is a contemptuous attitude toward seemingly endless processes in search of agreement. Are these costly exercises really necessary? Why wait interminably for these contingent outcomes of political mediation, of complex gropings after the middle ground, if knowledge can be had in less sluggish and far more effective ways? Thus we find Rousseau imposing the sanction of a legitimacy that is in reality independent of opinions and votes, for it antecedes them. Procedural democracy does not establish the general will, it only takes in what, objectively, is already "there," awaiting discovery. If procedures fail to uncover it, this means that there is a serious flaw in the procedures as a result of which they produce the will of all in place of the general will.28 In other words, if there is a Tightness that is always right, it contains its own intrinsic validation without regard to procedural modalities; it is a Tightness that transcends the will of the

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majority. A general will, possessed of transcendent Tightness, surpasses the contingent outcomes of democratic processes. Lack of consensus now implies that some are too dim or too selfish to see what is incontestably right. With all the stress on procedural democracy, therefore, Rousseau in truth merely uses it as a sort of confirmation of what is antecedently right, although there can be little doubt that he did place paramount emphasis on procedurally guided deliberation by the citizenry. And yet one cannot resist the suspicion that the selective process of democratic validation is in reality perfectly expendable. For Rousseau, as for some experts in engineering, there is but one right solution; the only and important difference in Rousseau's scheme is its anti-elitist belief in the possibility of citizens' themselves arriving at the correct solution, once they think and vote as citizens and not as private individuals - a possibility that, to Plato, seemed sadly unrealistic.29 Third, even if the universal lightness of moral norms were to be substantively granted, this by itself would not confer on norms a validating sanction that is identifiably political, notably in democratic terms. For while their moral content may be unequivocally clear, their political application may not; politically, they could be taken to mean whatever anyone wishes them to mean, and things could get mired in confusion. The move from moral norm to political action is not simply an automatic conversion from moral agreement to political agreement. We may readily agree to certain moral principles such as keeping promises or helping those in distress, but it by no means follows that such agreement would have any obvious bearing on who should rule, for how long, in what manner, and in pursuit of what particular purposes. And the danger lies in maintaining that consensus on what is morally right automatically entails consensus on what is found to be politically right in the wake of established processes of procedural democracy. This danger is all the greater when a political party, having the monopoly of power, stakes out the moral highground of what is to be done in the public realm; for it then blurs, if it does not obliterate, the difference between a Tightness procedurally arrived at and a rightness ante-cedently claimed. Any clouding, if not outright denial, of this difference is therefore worrisome. Certainly, no modern theory of democracy knows of a preexisting Tightness in and through a general will that is always right. And whether or not Rousseau believed in the necessary coincidence of procedural and substantive Tightness, he failed to let us in on the secret of a politically generated Tightness that exists before any procedural processes get under way. By contrast, democratic procedures, as normally practised in Western democracies, must be seen as essentially

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providing operational criteria of the kind referred to in chapter two, in that they deal with such issues as a government's mandate to bring in this or that legislation, as also with the manner in which it goes about implementing policies within its jurisdiciton. And moral rightness, surely, is no necessary by-product of such procedural Tightness. Unfortunately, however, even procedural Tightness may not be what it makes out to be. If procedural norms are used in a sort of loophole manner, for example, we end up with a selective kind of normativeness that is in truth but a subversion of political legitimacy and no less a problem than the conflation of procedurally valid norms with antecedently valid norms. Indeed, the damage may be even greater if viewed from the perspective of democratic legitimacy, as discussed so far. For, from that perspective, we cannot dispense with processual norms that make it their business to hold governments routinely accountable for what has been done in the public realm. And if processual norms are to do this work, and do it in the procedural way they are supposed to do it, they rest, in the final analysis, on something akin to Thomasius's idea of reciprocal fairness in the conduct of public business, an idea that is sustained by, and in turn sustains, standards of civic mutuality. In the absence of reciprocal standards, there can clearly be little ground for believing that differences in society can exist without citizens facing each other as mortal adversaries, or accepting that plural claims can be publicly contested. Furthermore, if no institutional mechanisms are in place to enable such standards to operate, or, if in place, they are ignored or in any other way seriously fall short of supporting the belief in procedural mediation, chances are that this could signal the end of a political culture and a profound crisis in civic confidence. Something of this nature, amounting to a collapse of faith in civic means of political accommodation - if not in the very meaning of citizenship itself - was strikingly evident after two decades of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia. Many of that country's inhabitants, including card-holding members of the Communist Party, could still recall the procedural modalities of pre-Communist Czechoslovakia. They remembered that political contestation demanded the existence of multiple parties, just as they were in no doubt that democratic representation was incongruent with elections whose outcome was decided before they even got under way. "Democratic centralism," they therefore realized, had very little to do with parliamentary democracy, majority rule, or the procedural settling of plural claims. For, whatever was decided was the work not of public deliberation but of opaque transactions within cloistered Party walls.30

75 Autonomy, Civility, and Democratic Norms PROCEDURAL DEMOCRACY AND ITS LIMITS

Admittedly, cloistered politics is by no means a Communist invention. That deals behind closed doors less frequently constitute an actual threat to the legitimacy of Western-type democracies is perhaps due to the fact that disclosure and the wrath of public criticism make the prospect of remedy a good deal less daunting. When, for example, general dissatisfaction was voiced in Canada with existing attempts of constitutional settlement through elite accommodation, governments at both federal and provincial levels felt constrained to widen or open up the process by initiating citizen forums, referendums, extraparliamentary committees, and constitutional assemblies. The example illustrates that procedural mediation is by no means a finished article in developed (liberal) democracies or, in itself, an absolute guarantee for a tension-free form of politics, even in the face of well-established parliamentary practices. All procedural mediation can do - and this is no mean thing - is to assist in safeguarding two rightly valued possessions of modern democracy of the Western type, at any rate: accountability and civility. Combined, they help come to terms with power and plurality in politics as also with the potential clash of multiple claims. Insofar as differences imply contestation, norms of civility provide boundaries of the procedurally permissible. But, for them to do so, the rules and standards they comprise must command general observance; as in a game, they involve self-limitations, which players must accept if they wish the game to go on. Similarly, accountability in politics implies that those who speak in the name of the people and are entrusted with power and authority to act on their behalf do observe the norms obligating them to account for their public deeds. Norms serve here at least two functions: they establish ground rules for the giving of reasons and they help to locate the agents who properly may be held to account. Both functions, in turn, call for certain modalities such as parliamentary question-time and ministerial responsibility, in the absence of which there would be no reliable basis for the process of answerability to come into being in the first place, let alone establish itself as an ongoing institution. Putting emphasis on these procedural modalities clearly rests on the belief that the concept of democratic legitimacy depends for its meaning and credibility on the how of political action, on the normativeness of processes and their institutional provisions, quite as much as on its purposive what and its justificatory why. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that procedural norms are no substitute for policy. However scrupulously democracies may guard due process, this cannot in itself serve as a sure path to trans-

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forming the aspired into the actual or, indeed, determine the nature and direction of political ends or the ranking of their priority. More worryingly still, procedural norms cannot in themselves be trusted to rule out the possibility that policies are pursued that are known to be intrinsically wrong, but whose outcomes are expected to pay off, at any rate in the short run, in terms of electoral votes. It follows that not only is there no necessary correlation between procedural legitimacy and substantive legitimacy in the ordinary course of things but also that political action may willfully cause their utter divergence. No obvious reasons exist, therefore, for presuming either that procedural correctness entails substantive correctness or that even seemingly correct procedures constitute genuinely correct procedures. This said, it would nonetheless be sorely mistaken, apart from being contrary to much that has been argued so far, to dismiss procedures as empty rituals. For one thing, emptiness does not define a ritual; for another, the perception of procedures as being empty has less to do with rituals (however understood precisely) than with a pronounced sagging of confidence in the conduct and quality of politics in general. And, more often than not, such decline in civic confidence is attributable to procedural rules' being ignored rather than overrated, as also to an insufficient recognition that the "common good" is in an important sense an integral quality contained in the manner in which public ends are pursued by those who, in the course of living and acting together, learn to share standards of mutuality and reciprocal fairness. Thus viewed, the common good entails a certain understanding of right conduct in the public realm which, while not strictly moral in character, is nonetheless, like "rightful decorum," not bereft of normative content in an ethically-prescriptive direction. For this reason, it is possible to think of a democratic order as providing a space for implementing shared goals and, at the same time, for setting the ethical boundaries to the manner in which these are attained. We may conclude, therefore, that although issues of democratic legitimacy transcend the ethic of regulatory norms, this ethic nevertheless crucially helps to establish a society's political culture as a culture of civility and rule-governed conduct. If it fails to exhaust political morality, it nonetheless discloses a good deal about political morality, about a regime's self-authenticating qualities. And it is emphasis upon these qualities that, above all, forms the continuum between Thomasius's pioneering theory of reciprocal civility and Weber's pioneering theory of procedural integrity. For in both theories accountably responsible governance forms the central idea - an idea that provided most of the driving impetus for the writing of this study and, in particular, the reflection of this chapter.

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As the previous chapter has so strikingly revealed, however, there is no necessary symmetry between autonomy in the genesis of procedural norms and autonomy in the assertion of individual representatives within democratic legislatures. In the light of this asymmetry, Trollope's observations have lost none of their pertinence. The only thing we may wonder about is whether they do not make too much of the personal element in a sphere of impersonal rules. Perhaps Trollope, like many others, transfers a way of thinking applicable to nonpolitical pursuits to the domain of politics, in which individual excellence is not commonly at a premium. Indeed, it may not be wrong to say that virtually opposite currents dominate political concerns as against typically social and individual activities at large. Thus, while in democracies policies are closely bound up with collectively sanctioned operational maxims and with emphasis on blending the self with others, in much of non-political life pervading standards extol individual competition and personal qualities of intellect or moral character. Although the so-called iron law of oligarchy has its force in all organizations, politics under democracy is normatively committed to the majoritarian idea. And even if this idea has its limits in reality, it does call for a form of thinking that centres on collective mediation and trade-offs in the choice of goals. Moreover, the goals themselves usually assume a certain generality of purpose in their normative grounding, when, in the rest of the social realm, private goals loom large, pitted as they often are against those of others. These contrasting standards are liable to clash within a person's civic consciousness. Conceivably because of this crossing of wires, the public media seek to overcome these tensions by portraying some humans as persons hugely towering over the rest of mankind, when, in fact, much that occurs in politics is conceived within anonymous committees or through the doings of behind-the-scenes bureaucrats. To be sure, emergency situations may call for bold leaders, men and women of genius in the mastery of adversity, for whom ample allowance must then be made for turning a blind eye to standards governing "normal" politics. And in such situations, the autonomy of politics may be practically indistinguishable from the uncontrolled rule of elites. However, unless we have to regard all politics as a state of endemic emergency, the source of its autonomy and the degree of its democratic authentication must be sought in the impersonal and inter-personal norms of ruling and being ruled, rather than in the individual idiosyncracies of political personalities. The status of norms hardly resolves, however, the discrepancy between the public philosophy of liberal democracy and its actual political practice, as noted toward the end of the previous chapter. I

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am not at all sure if this discrepancy is resolvable within existing parliamentary structures, but whether it is not not, it seems a bit of a puzzle why autonomous norms ought to imply in and for themselves the personal expression of autonomy by democratic representatives. Perhaps our perplexity over this discrepancy is to a significant extent attributable to the chief moulders of public opinion who think norms, like so much else in politics, too dull a subject to strike a public chord, and hence personalize matters by over-dramatizing personal qualities and blemishes. Unfortunately, they thus obscure the importance of guarding a nation's procedural ethic as a vital source of its political morality. For it can be an ethic only if its constitutive norms enjoin effective deference by being scrupulously observed - it is their observance that invests them with life. Bereft of this reviving continuity, they cease to serve as benchmarks of the kind of civic order that Max Weber and Christian Thomasius projected as both the outcome and the condition of a sound procedural ethic that is as distinctive as it is self-sustaining. Forming an "in-between" category of rightfulness that is neither strictly moral nor strictly legal in its source, it is meant to serve as the operational criterion of the relation among citizens themselves and also of their self-location within the public realm. The constitutive standards of reciprocity that are to sustain this realm and in return are to be sustained by its civic culture are intended to confer upon political instrumentalities their own moral weight as means-in-themselves.31 In view of their distinctive normative character as ordering principles, constitutive standards of reciprocity could be the means of creating a sense of civic mutuality sui generis. Indeed, I have hinted that such a sense, if widely shared, could be more effective as a move toward generating a consciousness of social responsibility than the attempt to transplant the ethical conception of autonomous selfdirection into the political realm. Arguably, this public consciousness could give rise over time to the kind of ethos that supporters of communitarianism appear to have in mind when they invoke the notion of "republican" traditions. What is different about the social ethic based on the classical concept of civic decorum, however, is that it goes beyond the consensual oneness of community thinking or, conversely, does not go quite that far, in that it merely seeks to establish a springboard for civic solidarity within a society of plural and potentially competing ends. Although ordering principles, as prudential standards of reciprocity, may therefore fail to give birth to communal fraternity and intrinsic rightfulness, they may nonetheless succeed in providing the basis for civic mutuality and procedural rightfulness and thus go some dis-

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tance toward making a discursive mode of acting potentially possible. To exceed this instrumental normativeness, and offer mechanisms and criteria for mediating or contesting policy ends, is, I am proposing, the function of substantively justifying norms, to which the next chapter refers as "performative" principles. The central point of the present chapter has been twofold: it sought to focus on a distinctly prudential morality as the ethic of political democracy, and it sought to put particular emphasis on the thesis that instrumentalities in politics are almost never value-neutral. Although ordering or procedural norms are conceivably less elevating than intrinsic morality, and less dazzling than epic attributes of personal greatness, they have nevertheless here been viewed as the principal begetters of democratic self-authentication and the critical source of civic association within society at large.

5 Political Principles and Plural Ends

So far our emphasis has been on procedural legitimacy, and we have looked at governmental self-authentication - the self-imposition of standards of probity - essentially through the prism of procedural principles. In the previous chapter, inquiring into the relation between procedural norms and the existence of an autonomous democratic ethic of politics, I suggested the possibility of grounding such an ethic through the notion of "rightful decorum," by dint of its celebration of civic reciprocity as a normative principle that is neither stricdy moral nor strictly legal. While making no explicit mention of democracy, Thomasius's notion of rightful decorum can nonetheless ensure that, as James Mill put it, rulers keep their hands out of the national till, in promoting accountability by governments and vigilance by citizens. Democratic validation, to be sure, involves more than guarding procedural probity, since it has to do with the why and the what of policy ends and not merely with the how of procedural means, although, as we observed, ends and means are never wholly separable in the morality of political action. This chapter seeks to adjust the balance somewhat by focusing on the stage of justifying (or challenging) the rightfulness of policy choices. Although its context is again for the most part that of mainstream forms of democracy, characterized by free elections, the safeguarding of rights and freedoms, and the existence of an institutional "space" for plural choosing, the chapter also speculates on the possibility of what Rawls calls "comprehensive doctrines" such as socialism, being capable of pluralization politically, by way of contesting alterna-

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live moves at the level of actual policy-making. At this level, I wish to call on the concept of "performative principles," in which the justificatory and contesting function exceeds the concept's ordering function. By employing it, I am trying to deepen the argument in support of keeping political consensus separate from credal consensus, partly for itself, but chiefly in order to contend that political pluralism is in principle compatible with the sharing of general core values. As its major theme, therefore, this chapter questions liberal theories that specify that the clash of such values is necessarily a condition of any political differentiation or contestation. CORE DOCTRINES AND PERFORMATIVE PRINCIPLES

In sharing the "in-between" status of civic decorum, the concept of performative principles is indebted to Hume's idea of blending philosophical beliefs with party-political ends, as put forward in his essay "Of the Original Contract."1 By means of this conceptual blending, "comprehensive" doctrines can be turned into politically employable principles; but, unlike sheer pragmatism, employing them involves a judgement that is both evaluative and factual. And, while they borrow from doctrinal-philosophical precepts, the converted or "refracted" products - our performative principles - have nonetheless a life of their own. Although normatively different from strict moral principles, performative principles combine, therefore, a particular what of proposed action with a general why of its purposive reasons. In view of this fusion, they could be said to relate to general doctrines in the way that particular perceptions relate to universals. For example, we would hardly wax indignant over injustice in a particular case if we could not presuppose justice as a universal value, even though we would be hard pressed to define it in the absence of concrete instances of wrongdoing from our own experience. By the same token I am suggesting that we view general doctrines as aids to setting priorities in roughly the manner in which we view universals with respect to particular cases. The point to note is that any universal, although self-sustaining, acquires practical relevance as a result of familiarity with particular instances. Concepts have meaning because we can perceptually grasp properties that our experience commonly associates with them; they make little sense otherwise. The metaphor "killing with kindness," for example, is a metaphor, because we know from experience that the vocabulary of murderous weapons does not include kindness.8 If we grant, then, that philosopical belief systems, not unlike universals, stand by themselves and can no more be assimilated to per-

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formative principles than a universal can be to the manifold experience of particulars, does it follow that, because there is no question of assimilation, there could likewise be no mutual interpenetration? Do we not, in the chosen example, grasp what "justice" means precisely because we find injustice, whenever we come across it, profoundly distasteful if not altogether intolerable? Thus, while universals or philosophical doctrines do not mirror an objective reality, they do constitute our vision of reality, in that they help to structure our interpretation of it. I refer to this linking of general doctrines and their interpretation as "interlacing" and postulate that the outcome of interlacing can assume plural expressions. A given doctrine of society, equality, for instance, is capable, on this argument, of yielding several diverging political understandings in the process of passing from credal generalities to performative particulars of political action. In "Of the Original Contract," Hume speaks of philosophical principles as being "annexed" to their practical use in politics like a "fabric reared to protect and cover that scheme of actions which a party pursues."3 In his formulation of "annexing," Hume points intriguingly to the content and multiple possibilities of interlacing as used here, in that it relates to specific forms of action as well as to diverse positions that individuals take, within and outside organizations, on particular issues of public concern. In this blending of socalled philosophy and politics, the intention may well be to protect or conceal partisan interests, as Hume himself observes, but this does not mean that "covering principles" are nothing but rationalizations, and Hume certainly does not suggest that it does. The crucial point, for our purpose, is Hume's recognition that the legitimation of claims in politics requires methods of authentication other than those derived from traditional or authoritarian sources. The "fabric" that a political party must weave to support its scheme of action demands forms of rational justification, that is, reasoned arguments, and not simply invocations resting on usage hallowed by time or commands backed by force. Tocqueville, who is closest to Hume in promoting this kind of interlacing, was no less aware of the danger of philosophical principles' being abused or sacrificed to "petty and transitory ambitions and interests."4 But he, too, refused to identify performative principles of political action with self-serving interests of sheer sail trimming. And he refused not only because this would debase the status of politics and politicians but also because it failed to correspond, in his view, to experienced reality. Principled argument, Toqueville insisted, does have causal efficacy in politics; if it fails to convince opponents, it at

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least makes reasoned and persuasive discourse possible and differences intelligible. Differences between parties could not be intelligibly political in the absence of divergences' being couched in the form of reasoned argument. The alternative to reasoned argument is either a shouting match or open warfare, and both could well mean the end of politics as human communication. Similarly, the denial of any need for open deliberative processes in the pursuit of values or ends, would imply a wholly elitist manner of pragmatic fixing, a purely ad hoc manner of doing things in the public realm. It is interesting that Tocqueville described cultures or periods in which reasoned argument carries no weight (or has ceased to do so) as "barbarian"; for them, action, including political action, would be a matter of sheer practice, of mindless doing, devoid of critical or reflective thought, indistinguishable from blindly executing commands, in total ignorance of any reasoned purpose.5 Under these circumstances, accounting for actions would make no sense. Accountable political action, therefore, demands a minimum of reasoned conceptualization, the perception of the particular through some universalizing prism by means of which reasons, seeking to justify a particular course of political action, get refracted. Tocqueville speaks of this reasoned conceptualization as a sort of "metaphysical" conversion, which, as in the case of Hume's "annexing," involves a certain interlacing between general philosophical precepts and particular political judgements.6 At least two points are worth noting here. One is that it is of secondary importance whether or not the philosophical precepts that are refracted are meant to disguise the true motives behind any legitimating claim; for, what counts as a substantive justification in politics is not the motivational source of claims but the mode in which they are presented, the reasons that are given for or against their acceptance. The second point is that to borrow performative principles from philosophical belief systems, in support of or in opposition to legitimating claims, is not the same as to invoke belief systems themselves. For what is involved in making these claims is a selective use of philosophical world-views, decided by what is thought most persuasive and most relevant to support publicly taken positions. I stated earlier that philosophical belief systems are capable of yielding diverse interpretations and applications, so that more than one political party could borrow from the same overarching body of beliefs. I wish to argue that such common borrowings need not in any way detract from the political distancing of the borrowing parties, nor from the sanctioning force of the performative principles which they distil. A legitimating claim is not any the less real or

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"substantive" for having drawn its justifying principles from within the same philosophical system of belief. Western democracies have demonstrated that it is by no means unusual to find that contending positions draw their sanctioning claims from one and the same philosophical "ism," since, as a rule, an "ism" yields more than one possible interpretation. What this indicates, I believe, is a certain gap, a certain performative space, between ideas and precepts as such and their refraction into principles of concrete policy. Among Marxists, for example, Austrian socialist leaders such as Otto Bauer, Max Adler, Karl Renner, and Rudolf Hilferding, learned very early in their political careers that applying Marxist doctrines to the complex reality of Austria-Hungary defied a direct use of Marxist revolutionary theorems.7 In a real sense, therefore, philosophical systems become tools, working equipment, in the hands of political actors who know that what matters chiefly is not intrinsic comprehensiveness or logical oneness but extrinsic relevance and appeal. Liberals and Conservatives, as much as Socialists, have had to face the fact that economic and ecological changes are capable of undermining a stricdy doctrinal approach, and that philosophical rigidity may prove politically costly. Performative principles, therefore, whether they elevate the status of politics, as Tocqueville held, or make politics possible at all, as I argue, are the critical means toward making general beliefs politically employable, both by "refracting" them and by "pluralizing" them. Without them, I would suggest, a democracy of discourse and diverseness would be seriously flawed, if not altogether unthinkable. Thus understood, performative principles combine a substantive content with a performative direction; they entail the evaluative ranking of ends themselves as well as their procedural implementation within a range of policy options. And, in this process of performative choice, they might be compared, perhaps somewhat improperly, to straddling between "faith" and "works" in that, as in the analogy borrowed from theology, they mediate between general articles of belief and specific projects of practical action. Admittedly, performative principles drawn from the same system of belief might be thought merely to constitute divergence of opinion over means and thus fail to qualify as political forms of differentiation. This, indeed, is a strongly held liberal view, which categorically rules out political contestation within shared ultimate ends. You simply cannot mix oil with water, according to this view. You cannot agree upon certain core values and, at the same time, speak of political pluralism. Where ends are agreed, the only questions left are those of means, and these are not political but technical, that is to say, capable

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of being settled by experts or machines like arguments between engineers or doctors.8 Against this position, I contend that shared core beliefs not only need not endanger political diversity but they may indeed help to combine diversity with civility, so that people can publicly contest substantive goals as fellow-citizens and not face each other as unintelligible strangers or outright enemies. This, in point of fact, is what Tocqueville maintained. A shared system of fundamental beliefs or social mores not merely did not conflict with a democracy of plurality, but quite conceivably helped to nurture it.9 There is, it appears, a certain discontinuity, or indeterminate space, between systems of belief and political habits of thinking and acting. They may reinforce each other but they may also run on separate rails. Thus, even where ends are agreed upon, in the sense Berlin speaks of ends as ultimate values about what we believe a good life or good society should be, such ends may be hotly contested once they are translated into concrete goals of national policy. Credal consensus, in short, simply is not the same as political consensus. Joseph Schumpeter gives a good example of this statement within the context of cold war thinking. Most Americans, he says, express the wish to serve humanity at large. Irreducible differences arise, however, as soon as political choices are debated. Some want the country to be the world's policeman and arm it to its teeth, while others think humanity is best served if Americans work out their own problems. Although Tocqueville remarked that the bridging of differences by compromise was the hallmark of American democracy, Schumpeter is right in saying that some goals defy compromise; the stakes are too high for the striking of deals, and compromise might "maim and degrade" the values involved.10 Thus, while it may well be the case that democracy does not work at its best when there are deep and fundamental conflicts over social values and basic institutions, it does not demand that such differences be bridged. The point at issue, however, is not whether value differences require resolution in order for democracy to work. What is at issue is that, even if there is a broad agreement on basic values, there can be sharp divergences about the implementation of values as policy ends. Once a shared "ism" is politically refracted, therefore, party differentiation is perfectly conceivable, not merely in terms of pragmatic choices but also by way of normative policy considerations. It seems, therefore, that there are valid grounds for questioning pronouncements to the effect that differences within a particular belief system are divergences only over technical means and not over policy ends. Clearly, if political

86 Democratic Legitimacy parties differ over the bearing of some core belief on specific issues or specific situations, they may well be differing over the effective meaning of doctrinal values themselves and not purely over instrumental alternatives. This is in part so because "means" in politics are rarely the sorts of issues doctors or engineers can resolve, for what is commonly involved are quandaries over value options such as jobs vs pollution, health vs sport promotion by the tobacco lobby, and so on, and not quibbles over technicalities. Largely, though, it amounts to saying that divergences are not trivial, value-neutral, or of illusory intensity merely because their basis derives from differences over performative principles and not from the doctrinal distance of fundamental beliefs. To draw the connection between credal (or moral) agreement and political agreement too tightly suggests therefore a propinquity that in truth is tenuous at best. SPACE A N D R E F R A C T I O N

By tiieir nature, philosophical (or religious) systems of belief are extraor supra-political, and, however widely shared by members of a given society, are still non-democratic in an institutional political sense as long as they have not undergone what I call refraction. For they are then outside the mediating space of procedurally generated processes and fail, therefore, to be within the scope of democratic acceptance or contestation. Only the refracting stages of political activity qualify, on this argument, as effectively operative phases in the genesis of validly procedural democracy. If, therefore, political choices are governed for the most part by extra-political authorities, it is hard to see in what sense their validation could be recognizably democratic. Refraction, for this reason, is not least important as the means of converting suprapolitical maxims into workable principles of democratic agency. The emergence of standpoints, publicly identifiable as political standpoints is, therefore, essentially the work of "performative" refraction; by virtue of it, general value preferences are transformed into implementational policies, and broadly credal ideas are turned into specific political positions. To a decisive extent, accordingly, what matters first and foremost in the aggregation and contestation of political parties within existing mainstream democracies is, I wish to suggest, the positional articulation of policy ends, and it is here that performative principles come into play. Whatever supra-political values people originally have in common, in some form of credal consensus, undergo fragmentation in the processual interval between general beliefs and political posi-

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tions. Of course, the converse is possible as well: credal differences in general beliefs may give way to political consensus when it comes to making implementational choices, to the stage of actually deciding what is to be done. By and large, however, the grounds for such eventualities are likely to be short-lived, issue-centred, and prompted by calculations of the moment. Even if the move at times assumes the form of a more lasting character, as the parliamentary alliance between the Nazis and the Communists did during the last stages of the Weimar Republic, more often than not it is a merely tactical expedient. The political Humpty Dumpty has to watch himself sitting widi others on the same wall lest he has a great fall. Once parties have established themselves as means of differentiation, they are not eager to lose their identities through more permanent alliances or forms of consensus building. The main thing to note here is that discovering the degree of political differentiation or the potential for political aggregation is possible only after the evolving process of refraction. Supra-political values in themselves, before refraction, do not yield this "positional" picture precisely because, by their nature, they are not meant to be tools, organizational devices designed just to serve the purpose of partypolitical contestation. Like all ultimate values, supra-political principles are not intended to be instrumental; their raison d'etre lies within themselves. If directly applied to the political realm, therefore, this could harbour the danger of political authoritarianism in its most literal sense, not uncommonly assuming the form of a self-righteous one-party system. It appears, then, that supra-political sanctions in themselves fail to meet the essential requirements of procedural and discursive democracy. For this reason the previous chapter spoke of "category reversal" whenever professedly democratic choices of policy ends are in truth the work of processes that are guided, if not governed, by extra-political doctrines and authorities. At times this move may undeniably prove the best of all possible worlds, if judged from some impartial Olympus. If judged from a strictly democratic perspective, however, the reversal is worrying, for both the choice and the implementation of substantive ends are virtually left in the hands of those who, not having been democratically elected, are not democratically accountable either. And, especially when decisions under these circumstances - regardless of whatever good things are at times brought into being - are presented as being in the best interest of the people at large, there is a serious risk that such "soft" paternalism bends the will of the people without their being aware of it - a thing Tocqueville feared most.11 For it undermines democracy from within.

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Having drawn a sharp contrast between core doctrines and performative principles, I nonetheless do not wish to overdraw it to an extent that might suggest mutually exclusive opposites. What I intend, rather, is to put emphasis on the interpenetration of distinct realms in the creation of an "in-between" that straddles ultimate ends and purely pragmatic "fixing." In part it is to uphold the autonomy of politics, however delimited; largely, however, it is to give point to the idea that the legitimation of democracy should not be the artifice of some outside body or comprehensive doctrine that has not undergone processual refraction. But this should not be seen as blatant ad hocism or as hostility to supra-political values. After all, performative principles are principles; that is, they are reasoned statements of normative orientation. I would not go so far as to assert that without borrowing from supra-political values there could be no principled politics, but, arguably, this may be so. What seems beyond argument, however, is that democratic validation is not a matter of logical derivation from antecedent axioms, comparable to the shaping of a logical syllogism or a figure in geometry, and, as Tocqueville put it, what may be of merit in philosophy may therefore be a vice in the statesman.12 Habermas, too, warns that translating theory directly into "political will-formation" cannot but prove "disastrous for political practice."13 At the same time, to insist on sharply distinguishing philosophy from politics is not to pronounce their total divorce, for interlacing would then clearly be devoid of intelligible meaning. The idea of performative principles, therefore, implies a processual stage in which parties forge their own particular interpretation or "definition" of concrete issues in the light of overarching theories, worldviews, doctrines, or ideologies. Without such a stage, political differentiation as well as political aggregation seems practically unthinkable. Overarching supra-political principles in themselves could not serve this function. No doubt, they could be looked upon, somewhat in the Natural Law tradition, as a kind of moral insurance against political arbitrariness and the abuse of governmental power. Unfortunately, however, such principles have proved, if not wholly illusory, nonetheless painfully inadequate, unless converted into tangibly political forms of normativeness. Something of this realization is captured, within a pluralist context, by R.A. Dahl's notion of "mutual guarantees" or that of "concessional associations."14 The need to curb political power and, in particular, political super-power, is beyond dispute; the world would undoubtedly be a safer place were it subject to supra-political authorities that super-powers would heed, and would have to heed. Regrettably, as recent events have once again shown, this is patently not the case; not even the most venerated spiritual authorities count.

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Alas, directly transplanting moral precepts into democratic contexts proves no less problematic, since democratic norms, as we have observed, demand being open to challenge and review. Whatever claims are supportable, therefore, on behalf of the permanence of moral principles, fail to be thus supportable on behalf of democratic principles. Institutional safeguards are clearly called for to stave off too frequent or too excessive changes, but even they cannot, in a democracy, guarantee absolute permanence. And yet, lack of permanence does not in itself invalidate norms, since the absence of everlasting validity is not the same as the absence of rule-governed conduct tout court. What it does mean is that, in the final analysis, the viability of norms in a democracy is a matter of balancing continuity with openness, for which, it is true, there seems no guide other than political judgement itself. Only it, and the experience on which it rests, can assist people in distinguishing sources that preserve an order of reciprocal public civility from those that threaten it. Any alternative to acquiring this kind of political experience and, with it, the skill of balancing continuity with contestability, therefore harbours the risk of drifting into the kind of arbitrary normlessness against which Max Weber uttered his most earnest warnings. PLURALITY, UNITY, AND SOCIALISM

In addition to the need for reconciling continuity with contestability is the problem of meshing diversity with unity. While political pluralism implicitly rejects a monistic understanding of statehood, plurality cannot do without locks and dykes to keep the tidal power of multiple divergences within bounds, lest they threaten the very fabric of civic society. As I have argued elsewhere, a society rent by powerful segments, each demanding exclusive recognition, is on the brink of disintegration.15 Plurality alone, therefore, cannot be relied upon to sustain a political order, as chapters six and nine reiterate. Bridging differences or, at least, containing conflicts, is clearly as much of a challenge for democracy as charting a course that allows for continuity without foreclosing change. To speak of "non-antagonistic conflict" is for this reason not necessarily to repeat a bad Stalinist joke. Two non-Stalinists, Hobbes and Spinoza, for example, said much the same, and they were not joking. For the point at issue is that while psychological antagonism as such may defy regulation, civic antagonism may not, once it is realized that uncontained civic rivalry, being politically self-destructive, threatens every individual's existence. The importance of coming to terms with "positional" plurality engages subsequent chapters, in particular chapters ten and eleven, in their

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attempts to contrast "public standards" with "public reasons" In essence, the problem consists in finding a way to keep discourse open, even if the outcome is merely a readiness to accept, or live with, divergences. Agreeing to differ is indeed often seen as the characteristic that typifies democracy and is, no less frequently, identified with "tolerance." However, to look upon tolerance as a cherished feature of democracy is not the same as to run it together with the notion of pluralism. To tolerate divergence in others is not necessarily to agree with them or to think them right; it means no relativism or scepticism about ultimate values. It is simply to put up with otherness, with those different from ourselves, but it in no way implies any liking or respect for otherness because it may possibly comprise important truths. Pluralism, on the other hand, does mean the recognition of many truths and their right to public expression. All the same, whether negatively sustained by tolerance or positively affirmed by reasoned belief in diversity, it is the coexistence of plurality with a sense of societal oneness that is the acid test of political pluralism, of the realization that to strive for measured coexistence is the only alternative to measureless non-existence, to chaos and disruption. The "state," as some sort of umpire, can no more be relied upon to prevent either than it can, by itself, be expected to fuse continuity with contestability. It follows that whatever unity is to be had must be generated amidst plurality. Neither the symbolism of the state, nor any particular traditions of judicial review, important though they are, may be enough to sustain this fusion. A pluralist democracy patently walks a tightrope, having to avoid procedural and juridical rigidity, on the one hand, and political self-annihilation, on the other.16 Any suggestion of pluralizing a monistic belief system politically must therefore go beyond formal statehood and constitutional courts to achieve unity, and beyond mere factionalism to achieve pluralism. And this beyond requires a certain space in which refractional processes turn doctrinal "isms" into politically contestable principles, together with broadly shared convictions abut the degree of civic unity that must go hand in hand with political plurality. Given the institutionalization of such a space, pluralist socialists consider the functioning of electoral and parliamentary pluralism perfectly thinkable, despite the sharing of fundamental societal values.17 If they are right in this, democratic regimes other than those self-professedly liberal could qualify for inclusion as pluralist democracies. On this view, beliefs thought to be endemically monistic - such as socialism - would not deny the possibility of plural refraction politically. Pluralist democracy under socialism is thus put forward as no less politically viable than

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pluralist democracy under capitalism, and equally compatible with the existence of a competitive party system. Any reference to pluralist socialism may no doubt seem academic in the most abstruse sense of the word, and not only since the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. For, no less than orthodox liberalism, traditional socialism itself has looked upon the conjunction of socialism and pluralism as something of an oxymoron. On the other hand, renewed interest in socialist expressions of pluralist democracy by theorists of market socialism does provide an impetus for mentioning the issue in this chapter. Furthermore, socialism is by no means the only belief system that finds itself confronted with serious problems in seeking to be directly transplanted into a political framework, in a system, that is, involving legal enforcements. Any belief system anxious to translate into a political democracy must be able to develop a modus operandi that can come to terms with plurality and at the same time resist the pressure of societal disruption. Clearly, if doctrinally credal command systems fail to convert into politically diversified societal orders, the prospect of widening the net of pluralist democracy remains exceedingly barren indeed. Much depends, accordingly, on whether socialism is understood as a purely social and economic creed - an alternative to capitalism and a market economy - rather than as a system of political rule. For, once a socialist economy is extended to society at large and not confined to self-management units, the question arises whether state socialism - as distinct from essentially communal or segmental socialism - must of necessity be a monistic system of political rule. As I have indicated, versions of a new and heresy-sounding conception of marketsocialism deny this.18 Democracy under socialism is now portrayed as a political system that demands the recognition of plural values and individual preferences; that is, as a civic order which, like the market, allows for competition and the availability of multiple alternatives.19 Implicitly and explicitly, this new understanding of socialism as a political order no longer sees in socialism an obstacle to pluralist democracy or the competition between political parties - there is to be as much political choice as there is economic choice. Admittedly (as I argue in the next chapter), the parallel between economic choice and political choice is open to question, as is that between socialism and capitalism as overarching economic value systems. Enlarging the area of pluralist democracies to include a politically pluralized form of socialism may therefore be subject to developments that neither the earlier guild-socialists nor contemporary market socialists have so far succeeded in making sufficiently clear to form a politically viable starting point. A socialist market economy

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may indeed involve features that go beyond promoting money/commodity exchanges, but there can be little doubt that it will severely tax the ingenuity of those taking the first practical steps to show that market socialism is the key to political pluralism. For it is one thing to revise the traditional position that socialism and a market economy are mutually exclusive notions, yet it is surely quite another to suggest that "market socialism" could serve as a sufficient basis for the emergence of a politically pluralized form of socialism. Two arguments put forward in support of market socialist claims are particularly problematic. One is the analogy drawn between competition in the market and competition in the political forum; for, as I shall show, it is an analogy that bristles with difficulties. The other is the belief that society can pretty well take care of itself in the absence of central institutions sui generis. As a reaction to Communist command socialism of the Soviet era, and possibly also as a critique of liberal democracy, a good deal of what market socialists have to say is illuminating and timely. Nonetheless, the application of socialism to a plural society, and the delicate balancing that political pluralism demands, may require more complex arrangements and, notably, more complex political arrangements. However, I had better make it clear that I am in no position to pontificate about the "true content" of socialism, and can only conjecture how the term may overcome its connotation of one-party despotism or of no-party surrogacy for the perfect society. I choose socialism as an example of the pluralization of a monistic belief system in part because of the vision of Guild Socialism and more recent expressions of Market Socialism. I do so chiefly, however, because socialism has consistently upheld the saliency of democratic principles as the validating force of a socialist order of society, even though it has often enough been objected that whenever socialism emerged as a political regime in Marxist revolutionary terms, it disclosed no conspicuous evidence of democratic practices, let alone pluralism. Also within socialist parties, as Roberto Michels so impressively discovered, democracy was a concept paid lip-service to, rather than an experienced reality. While the lack of intra-party democracy is surely not confined to socialist parties, the objection is by no means unfounded, since socialist parties could be expected to be more democratic than other parties. After all, democracy was for Marx the indispensable condition of socialism, even though he provided little guidance for socialism as a political regime, apart from pointing to the ephemeral Paris Commune as the model of a socialist state. And while he certainly had no wish to see diversity disappear, he just as certainly suggested no political pluralism. No wonder, therefore, that pluralist socialism has so far remained a

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socialism with an unknown face. What hopes, then, are there for socialism as a pluralist democracy? P L U R A L I Z A T I O N OF A M O N I S T I C "iSM"

Historically, socialism and pluralism have not made ideal bedfellows. For one thing, pluralism has generally been identified with the politics of liberalism. For another, most versions of politically interpreted socialism, including Fabianism and Marxism-Leninism, opted for a highly centralized form of economy and state management. With the exception of guild socialism, therefore, the idea of pluralist democracy under socialism verged on the absurd. Only with the emergence of "market socialism" and the substitution of more ethically grounded arguments for those stressing state ownership, has the pluralist idea made any inroads into the socialist camp. Paradoxically perhaps, the very pace of technological developments, by which nineteenthcentury socialists, including Karl Marx, set so much store as liberators, has, in our time, helped to revive interest in many a "utopian" vision that first animated men and women to turn to socialism as an alternative form of human mutuality. Their "successors," especially in Yugoslavia, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, urged the creation of selfmanagement units and the attenuation, if not the entire dismantlement, of the hegemony of state control. The worker's alienation, they felt, was not uniquely generated by privately owned means of production.20 In the light of these reappraisals, possibilities of plural ownership by means of trade union enterprises, cooperatives, and private undertakings, no longer seemed radically at odds with socialism. Emphasis shifted from planning to freedom, while "self-government" switched its meaning from political understandings to economic and social understandings. Unfortunately, this switch, often associated with talk of "liberalization," "pluralization," and "market socialism," tended to conflate abolition of the state command system with abolition of any form of political centrality. Only a minority of so-called revisionists sought to find for socialism (and Marxism) a reconstituted political employability, in an attempt to combine the preservation of core social values with a real measure of political pluralization.21 But it was precisely this attempt, with its accompanying flurry of debate, that brought the question of socialism as a plural political system into the open. Soviet intervention denied the possibility of observing what kind of institutional-political implementation the proposals for pluralizing socialism would have received, but it would, I believe, be churlish to deny that they held out profoundly exciting vistas.

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Of particular interest in these proposals was the projection of political differentiation amidst widespread agreement on social values, for it suggested that political contestation can exist without the clash of mutually non-reconcilable ends. Contrary to both socialist and liberal orthodox positions, the existence of overarching core values would not, accordingly, exclude the possibility of pluralist democracy or the authenticity of party-political competition. Indeed, it would underscore Western experience that the intensity of political contestation is governed for the most part by performative divergences and their justification rather than by the distance between competing world-views. On reflection, this observation is not all that surprising. After all, it is not unusual for people to appeal to similar ideals and principles in order to defend and justify dissimilar institutions, policies, or priorities; nor is it uncommon for broad agreement on moral precepts and doctrinal generalities to evaporate as soon as particular issues of practical policy come to light. If none of this is new, it nonetheless bears spelling out, for only too frequently political differentiation and political contestation are viewed as the exclusive result of clashing world ideologies rather than the work of performative principles in the wake of the refraction of ideas that had been originally shared. What commonly matters most in democratic contestation, accordingly, are conflicting "performative" interpretations of policy goals, and not competing core doctrines. On this view, and given Western experience or, less direcdy, Tocqueville's insights, there seem to be compelling grounds for questioning the view that to have a competitive politics that is neither trivial nor unreal actually requires the collision of fundamental differences of looking at the world. It does not therefore seem unwarranted to conclude that, regardless of the existence of clashing world-views, political differentiation and political contestation are in principle possible, provided that the natural tendency toward diversity and plurality inherent in most societies is allowed political expression. I suggested performative principles of justification as the regnant source of such plural differentiation, in that they bring to light the way opinions and loyalties potentially undergo a sort of metamorphosis once general ideas are translated into political objectives. Not that they create divergence; they merely articulate it, and, in articulating it, promote its public recognition. Furthermore, and no less significandy, by promoting the public recognition of diversity, performative principles obliquely serve as a reminder to power-holders that political power is not exclusive property like a piece of real estate, to which they, or any one party, can claim permanent possession.

