Democratic Society and Human Needs 9780773560161

Citation preview

D E M O C R AT I C S O C I E T Y A N D H U M A N N E E D S

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 Self-Recognition in Eighteenth-Century 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, c.1300–c.1650 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 22 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 Enlightenment and Conservatism 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 Böhme 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 SpanishAmerican Fiction Eoin S. Thomson 31 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 Marie-Dominique Chenu Christophe F. Potworowski 34 Democratic Legitimacy Plural Values and Political Power F.M. Barnard 35 Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History F.M. Barnard 36 Labeling People French Scholars on Society, Race, and Empire, 1815–1848 Martin S. Staum

37 The Subaltern Appeal to Experience Self-Identity, Late Modernity, and the Politics of Immediacy Craig Ireland 38 The Invention of Journalism Ethics The Path to Objectivity and Beyond Stephen J.A. Ward 39 The Recovery of Wonder The New Freedom and the Asceticism of Power Kenneth L. Schmitz

40 Reason and Self-Enactment in History and Politics Themes and Voices of Modernity F.M. Barnard 41 The More Moderate Side of Joseph de Maistre Views on Political Liberty and Political Economy Cara Camcastle 42 Democratic Society and Human Needs Jeff Noonan

DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY AND HUMAN NEEDS Jeff Noonan

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston London Ithaca G

G

© McGill–Queen’s University Press 2006 isbn-13: 978-0-7735-3120-8 isbn-10: 0-7735-3120-3 Legal deposit fourth quarter 2006 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. A grant has also been received from the University of Windsor, Office of the Dean, Faculty of Arts and Sciences. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Noonan, Jeff Democratic society and human needs / Jeff Noonan. (McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of ideas ; 42) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-7735-3120-8

isbn-10: 0-7735-3120-3

1. Democracy – Moral and ethical aspects. 2. Democracy – Social aspects. 3. Capitalism – Political aspects. 4. Capitalism – Moral and ethical aspects. 5. Socialism. i. Title. ii. Series. jc423.n629 2006

321.8

c2006-903087-1

Typeset by Jay Tee Graphics Ltd. in New Baskerville 10/12

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Toward a Renewed Critique of Liberal Capitalism

xi

part one the emergence of liberal social morality 1 The Social Context of Early Liberal Theory

3

2 The Evolution of Rights-Based Social Morality: Hobbes to James Mill 10 3 Case Study in Anti-Democratic Liberalism: The Property Defence League 38 4 Liberal Rights-Based Social Morality and Its Social Presuppositions 44 part two the emergence of needs-based social morality 5 Capitalism as Moral Revolution

53

6 Gerrard Winstanley: Freedom and the Needs of Life

59

7 The Dialectic of Rights and Needs in the French Revolution 8 Needs and Social Struggles in England and France in the Nineteenth Century 91 9 Socialism and Democratic Need Satisfaction

111

69

viii

Contents

part three the evolution of classical liberal social morality 10 Social Rights

133

11 John Rawls: Self-Determination – Moral or Material? 12 Habermas’s One-Dimensional Democracy

141

159

13 Chantal Mouffe: The Self-Contradictions of “Political” Democracy 185 part four a project for social democratization 14 The Reaction Against Social Democratization

201

15 Needs-Based Social Morality, the Life Ground of Value, and the Good for Human Beings 214 16 Negotiated Coordination and the Project for a Democratic Society 227 Bibiliography Index

259

249

Acknowledgments

p l a t o i d e a l i z e d the philosopher as a solitary contemplator of the truth, but his own practice, and the practice of every philosopher who has succeeded him, puts paid to that myth. Philosophy presupposes content, and content presupposes the existence of a world outside the thinker and the thoughts of others about that world. Hence, while one must take responsibility for the contributions to philosophical inquiry and criticism that one tries to make, one also incurs innumerable debts in the struggle to make one’s case. These debts are in the first place general, to those who make intellectual work possible. I must, therefore, first thank my family and my partner, Josephine, without whose support I would not be where I am today. I must also thank the Office of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Science for its support. As well, my colleagues in the Philosophy Department at the University of Windsor have been endlessly supportive of my work over the past nine years. Particular debts are also incurred along the way of writing and refining a book. In this regard I would like to thank my research assistants over the past three years Heather Greig, Petr Carvalho, and Holly Sweet, who patiently tracked down articles and references. Particular thanks are also owed to my colleague Deborah Cook, whose expertise, particularly with regard to Habermas, was essential in developing my own thinking. Evan Simpson of Memorial University read aspects of the argument about needs in a different permutation, and his comments sharpened my own thinking. Discussions with Alison Assiter of the University of the West of England also opened my eyes to certain tensions in my understanding of needs. Victor Willis, of the Parkdale Area Recreation Centre, graciously gave his time to discuss his centre’s housing project. The anonymous readers chosen by McGill-Queen’s Press pro-

x

Acknowledgments

vided keen critical insights that have significantly improved the argument. The editorial team at McGill-Queen’s also deserves thanks for their professionalism and dedication to the project. Finally, an especial thanks to John McMurtry of the University of Guelph for nearly fifteen years of argument, insight, collaboration, and friendship in the struggle for truth and freedom.

INTRODUCTION

Toward a Renewed Critique of Liberal Capitalism rights, needs, and the contemporary challenge to democracy t w o p h o t o g r a p h s dramatically illustrate the argument that I will develop in this text. The first, which I saw while perusing a commuter newspaper in April 2001, pictured a young South African demonstrator holding a placard protesting the price of aids drugs in Africa. It read, “To hell with patent rights when it comes to our lives.”1 The second I saw in the Globe and Mail the Monday after the largest global anti-war rallies in history. It showed a pregnant protester in New York City with a sign that said simply, “Power is in Giving Life.”2 The first photograph highlights the contradiction between the rights of property and the needs of human beings. I will argue that this contradiction has been the main impediment to the development of democratic society over the last three hundred years. The second photograph highlights the deepest value that has oriented democratic struggles over that period, the value of life as essentially creative and self-determining. To argue that there is an essential contradiction between a certain conception of rights, on the one hand, and democracy, on the other, is a heterodox departure from a growing consensus in democratic theory. As I will demonstrate, there has been a convergence of agreement in democratic political philosophy around the foundational role rights have played, and continue to play, in the evolution of democracy. While I will not contest the obvious fact that groups struggling against authoritarian 1 Metro, (Toronto), 17 April 2001. 2 Globe and Mail, 17 February 2005.

xii

Introduction

political systems have appealed to the concept of right to legitimate their struggles, or the equally obvious fact that securing civil, political, and social rights has been an important element of democratization, I will nevertheless maintain that an understanding of democracy that focuses exclusively on the expansion of individual rights privileges a one-sided political conception of democracy to the detriment of an understanding of democracy’s deeper social-material grounds. Rights evolved, I will maintain, in a social context dominated by the development of the capitalist economy. The defining features of this development were the commodification of universally needed resources and labour, and an expansionary drive to instrumentalize all fields of human activity. The original function of liberal rights was to establish the economic sphere of society as “private,” free from interference from above (the state) or below (workers and other groups made dependent for their survival on the state of market forces). While the language of struggle adopted by those groups often employed the concept of right, the core demands were directed against the privatization and commodification of universal need-satisfying resources, against, that is, the privacy of the economic sphere legitimated by appeal to exclusionary individual property rights. Because democratic struggles contested (and continue to contest, as the South African demonstrator’s sign proves) the legitimacy of economic “freedom” from popular control, I will argue that democracy cannot be understood simply as a political system of informed and collective consent to the law, although that is one dimension of it. What concerns me in this text is not the deliberative processes that characterize political democracy at its best, a theme extensively discussed over the last twenty years of democratic theory. Instead, I want to focus on the much less examined fact that the struggle for democracy has historically implied an alternative conception of social organization, one rooted in collective control over need-satisfying resources. In light of the totalitarian crimes of Stalinism and the failure everywhere of command economies to match the productivity of capitalist systems, this historic linkage is mostly ignored. Nevertheless, I will argue that an explanation of democracy that focuses exclusively on the universalization and deepening of liberal rights is inadequate as an understanding of the social-material conditions of the value of positive human freedom. Since a democratic social order is assumed to best preserve and promote human freedom, any conception of democracy that cannot fully account for freedom’s essential conditions of existence is inadequate.

Introduction

xiii

My aim in this text is to explore this opposition between a political conception of democracy and democratic social structures and relations. My method will be to trace the origins of each to distinct social moralities and these distinct social moralities to distinct value systems. Societies are stable over the long term if and only if they can gain legitimacy in the minds of their citizens. They gain legitimacy through the value system that explains in normative terms why that particular form of social organization deserves the allegiance of its citizens. Here I draw upon the pioneering work of John McMurtry. He defines a value system as an “overall structure of thinking ... [that] connects together goods that are affirmed and bads that are repudiated as an integrated way of thinking and acting 3 in the world.” Historically, liberal-capitalist society has appealed to a value system that understands the primary good to be economic growth as measured by increased productivity and ever higher returns to investors. However, citizens of any society are first and foremost human beings and, I will argue, as such defined by a shared set of fundamental needs which, if they are not met, cause harm and ultimately death. Since life, and beyond that a free life, depend upon the quality of need satisfaction, every citizen of any society, qua human being, has, I will argue, an equal life interest in need satisfaction. These permanent and universal interests define what McMurtry has called the life ground of value.4 A lifegrounded value system understands the good in general terms as the growth of life’s vital capacities. From its perspective, economic systems must be judged, not in terms of productivity and profitability, but in terms of how well or poorly they enable citizens to realize their capabilities in an individually and socially meaningful way. In order to examine the significance of these opposed value systems for democratic development it is necessary to see what their implications are for the values that regulate the socio-economic system. My idea of social morality is designed to do just this. Value systems structure thinking about society as a whole; a social morality, as I define it, is an underlying structure of values whose function is to justify the socio-economic dynamics of a given society by determining the principles of legitimate and illegitimate modes of producing, distributing, and appropriating natural and social resources. While there are as many social moralities as there are systems of producing, distributing, and appropriating resour3 McMurtry, Unequal Freedoms: The Global Market as an Ethical System, 7. 4 Ibid., 23–5.

xiv

Introduction

ces, two are essential for my purposes because they have undergirded the manifold struggles out of which contemporary liberal-democratic capitalist society has been produced. On the one hand, corresponding to the value system of a liberal-capitalist society is what I call classical liberal rights-based social morality (or classical liberal social morality for short). As I will show in part 1, this social morality co-evolved with the capitalist economy and was initially used to justify the new socio- economic system, and in particular to legitimate the observable harms this system imposed on the English peasantry. Since, however, this new social morality legitimated these harms without ameliorating them, those who suffered harm were forced to struggle against it in order to secure the resources that they needed to survive. As I will show in part 2, these struggles legitimated themselves by appeal to the principle that need satisfaction constituted a more fundamental and thus more legitimate basis for claims on resources. The role that these social moralities have played in the development of contemporary social systems has thus far been little examined in social and political philosophy. To understand their historical function, the key terms “right” and “need” must be defined. For purposes of this argument “right” signifies, in the most general terms, a legally actionable claim that individuals hold against the state and society. In Ronald Dworkin’s useful metaphor, rights are “trumps” that individuals can play against policies, authoritarian or popular, that violate the autonomy of individuals.5 Needs, on the other hand, will be understood according to McMurtry’s criterion which holds that “‘n’ is a need if and only if, and to the extent that, deprivation of n always leads to a reduction of organic capacity.”6 Needs are understood in contrast to wants or desires. The essential difference between a need and a want, I will argue, is that deprivations of needs always lead to harm whereas deprivation of wants is only harmful in light of revisable self-interpretations. That is, while I may feel harmed if I am deprived, say, of a fifteenth pair of shoes, I can revise my selfunderstanding such that I come to realize that, in reality, my health, happiness, and freedom in no way depend on accumulating more pairs of shoes. I cannot so revise my self-understanding of my need for a pair of boots in winter. If I venture into the snow without a decent pair of boots I will get frostbite, and no revision of my self-understanding can change that fact about my body. 5 Dworkin, “Foundations of Liberal Equality,” 196. 6 McMurtry, Unequal Freedoms, 164.

Introduction

xv

Failure to understand this difference between wants and needs has had powerful and deleterious effects in the history of liberal-democratic society. In large part the right to private property has protected accumulations of surplus wealth that entail deprivation for other human beings. In order to fully understand the normative significance of the contrasting social moralities it is thus necessary to study the actual role rights and needs have played and continue to play in the organization of human social life. When set in that living context and considered historically, it will become clear that the extent to which rights have become vital elements of democracy is due to the power exerted against an originally anti-democratic but rights-based liberal society by struggles grounded in a needs-based social morality. In its historical origins within classic liberal philosophy, rights-based social morality was consciously employed to justify the exclusion of the peasantry from lands formerly used in common, the consequent commodification of basic need-satisfying resources and human labour, and ultimately the dependence of the majority of people on economic dynamics that subordinated need satisfaction to profitable system expansion. To simplify, the value of money overrode the value of life. The productivity of the land was not measured by how well it fed the population but by how profitable it was economically. In response, newly dependent groups resisted the life-destructive implications of this new dependence by contesting the legitimacy of rights to private property as well as the social presuppositions that framed their development. Instead, they affirmed the free development of human creative capabilities as the only intrinsic value and worked toward socio-economic forms in which need satisfaction, the social-material condition of capacity development, would be the principle of social organization. The development of actual democratic systems is, I will argue, the outcome of struggles of groups fighting, not always consciously, according to progressively more complex versions of needs-based social morality against the life-destructive effects initially defended by liberal social morality. The radical implications of these struggles, however, have been attenuated by changes they have provoked in rights-based social morality. The effect of needs-grounded democratic action has not been the creation of a fully democratic society of collectively self-determining free individuals, but rather the evolution of the rights ground into a more comprehensive political doctrine that legitimates the political forms of democracy that exist. Rights are no longer interpreted on the model of classic liberal individual rights to life, liberty, and property,

xvi

Introduction

but rather as comprehensive protections for individual persons from the abuse of state power, from the repressive effects of tradition, and from the inegalitarian effects of the capitalist market economy. This development is to be celebrated. While my argument is critical of certain implications of the liberal idea of rights, it does not at all maintain that these rights ought to be given up. On the contrary, they ought to be used as a platform for the further democratization of socio-economic relations. The ultimate horizon of social democratization is a world in which particular social interests are reconciled with one another such that private rights held against other interests would not be necessary. That does not mean, however, that rights are not currently essential to existing democratic systems. I will argue, therefore, that the real benefits of a comprehensive schedule of rights notwithstanding, democracy remains unduly limited today because the social foundations upon which it is grounded are still characterized by a form of separation of political and economic power necessary to the operation of capitalist market forces. Even evolved rightsbased social morality does not claim the right to impose life-grounded values on the capitalist economy – internal democratization – but instead limits itself to the important, to be sure, but democratically deficient strategy of external regulation of those forces. It is deficient not just because it has never proven able to adequately redress gross inequalities, but more deeply because it does not address the problem of the instrumentalization of human life in ever growing domains of activity by an ever more invasive and global capitalist economy. This instrumentalization of life is now defended by appeal to a neo-liberal interpretation of rights-based social morality in which multinational corporations rather than isolated individuals have become the key rights holders. It is not, however, neo-liberal system defenders who concern me here, but rather system critics who argue from an evolved understanding of rights-based social morality. It is my contention that, because these critics fail to understand the development of democracy from the perspective of needs-based social morality, they fail to understand the depth of the contradiction between global capitalism and democracy. I do not thereby imply that rights are irrelevant to democracy, nothing but bourgeois platitudes whose sole purpose is to mask the social contradictions of capitalism. Rather, my point is that there is nothing intrinsically democratic about them and they are not the final form of human freedom. Rights have become crucial elements of democratic politics, but if democratic theory does not look more deeply into the way in which struggles that pro-

Introduction

xvii

voked this democratization were anchored in a needs-based social morality, then the unwitting effect of rights-based political conceptions of democracy is to preserve the undemocratic social conditions that determine ever more aspects of human life. My argument is thus at odds with contemporary democratic theory. As my examples of the latter I have chosen the egalitarian liberal theory of John Rawls, the discourse-theoretic reconstruction of liberal democracy of Jurgen Habermas, and the postmodern radical democracy of Chantal Mouffe. I have chosen these theorists for three reasons. First, singularly, each is the best proponent of the version of democratic theory being defended. Second, taken together, they articulate a comprehensive picture of the range of democratic theory grounded in evolved rights-based social morality. Third, in comparison with each other, they reveal a convergence of formerly opposed political philosophies around the belief that democracy is a political theory and practice whose main justification is its capacity to comprehend and preserve the pluralism definitive of modern society. They believe, as does classic liberal social theory, that a pluralistic society cannot be grounded in any overarching concept of the good life. Democracy, they each believe, satisfies this condition by eschewing substantive conceptions of the good life and concentrating on the formal conditions for the legitimacy of law. Democracy is thus understood as a political system grounded in a comprehensive schedule of civil, political, and social rights, and fulfilled in a society of citizens who, through the exercise of their rights in the public sphere, together determine the legitimacy of the laws they will obey. I have no objections to the general political position that they espouse. However, by not directly confronting the independent role a needs-based social morality has played in the democratization of rights, and by ignoring the normative dimensions of the capitalist economy (its value system and social morality), their political conception of democracy fails to confront the major threat to democratic self-determination and pluralism. In any definition, the idea of democracy is linked to the idea of selfdetermination. Democracy, howsoever conceived, is grounded in the belief that human individuals cannot flourish unless social structures and systems are organized in such a way that the interest of individuals in their own self-development takes precedence over the mere perpetuation of systems of power. Human beings, however, cannot determine themselves as individuals unless legitimate modes of interaction with others are worked out. Since human beings must live together, if one person’s or group’s activity were to destroy the possibility of another

xviii

Introduction

individual or group acting as they determine best, society would be in a perpetual state of destructive conflict. Classical and contemporary liberal political philosophy has dealt brilliantly with this problem at the level of the principles that determine the legitimacy of law. In its classical form, however, it has been blind to the way in which emergent social dynamics not reducible in their effects to individual intentions can compromise or destroy the life prospects of others. The contemporary thinkers I will examine are, of course, much more attuned to the injustice of these unintended effects. What they do not argue, however, (and this is my essential criticism) is that because the normal operations of the capitalist market economy necessarily instrumantalize human life activity, as well as produce freedom-negating material inequalities, the social conditions which allow it to operate outside conscious democratic steering must be transformed. The dominant feature of the last thirty years is the intensification of the global spread of capitalist market forces.7 As David McNally notes, “an extensive international survey of more than one thousand changes made between 1991 and 1999 to law on foreign investment revealed that 94 per cent of those changes increased the rights and freedoms of foreign capitalists.”8 What have been the effects of these changes? National markets have become increasingly dependent on foreign investment, with the result that public policy has been re-engineered to give priority to global competitiveness over funding public institutions. Nevertheless, it is true that at the same time the percentage of the world’s population living in absolute poverty (less than one dollar a day) has fallen from 30 9 to 23 per cent. These gains, however, are not the automatic product of the globalization of capitalist markets. As the same report goes on to observe, “economic growth alone is not enough. Growth can be ruthless or it can be poverty reducing – depending on its pattern, on structural aspects of the economy, and on public policy.”10 This point reiterates the 7 The present work is not directly concerned with the process of globalization as such. The best comprehensive treatment of globalization can be found in Held, McGrew, Goldblatt, and Perraton, Global Transformations: Politics, Economics, and Culture. Hence no extensive history of it will be provided. For a succinct political history of globalization that lays bare the links between the expansion of global capitalism and the erosion of democracy see Petras and Veltmeyer, Globalization Unmasked. 8 McNally, Another World Is Possible, 40. 9 Human Development Report 2003, 5. 10 Ibid.

Introduction

xix

claim made in the 1999 report, which contended that “markets are neither the first nor the last word in human development. Many activities and goods that are critical for human development are produced outside the market, but these are being squeezed by the pressures of global competition.”11 In other words, what makes economic growth important is the contribution that it makes to expanding the range of life activity of the people it affects. Left to operate according to its own value system, capitalist economic growth is indifferent to the life conditions of people beyond supplying what is necessary to ensure that they can contribute to further economic expansion. Understood in the light of the principles that govern economic activity, the problem today can no longer be productively conceived in terms of a choice between laissez-faire and centralized authoritarian regimes calling themselves “socialist.” Both poles of the antithesis have been historically exposed as incapable of securing the social and material conditions of democracy and, by extension, collective and individual self-determination. The critique of capitalism that I develop here owes much to Marx but does not thereby endorse his nineteenthcentury strategy of proletarian revolution as a solution to twenty-first century problems. Not only did it not work, it also could not see the unique structure of problems faced by women and by excluded and marginalized minorities, and failed to differentiate the value of selfcreative labour into a more complex understanding of vital human capabilities.12 That said, I remain committed to the view that the primary impediments to the more robust and all-rounded growth of democratic societies and active human freedom are the dependence of capitalist market forces on a precise form of separation between political and economic power, and the value system and social morality that justify that separation. The question is, what strategy is best for system critics who no longer hope for the promised revolution? 11 Human Development Report 1999, 2. 12 Given the aims of this book I cannot enter into an adequate discussion of the independent contributions that feminism, anti-colonialist and anti-racist struggles, anti-homophobic struggles, and the struggles of the disabled have made to the growth of a needs-based social morality. Since my focus is the general problems posed by the formal separation of political and economic power I tend for the most part to concentrate on peasant and workers struggle in abstraction from the concrete differences that define both. Nevertheless, I believe that the conception of democratic society developed here can form the normative foundation for new modes of solidarity. I will return to this point in the final chapter. See also Noonan, “Protest, Socialism and Social Peace,” 1–13.

xx

Introduction

Two very general strategies may be distinguished. The first, represented by the democratic theorists I will examine, is to try to expand the powers of political democracy against the undemocratic effects of global capitalism without directly challenging either the way in which political and economic power are separated within it or its underlying value system and social morality. This is the strategy of expanding rights-based social morality. While this expansion has had profoundly positive effects – the welfare state, wider and deeper effective powers for citizens, and improvements in the quality of life – it does not and cannot resolve the underlying structural and normative problems of this world. In fact, as its defeats since the Reagan-Thatcher years prove, its gains are always tenuous because it leaves preponderant social power in the hands of an appropriating class that is committed with missionary zeal to system expansion and increased wealth for itself above all else. Again, I am not saying that regulation of the capitalist economy is not a democratic gain. I argue, rather, that rights, even rights held against the economic system, are insufficient conditions of democracy when they are understood as deriving from a political conception of citizenship that assumes that the economy must be steered by self-maximizing private interests. The alternative strategy that I will defend does not reject rights but seeks to build on them. More particularly, it involves defending an evolutionary process whereby the external regulation of market forces gradually gives way to their internal democratic governance. The strategy is evolutionary insofar as it seeks to build upon embryonic forms of democratic governance of economic forces that are already at work and can be traced to long-term historical tendencies. I will adopt Pat Devine’s model of negotiated coordination as a realistic alternative to the life-blind rule of market forces over the material conditions of human life and freedom. As I will show, Devine’s model can be defended against objections that there is simply no alternative to an economy steered by market forces. Nevertheless, the deeper argument that I will develop, that ultimately democracy rests upon certain universal human values, and in particular a universal conception of the human good, contains a utopian element. Reorienting struggles for more democratic societies requires that we posit a utopian ideal in order to open new vistas of political possibility. In this I follow Kant, who argued against those who would reject the practical efficacy of idealization that “what the highest degree may be at which mankind may have to come to a stand, and how great a gulf may still have to be left between the idea and its realization, are questions which no one can, or ought to, answer.

Introduction

xxi

For the issue depends on freedom, and it is in the power of freedom to pass beyond every specifiable limit.”13 Thus, democrats should think of a truly democratic society as one that has superseded zero-sum competition and the conflicts of social interests that make rights necessary and valuable today. Since no such society is possible in the short term, rights, both negative and positive, remain necessary. That they remain necessary does not mean, however, that democratic activists should struggle only for more rights. Instead, I will argue that they should struggle against private constellations of economic power and the political forces that protect them and for new modes of collective democratic control over natural and social productive resources. Such struggles are not all or nothing. They will be most successful, I contend, if they are multi-layered, gradual, aimed at altering the values that govern existing institutions, and oriented toward the creation of conditions that will allow a new society to evolve within and progressively emerge out of the present. The argument will be organized into four parts. In part 1 I will uncover the social presuppositions of liberal rights-based social morality through a critical exegesis of milestone texts in the development of the classical liberal conception of social organization. It is important to emphasize that I am interested in the general structure of liberal society and its orienting value system and social morality. I am concerned here with the original function of rights as justifications for a formal separation of political and economic power. I realize full well that this understanding of society is not identical with all permutations of liberalism, but only with its classical and neo-classical versions. I will contend that the original meaning of the concept “right,” both as it was articulated and in terms of its ideal content, was essentially undemocratic. Its social function was to protect the privatization of universally needed social and natural resources. Its moral function was to explain and justify the suffering caused by the private appropriation of universally needed resources. The anti-democratic implications of this evolving rights ground of social morality were openly acknowledged by the key figures in the development of classical liberalism. In part 2 I will examine the emergence of needs-based social morality. It evolved through a variety of struggles variously engendered by the commodification of life resources. These struggles not only bring to light an opposed social morality, they also indicate which human needs 13 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 312.

xxii

Introduction

must be satisfied by major social institutions if society as a whole is to be democratic. The history of social struggle from the seventeenth to the twentieth century reveals at least three classes of fundamental human needs. Linking these classes of need together is the democratic principle that self-determination presupposes social institutions governed in their function by a principled commitment to using public resources to satisfy the physical, socio-cultural and cognitive, and temporal needs of human beings. In part 3 I will turn my attention to the way in which classical liberal rights-based social morality and needs-based social morality combine in a contradictory manner in contemporary democratic theory. I will examine the three most influential forms of contemporary democratic theory today, the egalitarian liberalism of John Rawls, the discoursetheoretic reconstruction of liberal democracy of Jurgen Habermas, and the postmodern radical democracy of Chantal Mouffe. While each thinker is aware that self-determination has material conditions, each fails to challenge the social presuppositions of the liberal rights ground. As a result, they conceive of democracy first and foremost as a political system rather than a form of social organization. Because they do not challenge the separation of the political and economic systems definitive of liberal capitalism and fail to distinguish conceptually between needs-based and rights-based social morality, their understanding of democracy proves self-contradictory. In part 4 I will defend a conception of a fully democratic society from two key objections. I will first argue against the objection that social pluralism rules out the possibility of universal normative foundations for a democratic society such as are implied by needs-based social morality. I will respond that since the universal values implied by needs-based social morality can be defended as in everyone’s equal interests, they provide strong reasons in favour of the self-transformation of particular conceptions of the good that currently violate the interests of others. Second, I will argue, against the objection that an internally democratic economic is a practical impossibility, that Pat Devine’s model of negotiated coordination, because it works with rather than against the longterm trends of historical development, is a plausible alternative to today’s regulated capitalist societies. I will conclude by arguing that needsbased social morality and the universal conception of the human good that it implies form the best foundation for the new modes of social solidarity necessary for the institutional change required for deeper forms of social democratization.

part one The Emergence of Liberal Social Morality

This page intentionally left blank

1

The Social Context of Early Liberal Theory i n o r d e r t o u n d e r s t a n d classical liberal rights-based social morality, the historical context in which it developed must be examined. Its first systematic expression emerged in England during the period in which a market economy in land was developing. The development of a market economy in land could not proceed unless the structure of rural village life, in particular its reliance upon common use of certain lands, was radically transformed. The enclosure of lands formerly used in common created a social crisis for the peasantry, driving them into new relations of wage labour. It also created, however, a moral crisis, insofar as the radical transformation of medieval social relations, including traditional peasant privileges, required legitimation. Classical liberal social morality was, I contend, the legitimating principle of the new socio-economic form. While it is impossible to provide here a complete historical reconstruction of the development of agrarian capitalism in England, it is nevertheless important to highlight the changed relationship between human beings and the resources they depend upon entailed by its emergence. Of greatest importance for my purposes is the relationship between the development of a market economy and the separation of producers from need-governed access to life-sustaining resources. The specific difference of a capitalist market, from my perspective, is that it subordinates the production, distribution, and appropriation of needsatisfying resources to the demands of capital accumulation and profitable investment. Goods are not produced, distributed, and appropriated in the life interests of the people who need them, but only because the class that privately owns those resources can expect ever increasing capital returns for themselves. As Ellen Wood argues, “capitalism ...