95 Political Principles and Plural Ends As for an overarching belief system such as socialism yielding the possibility of validation as a pluralist democracy, only the future can disclose how far reality bears out the arguments presented here. One thing, however, seems unequivocally certain. Any route to socialism other than a pluralistically democratic one bodes ill for the idea that men and women, as citizens, can disagree without ceasing to be members of a societal whole. Analogously, any "ism" that is politically enlisted needs to be a house of many mansions, shedding its monistic self-righteousness as the repository of a single truth and, consequently, conceding the possibility that in politics there can be more than one answer to any problem. PLURAL ENDS AND CIVIC SOLIDARITY

Ultimately, what appears most called for is the creation of a space that proves inclusive enough to be in tune with the possibility of mediating divergences over policy ends yet nonetheless manages not to get trapped into a boundless pluralism unmindful of a polis and a demos and unable to forge a synthesis between a plurality of ends and a solidarity of interest. Pluralist democracies, more than any other regime, could perhaps be said to have succeeded in forging this kind of synthesis, by dissociating contestation and dissent from civic strife and political fragmentation, even though they may have been less successful in containing a pluralism that allows some individuals and groups far more power than "is good for their country or for democracy."22 The principal point at issue, however, is not so much the perfection of pluralism as its conditioning source, its basis for political expression: in particular, whether or not it demands the clash of core values. The foregoing discussion has responded in the negative by arguing that performative principles are not an illusory basis for party-political contestation solely because they may lack doctrinal stridency. And it has concluded that the existence of contestation does not lapse because its style changes. For it does not necessarily follow that a change in confrontational style means that the alternatives it yields are less real, less pluralistic, or less capable of checking an arrogant party in power. The extent to which the alternatives are reconcilable, however, or how far they ought to enjoy equal consideration, are clearly knotty questions that acutely raise the issue of the scope and limits of balancing. In the reconciliation between plurality and unity, the crux of the matter could possibly be the relationship between diversity and equality. It may well be the case that the principle of equality does not go

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far enough in prevalent democracies, notably in the distribution of income and wealth. At the same time, the alternative worry could be that emphasizing the equality of numbers could constitute a threat to both diversity as such and to making qualitative distinctions between rival choices.23 So viewed, the principle of equality may need as a balancing force not only the principle of diversity but also the recognition that plural ends pose the problem of their ranking. If, therefore, equality demands to be institutionally enshrined, so does diversity and its potential hierarchy. Social thinkers, including Marx, searching for the right mix, were not unaware of the tensions involved. Could one balance equality and diversity, or (as Rousseau urged) freedom and morality, or, as some contemporary philosophers suggest, liberal "civility" and the "civic virtue" of communitarianism?24 It looks as though these ends are not as easily blended as those who are unhappy with existing democratic agency values might wish. It evidently cannot be taken for granted that balancing ends resolves their inherent tensions. The problem of balancing values and interests will surface in one form or another in subsequent chapters, particularly in conjunction with visions of market socialism, direct participation, and communal democracy. Although there are people whose faith in finding a sure route to the most perfect balancing act is somewhat chastened, I doubt if many of them have become so utterly resigned as to question the point of any balancing at all. However, regardless of the chance of discovering paths towards resolving conflicts by balancing competing ends or clashing values, there is arguably within plural societies much to be said for their articulation in and through the kind of reasoned "fabric" that Hume and Tocqueville are suggesting. I have tried to show that in order to convert philosophical doctrines or general values into the fabric of political positions, a process of refraction is needed. I referred to its outcome as "performative principles," that is, normative statements that relate purposive values to policy ends and integrally combine a justificatory why with a procedural how by meshing forms of evaluative ranking with directions of implementational charting. The link between performative principles, thus defined, and core beliefs or ultimate values is, however, neither direct nor determinate. There are situations, we noted, in which dissensus on core values does not rule out consensus on (refracted) performative principles in support of actual policies; conversely, there are situations in which consensus on core values does not rule out partypolitical contestation on principles of their political implementation. Although there are core values that defy refraction and balancing, permanent stand-offs appear to be the exception in established

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democracies, and trade-offs seem the rule. I would, however, hesitate to offer any theoretically supportable explanation for this statement, since I know of no general guides for bridging differences.25 Still, if trade-offs do indeed typify the working of mainstream democracies, this may account for the fact that political forums and economic markets are often thought to be analogous. In the next chapter, I therefore inquire into the extent to which both realms can be said to lie on one and the same spectrum of justifying validation.

6 Market Values and Democratic Validation

Agency values commonly associated with the validation of liberal democracy are frequently attributed to the existence of capitalist market economies. This link is increasingly taken for an indisputable fact, and the management of political government is viewed as analogous to the management of business corporations. In this chapter I mainly explore therefore the implied identity between political and economic modalities. Recalling what was said in chapter two about the normativeness of regulatory principles, I here argue that the ordering norms of capitalism and democracy or, indeed, of the market place and the political forum, are not only different but totally at odds, despite attempts to posit "competition" as a bridge. CAPITALISM AND MARKETISM

The terms "capitalism" and "democracy" serve both as weapons of attack and as bastions of defence. Unfortunately, the frequency of their use provides no guarantee of conceptual clarity; if anything, velocity of circulation only manages to further debase their meaning. Much the same applies to the interrelation of capitalism and democracy. Broadly, there are two contrasting schools of thought. Theorists like the once highly influential economist Joseph Schumpeter, for example, view the link in a way that makes political institutions and practices appear to be corollaries of economic institutions and practices. Despite the fact that significant features of democracy, such as majority rule and equality of voting power, are untypical of capitalism,

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Schumpeter speaks of democracy as the "product" of capitalism, drawing close parallels between its ways and methods and those of political government under democracy.1 For other theorists, however, the relation of capitalism to democracy is more contentious. There are those who readily accept the historic link between capitalism and democracy without thinking it a causal link or a commitment to "possesive individualism."2 They usually take the view that, given that democracy is the offspring of capitalism, there is no reason why it should be dominated by capitalism. Some go further, arguing that democratic values, to be fully realized, demand a drastic curtailment of capitalism, if not its abandonment.3 Finally, there are those who maintain that the workings of democracy are seriously hampered not merely by capitalism but by any form of market economy. Self-described Marxists, they reject the market as they reject capitalism, seeing in both the chief source of cumulatively unequal power and wealth. There has been a change of thinking, however, in recent years, in the course of which the idea of the market has come to be viewed in a different light. To a growing number of socialists, the market is no longer by definition tied to capitalism; indeed, it is now endowed with a certain universality, having as much meaning in socialist as non-socialist systems and, what is more, being of as much relevance to political values as to economic values. After all, the market does combine choice, competition, and the guarding of contractual commitments. And do not choice, competition, and contracts form the essential bases of democratic rights and freedoms?4 Clearly, arguments of this kind could only enhance the analogy between the market and the political forum. Behind this recovery of "marketism," in addition to the blatant inefficiency of Communist "command economies," was the growing recognition that the ills of capitalist society were not principally competition and private enterprise. The worker's alienation in industry was not generated solely or chiefly through its being privately owned or controlled by the operation of supply and demand in the market.5 Coupled with this recognition, especially in the then Communist countries, was the widespread conviction that state expropriations in the name of social control in truth invigorated state power and the bureaucracy without improving the quality of social life. Gradually, therefore, pressure built up among a growing number of Marxists to consider dissociating the market not only from capitalism but also from state and bureaucratic control. Under conditions of industrial self-management, the market by itself was expected for the most part to ensure not only more efficient production but also a drastic attenuation of state power.6

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In their different ways, then, socialist democrats and liberal democrats came to agree in attributing values to the economic market that mattered to them as democrats, notably multiple choice, the opportunity to express individual preferences, and the ability to act upon them. Although at opposite poles in most things, prominent market socialists such as Radoslav Selucky or David Miller, for example, scarcely found anything wrong with Adam Smith's analysis of social mutuality in and through the market, or Friedrich Hayek's idea of society as a "construct" of plural interactions. "In civilized society," wrote Adam Smith, "man stands at all times in need of the cooperation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons."7 Smith's "civilized society" - a (qualified) precursor of subsequent understandings of market or bourgeois society, as possibly also Hegel's "civil society" - rests as much on economic interdependence as it does on a political or legal order, if not more so. Smith points to the vast scale of impersonal links, established through the market, in sharp contrast to the highly limited scope of personal friendship. Far beyond the narrow range over which personal links of friendship supply a sufficient motive for action, the market, through its impersonal ties of mutual interest and norms of reciprocity, accounts for the bulk of human relations. Hayek speaks of these relations, taken together, as a construct, that is to say, as a form of "natural artefact" insofar as it emerges without anyone's having designed or willed it. As in Smith's portrayal of market society, social mutuality arises as a structuring resultant, a social ordering contained not in intentions or planning, but in the random play of impersonal interactions.8 At the opposite end of the spectrum, Radoslav Selucky describes the market as a "basis for political democracy and individual freedom," in that there is a "direct connection between the universality of the goods-money relationships and democratic society."9 Foremost among the critics of command socialism, Selucky also challenges the identification of socialism with the abolition of private enterprise. Such an identification, he argues, may have been convenient for the Communist regime, but it did little for the liberation or betterment of men and women. Failing to produce goods and services for the market, the command system neither promoted well-being nor provided a basis for a sense of citizenship. All it brought about was "economic dislocation and political bureaucratization."10 MARKET SOCIALISM AND POLITICS

In Market, State, and Community: Theoretical Foundations of Market Socialism, David Miller explores the kind of political system needed for a

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socialist market order to function, firmly placing his considerations on the priority of socio-economic and ethical concerns.11 Paying tribute to the pluralist insight "that to do justice to the plurality of basic values we need to create an institutional balance," Miller points out that "a compilation of negatives" (no exploitation, no war, no environmental destruction, and so on) does not render socialism a socio-economic system that has appeal to a "broad constituency" rather than the traditionally targeted "working class."12 One important path to this goal Miller sees in socialism's turning away from elitist state planning and showing itself less inhospitable to a "marketlike" economy. He lists four specific aims for this brand of market socialism: productive efficiency, minimal state intervention, worker management of enterprises, and greater equality of primary income. The key idea in Miller's version of market socialism is "that the market mechanism is retained," whereas the ownership of industrial capital is "socialized" and all productive enterprises are reconstituted as workers' cooperatives, which make entirely their own decisions about products, methods of production, prices, and so on, yet lease their capital from an "outside investment agency."13 What is of particular relevance to our argument is Miller's portrayal of a market that is not only divorced from capitalism but, despite dependence on "outside investment agencies," virtually self-regulating, thereby rendering the intrusion of governmental authorities practically otiose. Miller refers to this vision of an economic market as the "pure model of market socialism."14 Presumably sensing its lack of realism, he suggests what looks like an escape move, an "impure model of market socialism," in which different forms of enterprise coexist.15 Uncertain also as to whether market socialism would be more efficient than a capitalist market, he circumvents both the economic question of how to salvage less efficient units or regions and the non-economic question of what kind of authority is to make such decisions, by shifting the argument to "other values, such as freedom, justice, and democracy at work," which now are to serve as beacons for the operation of socialist markets. If this model involves income inequalities, someone should decide if they are avoidable or, conversely, if they can be justly grounded.16 It is hard to resist the impression that Miller takes back with one hand what he has given with the other. Unable to sustain the "primary income" argument, he falls back on the conventional solution of secondary redistribution, funded by taxes, and, far from banishing the state from a self-regulating socialist market economy, he now brings back the state "not only to ensure that the market works effectively, but, at a deeper level, to ensure that the system as a whole conforms to ethical criteria."17 Clearly, if, according

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to Miller himself, coherence is a vital requirement of a theory, his double vision of market socialism may have a hard time qualifying. All the same, Miller does succeed in conceptually separating the validating requirements of democracy from the ethos and methods of modern capitalism. In his search for social justice, his thinking is an ingenious way of putting old wine into new bottles. Ingenious, because he seeks to combine social justice with a maximum degree of diversity and choice, with competition in the market that enables people with distinct tastes and preferences to "flourish as individuals."'8 By the same token, the ideas of competition and choice are posited as validating grounds for political democracy, as the corner stones of what Miller calls "a politics as dialogue."19 In view of this position and his expressed bias in favour of a pluralist understanding of socialism, there can be little doubt that Miller is as anxious to preserve a plurality of voices as any Millian liberal. Whether this position is easily (or at all) reconcilable with his vision of "community" is a matter I will return to in chapter nine. As in Selucky's theory, competition, exchange, and choice - all characteristics of economic markets - are viewed as equally important for the working of democracy, ensuring personal freedom, individual rights, and value plurality. These features are taken, therefore, as evidence of a fundamental parallelism between the market place and the political forum. And it is precisely this claimed parallelism that is the central concern of the present chapter. Not infrequently, moreover, the parallelism is overlaid with a bias toward viewing the economic realm as the causally most significant, thereby reversing the classical bias, according to which humans are taken for political, not economic, animals. And while the reversal is no better founded than the classical bias, the implied "economism" deserves at least a passing mention. This manner of viewing politics seems to hark back to a mode of Marxian analysis according to which "society," together with economic life, forms the real foundation of human association, whereas politics and the state are mere ornaments (or decoys) much like the icing of a cake; for just as a cake without icing is still a cake, so society without politics is still fully a society. It is a mode of thinking from which a number of socialist philosophers otherwise sympathetic to Marxian categories of thought have increasingly distanced themselves, finding that the concepts of social base and political superstructure have ceased to be applicable to the constellation of modern capitalism. Jiirgen Habermas, for example, has convincingly argued that in the present century there is no such thing as a non-regulated market or a politically neutral social and economic base. "Society no longer 'autonomously' perpetuates itself through self-regulation as a sphere

103 Market Values and Democratic Validation

preceding and lying at the basis of the state ... [thus] society and the state are no longer in the relationship that Marxian theory had defined as that of base and superstructure."20 In other words, in stateregulated capitalism, which Habermas distinguishes from "liberal" capitalism, "the market" as well as the social structure have become so permeated by governmental activity and political rivalry that it is difficult to imagine how the marriage between economic and political functions coul be rent asunder again. Whatever boundaries were still recognizable in earlier stages of capitalism have become blurred or totally obliterated.81 Moreover, the marriage has helped to create new legitimating loyalties among a broad cross-section of the population, inducing it to support the social and political conditions of the status quo, and, in particular, the intimate linking between capitalism and democracy.22 This has certainly been the case in most industrialized Western democracies that have moved in the direction of state intervention in the economy, social welfare, and education. Nonetheless, it would surely stretch the argument somewhat to credit state intervention with having been able to reconcile such potentially clashing policies as the protection of capital growth and the safeguarding of jobs in the face of industrial restructuring, the smoothing of trade cycles and the intensification of competitive markets, or the overlap of "left" and "right" to an extent that renders their electoral confrontation obsolete. The "marriage" may therefore be less solidly founded than Habermas leads one to believe. Conditions may undercut the thesis that capitalism and democracy remain happily conjoined ever after. Economic stagnation, mounting unemployment, and the drying up of education subsidies, social welfare funds, and health benefits, for example, might seriously rupture the consensus between democracy and state-regulated capitalism that has helped to legitimize the status quo, and instead give rise to new forms of social polarization. And to anticipate that polarization would prove conducive toward generating a climate favouring the kind of institutional balance that Miller envisions as the framework of a pluralist-socialist order of society is surely a depressingly moot point. By far the greater likelihood is that it would usher in more autocratic regimes and a capitalism of highly ruthless disposition. The structure of market conditions under socialism would arguably differ from that of market conditions under capitalism; nevertheless, the problem remains as to why and how socialist markets should be able to dispense with state regulation any more than capitalist markets. Even if democratization at the micro-economic level of factories and offices were to prove more feasible under socialism, this would scarcely

104 Democratic Legitimacy

resolve the issue raised, that is, the possibilty of social and economic self-government in the total absence of controls and policies at national levels. Moreover, might not such an emphatic focus on selfregulation in micro-social concerns obscure the macro-social concerns of the nation at large? Of these, four potential problems would seem particularly challenging. One is the creation of market socialism itself, the transition from existing forms of ownership into worker-owned or socially owned enterprises. The second is the vast supporting infrastructure in the form of banking, stock-exchanges, insurance, investment institutions, shipping, telecommunication, and so on, as well as the nature of mutual inter-enterprise relations. Third, there is the whole field of education, health, welfare, and public transport: would market socialists wish to include these within their market schemes? Finally, and most worryingly: who, in the face of plant and regional disparities, would ensure some overall balance, if not equality, and by what means? For it is difficult to see how such matters could be handled and democratically accounted for, countrywide, without any political mechanisms at national centres of government. Whatever trade-offs seem feasible as a result of replacing professional elites by self-governing entities, the problem of mediating some societal cohesion, some provision for the articulation of a common good (however interpreted) remains. We may quite properly seek to reduce the powers of central governments and their bureaucracies without wishing the state to wither away, abandon its unifying role, and dissipate whatever functions it and its central institutions can uniquely perform. Surely, with all the justified emphasis on devolution and the invigoration of local, regional, or provincial government, the need for authoritative decisions that are binding on society as a whole is unlikely to dissolve; a self-managing socialist market society stilll demands that certain standards and forms of life be shared by all members of a nation, and these want guarding and administering, as well as ranking among other claims upon public resources. And, for all these provisions and arrangements to be at all assessable as democratically legitimate, in this broader sense, patently requires certain central mechanisms to be in place. If this be so, what is or is not an appropriate market, capitalist or socialist, depends essentially on these institutions and mechanisms, on their legitimate authority, and not the other way round. It is of interest, therefore, that so strong an advocate of direct participation as Benjamin Barber, favouring segmental "mediating institutions in which all citizens can participate," nonetheless puts politics above economics.23 For this reason, however fruitful the idea of market socialism (in one or the other expression) might be, a good deal may yet have to be

105 Market Values and Democratic Validation

thought through about the extent to which, and the reasons for which, it would render political legitimation by means of overall channels of opinion and government dispensable. In chapter eight I will return to this broader issue, which involves the interrelation of segmental interests and activities, on the one hand, and national interests and activities, on the other. It may, however, be worth noting that, in contrast to Barber, a recent proponent of participationism, Paul Hirst, in his doctrine of associationalism, follows the philosophic tradition of guild socialism in viewing "social actors" as adequate corrective forces of the market.24 I believe this view to be misguided; and while I do not profess to know how a socialist market society is to attain that institutional balance able to combine diversity with equality, I am fairly certain that any move likely to defer to the diversity of wants without denying a sense of equality demands a fuller recognition of the political, per se. The main reason for raising the issue of interrelationship, however, lies deeper. I think that the widely held belief that the two realms are perfectly comparable in motivation, performance, and their manner of establishing values needs exploring. For this belief lies at the heart of analogical deductions that, bewitching though they are, give rise to profound misconceptions concerning the normative requirements for the creation (or preservation) of procedural democracy and the validation of pluralist democracy. On this more fundamental question, opinions transcend the division of positions on capitalism and democracy. While most points of view hover between the extremes of total separation and total merging, the extremes do shed light on what the analogy obscures. To take the extreme of total separation first. There is probably no contemporary thinker who has portrayed the relation between economic and political concerns in more polarized terms than Hannah Arendt. As did Rousseau, Arendt believed that, freed from the particularism of economic interests, political opinion could not but coalesce. Once people deliberated as solely political participants, they would not fail to become conscious of equality and solidarity as citizens who, at all times, seek to take "the viewpoint of others into account"; they would, in the course of deliberation, engage in what (after Kant) Arendt calls "representative thinking."25 As a result, understandings would emerge that all can share and can perceive to be directed toward the common good. For this to happen, conditions must be right; they must not confuse people about what goes with what. Now, few nineteenth-century libertarians (or twentieth-century right-wingers) would have dared to venture as far as Arendt does in bracketing out "life's necessities" from the idea of a common good or

io6 Democratic Legitimacy

the purview of politics, just as few contemporary democrats would dream of taking welfare, education, and similar social concerns out of the orbit of public policy. Yet Arendt does not take this route to denigrate welfare or education but rather in order to delimit politics within its proper boundaries, within its own sphere of public distinctiveness. It is to confine itself to that space in which it can best act and bring about change. By enlarging its scope to include "life's necessities," politics corrupts its essential nature and helps to give rise to a climate of vying interest groups and particularist ends. Public life, instead of serving as a space for honourable deeds, comes to serve the ambitions of wealth, trade, labour, and welfare.26 The opposite extreme is the totalitarian state, notably the Communist command system. Control here implies the right of the (oneparty) state to invade all the spheres of people's lives that normally are viewed in terms of distinct areas and separate functions. However, it does not require a totalitarian state for political and economic realms to lose their own particular identities. In their way, the English guild socialists, for instance, succeeded quite well in clouding the individual character of the two realms, although, unlike the Communists, they sought to minimize, if not annihilate, the central role of the state. Instead they favoured the dispersal of highly autonomous self-management units somewhat on the model of the Paris commune. Politics was relegated to purely administrative functions and, thus minimized, virtually trivialized, together with the state, as a unifying and centralizing organ.27 Whereas under the Communist command system, depoliticization created a phoney unity, with politics reduced to the enforcement of the "correct line" as laid down by the Party leadership, under "anarchic" English pluralism, depoliticization resulted from the negation of, or indifference toward, any centre of political unity. In either case, politics was viewed as something inherently peripheral. Even among the successors of the English pluralists, such as the socialist pluralists in Eastern Europe or forms of "associationalism" in the West, only a minority developed what I elsewhere described as a civic conception of pluralism.28 Between these extremes lies a large grey area extending from the idea of market socialism through that of welfare capitalism to attempts directed at the privatization of public bodies and services, in which the lines marking off politics from economics are diversely blurred, if at all recognizable. Particularly under conditions of welfare capitalism, to which market socialism is as critical a response as to the command model of socialism, there is an unmistakable tendency toward economism as well. And it was undoubtedly the perception of such a threat that induced Hannah Arendt, fearing that the economic and

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social world would swallow the poltical world, to put forward her extreme, if not absurd, polarities. COMPETITION: A CASE OF TWISTED CAUSALITY? In contrast to polarizations of economic and political goals, on the one hand, and their entire merging, on the other, there is a school of thought describable as functional analogism. While recognizing the separateness of economic and political pursuits, it nonetheless insists on their essential interconnectedness. Both market and pluralist socialists appear to follow in this trend.89 Even so critical a commentator as Alex Nove toys with this approach, albeit in reverse order, by drawing parallels between centralized political despotism and centralized economic planning. Viewing this connection as inherently comparable to the simultaneous existence of pluralism and free markets, he speaks of it as a "functionally-logical linkage."30 What, I believe, calls for examination here is the basis of the analogy itself. As put forward, the analogy seems to involve four assumptions: (i) that liberal democracy and pluralism are one and the same thing; (ii) that pluralism qua pressure group politics invites the diffusion of governmental power; (iii) that markets under capitalism are characterized by competition; and (iv) that competition is the paramount condition of pluralist democracies. The belief that there must be some fundamental symmetry between political tyranny and economic planning because there is a similar symmetry, equally fundamental, between pluralist regimes and free economic markets strikes me as a telling illustration of what might be identified as a "metonymic" fallacy. Features associated with either regime are thought to be constitutive of it, as if pluralism, for example, were uniquely continuous with liberal democracy or, for that matter, economic planning with political tyranny. Of course, if pluralism is to mean interest-group rivalry and, simultaneously, such rivalry is taken as definitive of liberal democracy, the relation between the two becomes trivially analytic. Little is gained, however, by this identification, since it conflates two traditions by obscuring each. In point of fact, these traditions are of quite distinct vintage. Thinkers such as Justus Moser, in the eighteenth century, or Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, in the nineteenth, were outspoken pluralists but by no stretch of language liberals. They espoused notions of community, mutuality, and custom that have nothing in common with the fundamental individualism and antitraditionalism of core liberalism. And if liberalism, politically, is identified with the ideal of the limited state, then the pluralism most

io8 Democratic Legitimacy

closely associated with liberal democracy, such as the pressure-group variety, almost runs in the opposite direction. For, if anything, it favours the expansion of governmental centralization, since it simplifies the strategy of their lobbying designs. These observations, if correct, might give cause for taking the identification of liberalism with pluralism, and the close linkage of (interest-group) pluralism with the diffusion of governmental power, with some circumspection. By the same token, we may look not a little askance upon the matter-of-factness with which free competitive markets are thought characteristic of democracy under capitalism. Not that Schumpeter ever held that capitalism inclined toward competitive markets. Oligopolistic and monopolistic practices, he argued, were by no means the exception but the rule; and it was precisely for this reason that he saw the close affinity between the two realms. Not perfect, but highly imperfect competition linked their character, confirming for him their analogous relationship, in that competing elites in politics were generally backed by uneven clusters of power. Having unequal clout, political competition reflected for him quite faithfully the imperfection of economic markets.31 If, therefore, fair, let alone perfect, competition is seen as the link between markets and democracy, this is not how Schumpeter envisaged it. Intense competition may be a boon to consumers, but it has little attraction for the capitalist producer. Rockefeller is reputed to have declared competition to be "the ruin of industry,"32 for it means costly uncertainty in a market that, even without it, is full of unknowns. With competition, for any one person to become a Rockefeller many of his breed are crushed or swallowed up. If past records are anything to go by, there is little evidence that capitalists ever welcomed competition. They usually sought the aid of governments against competition, calling for import restrictions and excise duties. And, with few exceptions, they have not even bothered to pay lip-service to free-trade ideas. Now, as for the link with democracy, history points in the opposite direction, in the direction of autocracy. Generally, capitalists find it easier to gain the ear of politicians and bureaucrats when popular control is at a minimum and when oppositions, if they exist at all, are not taken seriously. To say this is not to imply that capitalists would dismantle democracy to substitute for it autocratic regimes. It is to say that, far from being the source of free competitive markets or the cause of political democracy, capitalism is more likely to constitute a threat to the fuller realization of either. There is, therefore, no need to attribute to capitalism a ruthless quest for private gain or an inadequate regard for public and environmental concerns - however justified such attribution would prove to

log Market Values and Democratic Validation

be, despite the staggering environmental pollution under command socialism - in order to call into question the symmetry between capitalism and democracy or their shared ardour for competition and individual choice. The idea of the market, capitalist or socialist, as some bridging concept between economic interests and institutions and political interests and institutions, likewise appears now in a far less obvious light. This is possibly a case of historical origins being mistaken for the existence of operational reality, as if the courtship of a couple characterized the fortunes of their marriage. Even the argument from origins, however, put forward by Schumpeter and those who followed him, has its causality twisted. For if, of the two, one is to have produced the other, it is most unlikely that capitalism produced democracy, from which it does not follow that democracy produced capitalism, but only that it is probably closer to the truth to view them as inherendy distinct, despite the fact that democracy and capitalism generally put up with each other and only sporadically collided. Conceptually, though, capitalism offers no help toward understanding democracy in its liberal form, if only because democracy favours the limitation and the diffusion of power. Ideally, it seeks to project the image of maximum dispersal, of a multiplicity of autonomous centres of power, none of which is strong enough to absorb or dominate the others. Herder's pluralist vision of societies and cultures or, in our time, Dahl's polyarchal model, sooner succeeds in portraying democratic modes of self-validation than Schumpeter's analogy, which wants to have us believe that, at bottom, there is not really much that distinguishes justificatory values in political discourse from values that determine market transactions. Admittedly, values are at times pressed into service in order to justify political systems such as democracy that are no more than lofty aspirations, ideals waiting to be realized. For example, there is clearly an air of unreality about the capacity of democracy, as we know it, to generate an equitable dispersal of opinions and interests. It may therefore be objected that it is one thing to set apart capitalism from democracy by identifying one with the concentration of power and the other with its diffusion, but quite a different thing to present the diffusion in terms of plural centres' having equal degrees of autonomy and power. The objection is undoubtedly valid and, not surprisingly, forms the nucleus of anti-pluralist arguments. My point, however, is simply that, if it is true that the general thrust of liberaldemocratic thought has been in the direction of championing the diffusion rather than the concentration of power, then liberal democracy, in its doctrinal orientation, is not only different from capitalism but its exact opposite. In whatever way capitalism and democracy may

no

Democratic Legitimacy

have coincided at some point in history, their conceptual roots are both distinct and dissimilar. As for the parallels drawn between democracy and the market, it is undeniable that choice is a prominent feature of both; what needs to be shown, though, before a convincing case could be made for their conceptual parallelism, is that it is so in significandy similar ways. This would be no easy task, unless we could be made to believe that the act of voting in democracies is no different from buying commodities in the market. When shopping for a pair of shoes, for example, we usually get shoes, not umbrellas. In an election, however, we cannot at all be certain that the person or party we vote for will be elected, or, if elected, will implement the policies that prompted us to vote the way we did. In other words, whereas in the market we get the things we wish to buy in conformity with our choice, in the political forum we can never be certain that ensuing results will be in keeping with the way we voted. Overall objectives, moreover, may also be at variance. Political resources are commonly intended to bear on "the collective decisionmaking procedure of the society," whereas economic resources are "primarily geared toward achieving more personal aims through exchange."33 Similarly, motivational preferences differ markedly. Surely, preferences that enter into voting and political activity generally would be thought exceedingly odd were they to affect market transactions. The mere fact that choice is involved in both does not make them comparable, let alone analogous. Only in the weakest sense, therefore, or the most cynical, are votes like dollars. Although voting, like shopping, is an individual act, voting and shopping are not the same. My questioning the analogy between economic concerns and political concerns should not, however, be interpreted as an argument in support of the kind of surgical separation that Hannah Arendt puts forward. For it is not the overlap of social, economic, and political matters that is at issue here. What I am disputing, rather, is the conceptual linkage, the analytic comparability of the validating criteria invoked. And I do so because, quite simply, radically different considerations loom large in the two spheres under discussion. Unlike pragmatic imperatives and the choosing between negotiable ends, about which bargaining is not out of place, choice involving political ends has, despite cases of wheeling and dealing, a normative rationale that implies goals and values involving loyalties and commitments that brook no trading: they are positions, on which we stand and can do no other. And these positional grounds for choosing require forms of mediation that are inherently other than those involved in comparing values, bargaining over prices, or choosing between bananas and oranges.

in

Market Values and Democratic Validation

DECEPTIVE PARALLELS

Thus, even though the analogy is widely sanctioned in popular usage, as for example in phrases such as "the market place of ideas," I nonetheless conclude that it is a thoroughly misleading conception. In the first place, as I have tried to show, the value relation between units of exchange is altogether different in political contexts from what it is in economic contexts. To take our example: While units, as commodities, become objects of value through the market, units, as norms or ideas in the political context, lose their value on this basis of exchange, precisely because they then become mere commodities. It is the intrinsic properties, not the external rate of exchange, that form the basis of their value, on which basis ideas may be challenged or defended, accepted or rejected, but not traded. Second, I have argued that choice, in view of significant dispositional and situational divergences, means an entirely different thing within the two contexts. Finally, competition also has disparate functions in each case. In the economic market, it occurs through the anonymous interaction of supply and demand and terminates at the point of equilibrium. In the political forum, on the other hand, competition is quite dissimilar, despite the use of similar language and the common existence of choosable alternatives. For the typifying characteristic of political competition lies in not being terminal in the equilibrium manner; it is not to terminate discourse but to provide a medium for the existence of positional contestants. If, therefore, political competition is at all analogous to economic competition, it is so purely by way of entailing rivalry and choice. Such surface similarities undoubtedly do help to make the analogy plausible, but, at the same time, they also help to conceal much more important dissimilarities in processes of operation, in the objects of value, and in the manner values themselves are perceived. There could arguably be certain parallels between prices and ideas, in that, as prices in the market help consumers in coming to decisions, so ideas and evaluative judgements help citizens find their political bearings. What is incomparable, however, is the evaluative perspective itself, the way things in themselves are viewed. In casting doubt on the soundness of the analogy between economic and political forms of competition, I am not unaware of the force of a deep-seated suspicion lurking behind the view that political competition is feasible only where there is also economic competition. What this suspicion draws attention to is the need for a real measure of self-sustaining autonomy on the part of diverse organizations and institutions. And quite rightly so, I believe; because, without such plural autonomies, no form of democracy, let alone pluralist democ-

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racy, can count for much. For autonomy in the plural sense implies otherness - differentiation of goals that are peculiar to parties and groups and make them what they are. In the absence of autonomous sources of power, therefore, competition in politics is plainly illusory. It follows that the purely nominal existence of multiple parties is no guarantee for effective political contestation. Among erstwhile Communist countries, Czechoslovakia and Poland, to take two examples, allowed some form of multi-partyism to survive. What was missing, however, was the dimension of self-sustaining otherness: the parties were in truth puppets of the ruling Party, with no political power of their own. Whatever life the Party bestowed on them, it could just as easily take away from them, thus ensuring that the pendulum simply could not swing. It was, in short, nothing but a sham variant of political pluralism, a charade, which denied any genuine contestation of parties at elections or in parliament.34 Hence, to serve as a credible source of choice and competition, political pluralism must afford differentiation that is unimpeded by edicts of the ruling party; it must be open to all parties. Some may object that choice is little more authentic in Western democracies, in which party contestation involves no ideological confrontation, no rivalry of world-views. Yet, as we noted, such contestation need be neither superficial nor phoney, for it requires no deep philosophical differences for parties to provide genuine positional alternatives or for party competition to act as a check against undue arrogance on the part of a ruling party. All the same, while party competition is integral to a politics of positional alternatives, it is neither the sole nor the supreme value in the normative grounding of democracy - augmenting more competition simply does not mean augmenting democracy. Democracy no more is competition than it is a product of capitalism - historical links form neither a causal nor a normative genesis. Competition, then, is not all that matters. The sheer intensification of political contestation and the multiple creation of autonomies are at best only one side of the validating coin of democracy. The other side, as I see it, consists of reminders of a society's oneness, of its common concerns, associated, however imperfectly, with some shared understandings about what to expect of governments and what to expect of citizens in a democracy in terms of electoral commitments and civic commitments respectively. Neither economic competition nor political competition diminishes the need for such understandings, if a measure of governmental responsibility and responsiveness, on the one hand, and a measure of reciprocal citizenship and civic inclusiveness, on the other, is to emerge. In essence, therefore, it is a matter of balancing plural choices with shared visions.

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This, of course, is easier said than done. Nonetheless, giving maximal scope to divergences of opinion and interest simply is not enough; equally important is the existence of institutions and processes at a level that may promote "representative thinking" within a mediating "space," in which plurality as much as an overall vision of ends can find expression and a possibility to blend. Democratizing segmental activities could indeed help toward the creation of self-sustaining autonomies; production for the market could indeed forestall the build-up of unwanted goods; and competition in the political forum could indeed provide the conditions for electoral choices. None of this is being gainsaid. However, if political participation is to assume operational reality, entirely segmental activity can hardly serve as a substitute for more broadly based structures of association or channels of public discourse. Market socialism, should it fail to recognize this, courts the danger of proving politically sterile. Devolution alone, in and for itself, may be no warrant for care being taken of issues beyond local or regional concerns. And it is therefore hard to see how one can think of political democracy in a societally inclusive sense without any mechanisms for overall responsibility. Democratizing society by means of a plurality of self-managing enterprises is one thing and, if realizable, an arguably commendable thing. But, as long as decisions have to be made that affect the nation as a whole, there must be a national locus for making these decisions and taking responsibility for their outcomes. Unlike market operations, political decisions are taken to be traceable to identifiable agents. If no space is allocated to modalities of effective scrutiny, or if they exist for token purposes only, we might as well forget about public accounting as a democratic requirement in regard to decisions that bear upon citizens and not solely upon members of self-management units. For a sense of common citizenship to emerge and survive, there must not be too intense a preoccupation with segmental pursuits, for an overdose of segmentalism can envelop people in a sort of fog that prevents them from recognizing loyalties and interests beyond particularist ends. With all the emphasis on individuality and plurality, therefore, a political order unable to moderate segmental particularism militates not only against a sense of national belonging - of what it is like to view oneself as a Belgian, an American, or a Canadian - but also against attaining some civic consciousness of sharing common institutions and associative principles. It is possible that John Rawls's idea of "public reason" could be said to symbolize this shared consciousness in an extended sense. But, whether it does or not, segmentalism, feeding entirely on itself, and in intense rivalry with others, could cripple society as a society by denying any feeling of generality.

114 Democratic Legitimacy

Put slightly differently, "we have to find a political language that can recognize heterogeneity and difference, but does not capitulate to an essentialism that defines each of us by one aspect alone," as Ann Phillips formulates it.35 Moreover, while segmentalism promotes an intense loyalty to the group and its values, it seriously imperils individuality quite as much as national belonging - something that has been known to social philosophers from Rousseau to Emile Durkheim.36 At any rate, it does not seem likely that parochialism of this kind is going to enrich whatever notion we have of civic mutuality, public accountability, or national solidarity as a normative grounding of democratic statehood. Diffusion of power, validating democratic structures and distinguishing them from capitalist structures, is therefore not the same as political fragmentation and the loss of a sense of societal oneness. That is why I draw a line between "anarchic" pluralism and "civic" pluralism and why I believe that the question of limits and the problem of striking an appropriate balance between diversity and unity are central and continuing challenges, whether democracy is conceived in liberal or socialist terms. Indeed, these may also be the most taxing challenges facing any attempt to democratize a system in the direction of market socialism and value pluralism. I have made no secret of the fact that I have no blueprint to offer on the specific steps to be taken, but neither did I conceal my doubts about undue economism or segmentalism, both of which I am inclined to attribute, in agreement with Habermas, to outmoded Marxian as well as non-Marxian thinking about society, capitalist markets, and contemporary states. To a greater extent, however, this tendency seems to be a by-product of analogical misconceptions about economic and political modalities, their regulatory and authenticating norms, and their underlying values. Surely, the point of an analogue is to clarify meanings and not to obscure the fact that what is constitutive of one area is won-constitutive of the other, so that the possibility of one deriving guidance from the other is logically foreclosed. The guiding criteria for economic activity and the guiding criteria for political activity are simply not the same, despite apparent surface similarities. Nor do we expect justifications that public authorities offer to citizens to be those that business firms offer to customers, despite growing attempts to turn the former into the latter. In place of these misconceptions, I have sought to put forward an argument in support of a fuller recognition of the distinctiveness of these modalities. And if one is to take priority over the other, I am inclined to favour the extension of the principle of public accountability to certain practices in the economic realm - a recommendation

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that somewhat recalls the classical ethic of reciprocal decorum or the medieval ethic of the just reward.37 While I conceded that not all values that are claimed on behalf of democratic regimes correspond to expeienced reality, I found it difficult to imagine how a conceptual parallelism between the economic market and the political forum could bring us any nearer to a more genuine implementation of democratic aspirations or a more ethically sustainable legitimation of democratic practices.38 If there is to be a revaluation of democratic values, therefore, the drawing of analogies between competition in the market and competition in politics is unlikely, I fear, to lead to it.

7 Rationality and Accountability

Not all theorists of democracy who see parallels between the economic market and the political forum also see an identity in the rationalities operative in each. Although Kenneth Arrow, for example, finds significant similarities between economic processes and political processes, and compares voting "typically used to make 'political' decisions" with the market mechanism "typically used to make 'economic' decisions," nevertheless insists that their respective rationalities are fundamentally different.1 Unlike some contemporary market enthusiasts, Arrow categorically denies that the market mechanism is capable of exercising any social welfare functions unless it is "deliberately manipulated" to do so, since its dominant rationality invokes essentially "pragmatic imperatives."2 And, not unlike Harold Lasswell, who describes governing as a "rather blatant form of profiteering," Arrow sardonically remarks that in "advanced democracies," such as the United States, prestige goes to profiteers, but he nonetheless refuses to put primacy on economic forces as the determinants of political life.3 In short, Arrow does not get carried away by surface similarities between economic pursuits and political pursuits, for "rationality" does not mean the same in both cases. There are undeniably parallels, as there are overlaps between voting in the political forum and choosing goods and services in the economic market. Possibly, too, there need be no sharp contrasts in motivation. Market decisions are not invariably selfish, and political decisions or objectives are not invariably selfless. People clearly do get involved in politics for self-serving reasons, out of ambition, quest for

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power, or business designs in anticipation of personal gain of one kind or another. It might well be the exception rather than the rule that men and women turn to politics solely out of joy of acting with others, as Hannah Arendt, for example, would have them do.4 However, even as an instrumentality - in order to secure government contracts, a pension for life at any age, or jobs for constituency members, for instance - the political forum demands a justifying rationality that is quite different from the rationality of market transaction. Notions like justice, fairness, or fittingness, rarely fail to enter political discourse. And while market activity consists of myriad impersonal interactions that obscure the locus of individual decisions, political actions are as a rule traceable to specific persons who can be called upon to render account. Particularly in democracies in which public agency is subject to institutional accountability on a continuous basis, there is a marked difference between political pursuits and economic pursuits. And it is in conjunction with the rendering of account in politics that Arrow's emphasis on rationality as a distinguishing criterion of democratic agency assumes its particular value and importance. The big hurdle, undoubtedly, is the word "rationality."5 What in particular do we have in mind when we are using it? Any set of actions can arguably be described, explained, or justified in a number of different ways. But, as others have discovered, it is notoriously difficult to decide which descriptions, explanation, or justifications qualify as rational. Moreover the practice of using a word like "rational" as some sort of weapon, in the manner of an ideological club to beat one's opponents with, does not help to make things any easier, since, whenever this happens, it in effect empties the category of any distinctive content. Once rationality is applied to all kinds of situations in which any cognate term would do as well, we are compelled to deduce its meaning from the context in which it is employed. The context suffuses the content, so that whatever distinctive content "rationality" is supposed to have gravitates away from itself. Not surprisingly, its status as a conceptual category is somewhat in doubt. In this chapter I explore the possibility of a rational integrity in accounting for actions by distinguishing between reasons from and reasons for. I wish to demonstrate how reasons for, as immanently purposive, relate to beliefs and commitments and, through them, to political action. In so doing, I seek to delineate what kind of rationality is relevant to, or compatible with, politics, and the extent to which it can be said to serve as a normative causality in the authentication of a politics of democracy.

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In referring to reasons for as immanently purposive, I think of them as structural ingredients of action proper as opposed to habitual behaviour or sheer accident. Usually two meanings of rationality, so understood, are contrasted: a substantive meaning and an instrumental meaning. The former is generally associated with indisputable truth or lightness, that is, with a quality that stands on its own and calls for no further justification, unlike instrumental rationality. For there is something axiomatic about substantive rationality that renders it beyond question. Just as in a truly rational society no one would question the imperativeness of moral principles, so, presumably, in a perfectly rational political society, no citizen would be in doubt about its need to serve the common good.6 Would, however, a rationality that carries the self-evidence of having truth and lightness on its side satisfy democratic conditions, under which governments are expected to be challengeable on the assumption that their rationality carries no such self-evidence? What, then, can be viewed as the minimal requirements of political rationality in a democracy? Three requirements, it seems, qualify reasons in this direction. One is a certain generality of purpose: they must be capable of having public appeal, and not appear privately self-serving. The second is that reasons need to be potentially shareable: reasons thought to be appropriate grounds for acting by some should be found compelling by others as well. And, third, notably in the context of accountable democracies, reasons must be able to explain or justify actions in terms that are generally intelligible, whether or not they are found generally acceptable. In all three instances - being non-subjective, graspable, and accountable - it is the reasons for bringing something about that matter, rather than reasons from which actions are motivated, although it may not in practice always be possible to keep them apart. Such an analytical distinction in essence echoes Hobbes's "two faces" of freedom, although it could be said to resemble also the more familiar distinction between negative and positive freedom.? In Hobbes's formulation of the two faces, one is turned to antecedent conditions and external impediments, and the other is directed to one's internal use of reason and judgement "to do what he would."8 It is above all the use of reason and judgement that is at issue here. We need judgement, however minimal, to appropriate reasons for to serve as our reasons for acting, and it is only with these reasons that we are also in the position to "own up," to acknowledge the authorship of a deed. If all that was done resulted from psycho-physical causes, because of stress, the influence of drugs, or deprivations of one kind

ng Rationality and Accountability or another, we could hardly give a rational account of what we did by citing reasons for. Strictly speaking, it is debatable whether we could at all be held accountable in such circumstances, although we may not be found blameless. The ability to render account, accordingly, rests on the possession of some knowledge of what we were trying to bring about, and not on antecedent conditions that "made us do" what we did. I propose to argue, therefore, that it is only reasons for that can form the basis of rational discourse and constitute the subject of democratic accounting. And, whether of not this purposive rationality qualifies as substantive rationality, it suffices, I shall suggest, for holding public agents individually or collectively accountable and, in a democracy, for expecting them to own up as a matter of institutional requirement. We should not expect, however, that the sharing of reasons and their capacity to make purposive sense be problem-free, partly because of the plurality of opinions and interests, but partly also because of potential misperceptions in the use of language, especially since communicative reasons in politics are not usually the kind of reasons that characterize scholarly or scientific discourse. Political debate requires no precise and epistemically grounded claims as indispensable prerequisites, for it is the work not of indisputable truth but of challengeable opinion, in which (in principle) all can have their say as citizens in a democracy. In view of these contrasting requirements, no demanding standards have to be met in order to establish one's cognitive credentials for citizenship. While rationality is posited as an essential ingredient of public accounting, it is therefore viewed not as a variant of truth in its pristine purity, but as a variant of reasoned opinion based on "reasons for." And while truthfulness in public utterances is assuredly desirable, it is neither the same as truth nor can it easily be made a qualifying condition of a person's rightful claim to participate in that associative culture known as political democracy. COMMUNICATIVE ACTION! REASONS FOR AND FROM

Habermas's consensually oriented theory of communication, taken as a political guide, is therefore somewhat worrisome. As Elster observes, it could at best "lead to paternalism, [and] at worst the high ideals of rational discussion could create a self-elected elite."9 Moreover, even if ideal conditions did materialize, making "truly rational" debate possible, who would check or ensure that the ideal conditions were being maintained? Some intellectual authority, not unlike Rousseau's Law-

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giver, seems to hover in the background, always ready to intervene if necessary. Maybe this, too, is part of the ideal conditions, but what is democratic about it is not easy to see. And the danger is that subjecting discourse in politics to some form of transcendent consecration would bring forth not a more authentic "dialogue" but rather a more or less disguised type of intellectual or moral dictatorship. The form of political rationality put forward here, by contrast, is based on (challengeable) opinion rather than on (indisputable) truth. I refer to it as "modal" rationality which, not unlike Aristotle's notion of the enthymeme, has in its employment and purposive rationality a cognitive status of its own, along with, yet destinct from, strict syllogistic argument, whose cogency, coherence, and "logic" are never wholly detachable from the communicative capacity to rally support, to persuade, and talk people into action.10 The communicative dimension of rationality, its potential to win over people in and through rational debate, is certainly well brought out by Habermas. What is less apparent is how he envisions that people will acquire the attitudes and dispositions that he deems essential for communicative rationality to do its job; how, that is, we are to get from here to there, as Jon Elster puts it.11 What sort of transition is required to usher in a form of public discourse that, embedded though it is in a culture of plural values, nonetheless produces a virtually unanimous resolve to suppress differences in an attempt to achieve not merely maximum agreement but, as in Rousseau's vision of the General Will, an optimum degree of moral Tightness and social justice? Habermas postulates that the absence of associational loyalties, class bias, and "irrational" passions forms the necessary condition for the emergence of unfalsified deliberation, making people realize that, as citizens, they have much to gain from actively participating in the resolution of whatever divides them.12 This poses, however, a problem for people who have a position, by almost implying the paradoxical equation of most rational with the least politically committed. That maximal flexibility and an ever-ready openness to a change of mind be demanded as a criterion of rationality clearly runs counter to a sense of abiding allegiance. Dedication to impartiality and truth, come what may, admirable in philosophy, could seriously conflict, in the realm of politics, with serving a cause, with having any deep convictions or cherished attachments. But even if Habermas fails to make clear exactly what rationality means politically, he is clear enough about what it does not mean; namely, a purely capricious manner of coming to decisions or a complete disregard for principles of mutuality, fairness, or justice. In his fight against sources of a socially false consciousness, he struggles

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above all against delusions or deliberate forms of make-believe which, as Rousseau already warned, induce people to think that any arrangement favourable to themselves is by that fact favourable to others as well. If he lacks perception of the intensity of passions in politics or seriously underrates the constraints that strictly political considerations impose, and the limitations these put on openness in debate, he nonetheless sheds needed light on many dark and tangled patches in a society of rampant individualism and reckless manipulation of human wants and human needs. One could almost view Steven Lukes's concern with rational constraints as a direct response to Habermas's original communications theory, whether or not this was in fact intended. For Lukes convincingly points to the inner conflicts within reasoning itself. These, in contrast to "structural" constraints, operate through the agent's own reasons. Rational constraints, thus defined, can limit a person's options, perhaps not as permanently as structural constraints might, but, coupled with a person's inner constitution, physical and temperamental, rational constraints can make their influence felt on the reasons for which we act as much as on the reasons from which we act.13 In giving examples for rational and structural constraints, Lukes poses the interesting question of why Bukharin did not resist Stalin, as Trotsky did, from the mid-igaos onwards. Lenin gave one explanation, a reason from type of psychological account: "We all know how soft Bukharin is -just like soft wax."14 Another explanation, provided by Koestler and Solzhenitsyn, lists Bukharin's profound dedication to party unity and party discipline, and his related fear of being expelled from the Party, but they also hint "at a lack of moral strength to fight back."15 Clearly, here it is extremely hard to keep apart structural constraints of an external character - such as a widely accepted dogma that public action outside the Communist party is illegitimate, or the non-working-class origins of a party member suspect - from inner rational constraints. Could Bukharin have acted otherwise than he did? Was he constrained by all that surrounded him or was he the victim of his own reasoning, perhaps regarding his thoughts, because of his bourgeois origins, dubious even to himself? The answer, says Lukes, "depends crucially on how the agent is conceptualized":16 whether, that is, the agent is held to be predetermined by his or her individual characteristics, loyalties, and commitments, so that it is a case of "no choice," in which the agent could not have acted otherwise than he or she did. This may, as Lukes states, be equally true of collective agents. I am less certain, though, that when right-wingers, as a group, claim to have no option but to cut social programs, they indeed can think of no

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other alternative. For I doubt that their range of agency is so predetermined that their s£/fdetermining potential is totally nullified. In other words, internally directional reasons for could potentially overcome externally conditioned reasons from (however internalized) in spite of ideological constraints or predilections. Constraints need not, moreover, arise solely from psychological reasons from that are attributable to antecedent doctrinal conditioning, as Lukes seems to suggest. They could spring also from wholly rational calculations, based essentially on forward-looking prudential grounds, and thus be closer to reasons for than to reasons from. Could not Bukharin therefore have eschewed attacking Stalin openly because the political effects of so doing seemed to him a threat not merely to Stalin himself but to the Communist regime as a whole? And, having a vested interest himself in the latter's preservation, may he not have had good and objectively valid reasons for avoiding open confrontation, despite having grounds for questioning Stalin's leadership? I shall return below to the possibility of discrepancies between reasons as beliefs and reasons as commitments to act, as borne out in Bukharin's reasoning. For the present, I only wish to note that, while constraints are at work in most choices, it is only when no alternatives are perceived that choice could be said to be inherently foreclosed. While the question of (moral or legal) responsibility might still arise, any talk of accountability in terms of reasons for would be out of place since, in this event, the agent presumably saw no way of acting differently. Action, if self-directed at all, would have its origin in motivating or constraining reasons from. It follows that the extent to which we understand ourselves as being able to act for reasons of our own choosing is bound up with the way we experience constraints.17 Not unlike Rawls, who speaks of a "thin" theory of the good, Elster contrasts a thin theory of rationality with a broad theory.18 What makes a theory "thin" is that what I am calling reasons from is left unexamined. It is intended, therefore, to focus on the content of choice, on what we consciously preceive as our reasons for acting and not on the cause of our action. So conceived, the criterion of rational choice is essentially a matter of purposive continuity, of what Elster refers to as "consistency" which, if I understand him correctly, is not the consistency of formal logic or syllogistic deduction, principally, but the degree of purposive coherence that one generally expects to find between components of an argument, explanation, or claim staked, as well as the degree of fit that can be observed between the particular character of a person and the reasons he or she declares as the ground for acting. In essence, this approximates to the requirements of modal rationality

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that I associate with the prevalent rationality of democratic discourse. What Elster calls the "broad theory" of rationality goes beyond modal requirements in that it is closer to viewing reason as a substantive causality, in the manner in which a "good will" forms (for Kant) the true source of moral worth. Although moral legitimacy would clearly demand rationality in this substantive sense, it is most doubtful that democratic legitimacy would, in its common political application, at any rate, since, in this application, it by no means follows, as we noted earlier, that what is thought politically right in a democracy is in some autonomous sense prefigured or determined by what is unquestionably right in strictly moral terms. For the generally accepted grounding of democratic legitimacy in politics is not the self-evidence of a (Kantian) "good will," but a far more contingent mode of normative causality as well as a far less substantive mode of rationality. But, even if we settle for the thinner interpretation of rationality and accept modal rationality as typifying the rationality of democratic politics, having reasons, thus understood, is not the same as being committed to act on them. This emerges, we noted, from the Bukharin example, as also from chapter five, which points to a gap between credal consensus and political consensus, or between general values and their particular translation into political ends. What we found, too, is that, regardless also of whether reasons given to account for political action are authentic reasons, their validating quality is expected to be other than that thought appropriate in market transactions or in strictly moral conduct. No one seeking political support is likely to offer reasons that are transparently selfserving, just as no one wishing to establish his or her credentials as an electoral candidate would be wise to account for failing to achieve practical results by expressing total indifference to outcomes. For merely professing sincerity or even nobility of motives or intentions is unlikely to endear aspiring candidates for nomination to a party anxious to win a seat. Most fundamental, therefore, is the question of what principally counts in making "reasons" and "accounting" at all functional in political discourse and political action. As the reader may recall, I listed earlier three specific properties that I consider essential requirements for reasons to prove politically viable as explanations and justifications of public action. I indicated that, in addition to being intelligible and shareable, reasons, to be politically serviceable, must be, or appear to be, non-subjective. A recent commentator quite rightly singles out, therefore, the quality of impersonality; following Rousseau, he argues that only reasons couched in impersonal terms can serve as credible

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explanations or justifications with regard to political action.19 To these core requirements, however, two more need to be added. One, as we just noted, is concern for outcomes; the other is concern for accounting. Clearly, to have operational validity in democratic accounting, reasons must imply identifiable agency. The notion of answerability is a vacuous notion as applied to action if no one can be held to account, if doers for the most part are anonymous. Hence, while reasons in politics should be impersonal, agents should be traceable to persons, to identifiable men and women who are willing and able to render account for what they say and do in the public realm they share with others. R E A S O N S , TRUST, A N D P O L I T I C A L ACTION

Although giving reasons for public agency is not exclusively the hallmark of democratic regimes, it is generally associated with the practices of political systems in which "the people" are constitutionally supreme and governments have only conditional power in terms of the length, probity, and objectives of ruling. Constitutionally imposed obligations in these directions do not, it is true, rule out mendacity or sham justifications; persistent lying, however, carries risks of its own. Although some evasions, cover-ups, or specious arguments might be attributed, at least in part, to undue pressures on governments to own up for every single act of policy, official lying, routinely practised, ultimately proves counter-productive; it undermines whatever trust a government originally enjoyed. Like inflated currency, bogus reasons cease to make any purchases. Institutional accountability as such and the self-declared conditionality of governmental power do not, clearly, render vigilance superfluous. Which is just another way of saying that some distrust toward official reasons given is never misplaced. Power needs watching, regardless of its doctrinal source. Total distrust, however, not only breeds anarchy but it also generally harbours the corrosive seed of massive corruption. And, whenever this happens, it might not be wrong to say of governments that they have overthrown the country. Fortunately, opinion is commonly a great deal more resilient than theorists of totalitarianism are wont to maintain. At any rate, there is little evidence from erstwhile Communist regimes that the prevalence of official lying fatally cripples people's perception of the truth, in particular of factual truth. Whatever impact governmental deception might have, being misinformed is not a case of "lying to oneself," as Hannah Arendt, for example, has argued.20 If people find it imprudent to tell the truth publicly, they

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have not ceased to know it. Not telling is clearly not the same as not knowing. An anecdote circulating in Czechoslovakia during the dark times of widespread distrust may help to illustrate this point. A man compares at some leisure two cars parked next to one another. One is a Rolls Royce, the other a Moskvitch. A bystander approaches him: "Which of the two cars do you consider the best?" Before replying, the man looks at the bystander, looks again at the cars, and at last says: "I think the Moskvitch." "Man, don't you know your cars?" the bystander exclaims in astonishment. "Oh, I know my cars alright," comes the reply, "but I don't know you."21 Sagging trust evidently affects truth-telling, but not necessarily truthknowing; and while mutual distrust may follow in the wake of governmental lying, it need not generate a loss of faith in the credibility of reasons as grounds for acting. What it does point to beyond any doubt is that, for explanations and justifications to be taken seriously, there must be a certain continuity between word and deed; reasons must be seen to play a mediating role in action, at least some of the time. Thus it is not enough that we "understand" reasons in a purely linguistic sense; we must also see a certain causality in them, a certain mediating force, in bringing about one thing rather than another. Whether reasons can account for actions, in other words, hinges on the extent to which they, in a conceptual sense, inhere in actions. If we cannot see that what is presented to us as reasons connects at all with what actually has been done, we may of course suspect mendacity, wondering if we are being fed with fibs. More seriously, however, we may fail to make sense, because we have ceased to believe that there is even the most tenuous link between actions and the reasons given for them. I say more seriously because, if this has been the case over a protracted period, we have most likely lost our moorings and are adrift in a sea of senseless doings. Political accounting, or any other accounting, is then literally meaningless; there simply is no point in it. When we suspect lying, we still have an inkling of the truth, but when we fail to make any sense whatsoever, we no longer know what is what; we are confused, helpless, and bewildered. Furthermore, since acting in politics occurs not in isolation from others but with or among others, reasons, to function as reasons, require some commonality of meaning; they must involve, that is, something in the nature of shared "forms of thinking," as Kant put it, or an affinity in what Tocqueville called "social mores," or what Heidegger means by Mitsein, the joint sense of being in a particular world with others, so I can be assured that what makes sense to me also makes sense to others. Yet, awareness of others and shared meanings, while essential, are not sufficient in themselves. Neither renders super-

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fluous the need for specific modalities for coming to terms with rival claims, with the contestation of "positional" reasons (as beliefs or commitments). For, if we need others because they yield opportunities denied to us when acting alone, we also have to put up with others and the extent to which they limit our freedom to do as we choose. Opportunities and limits, then, form the context in which we act with others. If a discourse of reasons is to do its work, if people are to act in politics by means of language rather than sticks and stones, there must be an institutional space, with rules of conduct and established provisions for questions and answers, in and through which they are able to deal with reasons, not only as sources of support but also as obstacles, as roadblocks that thwart their designs. Presumably, this is what acting in "civilized society" means: we insert ourselves into a world in which, apart from countless interactions in the market, and the few people we can number among our friends (as Adam Smith observed), we come to learn, in the course of political undertakings, what distinguishes us as persons and what joins us as citizens. The realm of citizenship is also typically the realm of collective action, of people banding together in groups and parties in pursuit of shared purposes. Joint agency indeed characterized for Tocqueville the nature of democratic societies. "The most natural right of man," he writes, "after that of acting on his own, is that of combining his efforts with those of his fellows and acting together ... Will and reason are applied to bring success to a common enterprise."22 Natural it may be, but the implications of this "right" are highly complex indeed, since collective action involves standards and evaluational criteria that are very different from those typifying individual action. The extent, therefore, to which a "common enterprise" can be made to coincide with each member's individual purposes and sense of right and wrong is a question not easily resolved. Rousseau wished to believe that the problem was not so much that people lacked the will to strive for it but that they often could not make out what it was; defects of perception, of vision, and judgement were the chief trouble, not defects in willing.23 So viewed, will and reason have to be brought together to yield a vision that enables people to create their associative institutions themselves, instead of having them imposed by bureaucrats or autocratic elites. The underlying idea is the belief that only a self-created association can be a democratic association. Ideally, therefore, a democratic association should be constitutive of shared goals - being what it is because of shared goals - so that its members could act jointly and still be severally accountable for whatever is associatively brought about. In reality, however, it would be rash to claim that associative action in the political realm is no different from associative action within seg-

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mental groups. For, unlike the segmental community, and its consensual "purposes," political society is marked by contested "objects" that must mediate between plural and frequendy competing demands. What is more, diere is the opposition between the private and the public to contend with. Even if we do not view private vices as public virtues, we cannot but acknowledge that time and again collective action gets away with what no individual action ever would.24 Conversely, what an individual judges to be right and proper may sadly fail to meet with approval politically. Robert Stanfield, who as leader of die Progressive Conservative Party of Canada publicly maintained that speaking the truth was at all times paramount, had to learn to his cost that honesty may not pay, and that the risk of dirty hands was a formidable one in politics, and one that was not easily escaped. Such dilemmas once again clearly point to a sharp asymmetry between forms of acceptable rationality, and raise the vexing question of how to be wholly ethical in politics. Serious though this question is, it is not really central to this discussion; for what chiefly is at issue is not the ethical quality of reasons that are publicly given but rather the extent to which they can be shared so as to make it possible for individuals to accept responsibility for whatever collective action has been taken. Although this chapter is returning to the question of the shareability of political reasons, in terms of both their being collectively professed and individually acknowledged, it should be noted for the present that, whereas in purely individual action intentionality is the vital clue regarding its rationality and moral worth, this is not commonly so in the case of action in pursuit of collective ends. To take our earlier example of Stanfield or that of Conservative leader Kim Campbell's pronouncement tiiat unemployment was unpreventable for years to come (during the 1993 election in Canada): in both cases, the adherence to truth, highly commendable from a moral standpoint, received little political credit, since the Party failed to win the election. Evidently, what chiefly counts in political action is rarely determined by the quality of motives or the sincerity of public declarations. Highmindedness invariably rates a good bit lower than achievement, in that action is judged by outcomes and by whether or not these live up to collective expectations. THE RATIONALITY OF P O L I T I C A L MORALITY

"Reckoning with consequences" seems, therefore, a constituent part of rationality in politics, insofar as results determine praise or blame. Clearly, once we switch private hats for public hats, the standards on

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which we are judged are no longer the same. But even if this is granted, I still wish to believe that such consequentialism need not open the floodgates to the waves of unbridled opportunism or establish a rationale for the dirty-hands syndrome. Caring about outcomes, though it may not qualify for moral acceptance in Kantian terms, nonetheless is what we normally expect from rational adults. Put another way, reckoning with consequences is not devoid of normative caring, and hence does not of necessity imply an ad hoc approach to politics. It does, however, underscore the thesis of an earlier chapter, that political norms are different from moral norms, and that, in public life, persons may be held responsible as well as answerable for occurrences they had neither intended nor initiated, so that "responsibility" and "accountability" virtually coalesce. Paradoxically perhaps, because this so frequently appears to be the case, political morality, in which concern for outcomes forms an integral normative component, needs even more firmly established performative standards of conduct than individual morality, in which the focus in assessing accountability is almost solely on the sincerity and the content of people's intentions.25 Can political morality be rationally justified in terms of reasons whose value claim is beyond any possible challenge or argument? The problem with opting for substantive rationality, so conceived, is its failure to be amenable to democratic contestation. Moreover, a rationality that is self-evidently rightful makes it all too easy for governments to dispense with rendering account, in that they may allege that an intrinsically valid rationality contains its own sufficient explanation as well as its own justification, and hence has no need for further sanctions. Once substantive (value) rationality, therefore, is claimed for governmental action, the question disturbingly arises of how such claims could be challenged without making dissent liable to imputations of irrationality, baseness, and criminal viciousness. On the other hand, not opting for substantive rationality might give rise to the view that the values which give life to political morality and enable performative principles to be principles, are in essence preferences and, as preferences, altogether incapable of being rationally justified. I am not sure whether it is true that preferences cannot be rationally justified, nor altogether clear about which kind of rationality is implied - the substantive or the modal one. But it could nevertheless be argued that a political morality grounded in the rationality of challengeable opinion, rather than one rooted in the soil of indisputable truth, is a highly precarious morality, vulnerably exposed to every wind of change. Unfortunately, any attempt to escape the danger of sheer relativism by some form of synthesis between substantive and instru-

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mental rationality is liable to skate on rather thin ice. Clearly, a democratic government, anxious to superimpose on its popular mandate ends which, however, intrinsically rational or desirable in themselves, are not what most people want or opted for with their electoral vote, runs the risk of driving a wedge between what it is authorized to do in accordance with the democratic principle of the electoral mandate and what, for subsequent reasons of its own, it then seeks to do. For the rationality it then invokes is plainly at odds with the rationality that put it into office. It seems, therefore, that the possibility of this sort of discrepancy strongly suggests that the political rationality operative in a democratic system of governance might indeed only most doubtfully be a rationality of objective or intrinsic Tightness, and thus a Tightness of unquestionable validity. Besides, it is by no means obvious how a rationality of objective truth or Tightness is to be uncovered politically. Only on the assumption of a latent and unanimous consensus corresponding to that of Rousseau's General Will - which is definitionally "always right" - could one readily dismiss a gap between modal rationality and substantive rationality as totally unwarranted. To do so, however, would involve a democracy in which the electoral mandate and coming to terms with numbers and votes would have no real significance. Political legitimacy would then indeed be more sure-footed, but at what cost? The rationality in a politics of democracy, therefore, is patently other than the rationality characterizing intrinsic morality or a general-will quality that is "always right," not unlike Newton's calculus. But, if political rationality is something sui generis, it nonetheless calls, like political morality itself, for the highest possible plateau of guarding that democratic constitutions and judicial review are able to provide. Otherwise, there sadly is no guarantee whatsoever for the emergence, existence, or survival, of a democracy of plural values, in which claims that have an overriding significance for some people have a chance of getting public recognition. Electoral majorities alone cannot be relied upon to uphold the right to otherness, the freedom to be different.26 What this amounts to is that plurality demands legitimating sanctions which, constitutionally and juridically safeguarded, give a certain normative continuity to democratic governance that the mutable results of periodic elections are unable to yield. Ultimately, of course, the most farsighted constitutional provisions cannot, in a politics of democratic contestation, secure a reign of generally agreed rightfulness, which, once discovered, is forever unassailable. Perhaps these shortcomings of existing principles of democratic legitimation have kindled expectations in the train of "truly rational" debate - a point to be gone into in the following chapter. Somewhat

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oddly, perhaps, this faith in the achievement of substantive rationality through communicative deliberation is not infrequently accompanied by doubts about rationality itself, or the scope of rational self-direction.27 Those who, like Habermas, have given currency to this peculiar combination of Enlightenment optimism and post-Enlightenment disenchantment undoubtedly articulate a widely perceived sense of simultaneous hope and despair, of euphoric mastery and utter helplessness. But, faith or doubt, we may have to make do with less perfect forms of rationality in order to come to terms with discourse and discord in a politics in which dissent is not less "rational" than accord, and in which it is therefore as legitimate to withhold authentication as to grant it. In effect this means that a politics of plurality renders rationality in a substantive sense highly problematic. If this raises the question of the value-foundation of political rationality, the uncertain causality of reasons in themselves could be said to undermine its conceptual status still further. Are, then, reasons as causes as debatable as the rationality of value preferences? Now, it is perfectly true that what is causally most significant in any sequence of reasons is nearly always contentious, but this does not question the causality of reasons as such. Nor, for that matter, does ordinary usage, since it would surely be strange if people inquired into the reasons of occurrences if they believed these to be totally unconnected with actions, with whatever is brought about. By the same token, if reasons were held to have no inherent link with actions, the practice of parliamentary question-time would even more often be a charade than it regrettably tends to be. For governments could then get away with citing whatever reasons they happened to choose, since those to whom they were given would be unable to conceptualize reasons as causes. If, however, this is not so or, at any rate, not quite as dismally so, why the uncertainty about the causality of reasons? Perhaps the most fundamental answer could lie in the realization that human reasons do not do their job in the manner that a knife cuts bread. For instance, when questions are asked in parliament, they are often intended to elicit not merely causal facts, but also reasoned justifications; that is, they are to bring to light the deliberative grounds for taking a particular course of actions. And such elaborations will be all the more called for the less familiar (or plausible) actions appear as rational or moral choices. Coupled with the troublesome issue regarding the continuity of the choices in terms of purposive reasons (to which I turn below), rationality and morality in politics clearly present us with causal problems that we are spared in the causality of mechanical operations or natural phenomena.28 And it is above all this difference

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that militates against treating causality in politics as though it were an analogue of causality tout court. CAUSES, CONTEXTS, AND COMMITMENTS

But, whatever conditions rational causality in politics precisely demands, a political system of democracy as accountable democracy heavily relies, we observed earlier, on certain contextual-historical modalities for the raising of questions. Hence, the degree to which governmental accounting can be expected to approximate authentic accounting is bound up with its institutional "embeddedness," with the kind of historical setting in which it has come to assume reality. Within this setting, the existence and nature of bureaucratic elites play no insignificant part. Since they enjoy continuity of office, bureaucrats are in a strong position to set boundaries to public accounting, as they are able also to manipulate the policy options in the first place. They can present cabinet ministers with only those alternatives that the officials themselves favour, even if this means concealing information that conflicts with their advice - advice on which ministers depend all the more heavily the less experience they have of government and government departments. Small wonder, therefore, that theorists of active political participation typically charge that citizens and parliamentary representatives are exceedingly short-changed by existing methods of political accounting, which, from the governmental and bureaucratic point of view, consist less of giving full answers than of cleverly evading them. This is not to go so far, however, as to say that institutional structures determine policies, so that bureaucrats could be looked upon as the movers and shakers of a nation's political destiny. No such inevitability is suggested in my drawing attention to the institutional context of governmental accountability, of the asking for and giving of reasons in politics. Human purposes, though embedded in a culture of contextual givens, are not derivative from them as an oak is from an acorn. There is much to be said, therefore, for proceeding with care in referring to existential "patterns" or "forms of life" as purposive explanations. No doubt, what gives meaning to a deed is not separable from a particular matrix of norms and conventions, but these can conflict or undergo change.29 Moreover, actions have inner meanings which, as in the case of ideas, have self-constitutive values that are not tied to particular contexts, as I argued in the introductory chapter. And these inner meanings, therefore, are not disclosed by minute attention to contextual detail. Instead, their recognition is a matter of perceptive judgements and deliberation.30

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Similarly, most political accounting, while inseparable from historical-institutional contexts, at the same time rests on inner groundings of deliberative judgement that have preceded a given policy decision. Since these groundings undergo a certain meandering before becoming settled positions or firm policy commitments, it could understandably be asked whether the uncertain journey in the formation of actual policy objectives ought to stop people from expecting governments to render account in terms of reasons that incontrovertibly reveal their purposive continuity. By and large, the conventional wisdom seems to be that it should not; that, as long as governments manifestly act on their own will and judgement, and are not made to do what they do my foreign powers, citizens are perfectly justified in thinking that their governments acted on reasons that had a continuity of meaning for them or, at any rate, that they could and should have acted on such reasons. Even so, the potentially mercurial genesis of policy outcomes could be said to raise doubts about the causal continuity of reasons and thus undermine faith in the purposive force of reasons for. Clearly, if aspired outcomes and actual outcomes unfailingly revealed no purposive continuity, then not only rational accounting would make little sense but also rational action itself. So viewed, the argument plainly bears quite fundamentally on the status of political action itself. Whether or not, therefore, the hiatus between reasons for and actual outcomes is universally warranted appears of lesser moment, and the crucial question to be posed demands reformulation. For, given that what occurs in the realm of political pursuits is not for the most part accidental (the work of unintended consequences), it surely is not so much a matter of whether directional reasons render a perfectly satisfactory account of the continuity of political purposes, as it is a question of how we could think of political action as action if we ignored reasons as purposes. And if the answer to this question is that we could not, then giving purposive reasons as grounds for acting cannot be devoid of meaning, however equivocal rational explanations or justifications may be in politics. Supposing we grant the validity of this response to doubts concerning the purposive continuity of reasons for in the transit from aspired ends to their political actualization, "having reasons," and being committed to act on them, calls for at least two kinds of further comments. The first is that governments may act for reasons other than those they give. This could be so because some occasions demand discretion, such as considerations prompting the devaluation of a country's currency. And, while deceit is involved, it is not wilful deceit as much

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as a conflict between telling the truth and harming a country's interests. Acting on reasons, moreover, is not the same as acting on a blueprint; original reasons may undergo change so that purposes may become estranged even from themselves. Politicians may not be eager to admit this or they may simply be unable to recall the reasons originally at work. Second, having reasons simply is in itself no sufficient ground for acting. Bukharin had eminently good reasons for opposing Stalin, as well as for denouncing the system he had created, having found out about the lying, the corruption, and the brutality of the party leadership, without in fact feeling compelled to act on them, turning, as it were, a blind eye to what he knew.31 Having reasons, therefore, is not the same as minding reasons; like Bukharin, people may be calculatingly reluctant to act, or be genuinely undecided, too timid, or not ruthless enough. But, whatever it is, recognizing wrongdoing need not turn them into rebels, reformers or, conversely, into hermits who have given up on the world. For just as there is no inexorable continuity between purposes and outcomes, so there is no necessary oneness in the relation between reasons as beliefs and reasons as commitments. If the switch from the one to the other does occur, it is probably not so much a cognitive change, whereby we suddenly come to see what we had not seen before in the manner a biologist discovers new data under the microscope, as it is a change in the way we mind what we have known all along. Minding then assumes the form of reminding, somewhat comparably to that in Plato's Meno, in that we recover a meaning that was there all the time, for ourselves. We do not know more; rather, we know differently.^2 It appears, however, that, unlike logical inferences, a sense of commitment cannot be deduced. At any rate, I am unable to generalize about its causal genesis, whether it consists of contextual moulding or of an internal conversion reminiscent of that of St. Paul, but I doubt if there is a specific property in the causality of reasons themselves that qualifies them to be either reasons as beliefs or reasons as commitments. For, do we not find the same reasons at one time (or with one person) powerfully compelling, and, at another time (or with another person) wholly ineffective as commitments to action? Raising this question poignantly recalls our earlier discussion of the shareability of reasons and the causality of contexts, in that it draws attention to the potential force of "environmental" changes. There has, for example, been a marked change in recent years in public attitudes to smoking and the possession of firearms; and these changed circumstances could be said to have causally intervened in significant transmutations of shared thinking that are not directly attributable to

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sources within the quality of reasoning as such. Indeed, it could be argued that these extraneous changes succeeded, not only in making positions more shareable by drawing the connection between individual and collective modes of thinking appreciably closer, but also in establishing a stronger link between having reasons and feeling committed to act upon them. On the other hand, even if we grant that contexts might effect transformations of thinking independently of reasons' undergoing change in their internal qualities, it surely does not rule out that external circumstances could also block transformations. "The period did not rebel," commented Karl Liebknecht on the failure of the Spartakist rising. Here, clearly, contexts conspired against the directional thrust of reasons that were shared by a group of committed individuals. In view of this contextual fickleness, should we abandon the notion of rational causality in favour of contextual causality? I think not. Ordinary language itself balks at such a step, since what makes an utterance a reason is its explanatory propensity, which it manifestly would not have were we never in the habit of acting upon reasons. After all, what distinguishes rational causality from other causal forces is the purposive sense it makes objectively and the meaning it has subjectively. For, once we switch from purposive reasons for to causal reasons from, we fundamentally shift the focus away from whatever point people see in their actions to what they fail to comprehend as reasons for acting, and hence cannot appropriate as their own reasons.33 To be sure, causation is at work in either case; people may suggest such hypothetical sources as having been under certain external pressures or under internal stress. What, however, is radically different between rational causality and contextual (or psychological, medical, or mechanical) causality is not only the mode of operation but the nature of causal understanding. Turning the key to start the engine generally provides an adequate rational explanation, without demanding an understanding of electronics or internal combustion. T H R E A D S OF THE A R G U M E N T

I have tried to maintain that what principally matters in democratic accounting is that reasons are entailed as purposive grounds for what is said in explaining or justifying public actions. But whether reasons are "there" is a question not of physical fact but of conceptual understanding, of grasping the inner meaning they yield. Only when there is doubt about the purposive sense they make do we cease to ask what people, or governments, are up to; we wonder instead what made them do what they did.

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Three salient points have accordingly formed the core of my argument. First, I posited that agents can rationally own up only if what they did rested upon reasons of their own. Because of this purposive "causality," I spoke of reasons as having directional meaning and of actions based on them as having a rational structure by virtue of which they are explicable, justifiable, or contestable. Second, I identified political rationality in democracies with a distinct modality, with the particular manner in which positions are publicly assumed and defended. Substantive rationality could, I argued, impair governmental accounting, in that reasons given by governments could be declared apodictically selfjustificatory. This, in a plural society, could threaten diversity of opinion as it could militate against the voicing of dissent. Third, I defined rational causality as the effective mediation of reasons in commitments to action. However, by "effective" I implied no proven utility comparable to the working of mechanical causality; instead I pointed to the teleological pull that reasons as purposive ends are able to exert. Thus understood, reasons could account not only for what prompted a government to act upon certain reasons but also why. In this event, the metamorphosis of reasons as beliefs into reasons as commitments would combine the factually rational - the reasons in and for themselves - with the purposively rational the reasons for their choice -, and thereby, arguably, suggest the coincidence of the professed telos with the true telos. For these central arguments to be at all tenable, however, at least two conditions must pertain. First, events must be traceable to persons as authors of deeds; and, second, things must occur within a context in which what is done politically is deliberate rather than purely accidental, so that the directional reasons for constitute the principal grounds for their occurrence. The presence of these conditions, making actions rationally explicable or justifiable, does not, it is true, rule out the fabrication of reasons; the architects of such practices can, however, rarely be sure that they, the trappers, do not themselves become ensnared in their own traps.35 The extent to which reasons for are able to merge individual and collective goals may admittedly prove by no means unproblematic, if participants recognize only some of the collective purposes as concurring with their own. It seems that the most critical question here is the degree to which directional ends are able to override differences, so that at least some purposes could be shared. For, in that event, joint and several accounting could be rendered possible, at any rate in principle. What is required, therefore, is the creation of a teleological consensus in which there is more to unite people toward a "common enterprise," as Tocqueville put it, than there is to divide them.35

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This is not to say, however, that the shareability of reasons should be taken for granted simply because a society is a democratic society. Given a fair measure of tolerance and civility, a democratic society may offer the opportunity for agreeing to differ, but is in itself no warrant of unanimity. While extraneous circumstances, as we found, may help toward the sharing of positions, even majoritarian consensus entails no guarantee for the emergence of the kind of agreement that betokens the degree of substantive Tightness associated with the working of Rousseau's General Will. Indeed, as chapter ten discloses, majoritarianism may, in the absence of supra-democratic devices, render substantive legitimacy not merely vexingly problematic, but irresolvably so. Yet, whether or not differences can be bridged by making reasons maximally shareable, there is need for shared standards to which reasons must conform to be at all functional in politics. And there is need also for an institutional "space" within which discursiveness and dissent are as much of a piece with democracy as consensual agreement, so that reasons can act as instruments of contestation no less than as instruments of support. Taking this line, I opt accordingly for suspending judgement about reasons' necessarily being able, within "genuine democracy," to resolve differences in the wake of communicative processes that are truly rational. OPENNESS AND DEMOCRACY

Finally, from what has been said so far about rational accounting in current democracies, must we conclude that, unless political answerability demonstrates total openness on the part of governments, it can scarcely be judged authentically democratic? No doubt, democratic validation demands continuous disclosure, of what is said and done by those who have been given the mandate to govern. Still, it could justifiably be argued that it is one thing to check whether those entrusted with authority measure up to what can reasonably be expected of them, and not quite the same thing to require governments to be entirely open, if they are to guard a nation's standing and protect its vital interests. Moreover, and perplexingly so, a nation's "vital interests" may not always be stable enough to yield continuously valid (or publicly intelligible) reasons as explanations. Yet, although there may be such grounds for waiving complete disclosure at all times, it is too often less a case of protecting interests of state than of protecting top ministers and top bureaucrats.36 Creating images, therefore, may be more important than giving actual reasons, especially since avoidance of error, or rather the appearance of such avoidance, might be taken for sound government. Ministers will

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accordingly take good care to heed the advice of their officials about what information to provide - or to withhold. After all, if no one knows everything there is to be known, then, presumably, no one knows what might have gone wrong. This type of thinking, specious or not - and it clearly seems the former - is by no means uncharacteristic of governmental accounting in existing mainstream democracies. Not surprisingly, critics urge that we need to discover forms of democratic authentication - of rational deliberation and rational accountability - that could win through, despite top ministers and top bureaucrats. While in chapters that follow I discuss ideas in this direction, in the present chapter I have tried to sort out what rationality in politics possibly implies as a form of democratic discourse and a medium of legitimation, in order to call attention to the limits of its normative force.37 For, if these limits fail to be recognized, it might have the effect of inducing citizens to exercise less control and forget that both the accounting and the self-authentication of democratic governments demand a public that is as watchful as it is critical. Precisely because justificatory modes of politics invite manipulatory devices, civic vigilance is pressingly called for. Clearly, if people's consciousness is skewed and their wills are bent without their noticing it, manipulation will be most effective, since it will not be perceived as such. To ward off this danger, there is a dire need for safeguards of a formal and informal kind, which are capable of preventing publicly given reasons from being utterly devious strategems. This means, in essence, that political rationality must be seen for what it is, and not be taken for some transcendent or ideal "public reason" as though it were a cognate of indisputable truth or the embodiment of the supreme moral, political, and constitutional values of a democratic citizenry. In viewing rationality in politics as something peculiar to itself, warts and all, I have sought to portray it as a Janus-like modality that, authentic or not, maximally shareable or not, effectively supportive or challenging or not, potentially helps to maintain civility and reciprocity in and through public discourse and, at the same time, doggedly serves to remind those who rule that they cannot get away with what they might get away with, were they rulers in other than a democracy. Besides, as chapters two, four, and five variously tried to suggest (in line with Thomasius, Hume, Tocqueville, Weber, and Habermas), alternatives to reasoned argument, such as terror, command backed by force, or appeal to indisputable custom are hardly preferable, if people define themselves as citizens rather than subjects, and their gov-

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ernments see themselves as trustees in need of self-authentication rather than absolute overlords. And while what I called "modal" rationality may fail to ensure a reign of sweet reasonableness, it may nevertheless help to avert a reign of flagrant arbitrariness.

8 Accountability and Participation

So far, this essay has for the most part dealt with control over the selfauthentication of democratic rule. In this chapter I want to discuss demands for greater control within democratic rule, which allows citizens to have a more active role in managing public concerns and reaching political decisions. Two principal issues present themselves: the relation of participation to accountability and the relation of segmental participation to political participation. The latter is the central theme of this chapter, as it links up with the problems of democratic validation and political rationality raised in the the previous two chapters, regarding the political mediation between autonomy in the singular and autonomy in the plural, or simply between the whole and its parts. While it is easy enough to agree that democracy requires popular participation in governing in order to make it rightful in the exercise of its political authority, it is less easy to agree what precisely such participation ought to consist in. Nor is it obvious why people should think it "rational" to invest time and energy in this activity.1 In this context, "rationality" is usually taken to mean the effectiveness in getting returns for whatever one does. Given, then, that people in a democracy find it rational, in this sense, to engage in public activity, do they view such an activity as functionally instrumental or intrinsically purposive, in terms of the ends pursued? Regrettably, there appears to be lack of agreement about the empirical evidence to answer this question.2 Nonetheless, theorists of political participation of all persuasions in support of "democratizing"

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society concur that democracy means more than voting in order to choose those who for the next four to five years are to make decisions that affect the rest of the country. Theories that focus on political participation from an instrumental point of view want to bring into life participatory activities that can be calculated to have an impact on governmental decision-making. The emphasis here is on "impact," on making a dent; it determines the rationality of any concerted strategy, regardless of the content, of whether or not it promotes "progessive change."3 The rationality of participation, however, is not always seen in these instrumental terms. Those who focus on democratization through a group's internal activities, for example, view themselves in radical opposition to the ethos and methods of instrumentally motivated forms of lobbying and pressure-group pluralism since, to them, these are bereft of intrinsic participatory value. They argue that the extension of democracy throughout society demands the creation of a multiplicity of self-governing entities, in which members are able to experience the meaning of participatory democracy. Underlying their search for a "more meaningful" democracy is the conviction that, without the provision of such opportunities for multiple group participation, "women and men cannot become individuals."4 For them, liberal democracy stands in the way of producing these "genuinely democratic" conditions. The question of replacing liberal democracy is examined in the next chapter. Here I confine myself essentially to three themes. First, I consider the relation between participation and accountability. Second, though principally, I look into arguments in support of extending democracy by applying it to industry and other segments. The crucial issue here is the sense in which segmental democratization can be viewed as political participation. Third, and in line with the discussion of rationality in chapter seven, I introduce the theme of "deliberative" democratism, as participation through "rational dialogue," a theme further elaborated in the next two chapters. ACCOUNTABILITY, PARTICIPATION, AND "DISTANCE" If "autonomy" in its negative sense sets boundaries on the power of governments to infringe upon the rights and freedoms of individual citizens, seen positively it demands that citizens have a say in what is decided in their name. Either way, however, autonomy implies a participatory model of democracy: those living in a country as citizens have a legitimate stake in whatever public action is proposed or

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decided upon. Nonetheless, there is considerable ambiguity about political participation as an effective guardian of autonomy in this twofold sense. Grounded in virtually unverifiable assumptions about human nature or human needs, "participation" calls forth radically different visions. At one end of the spectrum, maximum participation is hailed as the most appropriate means for uncovering the common good of society as well as the individual good of human self-development. At the other end, maximum participation is dismissed as a surplus of democracy, which, in being little more than talk, far from uncovering common ground, actually encourages divisiveness, so that, the more intense the level of participation, the more acrimonious it gets. Instead of helping toward consensus, it in fact deepens existing cleavages.5 From this perspective, therefore, maximum participation hardly looks as though it could displace "adversary democracy," in the absence of covertly engineered pressures.6 Such contrasting assessments of participation stem from fundamentally different conceptions of democracy - as a form of governance and as an expression of civic involvement. According to the Aristotelian idea of self-rule by free and equal persons, which envisions forming a constitutive oneness of rulers and ruled, participation ideally means co-determination and is intended to permeate society with a shared sense of political authority. Implicit in the notion of codetermination over a wide variety of activities is the belief that whatever experience is gained in any one area of participation is readily transferable to any other, and that this diffusion of participatory experience is bound to serve as a potent means toward a collective consciousness of oneness. Questioning the assumption of constitutive oneness, critics of active participation prefer that public debate be steered within institutional limits and be guided by professional politicians and opinion-makers. Less inclined to believe that political participation makes for better individuals, they are less optimistic about discovering a consensual popular will - or even granting its latent existence. They therefore settle for establishing electoral support by more indirect forms of participation. Finally, instead of bemoaning a lack of continuous interest in political participation, they usually interpret passivity as evidence of overall satisfaction with a particular regime, if not as proof of the fallacy of assuming humans to be by nature political animals. Both positions are liable to make it difficult for accountability to come into its own. If participation is tantamount to co-determination, it raises the question of who is accountable to whom; clearly, once rulers and ruled are the same, "distance" makes no sense at all; if all participate in reaching public decisions equally, so that "all the power

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belongs to the people," there seems little room for questions and answers. Rousseau, who, unlike Kant, viewed autonomy politically, saw this very clearly. Precisely, because he realized that direct or equal participation at all levels of government was an unattainable vision, he was at such pains to insist upon governmental accountability, so that those responsible for the administration of government would report to the citizens about their activities and the manner in which policies were implemented.7 The point of political participation, on this argument, is not that everybody should have a hand in everything, but that there should be institutionally guarded opportunities for raising questions and exercising control. Those whose job is to govern should have room to act, so that, however circumscribed their actions, these should still be their actions that are subject to control. In other words, as long as governments are needed within the public realm, "participation" must not stop them from being able to act one way or another within a given discretionary space. Otherwise, governments have nothing to be accountable for, and citizens nothing to watch. Given widespread apathy, on the other hand, governments have little to worry about except during elections. Any accounting to the public is then wholly dependent on the extent and vigour of institutionalized oppositions. People may then, as Rousseau was not slow to point out, increasingly find it "rational" to delegate their authority, so that action committees would emerge, doing their own thing and accounting only for what they considered their main actions. Before long, however, as Rousseau feared, they would hardly bother to report, and finish up accounting for nothing.8 It is therefore critically important to ensure that governments remain subject to control without being at the same time powerless to act on their own initiative. And this involves finding a delicate balance between granting discretionary space and ensuring that autonomy is not lost, between control and elbow-room, and between trust and distrust. Participationists, inclined to look upon Rousseau as the philosopher of participationism, are apparently unaware of his insistence on limits and his profound insight regarding the need for distance - a distance precisely between partaking in government and keeping a sharp eye on government, between participation and maintaining accountability. Without that distance, I suggest, there can be no master-servant relationship of any kind. Roll them into one, and you threaten accountability without promoting autonomy. Because of the immense importance of guarding a democratic constitution and the great complexity of making it do the work of ensuring governmental accountability, Rousseau gives considerable attention to procedural details, so that nothing is left to chance regarding

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the manner and form of questioning in the assembly. The strictest observance of performative norms and rules for debate, formulating questions, and delegating authority: none of these is for him a matter of empty ritual, and each of these provisions, in one form or another, looms prominently in his political discourses, his advice to the Poles and Corsicans, and his masterpiece Emile: "Under whatever name the executive is elected, the chiefs of the people can never, without violating the social compact, be anything but the officers of the people. It is they whom the people directs to execute the laws, and it is they who owe the people an account of their adminstration."9 Political participation, in this view, unmistakably involves the utmost vigilance in combination with distance - not out of any imputation of vice and malice, but rather out of an acknowledgement of human weakness and human fallibility. Humans do err, they do forget; and, above all, they love to delude themselves. Many think quite sincerely that they act in conformity with reason and the public good when they in fact follow their private inclinations.10 Giving governments a chance to act is therefore not tantamount to forgetting that they are human too and hence need checking. In essence it is a matter of combining distance with limits, of giving governments the benefit of the doubt, yet at the same time reminding them that citizens are not worshippers and do not think that those to whom they entrust the public's business are omniscient. While Rousseau urges that citizens keep a close watch on a government's rightful exercise of its duties, he nonetheless pleads for a discretionary space in which it can act. This mixture of distrust and trust is robustly paralleled by a more recent observer of democracy, John Plamenatz. Members of government, he writes, would have no time to do the job for which they were elected, or appointed, if any number of citizens could incessantly exert pressure and have access to ministers whenever they felt so inclined. "Rulers, even democratic rulers, need to be protected from their subjects, and citizens even in a democracy need to be able to shut their doors and their ears to one another." If everyone were obliged to listen to everyone who claims a right to be heard, at any time, then, Plamenatz wryly adds, "God would surely have provided us with a more complicated brain and with many more than two ears."11 Plamenatz in effect draws attention here to what more recent theorists call "overload," the result of too many segmental pressures. In response to such excessive demands, moreover, politicians make vote-catching promises that they know they cannot honour once they are elected - a reason frequently given for the occurrence of "legitimacy crises." Overload could no doubt be dismissed as a neoconservative ploy, were it not for the fact that fears of overload have