4

Democratic Society

required not a simple extension or expansion of barter and trade, but a complete transformation in the most basic human relations and practices, a rupture in age-old patterns of human interaction with nature.”1 The most significant rupture was the enclosure of lands used in common. Fencing in lands that peasants had formerly used to satisfy their own needs was the most overt and life-destructive sign of the emergence of the rule of capital over human beings. Thus it is essential to focus on the practice and implications of the enclosure movement. Because the practice of enclosure violated traditional social arrangements and customs and its effects were so obviously life-destructive, a new social morality was required. It was the emergent capitalist landowning class that first formulated it. Before the doctrine can be understood, something must be said about the class that created it. In England, a marked contraction of agricultural production in the fourteenth century forced the landowning class to intensify its demands on the peasantry. Whereas in post-industrial revolution capitalism production surpluses are generally achieved through technological intensification of the production process, in feudalism the landed classes were limited, for the most part, to physical coercion when they needed more product from their peasants. However, the increase in absolute obligations owed the lord, combined with physical attacks backed by the force of law, pushed the English peasantry toward rebellion in the late fourteenth century.2 Though the risings were eventually suppressed, they succeeded in checking the landowner’s offensive and in reducing the amount of product the peasant owed the noble. Fortuitously, this reduction in feudal obligations coincided with a series of abundant harvests and a higher monetary value for agricultural products. Major landowners began to rent the land to an increasingly wealthy segment of former peasants who in turn began to farm the land using wage labour. According to McNally, this middle stratum between traditional landowner and peasant developed a unique social interest. Unlike the traditional nobility, they derived their wealth and power not from receiving payments in kind, but increasingly from selling the products of agrarian wage labour in an emerging market for

1 Wood, The Origins of Capitalism, 95. 2 Hampton, ed., A Radical Reader: The Struggle for Change in England 1381–1914, 49– 69.

The Social Context

5

their products. Agrarian capitalist society evolved through the consolidation of power of this emergent social interest.3 The new agrarian-capitalist owners were spurred by the ever-present threat of a poor harvest to accumulate resources on a small scale. They began a cycle of saving and investment in improvements that enhanced the productivity of their land and thus generated higher profits and the extension of their holdings. However, although these improvements were potentially in the life-grounded interests of all, private control over this wealth meant that its benefits would initially be limited to the new class. In other words, the cycle of improvement and reinvestment was not motivated by the goal of better feeding the population, but primarily by the goal of ever-expanding private monetary returns. The cycle generated the impetus for further enclosures. The growing wealth and power of the yeomanry set a social example for the traditional landowners. They now began to shake off the delirium of tradition and enter into the business of enclosures. Marx observed that “in insolent conflict with king and parliament, the great feudal lords created an immeasurably larger proletariat by the forcible clearing of the peasantry from the land, to which the latter had the same right as the feudal lord himself, and by the usurpation of the common lands. The rapid rise of Flemish wool manufacture, and the corresponding rise in the price of wool in England, gave direct impetus to these evictions.”4 Despite the fact that these enclosures were, strictly speaking, illegal and contrary to tradition, they continued. A new social constellation arranged itself on the land – the gentry – composed of enclosing feudal lords and the upper yeomanry. Their interests did not entirely coincide, but they were united in breaking the hold of feudal custom on accumulation and common use of the land. The gentry’s power depended upon increasingly radical breaks from tradition. The bonds uniting peasant and lord were broken, replaced by the abstract “freedom” of wage labour. The triad of owner-tenant farmer-wage labourer began to evolve. Those who could not find work were hounded, branded, enslaved, tortured, or judicially murdered according to the prescriptions of the Poor Laws.5 Marx described the 3 McNally, Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism, 5. See also the essays in Alston and Philpin, eds, The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe. 4 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 672. 5 Ibid., 689–93.

6

Democratic Society

history of the expropriation of the English peasantry and their conversion to wage labour as a history “written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.”6 By the time of the Stuart ascension (1603), the gentry had consolidated its effective hold on Parliament. Its power base, however, was the countryside, and this dispersal of power worried Charles I, who strove to re-consolidate royal authority. But his efforts at turning England into an absolute monarchy were disastrous. They coincided with a new political self-consciousness within the gentry. In 1628, the gentry-dominated House of Commons declared that “every free subject of this realm hath a fundamental property in his goods and a fundamental liberty in his person.”7 The qualifier “free” was essential. These rights did not extend to every member of the realm, but only to members with sufficient property. The classical liberal idea of right was thus born within an emergent class whose social and economic activity radically violated traditional practices, who had unleashed a new social and economic dynamic that had monstrous consequences for the displaced peasantry, and who needed to justify their break with tradition, the consequences that break had for now landless peasants, and their own new-found social and economic power. It is within this matrix that rights-based social morality was born. It centres on the idea that the human being is an independent individual whose interests are secured against the competing interests of others by certain natural rights, most importantly, property and life, and that no social or political power, from above or below, can legitimately transgress these natural rights. Political power is, from this perspective, rightly the preserve of those with social and economic power. As McNally argues, “this ‘bourgeois’ revolution was a revolution against centralized state power. This characterization of the English Civil War is perfectly explicable if we see it as an attempt by the agrarian capitalist landowners to preserve and protect their property rights, their new-found forms of surplus extraction ... and their right to participate in the ‘committee of landlords’ ruling England at the local level and increasingly shaping events at the national level.”8 The English Bill of Rights (1688), which consolidated these gains, articulates the political and civil rights the agrarian capitalist landlords claimed for themselves. Aside from affirming Protestant supremacy in the realm, 6 Ibid., p. 669. 7 Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution, 32. 8 McNally, Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism, 9.

The Social Context

7

the Bill subordinates royal power to Parliament, argues that election to Parliament “ought to be free” (i.e., determined by a majority of the small minority with the right to vote), and makes all royal appropriation through taxation subject to parliamentary approval. It also lists numerous civil rights with respect to trials and the courts.9 These rights were not held universally, but only by those with property sufficient to secure them an interest in controlling monarchical power. In other words, rights were not initially understood as a universal possession of persons as such, but of property owners, and their function was to legitimate the private appropriation of universally needed life resources, not to spread political and social power democratically throughout the state.10 The life-blind social interests served by the new rights-based social morality are clear from the changed principles governing economic legislation following the Glorious Revolution. Prior to 1688, enclosures were technically illegal. As the right to private property gradually transformed political power’s understanding of legitimate and illegitimate modes of production, distribution, and appropriation, enclosures were legalized. Barrington Moore, Jr. explains that “it was parliament that ultimately controlled the process of enclosure. Formally, the procedures by which a landlord put through an enclosure were public and democratic. Actually, the big property owners dominated the process from start to finish. Thus, the consent of three-quarters to four-fifths was required on the spot before parliament would approve an enclo11 sure. But consent of what? Property, not people.” By the eighteenth century, large landed property, now deriving most of its income from the exploitation of wage labour, had secured political control over England and began recoding its legislation to suit its changed social interests. By the nineteenth century, as Marx observes, “the very memory of the connexion between the agricultural labourer and the communal 12 property had ... vanished.” Social revolutions on this scale cannot succeed by physical violence alone. Success equally depends on reconstructing the political and moral understanding of social legitimacy. Philosophy mediated the

9 The Avalon Project of the Yale Law School, The English Bill of Rights, www.yale. edu/lawweb/avalon/englan.htm, 6 October 1999. 10 Hill, Century of Revolution, 127. 11 Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, 22. See also Moores, The Making of Bourgeois Europe, 155–69. 12 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 681.

8

Democratic Society

transition from feudalism to agrarian capitalism by developing a new ground of social morality centred on the idea of individual natural rights held against the state from above and the majority of people from below. The social presuppositions of this new ground of social morality were the development of economic dynamics that had to be free of central political control (monarchical or democratic) in order to work and a class composed of individuals who had both a collective interest in securing control over productive resources and a private interest in competing against other members of their class. As I will explain in more detail in the next section, the emergent idea of right became linked to the exercise of individual rationality in a way that obscures its social function. Appropriating landlords justified the exercise of their rights by reference to the “improvements” that they introduced into the realm. As Wood demonstrates, “improvement” was synonymous with “increases in productivity in the yield of the land.”13 Hence “improving” landlords could argue that they were the vanguard of a new social rationality freeing the economy from wastefulness. The reality beneath this new social rationality, however, was that the basic needs of the peasantry were not being met. Indeed, the very idea of human need as a legitimate basis for claims on resources was being obliterated. In the new social morality, gross failures to satisfy even people’s most rudimentary needs might stimulate wealthy individuals to acts of charity, but any social obligation to use natural and social wealth to satisfy them was repudiated. Productive wealth was the private property of those who controlled it; all others would have to work for wages and hope that those wages would be sufficient to purchase what they needed on the market. The landowning class argued that it had no binding social obligations to its fellow human beings to produce what everyone needed or to distribute resources to them in case they could not afford it. Individuals were reconceived as private persons naturally set against each other in a competitive struggle to accumulate as much as possible for themselves. To sum up, the new social morality developed amid radical changes in the relationship between human beings and the production, distribution, and appropriation of basic resources. Peasants were excluded from their traditional access to common lands and were ultimately transformed into wage labourers dependent on economic forces for which profitable return on investment, not direct need satisfaction, 13 Wood, The Origins of Capitalism, 106.

The Social Context

9

served as the governing value. Those new economic forces served the interests of an appropriating class that had a collective interest in securing private property and a private interest in competing against each other to maximize their accumulations. Rights-based social morality maintained that owners of private property were the rightful rulers of society. Thus it legitimated the restriction of political power to “public” affairs and constructed the economic system as a “private” concern, even though everyone depended upon it for the maintenance and development of their lives. I will now unfold a more complex analysis of this rights-based social morality by tracing its conceptual development in liberal philosophy and social theory from Hobbes to Benthamite utilitarianism.

2

The Evolution of Rights-Based Social Morality: Hobbes to James Mill t h e s o c i e t y from which liberal capitalism emerged was legitimated by appeal to an organicist principle of social hierarchy. Social order reflected the natural order which was in turn understood as the creation of God. If all persons accepted their natural place then society would function as a harmonious body. The political theory underlying this conception of naturally grounded social hierarchies has roots in Western philosophy stretching back at least to Plato. For Plato, society could only function properly if political power was steered by philosophical knowledge of an eternal Good. This knowledge was essential because, according to Plato, the Good is “the cause 1 of all that is right and beautiful.” The Good is supposed to function as a principle of social order. That is, the philosopher, by grasping “what is right and beautiful in everything” is able to organize social institutions such that they manifest, as far as possible on earth, the universal Good. In a well-governed society, everyone’s life would be steered by a commitment to their individual contribution to the overall goodness of the whole. One would derive satisfaction from one’s own work because of the contribution that it makes to the health of the whole upon which individual life depends. Social order depends upon everyone understanding and accepting their place within the whole. The social effect of conceiving the Good as a regulating principle of life is to subordinate the individual to the social whole. Historically, subordination was often achieved in quite repressive ways. As the social relations that typified medieval England began to break down under the pressure of new socio-economic forces so too did the organic con1 Plato, Republic, 517c.

Hobbes to James Mill

11

ception of society that justified them. In its place evolved a social theory that understood social relations as voluntary or contractual and the good simply as what every person happened to desire. Rather than conceive of the individual as naturally bound to some one limited sphere of activity, liberal social theory reinterpreted humans as naturally free and equal, entitled to pursue whatever course of life they chose for themselves. Because liberal social theory posited individuals as free and equal, and because it justified this freedom and equality by appeal to natural individual rights, it appears intrinsically linked to the development of democracy. On one level it is certainly true that democratic society is incompatible with ideologies that justify social position and life activity as a function of a natural order fixed by some transcendent power. While not denying that some organic conceptions of society have in fact been used to legitimate the worst sorts of oppression (slavery, the subjugation of women, etc.), I want to highlight in this section certain undemocratic implications of classical liberal rights-based social morality, including the often unseen problems attaching to its rejection of any and all substantive conceptions of the Good. I begin with the epochal contribution of Thomas Hobbes.

thomas hobbes Hobbes’s great work, Leviathan, was, on the surface, a defence of absolute sovereignty, written in a period when a breakdown in sovereignty had led to civil war in England. Yet its lasting significance is not as a convincing proof of the need for undivided political power but as a seminal text in the development of classical liberal social morality. Its key contributions in this regard are its critique of substantive conceptions of the Good, its conception of human beings as individual self-maximizers, its understanding of the origins of sovereignty in voluntary contract, and its implicit defence of the formal separation of economic activity from the control of political power. I will treat each theme in turn, beginning with Hobbes’s critique of substantive concepts of the Good. For Hobbes, the Good is not a universal principle of harmony, social order, and individual purpose. It has no intrinsic connection to need satisfaction or individual capacity realization. The good is just what every person calls good. He writes, “for whatsoever is the object of any man’s appetite that is it which he for his part calleth good ... For these words of good, evil, and contemptible are ever used in the relation to the person that useth them, there being nothing simply and absolutely

12

Democratic Society

so, nor any common rule of good and evil to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves.”2 The implications of this redefinition of the Good as desire satisfaction are contradictory. On the one hand, Hobbes’s theory cuts against ideas of social positions as naturally ordained and fixed. On the other hand, however, it disconnects individual activity from overall social purposes and overall social purposes from ensuring that every individual has a socially important role to fill. Humans are not by nature social but naturally set in competition with one another for whatever objects they individually desire. Hobbes conceives of human beings as essentially “wanting things.”3 Since the good is just what anyone happens to want, and humans are naturally driven to pursue their wants, the outcome of the inevitable struggles over objects of desire, no matter how destructive of life for some, cannot be judged morally wrong, at least so long as there is no legitimate political power ruling over individuals. The Good, for Hobbes, is anything that happens to be the object of desire. A “good life,” then, is a life in which a person succeeds in accumulating the desired objects, free as far as possible from external limitations. Not only are there no limits to the sorts of objects people can desire, there are no limits to how much one may legitimately acquire. As Hobbes argues, “in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire for power after power, that ceaseth only in death.”4 He means by “power” the capacity to secure and enjoy the objects of desire. Power is the condition of enjoying that which one has accumulated, and is thus the ultimate object of accumulation. The more power one has, the more one is able to enjoy the other objects one has accumulated. Power, accumulation, and enjoyment – without normative discrimination as to the quality or quantity of the object desired or deliberation as to whether one’s accumulations interfere with other people’s needs – are the hallmarks of Hobessian humanity. Human beings do not simply pursue power in an unthinking and irrational way. Hobbes uncouples reason from reflection as to the goodness of ends. Any goal is good as long as someone chooses to pursue it. 2 Hobbes, Leviathan, 28–9. 3 Bob Brecher provides a concise yet illuminating history and critique of the link between the definition of human being as a “wanting thing” and the uncritical relativism of liberal and postmodern philosophy. See Brecher, Getting What You Want? A Critique of Liberal Morality. 4 Hobbes, Leviathan, 58.

Hobbes to James Mill

13

Reason is just the ability to calculate the most efficient means to one’s ends. Reason does not oblige anyone to take other people’s needs into account. The accumulation of objects is not illegitimate just because it may go past the point where it impairs a neighbour’s ability to satisfy her basic needs. Indeed, Hobbes pays no mind to the distinction between needs and desires. From Hobbes’s perspective, all that matters is desire and desire is, as we have seen, infinite. Since, however, desire is infinite and the objects of desire are finite, conflict between human beings is necessary. In fact, Hobbes’s conception of right is at the root of the war of all against all. According to Hobbes, all human beings have a natural right to preserve themselves, a right that they hold against all other individuals.5 Hobbes thus understands by the concept of “natural right” an inalienable principle that justifies human beings in doing whatever they judge to be necessary to preserve themselves against the mortal threat he assumes other human beings pose. If, however, everyone acts on this right, its deep purpose – self-preservation – is undermined. War, not security, is the natural outcome of everyone’s acting on their right to preserve themselves. Hence reason teaches human beings that they must establish some framework principles that constrain self-interest for the sake of overall security. What is interesting from my perspective is not Hobbes’s well-known defence of absolute sovereignty but rather his theory about the relationship between absolute sovereignty and property. Keep in mind that Hobbes is writing in the midst of political struggles brought on by the social and economic changes discussed in the previous section. While Hobbes does not argue that political power should be the preserve of the propertied class, he is nevertheless writing in a context in which the political structure was under assault from a class whose power derived 6 “from private property and economic exploitation.” It was within this class that competition to accumulate was most acute. Viewed in that context, the natural propensity to struggle for power after power was not typical of humanity as such but of the contending classes in the struggle to secure control over natural and social wealth and the state. Prolonged warfare, however, threatened the conditions for maximum accumulation. Hence a new theory of state power was required. That theory was rooted in the growing belief that “self-interest and economic

5 Ibid., 79. 6 Wood and Wood, A Trumpet of Sedition, 103.

14

Democratic Society 7

freedom [were] the natural basis of human society.” It was Hobbes who first systematically articulated that position. The creation of the commonwealth through the voluntary consent of its future citizens does not change, but only domesticates, the natural struggle for power after power. Whereas in the state of nature direct physical subordination of others to one’s will is the norm, in the commonwealth the goal is to peacefully purchase the services of others. “The value of a man,” Hobbes writes, “is his price.”8 The more money one has, the more one is able to meet the price of others, the more one is able to harness their power to one’s own. As MacPherson argues, Hobbes’s understanding of power manifests “the essential characteristics of a competitive market.”9 The good commonwealth will harness the competitive energies of its citizens in productive ways. Gooch comments, “the Government would interfere but little in daily life. While possessing the right and the power to determine every detail, it would in practice permit whatever did not tend to disturb the peace.”10 Thus it is in Hobbes that the separation of private economic from public political power, central to classical liberal social morality, receives its first, albeit ambiguous, expression. Hobbes maintains that the sovereign may pass any law it pleases, but it should pass only such laws as are necessary to prevent warfare among the citizens. Good laws, he writes, are like hedgerows which guide the traveller safely to his destination.11 Good laws safeguard the property of citizens, thus ensuring the conditions for “fruitful labour.”12 Civil liberty consists essentially in the freedom to dispose of one’s property as one will within the limits of the law.13 One key sign of a well-governed commonwealth is thus economic prosperity. In Hobbes the social presuppositions of rights-based social morality are thus developed systematically for the first time. He defines human nature as naturally competitive, society as the outcome of voluntary agreement between people who require peace in order to safeguard their lives and property, and implies that political power should leave

7 MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, 17–68. 8 Hobbes, Leviathan, 67. 9 MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, 38. 10 Gooch, Political Thought in England, Bacon to Halifax, 32. 11 Hobbes, Leviathan, 219. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 136, 143.

Hobbes to James Mill

15

economic matters to rational agents pursuing their private interests. The legitimacy of society follows from every person’s natural right to self-preservation, a right which Hobbes ultimately interprets as the right of individuals to dispose of their property in the most profitable manner, without regard for the needs of others or for the collective interests of society. There is no collective interest of society but only the interests of each individual in the maximum possible accumulation of power. In Hobbes, however, safeguarding the right of citizens to dispose of their property as they themselves decide is only prudent counsel to the sovereign. It does not become an explicit limit on state power until the work of Locke.

john locke Hobbes, while not a self-consciously liberal thinker, nevertheless introduced concepts that would become pillars of the classical liberal understanding of social order, political legitimacy, and individual rights. He assumes that humans are naturally free and equal, that they are driven by an unceasing desire to accumulate as much power as possible, that they require some voluntary, agreed-upon framework of interaction if their competitive nature is not to undermine their security, and he provides prudent counsel to the state that if it wants the commonwealth to succeed, it best allow rational individuals to dispose as freely as possible over their property. What in Hobbes is prudent counsel becomes, in Locke, an explicitly developed distinction between the “private” economic sphere of social relations and the “public” political sphere. It is in Locke that liberal social theory attains unambiguous expression. On first glance, however, Locke’s work appears to be opposed to, rather than continuous with, that of Hobbes. Whereas Hobbes argues that the state must rigorously control all intellectual activity, Locke provides a stirring defence of religious toleration. His claim that “everyone is orthodox to himself” still resounds in contemporary defences of pluralism, defences which, as I will show in part 3, are of the essence of contemporary democratic theory.14 An even more striking apparent difference is their respective conceptions of the state of nature. Whereas Hobbes argued that people are naturally warlike, Locke maintains that human beings in the state of

14 Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, 23.

16

Democratic Society 15

nature are peaceable. He describes the pre-social state as harmonious because the selves who exist within it are content to appropriate from nature just so much as they need. That is, Locke’s initial characterization of the state of nature is life-grounded. Locke argues that human beings in the state of nature recognize that their lives depend upon need-governed appropriation of the natural wealth that God has created for our sustenance. While Locke believes that there are no necessary social bonds linking individuals to one another in the state of nature, he does recognize definite moral obligations linking individuals to others, obligations that follow from the universality and objectivity of those needs that connect humans to the natural world. He thus argues that the appropriation of resources from nature is limited by two natural laws, one which restricts the quantity taken from nature to what one can use for oneself, the other which asserts that the quality of resources left for others must be as good as that which the self has used.16 On first glance, then, Locke’s conception of the state of nature would seem to imply a fundamental criticism of the social conditions then evolving in England. However, at a deeper level, Locke’s and Hobbes’s conceptions of the natural state of human beings are not essentially opposed. In his introduction to the Second Treatise, MacPherson draws attention to the contrast between what Locke says about human nature in his political work and what he says about it in his Treatise on Human Nature. There, one finds a different account of the springs of human behaviour. Locke argues that “principles of action indeed there are lodged in men’s appetites, but these are so far from being innate moral principles that, if they were left to their full swing, they would carry men to the overturning of all morality. Moral laws are sent as a curb and a restraint on these exorbitant desires.”17 Human nature is thus not naturally peaceful, but peaceful only so long as these principles of motivation are kept in check. They can be kept in check only so long as there are natural limits on what one’s own labour can procure for oneself. As will become clear, once it becomes possible to accumulate goods without natural limit, the more aggressive and “Hobbesian” traits of human being take precedence. 15 See Gauthier, Moral Dealings, 22–44, for a close examination of the differences between Locke and Hobbes. As we will see, these differences are ultimately not as stark as Gauthier thinks. 16 Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 21. 17 Locke, A Treatise on Human Nature, 39. See MacPherson’s introduction to the Second Treatise for his interpretation.

Hobbes to James Mill

17

In the state of nature, accumulation is limited by need insofar as the only way to appropriate a resource is to “mix” one’s labour with it.18 The physical limitations of individual human labour power are sufficient to ensure that private appropriation of goods in an undeveloped state of nature will not exceed the limits established by natural law. It is only once appropriation is unhinged from direct physical mixing of labour with the appropriated good that human beings fall into conflict one with the other. Once it becomes possible to accumulate land through purchase rather than through one’s own direct labour, the right to private appropriation comes into conflict with the needs of others to satisfy their fundamental life requirements. Given the historical context, it is unlikely that Locke chose the word “enclosure” to describe the process 19 by which land was privately appropriated arbitrarily. As Wood and Wood maintain, Locke’s “praise for the removal of land from the common, and indeed for enclosure, had very powerful resonances in that time and place.”20 Nevertheless, the appropriation of land being used by others to satisfy their needs seems to flatly contradict the prescriptions of the laws of nature that Locke himself invokes. Locke’s attempt to resolve this apparent contradiction is one of the most significant steps in the historical development of the liberal rights ground of social morality. Locke’s wrestling with the moral implications of the enclosure movement is the first clear instance in classical liberal philosophy of the opposition between a rights-based and a needs-based social morality. It was obvious to a careful observer of social dynamics like Locke that there was at least an apparent contradiction between the unlimited exercise of private property rights and the satisfaction of the needs of those social orders against whom those property rights were exercised. If natural law limited private appropriation of natural resources both quantitatively and qualitatively, and if private property could only be obtained through the labour of individuals working for the sake of satisfying their own needs, how could landholdings that depended upon enclosure, and which could never be worked by a single individual, be justified? Locke answers that the use of money changes the way in which property can legitimately be acquired. Thus, it is essential to understand Locke’s conception of money. 18 Locke, Second Treatise on Government, 19. 19 Ibid., 21–2. 20 Wood and Wood, A Trumpet of Sedition, 133.

18

Democratic Society

Again, it is crucial to keep in mind the historical context. By the time Locke wrote the Second Treatise, agrarian capitalist relations in England were well established.21 There was a market in land and the labour power that worked it. Monetized transactions were crucial to the functioning of this increasingly complex socio-economic system. Yeoman farmers exploited wage labour in order to both pay their rents and produce profits for themselves. Locke, however, does not trace the actual historical development of the use of money or admit that there is any difference between money as a simple means of exchange and money, in the form of profit, as the dominant end of social production. Without argument, Locke simply asserts historical fact – the existence of money – as the outcome of conscious political deliberation. That is, he takes the actual use of money as proof that people have “consented” to its use. Even supposing that the idea of consent is meaningful here, the inferences that Locke draws from it are problematic. Let us suppose that people’s use of money is a sign that they have consented to its use. It does not follow that consenting to the use of an instrument which makes exchanges easier entails consent to the social consequences of its becoming not a means of exchange, but the end (goal) of production. Yet that is in fact the conclusion that Locke draws. Since money does not spoil no matter how much of it an individual has, and since it is a legitimate means of exchange, it has become the equivalent, Locke believes, of labour as a means of acquiring private property.22 Locke, however, does not think that money is simply a means of exchange; it is also the end or goal of production. For Locke, it is not the workers who physically produce the goods that are productive, but the owner who employs their labour. As Wood and Wood comment, “Traditional ruling classes ... would never think of themselves as producers. The kind of appropriation that can be called ‘productive’ is distinctively capitalist. It implies that property is used actively ... for 23 investment and increasing profit.” Although the higher productivity of the land could be used to satisfy the needs of more people, that is not the aim of agrarian capitalist producers. Locke himself explicitly acknowledges this point: “An acre of land, that bears here twenty bushels of wheat, and another, in America, which, with the same husbandry, would do the like, are, without doubt, of the same natural intrinsic 21 See Wood, John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism. 22 Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 23. 23 Wood and Wood, A Trumpet of Sedition, 132.

Hobbes to James Mill

19

value: but yet the benefit mankind receives from the one in one year, is worth £5, and from the other ... not a penny, if all the profit an Indian received from it be valued.”24 This argument is a perfect illustration of the conflation of increased money value with increased life value. Locke recognizes that the life value of the land is its “natural intrinsic value,” i.e., how much food it can grow. Valued from a life-grounded perspective, the value of the two plots of land is equal if they are equally arable. However, Locke does not recognize this life value as the “benefit to mankind” the land confers. Instead, since the English land produces profit for the landowner but for the Indian only food and no profit, only the English land benefits humanity. But how is profit for a private individual a universal benefit for humanity? The only universal benefit that humanity can receive from the arable land is food, and the more and better the food, the more the benefit. This point is true even if one agrees with Locke that capitalist farming methods increased the yield of foodstuffs. The value of the land to human beings understood as needy is still the food it produces, not the profit it creates for the individual landowner. Locke, however, unwittingly conflates the two very different measures of value. That basic conflation of value persists throughout classical liberal social theory and down to the present, as subsequent chapters will make clear. For the moment, it is essential to examine the political implications that Locke draws from his social philosophy and its rights-based social morality. The “chief end” of civil society, Locke famously argues, is the “protection of property.”25 Property, for Locke, includes life, liberty, and estate. “Man,” being born free, “hath by nature a power ... to preserve his property, that is, his life, liberty, and estate, against the injuries and attempts 26 of other men.” Political society comes into being when individuals agree to transfer the power of punishing transgressions to an agreed-upon central power.27 While all people might have a right to life, only those with more than their life to lose have a legitimate right to participate in government. Were the propertyless to acquire political power they could use it (as the Levellers, for example, argued) to redistribute property, and thus contradict, in Locke’s view, the very purpose of political organization. The materially propertyless are not “freemen” and therefore not 24 25 26 27

Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 26. Ibid., 45–6. Ibid., 46. Ibid.

20

Democratic Society

counted among the “majority” according to whose will political society is created and sustained.28 As in Hobbes, maintaining the peace is the essential function of government. Locke is explicit, however, that peace is an instrumental value. What is intrinsically important for Locke is the liberty of property owners to continue to increase their wealth, even at the expense of the life interests of the direct producers. Indeed, property holders retain a right of just rebellion if the civil authorities should interfere with their “private” economic activity.29 With Locke’s argument, classical liberal social theory reaches a milestone. In defending a right of rebellion against political power were it to decide to interfere with property, Locke clearly implies that a wellordered society must be distinguished by a formal separation of economic from political power. Whether from above or below, absolutist or democratic, political power has no right to interfere with the economic activity of the property-owning class. Locke can speak of “democracy” of course, insofar as it means “majority rule,” but his “majority” is a majority of property owners and, even then, his limits on the exercise of political power would still apply to their decisions. As I will argue in the remainder of this text, it is this formal separation of political and economic power, morally legitimated by appeal to rights-based social morality, even in its more evolved contemporary forms, that serves to limit the democratic efficacy of rights-based struggles for democratization. If popular power from below must limit its demands to regulating, but not fundamentally transforming, the social structure and social morality of liberal-democratic capitalist society, then it will always find itself checked in its democratic advance by the private accumulations of social and economic power shielded from transformation by property rights. Before the positive argument in support of that conclusion can be developed, however, it is essential to examine the idea of society as a spontaneously evolving order. This idea emerges from the classical liberal defence of the necessity of a formal separation of political and economic power. The next key step is taken by Hume.

david hume Hume’s social theory is not the most significant or discussed aspect of his philosophy, yet his contribution is important to the development of 28 Ibid., 53. 29 Ibid., 111.

Hobbes to James Mill

21

classical liberal social morality. His connection to its development is perhaps obscured by his critique of natural rights. Yet, just as Locke’s apparent differences from Hobbes concealed a deeper thematic relation, so too the apparent differences between Locke and Hume give way to a deeper unifying interest if one focuses on the general conception of social order that each is explicating. Viewed from that perspective, Hume does to Locke what Locke did Hobbes, namely, spell out the implications of a principle only implicit in Locke. As I argued in the previous section, Locke elaborated a rights-based defence of the formal separation of economic from political power. Hume begins to explicate the understanding of society as a spontaneous order which Locke’s principle implies. Hume does away with the fiction of an original social contract, adopting instead a proto-historical and pragmatic approach to the genesis of human society and the origins of rights. To fully grasp his social and ethical significance, however, it is necessary to take a brief detour through Hume’s understanding of the formation and function of moral concepts. Like Hobbes and Locke, Hume argues that universal concepts are the products of the human mind generalizing from experience. While Hume is often judged to be a skeptic, this term carries with it implications about the need to suspend judgment about matters of truth that Hume does not accept. Instead, Hume believes that judgment, the application of a universal concept to a particular experience, is a natural necessity. While he does not believe that human experience can establish whether there is a fixed and immutable causal order in nature, he does believe that the judgments that we do make are in general adequate to the purposes of human life. He argues that “Nature, by an absolute and incontrovertible necessity, has determined us to judge as well as to breathe and to feel; nor can anyone forebear viewing certain objects in a stronger and fuller light upon account of their customary connection, than we can hinder ourselves from thinking as long as we are awake, or seeing the surrounding bodies, when we turn our eyes towards them in broad sunshine.”30 The universal concepts which human minds produce are applied in judgment to the objects of experience because human life and activity require that those objects be classified and organized. The same holds true for universal moral concepts. They are not innate or inferred from a transcendent Good. They are names given to rules that serve some social function. If one wants to 30 Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, 183.

22

Democratic Society

know what “justice,” for example, means, one must ask, “what social or customary function does the concept of justice serve?” Moral concepts in general respond to the need for order in our relations with one another. Humans have a certain natural sympathy, within a restricted range, for their fellows. This sympathy, however, is not of sufficient force to restrain human avarice. As in Hobbes and Locke, so too in Hume, human beings are understood as infinite desiring machines who will destroy each other to get what they want unless some form of constraint keeps desire in check. As he argues, “this avidity alone of acquiring goods and possessions for ourselves or our nearest friends, is insatiable, perpetual, and universal, and directly destructive 31 of society.” Left to themselves, humans will degenerate into a Hobbesian war of all against all. Since such a war would be tantamount to selfdestruction, there is a need to establish peaceable relations between people. The function of justice is to establish the conditions for such relations. Justice is necessary in any society where relative scarcity prevails. If there were unlimited abundance (or absolute scarcity) justice would 32 serve no purpose. The infinite character of desire rules out the first possibility as utopian. If there are more goods, there will be a corresponding increase in desire, ruling out the hope that increases in productivity could sate humanity’s wants. Since desire for more is permanent, everyone’s goods are under permanent threat from the desires of others. Hence there arises the need for fixed rules of justice. The origin of justice is thus the threat posed to society by an unceasing desire for more. The customary form justice takes, once it is institutionalized, is the principle that private property is inviolable. Property separates mine from yours, and in so doing, secures what is mine from your desire to make it yours. The function of government is to uphold the principles of justice by threatening transgressors with punishment. While respect for antiquity and a sense of the general advantages brought by government also serve to legitimate it, property defence is its essential social function.33 Indeed, Hume argues that the concept justice has no meaning outside private property relations. Justice is defined by a set of rights whose 31 Ibid., 491–2. 32 See Hume, An Inquiry into the Principles of Morals, 21–6, where Hume considers different social models and their relation to justice. 33 Hume, “On the First Principles of Government,” 1.

Hobbes to James Mill

23

essential function is to protect property. As he contends, “after this convention concerning the abstinence from the property of others has been entered into, and everybody has acquired a stability in his possessions, there immediately arises the idea of justice and injustice, and also those of right, property, and obligation.”34 Hume does away with the idea of a natural right to property, anchoring the concept of right instead in the evolved forms of social relation characteristic of his own society. Rights are no more (and no less) than conventions which codeveloped with the institution of property, itself a social convention. The function of rights is to legitimate the social convention of private property. By freeing the concept of right from its metaphysical form of “natural” rights, Hume makes clear its essential social function. The essential social function of the concept of right, (that which makes it the basis of a social morality) is that it justifies private property. Private property, in turn, is not justified on the grounds of Locke’s quasi-theological understanding of property, but in terms of utility. Hume writes that “’tis obvious that those reasons are not derived from any utility or advantage either the particular person or the public may reap from the enjoyment of any particular good, beyond what would result from the possession of them by some other person ... The convention concerning the stability of possessions is entered into in order to cut off all occasion for discord and contention.”35 Thus Hume believes that private property, secured by a socially enforced right to it, best serves the purposes of social peace. It follows from this position, then, that any disturbance of the rights of private property is illegitimate, since it would by definition upset social peace. As in Locke, so too in Hume, a life-grounded valorization of social peace goes hand in hand with an affirmation of the inviolability of property rights. Like Locke, Hume believes that the greater productivity (social utility) entailed by secure property relations will be sufficient to maintain that peace. He goes further than Locke, however, in sketching the outlines of a theory of society as a spontaneous order that functions best when there is as little political interference as possible in the economic system Once property is secure, Hume believes that society unfolds itself harmoniously. Hume turns Locke’s separation of economic relations from political interference into a proto-theory of society as a spontane34 Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, 490–1. 35 Ibid., 502.

24

Democratic Society

ous order: “No one can doubt that the convention for the protection of property is, of all the circumstances, most necessary for the establishment of human society, and that after the agreement for the fixing and observing of this rule, there remains little or nothing to be done towards settling a perfect harmony and concord.”36 Here is the origin of the theory of society as a spontaneous order crucial to Adam Smith and to twentieth-century neo-liberals like Friedrich Hayek.37 The importance of this theory to the justification of market relations should not be underestimated. Hume’s position implies that, if society gets its property relations right, there is little the government need do to keep the peace. Society will, without interference from the state, produce and distribute its goods in a utility-maximizing way, and thus ensure its own happiness. He argues that “the greatness of a state, and the happiness of its subjects ... are commonly allowed to be inseparable with regard to commerce.”38 Commerce is, according to Hume, the province of private individuals. Governance, the overseeing and direction of public affairs, must, on this account, be kept out of what is, from the perspective of the value of democratic self-determination, the most public of all things – the production, distribution, and appropriation of life goods. Hume makes this very clear. The sine qua non of social harmony is security of private property, not as an individual right but as a social institution. The function of that institution is to ensure social peace, which in turn establishes the conditions for the “greatness” of the state. The implications of that social institution for those who are not owners of productive resources, however, go unexplained. They are presumably subsumed under the interest of property owners, left to their fate to satisfy their needs as best they can with whatever income they derive from their labour. Such a form of dependence, is, however, as I have remarked above, clearly incompatible with the conditions required for self-determination. This material impediment to self-determination is not evident to Locke or Hume because they do not conceive of the propertyless as full citizens of the state. Yet the deeper problem, to which I alluded in the 36 Ibid., 491. 37 See Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, 18–19, 21; Hayek, “Freedom, Reason, and Tradition,” Keeping the Tablets, 166; DiZerega, “Democracy as a Spontaneous Order” 206–37. 38 Hume, “On Commerce,” 2.

Hobbes to James Mill

25

previous section, is not the restricted application of the concept of right but rather the separation between political and economic power that its classical liberal form presupposes and in turn justifies. If a legitimate state is assumed to be one in which citizens consent to the laws that govern them, but those laws are restricted in their application to “public affairs,” i.e., affairs that do not relate to individuals as property owners, and other individuals are dependent on the economic forces controlled by the property-owning class, they cannot be free (self-determining) even if they gain a share of political power. I am not at all minimizing the importance of the universalization of rights in the history of democracy, but instead emphasizing certain undemocratic implications of classical liberal rights-based social morality. By impeding the collective determination of economic goals, this social morality in effect justifies the determination of the life horizons of the propertyless by reified economic forces and the class that benefits from their (democratically) ungoverned operation. The interests of that class and the implications of those forces are, as I have noted, opposed to the free self-determination of human beings where self-determination is understood comprehensively, as embracing both the political and material dimensions of human life. How and why that is becomes perfectly clear in the political economy of Hume’s great contemporary, Adam Smith.

adam smith It is in Adam Smith’s political economy that rights-based social morality is systematically linked to a social theory of the free market. Smith shares Hume’s concern for understanding the basic conditions of social peace but provides a more elaborate explanation of how society as a spontaneous order functions. The explanation centres on his theorization of the operations of market mechanisms. In what follows I will not be concerned with an assessment of Smith’s doctrine from the standpoint of political economy, but rather with its contributions to classical liberal social morality. Thus I will concentrate on how Smith’s conception of the market mechanism contradicts his life-grounded concern with sympathetic human interaction and optimal economic performance. As with the previous three thinkers, Smith’s affirmation of the inviolability of the right to private property ends up blinding him to its incompatibility with the human values that he affirms. Thus, it is essential to begin with a brief comment on Smith’s moral philosophy.

26

Democratic Society

While Smith’s political economy uncritically champions the free market, his moral philosophy is suspicious of the motivations of capitalist merchants.39 More generally, Smith argues that the grand source of the corruption of morals is the undue respect accorded the rich. He claims that “the disposition to admire, and to almost worship the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect, persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and maintain the distinctions of rank and the order of society, is at the same time, the greatest and the most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”40 The true beauty of a human being, Smith argues, lies in the capacity for beneficence.41 This capacity is rooted in our sympathetic nature, our capacity to step outside ourselves and feel what other human beings feel. However, this capacity cuts both ways. It enables human beings to be generous toward those who are suffering, but it is also the basis of the human desire to emulate the rich. While this desire is corrupting insofar as it tends to cause us to overlook the suffering of others in our midst, this corruption, Smith believes, is more than compensated for by the spur to industry that it provides. The paradoxical production of social good from individual self-interest is the core of Smith’s theory of the invisible hand. However, before that doctrine can be properly appreciated, the nature of a moral society must be more fully explored. In his moral philosophy Smith understands human beings as social creatures bound together by sympathy and capable of recognizing need as a legitimate ground for claims on social resources. He argues that “it is thus that man, who can subsist only in society, was fitted by nature to that situation for which he was made. All the members of society stand in need of each other’s assistance, and are likewise exposed to mutual injuries. Where the necessary assistance is reciprocally afforded from love, from generosity, from friendship and esteem, the society flourishes and is happy.”42 While the reciprocal satisfaction of need out of sympathy and care for our fellow citizens is a moral ideal, it is also 39 McNally provides a fundamental rereading of Smith in light of his moral critique of merchant capital in Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism. It is a compelling case, but I am not going to dwell on it here. My purpose is not exhaustive exegesis but simply the extraction of the key principles of early liberalism that are opposed to democratic social relations. 40 Smith, A Theory of Moral Sentiments, 126. 41 Ibid., 159. 42 Ibid., 166.

Hobbes to James Mill

27

beyond the capacities of human beings. Our sympathies are too weak to cause us to care about everyone in need. More importantly, the moral sentiments are not a sufficient spur to industry. As it turns out, if people relied on the sympathies of others for the satisfaction of their needs, and they on our sympathies, society would soon collapse. While beneficence and humanity are beautiful, they cannot be the organizing principles of any complex and advanced society. A developed society simply has too many needs, requires too great a variety of goods and services, to be organized along moral lines. If society is to endure and grow it must anchor its productive apparatus in the strongest of human passions, the desire to be esteemed by our fellows.43 The desire to be held in high regard stimulates the desire to be rich and the desire to become rich is the spur to industry. Through industry goods sufficient for the needs of all are provided. However, it is not need satisfaction that motivates the production, distribution, and appropriation of resources in a capitalist society. The end of production, distribution, and appropriation is the realization of private profit, not universal need satisfaction. The market mechanism works by subordinating production for need satisfaction to production for the sake of profit. Only the desire to become rich can ensure the health and happiness of a complex society. Thus Smith argues that “the pleasures of wealth and greatness ... strike the imagination as something grand and beautiful, of which the attainment is well worth all the toil and anxiety ... And it is well that nature imposes upon us in this way. It is this deception which arouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind. It is this which first prompted him to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the 44 sciences and arts.” Without intending to, the industrious are driven to produce more than they can possibly consume. Because they produce beyond their own needs, and yet desire riches, they are forced to distribute the surplus to those who are without, and thus unintentionally produce social good from self-interested action. Smith encapsulates the unintentional satisfaction of public needs through private industry in his famous idea of the “invisible hand”: “though they [the rich] mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands they employ be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the 43 Ibid., 349. 44 Ibid., 303.

28

Democratic Society

produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life which would have been made had the earth been divided into equal portions.”45 Why a division of the earth into equal portions would yield the gross asymmetries of wealth and power easily observable in Smith’s day we are not told. It may be true, then, that the capitalist market proves superior to earlier systems in terms of quantitative productivity. Productivity, however, and need satisfaction are distinct problems. The abundance of goods in a capitalist society does not necessarily entail either that those goods satisfy genuine human needs or that, in the case that they could, those who need them can afford them. Given that Smith places his trust in a providential “invisible hand” to guide resources to those who need them, he believes that humanity and fellow feeling are unnecessary moral foundations for a good society. In fact, their function – ensuring social solidarity and the satisfaction of needs – is taken over by a well-functioning social system justified by appeal, once again, to individual rights. Smith articulates his version of rights-based social morality as three principles of “natural” justice. The first rule commands respect for life as the precondition of human flourishing, the second respect for property as the precondition of human security, and the third respect for personal rights (upholding promises and contracts) as the precondition of human industry.46 If individuals and governments obey these framework rules then citizens will be at liberty to pursue their talents, which in turn ensures an optimum division of labour, which creates the conditions for the highest level of productivity. It is especially important for government to limit its sphere of operations since it has the power to greatly interfere with the invisible hand and thus cause massive social disruption. As McNally argues, “the crucial function of government for Smith, as for Hume, is to establish a judicial framework which guarantees the liberty of life and property. The great achievement of the English constitution is that it enshrines 47 these rights.” While Smith believes that poverty is to be lamented, the concern for the poor must not be used as a justification for redistributive reform programs. Whatever moral duties toward the poor government and other citizens may have, they do not authorize any public policy which would 45 Ibid., 304. 46 Ibid., 163. 47 McNally, Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism, 202.

Hobbes to James Mill

29

interfere with property. He contends that “the distinction of ranks, the peace and order of society, are in great measure founded upon the respect we conceive for the former [the rich]. The relief and consolation of human misery depend altogether upon our compassion for the latter [the poor]. The peace and order of society is of more importance than even the relief of the miserable.”48 Although Smith develops his moral theory from an explicit recognition of the needy and interdependent nature of human beings, his evolving social and economic theory rules out need satisfaction as a principle of governmental (or extra-governmental) action when that action would involve upsetting the established “ranks and orders” of society. All must put their trust in the operations of the invisible hand to eventually produce enough to satisfy the needs of the poor. Attempts to impose a need-satisfying logic on the market radically underestimate the complexity of economic relations and are thus doomed to failure.49 All society can do is await the natural increases in prosperity the expan50 sion of production must inevitably bring. As in Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, there is undoubtedly an essential anti-authoritarian spirit to Smith’s arguments. His defence of the free market is a defence of human initiative and creativity directed against corrupt and unproductive monopolies. However, anti-authoritarianism does not in and of itself satisfy the conditions of democratic self-determination. Worse, Smith’s argument that moral sentiments must not be allowed to interfere with the market ensures that the life horizons of everyone dependent on its operations will be determined by its lifeindifferent dynamics and not by their own decisions about what life project(s) to pursue. In order to understand this point clearly, Smith’s understanding of the division of labour must be examined. Smith understands the division of labour to follow from “some truckling disposition” in human nature.51 The difference between the capitalist and the ancient division of labour is that the capitalist division operates within as well as between tasks. The analysis of complex manufacturing processes into their basic sub-processes is the cause of the massive productivity gains of the capitalist period. Those productivity gains are undeniable, even though the problem of gross failures of 48 49 50 51

Smith, A Theory of Moral Sentiments, 369. Ibid., 379. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 115. Ibid., 119.

30

Democratic Society

need satisfaction still plague the globe. It is not abject poverty that concerns me here, however, but rather the general form of dependency that the universalization of market relations establishes. The immediate consequence of the division of labour for workers is the reduction of their life activity to specialized functions so routinized that meaning can no longer be derived from them. This consequence is openly acknowledged by Smith. A developed division of labour “reduce[s] every man’s business to some one simple operation,” which thus becomes “the sole employment of his life.”52 As quantitative productivity and general social creativity increase, the quality and value of life activity of individual workers decrease, as Smith freely admits. The character of workers’ life activity is determined by the internal dynamics of competition between firms battling for market supremacy. But these dynamics determine not only the character of work activity but also what proportion of workers’ lives will be spent at work or resting up to return to it. These consequences are perhaps felt most sharply by those whose lives are spent as workers in a capitalist economy, but they radiate out from the heart of the economy to affect social relations as a whole. Since the market mechanism is assumed to be omnicompetent in determining what goods, talents, capacities, and industries should be developed, the lives of all people inside and outside the workplace are determined by capitalist market forces to the extent that they are allowed to function free of all democratic deliberation and needs-grounded public reasoning. Smith does not recognize these undemocratic consequences. He argues, rather, that a society which respects natural justice and allows the “invisible hand” of the capitalist market to “decide” all matters of production, distribution, and appropriation of resources will be as free and prosperous as possible. Since Smith contends that any democratic “interference” in the market will upset its natural equilibrium, there is nothing political power can do, in his view, to alter the character of lives as they are determined by the operations of the capitalist market. This theory entails the more and more complete subordination of all human life activities to forces that treat those activities as nothing more than means to their own end of growth. The dynamic of system expansion, as Moishe Postone argues, is “quantitative and without an external telos.”53 Put more concretely, what Postone means is that capitalist dynamics 52 Ibid., 112. 53 Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 268.

Hobbes to James Mill

31

seek to privatize and commodify all resources and services: schools, hospitals, prisons, sports, art, leisure, and today, perhaps commodification’s final frontier, the body itself and its genetic structure. In each case where a (potential or actual) public good or service is privatized and commodified, those who need the service or good find themselves dependent on the ability to pay market price in order to satisfy their need. The simple universalization of political rights to include workers and other excluded populations is not capable, in and of itself, of transforming this deep structure of dependency. So long as political rights are exercised within the limits established by the social presuppositions of classical liberal social morality, i.e., exercised as rights to participate in a political process debarred from “interfering” in the “private” economic systems, citizens will remain determined by market conditions (and therefore not their own collective and individual decisions) in their most vital, important, and potentially meaningful activities. If democracy is understood only as a political form of expressed consent to the laws, it fails to satisfy the conditions of its deepest value – self-determination. To conclude this section I will examine the philosophies behind the political reforms of the mid-nineteenth century as these are developed in the work of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, and argue that the same failure persists.

jeremy bentham and james mill By the late eighteenth century the social and economic changes that had occurred in England had exposed deep irrationalities in the country’s political structure. Between 1776 and 1832 successive waves of reform swept England, driven by the twin desires of creating a climate more hospitable to the growth of industry and eliminating the archaic political privileges of the aristocracy. In short, the aim of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century social and political reformers was to bring the political structure of England in line with new social and economic realities. While it was not uncommon for early radicals to demand universal male suffrage, there was no question of interfering with the rights of property. The liberal premise concerning the equality of men was interpreted as applying to political society and the standing of men under the law, not to the material conditions of life or to the quality of life activity. As Dickinson argues, “all the reform movements, even the Society for Constitutional Information, were dominated by

32

Democratic Society

members of the middling orders, by men of property and education. The radicals resented the excessive influence of the great landowners and were determined to increase the political power of the middling men of property, particularly the commercial interests of the large towns. They were ready to speak up for the rights of men, but they did not envisage a political society in which the poor would actually wield power.”54 It is in the nineteenth century that the liberal rights ground of social morality was realized in a system of expanding formal equality within an economic system assumed to be self-regulating, maximally efficient, and just. The utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill provided crucial philosophical support for the reform movement. Bentham was very much the philosophical heir of Hume, though less conservative politically. For Hume, utility was maximized by not altering existing social and political relationships. But half a century later the old order appeared obviously inefficient and corrupt. An economic system premised on the equal rights of individuals coexisted with a political system in which titled aristocrats retained hereditary privileges. Bentham’s abstractly egalitarian philosophy addressed this contradiction. Bentham was first and foremost a philosopher and legal reformer, with little political savvy. The task of popularizing and operationalizing utilitarianism fell to his collaborator, James Mill. I will first consider the principles and then examine the practice. As with the other thinkers examined, Bentham’s philosophy starts with principles of human nature which he takes to be universal and also scientifically established, but in their detail they do not differ significantly from those postulated by Hobbes or Hume.55 For Bentham, human action is determined by desire which is in turn stimulated by perception. Human beings mechanically and necessarily seek those objects whose appropriation causes pleasure and avoid those whose appropriation causes pain. There are no qualitative differences between pleasures. As in Hobbes, the good is relative to individual desires. There is no collective interest of the community or humanity generally, but only the sums of

54 Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 228. 55 He considers them scientific even though they had been held up to serious criticism by this time. He is either unaware of or indifferent to Diderot’s attack on Helvetius’s reduction of human motivation to the twin springs of pleasure and pain. See Diderot, “Refutation of the Work of Helvetius Entitled, ‘On Man,’” 283–95.

Hobbes to James Mill 56

33

individual pleasure or pain. Since it is not therefore possible to resolve conflicts over different courses of action by appeal to what is socially or humanly good, society requires a formal method of calculating the sums of pleasure and pain different policies are likely to yield. The end of all human action is happiness, Bentham claims, and from this it follows that the criterion of good action (or good state policy, it being the business of government to “promote the happiness of the people”) is the “greatest happiness principle.”57 It is not necessary to examine this principle in fine detail, or to criticize Bentham’s naive belief that sums of happiness can be added and compared. Instead, I want to examine its social and political implications. On the surface, the principle seems biased in favour of equality and liberty. In a letter criticizing England’s usury laws, he argues that it is the duty of the opponent of liberty to defend any proposed restriction on it. “You, who fetter contracts; you, who lay restraints on the liberty of man, it is for you ... to assign a reason for your doing so.”58 Once again a close connection between liberty and economic liberty is evident, but the utilitarian calculus does not initially seem to be biased in the interests of property. After all, the poor were the most numerous interest in the country, and one might therefore be led to conclude that classical utilitarianism would recommend economic reforms as well as some sort of majoritarian political system in the interests of maximizing the happiness of the greatest number of people. That conclusion, however, is not the one that Bentham draws. While it is true that all pleasures count as one, it is not the case, according to Bentham, that pain and pleasure are always of equal force. In fact, he argues that the pain of a loss generally outweighs the pleasure of gain, and this assertion has direct economic and political consequences. Since losses are more detrimental to happiness than gains are productive of it, it follows that the deprivation of property which a redistributive program would necessitate would create more overall unhappiness. He argues that “men in general seem to be more sensitive to pain than to pleasure, even when the cause is equal. To such a degree, indeed, does this extend that a loss which diminishes a man’s property by one quarter will take away more happiness than he could gain by doubling his fortune.”59 It follows that the loss of any part 56 57 58 59

Bentham, Principles of Morals and Legislation, 3. Ibid., 70. See also Bentham, Fragment on Government, 118–19. Bentham, Defence of Usury, 1. Bentham, “Principles of the Civil Code.”