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been expressed for some time. A.D. Lindsay - by no means a conservative - wrote, for example, in the early forties: "So much is asked [of governments] that democratic machinery seems more and more inadequate for this tremendous task" - a view that was confirmed by detailed empirical studies, also before neo-conservatism made its appearance.12 A certain trade-off between participating by being internally with authority and participating by exercising external control over authority - between allowing a discretionary space within which governments can effectively function and maintaining a vigilant citizenry able to ensure governmental probity - would therefore seem desirable. How precisely this balancing act is to be carried off is unquestionably a persistent challenge to procedural democracy. Its need, however, is borne out by the realization that participation at the cost of accountability is a very doubtful gain. Arguments that purport to show that segmental participation, in promoting particularist ends, significantly furthers the creation of a politically democratic society need to be assessed, therefore, not only for the claim itself, but also in its bearing upon the existence and extension of a politics of public accountability. This leads me to the central theme of the present chapter. Proponents of participatory democracy, in opposing group participation to interest-group pluralism in liberal democracies, are anxious to present involvement in group participation not simply as modes of external pressure but as opportunities for internal democratization, as points of entry into areas in which democratic values can be disseminated and an individual's sense of "self-government" effectively nurtured. In thus arguing, they appear to hark back to a conception of participatory democracy in strictly individualistic terms, in which "majority" literally means the aggregate of individuals as individuals in numerical superiority, while "factions," as they term segmental groups of individuals, are repudiated as totally incompatible with democracy. At the same time, however, contemporary participationists, in stressing group participation and segmental concerns, are no more individualistic than interest-group pluralists, nor any the less particularistic, so that the contrast they seek to draw between themselves and group pluralists is at best fiercely overdrawn. Interestingly, moreover, in their emphasis on participation as an intrinsic value, participationists revert to the "guild" pluralism of early twentieth-century England. Carole Pateman, a foremost contemporary group participationist, for example, goes so far as to urge the recognition of the earlier group pluralists in their belief in the intrinsic merit of participation in partial concerns by virtue of its carrying within itself self-sustaining agency

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values of its own. A still more recent, if somewhat chastened, version of "English" pluralism, the associationalism of Paul Hirst, strongly endorses this point: the democratization of segmental entities promotes the democratization of society at large by generating a deeper sense of citizenship and political commitment generally. I want to look more closely at these claims. SEGMENTALISM AND CITIZENSHIP

Diverse affiliations within society are conventionally viewed as intermediary groups between the private individual and the governmental authority within a state. This mediation is apt to get blurred, however, in demands to extend democracy to social and economic institutions, in that participation within particularistic entities is seen either as a substitute for political participation at the level of the general constituency or as a training experience for it. In the substitution argument, the supposition that there is no difference between segmental units and the general constituency other than scale altogether drains the idea of a distinctly public dimension of all meaning. In the training argument, on the other hand, political meaning is simply taken for granted: experience of participation at particularist levels is perfectly transferable to activity at the level of the state because it is political experience. And both the substitution argument and the transferability argument strongly suggest that there really is not much to distinguish the legitimating force of either; one serves as well as the other to authenticate democracy. Implied in this line of thinking is a marked relegation of the state, a denial of both its importance and its distinctiveness. Harold Laski, engaged in "demystifying" the state, claimed, for example, as much politics for a baseball club as for state governments. And, like subsequent participationists, he predicted brighter prospects for democracy within the limited sphere of segmental participation than within society at large or the "remote" and "abstract" state. In effect, he saw groups as self-sustaining locales. Of the dual rationality mentioned earlier, the intrinsic purposiveness of segmental entities assumes primacy; participation in these is an end in itself, its rationality lies in itself. Unlike instrumental participation, in which means and ends are distinct, intrinsic participation forges their oneness: in and through "self-development" they coalesce.13 With the derogation of the state, therefore, "involvement" appears to take the place of "mediation." Despite different individual emphases, proponents of participatory democracy largely concur in viewing participatory involvement in group decisions affecting work, education,

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health, the environment, or leisure pursuits as essentially political activity. Participation within such groups simultaneously promotes enhanced overall citizenship because segmental activities of this kind are bound to create "more self-confident, politically aware citizens" and are therefore best able to render democracy legitimate "in accordance with democratic ideals."14 Thus, while the state is conceptually withered out as a qualitatively different macro-institution and assimilated to segmental micro-institutions, the idea of citizenship and nationhood is massively reinforced.15 I return to this apparent elimination of groups that act as sources of political mediation at greater length below. For the moment I want to make clear that I am not concerned with participationist proposals for the democratization of the factory, the office, the university and so on, as such, but merely with the grounds upon which these proposals are made. Nor do I wish to survey the considerable literature on participation. My aim here is more limited: I want to focus on the typical arguments that are used to justify segmental participation as political participation. In particular, I want to look more closely at arguments that equate democratization within economic institutions with processes within political institutions; for what is called into question is not so much the extension of democracy as the extension of politics, since this position clearly signals a real shift of thinking about parts and wholes; and it implies that participation at segmental levels is perfectly analogous to, and continuous with, participation at the national level. This assumption seems to me worrisome for principally three reasons. First, it obscures highly disparate grounds for democratic legitimation, such as the internal structure of segmental entities, their relation with other entities, and, most significantly perhaps, their sense of self-location within society as a whole. Second, though relatedly, the assumption blurs the degree to which ends, interests, and commitments in the private realm, such as a business corporation, differ from ends, interests, and commitments in the public realm, thereby courting the danger of suggesting that democratizing one realm has immediate and direct bearing upon the other. Third, yet most important, not only does this assumption fail to disclose the nature of mediation between the particular and the general but it creates a lack of clarity regarding the need for political mediation as such. The structural-similarities argument is familiar enough: business corporations are political because they constitute patterns of hierarchy and power. But the political-structure argument is not the only argument that is invoked to justify the identification of business corporations with political institutions. The other argument most commonly

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employed is one that stresses relevance more than structure: corporations are political because their activites impinge on the community as a whole.16 Democratization derives its legitimating sanction, accordingly, from the existence of sources of domination and unequal power, and/or from the spilling-over propensity of corporate business decisions, by dint of which the life and well-being of people within the larger society are affected. Unfortunately, little recognition is given to the difference between the political-structure argument and the political-relevance argument, thereby encouraging the belief that "democratization" in one stroke settles the problems arising out of both. Pateman's theory of political participation perhaps most strikingly illustrates this conflation of the political-structure and the political-relevance arguments, as if issues of internal power and hierarchy and issues of external spill-overs were one and the same. Pateman argues that the majority of democratic theories have been evolved by writers who concentrate exclusively on the politics of the state and therefore dismiss direct participation as impractical, if not Utopian. By contrast, Pateman considers electoral voting as nothing more than a pretense of political equality, "which, when performed, creates a vertical, unmediated bond between each individual citizen singularly and the institution of the state," whereas she sees in direct participation the genesis of horizontal bonds, of true equality, and civic solidarity.17 Unlike other participationists, Pateman pays homage to Cole's Guild Socialism as the culmination of the tradition of democratic thought that envisions democratization as a process by which people's control over their immediate environment can be enhanced. Opting for "a wide definition of the political," which embraces non-government institutions such as business corporations as well as government agencies, Pateman fuses the two arguments as if they were identical ways or senses in which the notion of the political might be extended. Corporations (like Laski's baseball clubs) can be described as political because they are instances of the wider political system, in that they involve possible conflicts of purpose as well as the use of power. By the same token, apparently, corporations can be characterized as political because they make decisions of far-reaching importance for society at large. Although Pateman refers approvingly to Bachrach, unlike Bachrach she regards corporations not as micro-political but as macropolitical, suggesting that industry and other spheres form political systems in their own right.18 And they do so because of the power they exercise over their employees. For Pateman, therefore, worker control of the factory is an essential ingredient of the extension of political democracy.

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This means, in effect, that giving greater control to those who are subject to an enterprise's authority is analogous to giving greater control to citizens subject to governmental authority; from which it would follow that the process of democratic legitimation involved is virtually identical in both situations. Yet, surely, to argue thus is to obscure not only the meaning of democratic legitimation but also the source and nature of political legitimacy itself. There is clearly a radical difference between democratizing an institution because of its location, thereby paving the way for more effective public control, and democratizing it in order to provide more worker's control. Whereas one conception of democratization leads toward reinforcing the public by bringing its concerns to bear on a wide range of activities, the other conception leads away from any notion of the public; instead it represents a model of society as a set of self-contained segments whose sources of democratic validation are derived, not from their location within the broader society, but from their internal restructuring, following a shift of organizational power. Such fuzziness in the treatment of democratization as a political theory of participation contrasts sharply with Rousseau's thinking, on which Pateman professedly seeks to place particular reliance. For Rousseau was strenuously determined to keep apart what Pateman is anxious to join. Modes of democratization that appear analogous and continuous in Pateman's theory clearly form in Rousseau's thinking two radically different and mutually exclusive choices: you can either reinforce partial attachments and efface the public or reinforce the public and efface partial attachments.19 In attempting to do both at once, Pateman appears to stipulate that the collective will of segments and the collective will of the general constituency are somehow complementary, if not dovetailing. But she does not explain why more intense commitment to partial organizations should kindle in participants a stronger sense of commitment to public issues or in any way add to their impact on them. This is a pity, since, unfortunately, whatever experience we have points in the opposite direction. The individual may indeed participate more effectively in smaller segmental units; but, the smaller the units, regardless of the intensity of participation, the less power they have to affect the outcome of broader issues - control of the environment, education, or health, for example.20 Clearly, there is a downside to highly particularist attachments to which participationary theorists seem to turn a blind eye despite Rousseau's emphatic warnings. Similarly, participationary theorists leave us in the dark as to why, conversely, a greater degree of national involvement should make segmental involvement more intense, thereby causing the internal struc-

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ture of firms, for example, to be more democratic. Perhaps these are not irreconcilable visions; but simply projecting them as if they were obvious conceptual entailments does little to make the proposed extension of politics and democracy any the more intelligible. On the face of it, the issues that demand the most critical attention appear to be defined away. Alternatively, the conflation of legitimating grounds only serves to distract from the problematic relationship between the parts and the whole and, more worrying still, deceptively invites us to imagine society as a harmonious nest of complementary jurisdictions that differ in scale only; in which case it is hard to see what need there would be for any mediation, let alone political mediation. THE TRANSFERABILITY ARGUMENT

The cloudiness of political mediation is paralleled by the uncertain meaning of the state itself. If segmental groups are to mediate between the state and the individual, how do participationsists tend to view the state? To be sure, theorists favouring more direct and more active civic participation in politics by no means all speak with one voice. Nonetheless, on the nature and role of the state they display a highly similar degree of ambiguity. Two things in particular are unclear: whether an overall authority is denied existence altogether or whether the state is merely relocated in some "complex of associations."21 It seems that while, as an institution, the state is to be stripped of its supreme legitimacy, as an associational or communal complex, it is to be massively enhanced in prestige and permeation. As with the Guild Socialists, this could mean a narrowly specialized type of "government," and a decisive shift from politics and law to voluntary activities within society (somewhat in the tradition of Locke) or it could mean a (decidedly unLockean) "idealist" or "metaphysical" theory, in which the state is an object of paramount allegiance - with the important proviso that the "state" be identified with the expression of some transcendent as well as permanent interest of society or, more precisely, "the community as a whole." In effect, the focus of loyalty, and its justifying validation, is switched from the political to the social, to a "complex" of communal associations, which, despite its constitutive multiplicity, is thought to have an "organized will." The communal associations, in turn, are called upon to serve the "developmental" function of moulding the habits and attitudes of their members in the direction of overall cooperation.22 Participationists by and large follow the same line of argument when they attribute to segmental groups politicizing functions that are intended to instil an enhanced civic consciousness in their members. Participation at the state level, although still essentially con-

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fined to the casting of votes, now becomes "enlightened" voting, voting with maximal "political awareness."23 The outcome of this odd conjunction of "Lockean" and "idealist" impulses is a conceptual incongruity of formidable proportions. In the Lockean mood, participationists project society as a complex of rights guaranteeing immunity from governmental interference. In the idealist mood, however, the relocated "state" embraces the totality of segmental institutions and activities, and forms the object of an individual's highest duties. This elevation of the state wholly demolishes the Lockean conception of government and the minimal state, and substitutes for an inherently liberal philosophy an inclusive doctrine of human association that has little or no use for a theory of natural rights. After all, is it not absurd to speak of having rights against a state that is identical with the common good, as T.H. Green has amply demonstrated?24 In the light of this transfiguration of the state, David Miller's attempt to combine the idea of the state as a civic "community" with the recognition of individual rights takes the participationary argument a good step further, even though his conception departs from viewing democratization as the sole or overriding consideration in legitimizing social and political life.25 Rather intriguingly, Miller fuses the idea of autonomy at local levels of decision-making with the nondemocratic idea of a supreme constitutional court for settling coordination problems, in preference to C.B. Macpherson's idea of subordinating local decisions to democratic (majoritarian) processes at the state level. Interestingly, too, in order to combine "community" with "rights," Miller excludes certain types of decision-making from the ambit of democratic participation. In meshing the idea of the state as the guardian of the individual with the idea of its being the guardian of the diverse segmental communities, Miller evidently tries to link the aim of segmental devolution with the aim of overall cohesion. Yet, despite this new interpretation of the role of the state, Miller seems to share the view of participationary theorists who see the autonomy of the individual as being of one piece with the autonomy of the group to which the individual belongs. And since autonomous groups are by definition self-managing entities, their particular purposes are of concern to no one but themselves.26 It follows that in either case central government is otiose. Just as individual rights are taken care of by self-governing autonomies, so self-governing autonomies themselves have no need for the services of an outside umpire, given that their activities are strictly local or particularist and their structure such as to minimize the existence of internal conflicts. One may possibly question this line of argument on empiri-

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cal grounds, but conceptually it seems self-sustaining. The real difficulty, as I see it, lies with another argument which, although it inherently differs from the insulating argument, nonetheless makes its appearance in Cole's pluralism as it does in subsequent participationist theories. According to this second argument, the state is found superfluous because segmental entities, particularist though they are, nevertheless share a commitment to the community as a whole. In this argument the thrust of reasoning shifts quite fundamentally; segmental entities are now thought to be permeated by an ethos of generality and public spiritedness. From this perspective, central authority becomes redundant because concern for, and understanding of, the needs of the national community are already so widely diffused. The unifying role of the state may, then, be dispensed with on either argument. Not infrequently, however, participationists introduce a third argument, possibly as a bridge between the previous two. This third argument is none other than the transferability argument. Now participatory activity within segmental units is presented as preparation for participation in macro-politics, the domain of citizenship. Autonomies, which serve distinctly particularist ends, are no longer seen as self-insulating but are expected to perform mediating functions in forging the link between the plural particular and the unifying general. Members of micro-units learn all there is to be learned from their particularistic involvement for use within the macro-unit of the nation. One provides the necessary path to the other; the pursuit of particular goals brings with it a better awareness of general ends. A somewhat mysterious unifying presence is now presumed to be generated, by virtue of which intense involvement carries within it the seed of mediation, of connecting parts and wholes, so that good segmentalists emerge as good citizens. While the second argument presents a situation in which segmental units are ab initio imbued with a spirit of generality and unity - a oneness merely hidden beneath plurality - the third argument suggests a movement, an ongoing process of becoming, by dint of which particularistic pursuits promote "thinking big," in helping individuals to transcend their parochial concerns, thereby virtually substituting one kind of involvement for another. It could be objected that in any society individuals have both partial and general attachments. This, of course, is perfectly true, and I do not want to be understood as saying that the existence of the one precludes the existence of the other. What I am questioning, however, is whether the two are or should be continous and equally describable as political. There clearly is no reason why fervent loyality to particularist causes should simultaneously give birth to fervent loyality to general causes. By designating both, say, vegetarianism and nuclear disarma-

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Democratic Legitimacy

ment, as inherently linked and thus equally political, we learn as little about their relationship as about their difference; such a linkage clouds not only the meaning of the political but the idea of mediation itself. For why and how should insulating designs, intended to ensure self-regulating otherness, at the same time perform linking functions toward the attainment of oneness? The only way out is to admit that segmental units are in truth not ^^constitutive autonomies, in and for themselves, but instead are functional in character. Cole, indeed, suggested some such strategy in order to bridge the hiatus between the particular and the general. By distinguishing "purpose" from "function," Cole wished to make a case for diversity being compatible with unity. Groups are constituted by purposes common to their members, but they simultaneously serve the function of making a specialized contribution to society as a whole. On closer examination, however, Cole's distinction amounts to very little. As with the participationists' extension of the political, it merely helps to conceal the hiatus, not to close it. The new functionality of specialized groups, their forming snug components of an overall "complex," makes sense only - as Cole was honest enough to admit if groups no longer seek to be self-regulating, autonomous entities in their own right, but are prepared to becomes "factors," integral parts within a "coherent whole." In the course of this transformation, groups need to scrutinize their own specific purposes "in the light of their communal value in and for the whole."27 With Cole, as with the participationists' image of intermediary groups, the gap between the particular and the general is bridged by the suppressed admission that the distinction between purpose and function is now abandoned. Instead, purpose is turned into function; a group's goals, in fact, are not strictly the group's purposes, the kind of goals that validate its raison d'etre as a group, but are societal requirements, as external to any particular group as any central government could be. If participationists wish to claim that segmental entities are purposive and functional in order to establish their legitimating status within the polity as a whole, then the source of this claim is somewhat enigmatic. Surely, once complementariness is built into diversity, political mediation is in truth beside the point. The idea of groups acting as self-regulating intermediaries between the individual and the state is emptied of meaning, because this idea rests on the lack of natural complementarity. The matter, however, goes deeper than this. If, in effect, the segmentation of society is functional from the outset, groups can hardly be viewed as instruments of politicization, for they are politicized on coming into being by virtue of locating themselves as integral and functionally required parts of the larger whole. And neither mediation

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nor transferability comes into play on the assumption of inherent complementariness; for, on this assumption, it is not so much a case of groups creating more intense democratic solidarity or public spiritedness as it is a case of groups expressing a prior commitment to either or both. Perhaps this line of argument could be said to anticipate, if not transcend, communitarian visions of the encumbered self, in as much as it hints at an encumbered group. But, whichever way we look at it, intensified group participation in and for itself provides no warrant for a sense of civic belonging or political identity. Only by making itself fit into the overall scheme of things, therefore, can a group become "political," and its innate functionality set the course of its political embeddedness. It follows that to functionalize a group in this manner is to substitute jbrg-determination for ^^determination. For participatory activity thus becomes governed not by its own distinctive purposes but by a group's allocated place within the total (national) context of ends. The general constituency then suffuses the particular constituency with whatever political content it has. And any civic consciousness or political activity can scarcely therefore be said to be modelled by replication, on the micro-political activity of particular groups. No such transfer appears to be taking place at all. If there is any kind of transfer, it could only be in the opposite direction, from the general to the particular. For, whatever civic consciousness is brought into being would have to be attributable to "radiation" emitted from involvement with the general and not from segmental involvement with the particular. In other words, the conventional participationist theory would have to be turned to stand on its head. Are there, then, no inherent similarities between group participation and civic participation? Indeed there are; and the existence of such similarities may undoubtedly infuse participation within baseball clubs, industrial enterprises, or univeristy committees with a certain educative value describable as political. Participating in such entities could teach individuals something about decision-making as it may enable them to acquire confidence - a sense of efficacy, as it is usually called, a willingness to compromise, techniques of persuasion and dissimulation, and so forth. But, whatever transferable skills are acquired are derivable from similarities of process, and, however valuable in themselves, hardly justify the transfer thesis in the substantive sense in which it frequently is presented, since they lack the mediating force of ends that loom large at the general level of political action. It would seem, then, that one cannot assume a direct continuity between levels and sites of participation because the criteria of effectiveness or appropriateness are simply not the same. Any potential

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legitimation through transfer-f alues of political agency in terms of societal purposes does not actually come about; the emphasis, clearly, is far too exclusively on certain processual or behavioural propensities. The how of politics is undoubtedly important; but it still requires a telos to be politically identifiable. Whatever the similarities of process, they do not reveal much about political thrust or content. Unless, therefore, democratic legitimation is entirely confined, Schumpeter-like, to matters of method - and, specifically, to electoral method - we are forced to conclude that the value-transfer from participatory activity at segmental levels to the domain of citizenship and macro-political commitments is at best minimal. If any transfer-theory is at all sustainable, it can, I believe, only be a very thin theory. As such, it suspiciously resembles Cole's vision of keeping politics out of government, or, in culinary terms, it is like making a Hungarian gulash without paprika. Segmentalism, therefore, as I.M. Young has remarked, does not "purify politics as its proponents think, but rather avoids politics."28 LEVELS OF D E M O C R A T I Z A T I O N

Nevertheless, despite the downgrading of politics, a whole variety of paraphrases comes to be introduced, demonstrating the persistence of the general constituency: "citizenship," "nationhood," the overall "community," or in the notable case of Robert Dahl - who probably has done more than anyone to extend the reference of politics - the "public's business."29 What is missing, however, is a plausible theory for its coming about, for the general constituency's assuming political reality. Political mediation is out; but what is in instead? In maintaining the thesis that levels of participation are continuous and differ in scale only, theories of participatory democracy strikingly recall the characteristically medieval conception of "Mediate Articulation," according to which particularist groups stood in graduated order between the individual and the sovereign. Similarly, the contention that we become better citizens by participating in the factory or the faculty club echoes Althusius's view that we are led into "the universal symbiotic association" of the state through our membership in the "symbiotic life of families, kinship associations, collegia, cities and provinces."30 Rather strangely, perhaps, the post-modern and the politically archaic appear to join hands. I have tried to argue that one can assume "mediate articulation" as a source of political legitimation only by denying important differences between levels of association. The attribution of significant similarities between the general constituency and segmental entities rests,

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I believe, on either a mistake or an illusion. A theory of participatory democracy is mistaken if it relies on the similarity of process, for such similarity tells us nothing about the content or the relationship of the levels in which it takes place. It rests on an illusion if a mediating link or transferable property is presumed by reading into the relationship qualities that in fact have not been established. One level simply does not replicate the other, nor can one be reduced to the other. Whatever form of democratic validation is held appropriate at the level of the factory floor is therefore hardly derivable from democratic principles appropriate at the level of national politics, nor can the latter be reduced to the former. On this view, in short, there is much to be said for preferring Aristotle to Althusius, by distinguishing firmly between "the various institutions of a common social life" and "the end and purpose of the pohV'31 Given this conclusion, two question arise: whether participation within particularist entities is in fact political participation, and whether experience of participation at particularist levels is readily transferable to activity at the level of the general constituency. I have argued that, because there is a fundamental difference between the segmental community and the political society, there is a comparably fundamental difference between group purposes and societal or public objects. Furthermore, and contrary to participationists' claims, I believe that, by widening the gap between the parts and the whole, intense preoccupation with segmental concerns is more likely to result in the overall ctepoliticization of society rather than its politicization. Overall depoliticization could assume two principal forms: the first, and most obvious, might result from the possibility that segmental participation leaves little time or even interest for the pursuit of national concerns.38 The second, if less obvious, form of depoliticization might occur when members of groups are required to ensure that their own purposes not collide with those of the nation at large. This, though possibly less transparent, could in truth be the more ominous form, since it would drain segmental entities of their distinctive character. For, once the idea of instrumental functions displaces the idea of intrinsic purposes, conditions are created under which particular groups cease being masters in their own home, having instead to take whatever place has been allotted to them. And whether or not such predetermined functionality harbours the risk of totalitarianism, it certainly blurs the categories in which we normally think of parts and wholes, as it in effect negates the need for their political mediation.

156 Democratic Legitimacy DELIBERATIVE AND DIRECT DEMOCRACY

In the light of these observations, it is not surprising that theorists of deliberative democracy explicitly view the particular through the prism of the general.33 Bernard Manin, for example, has drawn attention to the guiding priority of the general within the context of public debate. Involving confrontation as well as the coming together of positions and values, public debate makes people discover how incoherent in the first place their preferences really are, and thereby induces them to clarify and structure these in a way that frequently helps them to disclose more sharply their particularist interests by making them think of their general goals.34 There is no suggestion in Manin's thesis, however, that segmental entities ought to play a merely functional role by predeterminately fitting into the general scheme of things. Moreover, in keeping with other deliberative approaches to participatory democracy, its main emphasis is not restricted to the relation between the particular and the general. Rather, his thesis extends to the broader question of democratic legitimation by putting maximum weight on the authenticating quality of the exercise of democratic governance instead of on the quantitative origin of its acquisition. Hence, the wellspring of democratic legitimacy is identified not with the numerical force of the popular will but with the mode of its formation. By itself, a majoritarian will is viewed as inadequate, since it potentially falls short of upholding civic inclusiveness. In chapter ten I agree therefore with Manin that "it is not possible to deliberate all possible outcomes; the range of proposed solutions must by necessity be limited."35 There are value issues that defy majoritarian resolution. In recognizing the need for authenticating boundary markers within democratic legitimation, Manin's approach betokens a judicious awareness of the difficulties involved in attaining an integral oneness of civic ends amidst a plurality of values and attachments. I do not know if deliberative approaches could come to terms with these difficulties or could at least succeed in reducing the tensions between competing segmental demands within society at large. Regardless, however, of whether or not they could sufficiently reconcile values of segmental loyalties with values of overall citizenship or, for that matter, could find a middle ground between ruthless individualism (personal and corporate) and an all-embracing super-state, the open recognition of perplexingly competing preferences seems to me of immense importance in the search for a more widely shared sense of common objectives and the ranking of their implementational priorities.

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If there are grounds for reservations about some deliberative approaches, these (once again) derive largely from the notion of "rationality" or, more precisely, its interpretation. Notably those who speak of "rational dialogue" frequently do so in a manner that suggests undue faith in its capacity to settle political differences. Underlying this faith, there appears to be a tendency to draw a rather close analogy between rationality in politics and rationality in philosophy. Unobjectionable perhaps in an ideal world, this analogy courts the risk, as I have argued in the previous chapter, of introducing into democratic contexts, such as they are, an intellectual elitism or paternalism of a kind that hardly sits will with the deliberative idea of unrestrained debate among equals. No less problematically, the analogy is liable to obscure the inescapable fact that, however, rational the debate and however unrestrained, it need not stop issues from remaining contentious. Failure to reach agreement, in other words, signals neither a breakdown of rationality not a "crisis of legitimacy." It is therefore of interest that for Manin deliberation is a rational process precisely in being a discursive process. Although he sees that its purpose is to reach "agreement in the listener," he does not identify rational deliberation with the type of logical argument that entails "necessary conclusions" the listener cannot reject; "the listener," Manin insists, "remains free to give his agreement or to withhold it."36 By contrast, the position of John Dryzek makes it difficult to associate the operation of democratic rationality with political deliberation. Dryzek rejects forms of rationality that he calls "instrumental" as fit candidates for the job of democratic deliberation because of their alleged repressiveness. Approvingly citing certain feminist charges on these lines, as well as Foucault's repudiation of reasoned discourse as "entrapment," Dryzek opts for a "different kind of rationality," one that is truly "democratic rather than instrumental."37 This could mean that Dryzek here implies the kind of distinction made at the outset of this chapter between instrumental participation and intrinsic participation. Should he, however, apply "democratic rationality" to some supra-political ideal of democracy that negates contestation and the existence of plural ends, then this would beg the question of the sort of political democracy he basically has in mind. Yet, in whatever form rationality is conceived, one can talk only for so long. Prolonged debate may not bring on the collapse of the republic, as Rousseau feared, but it certainly makes onerous claims on people's time, quite a number of whom may feel what Oscar Wilde said about socialism, that it "takes far too many evenings." At some point decisions have to be made and votes taken, however short these decisions may fall of results attainable by unrestrained deliberation.38

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In voicing uneasiness over placing excessive emphasis on "dialogical" agreement, I am not anxious to raise the spectre of despotic oneparty regimes, notorious for their "rational discussion" producing agreement "at all levels of society." Yet, even in their absence, subtly conformist pressures cannot easily be discounted.39 An overabundance of zeal to produce definite solutions in the form of indisputably rational outcomes, or too desperate a desire to ward off any kind of disagreement as something inherently in conflict with "genuine democracy," presents dangers, and these are not reduced when expectations of agreement through "truly rational" debate are so highly escalated. However inadequate voting may be in establishing by itself the conditions of democratic legitimacy, it may ultimately be the only workable way of coming to terms with disagreement. This is not to deny, though, that voting could be made more rational if, as Miller argues, alternatives and preferences were more clearly, or more openly brought into the debate.40 Could "deliberative" forms of participation, however, be viewed as an alternative, and not merely as a complement, to representative democracy? Before addressing this question, two things should perhaps be clarified. One is that theorists of participationism do not rule out any form of representative institutions at the national level simply by virtue of preferring a politics of dialogue to a politics of aggregation.41 The other is that theorists who maintain that modern democracy cannot dispense with forms of representation do not exclude the possibility of experimenting with direct democracy with the help of high-tech devices in order to broaden the extent of civic participation at pre-decision stages.42 Especially in situations in which the performance of parliamentary or congressional authorities is found badly wanting, direct participation could serve as a promising option in the setting of broad priorities, say, within constitutional assemblies or citizen forums. Technological developments may not usher in an age of face-to-face democracy, but they may go some way in this direction. As long as theorists do not pretend that participatory democracy is a panacea without limits, politics as dialogue, as David Miller presents it, can only enrich the tradition of democracy as it has been understood and cherished since its modern inception. And, trying to keep this tradition at a credibly down-to-earth level, Miller eschews raising undue expectations in the train of rational dialogue. Not unexpectedly, therefore, he takes issue with Habermas's original communication theory and, in particular, with its starting point, the "ideal speech situation." Although Miller accepts Habermas's conditions, such as unconstrained dialogue between equals and no inducement toward

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agreement other than rational argument, he deplores the vagueness in Habermas's thinking about the political scope of deliberative democracy, as well as his tendency to conflate political legitimation with moral justification.43 Interestingly, too, Miller proposes forms of judicial review in cases of conflict between levels of political decisionmaking rather than majoritarian devices that involve hierarchical structures, as he also pleads for more clearly recognizable boundaries of majoritarian democracy.44 In emphasizing boundaries, Miller echoes Weber's and Arendt's fears of unduly extending the range and the attainable outcomes of political action. Political dialogue best furthers participatory legitimation by eliciting common interests and adjudicating competing claims "in terms of shared standards of justice."45 Implicit in this argument is the idea that restricting the scope of political dialogue generally heightens its chance of success. And it also implies the belief that common ground is more likely to be found by excluding personal elements. Miller, in moving in this direction, which, after Kant and Arendt, he describes as the direction toward representative thinking, is aware, however, that it may prove highly problematic in practice to separate positions taken in politics from the excluded personal elements, such as matters of taste, individual convictions, principles of private morality, or religious beliefs.46 To put forward a politics of dialogue as a form of direct participation is one thing; to see in it a warrant for the displacement of representative democracy is something else again. For feasibility apart, it is quite possible that such displacement would be open to serious misgivings over its popular authenticity unless all citizens could be - or at least be perceived to be - equal participants. Experience suggests that only a minority would be incined to play a continuously active part; if so, why should they be considered justified in speaking for all? Second, and perhaps more worrying, as mentioned earlier, it is not easy to see how full and equal participation by all would leave much room for the working of political accountability, even if such an intense and direct manner of universal participation were somehow practicable. At any rate, whenever direct democracy has been pressed into service politically, it has proven rather inimical to governmental answerability and, by no means infrequently, has in fact inhibited debate itself. Authoritarian regimes no doubt typify these negative effects but, as I indicated earlier, they do not hold a monoply on them. Dissent has been known to be seriously jeopardized under conditions of direct democracy in an overall context of free speech and avowed tolerance.47 It seems that at some poiint, or at some level, there is a need to weigh the virtues of direct participation against the possible loss of what I called "distance,"

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the space required between those authorized to act and those who do the authorizing. This call for space appears somewhat ignored or underrated; even when direct participationists concede the indispensability of representative government at the national level, they say little or nothing about the importance of an indirect system for the dynamics of political accountability. This omission is unfortunate because it obscures the fact that the dynamics of accountability demands an essential distance between the governing and the governed, between the entrusted and the entrusters, and makes us forget that citizenship is other than fraternity, political society other than credal community, and political democracy other than total and unbroken solidarity.48 It might not be wrong to conclude, then, that too strident an insistence on the universal applicability of direct democracy could in truth impair political participation. Before direct participation can claim superiority as a legitimizer of political democracy, therefore, it would need to be shown that: segmental participation is indeed political participation; democracy can indeed dispense with intermediary representation and accountable government; public debate is indeed public debate; and dialogical consensus indeed renders dissent no less legitimate than agreement. Of these criteria, the first has formed a major theme of this chapter, because there is still a great lack of clarity about the link between segmental participation and participation within society at large; so much so, in truth, that one commentator speaks of a serious "coordination vacuum."49 To be sure, democracy could benefit from a greater diffusion of social, political, administrative, and economic institutions and activities in order to strengthen the self-government of plural autonomies and thereby counteract pressures toward large-scale amalgamations. However, intense participation in particularist concerns ought not displace the need for overall coordination, overall equity, or overall accountability. Nor should segmental participation per se, I suggested, claim universal acceptance or be viewed as the criterion of genuine democracy. For this might distract attention from experience with participatory democracy in the form of endless bickering, frequent deadlocks, if not utter chaos. Collective memories die hard; it stands to reason, therefore, that there are times and people that call for decisiveness, less debate, and more expeditious action, in preference to lengthy and diffuse participation. At the same time, if experience warns against too much talk, it also warns against too much direction from the top and the passion for quick fixes, both of which could impede the preservation of democracy as a discursive and accountable mode of governance. The present

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chapter does not therefore deny the merits of civic participation or the benefits of democratizing the workplace by calling attention to the potentially negative effects of excessive participatory claims on the role of mediation and accountability in politics, lest these threaten to overshadow, if not entirely eclipse, either or both. Awareness of such diverse effects, moreover, may also help unravel the difficulties involved in ranking the two rationalities that I pinpointed at the outset as the perplexingly critical choices between forms of civic participation. Yet, even if the unravelling should fail to settle the question of ranking, it could nonetheless yield a more sober recognition of the boundaries of the democratically demandable and politically realizable, thus protecting us against the spread of "disenchantment with visionary politics," in respect of any "model of democracy."5° But however soberly one seeks to keep apart the seemingly Utopian from the seemingly realizable, one would be hard put to it to state categorically which of the two rationalities, the quantitative or the moral, should be viewed as maximally democratic, when the former involves the pursuit of ends that people in fact deem worth pursuing for reasons of their own; and the latter involves the pursuit of ends that people ought to pursue in light of ethical precepts. As the previous chapter indicated, there is a real risk of driving a wedge between democratic (quantitative) validation and supra-democratic (moral) validation in this choice. And, just as there seems no obvious rule of performative guidance to determine at what point deliberation should give way to voting, there seems no obvious authority for deciding which option is closer to representative thinking.51 The following two chapters resume the discussion of deliberative approaches to democracy in an attempt to clarify the idea of "representative thinking" itself, but principally in order to bring into sharper relief the distinction between the right to rule based on numbers and votes at any given time and the right to rule based on evaluative judgements overtime.

g Critiques and Visions

Chapter five sought to make clear why aiming only at plurality without giving any thought to unity would be like wanting to build a house with bricks and no mortar. If liberal democracy were wholly defined in terms of plural autonomies, therefore, it would scarcely qualify as a political system. Certainly, while plural diffusion alone may satisfy purely liberal forms of validation, it would not do as a foundation for democratic legitimation. Supposing we grant the truth of this proposition, the question to be asked is whether, conversely, purely democratic forms of validation would be sufficient either. The intent of this chapter is to address this question, in an effort to shed light on the legitimating requirements of a democratic society that is also a political society. The central point at issue is whether, to meet such requirements, communal conceptions of democracy would be preferable to liberal conceptions. REPLACING LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

Critics of liberal democracy argue for the most part that its failure to match individual freedom with a sense of social responsibility renders its claim to democratic legitimacy seriously deficient. By its remoteness, indirectness, and unrepresentativeness, they charge further, liberal democracy is causing, as it is caused by, unequal access to political influence and political power. While some who call for sweeping reforms still see value in preserving the marriage between liberalism and democracy, others find that there is no point whatsoever in keeping the

163 Critiques and Visions marriage alive, and hence call for a divorce. Liberal democracy, they insist, neither serves democracy nor guarantees liberty, its voluntarism is illusory, and its equality of voting rights an empty gesture. Aside from outspokenly Marxist theories, Carol Pateman's The Problem of Political Obligation: A Critique of Liberal Theory typifies most lucidly the mainstream of radical thinking on this issue. Whereas her earlier Participation and Democratic Theory centres on workers' self-management as the principal expression and validating source of political democracy, the later work carries the argument further by declaring the identification of liberal democracy with democracy proper to be fundamentally mistaken: liberal democracy "is not a synthesis of 'liberal' and 'democratic' ideas and practices;" indeed, they are wholly incompatible; where there is one, the other cannot be.1 In sharp contrast to other critics of liberal democracy such as Robert Dahl and C.B. Macpherson, Pateman makes no attempt to conceal the fact that she demands a complete break. Principles of liberal democracy are neither "truly democratic" nor "truly liberal" and thus lamentably fail to serve as legitimating sanctions of political obligation.2 At the same time, some things do need recovering, such as the ideas of "selfassumed obligation" and "voluntariness," which are upheld as "invaluable democratic kernels that deserve to be extracted from the shell of liberal hypothetical voluntarism."3 (Why they obviously are democratic kernels Pateman finds unnecessary to explain.) What, on the other hand, demands no recovery is the idea of the state. In both her earlier critique and her later work, Pateman categorically denies its importance as a unifying concept, calling it a pure "reification," and puts in its place the idea of community.4 In substituting the community for the state, Pateman reopens a number of themes of the earlier English pluralists, notably G.D.H. Cole and Harold Laski, although she expressly presents her thoughts as being concerned with concepts and ideas, and not with practical proposals. She does not attempt to map out the transition from the liberal-democratic state to the genuinely-democratic community, and hence cannot be criticized for failing to do so. But the fact remains that the hiatus between the here and now and the envisioned tomorrow is as deep as ever, a coordination vacuum in time as in space. It is of interest to note, however, that, on bringing about the desired transition, Pateman does not share the direct participationism of those who welcome technological developments in communication as a path to a more authentic democracy.5 On the contrary, any such developments, she insists, favour liberalism rather than democracy, "vertical" voting as under liberal democracy, not "horizontal" voting as under the democratic community - "populism," not democracy.6

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A work that appeared about the same time goes beyond Pateman in calling for the replacement not only of liberal democracy but of democracy altogether, arguing that democracy does not and cannot exist in practice. It opts instead for the creation of "statistically representative decision-making bodies" throughout the national "community."7 I am referring to John Burnheim's Is Democracy Possible? Burnheim asserts that the defects of party politics are such that democracy, as we know it, is beyond reform.8 While Burnheim shares Pateman's segmentalism by wanting to break down bureaucracies into small units, he favours the relevance argument put forward by Peter Bachrach: segmental areas of administration are to be under "direct control of those they affect."9 Accountability is to be enhanced by severely limiting the jurisdiction of central agencies in the management of public goods; their dispersal is to reduce the risk of irresponsible action and offer a far better chance for the exercise of civic vigilance. Although people in general are held to be incapable of making sound assessments of major issues of government policy, or even of judging the merits of rival elites competing for votes, "most people, if they are faced with limited concrete questions about matters that affect them directly ... can make sensible choices about them."10 "Community control," therefore, is limited to such issues, while the state is rendered superfluous by "negotiation," in place of coercion, once "specialization of functions" has sufficiently advanced.11 (Surprisingly, Burnheim, though acknowledging Pateman, seems unaware of his debt to Cole.) In his envisioned "demarchy" - an archaic term borrowed from Friedrich Hayek - there is not the slightest suggestion that everybody's opinion has the same claim to be taken seriously, yet maximal emphasis is nonetheless put on "continued debate," and a "rational sorting out process designed to bring out the best of what each is capable of."12 Why exactly this should happen is not spelled out, but, since the whole scheme is selfprofessedly Utopian, we presumably should not be too censorious, and should not mind taking Burnheim's word for it. To be fair, however, Burnheim visualizes demarchy merely as a first step in the transition to the desired transmutation of political validation - a sort of practical, if speculative, postscript to Pateman's philosophical meditations. As for Burnheim's segmental models of participation, much the same comments would apply as those I made on Pateman's self-management ideas. In essence, I feel that segmentation excessively narrows down the content of public debate, as it leaves a coordination vacuum between the particular and the general - despite Burnheim's attempt to eliminate the latter. But it may be of interest to record that Burnheim emphatically declares his intention to salvage "the strongest elements of the liberal tradition," by upholding pluralism as

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well as the need for individual independence. All he wants, he modestly adds, is "to replace the rigid legal, electoral, and administrative procedures of state democracy ... by flexible, responsive, participatory procedures that permit and foster maximum variety."13 Furthermore, Burnheim fully acknowledges that "what is politically possible is limited," and hence it is only "right that these limits are observed."14 Valuable though this acknowledgment is, it is not easy to make out what demarchy may achieve as an alternative mode of political legitimation; nor is it easy to determine how Burnheim's neo-representative scheme is to come into being as an alternative to democratic representation. One commentator, more competent to pass judgement than I feel myself to be, prefers the idea of demarchy to voting, insofar as it is not easily manipulable, unlike other practicable choice procedures. All the same, he observes, there remain political issues that cannot be resolved by it. Demarchy by representative samples, comparable to market research, does not involve discussion or the deliberation of competing priorities. "The analogy between a political system and a superstore is not perfect either descriptively or normatively. In a political system there is communication both ways: politicians tell voters what they think ought to be done, as well as the other way about."15 Demarchy apparently does not allow for this, nor for the possibility that either side may change its mind in the course of public debate. Finally, while Burnheim dismisses both "the state" and "the general" as total fictions, his image of community is every bit as abstract as any state concept could be and, if anything, a good deal less intelligible than the nation-state as a legitimizing symbol. For, when he speaks of "community control," he has in mind a particular locale, not a community of choice or distinct purposes of its own. The "community" in Burnheim's scheme is essentially an administrative entity which, as a collectivity, is neither a part nor a whole, having even less unifying potential than Pateman's self-management units. Bereft of intelligible meaning as a social whole, it is equally empty as a self-sustaining group, with its own life and sources of cohesion. An entity does not become a community by being administratively politicized. Far less ambitious in design, and far less eager to break with democracy, is the theory of associationalism, as advocated by Paul Hirst - a sort of moderate Guild Socialism. Its principal aim seemingly is to reverse the order of things by treating "self-governing voluntary bodies not as secondary associations," but making them the primary means of "democratic governance"; the relationship between the parts and the whole is to be turned "on its head."16 In contrast to the scheme of Guild Socialism, however, as well as to that of subsequent proponents

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of participatory democracy, Hirst is not bent on making the state redundant. Though no longer central, the state is nonetheless still "vitally necessary"; its role is to act as a mediator between associations, administer public funds, and protect individual rights. Moreover, associationalism is not to be thought of as "a social system complete in itself," but rather as what Hirst calls "an axial principle of social organization" and a kind of "supplement to our failing institutions." Not all economic activities can be carried out by self-governing cooperatives, and not all public welfare can be entrusted to voluntary agencies.17 And, unlike Burnheim's administratively generated communities, Hirst's segmental communities rest upon self-creation: they are either communities of fate, such as ethnic, gender, or religious associations, or communities of choice, such as environmental groups or gun-lover clubs. The professed end of associationalism is to "bridge and transform" the division between politics and economics or, more broadly, between "state and civil society." The desired outcome is a decentralized welfare state consisting of a plurality of self-governing, competing, voluntary associations, none of which is to have "omnicompetent control over all the others."18 The obvious question that arises is that of viability. The ship of state may be the only ship that leaks from the top, but it can hardly sail by resting on its mast. Metaphors aside, how can a state function as a coordinating and unifying agent if, politically, it is reduced to second place and, structurally, denied the means of exercising any effective control or authority? If "social actors" and voluntary associations fail to negotiate between highly antagonistic segments, why and how should a virtually impotent state be any more successful? Above all, it is by no means evident how overall accountability is to work if segmental associations, in taking over public functions, are to be answerable only to "their own membership through their processes of self-government for the administration of these activities."19 Voluntary agencies and social movements have their undoubted value, but this hardly warrants the disempowerment of institutions of centrality. Devolution of power, especially of bureaucratic power, clearly has its place in democracies; fragmentation, however, does not. And it is deeply problematic whether voluntary associationalist bodies are in an obviously better position to mediate between plural ends than the procedural means of existing democracies, despite their different shortcomings. Another issue to be faced is the oft-noted problem of getting from here to there. Radical change can make demands on people that people are unwilling to meet, especially if they feel uncertain about its outcomes. And it is difficult, in democratic terms, to justify a transformation in which "the price of participation" would amount to a

167 Critiques and Visions "greater degree of activity than the average person can reasonably be expected to contribute," as so prominent a critic of liberal democracy as C.B. Macpherson has pointed out.20 In addition to these "dispositional" obstacles, there are what Barry Holden calls "situational" considerations against the kind of changes reformers like Pateman, Burnheim, Benjamin Barber, or Paul Hirst propose, difficulties that involve questions of scale and complexity.21 Democratizing structures in factories and offices leaves wide open, we noted, the question of its bearing upon society at large. There may undeniably be room for administrative devolution, for increasing the autonomy of segmental groups, but at every point one is confronted with the problem of relating the parts to the whole, of weighing the advantage of segmentation and direct participation against the cost of excluded opportunities, of chances to create better forms of national representation and accountability, and thereby, a stronger sense of overall cohesion. Thus viewed and weighed, Barber's claim that representation destroys citizenship, and that, therefore, any democracy based on it negates its legitimacy, may not be quite as obvious, despite the evident flaws in existing representative institutions. So, while he may be on safe enough grounds in pointing to defects, he is on less safe grounds in advancing his notion of "strong" democracy as a synthesis between the "conservative appreciation of community and the democratic attachment to participation."22 For, if the replacement of representative democracy by direct democracy is to result in the demise of the we/they antagonisms, multiplying segmental participation is unlikely to do it. Democratizing segmental entities may strengthen their sense of corporate attachment, but is hardly likely to produce national attachment, let alone a national community of communities - the claimed ideal of conservative republicanism. If anything, an invigorated parochialism can only help to intensify the duality of the we/they syndrome - a danger that does not escape Barber himself. Moreover, it is not at all certain that Pateman's avowed principle of voluntarism stands a better chance of being put into practice under conditions of direct participation than under those of representative democracy. "Strong" democracies are not known to take kindly to "otherness," to dissenting minorities.23 "Democratic decisions can be illiberal, and we may choose liberty over democracy some of the time," as Iain McLean remarks.24 The picture painted by advocates of direct democracy appears attractive enough, but, as James Fishkin shows, with the support of detailed evidence, it is in truth highly Utopian. It is not enough, he therefore points out, "to bring power to the people, for them to become engaged and sufficiently interested in politics to achieve the result of mass deliberation."25 Fully sharing Peter Laslett's

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position that "we are haunted by the metaphor of face-to-face democracy inherited from the Greeks,"26 Fishkin is unmistakably torn between the opposites of equality and elitism "between the nondeliberative (formal) political equality of the masses and the deliberative political inequality of the elites," which is based on "the presumption that the masses will not be sufficiently engaged or aroused to be deliberative on national issues of the large-scale nation-state."27 But he cites an important exception, Bruce Ackerman's notion of "constitutional moment," according to which the masses may become engaged episodically, in moments of crisis "when everyone is open to continuing deliberative mass discussion."28 If so, there appears to be more hope for extending deliberative democracy and the activities of new social movements, such as those focusing on environmental concerns, than for extending direct democracy. Reinventing Athenian democracy may be a worthwhile thought-experiment, or "demarchy," as proposed by Burnheim, less prone to manipulation than electoral politics; but I doubt if either yields scope for debate that is genuinely unrestrained or ensures decisions that are genuinely based on it. New England town meetings and Old England parish meetings may enable everyone attending to have her or his say, but what is decided in fact does not necessarily follow from or correspond to what has been said in open meeting. Moreover, even if it does, outcomes have as a rule very limited significance within the context of national or broader political issues.29 The previous chapter made mention of the sharp contrast between arguments in support of intense participation and arguments in support of moderate participation as legitimating grounds for political democracy. Among contemporary theorists of democracy, Robert Dahl has, I believe, been foremost in giving a fair assessment of these arguments, and I have little to add; what is more, my concern in this chapter is at once broader and narrower. Broader, because I consider the scope of democratic validation per se, and narrower, because I am focusing on critiques of liberal democracy from the angle of distinctly communitarian visions. WILL OR CONSENSUS?