34

Democratic Society

of a man’s fortune will outweigh the pleasure felt by another man whose fortune is increased by the same amount. Hence, redistributive programs based on taxation will run afoul of Bentham’s greatest happiness principle. The abstract egalitarianism of desire presupposed by the principle of utility need not entail democratic or substantively egalitarian social dynamics. Indeed, as Polanyi observes, “freedom in dealing with property, and especially property in land, was an essential part of 60 the Benthamite conception of individual liberty.” Once again the liberal rights ground of social morality values the protection of property over collective need satisfaction. The protection of property, however, does not resolve the problem of the inefficiencies and irrationalities of the political system. Even if property must be protected from redistributive efforts, the abstract egalitarianism of utilitarianism would still seem to entail some form of political democracy. Indeed, as James Mill’s work reveals, it does just that. However, the social presuppositions that frame Mill’s conception of democracy ensure that it will take a form that cannot penetrate the closed system of economic relations. Mill begins with an extreme formulation of the liberal understanding of human beings as infinite desiring machines. He argues that “the demand, therefore, of power over the acts of other men is really boundless. It is boundless in two ways: boundless in the number of persons to whom we would extend it, and boundless in its degree over the acts of each.”61 It would seem that Mill is asserting that the desire to enslave unlimited numbers of people is the primary driving force of human beings. Each person stands to the other person as a threat to the other’s liberty. Mill agrees with Hume that if society is to avoid degenerating into a Hobbesian war of all against all, some regulatory ground rules are necessary, as is some force capable of upholding them. Thus, government is necessary. But its very necessity makes it the most dangerous institution humans could devise. It is founded on the principle that “a 62 man, if able, will take from others anything they have and he desires.” Government will therefore inevitably degenerate into tyranny unless the governors have a private interest in limiting their own governmental power. 60 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 180. 61 Mill, An Essay on Government, 57. 62 Ibid., 54.

Hobbes to James Mill

35

Thus, Mill asks himself what form of government would be so structured as to make oppression impossible. Unfettered democracy is ruled out at once. A genuine participatory democracy would require constant assembly of the community of citizens. But if the whole community were assembled as often as would be required by their duty as governors, there would be no one left to work. Without work, there is no property, without property, no community because the community 63 exists for the sake of property protection. Aristocracy and monarchy are ruled out for obvious reasons. There is too little or no countervailing force to check the oppressive acts of the aristocratic assembly or royal decree. Some form of representative government is the only solution to the problem. But who should be represented? According to Mill, the essence of good government lies in putting that class in power which has an interest in limiting the extent of its power over the collectivity of individuals. This criterion of good rule means, then, that the middle class should be put in power. Since their private success is dependent on the free market, and the free market is dependent on limited government, they can safely be entrusted with governmental power. To oppress the overriding interest in the freedom of property is to oppress themselves, and, according to Mill’s theory of human nature, no one willingly oppresses him or herself. The propertied will not confiscate their own property; to do so would be irrational. Thus, good government is government by the bourgeoisie for the bourgeoisie. The working class is excluded from representation because they are not considered independent rational agents. As in the case of women and children, their interest is purportedly bound up with the interest of the propertied, since it is only in virtue of economic growth that they earn a living. The signs of independence are age, property, and profession, and workers satisfy only one of three criteria.64 There is, therefore, a property qualification for political representation. The primary interest of society is property protection and so it follows that only those with something to protect should be entrusted with the means of protection. Mill does not say explicitly that the working class is the prime threat to property, but the idea is certainly implied. Government exists, he says, to ensure that each receives the maximum of the product of his labour. Again, this sounds democratic, even socialistic.65 But he is not 63 Ibid., 51–2. 64 Ibid., 73–4. 65 Ibid., 49–50.

36

Democratic Society

talking about workers here. Mill assumes, as does Locke, that only property owners are productive. The labour of those who actually produce wealth is counted as the labour of the employer. The threat to property comes from those who do not receive the whole of the product of their labour. The property owners thus unite against the propertyless, or those who only receive a portion of the product of their labour, in order to ensure that they receive the whole of their ‘labour.’ The clear implication of Mill’s essay is that democracy must be limited to those groups who can exercise the franchise “responsibly,” that is, who would exercise political rights in such a way that the freedom of market forces would not be threatened. A full democracy, one that was based on (at least) universal male suffrage, would empower groups whose interest lay in regulating the market, or, worse, democratically transforming market relations. In Mill’s view, such redistribution as the working class might legislate into existence is unjust since it would require seizing a portion of the product of the ‘labour’ of the capitalist class, even though that product exists only through the collective labour of workers linked together across complex chains of social activity. Nevertheless, it is true that the utilitarian explication of rights-based social morality urges a certain limited form of political democracy. It is premised on a conception of human interests as qualitatively equal, and seeks a rational method, embodied in law, for reconciling the opposed interests of individuals. On the other hand, it rejects any idea of shared human interest in need satisfaction and rejects any possibility of there being shared human goals and thus any form of shared universal human good. The democracy that it envisages is a democracy limited to the rule of a majority of responsible property owners governing the state according to their private interests. These utilitarian arguments guided the electoral and labour law reforms of the 1830s. The Reform Act of 1832 took political power away from the aristocracy and gave it to the middle class. Their first act in the new parliament was to repeal the “right to live” provisions of the Speenhamland Act, the last line of defence for the dispossessed rural poor. The Poor Law Reform Act of 1834 repealed all the protections the Speenhamland Act ensured and created, finally, the conditions for a “free” market in labour.66 A free market in labour, however, presupposed the absolute inability of labour to maintain its life other than by working within industry for whatever wages labour markets would pay. 66 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 78.

Hobbes to James Mill

37

In other words, it presupposed the universal hegemony of market forces over all facets of life. As Polanyi argues, “for a century, the dynamic of market society was governed by a double movement: the market expanded continuously but this movement was met by a counter-movement checking the expansion in definite directions. Vital though such a counter-movement was for the protection of society, in the last analysis it was incompatible with the self-regulation of the market, and thus with the market system itself.”67 I will examine this counter-movement in part 2. In this section I have sought to explain why classical liberal social morality, based on the idea of exclusive individual rights to private property, posed a powerful barrier to democracy. The essential impediment was not the restriction of political rights to the propertied class, but the interpretation of those rights to justify the formal separation of political and economic power. By 1867 the restriction of political rights to the propertied class had been overcome for men, and by 1920 for women as well. So long, however, as political democracy and collective values were not allowed to penetrate the “private” economic sphere, the coercive power which that sphere generated functioned as an undemocratic social force within formally democratic polities. So long as the social power of property was secure the majority of citizens found their life horizons determined by forces beyond their control, their having full political rights notwithstanding. As I will now demonstrate, nineteenth-century liberal opponents of democratization were fully aware that democracy meant something more than the universalization of political rights. They were opposed to democracy not because of its political form (equality of political and civil rights and majority rule) but because its social implications violated the formal separation of political and economic power essential to liberal capitalism.

67 Ibid., 130.

3

Case Study in Anti-Democratic Liberalism: The Property Defence League gue

a s l i b e r a l r i g h t s - b a s e d s o c i a l morality tried to accommodate itself to growing demands that it be consistent with its abstract universal principles proclaiming the equality of “man,” fears emerged within a segment of the liberal movement that too many concessions to the formerly disenfranchised would destroy the very foundations of liberalcapitalist society. Liberal proponents of a minimal state and unregulated markets openly avowed that the enemy of liberal capitalism was democracy. From their perspective, democracy was indistinguishable from “collectivism” and “collectivism” was identical to “socialism.” What they feared about democratic movements was not the demand for political rights in the abstract, but the social power that lay behind these demands and the different understanding of legitimate social order and social morality. I will examine that theory of social order and the distinct needs-based social morality in part 2. Here I want to emphasize the undemocratic implications of classical liberal rights-based morality by examining the Property Defence League, whose writers and activists were perhaps the most vociferous nineteenth-century liberal critics of democracy. My purpose in so doing is not to deny that liberalism, by the nineteenth century, was a complex political theory and practice, but rather to bring into the sharpest relief possible that aspect of classical liberal social morality which was undemocratic. It is important to do so because, as I will argue in part 3, contemporary democratic theory retains important elements of this social morality even as it has shed the classical liberal critique of public goods. By concentrating on the reasons why nineteenth-century classical liberals feared democracy, contemporary democratic theory can learn something essential about the social content of democracy that it too often forgets.

The Property Defence League

39

The Property Defence League was born in 1882 when the Earl of Wemys joined with Wordsworth Donisthorpe to expand the State Resistance Union. Wemys was motivated by the passage of the Irish Land Reform Act. The act had angered imperial landlords because it violated their rights to free disposal of their Irish holdings. It established land courts to settle rent disputes, fixed the tenure of renters, and, most audaciously, allowed tenants the freedom to sell their leases. What concerned the English landlords was not the likely effect this bill would have on the living conditions of Irish farmers, who were but a few decades removed from famine, but the fact that it violated freedom of contract. That the colonized situation of the Irish made “free” contract impossible, that many Irish farmers could not even eke out subsistence from the land, was of no consequence.1 Benefiting Irish farmers at the expense of English landlords was bad enough. Ending the common practice of employers doing an end run around their obligations to compensate injured workers was the last straw. By the mid-nineteenth century this practice had become widespread. Employers would pressure workers to sign onto an insurance plan sponsored by the owner. If a worker did sign on, he or she waived all legal claims against the owner in the event of injury on the job. The Liability Act Amendment Bill aimed to put a stop to employers’ attempts to evade their liability. This was the second piece of legislation that led to the formation of the League. From the League’s perspective, these bills signified the growing strength of the poor and the working class. The philosophers and commentators who joined or supported the League saw a fundamental threat to liberalism in the form of militant unionism (the “New Unionism”) and the growing social and political strength of labour. They called the systematic alternative to liberal-capitalism that this new power represented, interchangeably, democracy or socialism. Their arguments against it were set out in a manifesto of sorts, A Plea for Liberty. The philosophical tone is set in an introduction written by Herbert Spencer. Spencer retains the psychological principles first set forth in eighteenth-century liberalism, but reinterprets them in the context of evolutionary theory. The theory of society as a spontaneous order is transcribed in the language of evolution. He argues that “... most of all the products that distinguish civilization from savagery, and [make] 1 This history follows that given in Jeffrey Paul’s forward to the League’s manifesto. Paul, “Forward,” viii.

40

Democratic Society

possible the maintenance of a large population, have been developed by the struggle for existence.”2 Both species and societies evolve according to the law of natural selection. Those societies which thrive do so because they have evolved to meet local and general requirements without having to rely upon some central planning organization to anticipate contingencies. Individuals within societies also must adapt to given conditions. Those who do, flourish; those who do not, perish. The motor of social evolution is, according to Spencer, the capacity to adapt to a dynamic reality. The capitalist market, he contends, is the only coordinating mechanism capable of rapidly adjusting society’s productive apparatus to changed conditions because it is rooted in individuals’ knowledge of their own conditions. Since knowledge is decentralized, and individuals can be counted on to act in their own best interests, the market can produce optimum distributions of occupations, goods, successes, and failures if only centralized authorities do not regulate interactions within it. Society can function according to either “voluntary co-operation,” (Spencer’s code-word for contract and market mechanisms) or “compulsory co-operation” (his term for any form of collectivist regulation of the market). He argues that “voluntary co-operation, from its simple to most complex forms, has the common trait that those concerned worked together voluntarily. There is no one to force terms on its free acceptance.”3 Compulsory co-operation, on the other hand, violates the natural liberty of human beings and continually falls victim to inefficiencies. Centralized authority always runs an information deficit which hampers its ability to predict what types of occupation and what goods will be needed in the future. Looking back at Spencer’s critique of central bureaucratic planning from the perspective of the twenty-first century, it must be admitted that the problems of the Soviet command economy demonstrate that he was prescient in one respect. It does not follow from his argument, however, that democratic governance of a developed economic system according to the universal human value of need satisfaction must entail economic ruin. Spencer, having no example of Stalinism to critique, however, draws no distinction between bureaucratic state planning and decentralized democratic planning. From his perspective, democracy means collectivism and collectivism entails social disaster. 2 Spencer, “From Freedom to Bondage,” 7. 3 Ibid., 10.

The Property Defence League

41

The essays which follow Spencer’s introduction attack different public development projects on the grounds that they violate liberty and are inferior to what the market would produce if left to its own devices. Each argument is premised on Spencer’s formula: a sound society must be a liberal society structured by market relations because only such a society can efficiently adapt to complex and dynamic circumstances. Democracy, on the other hand, is, according to one of the main essay4 ists, Wordsworth Donisthorpe, a system of “regimentation.” It is therefore an unnatural, anti-evolutionary collectivism opposed to the entrepreneurial spirit that reigns in liberal capitalism, adds Edward Stanley Robinson.5 Democracy attempts to substitute conscious control for spontaneous market response to changing circumstances and imposes collective goals on free individuals. It is, as a consequence, both inefficient and illiberal. Most of the essays in the manifesto denounce specific policy proposals as threats to liberty. They vilify any piece of legislation that seeks to improve the life conditions of workers and the poor, whether in the factory or the neighbourhood. The articles inveigh against the development of public infrastructure allocated on the basis of need and without regard to ability to pay market price. Since need satisfaction and not ability to pay market price is the universal material foundation of human self-determination, the insistence that the outcome of everyone’s life be determined by the outcome of unplanned market-based decisions, in a context where it is clear that such outcomes impede most people’s ability to determine their own life projects, clearly implies that, from the League’s perspective, liberal rights-based social morality does not value the social maximization of individual self-determination. From their perspective that which the market rules out in fact ought to be ruled out, because what the market “decides” is always correct. League members openly denounced as “democratic” movements and legislation that interfered with the market. What sorts of public resources did the League see as democratic threats to liberal society? The list is long so I will have to be selective. Public health, one would think, is a good that all could universally affirm as necessary to a viable and free society. Not if one is Arthur Rafalovich. He worried that public sanitation laws would create a caste of “sanitarians” who would “become masters and succeed in regulating 4 Donisthorpe, “The Limits of Liberty,” 82. 5 Robinson, “The Impracticability of Socialism,” 74–5.

42

Democratic Society 6

our lives to the minutest detail.” One can be reasonably certain that Rafalovich was not living in an area where untreated sewage mixed with his own drinking water. Again, one might assume that the free provision of reading material is a public good that contributes to social intelligence with minimal social cost. Again, one would be wrong. M.D. O’Brian uncovers the secret of libraries. They are in reality “socialist 7 continuation schools” funded by “legalized theft.” In addition to these two public goods and worker’s compensation noted above, legal limits to the working day, social housing, and free primary education are also attacked as illiberal. According to the League, democracy must be resisted for the “good” of the poor themselves. “What is the spring of human effort?” O’Brian asks himself. “Self-discipline, self-control, self-reliance are the habits which govern in men who are allowed to act for themselves,” he answers.8 League supporters believe that the motive of social evolution, recall, is individual effort in the face of death (Spencer’s “struggle for existence”). Consequently, because it insists on the development of public infrastructure and the securing of the resources for survival and health by public means, democracy appears to threaten the evolutionary basis of civilization. Far better for the species that some (even if that some is the majority of a nation’s inhabitants) suffer unaided than that society deploy the resources that the majority produces for the benefit of all. The point of this survey is not to use the writings of the League as a reductio ad absurdum of liberalism, but rather to expose how classic nineteenth-century liberalism feared democracy because of the social changes it entailed. Central among these changes was the subordination of the blind competitive dynamic of the market to collectively agreed-upon ends in the form of need-satisfying public institutions and investment. The League did not oppose the universalization of political rights because it would give the poor and working class the right to vote. What they feared, rather, was the social power behind that vote. In other words, they feared that the peculiarly liberal separation between the economic and the political would be transgressed, the master-right of private property violated, and the production, distribution, and appropriation of resources subordinated to the outcomes of democratic delib6 Rafalovich, “The Housing of the Working Classes and the Poor,” 351. 7 O’Brian, “Free Libraries,” 415–16. 8 Ibid., 416–17.

The Property Defence League

43

erations undertaken according to a needs-based principle of social morality. Insofar as democracy was understood as an attempt to subordinate the market to collective reasoning over social goals and goods, it appeared as anti-freedom. William Lecky, a fellow-traveller of the League, makes this point clearly. “The day will come,” he writes, “when it will appear one of the strangest facts in the history of human folly, that such a theory [democracy] was regarded as liberal and progressive.”9 It is folly to believe that democracy can be liberal because it attacks the chief value of a liberal society, namely, “that under its shelter many different types of life and character may develop unmolested and unobstructed.”10 What Lecky in particular and classical liberal rights-based social morality in general ignores, however, is precisely that which (even in their own conception) democracy insists upon: satisfaction of the social and material conditions of freedom, i.e., of conscious self-differentiation and individuation. Unless fundamental human needs are satisfied, the human creative capabilities through which people individuate themselves cannot develop in unique directions. The “mass” character of society is not a function of democracy but of the subordination of human creative potential to uniform market outcomes. In other words, in a “free” market society the character of everyone”s life activity must conform to what the “market will bear.” Hence the genuine value espoused by all forms of liberalism – free and unique development of human individuality – is undermined by the separation of political and economic power. This is a lesson, I will demonstrate in part 3, that contemporary democratic theorists have not understood consistently. But before the reasons supporting that claim can be understood, the contrasting needs-based social morality must be explained. Before that goal can be accomplished satisfactorily, however, a theoretical review of the implications of the classical liberal idea of rights and its social morality is required.

9 Lecky, Democracy and Liberty, Vol. 1, 22. 10 Ibid., p.43. See also de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 114–15.

4

Liberal Rights-Based Social Morality and Its Social Presuppositions a s t h e p r e v i o u s s e c t i o n s of this part revealed, classical liberal rights-based social morality co-evolved with the development of the capitalist market. The development of the capitalist market created a socially specific form of dependence of human life, in terms of both its maintenance and its qualitative development, upon the ability to pay market price for basic resources and for the creation of opportunities for self-realization. Initially, as I have argued, rights-based social morality did not challenge this form of dependence; it defended its legitimacy. The protection it afforded to the development of capitalist market relations simultaneously enabled epochal increases in productivity and the “colonization,” to use Habermas’s term, of more and more aspects of human life activity. During the nineteenth century the capitalist division of labour fragmented the capacities of the human being, reducing its life activity to individually meaningless detail work. As Marx emphatically argued about the capitalist labour process, “it converts the labourer into a crippled monstrosity, by forcing his detail dexterity at the expense of a world of productive capabilities and instincts.”1 I want to conclude this part by examining classical liberal rights-based social morality and its social presuppositions in more theoretical depth. The consistent assumption made by liberal social theory from Hobbes to utilitarianism is that human beings are essentially self-maximizing individuals driven by insatiable desire. While not all the thinkers central to the development of liberal social theory agreed that human beings are essentially anti-social, they did share the view that competition for wealth and social esteem is natural. Not only is competition nat1 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 340.

Social Presuppositions

45

ural, it is the essential motor of social progress. The assumption that competition is natural and progressive has profound political implications. Since it is assumed that desire sets people at odds with each other, formal guarantees backed by state power are assumed to be necessary if individual freedom is to be preserved. These formal guarantees, legal entitlements to pursue one’s self-interest free from interference from above or below, are the rights of rights-based social morality. Thus rights are assumed to be necessary, and property rights especially necessary, because people are assumed to be threats to each other’s interests. When individual people form themselves into collectives (whether official collectives such as a political party or unofficial collectives such as an extra-parliamentary movement) they become especially dangerous in the eyes of classical liberal social theory. On one level, of course, this argument is entirely correct. Since freedom is a form of activity, and only individuals are really capable of action (collective action being a form of decisions taken by individuals interacting in a group), where contradictory social interests exist, such that one person’s or group’s activity can have damaging effects on another person’s or group’s activity, legitimate frameworks of rules that govern permissible ranges of activity are entirely necessary. Thus, insofar as the classical liberal principle of consent to the laws that will govern action and interaction is connected with removing arbitrary impediments to self-activity, it is a victory over oppressive power. Once the right to consent to the law has been universalized, the formal framework of political democracy is established. Thus the liberal doctrine of free and equal individuality, universalized as equality of political rights, is an essential moment in the development of political democracy insofar as political democracy is intrinsically related to the idea of the legitimate, as opposed to the arbitrary, exercise of political power. The political is only one side of the story of democracy however, and equal political rights are a historically specific form of checking the arbitrary exercise of political power. In a society in which contradictions of social interest are real, rights are necessary. This necessity is not absolute, I will argue in the remainder of the text, but historically contextual. Rights remain necessary just so long as there are social interests at work that would deprive others of their ability to realize the capabilities that rights, in a liberal society, protect. Not only are rights historically specific, however; their classical function of protecting the economy as a legitimately “private” sphere of self-interested instrumental action has worked as an impediment to securing the full range of

46

Democratic Society

material conditions for the realization of the capabilities that rights protect. As Wood argues, the extension of the rights of citizenship took place in the context of this “new relation between the ‘economic’ and the ‘political’ which had reduced the salience of citizenship and transferred some of its formerly exclusive powers to the purely economic domain of private property and the market, where purely economic advantage takes the place of juridical privilege.”2 In other words, construed as a defence of private control over universally needed resources, classical liberal rights-based social morality not only confined democratic power to a separate political sphere, it tended to regard any form of organized collective power as oppressive, even power that was directed at securing those resources such as are necessary for anyone to consciously individuate themselves. This point is especially significant today where, under conditions of developed capitalism, it is no longer individual private property that rules, but rather multinational corporations obeying economic dynamics whose functioning is not under the control of any individual or even nation and whose outcomes are steered by the goal of expanding into ever new regions of the globe and ever new domains of human existence, including, as I noted earlier, the molecular sequences that are the ultimate foundation of life itself. In addition to its traditional function of determining the nature of work, globalized capitalist market forces now claim omnicompetence: to decide what people will study, what medicines will be available, the content of cultural systems, and what people will do in their free time. That market forces actually determine what their supporters claim they have the competence to determine proves that social life is governed by a market monovalue. To the extent that social life is governed by a market monovalue it is not governed by different sets of values that might emerge from the free reflection and deliberations of citizens. What those values might be I will begin to develop in the next chapter. Here the point to keep in mind is that what liberal social theory defends at the formal level of politics – free determination of collective goals and individual life plans – it negates at the social-material level of resource access to the extent that it allows economic relations to develop according to the driving value of the capitalist market – increasing monetary returns to investors.

2 Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism, 211.

Social Presuppositions

47

Ellen Wood explains the development and implications of this deep structural dependency of the horizons and content of life activity as follows: market dependence gives the market an unprecedented role in capitalist societies, as not only a simple mechanism of the exchange and distribution but the principle determinant and regulator of social reproduction ... this unique system of market dependence has specific systemic requirements and compulsions shared by no other mode of production: the impetus of competition, accumulation, and profit maximization. These imperatives mean ... that capitalism can and must impose its imperatives on new territories and new spheres 3 of life, on all human beings and the natural environment.

So long as this system of expanding dependence is shielded by classical liberal rights-based social morality from democratic opposition it is able to determine the quality of lives of citizens regardless of whether they have formal political power or not. Of course, it is better that people are citizens of states in which they have formal political power, most importantly because it facilitates deeper forms of democratic movements. Nevertheless, the coercive force exerted by capitalist market dynamics is not essentially dependent on who rules the state (as the history of New Labour in England, for example, proves). If those who rule the state accept, in classical liberal fashion, that productive, distributive, and appropriative decisions are always best when they are the outcome of capitalist competition, then their party affiliation or professed commitments to the impoverished are irrelevant. The deep point is that market forces themselves introduce profound social changes, regardless of the political party in power. As Moishe Postone explains, capitalism “entails on-going, massive changes in the mode of social life of the majority of the population – in social patterns of work or living, in the structure and distribution of classes, the nature of the state and politics, the form of the family, the nature of learning and education, the modes of transportation and so on.”4 These changes are justified by appeal to the principle that the market provides only what people demand. Where capitalist market forces control the production, distribution, and appropriation of resources they invariably produce a conflation of what is needed with what is purchased. That is, there is no distinction, 3 Wood, The Origins of Capitalism, 97. 4 Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 294.

48

Democratic Society

from within the thinking typical of capitalist social systems, between a need and an arbitrary and variable want or desire. Therefore, from the standpoint of supporters of the free market, it is unjust to restrain the demand of some group or individual for the sake of freeing resources to satisfy the needs of other individuals, because needs are nothing more than expressed wants and expressed wants are signified by market purchases. Nor is there any contradiction in this system of value in asserting that those who lack the ability to pay for what they need actually lack the need. Since “need” is signified by purchase, and lack of money entails lack of purchase, lack of money, judged from within the value system of the capitalist economy, is tantamount to lacking the need. What is missed in this argument is precisely the non-voluntary character of need in contradistinction to the voluntary and alterable character of demand. As Doyal and Gough note, “whether or not I want something depends upon my beliefs about it and not on its actual attributes,” whereas I need things because of their attributes in relation to the structure of my social-organic being.5 I can change my wants by changing my beliefs, but I cannot change my needs because I cannot change the nature of my organism that requires them. Thus I can learn not to want to smoke, but I cannot learn not to need to breathe or eat. I will return to this important distinction between wants and needs in the next part. If democracy is understood as a social system oriented toward the fullest possible realization of the value of self-determination, and if selfdetermination depends upon the satisfaction of definite material conditions lying in vital human needs, then the undemocratic implications of classical liberal social morality are clear. First, since no creative capacity of the human being can be developed without fundamental needs being satisfied, a social system that subordinates need satisfaction to profitable system expansion subordinates the material conditions of self-determination to an economic system that treats human beings as instruments of its own development. Second, insofar as the legitimacy of this system is secured by a conception of individual rights to private property, it establishes a powerful normative impediment to the growth of democracy in its social-material dimension. Collective movements oriented by the goal of imposing a needs-based social morality on the production, distribution, and appropriation of goods will appear to be opposed to the essential structure of individual freedom. Individual freedom is conceived in abstraction from its material conditions. This 5 Doyal and Gough, A Theory of Human Need, 41–2.