From the broader perspective, it is doubtful that the mere substitution of direct forms of political participation for conventional representative institutions settles the problem of democratic legitimacy within conditions of societal value plurality. For, just as "truly rational dialogue" may fail to resolve differences arising out of what I called "positional" loyalties in political terms, so the degree of directness of polit-

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ical participation need not affect the bridging of sheer otherness in cultural, religious, or ethnic terms. Radical democrats, it is true, do not reject all forms of representation; they are not, however, very forthright about what needs changing or retaining in order to combine a plural society with a political society. In particular, they seemingly fail to recognize that the distinction between "consensus" and "will" may be more politically pertinent than that between direct and indirect democracy, notably if it is agreed that the deliberative formation of a collective will is of greater evaluative moment than its instant (numerical) expression. Be that as it may, commentators, while in support of further democratization, wonder if the electoral "will" would at all times be "good and wise" to ensure the kind of balancing that a plural society politically requires.30 Thus, while endorsing the principle of participatory democracy, they nonetheless favour a more circumspect approach to the choice and implementation of issues suitable for participatory modes of decision-making. Such a selective approach, they argue, could only strengthen the legitimating force of the principle itself.31 And it is this emphasis which, amidst conditions of plurality, makes them opt for "consensus" in place of "will," especially if the latter is associated with unanimity and a lightness that is held to be inseparable from it. For they prefer to think that what gives meaning to democratic validation in a society of plural values is not so much some allegedly intrinsic quality of a general will as the mode of its emergence, its coming into being. Underlying this preference is the conviction that the more unmediated this emergence is, "the more the people as a multitude want to express themselves directly, the more they lose influence over the details of what really happens."32 In this view, an unmediated popular will unguided by discursive opinion formation is, for the most part, an inchoate, if not impotent, will. The broader question this raises is in truth no less than a question of what to make of self-government itself. Is it to be thought of in terms of a collective self, with a single will of its own, or as a collective self in plural and representational terms? The latter is in an obvious sense a weaker form of democratic legitimation, insofar as authorization is diffused and indirect, by way of voting into positions of authority those who are to carry out certain agreed functions and policies.33 Proponents of "strong democracy" look upon it as second-hand authorization, if not as a device for muzzling the popular will and, thereby, democracy itself. At the same time they fail to disclose how a direct popular will, if discoverable at all, is to operate within a plural society, and come to terms with disagreement or reach a consensus that allows for dissent.

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The legitimating force of a direct popular will (as opposed to a measure of democratic consensus) is the major theme of James Fishkin's Democracy and Deliberation. No matter how widely popular the persecution of Jews by Hitler might have been, or Idi Amin's expulsion of Asian citizens from Uganda, Fishkin states, "no defensible theory of democracy can legitimate such outcomes."34 While I do not for one moment question the moral gist of this statement, I do not much care for its formulation, since it is liable to misdirect attention from what needs qualifying. As it stands, it suggests loading "democracy" with substantive morality, whose sources largely consist of precepts and beliefs that are extraneous to the concept itself. Procedurally, there is indeed no guarantee whatsoever, that, in the absence of legally guarded democratic restraints intended to override the mandate of the electoral "will," majoritarian sanctions would not be forthcoming to back such inhumanities. Despite the above formulation, Fishkin would not dispute this caveat. His emphasis is not on numbers but on the quality and range of "representative deliberation."35 Political equality without deliberation, he says, "is not much use, for it amounts to nothing more than power without the opportunity to think about how that power ought to be exercised."36 The critical question, therefore, is whether the source of any normative qualification, moving from the electoral right to rule to the procedural rightfulness of rule itself, is properly describably as "democratic" in itself. Fishkin suggests that this might be so if reform proposals, such as deliberative opinion polls, were put into service, a measure which, unlike conventional representative institutions, would ensure the overriding goal of deliberation without the loss of equality.37 What, however, is to inject legitimating properties into deliberation? There is with Fishkin, as with Bernard Manin and Jurgen Habermas, among others, the Enlightenment conviction that people, if they are better educated, or better informed, will use their vote with "an increased level of knowledge and sophistication."38 Fishkin, it is true, sets apart conditions from outcomes. No matter how well informed citizens are, their knowledge "does not guarantee the correctness, either moral or political, of the conclusion."39 But, if this is so, there can surely be no certainty that deliberative processes, any more than direct will, must produce democratic legitimacy, or that whatever legitimate outcomes do ensue are of necessity the product of democratic processes of validation rather than their normative qualification.40 In this connection, Manin's suggestion that "there is a double dimension" to processes of deliberation is therefore of particular interest.41 In addition to establishing bases of agreement, he says,

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these processes are to discover the foundation of overriding principles of legitimation that go beyond the application of majoritarianism. Rejecting happiness and welfare as such a foundation, Manin puts forward, following Kant, the notion of autonomy as a universal value. Only autonomy can ensure truly uncoerced conditions of deliberation, for only then - and here Manin echoes Isaiah Berlin and John Rawls - are conditions free of coercion if an individual can exercise the right to be different.42 And he criticizes Habermas for insufficiently recognizing that democratic consensus is not the work of superior rationality, but a matter of using arguments able to convince autonomous individuals individually. "The better argument is simply the one that generates more support," and not the one that is able to "convince all participants," with a view to creating a unanimous oneness within a collectivity.43 Besides, as Jon Elster remarks, "the best can be the enemy of the good," insofar as "a collective decision is more trustworthy if it is less than unanimous."44 To be sure, a measure of political consensus is necessary for a society to remain a society, but the real point of deliberation is not the degree of consensus that is attained, but deliberation as such.45 If this is so, however, bounds need to be set to the authenticating validity of majoritarianism. Thus, if "autonomy" is to set these bounds, the quantitative sanction of a majoritarian will demands to be tempered with qualitative constraints within the workings of democracy. These inner constraints are well brought out in Barry Holden's Understanding Liberal Democracy. Viewing them historically, Holden traces them to their chief source in the natural right tradition of liberalism and its celebration of individual freedom vis a vis governmental authority. Contract theory, together with strong emphasis on voluntarism, could be said to have reinforced this tradition, as it has also drawn on it. And it is presumably the blending of this tradition with the idea of a broader franchise that succeeded in combining the self-limiting dimension with the self-affirming dimension in liberal democracy, thereby potentially yielding scope for the idea of an overriding principle of validation within democratic processes of legitimation. To be sure, "autonomy," politically applied, is not, as we found, unproblematic; in view of this, it may well be the case that, as an integral principle of democracy, it proves stronger as the "self-assertion" of a corrective force than as the "self-foundation" of a legitimating force — to use Hans Blumenberg's insightful terminology.46 For autonomy then serves chiefly as a mechanism for the preservation of the conditionality of power, and, in this indirect manner, as a validating medium in reaffirming the authorizing source of democracy: the

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same people who confer power can also take it away again by "kicking the rascals out."47 LEGITIMACY AND COMMUNITARIANISM

Some have difficulty, however, in distinguishing constraints within democracy from brakes upon democracy. To ensure "truly democratic" conditions, they call, not unlike the Webbs before them, for the creation of "economic" democracy in place of purely "formal" democracy, or indeed for some form of "democratic socialism."48 Matching quantity with quality, plurality with civility, or affirmation with restraint, is not enough, in other words. Beyond these specific pressures for reform, moreover, critics point to a more fundamental and more general malaise. What is required, they declare, is no less than a thoroughgoing transformation of legitimating values in and for themselves. And it is this demand for a basic reassessment of values that underlies their reappraisal of democracy from an expressly communal point of view - the narrower concern of this chapter. Apart from earlier proponents of "community," such as Justus Moser (who stressed the autonomy of spatial communities) andJ.G. Herder (who stressed the embeddedness of the self within ethnic communities) in the eighteenth century, and conservative Romantics in the nineteenth century, the first explicit confrontation in political terms between liberal and communitarian understandings of human association can be found in Marx's early writings. Following Herder, and anticipating contemporary communitarianism, Marx states in the sixth of his "Theses on Feuerbach" (1845) that "the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations" and, abstracted from the historical process, is "an abstract-isolated-human individual." Earlier still (1843), in "On the Jewish Question," individuals are said to have a "double existence," in that, while in the "political community [the individual] regards himself as a communal being... in civil society ... he acts simply as a private individual [and] treats other men as means." As a result, "the political state, in relation to civil society, is just as spiritual as is heaven to earth." Consequently, "political man is only abstract, artificial man ... [and] human emancipation will only be complete when the real individual man has absorbed into himself the abstract citizen, when ... in his everyday life ... he has become a species-being."49 There is in bourgeois-liberal society, Marx contends, a perceived lack of community, and this lack expresses itself in the mental projection of a purely "abstract unity," the idea of the state. By inference, explicitly drawn out in later writings in collaboration with Engels

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(especially in the German Ideology), the achievement of concrete unity will render political relations unnecessary - the abstract citizen will have been absorbed into the concrete man of communal (or species) democracy - political democracy will be rendered redundant.50 Among contemporary critics of liberal democracy, Alan Wolfe, in Limits of Legitimacy, seems closest to Marx's conception of the needed transformation of core values. He charges that, while liberalism has become too exclusively the philosophy of capitalism, democracy has become too intimately identified with "certain formal features," instead of being defined by "standards of participation and equality."51 Wolfe proposes that democracy be viewed as an "ideal," in whose light a "community" is to be created in which all partake equally in determining commonly-shareable goals. Echoing Pateman, Wolfe finds liberalism and democracy, "like many marriage partners," totally "incompatible." Having had their fling, their marriage is "no longer relevant."52 Unmistakably the expression of profound disenchantment, Wolfe's critique is characteristic of those who have decided to bury liberal democracy and recover ideal democracy. Yet, despite his low opinion of liberal democracy and his high hopes for communal democracy, he streses the importance of limits. "A value system which is normally good in itself is not necessarily optimized when it is maximized."53 Applying this principle to the proposed transformation of democratic legitimacy, Wolfe therefore speaks of "potentially desirable limits" in its propagation, even if to make such a recommendation may "violate its rhetoric in public."54 He seems also more patient than his fellow-transformers. Conceding that it is relatively easy to renounce liberal democracy because of its severe defects, he acknowledges that "it will take a long time" for a post-liberal form of democratic validation to work itself out.55 The kind of transitional changes Wolfe proposes he sums up in the phrase "democratization of accumulation"; this term clearly has an unmistakably Marxist ring to it, but Wolfe wants to ensure that it does not take on the statist twist it has acquired in Communist regimes. People are to be given the same voice in the making of investment and allocation decisions as they "theoretically have in more directly political decisions."56 Understandably, since the realization of this vision is rather far off - Wolfe offers no time schedule - he counsels "fullest use of the existing political framework" to bring about the desired change.57 Ideals are perhaps best preserved if their implementation is not unduly rushed. Unlike diverse atempts to find a conceptual bridge between communal and liberal arguments, to which attention has particularly been called in chapters one and three, philosophers of communitarianism such as Alasdair Maclntyre, Charles Taylor, and Michael J. Sandel have

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put forward arguments in favour of replacing liberal democracy with forms of communal democracy and the emphasis on individual autonomy with that of individual "embeddedness." Although they think of themselves as progressivists, it is remarkable what an extraordinary fascination the tradition-bound notion of community has for them. Sandel, in particular, seeks to combine this notion with the revival of another tradition, which he calls the "republican" tradition of democracy.58 Maclntyre, although also stressing embeddedness, seems somewhat ambivalent in simultaneously insisting on the plurality of individual choices.59 Taylor, on the other hand, seems closer to Sandel in his critique of liberal individualism and his advocacy of communal identity as the source of individuality.60 Comunitarianism principally calls attention to what it regards as serious flaws in the liberal-individualist tradition, notably the idea of an "unencumbered self," a tradition it seeks to replace with the vision of an intimately connected and socially responsible self, rooted in a setting of communal purposes. In place of the (abstract) identity of the isolated self, it therefore puts the (real) identity of the communal self. While I find myself in sympathy with communitarian social aspirations, I have misgivings about their political implications. Two things disturb me in particular. One is that the emphasis on "collective identity" tends to strengthen exclusionary attachments based on ethnicity, gender, or sexual preferences - so-called communities of fate - which, by their stress on distinctive rootedness, scarcely promote solidarity within the larger society. The other worry, though related to the first, is the problematic translation of communitarian impulses (or philosophies) into political modalities and, through these, toward the overall reciprocity of citizenship. If segmental identities, therefore, provide a corrective to atomistic individualism, their clannishness is unlikely to provide the possibility of a more broadly conceived integrative sense of civic inclusiveness - a point to which I return below. Michael Walzer, although supportive of communitarianism, nonetheless shares some of my reservations in his desire to preserve a politics of plurality, and hence tries to balance the "civic virtue" of communitarian democracy with the "civility" of the liberal tradition.61 An ambivalence, strikingly similar to that found in Maclntyre's communitarianism, typifies the approach to communal democracy by Bikhu Parekh. Unlike Sandel and Taylor, who appear to be chiefly motivated by profound discontent with North American individualism, Parekh places communitarianism within a broader, "global" perspective. He traces the belief in the individual as the "ultimate and irreducible unit of society," with its implied idea of "self-enclosure" by autonomous, self-determining selves, to its point of departure in the

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cultural origins of Western democracy as a whole.62 Insisting that the individual can flourish only within a "communal soil," he contrasts the Greek archetype of democracy, which "took the community as the starting point," with the "much-trumpeted" openness of liberal democracy, finding the latter marked by endemic falseness, in that it is beyond his comprehension "how an open society can be created out of closed selves."63 Like Pateman and other critics of liberal democracy, Parekh sees no way of reconciling the notion of voluntariness - the idea of contracts "freely entered into by self-determining individuals in the pursuit of their self-chosen goals" - with a state that is in fact a "coercive and compulsory institution."^ Whereas for classical Athenian democracy freedom was defined in participatory and communal terms, for the defenders of liberal democracy, "liberty is defined in protective and individualist terms"; for the Greeks, therefore, democracy was a way of life, "a vehicle of collective self-expression and self-determination," in sharp contrast to the liberal democrat, for whom it is merely a form of government, "a device for keeping others at a safe distance - a legally secured private space."65 Parekh is perfectly correct; we are dealing here with quite different conceptions of self-determination and democracy; but what is one to make of this critique? Supposing we could recreate the Athenian model of democracy, would we wish to do so? Nor is he wrong in viewing representative government as an "effective way of insulating the government against the full impact of the universal franchise."66 But is this such a bad thing, given that "distance" is a necessary condition for enabling political accountability to work? All the same, when the chips are down, Parekh is closer to those seeking to reform liberal democracy than he is to those seeking to bury it. He merely wants a shift of emphasis, he says, a shift from liberal democracy to democratic liberalism, in order to make "democracy the dominant partner."67 And, indeed, in much that he proposes in the direction of enlarging the opportunities for the exercise of active citizenship, Parekh resembles more closely reformers such as Dahl, Nove, Miller, Held, or European social democracy, than those who want a clean sweep, bent on having done with liberal democracy. However, Parekh conveys also the opposite impression. For, when he speaks of a "constantly evolving democratic consensus" that seeks to redefine "basic rights," or when he extols the communal virtues of Middle Eastern and African political systems, specifically mentioning Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, one begins to have doubts about his affirmation of the value of individual rights and the moral "transcendence" of liberal democracy that he has in mind.68 For, whatever models of the "good life" or "communal culture" these

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states represent, they are not known for having much use for individual rights and freedoms or a plurality of social values, nor is it easy to see how their sense of equality is so much more in evidence than in non-traditional societies of the West. It seems, therefore, somewhat of a puzzle why Parekh should see in these cultures a path from liberal democracy to democratic liberalism. Surely he must know, as many had to learn at first hand in our times, that there is a brutal downside to these communal cultures as political cultures, for the celebration of consensual oneness and fraternity in the civic Gemeinschaft offers alternatives that are anything but "democratically liberal"; either you are one of us or you are against us; there is nothing "liberal" in between.69 Clearly, if the conflictual latency of the diverse pulls of opinions, interests, and attachments creates serious ambivalence in the political application of "autonomy," it is not easy to see why the application of "community" to political society as a plural society should prove any the less problematic. Even if it is intended merely to symbolize a sense of collective identity, the use of the concept is questionable because behind the profession of faith in its unifying potential there seem to lie worrisome expectations of consensual oneness in a culture of plural values. We may deplore the intense rivalry of plural claims within political society, as we may, in sympathy with Habermas, wish to dissociate communitarianism from its particularistic associations,?0 but I doubt that the rhetoric of "community" can do much about either. What unfortunately cannot be ruled out in this rhetoric is that a great deal that is found wrong with liberal democracy might somehow be assimilated to "communal unity in political culture."71 In that event, however, need those who have misgivings about the transformation, or the very terminology employed, necessarily feel less moral or in some way less "democratically liberal"? Do civic relations demand or entail a communal unity in political culture, whatever this may mean precisely? Somehow one cannot help sensing in this acute yearning for a nationwide creation of "community" a suppressed analogy between the civic mutuality of a political society and the consensual oneness of a religious order. Undoubtedly, a communitarian vision of fellowship, of cooperation in place of competition, is a highly enchanting vision. It contains the ethical (Kantian) principle of treating others as ends and never merely as means, by accepting one another as wholly co-equal, thus ruling out the idea of using the other for one's own self-advancement. The vision of an ethical community, or that of "civic friendship" (as Rawls puts it), certainly elevates political society to a level that dramatically alters our under-

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standing of democratic requirements.72 But is this not a misguided extension of human sentiments? I do believe this to be the case. Metaphors of love and friendship are simply inappropriate to the warp and weft of civic relations. Inappropriate because they conflate the public with the private, the political with the personal, and the civic with the fraternal. Communal thinking is flawed above all by this conflation, a conflation that obscures the fact that what fundamentally distinguishes love and friendship is their exclusiveness, and not their communality. Love and friendship cannot be boundlessly extended, let alone formally legislated, without losing their meaning. But if "community" is not to be understood in these consensually religious or personally intimate terms when used in a civic or political context, but merely as a sort of distant cousin - in its "thin" sense - then, pray, why use it at all? Still, if it must be used, need it be thought of as comprising values that, like "democracy" itself, always trump all the others? Unfortunately, applying communitarianism to a political society carries the risk that beneath the idyllic concept of "community" and its benevolent intent there lurks the danger of repressive depoliticization or, at least, the constriction of political choice. Potentially, therefore, a communitarian vision of democracy, despite its ethical thrust, poses a threat to political differentiation, if it does not verge on the negation of pluralism in any recognizably democratic sense. As a result, instead of enlarging the possibility of positional attachments gaining political recognition within the discursive authentication of democracy, it could drastically minimize the chances of their legitimate expression. Furthermore, there is the danger that, in their enthusiasm for the communitarian alternative, proponents may overlook the fact that the "community" is a micro-concept. As such, it is self-constitutive, being what it is by virtue of itself, with its own distinctive purposes and inner bonds. Political society, by contrast, requires processes of procedural mediation in its formation and continuation, precisely in view of the potential clash of rival claims. There is consequently a radical difference between it and a segmental community. Whereas the latter, in its root metaphor, is inherently constituted by shared identifications from its very emergence, political society demands a mediating space in which to evolve, a space characterized by the political refraction of multiple ends through granting and withholding processes in the search for consensus; it establishes, as it were, what citizens are prepared to identify with. And this mediating action is channelled in ways that, unlike communal relations, are in need of institutions through which the terms of political association can be challenged or endorsed or modified, and clashes of opinion and interest be mediated. And that

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is also the reason why I am suggesting a fundamental distinction between the common purposes of the (segmental) group and the public objects of (political) society at large. To reduce political society to a "community of communities" by ostensibly elevating it borders, therefore, on a structural absurdity; the sum total of communities simply does not create a super-community. A redemptive superstructure of this kind is but a will-o'-the-wisp. Perhaps such images cannot easily be avoided; the rhetoric of "community" may be confused, ambiguous, and potentially sinister, but in an inherently secular culture it may meet ineradicable needs for order, harmony, or indeed a sense of meaning. And it is understandably not surprising that critics of "competitive" liberal democracy fervently hanker after the oneness and fellowship of a community writ large, believing it nor merely highly desirable but altogether attainable, given good will, an unfalsified social consciousness, and speech situations conducive to societal understanding and agreement. Habermas is not the only one to share this yearning, nor is he likely to be the last.™ However, agreeing with social critiques of rampant individualism is not the same as embracing communitarianism as a political solution, for the simple reason that individuals are not homogeneously shaped by a single tradition.74 I have tried to argue, therefore, on both political and structural grounds, that it is doubtful whether communitarianism can serve as a guide in the direction of democratizing a plural society. To say this does not imply, though, that maintaining the difference between segmental communities and overall society precludes the consideration of communal concerns. Liberal democracy may indeed be a "paradoxical conjunction," but as a conjunction it has not done too badly in disclosing that preserving individual rights need not mean rampant individualism. Institutionally providing a refractional "space," it has managed, what is more, to combine majoritarian principles with qualifying standards in order to accommodate plural autonomies. In a sense, therefore, disputes about the legitimacy of liberal democracy are disputes about meshing competing agency values, about how much of one or the other - individual rights, communal interests, popular control, governmental authority - needs augmenting or moderating. In another and arguably more profound sense, however, disputes assume an inherently qualitative and validating character that involves ranking ends themselves, and placing them within a schedule of priorities. David Beetham has made an apposite distinction in this regard between the concept of democracy, which many critics of liberal democracy variously share, and theories of democracy, "which involve contestable claims" as to what is "desirable

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or practicable and how it might be realized in sustainable institutional form. "75 Like others, Beetham sees in the linking of democracy with liberalism a relationship "that is both one of mutual necessity and a source of tension and antagonism," but, he significantly adds, it is precisely this odd conjunction that makes opting for a viable alternative to liberal democracy so problematic. The question he poses goes right to the heart of the matter: "How far can the constraints that liberalism has historically placed on the process of democratization be overcome, without undermining the basis of democracy itself?"76 while there are undeniably roadblocks in liberal-democratic systems that obstruct a move to greater equality of citizenship, experience with attempts to transcend liberal or "bourgeois" democracy has shown in unusually stark examples that certain forms of doctrinal communitarianism can smother the kind of civic safeguards that any student of democracy must take seriously, without in truth establishing further democratization in the structure of society or the degree of political participation.77 Safeguarding individual rights, while by no means ensuring equality of conditions, nonetheless enables us to stand up and look others in the eye, feeling in an important sense the equal of anyone. So, unless we see in the demise of civic rights a necessary stage toward communal democracy, we had perhaps better suspend judgement about the moral transcendence of non-communitarian regimes. BEYOND THE LIBERAL-COMMUNITARIAN DEBATE: FEMINIST VOICES

It is presumably in light of experience with socialist communitarian rhetoric that Beetham speaks of feminism as a "more plausible prospect for the progressive transformation of social relations consistent with democracy than socialism."78 Unfortunately, it is not clear what is being said, unless "feminism" unequivocally stands for a single identifiable political orientation that is simultaneously "progressive" and "democratic" in a way socialism is not. Judging from expressly feminist writings, there is no such political identity. "There are many groupings to which each of us might in principle belong," writes Ann Phillips.79 Elizabeth Frazer and Nicola Lacey, also writing from a feminist perspective, bluntly state that "of course feminist theory is divergent" and that it therefore is "absurd to attempt to unite the diversity of women's movements and feminist thought past and present in a very particular definition." And they list Marxist, liberal, radical, revolutionary, and other strands within feminism, which frequently offer "rival analyses."80 Although Phillips grants

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that "liberal democracy has triumphed in the realm of political practice," in the realm of thinking and ideas she seems more comfortable with communitarian "republican" notions of participatory democracy.81 For other feminists, however, neither the liberal nor the communitarian expression of democracy has much to offer; for them it is in truth a case of, "A plague on both their houses." While debates rehearsing liberal versus communitarian arguments may still be in full swing, therefore, feminist voices are increasingly calling for going beyond the skirmish, for transcending the somewhat antiquated mould of existing arguments.82 Be that as it may, the prospects of a marriage between liberal democracy and feminism are not central to our concerns. More pertinent is the extent to which feminist political theory has succeeded in clarifying the question of democratic legitimation in directions that are recognizably new. On this issue, Ann Phillips has an unequivocally plain answer. Feminism, while it seeks to promote active democracy, has "no astonishing new insight" to offer as to its validation.83 Nevertheless, feminist thinking has helped to shed light on the limits of democratic participation as also on the extent to which communal segmentation can undermine participation within the general constituency, within the domain of the state, on matters of national concern. A number of feminist thinkers have, moreover, in conjunction with theorists of new social movements, pleaded for a less dichotomized approach to "democratization" and, most closely in harmony with a recurrent theme of this essay, have urged a less blinkered understanding of power as an inescapable ingredient of politics.84 The recognition of power as an integral component of political democracy is clearly of crucial relevance to my argument. While we may wish to applaud the ethical thrust of communitarianism, we may be unable to suppress misgivings about it as a political idea, its major conceptual underpinnings being fatally marred by the failure to differentiate between what characterizes personal relations and what characterizes civic relations, to the detriment of both and the benefit of neither. Instrumental reasons of political commitment, which are designed to safeguard civic rights and freedoms as well as the conditionality of democratic governance, simply do not derive from intrinsic reasons of communal commitment, as chapters three and four sought to make clear. On the other hand, to minimize the extent of the transformation by saying that it merely amounts to a shift from liberal democracy to democratic liberalism is to trivialize it and, at the same time, empty the meaning of both democracy and liberalism. A redescription of this kind is either deeply mistaken or conceptually vacuous, but, either

181 Critiques and Visions way, it does little to disclose awareness of the difference between communal solidarity and civic solidarity, between fellowship within segmental communities and citizenship within overall society. And, in seemingly failing to recognize this relational difference, the redescription is of doubtful use in coming to grips with the problem of societal plurality and the institutional provisions it calls for. If, however, institutional provisions designed to facilitate the complex meshing between societal plurality and societal oneness are deemed unnecessary under communal forms of democracy, or indeed, like civic vigilance, entirely incompatible with them, then, surely, it might be better to accept that the language of community simply is not the language of politics, including that of democracy. Using this language, I fear, cannot but court the risk of raising illusory expectations regarding political society, the guarding of its plurality, the degree of its optimal solidarity, and the scope of its democratically generated rightfulness.

io Legitimacy and Limits

The loftiness of a vision in which women and men enter into activities of public concern is undoubtedly one to be cherished from any perspective of democratic legitimacy. In the previous chapter I did not mean to question the intent underlying this vision when I expressed reservations about the form it could assume politically. Just as earlier misgivings about identifying political norms with moral norms did not imply the denigration of moral principles, my misgivings about community as an organizing metaphor of political democracy do not imply the denigration of the communal ideal as a social idea, involving, as it does, service rather than profit, and cooperation rather than competition. If people choose to live within communities as a social way of living, in preference to private forms or in order to share religious, ethical, or ideological beliefs of one kind or another, this is clearly a voluntary act, born of free choice and, as such, quite different from being politically instituted. Even then, however, scale cannot be ignored, if we agree that a community cannot be boundlessly extended without losing its own particular reason for existence. In this chapter I follow up this emphasis on limits by warning against minimizing the importance of limits not only upon governmental power but also upon power in other realms such as the sphere of the economic market. These risks are very real, I contend, if we accept theories that claim an essential oneness between those entrusted with power and those who do the entrusting, in that they implicitly deny the need for distance or any normative safeguards against the coercive dimension of politics. In effect they appear, therefore, to take power

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out of politics, if indeed they do not move toward a virtually depoliticized form of public life. Certainly, the model of political society that they project suggests wholly voluntary and essentially consensual relations, in which conflict and compulsion have no place. THE PRICE OF L I M I T S

Not surprisingly, urging citizens to be on guard against their own government jars with the idea of communal oneness and has as little appeal as the call for distance and limits. For being on guard implies an anticipation of abuse of democratic authority against which legal safeguards are necessary, and thus portrays the image of a house divided against itself, a sort of internal picket directed at the source of the people's will as such. Communitarian and radical democrats therefore understandably ask whether the underlying distrust and watchfulness are but the means of circumventing democracy itself, of undercutting the very basis of its legitimate existence. Many see in the emphasis on limits and the institutionalized "lying-in-wait" on democratic governments the symptom of chronic decay; the remedy, accordingly, is restorative rather than innovative. Democracy, having lost its original grounding, has gone astray, and needs resuscitating. Much is to be gained, therefore, from uncovering its "classical" roots, so that it can grow again and retake possession of its true heritage. On reflection, none of this is to be wondered at. A world that has allowed democratic growth to be stunted, its vital essence to be drained, and its proper destination to be lost sight of is a profoundly baffling world. The quest to recapture earlier forms of human association should not, therefore, be dismissed as a na'ive hankering after face-to-face democracy or an artful neo-Marxist ploy. But neither, on the other hand, should censure misleadingly suggest that ready solutions are to be had, given reasoned argument and unrestrained debate. Deliberation and pressure are immensely important if they can lead to equalizing resources so that people can promote their diverse claims. But it is surely less obvious that equality of resources in themselves would gain citizens equal and direct access to decisionmaking at governmental centres of power or be more likely to secure agreement about how public resources ought to be used. Hence, to maintain that the democratic conception of politics is that of a "perfectly harmonious community... in which political decisions are manifestly based on the judgements of the members as free and equal persons [expressing] their self-governing capacities"1 is not only to make highly abstract claims but virtually to utter oracular pronouncements.

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It could be conceivably argued, however, that political philosophy ought to inspire us by transcending mundane realities. Or, following Rousseau's dictum that "the limits of possibility in the moral realm are less narrow than we think," it could alert us to a false sense of realism.2 Nevertheless, few would dispute that the limits of possibility in the political realm are palpably less wide than those in the moral or philosophical realm. And my worry is that overly lofty principles threaten to harvest disenchantment once political parties claiming them get into power. Even if we allow for the chance that segmental communities might succeed in translating lofty principles into performative principles, it still leaves wide open the question of how far this would affect political society as a whole. Clearly, transforming the part does not turn it into a societal whole. The part is still a part, to which the whole is something external and something politically unrelated. And, unless this "coordination vacuum" is overcome, it represents a striking illustration of the thesis that not all values, however good and worthwhile in themselves, necessarily achieve optimization by being maximized. The sheer multiplication of autonomies or of segmental self-management units does not simultaneously enhance the political democratization of society as a whole. "Full and equal participation," even if it were found realizable within segmental entities, still fails to settle the question of political participation, of being actively involved in concerns that transcend local or particularist interests. As it is, therefore, the phrase has every appearance of a slogan. Now slogans, if doggedly repeated, have a certain potential to manipulate opinion, provided they are not masked as empty catch phrases, in which case they are no longer taken seriously. For once people know how to decode such messages as "frank and honest exchange of views" or "our heroically fighting troops," as "no agreement has been reached" or as an obituary of defeat, the manipulators have clearly lost out. But slogans or not, could there be full and equal participation in government? And if, on scrutiny, this degree of direct democracy is found illusory, should we serenely turn to those elected or appointed to act on our behalf, as though this harboured no risks whatever? In either case governmental accounting would clearly be totally irrelevent; for in the former there would be no governmental authority, and in the latter no cause for questioning its wisdom or "representative thinking." As things are, however, neither participation nor trust can be left unqualified; each calls for limits in its own way, and we had better grant, therefore, an in-between space, a sort of no man's land, between the authorized and the authorizers in order to create conditions under which accountability is rendered feasible politically, even if this might carry with it a certain watchfulness mixed with less than total trust.

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It appears that, however democratic a society is, as long as it is also a political society - and not a congregation of believers or a friendship club - it cannot altogether dispense with the we/they syndrome. A certain adversariness is possibly the price we have to pay for governmental accountability, unless, that is, we can either abolish government altogether or accept its unconditional authority. In the absence of these alternatives, however, much speaks in favour of demystifying the conceptual language of democracy instead of fabricating highsounding slogans. At the same time, to acknowledge the need of some adversariness to make accountability work in politics is not to ignore the no less important need for a sense of collective belonging despite a plurality of ends. It is a need exploited by nationalism although not first discovered by it. But while nationalism rightly stresses that unifying bonds are essential for people to live together, it not infrequently manages to use these bonds to stifle the equally essential requirement for distance and social space. For, to understand themselves as accountable, people clearly must be in a position to make choices of their own. It is perhaps the most significant single merit of liberal democracy, therefore, that its agency values have succeeded in creating the formal conditions for the expression of choice, by seeking to combine a measure of societal oneness with maximal individual freedom and the existence of plural autonomies, without losing sight of the danger of letting the wells of overall reciprocity dry up altogether. True, the fusion between the plurality of distinct autonomies and the unifying oneness of a single autonomy may be as tenuous as it is vulnerable; but it is doubtful whether it could have been attained at all, such as it is, by either purely liberal efforts or purely democratic efforts, acting in isolation from the other. At any rate, no other known political regime has so far achieved a similar degree of synchronizations between conditions that make for plural choosing and conditions that make for the existence of a shared civic order. The combination of positive (democratic) affirmation of oneness with negative (liberal) restraint in support of plurality may, however, be considered somewhat odd in that it gives rise to the seemingly paradoxical idea that democratic legitimacy demands liberal limitations, and that self-rule by the people therefore rests on self-limitation by their governments. Similarly, the practice of governments' freely acknowledging the conditionality of their power, does conjure up, I suggested, the image of puppets in possession of their own wires. But, however it strikes us, for a ruling party never to use its power to entrench itself as a permanent government is a self-limitation that other regimes have shown little eagerness to adopt.

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A system that embodies two opposite pulls, the impulse toward governing and the impulse toward its curbing, is undeniably a highly complex system. This tension-filled complexity probably explains the difficulty that liberal democracy has in taking root in the absence of its own historical antecedents. The chief problem seems to lie in finding and maintaining an appropriate balance between competing claims. Admittedly, in setting limits to the powers of majoritarian governments, liberal democracy can hardly be said to have discovered the most perfect balancing act or the incontestably royal road to the true legitimation of democracy. What governmental self-limitation has unquestionably accomplished, however, is to allay apprehensions of overbearing state power, as it has also carried forth a tradition in which the rule of law is seen as a safeguard of the overall conditionally of authority, on the part of governments as much as on the part of individuals and corporations, and thus has added strength to the belief in the legitimacy of limits as such. LIMITS AND DEMOCRACY

It could no doubt be objected, as we noted earlier, that emphasis on institutional limits might undermine the position of democracy itself, especially when limits are imposed from outside the political system and its processes in what I called a "category reversal." Indeed, the objection calls attention to what appears to be a fundamental dilemma: we may achieve Tightness by setting up limits as qualifying principles, but fail to sanction this move on accepted democratic grounds. On the other hand, we may ensure that norms and principles evolve from within the political orbit, so that they are democratically self-generated, as it were, but fail to arrive at substantive legitimacy or indisputable Tightness. In other words, following democratically sanctioned procedures does not in itself ring in the dawn of universal justice. What procedural democracy can do is generate a political Tightness sui generis, which, because it is not the same as indisputable Tightness, lays bare the limits of the politically generable. In a real sense, therefore, procedural democracy acts as a reminder of its shortcomings, of its own inherent bounds. Even so, however, the degree to which ordering norms of procedural democracy are routinely taken seriously, does bear significantly, I feel, on the ethical groundings of representative government and, at the same time, conceivably helps to salvage governmental accounting from being dwarfed by claims in support of direct participation. Presumably, it was because Hannah Arendt believed representative government to undermine the assumption of identity between rulers and

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ruled - which to her was the hallmark of democracy - that she had so little to say on accountability in politics.3 Underlying my plea for intensifying the study and the practice of political accountability is the belief, expressed earlier, that participation at the expense of accountability is a questionable exchange. Nonetheless, it is not the opposition of participation and accountability that I put forward but their combination, so that both in conjunction might further the continuous assessment of democratic legitimacy by focusing on the exercise of rule over time. Of course, this should not be construed to imply that closing the gap between political and moral lightness is merely a function of the optimum combination of participation and accountability. Certainly, I make no such claim on behalf of political accountability; for, while conscientious accounting by governments may go some distance toward making them responsive and responsible, it can by no means be looked upon as a guarantee for what, from some transcendent vantage point, would open up vistas for the attainment of the oneness of procedural and substantive rightfulness, that is, the culmination of the reign of legitimacy tout court. Whether or not ideal democracy could bring about the perfect fusion of participation and accountability and, with it, the total convergence of political and moral lightness, it is most doubtful that political democracy holds out any such promise, based as it is on the majoritarian principle, if not indeed essentially defined by it. Emphasizing the limitations of majoritarian democracy in bringing about the fusion of political and moral legitimacy, theorists of deliberative approaches to democracy favour restricting the subjects that are resolvable by majority decisions. Neither direct participation nor indirect accounting, referendums or opinion polls, could resolve, for example, such issues as having religious schools publicly financed or granting Sikh members of the police the right to wear turbans, since on questions of this nature a minority would nearly always be outvoted. This leaves the options of altogether excluding such issues from the scope of democratic validation or finding a way that could still meet democratic requirements of validation despite defying majoritarian forms of resolution. Addressing this problem and suggesting a possible method of dealing with it, Albert Weale points to Habermas's distinction between organizational democracy and justificatory democracy. Habermas argues that Rousseau's notion of the general will has confused the modern discussion of democracy, since the majority principle is purely an organizational device, whereas the general will, implying as it does objective lightness, is to serve as a substantive justification, as a search for objective truth. And it is this kind of "consensus on the truth" that

i88 Democratic Legitimacy

Habermas puts forward as the goal of "constitutional dialogue," which is to take place under conditions of the "ideal speech situation," that is to say, under a form of discussion that is an informed and uncoerced communication between equals.4 Weale looks upon this distinction, insofar as it invokes a superior principle logically prior in a scale of values, as a possible way out; this principle is identified with autonomy as the supreme value of democracy. In this view, minority rights embody the recognition of the legitimacy of collective autonomies, and the recognition itself is seen as the outcome of evaluative reasoning by unbiased participants in a debate that from the outset respects the protection of autonomy interests as a paramount constitutional principle. But is this not a somewhat circular argument, and, strictly, less a case of democratic validation than a way of transcending it? Put another way, once we stipulate that autonomy interests provide value priority as a justifying ground, we in effect limit the scope of democratic procedures. Weale puts it similarly: "Protection of autonomy interests is the first condition that must be satisfied in the operation of political systems, and this in turn implies limits on what democracies may do."5 In that case, however, Habermas hardly succeeds in providing an alternative democratic authentication of political legitimacy, unless "democratic" undergoes a drastic redefinition. Nonetheless, the distinction between organizational and justificatory modes of legitimation is a useful distinction, and potentially pertinent to coming to terms with multiple claims and minority demands that strictly democratic validation processes fail to meet. Unfortunately, it is not clear how such justificatory modes are to override democratically agreed-upon processes of procedural democracy. Only if a substantive value such as "autonomy" or "equal consideration" commands acceptance in terms of procedurally achieved democratic norms does the possibility of "extending" democratic legitimacy exist. Otherwise, the move is problematic, for it may mean a change in the rules of the game, since what is or is not democratically legitimate could become a matter of additional stipulations, whose authority is derived from prior (extraneous) understandings rather than authentically procedural sources. Short of integrating supra-democratic standards into recognizably democratic norms, therefore, the only alternative seems indeed to exclude certain issues from being fit subjects for democratic validation. Although such a move does not escape the charge of arbitrariness, it does implicitly acknowledge the limits or shortcomings of democratic legitimation. It is possible that it was the impulse to call attention to these limits that prompted the arguments put forward by Elster, Miller, or Held in support of the exclusionary alternative, although some of their arguments make the added claim that taking