Social Presuppositions

49

abstraction explains why a system can be defended as “free” when it in fact subordinates the life horizons of all people to its own life-blind motive force. People appear to be free where coercive political authority is absent. But the absence of coercive political authority does not entail the absence of the coercive social power of capitalist market forces. Coercive social power, however, cannot be democratically transformed simply through the acquisition of countervailing rights on the part of the excluded, exploited, and oppressed. If political struggles go no farther than asserting counter-rights to the rights of property, if they fail to examine the logical structure of the concept of right as such and its connections to assumptions about the nature of self-interest, individual freedom, and the nature of social relations, then they fail to comprehend at the proper social and normative depth the undemocratic social structure of the contemporary world. By “logical structure” I mean the range of inferences that the definition of a concept makes permissible and the corresponding range of inferences that it rules out. The logical structure of political concepts such as right cannot be understood outside their historical context, but neither is it simply reducible to that context. As I have argued, the contemporary idea of right evolved in the context of the development of capitalist relations on the land in early modern England. It assumed a definite theory of human nature, human purposes, and social relations. These assumptions are universal while the historical context is particular. The logical implications of this concept tend to rule out inferences that would lead from the idea of right to the reality of universal human purposes that ought to be embodied in legislation. It does permit, however, inferences that would extend the meaning of right to accommodate countervailing claims against the exclusive right of private property. It can permit these sorts of inferences because of the role the idea of equality played in the development of classical liberal rights. This extension of the concept, however, does not challenge the legitimacy of the basic structure and dynamics of liberal capitalist society. This structure and its dynamics, however, are the cause, not only of quantitative inequality, but of the global form of dependence that I have explained above. Since this structure of dependence is the social-material impediment to the development of a democratic society (in contrast to a democratic polity), rights are contextually necessary but ultimately insufficient conditions of democratization. In order to understand the distinction between a democratic society and a democratic polity and the significance this distinction has for

50

Democratic Society

democratic struggles today it is important to shift our focus to the underlying value system and social morality of struggles against classical liberal rights-based social morality and the value system of the capitalist economy. As will become clear, these struggles, while they often employed the concept of right, did so within a radically different set of assumptions about human nature, human purposes, and social relations. In the next part I examine the emergence and logical structure of a distinct needs-based social morality, connected to a life-grounded value system, and illustrate how these combined to legitimate struggles whose aim was the democratization of society.

part two The Emergence of Needs-Based Social Morality

This page intentionally left blank

5

Capitalism as Moral Revolution

ution

t h e e m e r g e n c e o f classical liberal rights-based social morality expresses, in the words of Christopher Hill, a moral revolution. As he argues, “the victory of the capitalist economy involved a moral revolution, the assertion of the sanctity of private property, and its absolute right to override the customary rights of the poor.”1 I have argued that the implication of this revolution for the peasantry and emergent working class was a new form of dependence of human life on capitalist market forces. The rights of owners of productive property to use it in the way most profitable to themselves trumped the needs of the peasantry and poor to have access to and use those resources to sustain and develop their lives. Since life itself was threatened by the enclosure movement, those who found themselves cut off from the land were immediately conscious of the life-blind and need-depriving implications of the new social relations. Viewed from the perspective of the needs of human beings embodied in the dispossessed classes, classical liberal rights-based social morality did not legitimate a social order whose foundational value was universal individual freedom but a system of unrestrained avarice and life destruction. It was that face of liberalcapitalism against which they struggled. These struggles are generally interpreted as also rooted in rightsbased social morality, i.e., what the dispossessed fought for were their “rights” against the rights of property. On one level this interpretation is not incorrect. It fails, however, to look closely at the assumptions about individual nature, social relations, and social purposes that informed their demands. It also fails to examine the explicit role that the 1 Hill, Liberty Against the Law, 22.

54

Democratic Society

idea of needs played. When one considers this role in the context of the different assumptions about individual nature, social relations, and social purposes, a distinct social morality appears. I call this distinct social morality needs-based in order to emphasize that the demands made against classical liberal society were not simply that property rights were exclusionary and applied in a life-blind fashion, or that the majority were deprived of their civil and political rights. Beneath and beyond those demands, needs-based struggles called into question the assumed competitive and egocentric nature of human beings, the contractual nature of social relations, and the abstract and negative conception of freedom as non-interference in the “private” (economic) sphere of human existence. As these struggles spread in scope and complexity over the course of two centuries, they brought to light an understanding of human nature as social-organic, dependent for its full and free development on the satisfaction of three fundamental classes of human need: the needs that must be satisfied to maintain biological existence, the needs that must be satisfied to develop the capabilities distinctive of human life, and the needs that must be satisfied to develop those capacities freely. Needs-based demands thus go far beyond the universalization of rights held against others and the state. They are demands that, considered together, assert the need for a different form of society, one that recognizes the necessity of human interdependence and conceives of freedom as conscious individuation. There is a social and material condition of possibility for such freedom, namely, that major social institutions be governed by the principle that social organization, if it is to be legitimate, must give priority to the universal satisfaction of the three classes of needs over the realization of private profits. While the most systematic articulation of this ground of social morality is found in Marx (and his principle, “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”), it would be wrong to reduce the values embodied in needs-based social morality to a Marxist conception of socialism.2 As I will argue, needs-based social morality follows from a universal value system of which Marxism was only ever partially conscious. As I noted in the introduction, this value system is one which treats the maintenance of life and the maximal development of its vital capabilities as the only intrinsic value. As McMurtry argues, “this triune parametric of value – thought, experience, action – includes all that is 2 Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program,” Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, 119.

Capitalism as Moral Revolution

55

of value. Its lines of inclusion rule out from intrinsic value what does not bear thought, feeling, or animate movement.”3 This life-grounded system of value is the ultimate criterion of political and social legitimacy insofar as the interest in the development of vital capabilities is not the private interest of any class, gender, ethnicity, or sexuality. It defines the universal human interest beneath the particular sets of problems and interests of definite identities. What I aim to do in this part is to reveal the operation of this life-grounded conception of value at work underneath the explicit political demands of groups in struggle against classical liberal society. Further, I will reveal how the developing needs-based social morality becomes more conscious of this ultimate value ground as it develops insofar as it branches out from the assertion of claims on basic physical resources to more complex claims on the full range of resources necessary for the freest possible development of human capabilities. Throughout I will expose the intrinsic connection between the life ground of value, needs-based social morality, and a conception of democracy as a form of social order and not simply a political system. What makes needs-based social morality distinct from classical liberal social morality is precisely that it implies a different form of social organization. While it might seem that a principle which asserts that needs trump rights in the production and allocation of natural and social resources opens the door to authoritarian systems of bureaucratic rule or limitless and destructive demands on natural and social wealth, such need not be the case. First, since needs are interpreted here as instrumental to the development of vital capabilities, and vital capabilities cannot freely develop where a centralized authority governs over the whole of society in the interests of maintaining its totalitarian rule, a needs-based social morality is essentially opposed to any bureaucratic centralism. Second, since needs-based demands are much more restricted in their scope than the consumer demands of developed liberal-capitalism, a society whose productive system was governed by needs-based social morality would in fact reduce the level of demand for resources and energy below that which is typical of liberal-capitalism, especially in the world’s wealthiest countries. As opposed to liberal rights-based social morality, the needs ground emphasizes moral limits on the accumulation of goods in both a negative and a positive sense. Negatively, the needs ground of social morality rejects the legitimacy of endless accumulation that deprives others of even their basic needs and 3 McMurtry, “The Value of All Values,” 3.

56

Democratic Society

imposes costs on the earth that it cannot bear indefinitely. Positively, it asserts that the value of a life is not in having things but in developing capabilities. The organic capabilities of the human being it regards as intrinsically valuable. Everything else – money, property, the law, political institutions – it judges relative to the degree to which they enable or disable the development of our defining human capabilities. The best life is a life rich in “beings and doings” to paraphrase Amartya Sen, not a life drowning in the possession of things.4 The degree to which we need things to develop our capabilities is the limit of our demands on social and natural wealth. There are, therefore, key differences between needing something and wanting something. A need, to reiterate McMurtry’s criterion, is a requirement of organic existence that, if unsatisfied, results in objective harm to the organism. For human beings this harm can come in three types, corresponding to the three classes of needs. Deprivation of the needs of biological existence leads to harms in the forms of reduction in the range of basic physical and cognitive capabilities, disease or increased susceptibility to disease, and at the ultimate extreme, unnecessary death. Deprivation of the needs of human existence (education, opportunities for creative self-expression and non-instrumental interaction, work that is both individually and socially meaningful) damages our higher-level capabilities for self-reflective thought, action, and creation. Deprivation of our need for time not under the directive control of an external power that treats us as a means to its own ends, finally, damages our highestlevel capability of freely deciding and determining what shape and purpose to give to our lives. These forms of damage are objective in the sense that they exist even if the subject is not at a given moment conscious of them. Wants, by contrast, are subjective psychological impulses, generally stimulated by external social factors (envy, advertising induced demand-stimulation) which are not objectively linked to the development of vital human capabilities. Deprivation of wants may lead to subjective psychological harm, but, (and this is the crucial difference) this harm can be resolved by changing one’s self-interpretation. I may feel harmed if I do not get what I want when I want it. However, the option is always open to me to revise my wants in light of deeper self-understanding. Students, for example, may select an unchallenging course in order to raise their grade point average. They might initially feel disappointed when they realize that my class on early modern philosophy is anything 4 Sen, Commodities and Capability, 6–7.

Capitalism as Moral Revolution

57

but easy. If they persist, however, they may find that their understanding of the modern world is growing in proportion to the effort that they expend trying to understand the texts. As they develop their philosophical capabilities they may revise their initial want, recognizing it as an imposition of an intellectually lazy culture on their cognitive capabilities. They then can become conscious of the cultivation of this capability as a genuine need, damaged by the passive, consumeristic wants they have been conditioned to accept as natural. In general, since people are rational, they are capable of distinguishing objective harm from a subjective feeling of deprivation once the argument is put to them. Such, in any case, is the contention of a needs-based social morality and the lifegrounded system of value that underlies it. Before proceeding with that argument three other crucial differences between wants and needs should be noted. It follows from McMurtry’s criterion that needs are non-voluntary. Wants, by contrast, are subject to wilful change. No revision of my self-interpretation as a living, human, and potentially free being can alter the needs that those elements of my nature impose upon me. As the example above shows, however, I can change my wants by changing my self-interpretation. Second, needs are satiable whereas wants are not. While this point may seem to apply only to the first class of needs, reflection will show that it applies equally to the other two. Human capabilities are diverse and a maximal cultivation of our defining capabilities demands that we alter our activities. One cannot be overeducated in the sense that one’s finite mind could ever know too much (even the most scholarly can know only a tiny fragment of all that it is possible to know) but one can hide in books from the other demands of a full and free existence. Likewise, one can have too much free time. If there were no demands ever put on our time by anyone else for any reason, it would mean that we would have to live in absolute isolation from everyone else, thus denying our social nature and the increased richness of life it makes possible. Wants, by contrast, are in principle insatiable. One can hoard food, money, clothing without limit; one can needlessly consume medical care and frivolously take academic courses; one can accumulate enough money that one never has to do anything and thus waste the free time such independent wealth affords. Finally (and this point will be crucial in part 4), needs, being non-voluntary material conditions of a free human existence, impose an obligation on the principles of any social organization that legitimates itself by appeal to the values of freedom and democracy. As I will argue below, any society that is actually free

58

Democratic Society

and democratic must be organized such that people are able, through their collective activity, to satisfy the three fundamental classes of needs. A society is not free and democratic to the extent that its principles of social organization deprive citizens of what they need in any one of the three fundamental classes. While I do not maintain that needs are absolutely exclusive of wants, I do argue that a free society has no obligation to satisfy the wants of its citizens. Once the three classes of need are satisfied citizens are, I presume, in a position to rationally and maturely decide what it is that they want beyond that and pursue it. My argument does not lead to the conclusion that social life ought to regress toward simple forms of subsistence society or moralistic asceticism. Physical needs are only one class of needs. The metric of value of social life, nevertheless, is not the quantity of goods available for consumption (want satisfaction) but the depth, breadth, and intensity of human capability development. The first step in developing the argument that supports this conclusion is to examine the development of needs-based social morality. First, I will examine its historical origins in the struggles of the peasantry against the enclosure movement. These struggles demonstrate that the most basic human need is the physical conditions of life maintenance. These struggles also express an explicit but undeveloped consciousness of the link between need satisfaction, the development of vital capabilities, and human freedom. Next I will examine the struggle between rights and needs-based social moralities in the French Revolution. Here republican and radical opponents of the liberal elements of the Third Estate put forward a set of needs-based demands that broaden the conception of human needs beyond the mere biological foundations of life to include cultural and political needs. In the nineteenth century needs-based social morality is further developed by the struggles of the organized working class to include the demand for free time. Taken together, the struggles that I will focus on reveal the existence of three fundamental classes of human needs: basic physical needs, which are the condition of life; socio-cultural needs, including education, meaningful work, and democratic political systems, which are the conditions of human life; and a temporal need, for free time, which is the condition for a free human life. These classes of need, I will argue, are universal, although their content can vary according to historical period, culture, sex, and other concrete determinations of human life. To conclude this part I will read Marx’s critique of liberal-capitalism as rooted in a systematic, democratic interpretation of needs- based social morality.

6

Gerrard Winstanley: Freedom and the Needs of Life o n 1 a p r i l 1649, a small band of men led by Gerrard Winstanley began tilling the unused land around St George’s Hill in southern England. Moved by Winstanley’s mystical vision and an earthly calamity (the failure of the Commonwealth to secure land for decommissioned soldiers), the Diggers, or “True Levellers,” attempted to establish a community based upon need satisfaction through collective labour. Initially, the group aroused indifference, then curiosity, and finally hostility. Sir Francis Drake, owner of the land upon which the Diggers had camped, finally tired of their presence. On 23 June he brought suit against Winstanley and by the fall the community was forced to pack up and 1 move on. On the surface, the Digger’s experiment in communal living seems trivial when compared with the epochal struggle of the English Civil War. Certainly the Diggers were less organized and less influential than the Leveller movement. The Levellers had a significant social base of support in the army, had sufficient power to force a famous debate on an alternative constitution at Putney, and were for a time a genuine threat to Cromwell. But the Levellers did not propose an alternative social system legitimated on the basis of an alternative social morality. As Sabine argues of a typical Leveller, “the object of his reforms was to safeguard personal and civil liberties. These liberties he conceived as inalienable rights inherent in every human being and inseparable from the idea of freely acting personality. The critical points in his political program were for him the suffrage and the bill of rights … the first to 1 A detailed history of the various incarnations of this Digger community can be found in the Introduction to Sabine’s edition of Winstanley’s collected works, The Works of Gerrard Winstanley.

60

Democratic Society

ensure that government should be responsive to the popular will; the second to keep even a popular government from intruding upon the inviolable domain of individual rights.”2 The Levellers thus proposed an early version of representative democracy, but they did not question at a fundamental level classical liberal social morality or its understanding of human nature and social relations. Winstanley, by contrast, exposes the undemocratic nature of classical liberal rights-based social morality. His importance to the development of a democratic conception of society cannot be measured by the numbers of people he mobilized but rather by the clarity with which he exposed the undemocratic implications of a rights-based formal separation between political and economic power. I will analyse this argument into three moments. First, I will highlight the role that needs play in justifying the appropriation of social resources. Second, I will explicate the general social and political implications of his needs-grounded social morality as these are revealed by his critique of law. Third, I will examine the underlying role a life-grounded value system played in framing his conception of human freedom.

need satisfaction as the material presupposition of human freedom Winstanley was the first to explain systematically why the separation of producers from productive resources introduced by enclosure was in contradiction to the social conditions of human freedom. While Winstanley roots his argument in a communistic interpretation of the Bible, its implications can legitimately be regarded as clearly secular. He argues that “in the beginning the Great Creator, reason, made the earth to be a treasury, to preserve beasts, birds, fishes, and man ... Not one word was spoken in the beginning that one branch of mankind 3 should rule over the other.” Implicit in this claim are two philosophical insights central to the development of needs-based social morality. First, he implies that needs are non-voluntary requirements of life. Second, he asserts that the earth, judged from the perspective of these objective requirements, is valuable not because profit can be made from it but because it is the foundation of all need satisfaction. While Winstanley clearly relies upon the Genesis creation story for the con2 Ibid., 4. 3 Quoted in Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, 132.

Gerrard Winstanley

61

tent of his argument, it is not necessary to appeal to divine intentions to explain the relationship between universal needs and the earth as the fundamental need satisfier. Since God is reason, and both nature and humans are rational, it is not an arbitrary divine intention that nature exist for the sake of need-satisfaction, but rather its necessary rational function. Needy embodied beings require objects outside of themselves to live. If society is rational it will therefore be so organized as to ensure the satisfaction of the needs of all its members. The key to understanding the normative legitimacy of needs-based claims on resources is the fact that no creature chooses to have the set of needs that it has. Every creature’s needs follow from its organic structure, and every creature can (in principle) find in the external world the resources that it requires in order to live. If creatures do not satisfy their needs, according to Winstanley, they are necessarily harmed. When humans – to focus on the case most important for present purposes – are deprived of what they need because of social structures over which they have no control, then they suffer harm through no fault of their own. It is not the activities of individuals acting in isolation that causes this injustice, however, but the social organization of productive resources and the social morality that legitimates private property in universally needed resources. Hence Winstanley concludes that classical liberal social morality is the cause of unjust harm. The only way to resolve that injustice is to transform social relations and their justifying social morality. Significantly, Winstanley explicitly contrasts the exclusivity of classical liberal rights to the universality of needs in such a way as to demonstrate how it is possible to deprive some people of that to which they have right without fundamentally harming them, while it is impossible to deprive others of what they need and not harm them. As he argues, “blame us not if we make stop of the carts you send and convert the wood to our own use, as need requires, it being our own, equal with him who calls himself lord of the manor, and not his peculiar right” [emphasis added].4 The key point to note is the contrast between the asserted moral equality of needs-based claims and the asserted moral exclusivity (peculiarity) of rights-based claims. In a manner reminiscent of Locke’s theory of property in the state of nature, Winstanley argues that rightsbased appropriation exceeds the point where the lord can use all that 4 Winstanley, “A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England,” 105.

62

Democratic Society

he takes. The problem with this mode of appropriation is that he thereby deprives others of what they need. Since needs are the basis of life maintenance, and everyone’s primary interest is in maintaining their life, Winstanley contends that it is legitimate for the need- deprived to seize from the rights-bearer just so much as they objectively require while still leaving the lord enough for his needs. The needs-based claim is morally reciprocal, while the rights-based claim is morally exclusive. That is, Winstanley does not deny that the lord too has needs. Everyone has the same objective needs following from their human organic constitution. If everyone appropriated resources solely according to their needs, then there would be sufficient resources for all and no one would suffer the harm of need deprivation. But if one party acts according to a right that excludes consideration of the needs of other parties, then those other parties are systematically deprived of resources and therefore harmed through no fault of their own. When people are so deprived, “the body languishes, the spirit is brought into bondage, and at length departs and ceaseth its motional actions in the body.”5 Since this harm would affect anyone who experienced basic need deprivation, it is equal across class differences. Thus, the moral value of all needs-based claims is equal, relative to the degree of need. The moral value of property rights-based claims, by contrast, is absolutely unequal. That is, if you have a property right you can exercise it over as many resources as you want; if you lack the right, you simply go without. Winstanley’s contrast between the moral value of needs and rights implies that it is irrational to organize a society of naturally needy beings according to values and laws whose regular operation does not prioritize need satisfaction. A rationally organized society, therefore, ought to follow from what is manifestly the case: the shared reality of fundamental human needs for life-maintaining resources is an objective basis for an equal universal interest in modes of appropriation that satisfy those needs. Institutionalizing that interest, however, is impossible if the dominant social morality defends a merely private interest to appropriate as much as is desired regardless of the consequences for others. As he writes, “The first root [of civil law] you see is common preservation, when there is a principle in everyone to seek the good of others as himself, without respecting persons, and this is the root of true magistracy.”6 5 Quoted in Hill, Liberty Against the Law, 293. 6 Winstanley, “The Law of Freedom in a Platform,” 315.

Gerrard Winstanley

63

Thus the foundation of social justice in Winstanley’s system is a needsbased social morality. Since its institutionalization mandates the satisfaction of everyone’s fundamental needs, no one, he believes, could justly claim that they are harmed in their essential life interest by its operations. As Winstanley argues, “truly it will not be to your loss, to let your fellow creatures, your equals in creation, nay, those who have been faithful to you in your cause [the struggle against the Crown] ... I say to you it will not be to your loss to let them quietly improve the waste and common land, that we may live in peace, freed from the heavy burden of poverty. For hereby our own land will be increased with all sorts of commodities, and the people will be knit together with love.”7 In other words, Winstanley believes that everyone will benefit if needs form the basis of legitimate claims on resources. The harm of need deprivation will be cured and the productive energies of all citizens will be engaged, ensuring both a robust supply of goods and the development of the capacities of all. It is the rights-based society that is wasteful since it condemns those without land to a life of unproductive suffering. This unproductive suffering divides society in two, into those with nothing and those with whatever they want. Hence, instead of being wed together by love in a common endeavour, human beings waste their energies in destructive struggle over goods that, judged rationally, are sufficient for all. That which destroys the love that ought to exist between human beings is money. Money is an artificial need that unjustly imposes itself between human organic nature and the resources that would satisfy humanity’s defining needs. Since money is not a natural resource but a social convention, and the end of society is “common preservation,” the justice of money must be determined relative to its implications for life (common preservation). Since the observable social result of this convention is harm for the majority that lacks it, Winstanley judges money to be unjust. He thus asserts that “we must neither buy nor sell; money must not any longer ... be the great god that hedges in some and hedges out others ... the righteous Creator ... did never ordain that unless mankind do bring the mineral (silver or gold) in their hands to others of their own kind, that they should neither be fed nor clothed.”8 A society in which money interposes itself between needs and need satisfiers is irrational, in contradiction to its implicit end of preserving and improving the species. 7 Winstanley, “A New Year’s Gift for the Army,” 165. 8 Winstanley, “A Letter from the Poor Oppressed People of England,” 100.

64

Democratic Society

Thus, Winstanley’s understanding of a just society is grounded in an emergent needs-based social morality. Since all human beings are defined by a shared set of non-voluntary basic needs, and everyone has the same interest in satisfying them, it follows that a well-ordered society is the one that best satisfies that interest. Social conventions, legitimated by appeal to private property rights, are irrational and unjust when they cause some to suffer harm while protecting the superfluous accumulations of others. A society legitimated by appeal to classical liberal social morality justifies an unnatural form of dependence and deprivation. A needs-based social morality, by contrast, recognizes the interdependence of human life, on each other and on nature, and enables citizens to satisfy their needs actively, through their own collective labour. Thus Winstanley looks toward a radically different form of social organization, one in which there is no artificial dependence on social conventions (property rights) which he regards as irrational. As Wood and Wood comment, “There will be no kings, lords, or lawyers, or priests ... [the government] will safeguard the people’s freedom by regulating the use of land ... Each man and woman will be trained in a practical skill and educated in the liberal arts and sciences.”9 Thus the essential function of government is to ensure that the interdependent activity upon which society is based is need-satisfying, not for its own sake but ultimately for the sake of human freedom. I will return to an examination of what Winstanley means by freedom below. First, it is necessary to examine more closely the social and political implications that follow from his theory of the function of the law.

true law and the material grounds of human freedom “True freedom,” Winstanley writes, “lies where a man receives his nourishment and preservation, and that is in the use of the earth”[emphasis added].10 Thus a truly free society cannot accept the formal separation of political and economic power. If freedom requires need-governed 9 Wood and Wood, The Trumpet of Sedition, 88. There are limits to Winstanley’s political vision, most importantly his failure to consider women as political subjects and potential rulers. However, as the point of this investigation is not to endorse Winstanley’s particular vision but to focus on its underlying principles insofar as they represent the emergence of a concept of the needs ground of social morality, I will forego detailed critique of its particular problems. 10 Quoted in Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, 139.

Gerrard Winstanley

65

access to resources, and if it is the ultimate end of human life and social organization, then social organization must be such that need satisfaction is treated as the essential material condition of freedom. As part 1 revealed, however, the law of the evolving capitalist market not only ignored the needs of the majority, it was rooted in a social morality that justified a mode of social organization that caused fundamental need deprivation. The law of early liberal capitalism thus undermined the conditions of “true” freedom. Winstanley argues that “most laws are but to enslave the poor to the rich ... at this very day poor people are forced to work for 4, 5, or 6 pence a day... for such small prizes ... that their earnings cannot find bread for their family. And yet, if they steal for maintenance the murdering law will hang them.”11 Thus the given social world according to Winstanley is morally inverted – what is just in reality (production, distribution, and appropriation of resources according to need) is unjust according to the law (theft) and what is just according to the law (unlimited accumulation protected by private right) negates the material conditions of human freedom in reality. Winstanley is saying more than that there is one law for the rich and one law for the poor. He is arguing that the function of law is perverted when it follows from a social morality that defends exclusive private control over resources that everyone needs. The unjust implications of such laws can therefore only be obviated by changing the social morality that underlies them. To simply change the content of the law without addressing the deeper structures of society and their legitimating social morality leaves the “trunk and roots” of the tree of oppression intact.12 In other words, simply extending the law of private property to everyone (as the Levellers recommended) does not challenge the deep structures (moral and material) of injustice and unfreedom. As Winstanley says, “take away the land from any people, and those people are in a way of continual death and misery, and better to not have had a body than not to have food and raiment for it.”13 The law of a free state must therefore derive from an overriding concern to ensure the satisfaction of our fundamental needs, rather than our egocentric interests as atomistic centres of unlimited desire. However, Winstanley does not understand need satisfaction as an end in itself. It is an instrumental value whose purpose is only realized when all human beings are free. 11 Winstanley, “A New Year’s Gift for the Army,” 201. 12 Ibid., 166. 13 Ibid., 182.

66

Democratic Society

Thus, to conclude this section I must explain Winstanley’s understanding of positive freedom.

life as a system of freedom In the previous section I showed that, in Winstanley’s view, rights-based law is not necessarily a sufficient condition of human freedom. Instead he maintained that freedom “lies” in the use of the land. “Lies” here, I believe, should not be read as meaning that freedom is identical to need satisfaction, but rather as indicating that needs-based control over the land is the material condition of freedom. I urge this interpretation in light of Winstanley’s definition of freedom. Rather than regard it as simply a capacity to choose between alternatives, Winstanley treats freedom as a natural force that distinguishes life from non-life. As he says, “freedom is a force which flows naturally through all Creation” which is “blocked or dammed up by covetousness,” i.e., by private appropriation of universally needed resources.14 If, however, covetousness is superseded in a society governed by a needs-based social morality, freedom can manifest itself as the “power of life.” “The power of life,” he writes, “moves man and beast in their actions, or that causes grass, trees, corn and all plants to grow in their several seasons, and whatever a body does, he does it as he is moved by this inner form.”15 Unlike non-living things, life forms can move themselves. Not only can they move themselves, living things can unfold their distinctive capabilities if the material conditions of their existence are satisfied. Thus freedom, in the deepest sense, is identical to the self-active nature of life. The natural or social environment is a material condition of the realization of this activity, but it is not a determining cause of action. Winstanley thus regards freedom as the defining characteristic of life. While this defining property is expressed in individual living things, it cannot be realized in an abstractly individual way. This point is especially important for human beings. Since human beings are essentially rational, i.e., capable of conscious decision-making about how they will live, they are capable of understanding freedom as a law. The law of freedom mandates such social relations as are necessary “for the preservation of the common peace.”16 Maintenance of the common peace 14 Winstanley, “A Watchword to the Army,” 134. 15 Winstanley, “The Law of Freedom in a Platform,” 374. 16 Ibid.