189 Legitimacy and Limits

issues out of the ambit of decisions by numbers strengthens the legitimizing force of democracy in areas in which numbers quite properly matter. Whatever the merit of these arguments, there can be little doubt that the selection of areas to be excluded is bound to provoke controversy. Arbitrariness could conceivably be minimized or totally avoided if the selection were rational in the sense that Habermas stipulates, for it then might have results on the line of his "consensus on the truth." More often than not, however, decisions will not be unbiased or impartial, but governed by prior loyalties and commitments, and arguments advanced in their support will be intensely positional The weighing of private property by social democrats, for example, will accordingly differ sharply from that of ardent libertarians; and this "positional" rationality will therefore come into play on issues that Weale mentions, such as environmental protection, health and safety provisions, the relief of poverty, and so on.6 The principle of universalization could arguably serve as a criterion of claims competing for recognition, insofar as the claims qualifying for validation are those whose exercise as rights would not prevent others from exercising theirs. Such a criterion could, however, be a merely formal criterion if inequalities of one kind or another were to frustrate the effective exercise of universalizable rights. But, whether or not distorting factors attributable to such inequalities make a move of this sort questionable, the principle of universalization may itself be open to doubt as a pertinent and objectively valid standard for coming to terms with competing "rights."7 Proponents of deliberation point to another exclusionary principle that ought to be pressed into service. In view of what amounts to a gap between political time and ordinary time, there could be a serious flaw in the implementation of policy ends that extend beyond an electoral mandate. Deliberatists attribute this gap to what they call the "democratic obsession" with electoral politics, which results, they charge, in the neglect of long-term goals on account of their lesser political payoff. These, therefore, ought to be taken out of the ambit of democratic legitimation through majoritarian aggregation and be subjected instead to a "politics of dialogue." Provided public debate is genuinely unrestrained and unbiased, taking this step would serve, they argue, not only as a substitute for electoral calculations but also as a path to consensus based on rational argument. Regrettably, we found, conditions for unbiased debate are not easily met in politics, because the tenacity of positional interests and atachments generally militates against them. The legitimacy of public debate in a democracy is beyond doubt; what is less certain, however, is its outcome. Excessive faith in the "rationality of argument" as the unfailing route to political

igo Democratic Legitimacy

agreement may therefore be inadequately warranted.8 Until we know more about the prospects of a politics of dialogue, or, indeed, about its nature, we might therefore do worse than keep in mind Rousseau's admonition against people's mistaking private benefits for public benefits, or Hume's advice that "even if politicians are not rogues, we should design our political institutions on the assumption that they are, to avoid the dangers associated with tyranny."9 Rightly or wrongly, there is appreciable scepticism about dialogue in a setting in which the vocabulary of one party may be foreign to the other, so that what is convincing or rational to one may fail to be acceptable, or even intelligible, to the other. But, scepticism apart, it seems that neither Habermas's communication theory nor most public-choice interpretations of rationality capture the nature of political justifications that is typically identifiable with democratic contestation. Perhaps, in insufficiently considering the limiting forces that affect the working of rationality in politics - not least because of electoral calculations -, they fail to provide much insight into a politics that is neither entirely disinterested nor entirely self-interested. Centering their emphasis on motivation, both of these approaches pursue a course liable to bypass the middle ground, in which political rationality and the operation of performative principles come into play.10 Although perhaps less exciting than the polarization of impartiality and egoism, this middle ground nevertheless does make manifest the extent of communicative normativeness in the formulation of claims. For, while claims are undoubtedly positional at source, to have political force, they must, as we observed, have recourse to impersonal standards of justificatory reasoning. Preoccupation with causal motives rather than with mediating standards, therefore, only distracts attention from the existence of competing claims. And these, if they are to be foiled from creating irreconcilable antagonisms and massive coordination problems, call for the intervention of limits.11 To prove acceptable, however, intervening limits must be backed by standards that enjoy reciprocal acceptance. And this, in turn, can be known only through political activity itself. For only political activity can disclose if standards are procedurally generated rather than apodictically imposed. STANDARDS OF R E C I P R O C I T Y

Unfortunately, it is the dynamics of political activity as such which seems strangely sidestepped in Habermas's communication theory. There is an apparently missing link between the theory and the activ-

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Legitimacy and Limits

ity to which it is to relate. For it is not at all obvious how the conditions that the theory stipulates are to assist in bridging positional differences or closing the gap separating political time from real time. It seems, therefore, that within the context of party-dominated democracies Habermas's theory of communication is almost like offering every kind of moral support short of actual help. Clearly, unless we envision a democracy far removed from the world we live in, we have to concede that claims arising out of electoral calculations or positional attachments hardly promise to enhance openness and the display of true motives. The crucial point is simply that in political discourse as we know it, political rationality and positional rationality are not in fact separate "things" but are basically one and the same mode of putting rallying weights on the scales of political argument. This precisely is what "modal" rationality is intended to do; but, as such, it is unlikely to involve absolute transparency or the absence of ambiguity and calculation. Stipulating disinterestedness and disclosure of motives as necessary requirements of "genuine democracy" therefore implicidy forecloses discursive challenge by attributing its occurrence to lack of trust, impartiality, truthfulness, or motivational openness. But does not raising the stakes of argument that high inhibit political activity from the outset? Surely, stipulations of this kind are not conducive to unrestrained debate, the basic condition set forth for genuine political discourse. On the face of it, then, Habermas's theory of political rationality excludes what appears to be of greatest political moment in a plural society - the staking of claims that rest on positional loyalties. And since these frequently clash, and since, as we found, many of them do not leftd themselves to being bridged by debate, however intense, open, and rational, appeals to the sincerity of intentions or the force of true rationality somewhat miss their target. For why should people find it profoundly rational to be so flexible as to ignore cherished attachments or abandon causes that matter to them? Alternatively, why should they prefer openness and sincerity if, in so doing, they may impair the attainment of their particular aspirations? Besides, stressing "motivation" rather than "formulation" is liable to blur the fact that what principally matters is not the degree of motivational rationality but rather the degree of persuasive rationality. And, in this search for aggregational support, appeal to impersonal standards is more likely to gain results and credibility than the avowal of personal sincerity. This is not to say, however, that appeal to standards in itself guarantees the attainment of consensus, for common standards can best perform their mediating function in bridging differences if their reciprocity is perceived to be normatively self-sustaining and not the work of particu-

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lar motives or ends that can be imputed to them. Finding standards acceptable and coming to consensus on rival claims simply are separate issues altogether; so that from the sharing of standards no inference can be drawn that political disagreement indicates the intrusion of selfishness, irrationality, or any other motive or disposition. Conceptually distinct from any of these characteristics, standards per se offer no causal grounds one way or another. Their normatively rational force is independent of any positional source or motivational end; it lies wholly in themselves. For example, the unconditional observance of rules that demand the resignation of a government after a decisive no-confidence motion by the opposition, or which forbid a governing party from using law to enact its permanent dominance in office, demonstrates the selfsustaining force of procedural standards, their integral normativeness. For standards to be standards in this sense requires, however, a fair measure of continuity and inviolability, so that the question demanding to be asked is whether democratic institutions of deliberative contestability can safeguard such "constitutiveness." This is a notoriously difficult question to answer since openness to contestation presents a potential obstacle to it in the absence of constitutionally anchored rules that can call upon juridical enforcement. It seems, therefore, that just as taking certain rival claims out of the purview of majoritarian validation entails the admission that democracy requires qualitative limits, so the maintenance of standards demands limits to the power of electoral majorities. Ideally, though, observance of constitutiveness, thus conceived, ought to be rooted in a widely shared acceptance of reciprocity coupled with the recognition that standards offer a more promising route toward plurality than aggregating reasons, since even maximal aggregation may fail to ensure that it would "guard the freedom to be different. To hold out the prospect of plurality forming an integral part in the validation of democracy therefore necessitates a sanctioning space in which constitutive standards yield scope for the presentation of rival claims, and in which procedural norms enjoin governments to observe these regardless of electoral fortunes. Precisely because plural society can ill dispense with constitutive standards of this kind, Thomasius's idea of rightful decorum and Weber's emphasis on procedural democracy have, throughout the argument, received major attention. For, in a real sense, both are pitting the force of standards against the force of numbers. DELIBERATION AND OVERLOAD

The importance of numbers, definitionally associated with democracy, may well, however, be exaggerated. Stressing this likelihood, propo-

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nents of deliberative democracy shift the focus from quantitative aggregation to qualitative evaluation; from the sheer counting of heads to the application of heads in the course of weighing competing ends. And it is by virtue of this shift that they widen the range of criteria in the validation of democracy and reinforce doubts about the adequacy of identifying it with merely adding-up votes. Habermas, as we noted, makes a distinction between an organizing principle, such as the majoritarian device, and a justifying principle. Similarly, several years earlier, John Hallowell made clear that "the majority vote does not precede the discussion but concludes it." No less remarkably, Hallowell anticipated themes concerning communicative conditions of political deliberation, such as that "judgement is uncoerced, that language is used not to obscure issues," and that participants in public debate "transcend the motivation of their private interests to contemplate the common good." And, to the extent that these conditions are not met, "the principle of majority rule is corrupted and debased," for it is the "reasoned judgment" and "not the will of the majority as such [that] obliges our compliance."12 As in Habermas's distinction, it is one thing to set organizational parameters to public decisions but quite another thing to make justifying claims about the legitimacy of the decisions themselves. In an intricate argument, Brian Barry likewise points to the difference between majoritarianism and legitimacy. Laws that "systematically violate the vital interests of a minority," even if passed by a majority, are "devoid of any claim to obediance."13 Unless a majority "respects the interests of all," by showing sensitivity for the rights of minorities, it cannot gain the cooperation of minorities - the majority principle then simply becomes a "broken reed."14 Barry indirectly suggests something closely similar to what I referred to as a trade-off between electoral and procedural sources of democratic validation, with a view to providing some institutional balance for a politics of plurality. However, it is not only the passing of laws that can systematically violate the interests of others, but also the obstructing of laws being passed, and this, as we found in chapter one, can be the work of minorities as much as that of majorities. A well-entrenched and wellconnected pressure group, even though it does not command the support of a majority, can make up for its inferiority in numbers by its superior political clout. In this event, the formally democratic system in effect legitimizes the actual control exercised by a minority and prevents voices from being heard, even though they may be the voices of a majority. Whatever James Madison had in mind, therefore, failed to create the required conditions in which the principle of civic inclusion

1Q4 Democratic Legitimacy

could reign supreme. His deep faith in institutional checks and in the diversity of the American electorate simply was not paralleled by the actual growth of tolerance of otherness, let alone its liking. And to assume, as some appear to do, 15 that sensitivity for plural ends or the acceptance of dissenting opinions conies with, or is produced by, "democracy," is somewhat questionable, since neither is known to have a notably democratic parentage to legitimate its birth. Setting apart promotional loading from sober realities, therefore, could be an eminently worthwhile task for deliberative approaches to democracy. This task could comprise two principal objectives. First, it could drive home the recognition that majoritarian democracy and pluralist democracy are not one and the same thing, in that the former constitutes no organic part in the anatomy of the latter; and that, even when pluralist thinking did come to be cherished, this was a result of the strivings of individuals who, for the most part, were in the minority, faced with a less than sympathetic majority. Second, deliberative approaches could correct misperceptions about the power of numbers in the actual shaping of national policies by calling attention to the need for exercising effective control over the few who are routinely engaged in policy decisions. From this kind of efforts a clearer public consciousness might emerge as to what may reasonably be demanded or expected of democracy, as well as the recognition that a democratic system of politics is still a system of politics, in need of appropriate safeguards against the arbitrary use of power. But, above all, gaining these insights should help citizens realize that a democratic system makes demands on them and that, in order to meet these demands, they may have to learn how to monitor authority. If they want to be able to keep an eye on politicians and officials and thus act as reminders to them that whatever authority they have is conditional upon the rightful exercise of their duties and on the manner of accounting for these, they will need to acquire the requisite skills. This, surely, is no beggarly trifle, regardless of the time and energy these moves may take, and regardless also of whether or not deliberative approaches to democracy are able to promote some "dialogical consensus," together with a clearer knowledge of what precisely it means; that is, whether we ought to think of it as maximum or minimum agreement, and over what I call "performative" principles or "ultimate" core values. But dialogical consensus or not, deliberation may help to sharpen our sense of smell so that we can detect the odour of corruption in good time; for the stench of corrupt democracy is no less nasty than the stench of corrupt dictatorships, even though we may derive comfort from thinking that, in a democracy, it could more

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easily be detected or more quickly dealt with. Thus, whether or not our expectations of democracy are over-escalated, our knowledge of consensus-building inadequate, or our threshold for smells too low, deliberative approaches to democracy may enhance our confidence that some balance may be found between debate and inaction, positional plurality and political fragmentation, and between excessive anticipations, born of politicians' promises, and utter despair, born of a sense of helplessness. Deliberation may even encourage people to feel that they could induce their governments to pay greater heed to what I referred to as their self-authentication, in that they could make them try harder "to behave as z/they were virtuous," if for no better reason than to make them realize that they are being watched, that their public deeds are not beyond notice or criticism.16 In a truly fundamental sense, therefore, aspirations of deliberative democracy coincide with the overall thrust of this book, in its plea for the invigoration of civic vigilence and political accounting. At heart, this plea recalls an old question: quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who guards the guardians themselves? By emphasizing the qualitative exercise of ruling rather than the quantitative source of acquiring the right to rule, deliberative approaches in effect reverse the order of priority between electoral authentication and procedural authentication. As in Max Weber's conception of democratic legitimacy, this reversal is clearly designed to provide the basis for the continuous assessment of democratic governance, its ongoing conduct of public business, and the authenticity of its accounting for it. Implicit, too, in the move toward balancing - if not toward reversing - electoral and procedural sources of legitimation, is an uncertain faith in the idea of a constitutive oneness between rulers and ruled. So viewed, there can be little doubt that the "old question" remains the touchstone for power not being irresponsible or beyond challenge in its claim to legitimacy. In posing the question, deliberative approaches raise by far the most significant issue of democratic rightfulness - from the perspective of this essay at any rate - the problem of the extent to which governments honour obligations that they have pledged to honour. And it is principally this question that I have tried to bring to the forefront of concern, in an attempt to highlight the importance of public standards and their being flanked by the existence of a vigilant citizenry. For democratic governments can no more dispense with either than any other kind of conditional rule - a point that bears repeating. At the same time a clearer perception is needed of what is, and what is not, politically attainable, and thus democratically demandable. While not resolving the ambiguity about what "democratic legitimacy"

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means or should mean, this greater clarity could nonetheless help to establish what it does not and possibly cannot mean, as long as "democratic" stands for politically democratic. For, regrettably, there are limits to the governmentally deliverable, and hence to what politicians can electorally offer with any chance of honouring their promises, regardless of the "democratic" pressures that are put on them.1? To keep a watchful eye on governments, including democratic governments, is therefore one thing; but to insist that whatever is demanded of democratic governments must be politically achievable is surely quite another thing. For, apart from raising false hopes, such an insistence would amount to maintaining that any demand for which enough pressure can be mounted does coincide with what democratic governments can (or indeed ought to) bring about. Although, as we found in chapter eight, this is a very tricky issue, I doubt whether the presumption in favour of regarding every kind of demand as equally demandable - as though all demands, like cats at night, are pretty much the same - is likely to enrich our understanding of what can properly be expected of democracy or properly claimed as a condition of its legitimacy. But, however arguable it may be to establish what is or is not democratically demandable, it should be borne in mind that "overload" is in truth a twofold problem. For it is a matter of overburdening not only the machinery of this or that democratic system, but also overloading the content or meaning of the concept of democracy itself. The latter problem, I fear, is the most worrying, in that demands made upon democratic governments may be attributable not so much to the existence of actual wants or widely felt needs as to escalated expectations that are generated by inflated images of democracy as a political idea. If this is indeed the case, a good deal of the problematic overload may be said to be conceptually derived. The risk of either type of overload is not the least compelling reason for my emphasizing the ethic of ruling so strongly. My emphasis is intended to serve as an antidote to seductive electoral calculations, exuberant pandering to lobbying pressures, and glaringly unrealizable promises which, in fuelling multiple segmental demands, pose the threat of political fragmentation. While the "legitimacy of limits" is in itself no magic formula, as the introductory chapter conceded, keeping limits in mind may nonetheless help to deepen civic understanding that governments must observe the bounds of the effectively attainable, even within democracies. Such civic understanding may, in turn, assist democratic leaders to uphold an ethic of honouring promises or, at the minimum, to resist making electoral promises too lightly. Jointly, citizens as much as their governments,

ig7 Legitimacy and Limits

might then be less likely to lose sight of the boundaries of the democratically demandable - of the fact, that is, that boundless demands, like boundless pluralism, need watching - if a society is to remain a society and democracy is to withstand pressures that could imperil its very existence. No doubt there is room for controversy about preserving a particular civic culture, as there equally is about what is democratically demandable. Yet, whatever the extent of disagreement, it must not obstruct awareness of the dangers arising from electoral calculations that focus entirely on political pay-offs at the cost of meeting real needs, or from escalated electoral promises that encourage the proliferation of segmental pressures. Nor should controversy conceal the ever-growing tendency for money to intrude upon electoral campaigns and political activity generally, lest it make a mockery of democracy itself. To ignore these dangers is bound to breed disillusionment not merely with democracy but with politics as a whole. It may take more than procedural integrity to guard against these dangers, however, in that it may be necessary to transcend purely formal processes of politics and democracy and address issues that bear upon the fabric or texture of the social and economic realms. Before ending this chapter with its emphasis on limits, it is therefore worth asking whether the principle of civic reciprocity does not implicitly demand the extension of limits to these realms by closely monitoring certain business practices, such as excessive price and pay hikes, in order to create a more level playing field all round.18 Justified though these practices commonly are on economic grounds, more often than not they benefit the few rather than enhance overall inclusiveness. It might be objected, however, that extending the application of limits in this way, so as to reduce social inequality and increase democratic inclusiveness, conflicts with the idea of voluntarism, the avowed bedrock of liberal democracy in prevailing understandings, linked as they are with the notion of a free market economy. If so, there is arguably much to be said for a renewed weighing of options in the direction of balancing competing ends, in order to forestall the risk of intense discontent and the breakdown of a common sense of shared citizenship. It seems, therefore, difficult to escape the conclusion that if "democratization," however construed, is to promote stronger feelings of civic belonging, the process must extend beyond the formally political, if only because otherwise the formally political may altogether cease to carry conviction any longer. Besides, if controlling excessive power makes political sense, why should such control be wholly out of place in the economic realm where it could help to

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check the inordinate growth of one person's power over that of another? Although my proposal to extend limits is not meant to obliterate the line separating the two realms, it does imply the belief that extending regulatory norms to both might help to democratize the social dimension of civic reciprocity; as it also lends force to my thesis that political democracy is not merely political.19 In essence, viewing the boundaries of the economically acceptable through a prism of the socially defensible is not unlike the way liberal democracy views the boundaries of acceptable authority, or the way deliberative democracy views the boundaries of acceptable majoritarianism. For, in each case, limits are invoked with the intention of augmenting the responsiveness and inclusiveness of democratic governance. In essence, too, this is not all that different from what Rawls says about setting limits to the "curse of money," because a political system "in constant pursuit of money ... is simply unable to function. Its deliberative powers are paralyzed."20 Either line of argument may nevertheless fail to satisfy "strong democrats." It would, however, be disturbingly odd if they dismissed every plea for limits as tantamount to a defence of the status quo; odd, because to be leery of spectacular or revolutionary change21 is not to deny the need for appraising the given, the ranking of its values and priorities, or, for that matter, the criteria of its legitimacy. Indeed, certain moves to restrain and delimit power, whether in the political forum or the market place, may strikingly bring to light that, even without dramatic upheavals, reality is not undisturbable. Far from being an obstacle to change, therefore, a consciousness of limits could markedly assist in providing tangible contours to its realizable scope. I have no wish to apotheosize limits per se, but I do believe that past experience compellingly suggests that boundaries within politics and society play a ubiquitous, and possibly indispensable, role in mapping out both the aspired and the actual. For, in setting limits, they define what is doable in the future no less than in the present; and, in reordering the given, they nonetheless create another order which, however different, is an order still, a delimiting framework of the achievable as much as of the demandable.22

11 The Overall Argument

It may be useful to bring strands of the preceding discussion together by recalling the main themes and emphases, to mention where they differ from other approaches, and to offer some concluding thoughts. Needless to say, any attempt to elicit validating bases of democratic legitimacy meets with profound complexities not only in the issues themselves but also in the conceptual arsenal to be applied in relating them. The final chapter attributes some of these complexities to the tendency to conflate moral and political understandings of legitimacy and to transplant supra-political notions such as rationality, autonomy, or community, from one context to another. This risk, we noted, is all the greater if the distinction between constitutive oneness and constitutive duality in the relation between rulers and ruled is minimized or altogether negated. DEMOCRATIC RIGHTNESS

The principal thrust of my overall argument is to lay open the ambivalence that characterizes claims in support of democratic lightness, notably in a society that is both a plural and a political society. The reason for much of the ambivalence lies in claims often being simultaneously contested on procedural and substantive grounds. Procedurally, claims are questioned whenever there are doubts about the observance, if not also about the processual source, of regulatory norms, whether or not they have been generated in and through political activity itself. Substantively, democratic Tightness is more con-

20O Democratic Legitimacy

testable still, in that its authenticity may be questioned on grounds of universal validity. By far the most intense controversies over what is or is not "genuinely democratic" arise out of this ambivalence. Undeniably, it is necessary to have standards of Tightness that are valid on independent grounds, if only because in their absence the concept of legitimacy itself would go begging for meaning. Yet, it is quite another thing to presume that a politics of democracy could substitute intrinsic Tightness for procedurally generated Tightness. For, in contrast to intrinsic Tightness, which contains its own legitimacy without regard to opinions, interests, or votes, and therefore bypasses political processes, democratic Tightness follows in the wake of these processes. The content of intrinsic Tightness implicates everyone; for what is substantively right by definition applies to all; its universal validity negates exceptionality or legitimate dissent. Outcomes of democratic legitimation do not command such universal validity: they neither entail nor confirm a Tightness known antecedently, prior to any political processes. And, unlike moral authentication, which is possessed of the certainty of Tightness through and through, democratic lightness is characterized by inherent indeterminacy.1 Throughout the argument put forward here, I therefore emphasize the contingency of democratic authority, whose conditionality is viewed as the hallmark of publicly accountable rule. RATIONALITY AND POLITICS

The rationality involved in democratic discourse is likewise different from the rationality of epistemic truth or cost-benefit analysis, in being at once more indeterminate and less universal. Similarly what applies to the relation between intrinsic Tightness and democratic Tightness applies also to the relation between substantive rationality and the rationality of democratic politics and its discourse - there is a comparable lack of convergence. It is doubtful, therefore, that substantive rationality would be any more in agreement with discursive democracy than substantive Tightness, in the scope it offers for questioning and contestation. Unless discourse and contestation are no different in politics from discourse and contestation in philosophy, and positional Tightness is no different from universal Tightness, there consequently appears to be need of a more contingent rationality, to which I refer as "modal" rationality. Insofar, however, as modal rationality serves as a basis for discursively contingent debate in contrast to substantively-scholarly debate, it must be viewed as an instrumentality, a way of yielding reasons in support of, or in opposition to, positional stands with regard to con-

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The Overall Argument

testable ends. As such, it may be judged as purely formal; for, whatever reasons it yields need neither be valid nor authentic reasons, unlike substantive rationality which, by definition, is knowledge of right reason. All the same, what makes substantive rationality intrinsically self-sustaining renders it problematic in a discursive democracy, in that it may have the effect of relieving governments of the burden of giving reasons, or even induce them to regard their being questioned at all on what is patently self-evident as an affront, as a blatant act of foolish or wilful defiance. Although modal rationality is positional rather than universal, cognitively it is not very different from Aristotle's concept of the enthymeme, which, we noted, is a form of persuasive argument but not necessarily the deliberate fabrication of untruths. For the most part, modal reasons, as purposive reasons for actions, constitute the mediating force of their occurrence and are, therefore, in this respect, no different from the directional pull of substantive reasons. Hence they confer upon actions whatever meaning they possess and whatever rational structure they can be said to have. Likewise, modal reasons, in accounting for political actions, are able to disclose not merely causal facts but also supporting principles, somewhat on the lines of reasoned answers in Plato's Dialogues. On the other hand, modal rationality can be, and not infrequently is, abused in political discourse. The reasoned principles that a government puts forward may therefore lack authenticity; so that the point made about modal rationality being essentially formal remains valid. By the same token, since modal rationality typifies "positional" arguments, that is, grounds intended to provide justifications for taking up this or that viewpoint, it manifestly has little in common with the impartiality or disinterestedness of epistemology or, for that matter, with the "technical" rationality of cost efficiency. Accordingly, it is no less misleading to speak of modal rationality as characterizing Habermas's "consensus on the truth" than it is to liken it to the rationality of market calculations. PERFORMATIVE PRINCIPLES AND PRUDENTIAL RECIPROCITY

Typically, then, political rationality is other than the rationality of economics or philosophy and, if closer to the latter, more concerned with ranking than with meaning, that is, with placing values within a schedule of practical ends rather than with their doctrinal content. On this argument, political contestation is determined not so much by the doctrinal divergence of end-values as by their diverse performative interpretations, which, not uncommonly, prove sufficient as sources of

2O2

Democratic Legitimacy

principled party contestation. Given the asymmetry between philosophical doctrines, and the use made of them in performative principles, political distance, I maintain, need not be the same as doctrinal distance. Implied in this contention is a critique of pluralist theories that rule out the possibility of political pluralism in the absence of clashing core beliefs. For, against this view, I argue that a monistic belief system (such as socialism) is in principle capable of political pluralization in terms of divergent performative positions as rival party-political arguments. This contention should not, however, be taken to imply that core values do not matter in taking positions in politics. Clearly, just as socialist core values impinge on prevalent thinking about political ends and their priorities, so basic values structure dominant norms of liberal democracies. There can be little doubt that, without liberal core beliefs about governmental self-limitation, the normative face of mainstream democracy would have assumed a complexion very different from what in fact it has. Granting this nevertheless does not invalidate the point that agreement on core values is no guarantee of political consensus; nor does it detract from the thesis that political contestation is no less real when it is based on divergent performative principles rather than conflicting core beliefs. On this thesis, moreover, performative principles in themselves are neither purely ad hoc instrumental expedients nor value neutral. For the way performative principles relate to general core beliefs is not unlike the manner in which particulars relate to universals. Also, as principles, they confer a certain generality on the formulation of claims, regardless of their particular motivation, while to be at all functional in politics, performative principles, we noted, must be, or at any rate must appear to be, impersonal. In view of their generality and impersonality, therefore, performative principles possess the potential of aggregating positions, whether or not they invariably manage to transcend positional differences tout court. Performative principles, then, may succeed in overriding sectional divergences, but equally they may not, in which case positional differences could remain unbridged. In either case, however, they have to work within a framework of standards of reciprocity in order to function as discursive principles in a climate of contested ends. If, therefore, rationality, to be democratically contestable, must be "modal," performative principles, to have discursive mediating force, must be backed by common standards, without which their scope as instruments of aggregation or differentiation would be seriously constricted. Common standards, however, must not be confused with common agreements, as the previous chapter sought to make clear. For common

203 The Overall Argument

standards can be compatible with highly divergent motives and sharply conflicting ends. Indeed, to enable rival claims to compete politically, standards must be, and must be perceived to be, conceptually separate from motives, reasons, purposes, or even "ideals."2 Whereas performative principles are almost definitionally characterized by positional value differences over policy ends and derive their normativeness from the core doctrines they originate from, standards contain no positional claims or value objectives whatsoever. They are what they are by reason of their self-constitutive worth, their intrinsic selves. It follows that, just as common standards should not be confused with common agreements, performative principles should not be confused with public standards. Operationally, however, once they have undergone "refraction" and have separated from their core beliefs, performative principles assume a political status sui generis. As such, they are capable of performing mediating functions with a view to making "comprehensive doctrines" pluralizable as well as politically discursive, and thereby succeed in negating the view that contestation within a doctrinal "ism" cannot be political contestation or that, unlike a pragmatism that makes a point in having no principles, performative differences are merely "technical" squabbles over means. The idea that there are such things as mediating standards which possess an ethic of their own that is neither strictly moral nor strictly legal in its value normativeness and, at the same time, not motivated by positional claims, is well brought out - possibly for the first time in Cicero's notion of decorum. As developed by Christian Thomasius, Cicero's notion takes on the form of an expressly civic standard of reciprocity. Although the child of a pre-modern era, it has, I suggested, lost none of its pertinence, combining as it does a quasi-aesthetic judgement with a sense of the prudentially appropriate.3 Furthermore, by virtue of its measure of self-sustaining normativeness, "civic decorum" is viewed by Thomasius not merely as an instrumental medium but also, potentially, as a substantive benchmark. This is intriguingly evident from his structural distinction between reciprocity as it applies to relations within overall society and reciprocity as it applies to relations within the segmental community. For, whereas in the former case it is seen as an instrumental medium resting on politically negotiated processes of citizenship, in the latter it is seen as an intrinsic benchmark, resting on unmediated fellow ship. It is, I believe, above all this distinction between mediated (political) sources of human association and unmediated (communal) sources that confers on Thomasius's approach to reciprocity its particular significance and originality. And all the more so, because this approach is linked with an incisive critique of elitist manipulation of public opinion. In this

204 Democratic Legitimacy

critique, most skilfully disseminated, the liberation of human understanding and the emancipation of the sexes are jointly posited as essential bases of a new mentality of public thinking about what Thomasius called "the politics of life." Together with Rousseau's monumental influence, almost a century later, upon what is frequently referred to as an expressly revolutionary consciousness, Thomasius's idea of a radically enlightened popular culture of civic reciprocity may therefore rightly be credited with having helped give direction to what Jurgen Habermas has described as the age of a "new notion of legitimation."4 SELF-AUTHENTICATION AND AUTONOMY

The attention I have accorded to the idea of performative principles and to Thomasius's conception of civic standards of reciprocity is matched by that given to Weber's procedurally centred approach to democratic legitimacy; in particular to his thesis that it is governments that are the chief guardians of rightful rule as also the principal causes of its demise. Although Weber's demand that governments act according to a self-imposed norm of corporate integrity does not form a conspicuous part of modern democratic theory, it does figure in emphases on the conditional authority of democratic regimes. Indirectly it also underpins the analogy that is at times drawn between the idea of governmental self-authentication and the idea of moral self-legislation in Rousseau's and Kant's thinking. In the light of this analogy, governmental accounting is to be viewed not simply as a feature of representative rule, but as the acknowledgment of the paramountcy of ethical autonomy. Intriguing though the analogy is which Weber's approach helps to kindle, it should not, I have been urging, imply that democratic selfauthentication can be left entirely to the "good will" of governments. For this reason I stressed the need for civic space - for some distance - in which citizens can be free to form their own political judgement, and by means of which they learn to assess their government's exercise of rule and its manner of accounting for it. What is involved, therefore, is the interaction between an area of autonomy in which governments can act and an area of autonomy in which citizens can exert control and potentially influence governmental policy. Both autonomies, I have been suggesting, need to be interdependent, in order to enable accountability to attain operational reality. Despite its undoubted importance in allowing accountability to have intelligible meaning, we found, however, that "autonomy" contains an

205 The Overall Argument uneasy fusion of two very different understandings, once it is applied to the political realm. For it is then subject to potentially opposing pulls and conflicting tensions. Alternatively if interpreted in terms of "moral freedom," it risks being a total misnomer, since there is no such thing as good freedom or bad freedom, but only freedom to do good or bad things. Either way, "autonomy" hardly provides an obvious "selffoundation" for legitimacy, and is therefore liable to undermine the parallelism between political self-legislation and moral self-legislation.5 Moreover, as a political category, it relies too heavily, we noted, on extraneous supports in the form of guidance, consent, or national will doctrines, to exert its own self-sustaining power. In view of these conceptual blurrings, the overall argument, in contrast to widely shared thinking, is reluctant to draw too close a connection between democratic legitimacy and autonomy, and concludes, therefore, that the concept's value for democracy lies chiefly in its regulative or corrective force rather than in its legitimating force. ACCOUNTABILITY AND PARTICIPATION

Regardless, however, of the political status of "autonomy," democratic governance presupposes some autonomy in the area of its jurisdiction, in which it can act and which, therefore, is the proper object of civic scrutiny. If scrutiny, however, is implicitly negated as incompatible with the oneness of rulers and ruled within true democracy, accountability is unlikely to get anything like a fair shake. While the extension of the popular franchise has understandably raised participatory expectations, it has done little to reduce uncertainty about precisely what citizens are to participate in or how - within groups or through groups, directly as individuals per se, or indirectly by means of representative bodies. The latter was, and is, unacceptable to democrats who resent any intermediary "factions" as impediments to the identity of the governing and the governed no less than to the genuine expression of the people's will. Proponents of representative democracy, on the other hand, question the possibility of direct involvement in the formation of a popular will, if they do not altogether doubt its very existence. But if notions of indirect participation are repugnant to those who consider that intermediary groups come between the people and their governments, so visions of political acountability via members of parliaments are equally seen to lack democratic validity. And it is chiefly for reasons such as these that critics of representative democracy although not they exclusively - suspect that much of the rhetoric of mainstream democracy in fact hides the absence of effective civic

206 Democratic Legitimacy

control over how public funds are spent and how spending priorities are determined. Unfortunately, intense preoccupation with direct participation has the tendency of causing the neglect of representative mechanisms that conceivably have the capability of enhancing governmental accounting. This, I fear, could amount to an alarming degree of myopia, born perhaps of too fervent a resolve to make reality "conform to plans" in which rulers and ruled, as a common identity, are held to be one.6 Well-intentioned though it may be, this line of quasi-populist thinking cannot but play into the hands of a potentially autocratic elite and result in the demise of democracy as discursive democracy. It would seem, then, that to replace a system of inadequate control by one in which the need for institutional scrutiny is disparaged, if not wholly repudiated - as being totally incongruent with having indisputable trust in the executors of a "common plan" - might prove doubtfully rewarding.

COMMUNITARIANISM: COMMON PURPOSES AND PUBLIC OBJECTS Absolute trust, therefore, may be as misplaced as absolute distrust; the one projecting a society that evidently dispenses with politics, the other depicting not a society but a state of (Hobbesian) chaos. Accordingly, what Marx has to say about the "concrete" or "communal" man of post-liberal society has noting to do with political democracy, for it renders distinctly civic relations unnecessary. By thinking of the transformed matrix of social existence as a locus of common purposes in which conflict has no real or permanent place, Marx reveals a conception of society that is as abstract as the alleged citizen of liberal democracy. It appears that here, as in some subsequent discussions by communitarians, the argument about politics ignores the politics of argument. Central to the overall thrust of this study, therefore, is the thesis that, just as political rationality is other than the rationality of philosophic discourse - in which inferences are drawn that are logically mandatory - so political relations are other than communal relations. Given this thesis, it is plainly a mistake to presume that reaching consensus in political discourse differs little from typically communal debate, in which disagreement is readily translatable, if not altogether reducible, to personal modalities of mediation, in which discord is resolvable in the manner in which lovers make up or friends simply shake hands; since, to raise such expectations, would deceptively imply that strictly political processes might easily be replaced or indeed entirely pre-empted.

207 The Overall Argument

Much the same appears to be true of attempts that conflate segmental participation within a particular community with participation within the larger society. This, I maintained, could be worrisome, in that it could amount to overlooking the fact that groups are what they are because of the constitutive purposes that define them, while societal ends are public objects in need of external justification and endorsement through public processes of mediation; they do not constitute society, they confront it. A "public object" of political society is therefore logically distinct from a community's "common purpose," involving the giving and the withholding of assent, and it is above all this ambivalent mode of mediation that typifies political society and the search for democratic consensus. While community sentiments are implicitly consensual and serve as their own intrinsic justification, civic commitments can go diverse ways, and they demand extrinsic jutification, the instrumentality of publicly stated reasons. Despite this inherent difference, it may be argued that the former could suffuse the latter to produce "civic virtue," provided care was taken to prevent the merger from obliterating the primacy of discursive rationality in political mediation, lest it put in jeopardy an intelligibly defensible or challengeable manner of claiming support and, with it, the procedurally contingent authorization of public ends. Applying the metaphor of "community" to society at large, therefore, could be as misconceived as applying economic "competition" to define democracy. For just as the maximization of competition does not mean the maximization of democracy (as I argued in chapter six), so extending the metaphor of common purpose does not mean that political democracy is simply a community of communities. The critical difficulty inherent in metaphorical and analogical theorizing is that there is no clear way of knowing where analogy leaves off and disanalogy begins, especially when the analogy is based on a distorted notion of the root metaphor itself. That is, above all, why I have been urging that the language of community be resisted in politics; to safeguard the distinctiveness not merely of political democracy but of political discourse as such. CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

I do not want to make too much of the distinction between "legitimation" and "justification," but I agree that, if used higgledy-piggledy as though they were freely interchangeable terms, they are apt to confuse political Tightness with moral Tightness, common standards with common agreements, and the right to rule with the rightful exercise of rule. Resulting conceptual muddles of this order only too easily give

so8 Democratic Legitimacy

rise to hyperbolically premature talk of crises in political legitimacy when, in truth, the trouble for the most part is the outcome of selfcreated terminological blunders. Similarly, "functional-logical" linkages intended to establish analogies between agency values in the market place and agency values in the political forum, positing competition as the bridging idea, only succeed, we found, in creating a twisted sense of causality in the validation of democracy. Perhaps what is needed is a certain deconstruction of political language or, at any rate, of its democratic vocabulary.? Moreover, assuming constitutive oneness between rulers and ruled hardly helps to make things easier. Implying the rejection of the (Lockean) opposition of government and society, the assumption of oneness cannot but grind down the idea and practice of governmental accountability. For, on this assumption, distance falls by the wayside, making civic vigilance a virtual absurdity. What it potentially brings in its train, too, is a narrowing down of debate, if not an actual closure of choosable options. And, once this happens, once there is pressure toward consensual oneness and unquestionable faith in governments as the embodiment of the people's will, dissent becomes weird, if not wholly illegitimate, and no dissenter can be sure to remain a citizen any longer. Emphasis on institutional duality constitutes, therefore, part and parcel of my overall argument; not because it guarantees the ultimate or most perfect manner of political association but because it may be the only structural safeguard against tyranny instead of association. And the simple reason for saying this is that duality and conditionality go together. Just as we cannot dispense with boundary markers that delineate the do's and don'ts of civic life, so we cannot dispense with signposts that indicate the purview of political governance and prevent us from being adrift in a sea of arbitrariness, incapable of knowing the duties expected of us and the rights and freedoms that we can properly call our own. Consciousness of the need for duality bears accordingly on what we make of further democratization.8 Inherently, it may also prove more congruent with the strains of any political system, by virtue of the simultaneous workings of voluntarism and compulsion, trust and distrust, or hierarchy and equality. Hence, if in place of duality we put our faith in the identity of rulers and ruled as the justification of democracy, we court the risk of obscuring the roots of its authorizing legitimation. And this could make it difficult not only to keep apart conditional government from unconditional tyranny but also to separate democratically instituted law from purely administrative fiat.

2og The Overall Argument

So, unless we categorically disclaim these strains and dangers, we have to accept that even in a democracy there is an imperfect union between citizens and their governments, less than complete identity of aims, and no lack of tension in their coexistence. Whatever we posit, therefore, as the ideal of democracy, may not alter the fact that, as I indicated in the introductory chapter, political democracy resembles more closely an uneasy truce than the harmony of perfect peace. Democracy may soften the force of government power, but it does not eliminate it, any more than it fuses ruling with being ruled. And thinking of limits is not unconnected with this sombre realization. From this perspective, three sets of limits claim attention. First, whenever issues appear to defy resolution by means of the majoritarian principle, qualifying limits are called for, even to the extent of removing such issues from the ambit of democratic processes. Second, limits are desirable whenever there is a threat to the possibility of cherishing diverse visions of the good society, for the devaluation of diversity could presage the enthronement of a single pervasive value that surpasses all other values in the assessment of democratic legitimacy. The third set of limits may have to be borne in mind whenever there is a move from constitutive duality to constitutive oneness, which, although designed to uphold democracy, in fact threatens to conceal its political dimension and, thereby, to pervert its understanding as a system of enforceable rule. If left unchecked, therefore, such a move, in blurring the distinction between mediated and unmediated sources of association, could result in democracy becoming disconnected from its contingently mediated authorization as the wielder of supreme political power. These considerations could serve as a kind of filtering lens through which to scan the range and the limits of further democratization. Admittedly, the real cost of any change cannot antecedently be known with certainty, nor can limits be presumed fixed once and for all, since aims and preferences undergo mutation. Even so, sharp discontinuities can pose problems that are not easily resolved, for once agency values are lost they are rarely fully regained. This said, further democratization is assuredly to be welcomed if in its wake citizens can expect the creation of an intensified feeling of mutuality, a less unevenly structured pluralism and party system, more controlled forms of electoral campaigning and party financing, and, generally, a closer approximation of political democracy to accountable democracy, and of representative democracy to responsive democracy. Toward these ends, an invigorated and more widely diffused form of deliberative processes as well as a less restrictive mode of hierarchical organization could not but help, if the agency values most

21 o Democratic Legitimacy

highly prized are indeed those of public discursiveness and social reciprocity. To see the need for qualitative limits, therefore, is not to belittle the need for change, notably in the direction of social democracy which, though undeniably not the same as political democracy, is not its exact opposite either. In line with this observation, the previous chapter suggested a sort of turning of the tables in the relation between agency values of the economic market and those of the political forum. For it proposed the reversal of their ranking, with a view to making some economic practices subject to norms intended to curb domination in the political sphere. While such a reversal would no doubt be resisted as an encroachment on free enterprise, it could, I believe, do much toward creating the climate for a more credible faith in the equality of civic worth and civic belonging. I advisedly say "climate," since, as we found, reducing social inequality does not necessarily in itself establish greater political equality, enhance civic rights, or promote more active political participation. Levelling incomes no more produces equitable citizenship than capitalism produces democracy. The distinctness of the two realms is not therefore under question; creating a heightened sense of civic reciprocity does not call for their fusion but merely for a greater degree of shared normativeness. Two principal concerns, therefore, loom prominently in the way I have been approaching the issue of democratic legitimacy. One is the question of plurality, while the other is the question of inequality. Both questions present challenges that are not new, for each involves a daunting degree of complexity, and not least because suggested remedies tend at times to overrate the demandable morality of governments and citizens alike. All the same, this essay has sought to make clear that plurality needs to be tempered with a sense of overall citizenship, while gross inequality calls for measures that temper the politically formal with the palpably just. In both instances, however, standards of augmented civic reciprocity were seen to be derived from processes of decidedly public deliberation rather than from the promulgation of an instant "will." What essentially matters, from this perspective, therefore, is more than the celebration of electoral votes. And this "more," I suggested, requires something of an ongoing tradeoff between electoral sources of authentication and procedural sources, between legitimation through the ballot box at any given time, and legitimation through accountably discursive rule over time. Of these, the latter has here been given primacy, more elusive though it arguably is. For, while not denying the majoritarian sanction of democratic power, it nevertheless questions its unconditional claim to demo-

2H

The Overall Argument

cratic authority in a society of multiple values and diverse autonomies. Implicit in the paramountcy of civic reciprocity and the institutional balancing of plural ends, therefore, is a certain shift of weight from the electoral right to rule toward the procedural rightfulness of its exercise; a shift which, in a sense, amounts to taking away from democracy in order to add to civility. Unless the right to be different is disavowed as an illicit privilege, there must, I conclude, be room for qualitative considerations that call for a broader understanding of democracy than one which identifies it solely with a regime rooted in the principle of majority rule.9 Even then, however, even if it is agreed that qualitative limits are a validating requirement of democracy, they are nevertheless a requirement in need of sanction by recognizably political and recognizably democratic processes. Otherwise, limits could amount to surreptitiously loading democracy with virtues, identifiable not with itself, but with extraneously imposed supra-political norms; or, conversely, they could be viewed as an attempt to surreptitously negate the majoritarian principle altogether. Which is just another way of saying that democracy, however precisely defined in terms of desired outcomes, must be procedural. Coming to grips with a society of plural attachments is nevertheless only one task facing a broader understanding of democracy. The other task is to come to terms with the indicated gap between social democracy and political democracy, or the other way round. Even in countries generally held up as models of advanced democracy, such as the United States and Canada, social democracy markedly limps behind political democracy, in that public assistance typically goes to the few with the most political clout rather than to the most numerous or needy. The increasing gulf that, as a result, separates reality from proclaimed democratic agency values does little to augment their credibility in the minds of those left out or severely marginalized. And, all the more so, if they have given up hope that those representing them are able to exercise an effective check on what is done at the centre of power, on the way public resources are put to use. Small wonder, therefore, that there is a longing for change in the direction of communitarianism. Liberal democracy, although it has generally been in a position to maintain an equilibrium of loyalty - unstable though it may be - cannot easily claim to have come to terms with this longing. Evidently, maintaining a degree of equilibrium between plurality and unity may not be enough to create civic inclusiveness, if there is a lack of perceived association or civic belonging. Unfortunately, there are grounds, we found, for having serious reservations about the implementation of communitarianism politi-

212 Democratic Legitimacy

cally. As an alternative I therefore suggested elevating governmental accountability as the paramount self-authenticating "decorum of power," as well as extending the legitimacy of limits beyond the formally political, with a view to creating, in conjunction with an enhanced degree of political responsibility, a deeper sense of social responsibility. A closer link between the two might conceivably nurture a public consciousness persuaded of the value of shared citizenship within a culture preoccupied with private gain, aggressive oneupmanship, and self-serving make-believe. Although far from sanguine about stemming the tide of the prevailing culture in mainstream democracies, I nevertheless make no secret of my concern over growing trends to view governments as business corporations and citizens as customers who are entirely fair game for manipulatory trading techniques. Running together agency values of the market with those of the political forum, I argue, is no less misguided than conflating moral agreement with political agreement, or consensual (communal) purposes with contested (public) objects. By the same token, I do not conceal my misgivings over the tendency to underestimate the importance of distance and duality for maintaining accountable and conditional authority, or the tendency to overestimate "truly rational" argument as a bridging force within a politics of plurality. In point of fact, in several chapters I have sought to launch a distinctly political rationality that could act, on the one hand, as an instrument of discursive civility and, on the other, as a medium of robust challengeability. Yet, whether or not it could also help citizens to give themselves the laws they want to obey in fashioning what Habermas calls their "life context," rationality in politics should not, I feel, be overburdened by claiming for it (as Rawls appears to do) the status of a morally and juridically overarching "public reason."10 For we may not (and perhaps should not) put our entire trust in publicly given reasons' being true reasons, and thus forgo the chance of challenging them in a way we cannot challenge commands backed by force or the authority of hallowed traditions. Indeed, in the last analysis, it is this chance of challenging reasons that forms the staunchest defence of accountable democracy as a political order which, in however imperfect a sense, also constitutes a rational order. Finally, though uncertain about the possibility of a synthesis, in political terms, between liberalism and communitarianism, I have nevertheless urged the infusion of properties into democracy that could enhance its potential as a polity of stronger civic ties. Not, to be sure, by precepts decreed from on high, but in and through reciprocal understandings worked out within its own processes of procedural

213 The Overall Argument

self-generation and ethical self-authentication. Equally uncertain, however, about the scope of redemptive solutions within the politically achievable, my overall argument has viewed democracy as akin to a trial rather than to some uniquely manifest destiny. Or, to use another metaphor, I have suggested its role as a path which, in leading from the given to the aspired, could serve as a sort of training ground in nurturing habits of normative reciprocity, so that those embarking on it would learn to distinguish "saving the world for democracy" from bombing it out of existence.11

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Notes

PREFACE

i Among "recent" writings I include works published over the last thirty years or so, which, together with broadly "classical" sources, I found of diversely poignant relevance to my central arguments. The older sources should be familiar for the most part to those interested in the history of political thought, with one possible exception - that of Christian Thomasius. For this reason, but chiefly because of his pioneering contribution to the philosophy of normative civility (in terms of a reciprocity, distinct in its source from both intrinsic morality and judicial law), I have accorded him space comparable to that given to Max Weber, who, though better known, is somewhat misperceived on "democratic legitimation," a term he was the first to coin. CHAPTER ONE

i See Alan Hamlin and Philip Pettit, eds., The Good Polity: Normative Analysis of the State (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 12. Ideas about how things are done, or not done, potentially bear, therefore, in this frame of reference, upon what can or cannot be done. See also, on this point, what Quentin Skinner has to say on the relation between projects and normative language, according to which the tailoring of projects has to fit the available normative language, and not the other way round. In "Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action," in J. Tully, Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (Princeton: Princeton

216 Notes to pages 4-9

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University Press, 1988), 112. I interpret this article as an endorsement of the self-sustaining status of ideas. Compare, for example, Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 133-? and 332, with John H. Schaar's line of argument in Legitimacy in the Modern State (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1981). John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1971), 13. There is apparently doubt about Rawls accepting this extended interpretation of "self-imposed obligations." On the mutability of political ideas, see Terence Ball, Reappraising Political Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 67-82. On the limits of democratization, see Albert Weale, "The Limits of Democracy," in Hamlin and Pettit, eds., The Good Polity, 35-47. In this connection, see also Alan Ryan, "Two Concepts of Politics and Democracy: James and John Stuart Mill," in Martin Fleisher, Machiavelli and the Nature of Political Thought (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 76-113. I consider it a most fascinating contribution to the question of democratic validation. See Iain McLean, Democracy and New Technology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), 162. J.J. Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. J.M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1953), 218. See also my "Accounting for Actions: Causality and Teleology," History and Theory, xx (1981), 291-312. Rousseau certainly had no illusions about democratic governments' needing as ceaseless a guarding as any other government. See, for example, Social Contract, iv, ch. i, Political Economy, in G.D.H. Cole, trans., The Social Contract and Discourses (London: Dent, 1946), 244-8, Emile, trans, by Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 463, in Rousseau's advice to the Poles and Corsicans, and in Letters from the Mountain (Lettres ecrites de la montagne), Oeuvres Completes, (Paris: Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, 1959-69), III, 814-15. See also my "Rousseau's Agonizing Over Political Accountability," Studies in Political Thought, I (1992) 3-17. Jiirgen Habermas, for example, considers debates that precede a decision, if widely diffused and rationally argued, capable not only of broadly transforming pervasive attitudes and values but also, albeit indirectly, of influencing governmental decisions by "altering the parameters of institutionalized will-formation." See his "Popular Sovereignty as Procedure," in J. Bohman and W. Rehg, eds., Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 35~65> esP- 57-6o. Aristotle, Politics, Bk. VI, ch. 4, 13180-13193, trans. Richard McKeon. Jeremy Bentham, A Fragment on Government, ed. W. Harrison (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1960), 94-5. See also David Held, "Central Perspectives

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Notes to pages g—i g

on the Modern State," in David Held et al., eds., States and Societies (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1983), 14-23. John Dryzek, Discursive Democracy: Politics, Policy, and Political Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 6, 16. Even Habermas and Rawls are accused of postulating "essentially masculine constructs." See also Carol Gould, Rethinking Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 18, 126-7. For recent attempts in this direction, see Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), and Finding Our Way (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1998). See also Margaret Moore, "Liberalism and the Ideal of the Good Life," The Review of Politics, 53 (1991), 672-90. For an alternative to both liberal and communitarian approaches, see Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), esp. 180-205 and ch. 8. For writings on and definitions of democracy, see Barry Holden, Understanding Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Philip Allan, 1988), ch. i; see also Jack Lively, Democracy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), and Prospects for Democracy, Political Studies, Special issue, 1992. See especially A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 4-89. Habermas comes close to capturing what I have in mind with "distance," namely, an autonomous "space" for citizens to forge their own way of looking at things and for judging government performance. He speaks of it as "communication in a public sphere" in which public debate takes place outside organized parties, administrative bodies, and media pressures. See "Popular Sovereignty as Procedure," 57. I have touched on this in Pluralism, Socialism, and Political Legitimacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 3-9, 128-38. Rousseau, Political Economy, 245; see also Second Discourse, 212-13. This still seems to be Habermas's position, for he approvingly quotes Julius Frobel's conception of democratic consensus as "the search for truth." "Popular Sovereignty as Procedure," 47. This suggests a mode of reaching consensus that is highly atypical of politically democratic processes, since it presumes a consensus to agree, and thus begs the very question of reaching it. Procedural legitimacy demands no consensus on substantive ends, as I argue in the following chapter, on the truth or anything else. See also David Held and Joel Krieger, "Accumulation, Legitimation, and the State: the Ideas of Glaus Offe and Jiirgen Habermas," in Held et al., States and Societies, 487-97. This refers to John Rawls's idea of "public reason" which is supposed to reflect or specify "at the deepest level the basic moral and political values

218 Notes to pages 19—23

20

21

22

23

that are to determine a constitutional democratic government's relation to its citizens and their relation to one another." "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," University of Chicago Law Review (64), 1997, 765-807, esp. 766; and his Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 231, where Rawls speaks of the judgements of the United States Supreme Court as the exemplar of public reason. Instead of being potentially fruitful efforts in a joint enterprise, differing approaches almost assume the character of many sects busily defending their methodological purity. Communication across lines has also been hampered by highly specialized vocabularies, intelligible only to members of a given sect. In place of cross-fertilization we find therefore a tendency to inbreeding. My fear is that these categorical disjunctions do little to help identify, interpret, or evaluate the complexities of competing values and ends. Immanuel Kant, "Theory and Practice: Concerning the Common saying: This May Be True in Theory But Does Not Apply in Practice" (1793), in H. Reiss ed., Kant's Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 61. "Interpenetration," therefore, involves a mediating process that comprises empirical standards of evidence as referential aids as well as evaluative interpretation, and a conceptual language that is at once objective and subjective in origin. In other words, evaluative accreditation cannot be escaped; and any such accreditation seems hard to envisage in the absence of some measure of theoretical generalization. Admittedly, persons as individuals, with their peculiar idiosyncracies and foibles, do defy generalizing treatment; yet as members of social entities, engaged in diverse functions and roles, they are susceptible to general principles of reciprocity that are applicable to human relations beyond national borders. Otherwise, no criteria could be invoked in attempts to understand or assess civic relations or political conduct, and notions of political morality would be totally incomprehensible. In view of my questioning the tendency to transplant moral concepts directly into political contexts in place of recognizeably political or democratic processes, my position is close to that expressed by Bernard Crick in In Defence of Politics when he says that "neither doctrine nor tradition are sufficient in themselves. The relationship between them, and between the many forms of them which may exist at any time, is politics itself." (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 121. At the same time, this should not (in light of the previous note) be construed to imply that the relation between means and ends in politics, or the choice of ends themselves, is of no normative importance. Clearly, my emphasis on rightful decorum throughout belies such procedural neutrality.

219 Notes to pages 26—31 CHAPTER TWO

1 Rodney Barker, Political Legitimacy and the State (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 199°)' 1972 The most frequent question raised is about the relation of legitimacy to legality. See, on it, David Dyzenhaus, Legality and Legitimacy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Its history as a political concept is most interestingly investigated by Stephen Holmes's article "Two Concepts of Legitimacy: France after the Revolution," in Political Theory, 10 (1982), 165-83. See also Jiirgen Habermas, "Popular Sovereignty as Procedure," inj. Bohman and W. Rehg, eds., Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 39-41. 3 See Barker, Political Legitimacy, 57-8, 74-8; and David Beetham, The Legitimation of Power (London: Macmillan, 1991), 8-10, 136-7. 4 Regarding tacit consent, see David Hume's essay "On the Original Contract" (1752), in Charles W. Hendel, David Hume's Political Essays (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1953), 43-63, esp. 53-7. On "a certain minimum of voluntary submission," see Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. A.M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (New York: The Free Press, 1964), 324-7. Weber, not unlike Rousseau, combines here the idea of subjective choosing with the idea of "rationality" qua objective justifiability in the causality of willing. 5 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970, 85-6. 6 Rousseau, if not Rawls too, wanted to have his (procedural) cake and, at the same time, eat it (substantively). Rousseau, as we note, made political legitimacy depend upon elaborate procedural safeguards in the determination of the General Will. Yet he also wanted the General Will to be right substantively, regardless of the procedures that preceded it. 7 barker, Political Legitimacy, 190. 8 Ibid., 59. However untidy and imperfect democratic institutions may be, they are nonetheless preferable to the efficient government of the enlightened despot, wrote Herder in 1774 (Yet Another Philosophy of History, ed. Suphan, V, 516). 9 Ibid., 16-17. 10 Ibid., 24. 11 David Beetham, Max Weber and the Theory of Modern Politics (London: Macmillan, 1974), 266. 12 Beetham, The Legitimation of Power, 8.

13 Ibid., 8-9. 14 Ibid., 9-10, 136-7. 15 Ibid., 9.

220 Notes to pages 31—8 16 Ibid., 10. While it is true that Weber stresses "habituation" and "institutionalization," he generally implies a normative (moral) element by maintaining that people most willingly obey when they feel a moral obligation to do so. 17 Ibid., 10-11. 18 Ibid., 11. 19 Weber, Social and Economic Organization, 324, 386. 20 Beetham, The Legitimation of Power, 14. 21 Ibid., 13. 22 Ibid., 244-7. 23 Ibid., 13-14. For a different, and highly original, interpretation of Rousseau's General Will, see David Braybrooke, "A Public Goods Approach to the Theory of the General Will," in J.M. Porter and Richard Vernon, eds., Unity, Plurality and Politics: Essays in Honour of P.M. Barnard (London: Groom Helm, 1986), 75-92. 24 This is my principal objection also to Rawls's approach to political legitimacy. 25 Weber, Social and Economic Organization, 386. 26 Ibid., 384-7. 27 Ibid., 387. 28 Beetham, The Legitimation of Power, 156. 29 Weber, Social and Economic Organization, 385. 30 Ibid., 386. 31 Ibid., 387. 32 Ibid., 387-8. 33 Ibid., 388. 34 Ibid., 392-405. 35 Ibid., 388-9. "Caesarism" is the term Weber applied to a situation in which the absolute rule of the leader is legalized. To prevent this from happening, institutions should provide for the possibility of replacing a leader who no longer commands the trust of most people. Weber's admiration for the British parliament crucially rested on its having such institutions, for the British parliament "legally and constitutionally sets limits for the prime minister's exercise of power. He cannot infringe on the guaranteed rights of the citizens. The internal machinery of Parliament provides an orderly form of political testing, and, above all, peacefully eliminates Caesaristic dictators." Politische Schriften, 383, cited in Karl Loewenstein, Max Weber's Political Ideas in the Perspective of our Time (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1966), 71. 36 Democratic government had come to Germany, Weber argued, not as a result of the triumph of the bourgeoisie, as in Britain, but as the consequence of defeat. See Anthony Giddens, Politics and Sociology in the Thought of Max Weber (London: Macmillan, 1972), 24.

221 37 38 39 40

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42

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Notes to pages 38-46

Weber, Social and Economic Organization, 389. Ibid., 412-15. Ibid., 391-2. Ibid, 339; see also Weber, "Politics as a Vocation," in H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 82. The essay was first published (in German) in 1919. Unlike Max Weber, his younger brother Alfred (1868-1958) thought possible a "debureaucratized" form of "free socialism" that would take the place of state socialism, whether of the Bismarckian or Marxist-Leninist kind. For further reference, see my article on him in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan, 1967), vol. 8, 281-2. Weber, Social and Economic Organization, 389, 391-2. See also Anthony Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 181-2. Unlike Marx, who viewed governments as executive committees of the ruling class, Weber saw governments as selfsustaining institutions with clearly specialized functions and strictly limited jurisdiction. Any "overloading" carried therefore serious risks. Cf. Reinhard Bendix, Max Weber (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960), 485-6. See Norman Mackenzie, ed., The Letters of Sidney and Beatrice Webb (London: Cambridge University Press and London School of Economics, 1978),!, 19-20. Ibid., I, 102. This, as I pointed out in n. 24 above, is the chief source of my disagreement with Rawls; I fear that he makes too close a connection between the sharing of general beliefs about a democratic political order (as "public reason") and the sharing of particular political interpretations of these beliefs - an objection I return to in chapters 4, 5, and 7. CHAPTER THREE

1 These are terms J.G. Herder used when juxtaposing "nation" and "state" by opposing the "mechanical" nature of the latter to the "organic" nature of the former. For further details, see my Herder's Social & Political Thought: From Enlightenment to Nationalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965, 1967), 62-87, and Herder on Social and Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,, 1969), 3-32. See also D. Philpott, "In Defense of Self-Determination," Ethics, 105 (1995), 352-85. "Conscious self-creation" is a phrase I borrowed from Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 390. See also his Ethics in the Public Domain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 102-9. 2 Interestingly, the preamble of the Swiss constitution refers to the multiethnic inhabitants of Switzerland as a nation. See also G. Sartori, "How

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far can free government travel?" Journal of Democracy, 6 (1995), 101-11. 3 For a masterly account of this transition, see Friedrich Meinecke, Weltburgertum und Nationalstaat (Munich: Oldenburg, 1963), 10-26. 4 For an elaboration of this argument, see my "National Culture and Political Legitimacy: Rousseau and Herder," Journal of the History of Ideas, XLIV (1983). 231-535 See above, ch. i, n. 12; see also G. Parry and C. McCulloch, "Pluralism, Community and Human Nature," in Porter and Vernon, eds., Unity, Plurality and Politics, 162-84; G. Parry, "Tradition, Community and SelfDetermination," British Journal of Political Science, 12 (1982), 399-419; and S. Avineri and A. de Shalit, eds., Individualism and Communitarianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 6 For an overview, see David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 7 I discuss this point in Self-Direction and Political Legitimacy: Rousseau and Herder (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), Part in. 8 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Preface to Narcissus, The Miscellaneous Works of Mr.].]. Rousseau, anon. (NewYork: Burt Franklin, 1767, repr. 1972), ii, 138. 9 Jiirgen Habermas, Die Nachholende Revolution (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992), 151-910 Rousseau, Political Economy, in G.D.H. Cole, trans., The Social Contract and Discourses (London: Dent, 1946), 246. 11 Maurizio Viroli, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). 12 Viroli, For Love of Country, 184. 13 While Rousseau felt compelled to renounce his citizenship of Geneva, he still thought of himself as a patriot and considered Geneva his true patrie. See his declaration in the Introduction to the Letters from the Mountain. For more details, see my "Patriotism and Citizenship in Rousseau," The Review of Politics, XLVI (1984), 244-65. 14 Viroli, For Love of Country, 16. 15 Ibid., 15-16. 16 Barnard, Self-Direction and Political Legitimacy, 55-67. On Habermas's idea of guiding public consciousness, see Jon Elster, "The Market and the Forum: Three Varieties of Political Theory," in Bohman and Rehg, eds., Deliberative Democracy, 11-14. 17 See I. Berlin, "Two Concepts of Liberty," in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). See also William H. Riker, Liberalism Against Populism (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1982), 12-13. 18 Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk. 2, ch. 12. 19 Republic, vi, 493. Plato poses the (to him insoluble) problem of combin-

223 Notes to pages 52—60

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23 24

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29 30

31

ing what an assembly of men actually think or approve of, with doing what (objectively) ought to be done. Social Contract, Bk. 2, ch. 6, in Cole, trans., The Social Contract. See also G. Dworkin, "Paternalism," in P. Laslett and J. Fishkin, eds., Philosophy, Politics and Society, 5th sen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 78-96, and D.N. Husak, "Paternalism and Autonomy," Philosophy and Public Affairs, 10 (1981), 27-46. See also William Galston, Liberal Purposes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), on reconciling paternalism with the democratic state. John Locke, Second Treatise (1690), ch. 6, para. 57. Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (Konigsberg: F. Nicolovius, 1800), 326-8. (MJ. Gregor, trans. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View [The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974], 190-1.) See also Kant, Metaphysical Elements of Justice (1797) (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merril, 1965), 112-13. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, J.P. Mayer ed., (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), 693. On this point see Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain, v, vi, where he recalls his position in The Morality of Freedom that "political morality is concerned primarily with protecting and promoting the well-being of people," but now finds this position "full of puzzling issues." This was of course Sir Robert Filmer's thesis in support of the natural power of kings in his Patriarcha which was posthumously published in 1660 and challenged in great detail by Algernon Sidney and John Locke precisely on this thesis. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 42-3. Rousseau, letter to Mirabeau, in C.E. Vaughan, Rousseau's Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915), ii, 160. Kant, Anthropology, 190-1. Whatever Kant still held thinkable in the Second Critique (1788) seemed no longer obvious when he published the second edition of the Anthropologie in 1800. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 692. Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), xv. Kant himself never denied that our self-understanding as autonomous beings goes beyond scientific reason or empirical proof, in view of which he could not accept "autonomy" as a truly causal idea. Similarly, the historian Hans Blumenberg opposes our "self-assertion" as self-directing agents to our (epistemologically uncertain) "self-foundation" as two distinct aspects of the Enlightenment, in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert Wallace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982). Anthony Trollope, Autobiography (1883), ch. 20.

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32 Ibid., ch. 20; see also his political novel PhineasFinn (1867). I return to this point toward the end of the next chapter, but, in light of an "eminently reliable" source, not much has changed. Even cabinet ministers are treated as though they were mere "pebbles," whose only "conscience" should be the conscience of their party, not their own ideas of right and wrong. "Telling a Chief Whip that you have to follow your conscience really is like waving a red rag at a bull." "Flashing your petty private little individual conscience" is to him a case of pure "moral self-indulgence" and one of the "most disgusting things." See Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay, Yes Minister (London: BBC, 1983), iii, 123-4. CHAPTER FOUR

1 It is the explicitly prudential basis of Thomasius's conception of reciprocity and civility that sets it apart from that of Rawls, who also puts paramount weight on the requirement of civility and reciprocity; however, Rawls derives this requirement from intrinsically moral sanctions. See his "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," 766, 769-71. This does not make Thomasius's conception necessarily preferable; the only reason I draw attention to the difference is to underscore the distinctly "autonomous" sanction of the notion of "rightful decorum." 2 Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Commonwealth (Columbia, Ohio: State University Press, 1929), 47. See also Karl Biichner, Cicero: Bestand und Wandel seiner geistigen Welt (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1964). 3 Cicero, De Officiis, trans. Thomas Cookman (London: Dent, 1909), 7. 4 Ibid., 48. 5 Ibid., 42-56; see also Aristotle, Rhetoric, bk. in, ch. 7. 6 Christian Thomasius, Ausiibung der Sittenlehre (Halle: Salfeld, 1696), 514. Hereafter cited as AS. 7 Thomasius, Einleitungzu der Sittenlehre (Halle: Salfeld, 1692), 233. Hereafter cited as ES. See also his most mature work, Fundamenta Juris Naturae et Gentium (Halle: Grosse, 1705), i, ch. 6, para. 41. 8 ES, 358, 360; AS, 10, 544; also Ausiibung der Vernunftlehre, 292-5. 9 ES, 358. For an intriguingly similar feminist position, see Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 234, 241. 10 Thomasius, Der Politische Philosophus (Frankfurt and Leipzig: Grosse, 1724), Preface. Also Einleitungzu der Vernunftlehre (Halle: Salfeld, 1691), 167-8. (Hereafter cited as EV) On a sense of shame, see ES, 104. "Taste" figures most prominently in his Fundamenta, i, ch. 6, paras. 40-2. In his thinking on taste, Thomasius was influenced by the Spanish philosopher Baltasar Gracian (1601-58), as was subsequently Kant. 11 EV, (Dedication), *4_

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Notes to pages 65-8

12 Ibid., 13, 76, 87, 151, 226-7, 275-6, 287-95. 13 Thomasius, Fundamenta, i, ch. 6, para. 41; see also Fundamenta, i, ch. 7. 14 EV, 172-3, Fundamenta, in, ch. 6. Following Pufendorf, Thomasius denies any directly derived divine rights of kings. 15 EV, *416 Thomasius, Kurtzer Entwurff der Politischen Klugheit (Frankfurt and Leipzig: Grosse, 1713), 5; see also ES, 30: Political society, Thomasius insists, cannot do without "decoro in vita civili." 17 Thomasius, Fundamenta, i, ch. 4, paras. 32-64; ch. 5, para. 58; ch. 6, para. 35; ch. 7, paras. 1-5. 18 EV, 13, 76, 151-2, 269; AV, 81, 91. The shift from motives or intentions in politics to outcomes also most strikingly contrasts with Rawls's emphasis on the "sincerity of intentions" as the essential requirement of "public reason" in politics. John Rawls, "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," University of Chicago Law Review (64), 1997, 786-7. See also his Political Liberalism, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), i, Iv-lvii. 19 AV, 100. Thomasius argues on similar grounds in his treatment of universals. Without personal experience universals fail to come to life. 20 EV, 259-61. Thomasius was one of the few contemporaries who recognized Vice's genius. 21 EV, 261. 22 See Werner Schneiders, "300 Jahre Aufklarung in Deutschland," in Christian Thomasius (Hamburg, Meiner, 1989), 1-20. 23 Thomasius was profoundly admired by such leading writers as Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Schlozer, and Gottsched. By far the greatest political impact ensued from Thomasius's lectures at Halle, then the chief training ground of the Prussian bureaucracy. For a more detailed account, see my "Christian Thomasius: Enlightenment and Bureaucracy," American Political Science Review, 59 (1965), 430-8; "The Practical Philosophy of Christian Thomasius," Journal of the History of Ideas, 32 (1971), 221-46; "Self-Direction: Thomasius, Kant, and Herder," Political Theory, 11 (1983), 343-68; "Fraternity and Citizenship: Two Ethics of Mutuality in Christian Thomasius," Review of Politics, 50 (1988), 582-602; and "Rightful Decorum and Rational Accountability: A Forgotten Theory of Civil Life," in Christian Thomasius, ed. Werner Schneiders (Hamburg: Meiner, 1989), 187-98. 24 See G.H. von Wright, Norm and Action (London: Routledge, 1963), 11-15, for a useful overview. On the question of universalizing political norms, see John Rawls, "Justice as fairness: political not metaphysical," Philosophy and Public Affairs, 14 (1985), 223-51; see also W.E. Connolly, Politics and Ambiguity (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), esp. ch. 6; and James Fishkin, Tyranny and Legitimacy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), ch. 8. Even if norms are fuzzy

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Notes to pages 68-81

and their edges blurred, this does not render them empty of meaning. And they have their meaning so long as they manage to sustain a certain order. Clearly, there can be no social order without the recognition of norms of reciprocal conduct; for, in their absence, there are no safeguards for rights and freedoms, no bases for their protection. While a normative order ensures in itself no maximally perfect conditions of civility and integrity, it does provide the minimal conditions for a political society. On this point I agree with Michael Oakeshott's emphasis on "activity" as an intrinsically valuable clue regarding a procedural ethic. See his Rationality in Politics (London: Methuen, 1962), 97. For an interesting argument regarding the question of derivability, see Thomas Nagel, "Ruthlessness in public life," in S. Hampshire, ed., Public and Private Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 75-91The terror of the French and Russian revolutions, as also that of Fascist and Nazi regimes and certain theocratic-fundamentalist systems of politics, yields ample evidence of this. Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk. II, ch. 3. I discuss this more fully in SelfDirection and Political Legitimacy: Rousseau and Herder (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 68-82. Plato, Republic, vi, 493. For a more detailed account, see my "Czechoslovak Political Culture: continuity and discontinuity," in H. Gordon Skilling, ed., Czechoslovakia 1918-88 (London: Macmillan, 1991), 133-53- Although "reciprocal fairness" in Thomasius's conception is motivated differently from that of Rawls, it constitutes for both the ultimate basis of any normative structuring of political life and civic activity. On the dynamics of this vital interaction, seejurgen Habermas, "Popular Sovereignty as Procedure," in J. Bohman and W. Rehg, eds., Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press), 1997, 61-2. The impulse to personalize political practice within contemporary democracies could perhaps also be viewed as the reaction to what Habermas describes as the increasing depersonalization of political authority, so that "democratization now works to overcome not genuinely political forms of resistance but rather the systematic imperatives of differential economic and administrative systems." Ibid., 41. CHAPTER FIVE

i Charles W. Hendel, ed., David Hume's Political Essays (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1953), 43-61. Unlike Rawls's "public reason," performative principles do not exclude what he calls "comprehensive doctrines," for

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Notes to pages 81-go

they serve to "refract" them. See his Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, 1996), ix, 14, 247, and "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," University of Chicago Law Review (64), 1997, 799. Similarly, when we say of a person that she knows how to drive a car, we usually do not merely imply that she is familiar with the rules of driving; for what we have in mind, and what others perceptually understand us to mean, is a performative kind of knowledge. Hendel, Hume's Political Essays, 43. Alexis de Tocqueville, Oeuvres et correspondance inedites, ii, 83-4, cited in Jack Lively, The Social and Political Thought of Alexis de Tocqueville (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 58. Tocqueville, Oeuvres (B) ix, 123, cited in Lively, Tocqueville, 61. Tocqueville, Letter to Corcelle (16 October 1855), Oeuvres, ii, 301, cited in Lively, Tocqueville, 59. See T. Bottomore and P. Goods, eds., Austro-Marxism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). This, too, contrasts sharply with Rawls's argument. Isaiah Berlin, "Two Concepts of Liberty," in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 118. Tocqueville, Democracy in America,].1?. Mayer, ed., (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), 287-93, 289, 435-6, 442. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1942, 1947), 251. On the question of agreeing on a "fair compromise," see Peter Singer, Democracy and Disobedience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), ch. 5. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 692. Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 147. This is the principal argument in his critique of eighteenth-century rationalism (138-69). Jurgen Habermas, "Popular Sovereignty as Procedure," in J. Bohman and W. Rehg, eds., Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 42, 61. R.A. Dahl, After the Revolution? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 15-19; see also his Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), ch. 6, and Democracy and its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). F.M. Barnard, Pluralism, Socialism, and Political Legitimacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), esp. 3-20. Paul Hirst, in Associative Democracy: New Forms of Economic and Social Governance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 65-70, draws attention to the extremely radical differences between segmental groups, especially in the United States, such as those between Gays and Christian fundamentalists, pro- and anti-choice campaigns on abortion, Blacks and Hassids in Brooklyn, and so on, which the "state" can neither prevent

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Notes to pages 90—3

nor check. It is of interest to note that most of the newly claimed "rights" are the expression of difference, whose importance is to be publicy recognized and institutionally enshrined. Unfortunately, those who claim these new rights in the name of "democracy" do not seem to realize that, unlike the traditionally claimed "rights of man," the newly claimed rights cannot be universalized. Similarly, it is not always clear whether reliance is to be placed on the government of the day to legally encompass the new rights, or alternatively, on some legal or administrative bodies, on the mythical assumption that there are single right answers to every legal or administrative issue. 17 I have touched on this issue in "Between Opposition and Political Opposition: The Search for Competitive Politics in Czechoslovakia," Canadian Journal of Political Science, 5 (1972), 532-52; Socialism with a Human Face (Saskatoon: University of Saskatchewan Press, 1973); "Electoral Confrontation under Socialism," Kosmas, i, 2, 3, (1982-3), 35-47, 15-26, 15-31; "Recovering Politics for Socialism: Two Responses to the Language of Community," Canadian Journal of Political Science, 16 (1983) (with R.A. Vernon); "Socialism, Politics, and Citizenship," East Central Europe, 12 (1985), 1-18; and Pluralism, Socialism, and Political Legitimacy. See also A.H. Brown, "Pluralistic trends in Czechoslovakia," Soviet Studies, 17 (1966), 453-72; and H. Gordon Skilling, Czechoslovakia's Interrupted Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). 18 For a detailed theoretical discussion of market socialism, see David Miller, Market, State, and Community: Theoretical Foundations of Market Socialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), esp. ch. 10. See also Alec Nove, The Economics of Feasible Socialism Revisited (London: HarperCollins,

1991)19 See Radoslav Selucky, "The programme of Democratic Regeneration of Socialist Czechoslovakia," Prace, April 11, 1968; Reform-Modell CSSR (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1969), 72-103; Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe: Political Background and Economic Significance (New York: Praeger, 1972), 20, and "From Capitalism to Socialism," in Gordon Skilling, Czechoslovakia 1918-88, (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1991), i54~73> esp. 170. 20 See Mikailo Markovic, "Philosophical Foundations of the Idea of SelfManagement," in B. Horvat, M. Markovic, and Rudi Supek, eds., Self-governing Socialism (White Plains, NY: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1975), I, 340; see also B. Horvat, Political Economy of Socialism (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1982), 84-105. 21 Failing political pluralization, the idea of socialism may indeed have to be seen as an inherently non-political, if not anti-political, creed which, like other (virtually superhuman) ideals, defies political application, at any rate within the framework of a politically discursive form of democracy. It is heartening to find, therefore, that the Canadian theorist of

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socialism, Frank Cunningham, reaffirms not only Marx's conviction that democracy is the indispensable condition of socialism, but also the belief that socialism requires the promotion of pluralism. See his The Real World of Democracy Revisited (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1994), esp. 39, 109. 22 John Plamenatz, Democracy and Illusion (London: Longman, 1973), x. Or, as a more recent writer puts it: "To be sure, pluralist institutions have a place in democratic society, but it must be a subordinate one." Thomas Christiano, The Rule of the Many: Fundamental Issues in Democratic Theory (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1996), 174. 23 This has generally been the line of criticism levelled at a purely quantifying Utilitarianism. Implicit in philosophical Utilitarianism, however, is the belief that most people are reasonable enough to discover that bad choices carry with them dire consequences. For a recent defence of Utilitarianism, see James Wood Bailey, Utilitarianism, Institutions, and Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). For a more optimistic response to the issue of "equal consideration" than I am able to offer, see Christiano, The Rule of'the Many, 58-75. He stipulates two conditions: a conception of interests that relate individuals specifically "to their common lives together"; and that "each has an equal share in authority over that common life." (58) The discussion that follows, though interesting, seems to me rather inconclusive. 24 Admittedly, Rousseau was not all that optimistic himself about this merger; nevertheless in his moralizing moods he tried to make out that, having gained moral freedom in society, humans would, on the whole, come to realize that making rightful choices always benefits the collectivity even if it does not suit the unenlightened or selfish individual. For more on this point, see my Self-Direction and Political Legitimacy: Rousseau and Herder (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 83-99. For the idea of a "balance of civility and civic virtue," see Michael Walzer, "Civility and Civic Virtue in Contempoirary America," in Radical Principles (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 61-2, 67-8. The central point is that to redress the balance in favour of civic virtue, patriotism, and political activism, we have to be aware that this might be done at the expense of civility and toleration. Although the main concern in the discussion is the balancing of plural political ends, and not cultural pluralism, the balancing of minority ethnic rights with societal cohesiveness in civic terms is at bottom a political problem too. See on this, Will Kymlicka (ed.), The Rights of Minority Cultures (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1995), and regarding political claims for secession by minority cultures, see Margaret Moore (ed.), National Self-Determination and Secession (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). That the possibility of balancing plural demands in a democratic society cannot be taken for granted is the subject of Ralph Grille, Pluralism and the Politics of Difference (Oxford: Clarendon

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Notes to pages 96-100

Press, 1998). My own position, more fully developed in subsequent chapters, admits to a certain qualified agnosticism regarding any generally accepted theory of bridging political differences, if these are perceived as fundamental. 25 On this point, see notes 10, 16, and 24 above, and further passing references in the text below. CHAPTER six 1 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1942, 195°)' 297, 271. 2 C.B. Macpherson coined the phrase, in The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962, 1964). Macpherson maintained that liberal democracy "was brought into being to serve the needs of the competitive market society," whose "product" it became in its later stages. See his The Real World of Democracy (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1965), 35. See also his Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 39-76. 3 This has been the prevailing position of non-revolutionary radicals and social democrats. 4 These views most characteristically found expression during the Prague Spring of 1968. For more on this, see my Socialism with a Human Face: Slogan and Substance (Saskatoon: University Lectures, 1973) and "The Prague Spring and Masaryk's Humanism," East Central Europe, 5 (1978), 215-31. Radoslav Selucky was one of the most outspoken exponents of these views. 5 See, for example, B. Horvat, M. Markovic, and Rudi Supek, eds., Self-governing Socialism (New York: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1975), i, 340. 6 These ideas were first put forward or, at any rate, popularized by socialist revisionists in Yugoslavia. For a thoughtful overview, see Ude Bermbach and Franz Nuscheler, Sozialistischer Pluralismus (Hamburg: Hoffman and Campe, 1973). 7 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (London: Dent, 1910), I, 12. 8 F.A. Hayek, New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics, and the History of Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 267-9; see also his Law, Legislation, and Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), i, 35~79 This is a major theme in Selucky's Reform-Modell CSSR (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1969), 77-9. 10 Selucky, Reform-Modell, 72-103; see also his Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe (New York: Praeger, 1972), esp. 20; and "From Capitalism to Socialism," in H. Gordon Skilling, Czechoslovakia 1918-88 (London: Macmillan, 1991), 154-73, esP- 17°-

231 Notes to pages 101—6 11 David Miller, Market, State, and Community (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), vii. I find myself in agreement with a number of the observations on Miller's socialist-market-scheme by Christopher Pierson in "Democracy, Markets, and Capital: Are There Necessary Economic Limits to Democracy?" Political Studies XL (Special issue, 1992), 83-98. 12 Miller, Market, 5-6. 13 Ibid., 9-10. 14 Ibid., 10. 15 Ibid., 13. 16 Ibid., 14-15. 17 Ibid., 16, 294-5. 18 Ibid., 10, 17. 19 Ibid., 252. 20 Jurgen Habermas, Towards a Rational Society (London: Heinemann, 1971), 101. Clearly, this is in sharp contrast not only to Marxian thinking but also to Hayek's notion of the neutral state. 21 Habermas, Towards a Rational Society, 107-12. 22 Habermas, The New Conservatism, S.W. Nicholson, ed. and trans. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 55. Habermas speaks of a crisis in the welfare state "as a result of its own success." (56-8). 23 Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 305. 24 Paul Hirst, Associative Democracy: New Forms of Economic and Social Governance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 65. It is perfectly understandable to want to displace the state, and all that goes with it, such as taxes and a bulging bureaucracy. Certainly, in the state of nature, as Rousseau informs us, natural man being wholly self-sufficient, can subsist without a state and its government. The civil state, by contrast, "can subsist only if men's work produces more than they need." There must, therefore, be a surplus in order to have a state and public services to start with, since "the public person consumes but produces nothing." Social Contract, Bk. Ill, ch. 8. 25 Hannah Arendt, "Truth and Politics," Between Past and Future (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 242; "The Crisis in Culture," Ibid., 219-22. See also Ronald Beiner (ed.,) Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 42, 70. 26 Arendt, "Truth and Politics," 264. I have discussed this in greater detail in "Infinity and Finality: Hannah Arendt in Retrospect," Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fur Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 69 (1995), 546-69. 27 For a fuller discussion of this point, see F.M. Barnard and R.A. Vernon, "Socialist Pluralism and Pluralist Socialism," Political Studies, 25 (1977), 474-90; and, for an insightful approach to recent theories of self-man-

232

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30 31 32

33 34

35

36

37

38

Notes to pages 106—15

agement, see Branko Horvat, The Political Economy of Socialism (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1982), esp. 84-105. F.M. Barnard, Pluralism, Socialism, and Political Legitimacy: The Opening Up of Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). To my knowledge, Bruno Leoni's critique of this trend is still one of the most incisive, in his "The Meaning of 'Political' in Political Decisions," Political Studies, 5 (1957), 225-39. A. Nove, The Economics of Feasible Socialism Revisited (London: HarperCollins, 1991), viii. Schumpeter, Capitalism, 271. Cited by Jean Baechler (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) in "Capitalism and Democracy," an unpublished paper prepared for the Conference for the Study of Political Thought, 6-8 April, 1979, 19Thomas Christiano, The Rule of the Many: Fundamental Issues in Democratic Theory (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1996), 79. An elaboration of this point may be found in my "Between Opposition and Political Opposition: The Search for Competitive Politics in Czechoslovakia," Canadian Journal of Political Science, 5 (1972), 533-52. For a sophisticated discussion of the link between "autonomies" and "preferences," and the problematic variants of the latter, see Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the subversion of rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), esp. ch. 3. See also his "The Market and the Forum: Three Varieties of Political Theory," in Bohman and Rehg, eds., Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 3-33, esp. 26. Ann Phillips, Engendering Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 168. See also Christiano's observations on "normative citizenship," The Rule of the Many, ch. 5, esp. 174-8. For a succinct, though careful, exposition of Durkheim's thinking on this point see Anthony Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 65-105. For current attempts in this direction see D.W. Haslett, Capitalism with Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) and Hans Rung, A Global Ethic for Global Politics and Economics, trans. John Bowden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Although I find myself in agreement with Elster's emphasis on the performative thrust of political discourse, I wonder if his viewing economic matters as the principal purpose of political activity is not creating a false dichotomy between the purpose and the nature of political action - the very thing Arendt was struggling against - lest the market came to swallow the forum. I am referring to Elster's concluding remarks in "The Market and the Forum," 25-26.1 understand that he wants to steer a middle course; what is not clear is its destination. For a less equivocal

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Notes to pages 115—18

position on the contrast between democratic values and market values see Kai Nielsen, Equality and Liberty: A Defense of Radical Egalitarianism (Totowa: Rowman and Allanheld, 1985.) CHAPTER SEVEN

1 Kenneth Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (New York: John Wiley, 1951), i. See also Jon Elster, "The Market," 10-11. 2 Arrow, Social Choice, 86. 3 Harold D. Lasswell, World Politics and Personal Insecurity (New York: The Free Press, 1965), 175. 4 See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 125, 184-5; see a^so "What is Freedom?" Between Past and Future (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 151-5. A number of the points I raise in this chapter were first made in a contribution to the International Seminar for Philosophy and Political Theory. It was published as "Actions, Reasons, and Political Ideology," in J.M. Porter, ed., Sophia and Praxis (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House, 1984), 35-64. More recently, Professor David Braybrooke made helpful observations, particularly in regard to Arrow's use of "social welfare," which also applies to attempts to aggregate any preferences. On "selfishness" see also John Plamenatz, Democracy and Illusion (London: Longman, 1973), 154-6, and Max Weber's distinction in "Politics as a Vocation" between living for politics and living off politics, although he warned that the contrast should not be overdrawn. See H.H. Gerth and C.W. Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 77-87. Critics of Weber, but not exclusively they, could object that the distinction Weber makes suggests that politics is more properly the domain of the leisurely with independent incomes. 5 For an interestingly contrasting discussion of rationality, see T.F. Geraets, ed., Rationality Today (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1979). See also S.I. Benn and G.W. Mortimore, eds., Rationality and the Social Sciences (London: Routledge, 1976), chap. 14, for an analysis of the distinction between individual and social rationality. See also A.R. Louch, Explanation and Human Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966) and M. Hollis, Models of Man: Philosophical Thoughts on Social Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), and, on politics as an exercise in reason-giving, Stephen Macedo, Liberal Virtues (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). On Rawls and others regarding rationality in a politics of plural positions, see note 26 below. 6 See Immanuel Kant, "An Answer to the Question 'What is Enlightenment?'" in H. Reiss, ed., Kant's Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). See also P. Riley, Kant's Political Philosophy (New

234

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9

10

Notes to pages 118-20

Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1983), and H. Williams, Kant's Political Philosophy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983). On Rousseau, see The Social Contract, Bk. II, ch. 3. The rationality that Rousseau stipulates is not, however, the rationality that Kant's categorical imperative presupposes; likewise, Rousseau's postulate of the common good is a strictly political universality, unlike Kant's postulate of moral universality. On the problem of universalizing political norms, see J. Rawls, "Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical," Philosophy and Public Affairs, 14 (1985), 223-51. See also my SelfDirection and Political Legitimacy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 138-45. The best-known formulation of this opposition is I. Berlin's essay "Two Concepts of Liberty" in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 118-72. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Button, 1950), Part I, ch. 14; see also Part II, ch. 21, esp. 106, 177. In considering reasons for as the essential content of political accounting, I sharply depart from Kant and Rawls, for both of whom the quality of motivation is regnant. See esp. Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, 1996), 1, Iv; "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," University of Chicago Law Review (64), 1997), 766, 769, and 786-7. See also P.F. Strawson, Studies in the Philosophy of Thought and Action (London: Oxford, 1968), 75-80. "Reasons from," it is true, could sometimes be redescribed as "reasons/or," as in "acting out of gratitude," although I doubt that the two statements mean the same thing. But I grant that if human action is nothing but the reflex to environmental factors and psycho-physical sources, then the conception of purposive reasons, put forward here as the defining characteristic of action proper, is theoretically wrong and empirically useless. John Elster, "The Market and the Forum: Three Varieties of Political Theory," in Bohman and Rehg, Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 14. Plato, suggesting a similar idea, disguised by the 'noble lie' (Republic, iii, 414), was of course no democrat. The majority principle, he felt, would only bring about what most people want, but not what objectively ought to be done. (Republic, vi, 493). Habermas's theory of communication misleadingly lends credence to the view that contestation in politics is no different from disputation in philosophy. I am reluctant (as I indicated earlier) to assimilate political debate and rationality to phiolosophical debate and rationality because to do so seems incompatible to me with discourse among equals, not subject to some intellectual authority. Aristotle, Rhetoric, Bk. n, chs. 19-22, I393b-i397a, Richard McKeon, ed., The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random House, 1941) 1411-19. An enthymeme is a sort of composite, containing a maxim and its explanation by way of argument, comprising premises and conclu-

235 Notes to pages 120-1

11

12

13 14

sions. It is intended to persuade, to gain approval. This understanding of political rationality is therefore emphatically different from cost-benefit approaches such as the theory of democracy by Anthony Downs, according to which voters act with political rationality if they vote for certain policies expected to maximize benefits to themselves. At the same time it could be argued that, insofar as such grounds for voting entail "reasons for" they could be subsumed under it. Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 42. "One cannot assume," Elster writes, "that one will get closer to the good society by acting as if one had already arrived. If, as suggested by Habermas, free and rational discussion will only be possible in a society where political and economic domination have been abolished, it is by no means obvious that abolition can be brought about by rational argumentation." The original version of Habermas's communication theory appeared in Theorie der Gesettschaft oder Sozial-technologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971); for more recent versions, see his "Aspects of the Rationality of Action," in Geraets, ed., Rationality Today, 185-203, and his Moralbewusstsein und kommunikales Handeln (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983). It seems that Habermas thinks in philosophical rather than political terms when he speaks of "contestation." "A speech act," he says, "can be contested, that is, rejected as 'invalid', basically from three aspects: (i) truth claimed for a proposition; (2) truthfulness claimed by a speaker for his feelings, needs, wishes, intentions etc; (3) Tightness claimed for an action. Thus every communicative action can be rejected as untrue, untruthful or normatively wrong." In all three aspects some objective or universal selfevidence is projected. Failing such self-evidence, however, who is to establish the required cognitive and moral standards? Whose ruling counts? Whose mind is unfalsified enough to appraise the continued absence of falsifications of one kind or another? Merely to raise these questions is to lay bare the problem posed in note 9, the question of a superior authority. What this amounts to in political terms is highly puzzling. See also Geraets, ed., Rationality Today, 435, where one commentator speaks of Habermas's alternating between utopianism and elitism. In this context, I am not sure how far Christiano's six conditions for rational deliberation come to grips with the realities of party-political democracies, with the conflict, that is, between openness and loyalty to positional commitments. For Christiano's six conditions, see his The Rule of the Many: Fundamental Issues in Democratic Theory (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1996), 116-23. Steven Lukes, Essays in Social Theory (Southampton: Camelot Press, 1977), 10-13. Ibid., 10.