Gerrard Winstanley

67

requires more than private rights; it requires a change in the ends of individual action. Rational beings who understand the law of freedom are thus obliged, according to Winstanley, to see their private action as a thread in a web of social interaction, and thus to reorient their private interests such that the actions they cause are “done in love to the whole Creation.” Individual freedom is not grounded simply in the will, but depends upon “community in spirit, and community in earthly treasury.”17 This claim does not mean that individuals must negate their own interests but rather contends that they ought to redirect them toward forms of activity that strengthen the community at the same time as they produce individually meaningful life value. As I illustrated in the first section, Winstanley’s alternative society would take care to ensure that everyone was educated and found a place for their unique talents in the community. This dialectic of interdependence and freedom is most important for our purposes. Because classical liberal social morality denies that interdependence has institutional implications for social organization, it can both assert that human beings are essentially free and fail to satisfy the material conditions of free activity. Freedom is only accidentally connected to self-activity in this system of thought. In classical liberal social theory, an inert person being left alone to starve is no less free than a well-fed person living according to a plan of his or her own choosing because freedom is treated as an abstract individual property whose reality is secured simply by non-interference. If it is assumed that whatever anyone does they do because of abstract “choice” then the content of any life appears to be freely chosen, regardless of the material conditions in which it is lived. If, however, one begins from a conception of freedom as self-directed life activity, then its social conditions immediately appear. Since in order to act one must live, and in order to live one must secure the necessary resources of continued existence, and these resources are produced through collective labour, then it follows that individual freedom has social conditions that go beyond non-interference to include active satisfaction of fundamental needs. It is precisely active satisfaction of fundamental needs that classical liberal rights-based social morality militates against. By defending a formal separation of political from economic power such that conscious efforts to govern decisions about production, distribution, and the appropriation of life-sustaining resources are viewed as contrary to free17 Winstanley, “A Watchword to the Army,” 128–9.

68

Democratic Society

dom, this social morality, if it is successful in resisting needs-based demands for democratic governance of socio-economic life, ensures that the demonstrable material conditions of freedom will not be met for the majority of people forced into market dependence for their means of subsistence and activity. Winstanely’s essential contribution to the development of a conception of democratic society thus lies in disclosing the social-material barrier classical liberal social morality poses to the concrete realization of human vital capabilities. Yet he does not rest with just this negative demonstration, but provides an argument that gives democratic activists grounds for maintaining that even though an alternative needs-based social order would deprive some of the surplus to which they have a right according to classical liberal social morality, it would deprive no one of what they need, and therefore could not be said to be harmful to the human interests of those who are so deprived. Of course, Winstanley does not provide a systematic solution to contemporary social problems. Nevertheless, his work does reveal the operation of a distinct ground of social morality from which a conception of democratic society can be derived and developed. The next step in its development that I will examine is the struggle between liberals and republican radicals during the French Revolution.

7

The Dialectic of Rights and Needs in the French Revolution

rench Revolution

w i n s t a n l e y ’ s c r i t i q u e of the life-destructive implications of classical liberal social morality did not yield any practical victories of significance for the development of democratic society. The same is not true of the struggles of radical republican forces against supporters of classical liberal social morality in the French Revolution. Here the struggle between political liberalism and democratic social organization took on world-historical significance. I will argue that this struggle cannot be fully understood as a struggle between different interpretations of lib1 eral rights-based social morality. Rather, the explanation of the distinct conception of social or positive rights that develops here resides in the theory and practice of the republican movement which recognized needs as the material condition of human freedom. I will substantiate this claim by comparing the social morality underlying the 1789 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen with the normative foundations of the demands of the sans cullotes, the arguments of radical intellectuals, the Jacobin’s 1793 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen and their social policy, and the program of Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equals. The through-line will be the contrast between the liberal absolute affirmation of private property rights and the radical republican critique of the undemocratic implications of those rights.

1 Habermas, “Popular Sovereignty as Procedure,” 35–66.

70

Democratic Society

the french revolution and classical liberal social morality Like their counterparts in England, the French liberals who assembled at Versailles in 1789 were not motivated by the goal of establishing the material conditions for popular self-determination. As Cobban argues, the same people who asserted the need for constitutional government would prove to be “more ruthless than the ancien régime in [their] refusal to admit that the populace had any legitimate grievances.”2 The activists of the Third Estate certainly believed in the universality of the rights of man, but they did not interpret this universality in a socially democratic fashion. As Hobsbawm maintains, “on the whole, the classical liberal bourgeois of 1789 ... was not a democrat but a believer in constitutionalism, a secular state with civil liberties and guarantees for private entrepreneurs, and government by tax payers and property owners.”3 Hobsbawm’s interpretation is echoed by Aulard: “in proclaiming the ‘sovereignty of the people,’ men had no idea of founding a true democracy; they had no intention of confiding the government of the nation to what we call universal suffrage.”4 For the liberal revolutionaries the main goal of the revolution was to “defend the natural rights of humanity” against the “impious doctrine that subordinated these rights to prescription [and] political interests.”5 While it is true that the universality with which these rights were asserted created a context in which popular forces found a principled basis around which to organize, the actual rights asserted by the Third Estate, and the interpretation which they gave to these rights, demonstrate, as I will show, that their motivations were not democratic. The democratic content of the revolution cannot, therefore, be understood simply as a consequence of the universalization of rights-based social morality. The Revolution lifted the lid off a turbulent cauldron of social problems that could not be redressed from within the political interpretation of the rights of humanity to which the liberals appealed. Condorcet maintains that it was the philosophical principles of the Enlightenment that justi2 Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution, 144. 3 Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 80. 4 Aulard, The French Revolution: A Political History, Vol. 1, 121. 5 Condorcet, Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humaine, 235. My translation. “... l’un défendait les droits naturels de l’humanité ... l’autre leur opposait la doctrine impie qui soumet ces droits à la prescription, aux intérêts politiques ...”

Rights and Needs in the French Revolution

71

fied the revolution and popular organization that effected their realization.6 He fails to note, however, that the principles around which the popular forces organized were not identical to the principles the Third Estate had in mind in 1789. The key difference, I will argue, is the social morality that each presupposed. The dialectic of rights and needs that would shape the main internal struggles of the revolution was evident from its earliest days. Initially inclined to support the Third Estate, the Parisian masses first made themselves felt on 14 July. In response to aristocratic intransigence, the poor, led by the women of the Faubourg St. Antoine, sacked the symbol of ancient tyranny, the Bastille. While this political mobilization heartened philosophers like Condorcet, it alarmed other members of the Third Estate who saw in the poor a political power that would push forward a set of social and political demands jeopardizing the formal separation of economic from political power. Hence, only two weeks after that mobilization, Sieyès introduced into the National Assembly a distinction (which would be enshrined in the new constitution) between active and passive citizenship. As Aulard explains, “after the taking of the Bastille, when the bourgeoisie had vanquished the despotism by means of the multitudes of Paris, the idea of eliminating from political life the poorer part of the nation saw the light ... [On] July 20th and 21st Sieyès read to the Committee of the Constitution a work ... in which he distinguished ... passive rights from political rights, which he called active rights.”7 Sieyès believed that civil rights such as security of the person and property ought to be universal. Lest, however, those without property should exercise their rights against those who controlled the wealth of the nation, they were to be denied the political rights to vote and hold office. The new state was to constitutionally enshrine the formal separation of political from economic power necessary for the development of market forces. This distinction, motivated by the overt power the poor had manifested, should not be understood simply as an aberration in an otherwise democratic movement. To understand why not it is essential to look carefully at what is asserted and, just as importantly, what is not asserted in the 1789 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen.8 6 Ibid. 7 Aulard, The French Revolution, Vol. 1, 181. 8 The text of the Declaration which I am using is from a government electronic archive of French historical documents. The English translations are my own. http:// www.premier-ministre.gouv.fr/hist/ddhc.htm

72

Democratic Society

The Preamble to the Declaration asserts that ignorance, forgetfulness, and contempt for the rights of man are the sole causes of public misfortune and government corruption.9 From my perspective what is most interesting in this claim is that there are no social-material conditions of corruption identified. Neither here nor anywhere in the Declaration’s seventeen articles will there be any express recognition that social corruption is also signified by radical need deprivation or by private control over universally needed resources. Instead, the consistent focus is on equality of rights in abstraction from the social conditions in which those rights are exercised. The Declaration is indeed a triumph over arbitrary government, but it is at the same time blind to the social causes of poverty and social impotence. The first article of the Declaration makes its liberal essence clear. It asserts that men are born free and “equal in rights.” It then adds, however, that this equality of rights does not entail the abolition of all social distinctions. Like Smith and Hume, the framers of the Declaration assert that social distinctions are permitted if they are “founded on collective utility.”10 The meaning of “collective utility” is not explained, but the subsequent actions of the liberal revolutionaries clarify it. Social distinctions of property were not to be abolished. Rather, as Sieyès’s constitutional distinction between active and passive citizens proved, their traditional grounds of legitimacy were to be eliminated in favour of a new, rights-based, legal distinction. This interpretation is reinforced by the second article. The second article explains that the “goal of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptable rights of man.”11 These rights are, in order, liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression. Again, what is most interesting to me is what is not said. The revolutionaries do not state what the end of social as opposed to political organization is. Is the collective production of wealth to serve the universal interests of all in need satisfaction or to promote forms of economic growth that enrich those who control the productive wealth of the nation by right? Again, Sieyès’s idea of active and passive citizen9 “L’ignorance, l’oubli, ou le mépris des Droits de l’Homme sont les seules causes des malheures publics et la corruption des Gouvernments.” 10 “Les hommes naissent et demeurent libres, et égaux en droits. Les distinctions sociales ne peuvent être fondées que l’utilité commune.” 11 “Le but de toute association politique est la conservation des droits naturelles et imprescriptibles de l’homme.”

Rights and Needs in the French Revolution

73

ship proves that the core interest of the liberal revolutionaries was in protecting private control over the nation’s productive wealth by delegitimating political movements directed against the formal separation of economic and political power. The Third Article would prove more problematic to the liberal interpretation of the Declaration. It asserts that “the principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation” without qualifying what is meant by nation.12 Here one finds an element of republicanism that opened the door to the more radical assertions of popular sovereignty characterizing the revolution after 1791. If “nation” means “the body of adult citizens” then a wider set of interests is included under the national interest than is recognized by the class-based patriarchal limitation of active citizenship to propertied males. If sovereign power can be legitimately exercised to secure the national interest, then the broader interpretation of “nation” could in principle legitimate legal regulation of property such that its use is steered toward meeting everyone’s interest in need satisfaction. The Third Estate in 1789, however, clearly did not intend that “nation” be interpreted in this universal way. The constitutional distinction between active and passive citizenship once again proves this point. The Fourth Article returns to the essential rights of man and spells out the meaning of the crucial idea of liberty. It is defined very loosely as the “power to do anything that does not harm others” where “harm” is interpreted to mean preventing others from “enjoying these same rights.” There is another crucial ambiguity here which, as in the case of the unqualified meaning of “nation,” would later be exploited for more radical ends. That ambiguity concerns the types of activity that would count as illegitimate interference with the exercise of the rights of others. Does accumulating property to the point where the needs of others to live and flourish are no longer met violate their right to liberty? Or, more centrally, from a needs-based perspective, does a mode of social organization that deprives others of what they need to live and flourish are no longer met violate a more basic human interest in avoiding material harm? Once again the declaration is silent on these essential issues, but once again practice answers the question. No social obligation committing the government to use collectively produced wealth to satisfy need is recognized and no policy is initiated mandating that productive wealth be used to satisfy universal needs. Liberty was thus interpreted 12 “Le principe de toute souveraineté réside essentiellement dans la nation.”

74

Democratic Society

primarily as the liberty of the property owner to dispose of his property as he saw fit. This interpretation is supported by the crucial seventeenth and final article. It reiterates the right to private property and adds the epithets that this right alone is “sacred and inviolable.”13 What sort of property is this final article referring to? Does it mean primarily personal property in particular things intended for individual use? Or does it mean productive property, natural resources, capital, and the institutions of economic life? The article does not say, but the qualification the article adds (that only a legally defined public emergency can justify expropriation, and then only with compensation) would lead one to conclude that it is productive property that is primarily at issue. Seizing the clothes and chateaux of the few rich citizens of the realm could hardly be useful in a social emergency. Moreover, as the actions of the liberal revolutionaries in excluding the poor from political power would soon prove, what concerned them most was not loss of personal property but the loss of control over their productive assets. Hence, the Declaration, beautiful as it is as a universal affirmation of the rights of humanity against arbitrary authority, fails to acknowledge the way in which the institutionalized power of private property can function as a new form of coercive authority. Thus, as Cobban argues, “in the town as in the country, if we can pass any general verdict on the social developments of this time, it would be that they consolidated the claims of property against the propertyless.”14 This consolidation was achieved by declaring the right to private property “sacred.” If the right to private property is sacred then any policy which can be shown to be in anyway inconsistent with it will be profane and thus ruled out. This way of legitimating the exclusion of needsbased demands on productive wealth, however, leaves the revolution’s deepest values in contradiction with its social form. If the end of the revolution was to secure the freedom of “man” over arbitrary power, then to be successful it would have to secure the universal interests of “man” against all forms of arbitrary power. The Declaration, however, fails to even recognize the socio-economic system as a source of arbitrary power. That which it overcame at the political level, therefore, it preserved at

13 “La propriété étant un droit inviolable et sacré, nul le peut en être privé si ce n’est lorsque la nécessité publique, légalement constatée, l’exige évidemment; et sous la condition d’une juste et préalable indemnité.” 14 Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution, 161.

Rights and Needs in the French Revolution

75

the socio-economic level. Radical popular and republican forces understood this contradiction and worked to resolve it.

nature and need satisfaction: abbé cournaud Lefebvre estimates that, in 1790, 10 million persons out of a total population of 23 million were in need of some form of relief.15 Rather than focus social policy on addressing the life conditions of the poor, the National Assembly concerned itself with finding ways to justify excluding them from social and political power. It is true that the National Assembly abolished feudal obligations on 4 August 1789, but its interest in so doing was more to free up land for new, English-style, marketdriven production.16 In short, the triumphant liberal revolutionaries worked to secure control over the social-material conditions of freedom for themselves, not to end the social and economic subordination of the impoverished. Nevertheless, by tearing the veil of tradition off the social relations of the nation, the liberal revolutionaries opened new horizons of possibility in the imaginations of more radical theorists and in the public policy of republican politicians. My investigation of this theory and practice of democratic social organization will proceed from the abstract to the concrete, beginning with a radical pamphlet written in the spirit of Winstanley, the Abbé Cournaud’s De la propriété, ou la cause du pauvre plaidée devant la tribune de la raison. Cournaud was a thinker on the margins of Enlightenment social philosophy. He begins his critique of private property from three assumptions common to the French Enlightenment: 1) that reason is the shared essence of human being, 2) that reason discloses the natural foundations of justice, and 3) that the practical function of philosophy is to bring to light and advance the public good. From these principles, however, Cournaud draws political and social conclusions radically at odds with their liberal interpretation. Contrary to the 1789 Declaration, Cournaud argues that the “tyranny of riches,” more than than the tyranny of kings, is the root of oppression.17 Like Winstanley, he contends that the moral 15 Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, 109. 16 Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution, 52. 17 Cournaud, De la propriété, ou la cause du pauvre, plaidée devant la tribune de la raison, 12. The version of the pamphlet I am using was downloaded from the University of Chicago’s electronic archive (http://humanities.uchicago.edu/images/ prop/). 18 “Ses droits sont dans ses besoins.” Ibid., 14.

76

Democratic Society

basis of the tyranny of riches is exclusive rights to private property in land. His solution – to divide the land of France in such a manner as to give every family a roughly equal portion – is mechanical and crude. What is interesting, from my perspective, is the explicit role that a needsbased social morality plays in justifying his alternative. Considered in abstraction from all social conventions, the primary interest of human beings is the satisfaction of their needs. Thus Cournaud concludes that a human being’s “rights lie in his needs.”18 In other words, given the fact that people must exist in order to act on their rights, and their needs must be satisfied if they are to exist, needs both ground and determine the extent of any individual’s rights. Rights whose exercise would make it impossible for others to satisfy their needs are, on his account, illegitmate. Need satisfaction, therefore, and not security of individual rights, is morally basic. Cournaud does not argue that civil and political rights are irrelevant, but rather that they are secondary to our human interest in need satisfaction. Since exclusive rights to private property in productive resources contradict the universal human interest in need satisfaction, they are, Cournaud con19 cludes, unjust. Need satisfaction trumps exclusive rights where access to basic resources is concerned. This argument is incompatible not only with classic liberal rightsbased social morality but also with its assumptions about human nature. If humans really are driven by an unlimited desire to accumulate then Cornaud’s needs-based social morality, indeed, any needs-based social morality, would be impossible to institutionalize. Demand would always outstrip a society’s capacity to supply. Cournaud is aware of the problem and attempts to address it by arguing that human beings are not necessarily desire-machines. Since we are rational, and rationality in part means the ability to recognize and accept necessary limitations, he believes that people are capable of restraining desire. If people did limit their desires to what they objectively need, then the problem of unlimited demand would be solved. “As the milk of one mother suffices for all her children,” he argues, “the breast of the earth nourishes and grows all who receive life.”20 A free society, therefore, demands psychological and normative as well as legal and social changes. Justice cannot be achieved if people 19 Ibid., 12. 20 Ibid., 15. “Comme la lait d’une mère suffit à tous les enfants, le sein de la terre nourrit et féconde tout ce qui reçoit la vie.”

Rights and Needs in the French Revolution

77

allow themselves to be steered by irrational desires and the dominant social morality protects rather than criticizes this behaviour. Changes in individual psychology and social morality, however, will not be socially effective unless they are institutionally anchored. A change in social morality thus entails changes in social organization, primarily the abolition of exclusive private property in universally needed resources. Since “nature admits of neither exclusion nor division,” exclusive private property rights are arbitrary social conventions.21 Since our “rights lie in our needs” this convention is unjust insofar as it is the demonstrable cause of need deprivation. Hence this convention must be replaced with a different principle of social order, one according to which each has access to resources such that they may claim “satisfaction proportional to their needs.”22 I have examined Cournaud’s arguments not because their vision of a pastoral society is a solution to twenty-first century problems but because they explcitily invoke the idea that objective human needs ground a universal interest in need satisfaction from which an alternative social morality can be derived. To be sure, as a bare principle of production and distribution “satisfaction according to needs” poses profound institutional challenges. I will consider the general strategies contemporary society might follow in addressing those challenges in the final section. Those arguments will not be convincing, however, unless it can plausibly be demonstrated that there is such a thing as a needs-based social moralty and a democratic conception of social order that follows from it. To be sure, if that social morality is nothing but the ephemeral sparks of marginal intellectuals then it is an otiose fragment of philosophical trivia. Thus far I have done little to obviate that objection. In order to better respond to it, I will now turn to the work of Rousseau, and beyond him to Jacobin principles and practice, to provide evidence that needs-based social morality informed (ambiguously) the work of a political theorist of central importance as well as the policy of the republican forces he influenced.

rousseau’s theory and jacobin practice The tensions between liberal and republican factions exploded into open struggle on 17 July 1791, when a republican rally against the dis21 Ibid., 20. “la nature n’admet ni exclusion, ni partage.” 22 Ibid., 44. “soulagement proportionelle à ses besoins.”

78

Democratic Society

tinction between active and passive citizenship was supressed by the National Guard. Writing of this attack, Aulard concludes, “it was the day of a sudden blow struck by the bourgeoisie against the people, and against all democrats, whether republican or otherwise ... From the massacre on the Champs de Mars dates the irremediable division of the men of 1789 into two parties; parties that do not name themselves ... but which we may call the bourgeois party and the democratic party.”23 The combined economic and political crisis, coupled with first the threat and then the reality of war with Europe, created the context in which the Jacobin party gained control of the National Assembly on 12 March 1792. During the period of their rule the most radical experiments in a democratic society were attempted. This assessment of the Jacobins is not an endorsement of their practice in every respect. According to Soboul, the Jacobin program stemmed not so much from a principled commitment to the development of the public infrastructure necessary to a democratic society as from the need to house and feed soldiers conscripted by the levée en masse and to ensure that the sacrifices necessary to a successful war effort were made.24 Moreover, the fact that they were governing in the midst of war negated in reality whatever commitments to deeper democracy they espoused. Nevertheless, despite these difficulties and problems, Jacobin policy advances the development of a needs-based social morality insofar as it was the first to attempt to institutionalize on a national scale a social obligation to meet the basic needs of the population. Jacobin principles had two essential sources. The first was the content of the demands of the Parisian masses, whose support they needed to successfully carry out the war. Soboul describes these demands: the people’s social aspirations emerged with clarity in the struggles they waged to win their demands. In 1793 they demanded a maximum price for grain in order to bring bread prices into line with wages, or, in other words, to enable the sans cullotes to survive; their basic argument was that of a fundamental right to existence. Direct social demands preceded and stimulated theoretical reasoning, which was used to intensify the struggle, but no really coherent system of ideas emerged ... In opposition to absolute property rights the sans cullotes 25 demanded the “right to enjoy the fruits of property.”

23 Aulard, The French Revolution, Vol. 1, 315. 24 Soboul, A Short History of the French Revolution, 108. 25 Ibid., 99.

Rights and Needs in the French Revolution

79

This idea of a “fundamental right to existence” would resonate explicitly in Robespierre’s thinking and in Jacobin practice. The second essential source of Jacobin theory and practice was the political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Most important for understanding the Jacobin conception of popular sovereignty was his idea of the general will. The general will, according to Rousseau, could not be represented. As the actual will of each citizen insofar as each willed universally, as a member of the state and not as a private, self-seeking individual, the general will could only be expressed through actual participation in the public affairs of the nation. As he argued, the first and most important deduction that can be made from the principles we have so far laid down is that the general will alone can direct the state according to the object for which it was instituted, i.e., the common good: for if the clashing of private interests makes the establishment of society necessary, the agreement of these very interests makes it possible ... It is solely on the basis 26 of this common interest that every society should be governed.

While it is private appropriation of originally common property that makes society necessary, it is the desire to realize the common good that founds organized political society.27 The common good can only be realized if all the citizens of the state are able to participate in determining the laws that they will obey. For Rousseau, in contrast to the liberals of 1789, it is law that determines the extent of property relations, not the reality of property relations that determines the legitimate scope of the law. He argues, like Cournaud, that our rights follow from our needs: “every man has natu28 rally a right to everything that he needs.” While he does not infer from this principle that private property in productive resources is to be abolished (maintaining, indeed, that “it is certain that the right of property is the most sacred of all the rights of citizenship, and even more important in some respects than liberty itself”) he nevertheless argues that these property rights derive from the collective right of the entire citizen body to decide for themselves how they will be governed.29 Property rights are thus functions of a deeper interest in self-government. As he argues, “the right which each has to his own estate is always subordinate 26 27 28 29

Rousseau, “The Social Contract,” 182. Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality,” 76. Rousseau, “The Social Contract,” 179. Ibid., 138.

80

Democratic Society 30

to the right that the community has over all.” There is thus a deep tension in Rousseau’s understanding of the relationship between rights and needs. On the one hand he affirms needs as the basis of rightsbased claims on resources, from which he derives a duty to public assistance as a condition of a self-governing society. On the other hand he argues that property rights are also essential to a free state. This conflict results, I believe, because he interprets a needs-based social morality on the philosophical basis of individual rights. Consequently democratic society is not understood as rooted in cooperative production and distribution for the sake of need satisfaction and capacity development, but rather as being in a permanent conflict structured by the opposition between collective and private interests. This opposition cannot be resolved so long as there is a real opposition between private interests in exclusive control over productive property and a collective “right” to decide the limits of private interests. This contradiction would manifest itself in Jacobin policy. Nevertheless, there is also, I will argue, the philosophical foundation for the resolution of this contradiction, if the needs ground of social morality is teased out from its confused expression as an individual “right” to existence and a collective “right” to decide the limits of private accumulation. The idea that all rights derive from a fundamental right to existence reappears in Robespierre’s political thought. Going beneath the rights enshrined in the 1789 Declaration, Robespierre argued that “the most fundamental of all rights is the right to existence. The most fundamental law, that which guarantees this.”31 This claim is reminiscent of both Winstanley’s and Cournaud’s claims that true law follows from the nature of the beings that the law is designed to protect. Since human nature requires that all individuals regularly satisfy the same basic needs, all humans share the same essential interest in accessing the resources that their continued existence requires. The law, then, ought to serve this objective and universal interest. Robespierre’s appeal to the idea of an individual right to existence, however, introduces unnecessary confusions into his argument. This is the case because existence is a material condition of having and acting on rights (legally actionable claims). Consider an example that illustrates the point. If someone denies me my right to free speech, I have legal recourse against that person or institution. If someone denies me my “right” to existence, on 30 Ibid., 180. 31 Soboul, A Short History of the French Revolution, 88.

Rights and Needs in the French Revolution

81

the other hand, I no longer exist, and cannot, therefore, act against that person or institution. Prior to my acting on whatever set of rights I enjoy I must exist, i.e., I must regularly access the resources that I require. These resources cannot be secured by appeal to an individual right. Since rights are legally actionable, that is, they must be fought for in duly constituted judicial bodies, my body would expire long before my claim could be settled in court. It would be more consistent with Robespierre’s deeper value commitments to argue that social organization ought to be constituted such that no one would have to worry about acting on their “right” to existence because society would be governed by a principle of social morality that would ensure the regular and sufficient satisfaction of the needs underlying the exercise of higher-level capabilities. This point is only ambiguously recognized in Robespierre’s understanding of the role of government, the 1793 Declaration, and the public policy the Jacobins pursued. When Robespierre discusses the role of government he does not refer to rights but social obligations. He argues that “society is obliged to provide for the subsistence of all its members, assuring the means of existence to those who are not in a condition to work.”32 When it comes to justifying the provision of welfare to needy citizens Robspierre does not appeal to the “right to existence” but rather to the essential connection between fundamental organic needs, nature, and public resources: “Whatever is essential to preserve life, that is the common property of society as a whole.”33 This position makes sense only on the assumption that need as such is the basis for legitimate claims on life-sustaining resources. Need trumps property rights in cases where continued existence is at stake because the primary obligation of government is to ensure that the conditions of life and free existence are satisfied. The deep difference between this understanding of social obligation and the material implications of classical liberal rights-based social morality was made clear in a statement issued by the Commune of Paris in 1793: “Let no one urge on us the rights of property. The right of property cannot be the right to starve one’s fellow citizens. The fruits of the earth, like the air, belong to all men.”34 The difference between needsbased and rights-based social morality is that the needs-based conception comprehends the social-structural causes of harm whereas rights-based 32 Aulard, The French Revolution: A Political History, Vol. 2, 176. 33 Quoted in Thompson, Democracy in France since 1870, 18. 34 Aulard, History of the French Revolution, Vol. 2, 103.

82

Democratic Society

social morality, treating all morally relevant action as individual-intentional action, blocks comprehension of the way in which the unintentional outcomes of individual action cause moral harm. These unintended consequences cannot be alleviated by asserting one individual right (to existence) against another (property) because individual property owners acting as individuals do not intend to starve their fellow citizens. But starve the others do because of the social organization of production, distribution, and appropriation. The solution to that problem must work at the deeper level of changing social institutions and their legitimating social morality. The 1793 Declaration and Jacobin welfare policy attemped, albeit ambiguously, to do just that.35 The ambiguity that was evident in Rousseau’s discussion of the role of property rights reappears in the 1793 Declaration. I will not work through each article, but concentrate only on those which demonstrate the irruption of needs-based social morality into the otherwise rightsbased document. While the 1793 Declaration reaffirms the right to private property (Article 2) and reiterates that it can only be expropriated in time of public emergency and only if due compensation is paid (Article 19), it drops the epithet “sacred” that was applied to it in Article 17 of the 1789 declaration. Far more significantly, however, in its first article it adds “the common good” to the 1789 Declaration’s definition of 36 the ends of political association.’ Whereas the 1789 Declaration asserted simply that the end of political association was the preservation of natural rights, the substitution of “common good” entails fundamentally different social implications. The implications are apparent in Articles 4 and 25. Article 4, drawing explicitly on Rousseau, asserts that the law is the “free and solemn expression of the general will,” while Article 25 asserts that “sovereignty resides in the people.”37 In 1789 the link between general will and the legitimacy of law was qualified by limiting it to “citizens” who were subsequently divided into active and passive. Furthermore, in 1789, sovereignty was said to reside in the nation, not the people. Again, “nation” was subsequently interpreted to mean “property owners” and this dis35 The text of the 1793 Declaration was downloaded from the electronic data base of the Municipal Library of Lisieux, France. Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen (1793), http://perso.club.internet.fr/sneuf/S/1793.html. 36 “Le but de la société est le bonheur commun.” 37 “La loi est l’expression libre et solennelle de la volonté générale.” “La souveraineté réside dans la peuple.”

Rights and Needs in the French Revolution

83

tinction was institutionalized in the Constitution that excluded the majority of citizens from political power. The Constitution that followed the 1793 Declaration, on the other hand, did away with the dis38 tinction between passive and active citizens. The assertions that sovereignty resides in the people, that the law is the expression of the universal interests of the people (the general will), and that the government has a social obligation to ensure that fundamental needs are met combine to imply a fundamentally different understanding of democratic social structure. A free or democratic state cannot be limited to protecting the rights of citizens. Beyond that it must ensure that people are capable of acting as free citizens, and to ensure that people are capable of acting as free citizens the government must ensure that needs are met. While the Jacobins never provided a systematic theory of how a democratic society would be organized, much less realize one in practice, their 1793 Declaration did make explicit reference to two essential needs intimately linked with the possibility of free self-activity. Article 21 asserts that “public assistance is a sacred debt” and that society owes its members subsistence. Article 22 goes further in recognizing that “education is the need of all” and that society must favour “with all its power, the progress of public reason.”39 Article 22 thus broadens needs-based social morality beyond bare subsistence to include basic socio-cultural needs of human activity. In order to live as humans people must not only eat and breathe, they must be able to think. Since people are not in a position to educate themselves while young, society must marshall social resources in order to ensure that its citizens are capable of reflecting, deliberating, and deciding responsibly on matters of public concern. In order, however, to be able to marshall those resources, the government of a democratic state must not be debarred by exclusive property rights from deciding on how collectively produced resources are to be used. A democratic government can only fulfill its obligations to the whole of the citizen body if it exists within a democratic society, i.e., a society in which collective deliberation is entitled to dispose over the production, distribution, and appropriation of collectively produced resources. In explicitly affirming that public assistance is a “debt” and that education is a “need,” in abolishing property qualifications for office, and 38 Aulard, The French Revolution, Vol. 2, 199. 39 “Le secours publique est une dette sacrée.” “L’instruction est le besoin de tous. La société doit favorise de tout son pouvoir les progrès de la raison publique.”

84

Democratic Society

in grounding the legitimacy of the law in the actual expression of the general will, the 1793 Declaration not only exposes the interests of private property that governed the liberal interpretation of the 1789 Declaration, it affirms (at least implicitly) a conception of democratic society as self-governing across all social spheres. If people have needs that can be met only through social labour, if need satisfaction is a universal interest of human beings, and if it is society’s duty to satisfy its citizens’ universal interests, then it follows that democratic government must be entitled to rule over (in the sense of govern according to needs-based social morality) the collective wealth of the nation. Jacobin welfare policy was a first step beyond constitutional recognition of the reality of human needs into a practical effort to satisfy them. My examination will draw heavily upon the excellent work of Alan Forrest in The French Revolution and the Poor. As my interest lies in the logical implications of these efforts for the development of needs-based social morality and democratic society, I will exclude for the most part considerations of the details and complexities of their institutionalization. Forrest focuses upon three key areas: health care; pensions for the aged, infirm, and women who had lost their husbands in the war effort; and state-funded childcare for war orphans. Of most interest from my perspective are the information-gathering efforts that preceded the formulation of policy and provision of health care. The effort to develop the rudiments of a welfare state followed from the recognition, in the 1793 Declaration, that poverty was a problem of social organization and social morality and that a democratic government had an obligation to its citizens to eliminate it. Jacobin efforts to address poverty began with attempts to quantify the level of need in the state. In 1790, the Comité de mendicité and the Comité de secours publique began to travel the country in order to compile a statistical survey of poverty in the nation. What is interesting is that the committees were not simply top-down bureaucratic agencies. They provided an opportunity for the poor themselves to speak about their needs and to articulate their demands as issues of public concern.40 A visit from one of the committees was an occasion in which the political and the economic came together, where the links between need satisfaction and democratic self-organization were made apparent. This procedure stood in contrast to the period preceding the Revolution, when the poor regularly com-

40 Forrest, The French Revolution and the Poor, 77.

Rights and Needs in the French Revolution

85 41

plained that the cahiers de doléance ignored their concerns. While the committees did not evolve into community-based organizations in which the poor could join together in the work of satisfying their own needs, they at least bring to light the principle that democratic need satisfaction is not a matter of a central granting agency bestowing benefits upon the needy. Rather, it is a matter of the poor defining for themselves both what their needs are and the strategies appropriate for their satisfaction. Thus, the work of the committee was at least an implicit recognition of a difference, crucial, as I will argue below, between passive and active need satisfaction. By allowing the poor to speak for themselves, to influence through their own experiences social policy, the committees can be understood as embryonic forms of a synthetic democratic practice in which the political and the socio-economic were conjoined rather than forcibly kept apart. The specific difference marking this practice is that the need-deprived are not made the objects of a bureaucratic apparatus dictating to them what their needs are and how they will be met, but become subjects politically engaged in a project of reorienting the principles governing social-material life. The practical high point of Jacobin welfare policy was the effort to develop and fund a national system of publically funded hospitals. The goal of Jacobin policy was to create a national health-care system that would provide equal access to hospitals regardless of place of residence.42 Here once again one sees health care treated as a fundmental need of human existence and not simply as a legal right. The difference is crucial. As with the “right to existence,” treating heath care as a right is misleadingly abstract. If health care is a right then there must be some group whose interests are opposed to my receiving health care when I need it. Otherwise I would not require a legally actionable claim. Treating health care as a need, within a social formation governed by a needs-based social morality, on the other hand, entails that social resources are channelled to health care as a matter of social obligation. In other words, adequate satisfaction of the health-care needs of a community presupposes that all groups in that community have consciously committed themselves to ensuring adequate funding for it. That is, a needs-based rather than a rights-based social morality implies the principle that a democratic society has to ensure that its basic institutions (those institutions in which individual life horizons are shaped) 41 Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution, 143. 42 Forrest, The French Revolution and the Poor, 40.

86

Democratic Society

are funded such that no one would be in the position of having to plead their rights when their needs are not satisfied. Although the practice of the Jacobins was hardly democratic, that fact should not cause contemporary democratic theorists to lose sight of the democratic social implications of their practice. The idea of government as itself governed by a social obligation that follows from the needs of its citizens is not an essentially paternalistic principle, but deeply democratic. It is democratic insofar as it recognizes the reality of material conditions for free self-activity upon which a democratic society depends. Citizens who are fundamentally dependent upon forces which they are debarred in principle from governing cannot freely reflect upon their own interests, let alone the universal interest. The universal interest will always reduce to the interests of the class that controls the resources needed by everyone for survival. That means, however, that everyone must always conform their individual life-horizons to the state of capitalist market forces at any given time. It further entails that public policy must constantly limit itself to serving the interests of the owning and controlling class. Civil and political rights that are thus limited are capable of shaping a democratic polity, but at the cost of accepting an undemocratic social order. The differences between a needs-based and a rights-based social morality and a democratic society and a democratic polity were not lost on the Jacobins’ opponents. From their perspective the Jacobin efforts were a revolutionary challenge to classical liberal social morality. The Jacobin schemes were definitively shelved following the overthrow of the Mountain and the ascendency of the Directory in 1795. The liberal response to the most democratic constitution of the revolutionary period was swift and total. Jacobin hospitals were closed, the pension scheme was ended, any trace of a “safety net” for the needy and infirm was erased.43 The Directory eliminated egalitarian legislation, replaced the democratic constitution of 1793, and violently reasserted the rights of property. The “maximum” was repealed on the 3rd of Nivose, Year 3, and all responsibility for the poor abdicated. The Girondin Boissy d’Anglas sums up clearly the moral basis of the new regime: “Civil equality is all that a man can expect. Equality consists in the fact that the law is the same for all.”44 The equality of all under law, however, is fully compatible with the dependence of the majority of citizens on socio43 Ibid., 64. 44 Aulard, The History of the French Revolution, Vol. 3, 310.

Rights and Needs in the French Revolution

87

economic dynamics over which, according to classical liberal social morality, they do not have, and ought not to have, any democratic control. The truth of this point is brought home by the events following the overthrow of the Jacobin administration. The Directory unleashed a White Terror against the popular movements following the Prairial uprising, a movement led by the women of Paris demanding a reduction in the price of bread and the return of the 1793 Constitution.45 But even the Terror could not suppress the struggle for democratic social conditions. In the wake of the defeat at Prairial arose the most utopian of the radical democratic movements of the Revolution, Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equals. Politically, Babeuf’s goals were defined by the 1793 Constitution, especially its abolition of the invidious distinction between active and passive citizens. Socially, Babeuf’s program can be read as an elaboration of the 1793 Declaration’s recognition that human needs are a morally prior basis of legitimacy for claims on need-satisfying resources. Echoing Robespierre’s equation of social crime and need deprivation, Article Six of Babeuf’s program asserts that “[n]o one without crime can appropriate exclusively the fruit of the earth or of industry.”46 Exclusive appropriation is criminal because it is a violation of the moral structure of nature: “Nature has bestowed on everyone an equal right to the enjoyment of all goods.”47 Again the term “right” here should not be interpreted to mean simply “legal entitlement.” Babeuf is arguing that since human beings are needy, and nature provides sufficient goods to satisfy everyone’s real needs, society must be organized in such a way that its productive and distributive systems do not compromise need satisfaction. Otherwise, a socially destructive conflict between the rights of property and the needs of humanity will be engendered. Babeuf supports his moral principles by reference to the popular demands of the revolutionary masses. That is, he does not see his program as an arbitrary deduction from first principles but as a crystallization of the interests and politics of the sans cullotes. He strengthens his claim by contrasting these demands with the violent opposition they provoked in the liberal segments of the revolutionary forces: The Constitution of 1793 is the true law of France, because the people have solemnly accepted it; because the Convention has no right to alter it; because in 45 Ibid., 246–8. 46 Thompson, Democracy in France since 1870, 40. 47 Ibid.

88

Democratic Society

order to do so it has shot down the people who demanded its execution; because it has driven out and beheaded the deputies who did their duty by defending it ... because the Constitution of 1793 satisfied the inalienable right of each citizen to consent to the laws, to exercise political rights, to assemble, to demand what he believes useful, to educate himself, and not to die of hunger; rights which the counter-revolutionary act of 1795 completely and openly vio48 lated.

While Babeuf claims that the Convention is counter-revolutionary because it violates the rights of the people, we must look into this claim more closely if we are to fully understand its implications for a conception of democratic society. The Convention appears counter-revolutionary only if it is judged against the 1793, and not the 1789, Declaration and Constitution. If one judged its actions according to the 1789 interpretation of liberty and equality it could be argued that the Convention was doing nothing more than steering the revolution back toward its original principles. In other words, from the standpoint of the liberal revolutionaries, 1793 was a dangerous democratic distortion of a just, liberal, rights-based social order. Babeuf, judging from the standpoint of the universal human interest in fundamental need satisfaction, conceives of democracy not simply as formal equality in the rights of citizenship, but more deeply, as a society that is governed by universal interest in needs- based access to life-sustaining resources. Thus, only if Babeuf’s argument is read as grounded in a needs-based social morality is it coherent. Although Babeuf’s conspiratorial politics were not democratic, his social aims were. It is possible to reject the practice (on the basis of the principle that democratic change can come about only through democratic struggles) and still accept the principles as moments in an evolving understanding of the social-material conditions and social morality presupposed by a democratic society. The foregoing interpretation is supported by Soboul. As he explains, “sharing the basic necessities of life, which was the overriding concern of the common people at the time, occupied a central position in Babeuf’s thought.”49 The manifesto of the group spells out this concern clearly: “The French revolution is only the forerunner of a much greater, solemn revolution, which will be the last ... No more private 48 Ibid., 40. 49 Soboul, A Short History of the French Revolution, 137.

Rights and Needs in the French Revolution

89

property in land ... Begone, hideous distinctions of rich and poor, of great and small, of masters and servants, of governing and governed ... In the cry of equality, let the forces of justice and happiness organize themselves. The moment has come to found the Republic of Equals, that great hospice open to all men.”50 Here the secret to understanding Babeuf’s use of the term “rights” is revealed. Babeuf does not argue in the name of exclusive legal claims, whether negative or positive, but in the name of substantive equality. The last revolution does away with the class distinctions legitimated by appeal to the “sacred” right of private property. No mere re-interpretation of this right is sufficient to obviate its deleterious social consequences. The social presuppositions of this rights-based social morality, and that social morality itself, must be changed. At the deepest level, in the formative battles for democracy in both France and England, there was an essential conflict between social moralities. Initially, classical liberal social morality justified the exclusion of the majority of the population from both political rights and social and economic power. This exclusion generated struggles against the formal barriers to political participation and social and economic dependence. While the struggles for political inclusion can readily be understood on the basis of the idea of formal equality central to classical liberalism, the struggles for social and economic power reveal the operation of a distinct, needs-based social morality. This social morality, I have shown, obtains explicit development in the work of radical thinkers like Winstanley and Cournaud, but was most often ambiguously expressed in terms of embryonic “positive” rights to subsistence. However, since material, rather than legal, conditions of existence are at issue, it is more coherent, I have argued, to re-interpret those rightsbased claims explicitly as needs-based claims. Such a reinterpretation makes clear that classical liberal rights-based social morality places material impediments in the way of the creation of a democratic society. Thus, the republican movement did not simply argue that classical liberal society had to conform its practice to its principles; it asserted different principles of governance and social organization which were (ambiguously) legitimated by appeal to the principle that fundamental human needs trumped exclusive property rights to own and control the universal requirements of human existence. It developed the idea of fundamental human needs beyond the physical requirements of exis50 Thompson, Democracy in France since 1870, 19.

90

Democratic Society

tence to include socio-cultural needs of human existence, most centrally, education. In the constitutional recognition of education as a need, the Jacobins implicitly understood that what distinguishes human beings from other life forms is their capacity for self-determination and conscious individuation. Unlike plants that grow if furnished with water, soil, and sunshine, human beings cannot become free individuals automatically; they require institutions in which those capabilities can be cultivated through interaction with others. Those institutions, however, require public resources that can only come from the social wealth produced through collective labour. If those institutions are to be designed and governed in the universal interests of individuals in their own need satisfaction and capability development, and the social interest in intelligent and responsible citizens, then funding must not be dependent on any merely private interest or power, as it would be if it were dependent on the charitable donations of private individuals. Thus, implicit in the theory and practice of the republican revolutionaries are different ideas of human freedom and democratic society. In the next section I will examine key struggles of the newly organizing nineteenth-century working class that add crucial new dimensions to the understanding of fundamental human needs.

8

Needs and Social Struggles in England and France in the Nineteenth Century nd and France

w h i l e t h e j a c o b i n s were the first political movement to attempt to institutionalize needs-based social morality, they did not succeed in creating an institutional context in which the democratic power of French citizens increased. Indeed, viewed from a political perspective, the Jacobins might be accused of instituting an early version of what Feher, Heller, and Marcus, referring to Stalinism, called, the “dictatorship over needs.”1 If it is the case that, historically and conceptually, needs-based social morality must entail bureaucratic-authoritarian forms of domination over citizens then it would be the antithesis to, rather than the necessary normative framework of, a democratic society. Up to now my analysis has had to rely more on interpretation than direct evidence to support the conclusion regarding the essentially democratic implications of needs-based social morality. This is due to the paucity of explicit affirmation, in the theory and practice examined thus far, of the ultimate value of human capability development served by need satisfaction as its material condition. In order to provide stronger evidence of the democratic essence of needs-based social morality, it is crucial to discover actual struggles that advanced more complex demands for political power, meaningful work, and free time from a needs-based perspective. Such examples can be found in the struggles of workers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I will focus on the struggles of the Chartists for political power and the Luddites for meaningful work, the demands of the early trade-union movement for a reduction in labour time, and the conception of a “democratic and social republic” developed in the French Revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune. 1 Feher, Heller, and Marcus, Dictatorship Over Needs, 1983.

92

Democratic Society

active need satisfaction against liberty: chartists and luddites As I noted in the first chapter, eighteenth-century legal reforms were designed to eliminate the impediments imposed by the archaic political and legal system of England on economic efficiency and growth. As these reforms proceeded, the former peasantry was increasingly absorbed into the burgeoning factory system, its labour increasingly determined by the machine-rhythms of production that would typify industrial society. While goods and people flowed freely according to the demands of capitalist dynamics, the life value of labour as a form of vital human activity declined. While capitalist expansion made England the most wealthy nation on earth (measured by the metric of the growth of capital), this wealth was experienced by the new working class as an impoverishment of the quality of their life activity. Against this contradiction between the simultaneous growth of capitalist wealth and the contraction of human value, movements small and large resisted. The Chartists struggled against the exclusion of needs-based demands from political policy by fighting for the extension of the franchise to all adult males, while the Luddites struggled against the subordination of human creative power to machine production. Chartism developed in the matrix of industrialization as a mass political response to its life-destructive effects. Those effects are clearly expressed in the testimonials of workers drawn into the hell-fire of early factories. Consider for example the following words of a striking collier worker, speaking in 1818: “[the bosses] with scarcely a second idea in their heads, they are literally petty monarchs, in their own particular districts; and to support all this, their whole time is occupied in contriving how to get the greatest quantity of work turned off with the least possible expense ... I know it to be a fact that the greater part of the master spinners are anxious to keep wages low for the purpose of keeping spinners indigent and spiritless ... as for the purpose of taking the surplus into their own pockets.”2 Here the contradiction between increasing productivity and decreasing quality of life for workers is made explicit on the basis of direct experience. An even more overt assertion of the need-depriving and life-destroying nature of early industrialization was made by a weaver testifying before the Factory Commission in the early 1830s. He saw clearly the limits of the liberal rights ground of 2 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 218–19

Nineteenth-Century England and France

93

social morality as a ground for a free society. The structure of the rights ground in the 1830s ensured that “capital and property are protected, but their labour left to chance.” The Commission before which he was testifying objected that any interference in the contractual relationship in the form of a legislatively determined minimum wage would compromise the freedom of the worker. The worker responded by asserting that “I would rather put an end to the freedom of murder, and employing labourers beyond their strength ... because it was destructive of human life3 [emphasis added].” Thus, resistance to life destruction was Chartism’s deep systemic cause. Its proximate cause was the exclusion of the working class from the political reforms of the 1832 Reform Act. The first petition argued that “the Reform Act has effected a transfer of power from one dominating faction to another, leaving the people as helpless as before.”4 While the two petitions sent to parliament (in 1839 and 1842) were not documents that demanded revolutionary social reorganization and, in political terms, were fundamentally compromised insofar as they failed to demand the vote for women, they are nevertheless essential developmental moments of needs-based social morality.5 They are essential moments because both diagnose and challenge the undemocratic implications of the classical liberal form of separating political and economic power. Both petitions assert the republican understanding of popular sovereignty that had been gaining currency since the French Revolution. That is, both argue that the law is legitimate if and only if all (male adults) have explicitly and formally consented to it, and explicit and formal consent presupposes universal (male) suffrage. The second petition, which was signed by more than three million people, asserts this point as follows: “the Government originated from, was designed to protect the freedom and promote the happiness of, and ought to be responsible to, the whole people ... as the government was designed for the benefit and protection of, and must be obeyed and supported by all, therefore all should be equally represented.”6 The clear implication of this argument is that the meaning of “benefit and protection of all” cannot be determined if the majority of the population is prevented from 3 Ibid., 329. 4 “First Chartist Petition,” A Radical Reader, 477. 5 Mary Wollstonecraft had already advanced the demand for women’s suffrage in 1791. See Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women. 6 “The 1842 Chartist Petition,” A Radical Reader, 491.

94

Democratic Society

exercising any political power. Since, however, freedom, happiness, benefit, and protection all have clear material conditions (no one can rationally be said to be free, happy, enjoying benefits, or secure if they lack access to essential need satisfiers), the Chartists are also demanding that political power be used to (at least) regulate economic life in the universal interests of all in need satisfaction. Unless democratic political power has the final say on the development and distribution of fundamental resources a society cannot be free, even if its political form is based on universal (male) suffrage. The First Charter makes the articulation of political and socio-economic demands clear: “the laws which make food dear, and those which, by making money scarce, make labour cheap, must be abolished; that taxation must be made to fall on property, not on industry [work]; that the good of the many, as it is the only legitimate end, so it must be the sole study of government.”7 The second petition added that “in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, thousands of people are dying from actual want; and your petitioners ... view with mingled astonishment and alarm the ill provision made for the poor, the aged, the infirm; and likewise perceive, with feelings of indignation, the determination of your honourable House to continue the Poor-Law Bill in operation, notwithstanding the many proofs ... of the cruel and murderous effects produced upon the wages of working men, and the lives of the subjects of this realm.”8 Thus the political demands were driven by the experience of radical need deprivation caused by the capitalist economy and justified by classical liberal rights-based social morality. What the Chartists demanded was not political rights for the sake of logical consistency between principle and practice, but political power as an instrument of social transformation. In other words, they demanded the political means to participate in subordinating the socio-economic system, not to a bureaucratic dictatorship, but to the democratically determined ends of the citizens of England. They did not argue that the government should own every productive resource, but rather that the framework principles that governed production mandate the satisfaction of those needs instrumentally valuable to the development of the capabilities of free beings. The best evidence of this interpretation of the Chartist movement is found in the arguments of its propertied opponents. Inveighing against 7 “First Chartist Petition,” A Radical Reader, 478. 8 “The 1842 Chartist Petition,” A Radical Reader, 492.

Nineteenth-Century England and France

95

the first charter, The Times argued that to extend the franchise would be to return England “to that state of savage nature in which the natural rights of man might be exercised by everyone who was strong enough to oppress his neighbour.”9 Even more clearly, arguing against the 1842 Charter, Macaulay maintained that it was a direct attack on property and therefore “utterly incompatible with the very existence of civilization.”10 Together these arguments reveal that what concerned the propertied opponents of the Charters was the social content of the demands that drove the movement for political reform. Since the Chartists made it clear that they intended to use political power to challenge economic power, those who used the law to safeguard private control over universally needed resources rejected the demands outright. In rejecting those demands they rejected democracy, and not simply in the sense that they refused to extend the franchise. They refused democracy as well in the sense that they refused to enable the working class to subordinate the economic system to the imperative of need satisfaction, and therefore they supported the continued subordination of the life horizons of the majority of people to the power of capital to expand in need-depriving and life-blind ways. Socio-material conditions which do not recognize a person’s universal interest in need satisfaction constitute a deep form of material dependence, and therefore, unfreedom. Evolving industrial society was not only need-depriving and life-blind in relation to the basic physical needs of life. It also ignored the need for meaningful work. I want to now shift focus to this other essential dimension in order to explicate more clearly the instrumental relationship between needs and capacity development central to the democratic interpretation of needs-grounded social morality. I have chosen the Luddites as my example because, contrary to the popular understanding of their movement, they were not opposed to mechanization as such but only to its life-destructive effects. As Thompson demonstrates, they believed that the principles according to which machinery was introduced, not machines per se, were the cause of those life-destructive effects. They did not oppose all technological development, therefore, but only the ground of social morality that subordinated the interests of workers in meaningful and well-paying work to the maximization of profit. 9 Halevy, History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century. Vol. 3, The Triumph of Reform (1830–1841), 296n. 10 Macaulay, speaking in Parliament, 3 May 1842, quoted in A Radical Reader, 490.

96

Democratic Society

The main catalyst for the Luddite movement was the immediate and uncompensated displacement of skilled workers by machines. Byron, writing in defence of workers who faced death for smashing machines, notes the material conditions which drove the Luddites into action. He argues that the direct action of the Luddites has “arisen from circumstances of the most unparalleled distress: the perseverance of these miserable men in their proceeding, tends to prove that nothing but absolute want could have driven a large ... body of the people into the commission of excesses so hazardous to themselves.”11 It was the law, developed in the matrix of liberal rights-based social morality, that permitted the destruction of the workers lives for the sake of increased “efficiency.” In 1808 Parliament eliminated all ancient legislation governing the use of machinery in the wool industry. Rather than update the laws to take account of new economic conditions in such a manner as to both permit mechanization and protect those who would be displaced by it, legislators simply gave carte blanche to factory owners to mechanize. The Luddite movement emerged three years later and con12 tinued its activities until 1817. The normative foundation of Luddism in needs-based social morality is summed up nicely in its warning to the government that the struggle would not cease until the House of Commons passes an Act “to put down all machinery hurtful to Commonality.”13 One can see right away that the General Army of Redressers was not opposed on principle to the use of machinery, but only to machinery “hurtful to commonality,” by which they clearly mean “opposed to the security of life conditions” for those whose livelihood and purpose depended upon skilled work in the mills. That they were not abstractly opposed to the mechanization of the cotton mills is proven further by the fact that they proposed schemes to gradually introduce machinery, to develop rudimentary forms of what would be called today “just transition programs” for the displaced workers, and to tax earnings on profits to create a fund for the unemployed. In light of these facts Thompson concludes that the Luddites’ “opposition to the new machinery does not appear to have 14 been unthinking or absolute.” What the Luddites contested, then, was not “labour-saving” machinery but the life-destructive effects of the 11 12 13 14

Lord Byron, “Defence of the Framebreakers,” A Radical Reader, 391. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 570. Ibid., 579. Ibid., 575.