236 Notes to pages 121—8 15 16 17 18 19

20

21 22 23 24

25

Ibid. Ibid., 25. Elster, Sour Grapes, vii. Elster, Sour Grapes, i, 29-33; Elster's reference is to Rawls, A Theory of Justice, esp. 396-8. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on Political Economy, G.D.H. Cole, ed., (London: Dent, 1946), 235-6, 240. Or, as Adam Smith puts it in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, a person must "humble the arrogance of his self-love, and bring it down to something which other men can get along with." Derek Parfit, in Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 443, argues similarly. The "impersonality" of rationality in politics is, however, essentially calculating, and should not be confused with Rawls's idea of "public reason," which is intended to be inherently substantive. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 253-4. See also my "Infinity and Finality: Hannah Arendt in Retrospect," Deutsche Vierteljahrs Schriftfur Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, vol. 69 (1995) 546-69, 560-1. Being persistently manipulated not merely by governments but also by media subservient to them, a citizen no longer knows what to believe. A recent example of widespread confusion resulting from orchestrated justifications was the bombing of Yugoslavia. But confusion is not the same as self-deception. The anecdote is based on personal experience. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (i, 1835; ii, 1840), ed.J.P. Mayer (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), pp. 193, 195. Rousseau, Social Contract, G.D.H. Cole, ed., Bk. II, ch. 6; see also ch. 3, 31, 22-3. See also n.24 in ch. 5 above. See Thomas Nagel, "Ruthlessness in Public Life," in S. Hampshire, ed., Public and Private Morals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 75-91. See also Plamenatz's pertinent observation that some of the vilest actions are not selfishly motivated, while many selfish actions, if not exactly noble, are nonetheless harmless to others, or even beneficial to them. Of interest, too, is his point (against Downs) that it is easier to discover whether official (or collective) actions are rational than whether private actions are, because the former are ordinarily spelled out more clearly in terms of their goals. (Plamenatz, Democracy and Illusion, 155-9.) Max Weber's distinction between an ethic of faith and an ethic of responsibility (Gerth and Mills, ed., From Max Weber, 120) is of relevance here. Much as I applaud, therefore, Rawls's noble determination to apply Kantian criteria of morality, in terms of the sincerity of motives (reference to which has been made earlier) to political action, I cannot help questioning its sense of realism within "the real world of democracy." Moreover, in view of the problems to which any such substantively moral

237

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27

28

29

Notes to pages 128—31

rationality may give rise as an unchallengeable sanction of governmentally given reasons, Rawls's interpretation of "public reason" seems sadly misguided. Just as purity or sincerity of motives is not sufficient for validating action in the political realm, so a substantively moral rationality may conflict with the challengeability principle of discursive democracy, as also with the principle of political responsibility for outcomes. A democratic majority could therefore be thought objectively right only if the judgements of the majority could be assumed to be those of reason and justice, as Locke maintained. Whether judicial review can be looked upon as an instrument to ensure this, is of course a contentious point. Clearly, courts do not adjudicate without judges, and their particular interpretation of the law or the constitution; yet appeal to the courts may often prove the only route in order to uphold the right to be different. There is a vast literature on judicial review, but Rawls's article on "public reason" in its reliance on the impartiality of the United States Supreme Court and his earlier reference to the Supreme Court as exemplar of public reason in Political Liberalism, 216-31, esp. 231, is of particular relevance here. See also I.M. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 118. Ernest Gellner captured this mixture of faith and doubt in the belief of the power of human self-direction when he referred to Kant as the "philosopher both of the ghost and of the machine." For Kant appears to have been torn by two fears: one was "that the mechanical vision does not hold," and the other "that it does." The first fear is for science and the second for morality. Legitimation of Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 185. A good deal of contemporary political thinking is shot through with a similar tension. I do believe, though, that the distinction between "cause" as a temporal antecedent and "cause" as a directional end - in terms of "reasons from" and "reasons for" - does help distinguish between causal determinism and causal inevitability. Surely, what we consciously choose to do evidences a determinism that is psychologically and conceptually different from a determinism in which reasoned choice has no causal force whatsoever. This is not to deny that a good deal that happens is "the work" (as we ambiguously tend to say) of inertia, randomness, unintended consequences, and so on. See, for example, Richard Vernon, "Unintended Consequences," Political Theory VII (1979), 57-73. On the question of choice in history and the meaning of an action for its author, I have more to say in "Natural Growth and Purposive Development: Vico and Herder," History and Theory, xvm (1979), 16-36. Alasdair Maclntyre interestingly points to discrepancies between institutional norms and actual practices. See his Against the Self-images of the Age (London: Duckworth, 1971), 255; see also 207-8, and 215-17.

238 Notes to pages 131—9 30 If we assumed, for example, that Abraham's offer to sacrifice his only son Isaac was merely symptomatic of common contextual practices, a matter of regular child sacrifices, so habitual that it requires no reasoned reflection whatsoever, we would surely fail to understand the point of the biblical story and have nothing to judge about. 31 Gyorgy Paloczi-Horvath, who took an active part in the Hungarian Revolution of 1957, knew all along of the lying and corruption in the Party, the methods of extracting confessions, the terror and the camps, and the elimination of whole nations by the Kremlin leaders. See his remarkable The Undefeated (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1959), esp. 191. 32 Rousseau, in his Confessions, recounts that he knew perfectly well the risks of visiting a Venetian courtesan; he knew that no one "could leave the embraces of a padoana unscathed." It was, he admits, "one of those inconsistencies that I find it difficult myself to understand." The Confessions, trans. J.M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), 297. 33 This is elaborated at some length in my "Accounting for Actions: Causality and Teleology," History and Theory xx (1981), 291-312. 34 For a fascinating discussion of laying political traps, see Robert E. Goodin, Manipulatory Politics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980), esp. 65-122. 35 Most political parties are aggregations of diverse opinion and interest groups, coalitions that result from efforts to find enough common "reasons for" in order to enter the electoral contest as a single political entity. 36 Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay, Yes Minister (London: BBC, 1981), i, 149. Rawls also advocates openness as a condition of democracy, even to the point of "openly explaining our intentions" as "a basis of a political reasoning that all can share as free and equal citizens." "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," 787, 799. See also n. 12 above regarding political restraints to openness. 37 The majoritarian principle, while generally recognized as a rational organizing device in democratic decisions, is nonetheless found seriously wanting as a justificatory principle in a democracy of plural values, if it is not suitably qualified or limited in its range of applicability. It is therefore somewhat of a puzzle why accepting majority decisions should constitute a morally binding commitment, as Rawls seems to be suggesting in "Public Reason," 770-1. See also James Fishkin, Tyranny and Legitimacy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979) on this point. CHAPTER EIGHT

i See Stanley I. Benn, "The Problematic Rationality of Political Participation," in P. Laslett and J. Fishkin, eds., Philosophy, Politics and Society, Fifth Series (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 291-312.

239 Notes to pages 139-45 2 For a most careful analysis of the distinction between individual and social rationality, see S.I. Benn and G.W. Mortimer, eds., Rationality and the Social Sciences (London: Routledge, 1976), ch. 14. 3 For a recent analytical review of empirical studies, see Yannis Papadopoulos, "Analysis of Functions and Dysfunctions of Direct Democracy: TopDown and Bottom-Up Perspectives," Politics and Society, 23 (1995), 421-48. 4 Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), xv; see also his An Aristocracy of Everyone (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), esp. 266. For a trenchant comment on the educative benefits of participation, see Jon Elster, "The Market and the Forum: Three Varieties of Political Theory," in Bohman and Rehg, Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 19-20, where he describes such claims as "internally incoherent or self-defeating." For an even-handed discussion of educative claims made by "participatory democrats," see Geraint Parry, "Constructive and Reconstructive Political Education," Oxford Review of Education 25 (1999), 23-38, esp. 29-33. 5 Lester W. Milbrath, Political Participation (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1965), 147. Cf.Jane Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 6 See David Miller, citing I. Janis, Groupthink, in Market, State, and Community (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 270, and warning against the danger of moralizing collective decisions, in the way Rousseau appears to moralize the "general will." 7 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on Political Economy, G.D.H. Cole, ed., (London: Dent, 1946), 245-6. Barber, inveighing against representative democracy, calls it as "paradoxical an oxymoron as our political language has produced." (StrongDemocracy, xiv). 8 Rousseau, Lettres ecrites de la montagne, Oeuvres Completes (Paris: Pleiade, 9 10

11 12

13

1959-69) > m > 8l4-!5Rousseau, Emile, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 463. Rousseau, Geneva Manuscript, trans. R.D. Masters (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978), 161. See also R.W. Grant, "Integrity and Politics; An Alternative Reading of Rousseau," Political Theory, 22 (1994), 414-43. John Plamenatz, Democracy and Illusion (London: Longmans, 1973), 185. A.D. Lindsay, The Modern Democratic State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943, 1945), I, 250. See also Giovanni Sartori, The Theory of Democracy Revisited (Chatham: Chatham House, 1987), 122, and Richard Rose, Challenge to Governance: Studies in Overload Politics (London: Sage, 1980). H.J. Laski, "The Personality of the State," The Nation, 101 (1915), 116. See also H.A. Deane, The Political Ideas of Harold J. Laski (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955) and S.T. Glass, The Responsible Society

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18 19

20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27

Notes to pages 145-52

(London: Longmans, 1966). Paul Hirst, though not as dismissive of the state as Laski, nonetheless wants to turn things on their head by ranking the state as secondary, while giving primary importance to voluntary associations. (Associative Democracy: New Forms of Economic and Social Governance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 26.) It should be noted, however, that, unlike Pateman, Hirst is sensitive to the dangers of disintegrating fragmentation (64-7), as is Barber (Strong Democracy, 248-9), despite his emphasis on "mediating institutions in which all citizens can participate." Neither, however, seems to realize that it is beyond "the state" to avert such segmental fragmentation (see above, ch. 5), because its potential unifying role is denied or severely undermined. D.F. Thompson, The Democratic Citizen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 182. For critical comment, see n>4 above. See, for example, Miller, Market, State, and Community, 228-45. P. Bachrach, The Theory of Democratic Elitism (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967) 77-8, 102. Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), no; see also her The Problem of Political Obligation: A Critique of Liberal Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985), 185. Pateman, Participation, 21; cf. Bachrach, Democratic Elitism, 96. "Every political society is composed of smaller societies of different kinds, each of which has its interests and its rules of conduct." But what Rousseau emphasizes in the ensuing discussion is the discontinuity between such "smaller societies" and the state, between group membership and citizenship: "A particular resolution may be advantageous to the smaller community, but pernicious to the greater." Political Economy, ed. Cole, 237. Barber's and Hirst's vision of participatory democracy suffers from a similar slippage, which makes their idea of participation and Pateman's light-years apart from that of Rousseau. Barry Holden, Understanding Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Philip Allan, 1988), 130. See G.D.H. Cole, "Conflicting Social Obligations," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (New Series), 15 (1915), 158; and HJ. Laski, Authority in the Modern State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919), 29. Cole, "Conflicting Social Obligations," 158. Pateman, Participation, 105, no; Bachrach, Democratic Elitism, 98. T.H. Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation (London: Longmans, 1841), 122. Miller, Market, State, and Community, 245-51. Ibid., 262-4. G.D.H. Cole, Social Theory (London: Methuen, 1920), 48-50.

241

Notes to pages 154-8

28 I.M. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 233. 29 Robert A. Dahl, After the Revolution? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 120. 30 See O. Gierke, Political Theories in the Middle Ages (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 28; and F.S. Carney, ed., The Politics of Johannes Althusius (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 202. If, on the other hand, the political and social tend to coincide, as a number of feminist and new social movement theorists appear to argue, then no need would exist at all for a switch from the social to the political. 31 E. Barker, ed., The Politics of Aristotle (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), 120. 32 This point has been made often enough. But it is interesting to have it confirmed as seen from an expressly feminist perspective. Ann Phillips, for example, after sympathetically surveying the ground upon which feminists typically favour active forms of participatory democracy, concedes that the more participatory versions of democracy not only "founder on the problems of guaranteeing to everyone an equal weight" but also turn out to be "less accountable to those who are passive or inert." (Ann Phillips, Engendering Democracy, [Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991], 146, 163.) See also ch. 5, "Paradoxes of Participation." 33 This is true, particularly, of the views of Habermas, Miller, Manin, and Held. 34 Bernard Manin, "On Legitimacy and Political Deliberation," Political Theory, 15 (1987), 338-68, esp. 349-51. 35 Ibid., 357. For the passage as a whole, see 351-60. 36 Ibid., "On Legitimacy," 352—3. From this perspective, elite accommodation is generally viewed as an illegitimate "collusive transaction." 37 John S. Dryzek, Discursive Democracy: Politics, Policy and Political Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 5-9. 38 Although Miller concedes that "aggregation" and voting may be the only ultimate democratic forms for settling differences, he argues that both will be more rational as a result of being brought into the open. See his "Deliberative Democracy and Social Choice," Political Studies XL (1992), 54-67. See also J. Knight and J.Johnson, "Aggregation and Deliberation: On the Possibility of Democratic Legitimacy," Political Theory, 22 (1994), 277-96. 39 See Albert Weale, "The Limits of Democracy," in Hamlin and Pettit, eds., The Good Polity: Normative Analysis of the State (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 35-47; see also nn. 5 and 6 above. 40 Miller, "Deliberative Democracy," 55. 41 See Joshua Cohen, "Deliberation and Democraatic Legitimacy," in Hamlin and Pettit, eds., The Good Polity, 17-33.

242

Notes to pages 158—61

42 See Iain McLean, Democracy and New Technology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), 161, 170-3; James S. Fishkin, Democracy and Deliberation: New Directions for Democratic Reform (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 81-103; Dahl, After the Revolution? 149-50; and Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 340; see also Amitai Etzioni, "Minerva: An Electronic Town Hall," Policy Sciences, 3 (1972), 457-74, esp. 458-9. 43 Miller, Market, State, and Community, 263. 44 Ibid., 264. 45 Ibid., 264-7. 46 Ibid., 272-4. For a sympathetic treatment of Habermas's ideal of a deliberative community, seej. Cohen andj. Rogers, "Secondary Associations and Democratic Governance," Politics and Society, 20 (1992), 393-472, andj. Cohen, "Deliberation," 30. 47 See n. 6 above. C.B. Macpherson, a leading theorist of democracy, did not conceal his doubts about direct democracy and about the replacement of representative democracy by "full and equal" participation at the national level, for this would demand a degree of activity and the acquisition of knowledge and information, for which most people are hardly willing to invest the time. I return to this point in the next chapter; see especially n. 20. 48 This point is a central theme of the following chapter. 49 David Held, Models of Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 257. See also S.L. Schweizer, "Participation, Workplace-democracy, and the Problem of Representative Government," Polity, 27 (1995),

359-77-

50 Held, Models of Democracy, 262-4; see also McLean, Democracy and New Technology, 157; R.E. Goodin, "Political Ideals and Political Practice," British Journal of Political Science, 25 (1995), 37-56; and R.A. Dahl, "A Democratic Dilemma: System of Effectiveness versus Citizen Participation," Political Science Quarterly, 109 (1994), 23-34. For a contrasting historical account of participatory democracy and its juxtaposition with liberal and social-revolutionary democracy, see H. Mark Roelofs, "Democratic Dialectics," The Review of Politics, 60 (1998), 5-29. On the role of the intermediate group, see F.M. Barnard and R.A. Vernon, "Pluralism, Participation, and Politics: Reflections of the Intermediate Group," Political Theory, 3 (1975), 180-97. The present chapter owes a number of points to Professor Vernon's collaboration in this earlier publication. 51 Thomas Christiano casts some intriguing light on this question, however, by stipulating certain requirements of (normative) citizenship. The Rule of the Many: Fundamental Issues in Democratic Theory (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1996), 165-99.

243 Notes to pages 163—7 CHAPTER NINE

1 Carole Pateman, The Problem of Political Obligation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 5, 184. 2 Ibid., 6, 169. 3 Ibid., 178. 4 Ibid., 6. 5 Ibid., 184. 6 Ibid., 185. 7 John Burnheim, Is Democracy Possible? The Alternative to Electoral Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985), 17-18. 8 Ibid., see ch. 3. 9 Ibid., 17-18. 10 Ibid., 15-16. Nonetheless, decisions taken outside the local community may at times bear more strongly on the lives of its members. 11 Ibid., 19-21. 12 Ibid., 181. 13 Ibid., 181-3. 14 Ibid., 42. 15 Iain McLean, Democracy and New Technology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), 160. 16 Paul Hirst, Associative Democracy: New Forms of Economic and Social Governance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 25. 17 Ibid., 26, 42-3. 18 Ibid., 74, 170. 19 Ibid., 24. 20 Cited in Barry Holden, Understanding Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Philip Allan, 1988), 132. For a fuller exposition of Macpherson's thinking about participatory democracy, see his The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), ch. 5. See also D. Morrice, "C.B. Macpherson's Critique of Liberal Democracy and Capitalism," Political Studies, 42 (1994), 646-61. 21 Holden, Understanding Liberal Democracy, 129. 22 Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 180, 248-9. 23 Writing from a feminist stance, Frazer and Lacey observe that "formal rights of participation can all too easily serve to disguise inequalities of substantive access to speech and to be heard." See Elizabeth Frazer and Nicola Lacey, The Politics of Community: A Feminist Critique of the LiberalCommunitarian Debate (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 203. 24 McLean, Democracy and New Technology, 157. 25 James S. Fishkin, Democracy and Deliberation: New Directions for Democratic Reform (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), 85.

244 Notes to pages 167—72

26

27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40

41 42 43 44

Fishkin has in mind particularly Robert Paul Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 36-7. Ibid., 90. For Peter Laslett's argument, see "The Face to Face Society," Philosophy, Politics and Society (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1956), 157-84; esp. 162-8. Ibid., 40, 81, 85. Ibid., 101. See McLean, Democracy and New Technology, 11—14. David Held, Models of Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 263-4. Ibid., 283-97. Erich Kaufmann, "Zur Problematik des Volkswillens," in Manin, "On Legitimacy and Political Deliberation," 367. See also Habermas, "Popular Sovereignty as Procedure," 41, 44-5, 62, stressing will-formation as a redefinition of the principle of popular sovereignty and the authority of an unstructured popular will. See David Held, "Democracy: From City-State to a Cosmopolitan Order?" Political Studies, XL (1992), 10-39, esP- 35Fishkin, Democracy and Deliberation, 34. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 35-6. Ibid., 81-104; see also Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers, On Democracy: Toward a Transformation of American Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 146-67. Robert Dahl has for some time been making similar proposals. See esp. After the Revolution1?, 149-50, and Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 339-40. Fishkin, Democracy and Deliberation, 83. Ibid., 90. By presuming the existence of a definitionally correct general will as the legitimating foundation of civic deliberation, Rousseau allowed for the (legally) repressive use of force by the government in proportion to dissenting individual wills. (Social Contract, Bk. Ill, ch. i) Bernard Manin, "On Legitimacy and Political Deliberation," Political Theory, 15 (1987), 352. Ibid., 364. Rosa Luxemburg was one of the few socialists to make this point most insistently. Ibid., 367. Elster, "The Market and the Forum: Three Varieties of Political Theory," in Bohman and Rehg, eds., Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press,

1997). 14. J 745 Manin, "On Legitimacy," 361. 46 See above, ch. 3, n. 27. 47 Holden, Understanding Liberal Democracy, 184. For a similar view, see H.B.

245

48

49 50 51 52 53 54

Notes to pages 172—6

Mayo, An Introduction to Democratic Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 218-22. Alec Nove, The Economics of Feasible Socialism Revisited (London: HarperCollins Academic, 1991), 243. See also Robert Dahl, A Preface to Economic Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Karl Marx, The German Ideology, in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1978), 145, 34, 46. Ibid., 197-9. Alan Wolfe, The Limits of Legitimacy: Political Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism (New York: The Free Press, 1977), 5, 6. Ibid., 3-5, 7-8, 323-4. Ibid., 326; see also 325-30. Ibid., 327.

55 Ibid-> 341~256 Ibid., 346. 57 Ibid., 341-2. 58 In Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), and "The Procedural Republic of the Unencumbered Self," Political Theory, 12 (1984), 81-96. On the link between communitarianism and progressivism, and the tension within thinking in terms of "tradition," see Frank Cunningham, The Real World of Democracy Revisited (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1994), 95-114. 59 Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), ch. 15. See also his What Justice? What Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988). 60 In Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 157-9; see also ms Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), and Multiculturalism and the 'Politics of Recognition' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 61 Michael Walzer, "The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism," Political Theory, 18 (1990), 6-23. See also ch. 5, n.24 above. 62 Bikhu Parekh, "The Cultural Particularity of Liberal Democracy," Political Studies, XL (1992), 160-75, esP- 161-2. 63 Ibid., 161-2, 168. 64 Ibid., 163. 65 Ibid., 165. 66 Ibid., 167. 67 Ibid., 169. 68 Ibid. 69 The idea of a national community (Volksgemeinschaft) acquired distinctly racial overtones in Nazi Germany which, coupled with an arrogant exclusionary ethos, assumed forms of unprecedented viciousness: Und willst du

246

Notes to pages 176-80

nicht mein Bruder sein, dann schlag' ich dir den Schddel ein. ('You are either my brother or your head needs smashing in.") See also my "Metaphors, Laments, and the Organic Community," Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science (1966), 281-301. "Community" thinking, writes the feminist I.M. Young, "often operates to exclude or oppress those experienced as different... for it carries connotations of ethnicity, race, and other group identifications." In so doing, it "channels energy away from the political goals of the groups" and produces "a clique atmosphere." Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, !99°)> 234-5. 70 See reference to Habermas's constitutional patriotism, ch. 3 above. 71 On "communal unity in political culture," see Miller, Market, State, and Community, 17, 298. 72 On "civic friendship," see John Rawls, Political Liberalism, li, and "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," University of Chicago Law Review (64), 1

igg?*?? -

73 All this has strong romantic overtones, rekindled by F. Toennies's Community and Society and R. Nisbet's Community and Power. Habermas, however, has more recently acknowledged that the communitarian assumption of republican virtues "is realistic only for a polity with a normative consensus that has been secured in advance through tradition and ethos." Jiirgen Habermas, "Popular Sovereignty as Procedure," in Bohman and Rehg, Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 45. 74 This is the principal charge Amy Gutman raises against communitarianism, in "Communitarian Critics of Liberalism," Philosophy and Public Affairs, 14 (1985), 308-22, esp. 316. 75 David Beetham, "Liberal Democracy and the Limits of Democratization," Political Studies, XL (1992), 40-53; here 40. 76 Beetham, "Liberal Democracy," 41. Jack Lively makes a closely similar point in Democracy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), 148. 77 Despite Communist claims of "extensive participation of broad masses" less than a third of the population had any influence on politics, and less than half had any say even at the lowest management level. For a most careful study, see Pavel Machonin, ed., Ceskoslovenskd Spolecnost (Czechoslovak Society) (Bratislava: Epocha, 1969), 235-64. It has summaries in English. 78 Beetham, "Liberal Democracy," 52. 79 Ann Phillips, Engendering Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991),

*5580 Frazer and Lacey, The Politics of Community, 7, 57. For a collection of views on different aspects of feminism and politics, see Ann Phillips., ed., Feminism and Politics (Oxford Readings in Feminism), 1998. 81 Phillips, Engendering Democracy, 148.

247

Notes to pages 180—9

82 I.M. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 233-50; Frazer and Lacey, The Politics of Community, ch. 6. See also Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 241-70, for an alternative. 83 Phillips, Engendering Democracy, 163, and her The Politics of Presence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 84 Ibid., 146, 168; Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, chs. i and 2, 235-50; Frazer and Lacey, 168-9, 193!and Hans-Peter Kriesi et al., New Social Movements in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 236, 243-8. For a wide-ranging critique particularly of Sandel's communitarianism, see Anita L. Allen and Milton C. Regan, Jr., eds., Debating Democracy's Discontent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.) CHAPTER TEN

1 Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers, On Democracy: Toward a Transformation of American Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 148-51. It is clearly easier to escalate goals in order to gain political support than to de-escalate them once in power. For lofty principles can create expectations which can be subsequently ignored only at considerable peril. 2 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk. Ill, ch. 12. 3 See esp. On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1965). See also K. Reshaur, "Concepts of Solidarity in the Political Theory of Hannah Arendt," Canadian Journal of Political Science, 25 (1992); and M.P. D'Entreves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt (London: Routledge, 1994), 98-9, 147-8, 154-5; Peter Fuss, "Hannah Arendt's Conception of Political Community," in Melvyn A. Hill ed., Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World (New York: St. Martin's, 1979), 157-77, *s a^so instructive on this point. Arendt does touch on accountability in connection with her studies on Kant, but there is no follow-up in modern political terms, and no mention of the relation between participation and accountability in the kind of direct participation she advocates. See, Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy Ronald Beiner, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 41. Thus, while she grants that the term (accountability) is "political in origin," dating back to Athenian democracy, she principally discusses it as the basis of all critical thinking. See also ch. 6, above, n. 24. 4 Albert Weale, "The Limits of Democracy," in Hamlin and Pettit, eds., The Good Polity: Normative Analysis of the State (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 39-4°5 Ibid., 41. 6 Ibid., 42.

248

Notes to pages 189—96

7 See above 5, n. 14, referring to new "rights" that are claimed, involving the expression of difference which, unlike the traditional "rights of man," cannot be universalized. See alsoj. Rawls, "Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical," Philosophy and Public Affairs, 14 (1985), 223-51. I have similar doubts about his concept of "public reason" - as most recently developed in "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited" - being able to transcend competing claims perceived and presented as civic rights, in the absence of court judgements, for the concept itself has no selfevident force. 8 The presupposition that rational debate must produce agreement rests on undue expectations of an underlying unity on any particular "common good" which, as I.M. Young points out, could entail or lead to the suppression of difference. See her Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 119. See also Elster, "The Market and the Forum," in Bohman and Rehg, eds., Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 11-19. 9 Cited in Weale, "The Limits of Democracy," 45. 10 As discussed in ch. 5 above, also as regards Rawls's stress on motives. 11 David Held, Models of Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 257. See also above ch. 5, n.1412 John Hallowell, The Moral Foundation of Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), 121-2. (Italics are added.) John Locke, of course, argued similarly regarding majority decision. 13 Brian Barry, "Is Democracy Special?" in P. Laslett andj. Fishkin, eds., Philosophy, Politics, and Society, Fifth Series (New Haven: Yale University Press, !979)> 155-96. esP- 19514 Barry, "Is Democracy Special?" 168-72. 15 See, for example, Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xv, who wants us to accept that, like freedom and justice, these virtues are the very creations of democracy. For a detailed analysis of Madisonian democracy, see R.A. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), ch. i. In a sense, it may be true that almost all of us "are minorities on some policy or another." See Mayo, An Introduction to Democratic Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 220. 16 For this felicitous formulation, see S.I. Benn and R.S. Peters, Social Principles and the Democratic State (London: Allen and Unwin, 1963), 351. Regarding suggested institutional reforms to this end, see Thomas Christiano, Rule of the Many (Boulder, Colorado: Western University Press, 1996), 195-201, 222-38, and 254-61. 17 This is not the view of a neo-conservative, but rather that of a democratic socialist. See A.D. Lindsay, The Modern Democratic State, I (London: Oxford University Press, 1943), 250. See also ch. 8 above, for earlier ref-

249 Notes to pages 196—8 erences to the problem of overload. Communitarian theorists, especially in North America, seem inclined to discount the effect of overload on the growth of governmental bureaucracies, provided it holds out hopes of promoting civic solidarity or, at least, of averting its further deterioration. Well-intentioned though it may be, this kind of thinking suggests a readiness to take on board a good deal within the "communal unity in political culture" that is objected to within the "coercive state" of liberal democracy. Yet, the former, apart from excessive red tape, might bring on conforming pressures, if not outright ostracism, regarding those who happen to be at variance with the majority, despite the highly moralizing trappings of communitarian terminology. After all, army life, glorified though it often is, is decidedly communal, notably for the "private" - one of the mosts incongruous words that military language has devised -, but is army life therefore more desirable or morally superior? For an interesting and cogent response to communitarian conceptions of democratic citizenship, see Richard S. Ruderman, "Democracy and the Problem of Statesmanship," Review of Politics, 59 (1997), 759-87. That faith in the moral powers of "strong democracy" may be less than well-founded has been borne out time and again, but the classical moment of truth remains the Dreyfus affair at the end of the nineteenth century. Though France was a democracy, not more than one percent of France's total population managed to resist the mass-hysteria of anti-semitism. It clearly took much courage on the part of the few to refuse to join the chorus of hatred of the many. 18 A recent example of such immoderate hikes in personal incomes is the steep pay rise that has been awarded to the directors of a new bank in England that previously was a building society (Woolwich). One director is reported to have received a 153% pay increase, another to have doubled his remuneration to £335,000, and the chief executive officer to have increased his salary to £431,000. My concern is the lack of institutional norms to control such practices and unmask the phoney justifications that frequently are offered in their support. 19 Economic power can dwarf political power; owners of steel works, coalmines or autoplants, for example, who provide most of the employment in a town, have more effective power over its inhabitants and their lives than the town's elected council. Laissez faire liberalism must therefore be viewed as a failed candidate for a democracy that is not merely political. 20 Rawls, "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," 772-3. This is closely similar to what Rousseau said about the danger of wealth manipulating people into voting against their own judgement and undermining the integrity of the law and the constitution. Hence, "no citizen shall be rich enough to be able to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself." (Social Contract, Bk. II, ch. 11.)

250

Notes to pages 198—205

21 This may be so because, as Habermas observes, "we have lost our confidence that condidons can be changed by revolution." ("Popular Sovereignty as Procedure," in Bohman and Rehg, eds., Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 39. 22 For it is highly doubtful whether there could be any reordering without some conception of order itself. While, as we noted earlier (ch. 4), an order carries with it no ideal of a good society, it provides the minimal requirement of any society, by setting out its norms of reciprocity. And limits, rather than entrenching the status quo, may actually help to invigorate these norms. Even revolutions, as Marx duly noted (in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte}, occur within contextual orders, and whatever new order they generate is almost never entirely new since, to be at all viable, it too calls for boundaries that delimit its forms and structures. CHAPTER

ELEVEN

1 Regarding this indeterminacy, see, for example, Alan Hamlin and Philip Pettit, eds., The Good Polity: Normative Analysis of the State (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 240-1. 2 Since I view standards as entailing in themselves no motivational rationality or "ideals," as Rawls is suggesting, I am at variance with him, in arguing that common standards are conceptually distinct from common ideals or any consensus or substantively shared ends, whether or not citizens are "free and equal" for, even if they are, they still need not share any "public reason." Cf. "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," University of Chicago Law Review (64) 1997, 776, 801, and 771. See also above ch. 10, note 7. 3 This may not be acceptable to theorists of contextualism who negate such migration of ideas; moreover, there is also much controversy about Cicero's quality of thinking, as distinct from his generally acclaimed oratory. For a succinct and lucid discussion of contextualism and the "Cambridge School," see John Hallowell andjene Porter, Political Philosophy: The Search for Humanity and Order (Scarborough, Ontario: Prentice Hall, 1997), xiii. I am also much indebted to Professor Walter Nicgorski, University of Notre Dame, for giving me the benefit of his scholarship on Cicero. 4 Jiirgen Habermas, "Popular Sovereignty as Procedure," in J. Bohman and W. Rehg, eds., Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 395 Rousseau speaks of autonomy as moral freedom in the Social Contract, Bk. I, ch. 8. The term "self-foundation" is from the historian Hans Blumenberg, referred to in ch. 3 above, note 30.

25! Notes to pages 206—13 6 Alan Ryan's essay, referred to above in ch. i, note 4, distinguishes two principal sets of validating criteria at work in the past century and a half of democratic theory. One set depicts man as a consumer whose behaviour is to be understood in contractual and bargaining terms, while the other set depicts him as an agent, whose need is to make the world conform to plans he shares as a member of a community. In Martin Fleisher, ed., Machiavelli and the Nature of Political Thought (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 112. 7 For a wide-ranging, yet detailed, examination of political language, see Richard J. Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976); see also Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), esp. ch. i. 8 By "democratization" I mean here the deepening of existing democracies, and not the (more dramatic) transformation of non-democratic regimes into democratic ones. Yet, even thus narrowed down, it is as complicated a notion as democracy itself. For the most part, it means now the extension of democracy to non-governmental spheres, arguments in support of which formed the subject of ch. 8 above. However, because mainstream democracies typically operate on a party basis, future democratization may well involve significant changes in party structures, since much has altered in terms of socio-economic stratification. Whereas existing party differentiation had much to do with (doctrinally developed) economic class positioning and more clearly separable interest groupings on these lines, new parties may form around issues which have little relevance to the cleavages that first gave rise to political parties. This would arguably enhance the public recognition of previously ignored or marginalized concerns, thereby extending political debate, and cast doubt on measuring "stable democracy" solely by the number of telephones, refrigerators, computers, or automobiles. 9 For legal arguments see, for instance, Michael Mandel, The Charter of Rights and the Legislation of Politics in Canada (Toronto: Wall and Thompson, 1989), 35-61. 10 Habermas, "Popular Sovereignty as Procedure," 40. Regarding Rawls's "public reason," I have tried to make clear that the impersonality of political rationality implies no agreement on any substantive issue or the rendering of proof of the sincerity of motives. i l l am alluding here to sporadic bombing crusades from Vietnam to Yugoslavia, opstensibly in the service of "democracy." Understandably, there is an increasing number of people who share the uncertainty about politics being the appropriate vehicle for the actualization of visions as moral ends, if such ends are to remain intrinsically moral. My overall argument, despite its doubts about the moral continuity of ends and means in politics, nonetheless supports the view that, outside of a

252

Notes to page 213

context of recognized standards of human mutuality, "reciprocity" is bereft of meaning. So viewed, "democracy" ought to comprise normative principles that act as general guidelines of reciprocity and as reminders that procedural means in politics are never "just means" in some valueneutral sense.

Index

accountability. See political accountability agency values, 4; of democracy, 23-4, 98, 210; of joint agency, 126-7; supra-democratic, 187-8 Arendt, Hannah, on limiting politics, 106-7; on lying in politics, 124-5; on representative thinking, 105 Aristotle, 23; on end of polis, 155; on political discourse, 120; on representative democracy, 8-9 Arrow, Kenneth, on market rationality, 116 associationalism, 165-6 autonomy, 6, 62; concepts of, 43-4; ethical and political, 12-13, 57-8, 204-5; and paternalism, 52-4; and political accountability, 50-1 balancing in politics, x, 96-7; and value tradeoffs, 24-5, 210

Barber, Benjamin, 104; on representative democracy, 167 Barker, Rodney, on political legitimacy, 29-30 Barry, Brian, on majorities, 193 Beetham, David, 29; on congruence, 33-4; on replacing liberal democracy, 178-9; on Weber's theory of legitimacy, 3!-3 Bentham, Jeremy, on governmental accounting, 9 Berlin, Sir Isaiah, on autonomy, 171; on political pluralism, 85 Burnheim, John, 164; on demarchy, 165-6 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 63; on decorum, 64-5, 203 citizenship, 64; and fellowship, 64, 203-4; mediated vs unmediated association, 64, 68 civic decorum, 13-14; as civic ethics, 62-4, 203

civic inclusiveness, 112-14; and civic reciprocity, 197-8, 210 civic vigilance, 24, 181, 183; demands on citizens of, 194-5 Cole, George Douglas Howard, 147; on pluralism, 151-2, 163 communal oneness, xii; and governmental conditional! ty, 182-3; and political duality, 23-4 communitarianism, 10; and liberalism, 45—7; 176-8; and political legitimacy, 172-4, 182; and public objects, 206-7 consensus, xiii; moral and political, 15, 85-6; and standards, 191-2; and will, 168-9 consequentialism, 66-7, 127-8 Dahl, Robert, 11; on participation, 168; on polyarchy, 109, 154; on "public business," 163

254 Index democracy, xi—xii; competition and, 108-9, 111-12; conflicting traditions of, xii; definitional variants, 10-11; and deliberative democracy, 19-20, 156-8, 194-5; direct, 9, 159-60, 167-8, 183; electoral and procedural, ix, 11-12, 33-4, 37-8, 75-6, 195; limits to, x, 5, 24, 187-9, 198; and majoritarianism, x, 170-1, 187, 193, 210-11; participatory, 11, 17-18,36,39-40, 139-40, 159; political and social, x, 198, 211-12 democratization, 11, 18, 251, n.8; levels of, 154-5; limits of, 209-10 Dryzek.John, on "democratic rationality," 157

Elster.Jon, on Habermas's discursive theory, 119-20; and rationality, 122-3 Fishkin, James, on direction participation, 167-8; on popular will, 170 Frazer, Elizabeth, on feminism, 179; on participation, 243, n.23 Green, Thomas Hill, on common good, 150 Habermas.Jurgen, 102; on autonomy, 187-8; on communicative action, 120-1, 191; on market society, 103 Hallowell, John, on discursive democracy, 193 Hayek, Friedrich, on market relations, 100

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, on "civil society," 100 Heidegger, Martin, on Mitsein, 125 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 43; on embeddedness, 172; on pluralism, 109 Hirst, Paul, 105; on associationalism, 165-6; on democratization, 143; on "social actors," 105 Hobbes, Thomas, x, 63, 89; on two faces of freedom, 118 Holden, Barry, 167; on inner constraints of democracy, 171-2 Hume, David, 81; on "covering principles," 82-3 Kant, Immanuel, 50; on civic constraints, 53-4; on forms of thinking, 125; on self-determination, 43; on theory and practice, 22 Lacey, Nicola, on feminism, 179; on participation, 243, n.23 Laski, Harold, on demystifying the state, 145, 163 Leslett, Peter, on face to face democracy, 167-8 Lasswell, Harold, on government as "profiteering," 116 legitimacy, 3; levels of, 28-9; and limits, 186-7, 197-8; procedural, 27, 80; and substantive legitimacy, 28 legitimation, of democracy, 29-30, 33-4, 42, 162-3; of civic claims, x, 12, 20-1, 199-200; and justification, 5-6, 207-8; justificatory and organizational criteria of in democracies, 187-8, 193. See also electoral

and procedural democracy. liberal democracy, 3-4; and communitarian democracy, 10, 12-13; and distance, 13, 175, 208; and nationalist democracy, 43, 46-8; and openness, 136-7. See also communitarianism. Lindsay, A.D., on overload, 144 Locke, John, xii, 63; on anti-paternalism, 53-4; on minimal state, 149 Lukes, Steven, on rational constraints, 121-2 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 46; on the autonomy of politics, 62-3 Maclntyre, Alasdair, on communitarianism, 173-4 McLean, Iain, on liberty vs democracy, 167 Macpherson, C.B., 150, 163; on demands on people, 166-7 majoritarianism, see democracy Manin, Bernard, on deliberative democracy, 156—7; on double dimension of deliberation, 170-1 market socialism, 15-16, 100-2 market values, and democracy, 18-19, 109-10 Marx, Karl, 172; on communal man, 173 Mill, James, on civic vigilance, 80 Mill, John Stuart, 10; on autonomy, 52-3; on political rights, 66 Miller, David, on community, 150; on market socialism, 101-2; on participation, 158-9

255

Index

nationalism, 43; and patriotism, 49-50 norms, 68-g; autonomous, 77-8; of democracy, 70-1; as instrumental ethic, 78-9; and moral principles, 71-3, 81; procedural and substantive, 69-70, 73-4; of reciprocity, 74-5 Nove, Alec, on "functional analogism" between economics and politics, 107 overload, 19, 143-4; anc^ segmental pressures, 196-7 Parekh, Bikhu, 174; on liberal and communitarian democracy, 175-6 participation, instrumental and intrinsic, 139-40, 161; and limits, 141, 184; political and segmental, 40-1, 145-6, 154-5; and transferability, 149-50; and vigilance, 143, 185. See also participatory democracy and political accountability. Pateman, Carole, 144; on liberal democracy, 163; on participation, 147-8 performative principles, 14-15, 17, 81; and core doctrines, 87-9, 201-2; and political contestation, 14; and political differentiation, 85-6; and ranking, 84 Phillips, Ann, 114; on liberal-communitarian debate, 179-80 Plamenatz, John, on participation, 143; on pluralism, 95 Plato, 23; on popular choice, 52 pluralism, 14-15; and

monistic beliefs, 89-90; positional, 86, 120, 191; and socialism, 90-2; and solidarity, 95-6 political accountability, ix, 6-7; and contexts, 75-6, 131-2; and democracy, 8-9; and distance, 175; and mendacity, 124-5; and participation, 17-18, 141-3, 205-6; and predecision, 7-8; and rationality, 65, 120, 123-4; and religion, 34-5 political commitment, 120, 132-3, 180 political contestation, 14; and philosophical disputes, 112, 203; and economic competition, 111; and performative principles, 95 political feminist theory, xi, 21; variants of, 179-80 political forum, and economic market, iii, 15-16, 97; analogical thinking, 99-100, 116-17; extension of norms, 198, 211-12 political ideas, 3-4; "refraction" of, 4, 83-4, 86-7; self-sustaining status of, 4, 88. See also political morality. political mediation, 145-6; "coordination vacuum," 160; negation of, 149, 152-3; through standards, 191-2, 203 political metaphors, 21; and "community," 182, 207; and "self-legislation," 57 political morality, 15-16, 21, 41-2, 65-7, 76, 128-9 political rationality, 82; instrumental and substantive, 118; modal,

16-17, 19, 120; and positional political rationality, 190-1, 201-2; and prudential rationality, 64-5; and "public reason," 137, 212; and requirements of, 118-9 positional tightness, 86-7, 188-9; conditionality of, 182-3, !85-6, 209; and universal lightness, 20, 200 power, accountability as the decorum of, ix, 212; and political democracy, x, 180-1 procedural tightness, 11-12,41-2,75, 78-9 prudential principles, 12, 66-7; and democratic lightness, 41-2, 201-3 public objects, and common purposes, 20, 155, 178, 206-7, 212 public reason, 19; as distinct from public standards, 89-90; and political rationality, 137, 212; as shared consciousness, 113 ranking, 22, 24-5, 161, 198; and meaning, 201 Rawls,John, 4, 27; on comprehensive doctrines, 80, 113, 171; on the curse of money, 198 reciprocity, xi, 13-14, 67-8, 78, 209; mediated and unmediated, 203-4; standards of, 14, 74, 80, 190-1 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 5; on accountability, 143-4; on autonomy, 43-4, 50, 52-3, 56; on consent, 27; on the General Will, 73, 121; on limits, 184; on participation, 142, 148

2.56 Index Sandel, Michael, on communitarianism, 173-4 Schumpeter, Joseph, on credal and political consensus, 85; on markets, 108-9 segmentalism, xii, 18, 104; and citizenship, 112-14, 148-9, 174; and depoliticization, 145-6, 154-5; and functionalization, 152-3; and political fragmentation, 196-7; and political participation, 139, 144-6, 151-2 self-authentication, 4; and corporate integrity, 204; of democracy, 11-12, 34-5; as self-imposed governmental commitment, 4, 59 self-government, 9; and democracy, 12-13; economic and social meaning^ 93. 99- 104> 113> 145-6; as national selfdetermination, 43, 45-7; and paternalism, 52-4; and "will," 169-70

Selucky, Radoslav, 100; on market socialism, 102 Smith, Adam, on market relations, 100 standards, 4, 195; and consensus, 191—2, 202-3; and continuity, 28; of impersonality, 123-4, 19°~1! of political morality, 41-2, 64-5; of reciprocal civility, 69, 78-9, 89; as style of politics, 14 Taylor, Charles, on communitarianism, 173-4 Thomasius, Christian, 14; on civic decorum as public taste, 66; on civility, 67-8; on mediated and unmediated association, 64, 203; on reciprocity as rightful politics, 65 Tocqueville, Alexis, 125; on compromise, 85; on paternalism, 54, 87; on philosophical and political principles, 82-3

Trollope, Anthony, on autonomy of parliamentary representatives, 59-60, 77 Vico, Giambattista, on human self-understanding, 67 Viroli, Maurizio, on republican patriotism, 49-50 Walzer, Michael, on communitarianism, 174 Weale, Albert, on limiting majoritarian democracy, 283-4 Webb, Beatrice and Sydney, on political participation, 41 Weber, Max, on governmental self-authentication, 11-12, 36-8, 195; on procedural democracy, 39-40, 76, 78, 204 Wolfe, Alan, on liberal democracy, 283-4 Young, Iris Marion, on segmentalism, 154