Nineteenth-Century England and France

97

exercise of property rights. Byron, in his defence, again makes explicit reference to this contradiction between the interests of property rights and the universal interests of the workers embodied in their human needs. He remarks, sarcastically, that the workers, “in the foolishness of their hearts ... imagined, that the maintenance and well-doing of the industrious poor, were objects of greater consequence than the enrichment of a few individuals by any improvement in the implements of 15 their trade, which threw the workmen out of employment.” Thus the Luddites asserted the claims of need against the life-blind consequences of the exercise of liberal property rights. As I noted above, however, the Luddites also asserted more complex claims of a need for meaningful work. Machinery was not only “hurtful to commonality” in the sense that it was used in such a way as to deprive the displaced workers of the means of life, it was also hurtful in that it de-skilled work. Since human organic functioning includes thought and the creative transformation of matter, the subordination of human talent to machines without provision of new opportunities for creative work is as harmful to the humanity of human beings as deprivation of the basic means of life is to our physical being. This second and equally fundamental sense of “hurtfulness” is clear in the final stanza of the song, quoted by Thompson, “General Ludd’s Triumph”: Let the wise and the great lend their aid and advice Nor e’er their assistance withdraw Till full-fashioned work at the old fashioned price Is established by Custom and Law Then the Trade when this arduous contest is o’er Shall raise in full splendour its head And colting and cutting and squaring no more 16 Shall deprive honest workmen of bread.

The song focuses on the double deprivation suffered by the weavers. When machinery is introduced without regard for the consequences of the needs of life and humanity, workers are deprived of the means of satisfying their basic physical needs (it deprives them of bread) and their socio-cultural need for skilled, demanding, and meaningful activity (“full-fashioned work”). A just law would thus not ban outright the

15 Byron, “Defence of the Framebreakers,” A Radical Reader, 392. 16 Thompson, History of the English Working Class, 584.

98

Democratic Society

use of machinery, but rather would regulate its introduction in the interests of ensuring that both sets of needs are met. When the law serves only the interests of the propertied, it ends up in contradiction to the “interests of commonality,” that is, it subordinates the quality of life of human beings to the development of non-human, economic value, i.e., capital that is not mandated by social principle and law to serve the universal interests of the human beings who collectively produce it. As Thompson comments, “They could see no natural law by which one man, or a few men, could engage in practices which brought manifest misery to their fellows.”17 Contrary to their popular image, then, the Luddites did not look backward but, as Thompson argues, “forward to a democratic community [in which] industrial growth was implemented according to ethical principles and the pursuit of profit subordinated to human needs.”18 The struggle of the Luddites, isolated as it was, could not hope to achieve practical success commensurate with the human value of its principles. Nevertheless, its essential principle – that meaningful work is a vital human need which must be recognized and satisfied by the economy of a free society – remains of central importance today. If the progress of technological development has made meaningful work inside institutions of mass production impossible without giving up the massive gains in productivity achieved by those developments, the relocation of meaningful activity outside the factory (or the offices that coordinate production within and between them) is not ruled out. Such a relocation of meaningful activity, however, presupposes free time. Free time, I will argue, constitutes a third class of human needs. As with the other two classes, the recognition of free time as a vital need is the product of a set of struggles against the social forces that controlled time. I now turn to an examination of the struggles of the English working class for a shorter work day.

the need for free time From the perspective of classical liberal rights-based social morality, organized labour appeared to be the antithesis of free individuality. From the perspective of the evolving needs-based social morality, however, it is a conscious expression of the interdependence of human life 17 Ibid., 601. 18 Ibid., 603.

Nineteenth-Century England and France

99

that follows from our social-organic nature. That is, the union movement was a conscious form of human sociality. Our organic needs make us social beings because they cannot be satisfied outside social relations. New generations of humanity depend upon the coming together of two human individuals; the sustenance of the young depends upon, directly, the labour of women and, indirectly, the collective labour of society; the development of cognitive capabilities depends upon education; and the meaning of life-activity depends upon the recognition of its value by others. These claims were all clearly understood by the emergent union movement. “Man, by the constitution of his body and the disposition of his mind, is a creature formed for society,” reads the preamble to one union constitution quoted by Thompson.19 The espousal of this understanding of human social-organic nature shows the union movement in the opposite light from the one in which it was portrayed by liberal opponents. It is not a struggle for the abolition of individual differences and for a mass society. On the contrary, it is a struggle for the social-material conditions of free individuation. As Stearns argues, “the labour movement was not simply a struggle against mate20 rial hardship, but a way of human freedom.” A crucial contribution, I believe, was to reveal the connection between free time and the free development of human capabilities. The seemingly limitless productivity of industrial capitalism depended upon constant inputs of human labour. Since machines could run constantly, human labour had to be employed constantly. Thus, the interest of capitalists lay in employing labour up to its physical maximum. As Marx argues, “After capital had taken centuries in extending the working day to its normal maximum limit, and then beyond this to the limit of the natural day of twelve hours, there followed on the birth of mechanism and modern industry in the last third of the eigthteenth century a violent encroachment like that of an avalanche in intensity and extent. All bounds of morals and nature, age and sex, night and day were broken down.”21 The rhythms of production transformed the experience of time itself. In nonindustrial societies its passage is marked by natural changes (night and day, the phases of the moon, the seasons, life and death). Time is experienced as qualitative transformation of the experiential context of life and human activity as regulated by those qualita19 Ibid., 463. 20 Stearns, “The European Labour Movement and the Working Classes,” 157. 21 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 264.

100

Democratic Society

tive changes (sleep at night, work in the day, plant in the spring, sow in autumn, etc.). In an industrial economy, however, the qualitative dimension of time is abolished by its quantitative dimension. Time is understood as a factor of production to be exploited with maximal efficiency. The measure of time is determined by the organization of production. Each step is to be accomplished in as little time as possible in order to ensure maximal productivity. Capitalism thus objectifies time in a historically unique way. It becomes a reified power exerting determining control over the form and content of human activity. As Postone argues, “temporal social forms [in capitalism] ... have a life of their own, and are compelling for all members of capitalist society, even if in a way that benefits the bourgeois class materially.”22 Time literally is money in capitalism, and since the determining end of production is maximization of monetary returns, time is to be exploited like any other factor of production. Time not spent working, preparing oneself to work, or consuming the product of labour, is literally “wasted” time. As in the case of physical and socio-cultural deprivation, the social dynamics that denied workers their need for free time produced conscious struggles for it. As Marx notes, “as soon as the working class ... recovered, in some measure, its senses, its resistance began.”23 This resistance, I will argue, cannot be understood simply as a clash over the contractual legal limitations on the working day, but is rooted, rather, in a foundational moral contradiction between treating human beings as an instrumental value of production and treating production as an instrumental value of the development of human life. From the perspective of the owners of capital, the human labouring individual is nothing but labour power, to be used as a factor of production for the maximum amount of time physically possible. The human being is a mere instrument of production. If the labourer has needs, these are relevant only from the standpoint of ensuring the worker’s capacity to work. Marx asks, “what is the length of time during which capital may consume the labour power whose daily value it buys?... It has been seen that ... capital replies: the working day contains the full twenty-four hours with the deduction of the few hours of repose without which labour power absolutely refuses its services once again.” Capital’s assumption that time as such is identical to labour time, that is, that any moment the worker can physically work for capital it must be working 22 Postone, Time, Labour, and Social Domination, 214. 23 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 264.

Nineteenth-Century England and France

101

for capital, demonstrates the instrumental manner in which capital understands the worker. Marx continues, “hence it is self-evident that the labourer is nothing else, his whole life through, than labour power; that therefore all his disposable time is by nature and law labour time, to be devoted to the self-expansion of capital.” This assumption is thus ultimately a normative assumption about the meaning, purpose, and value of human life. It contrasts with the meaning, purpose, and value of human life judged from the perspective of the needs and capacities of the person conceived of, not as a worker, but as a human being. Marx concludes, “time for education, for intellectual development, for the fulfilling of social functions and for social intercourse, for the free play of his bodily and mental activity, even the rest time of Sunday (and this in a country of sabbatarians) – moonshine! But in its blind unrestrainable passion, its were-wolf hunger for surplus labour, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the working day.”24 The struggle over the length of the working day, then, is ultimately a struggle between different understandings of the value of human life. The capitalist understands the human beings who run the factory as nothing more than instruments of production. The union movement, by contrast, understood human beings as intrinsically valuable and time as a necessary condition of the free realization of the capabilities that constitute humanity’s intrinsic value. Lest it be concluded that the foregoing argument is tendentiously Marxist, compare Marx’s argument with that of Michael Sadler, head of the Parliamentary Select Committee whose investigation of conditions in the factories led to the passage of the 1833 Factory Act which, among other things, began the process of legally regulating the working day. Sadler, clearly not a Marxist, argued that the purpose of the act was to end “over-exertion and confinement which common sense, as well as long experience has shown to be utterly inconsistent with the improvement of [the workers’] minds, the preservation of their morals, or the protection of their health.”25 Sadler draws attention once again to the contradiction between time spent working in the factory and the physical, socio-cultural, and temporal needs of the workers. In fighting for free time, the early workers’ movement was struggling for the conditions in which they could “improve” their minds, their health, and their 24 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 252. 25 “Speech of Michael Sadler in the House of Commons on the Second Reading of the Factories Regulation Bill (13 March 1832),” A Web of English History.

102

Democratic Society

“morals.” Sadler goes further, however, and directly challenges classical liberal social morality. He maintains against opponents who argue that “the very principle of this bill is an improper interference between employer and employee” that labour markets are inherently unjust because “the employer and the employee do not meet on equal terms” but rather “the latter ... call him as free as you please, is often almost entirely at the mercy of the former.”26 In other words, Sadler recognizes that there is a difference between legal freedom defined by equality of rights and material freedom defined by equality of capability to determine one’s own life horizons and life projects. Interpreted as a contribution to the development of needs-based social morality, the struggle of the labour movement for a reduced working day is a struggle to free time from its oppressive determination by capitalist dynamics. More than this, however, the struggle brings into sharp relief the fundamental contradiction of values that divides classical liberal-rights based social morality from needs-based social morality. That contradiction is between a money-grounded system of value that treats human beings as merely instrumental factors in the accumulation of capital and a life-grounded system of value that treats the free development of vital human capabilities as intrinsically valuable. In the former, needs are not distinguished from wants and the satisfaction of either is contingent upon the ability to pay. Their satisfaction is not understood as instrumental to the growth of capabilities but rather to the growth of the economy in its blind quest to expand. In the latter, needs are distinguished from wants and economic growth is to be governed by the universal interests of human beings in the satisfaction of their needs and development of their capabilities. The self-organization of the working class, notwithstanding the many problems that have undoubtedly compromised it over time (sexism, racism, sectionalism, economism), presupposes a different and ultimately democratic and life-affirmative system of value. The realization of this system of value, in which value means the development of life’s capabilities rather than the accumulation of capital, presupposes that the need-satisfying resources that workers produce through their labour are distributed and appropriated on the basis of claims rooted in need. As Michael Lebowitz argues, “the political economy of wage labour ... stresses that only through combinations and unity can wage labourers capture the fruit of co-operation for themselves and realize them in the need for free devel26 Ibid.

Nineteenth-Century England and France

103

27

opment.” I will conclude this section by examining how a comprehensive articulation of needs-based social morality informed a conception of democratic society that oriented the struggles of French workers in the 1848 Revolution and the 1870 Paris Commune.

for a democratic and social republic The middle of the nineteenth century saw French workers weighed down by poverty despite significant overall economic growth. The work day was between fourteen and fifteen hours, living conditions disastrous, disease common and deadly, the life expectancy in the industrial areas only thirty-two years.28 As political turmoil spread, the working class, facing these forms of material deprivation, distinguished its demands for a “democratic and social republic” from the political demands of the bourgeoisie.29 I will focus on the relationship between ateliers nationaux (national workshops) and universal suffrage from the perspective of their contribution to the developing conception of democratic society and its needs-based social morality. The national workshops were the idea of Louis Blanc, the only socialist member of the provisional government. They were conceived both as a solution to the problem of unemployment and as a social investment in the development of the human capabilities of workers. On the surface, it is easy to interpret the idea as a development of liberal rightsbased social morality. Bury, for example, while correctly noting that the acceptance of the principle of the ateliers nationaux was a “radical departure” from the laissez-faire ideology of the July Monarch, nevertheless interprets the principle behind the workshops themselves as “the right 30 to work.” To so interpret the idea, however, is to miss the reason why this demand was a radical departure from laissez faire ideology. Recall that a right is an individually held legal entitlement. To be enforceable there must be some individual or group with a corresponding obligation to not violate the other’s right. Who violates the right to work? Individual capitalists? That cannot be the case. Owners of productive resources hire and fire according to the level of demand in the labour market in their industry. They are not in control of those dynamics and 27 28 29 30

Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 82. Jones, The 1848 Revolutions, 6–7. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 149. Bury, “The Second Republic,” 19.

104

Democratic Society

cannot be held legally responsible if some subset of the population finds itself unemployed. The “responsibility” for unemployment, then, lies in the dynamics of labour markets themselves. To insist on a policy of full employment is to call into question those dynamics, as well as their legitimating social morality. Interpreting that demand as a positive right obscures the depth of the critique of social organization implied in the demand that the nation’s wealth be utilized in such a way that the energies and capabilities of everyone capable of working are as fully developed as possible. Blanc’s program would require the reorganization of the production and distribution of social wealth such that meaningful work was available as a matter of social principle. Its radicality consists in its critique of the formal separation of economic and political power. Blanc conceived of the national workshops not as government-sponsored welfare provision justified by appeal to a right to work, but rather as self-organized worker co-operatives justified by the human need for meaningful work. His idea was a response to working-class demands. What the workers demanded was not simply a right to work, i.e., an entitlement to be occupied in any sort of remunerative task, but meaningful activity. This point is evident in the words of a worker quoted by Lord Elton. “It is not our will to work that is lacking,” he argued, “but useful work suited to our callings.”31 The worker implies that there is an intrinsic link between the given mode of social production and unemployment or meaningless employment. What he demands is not that the government simply provide him a livelihood, but deeper, a change in the values governing labour markets such that the realization of individual capabilities (“our callings”) contribute to the overall health of the nation (“useful work”). Individual self-realization, he implicitly understands, is not possible simply by force of will, but depends upon the social organization of productive resources. In practice, however, the workshops were a travesty of their guiding 32 value, “English workhouses in the open,” according to Marx. Again, however, I am not concerned with immediate successes or failures but with the slow evolution of needs-based social morality through a series of struggles. Marx, while viciously critical of the practice, recognized the deep challenge the principle of the workshops posed to liberal31 Lord Elton, “The Revolution of 1848,” 15. 32 Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France 1848–1850 (Moscow: Progress Publishers), 1972, 36.

Nineteenth-Century England and France

105

capitalist society. He argued that “behind the right to work stands the power over capital, behind the power over capital, the appropriation of the means of production.”33 The value that orients the appropriation of the means of production is not centralized state control (the dictatorship over needs), but rather self-determination, the use of social resources to enable citizens to pursue, in the words of the worker quoted above, their “callings.” Neither a centralized authority passively satisfying what it takes to be the needs of the citizens nor a liberal government safeguarding the “privacy” of economic power can satisfy the conditions for a democratic society. Society becomes democratic to the extent that its major institutions are governed by the collective decisions of its citizens. Arresting democratization at the gates of parliamentary assemblies leaves unchecked the power of dominant economic classes and results in a contradictory social formation. It is in the context of this idea of democratic society that the demand for universal suffrage should be interpreted. As I noted above, the slogan of the working class in 1848 was for a democratic and social republic. This demand is incompatible with the formal separation of economic and political power justified by classical liberal social morality. Such a demand does not regard formal political power as an end in itself but rather as a legitimate means of extending social democratization. As David Beetham rightly argues, “insofar as the principles of popular control and political equality can apply to the decision making of any group or association, democracy has a much wider remit than government as such ... one criterion of a democratic society is that its associational life should be internally democratic, as well as that it should provide the socio-economic conditions for political equal34 ity to be realized in practice.” The radical implications of such a conception of democratic society appear not at the level of equalizing rights but at the level of extending democratic power into socioeconomic life. This form of democratization itself should be understood as a vital human need insofar as human beings are potentially self-governing, that is, conscious of socially imposed barriers to free existence and capable of collectively reorganizing their social life in accordance with collectively agreed upon ends. That is, human beings are fundamentally harmed when their life horizons are determined by social forces over which they have no control. Indeed, for potentially 33 Ibid., 62. 34 Beetham, Democracy and Human Rights, 5.

106

Democratic Society

free beings, this may be the most unbearable form of harm, if judged over the long term. Marx’s dismissive attitude toward the demand for universal suffrage fails entirely to understand these radical implications.35 He cannot see beyond the liberal appearance of the demand to its radically democratic essence. I will return to Marx’s understanding of democracy below. Here I want to concentrate on the necessary link between formal political democracy and social democratization. The importance of workers, women, racialized minorities, and other oppressed groups gaining the vote is not that it makes the practice of classical liberalism consistent with its principles. Rather, it lies in the fact that it provides the opportunity for articulating unmet needs, and, most importantly, establishing a legitimate platform from which demands for social democratization can be launched, demands which, though they violate the formal separation of political and economic power necessary to liberalcapitalism, cannot be legitimately resisted without the resisting classes exposing themselves as an undemocratic minority interest. The social essence of political rights was revealed clearly in the political victory of the French working class in 1848. Securing the right to vote mobilized and brought together the impoverished mass of the population in a new-found understanding of the legitimacy of their own power. The elections became the occasion for mass processions and celebrations, producing a voter turnout of 84 per cent, a figure rarely if ever obtained today, when it has been made clear to people by long experience that social conditions are by and large unaffected by whatever party “rules.”36 The struggle over the franchise had a catalytic effect on the desire of the working class to transform themselves into subjects, ie., into the active creators of their own social and economic reality, and in so doing to point the way beyond the formal separation of economic and political power to a new society in which people could deliberate together about how best to govern the entirety of social institutions. The same transformed self-understanding can also be found among women and racially oppressed minorities once they had achieved political legitimacy. Released from their status as the objects of power, people manifest a hitherto hidden capability for responsible, reflective, and deliberative planning and decision making. An excellent example from 1848 was 35 Marx, The Class Struggles in France 1848–1850, 66 36 Duveau, 1848: The Making of a Revolution, 96.

Nineteenth-Century England and France

107

the Luxembourg Commission, established to generate ideas for new regulations governing working life. Like the national workshops, the reality of the Luxembourg Commission fell far short of its principle (to be a parliament of labour). Nonetheless, within it workers and union activists demonstrated their competence to deliberate, rationally formulate their interests, and work out practical means of transforming their own material conditions.37 To dismiss the development of formal political strategies as “detracting from the revolutionary struggle” is to ignore the necessary role that political debate, dialogue, deliberation, and rational conviction will have to play in any society that hopes to attain stability and social peace. Justifying a needs-based social morality solves the general problem of private control over universally needed resources; it does not solve the problem of how finite resources are to be most effectively used. Thus, if citizens are to actively satisfy their needs they must be able to argue about what the most pressing needs of the moment are, how to weigh alternative strategies of resource utilization, and how to develop and govern the mechanisms through which those resources will be produced, distributed, and appropriated. The Paris Commune demonstrated, albeit briefly, that major social institutions could be governed in this deeply democratic way. Despite three distinct revolutionary periods (1789–95, 1830, 1848) fundamental social problems persisted in France up to 1870.38 These unresolved social problems were particularly acute in Paris, a city of “appalling slums, vastly inflated cost of living ... long hours of work ... child labour, no security of employment, no sickness benefits, no pensions, [and] restrictions on the right to affiliate.”39 Fundamental need deprivation thus made Paris ripe for revolution. The defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War was the context in which these frustrations could explode into political struggle. The Commune set about tackling these socio-economic problems, drawing on the example of 1848 as well as upon the evolving body of socialist theory. The Communards planned to reopen closed factories as worker co-operatives; they opened the doors to the city’s educational institutions free of charge; they drew up plans for relief and imagined new systems of welfare delivery.40 Most importantly for my purposes, 37 38 39 40

Ibid., 69. Thompson, Democracy in France since 1870, 16. Horne, The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870–1871, 356. Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, 53–4.

108

Democratic Society

however, the Commune did not function by arbitrary fiat but through democratic deliberation involving working Parisians normally excluded from political power. Locally produced resources could be democratically distributed and utilized because the collective intelligence of the population could be marshalled in a way that is impossible if power flows from the national to the local level. The Commune thus envisaged a fundamental reorganization of the institutions of political and social power which one might call, following David Held, “pyramidal.” In this model of political organization power is grounded in local knowledge of local conditions and is fed upward to institutions of more general competence.41 This reorganization was envisaged as a means of democratically empowering citizens, the majority of whom could not be expected to participate full-time in national politics. The pyramidal reorganization of power would thus, at least in theory, allow a genuinely national interest to emerge, as opposed to the national interest being merely asserted by members of the national legislature formally disconnected from local levels of political organization. As Marx wrote of the project, “the unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organized by the Communal Constitution, and to become a reality by the destruction of the State power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and 42 superior to, the nation itself.” The idea was to ground political power in the experienced reality of people’s lives and thereby to enable citizens to have access to institutions and forums in which their concrete needs could be articulated and addressed. The national interest would thus become an emergent property of genuine popular deliberation, not whatever a ruling party happens to assert it to be. In the Commune’s practice all representatives at every level would be elected by universal suffrage, subject to recall, and remunerated at the average 43 wages of a worker. These measures were designed to ensure that politics was practised as a civic duty, not as a career. Political defeat meant the end of the project, but the value of its principle lives on.

41 See Held, Democracy and the Global Order. I should note that Held is skeptical of the viability of such a mode of organization, although his own project for cosmopolitan democracy depends upon the development of new constellations of local, regional, national, and international institutions. 42 Marx, The Civil War in France, 55. 43 Ibid., 54.

Nineteenth-Century England and France

109

This principle, that political power is grounded in local knowledge of local situations, is essential to the democratic implementation of a needs-based social morality because it offers the best hope for avoiding bureaucratic and authoritarian means of need satisfaction. If the national interest emerges from the deliberations of local institutions organically connected to the expressed needs of the population, then the practical decisions of the higher-level bodies could genuinely be said to be in the national interest. Of course, not every particular interest is going to be satisfied, but this fact is no more damaging to a pyramidal form of political organization than it is to any other. Since such a form of reorganization would be expressly democratic and consciously anchored in needs-based social morality, deliberations would be constrained by the definition of needs as well as by the formal constraints (constitutionally defined duties and responsibilities, formalized mechanisms of debate and decision) on individual power necessary for the functioning of any democratic body. The advantage of a bottom-up, rather than top-down, form of organization, however, is that local governments can involve more people more centrally than can national bodies in which the interests of millions have to be represented by hundreds. Since needs can be satisfied actively only if citizens can deliberate about priorities and principles of governance and implementation and have access to the resources necessary to the implementation of their plans, there must be institutions in which greater numbers of citizens can participate. Such participation cannot happen in a national capital, but only in the localities in which people live, work, play, and interact. The limits of population and time are the greatest threats to the republican ideal of a democratic, deliberative citizenship. These limits can be superceded only if local political institutions are developed which have control over the resources necessary for the satisfaction of local needs and which are organically linked with the institutions of general national sovereignty. In the final chapter I will turn to an examination of contemporary examples of experiments in local democratic need satisfaction. For the moment, let me sum up the results of this section. This section has examined the development of needs-based social morality to encompass the socio-cultural need for meaningful work and democratic self-determination and the temporal need for free time. Thus, an examination of the theory and practice of struggles against the life-destructive effects of classical liberal rights-based social morality uncovers demands for the satisfaction of three fundamental classes of human needs: needs for the natural conditions of biological life, needs

110

Democratic Society

for the socio-cultural conditions of human life, and temporal needs for the conditions of free human life. Underlying needs-based social morality and supplying its justifying value is the idea of the human being as a potentially free and conscious creator of itself as a unique centre of self and world creative activity. The conditions of realization of this potential are not found in the individual will abstractly conceived but in the social relations and governing social morality which form the concrete shape in which human interdependence is lived. Classical liberal social morality has been exposed as a barrier to the satisfaction of these conditions of realization insofar as it justifies a form of separation of political and economic power which makes democratic governance of the socioeconomic life of a nation appear to be unjust “interference” in affairs which are properly private. This form of separating political and economic power is undemocratic, however, because it poses socio-material limits to the formation and realization of collective and individual life projects which are not explicitly consented to by individuals, nor can they be to the extent that political power is debarred from imposing democratic governing principles on economic life. Although the term “rights” was often encountered in the justifying discourse of these struggles, I have argued that underlying the use of the term is the principle that the existence of a genuine human need trumps the value of countervailing rights. It is more coherent, morally and politically, to advance needs- based claims on necessary resources in the language of needs because, first, it exposes more clearly the life-blind nature of classical liberal rights-based social morality, second, it exposes the contradiction of social interests at work in such a society, and third, it points democratic activists toward the social, rather than legal, changes necessary to secure the universal human interests to which needs give rise. To conclude this part I turn to the first systematic articulation of a needs-based social morality in the work of Marx, focusing on his conception of democratic society, his critique of liberal rights, and the ambiguities in his understanding of the nature of human capabilities and needs and the relationship between them.

9

Socialism and Democratic Need Satisfaction Need Satisfaction

m a r x ’ s c r i t i q u e of capitalism and his positive understanding of human freedom synthesizes, in effect, the insights into the nature and content of human needs and their instrumental relation to substantive human freedom that the various struggles against classical liberal social morality generated. His famous assertion “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” is more than a slogan or a utopian principle. It is a conscious recognition of the essential interdependence of human life, the social grounds of individuation, and the intrinsic link between social and individual life value. Individuals can individuate themselves if and only if their fundamental needs are met, and their needs can be met only through collective labour mediated by social institutions. I will return to the problems of how such a principle might be progressively institutionalized today in the final part. Here I want to focus on Marx’s philosophical contributions to needs-based social morality and the conception of democratic society it supports. As I noted in the previous section, Marx’s mature theory was sometimes naively dismissive of political democracy. I will argue, however, that his polemical attacks on bourgeois democracy ought not to blind contemporary readers to the deeper democratic conception of society that Marx develops. Marx establishes a link between the organization of human activity in the socio-economic structure of society and self-determination. Democracy, recall, is conceptually linked to the idea of selfdetermination. Since self-determination has socio-material conditions (active need satisfaction) it is incompatible with the formal separation of economic and political power typical of liberal capitalism and defended by rights-based social morality. Marx’s critique of liberal rights, while troubling if it is read as concluding that civil and political rights

112

Democratic Society

are nothing but ideological masks of exploitation, sheds penetrating light on the democratic limitations of formal democracy if it is interpreted in the context of a critique of the liberal form of separating political and economic power. Marx’s systematic criticism of the “privacy” of economic power discloses the essential contradiction of a liberal-capitalist democracy: it undermines self-determination at the sociomaterial level even as it legitimates itself by appeal to self-determination at the political level. Marx thus reveals the general problem that must be solved by a democratic society: how to extend the practices of selfdetermination ideally expressed in the political dimension of life to the institutions that organize our material life activity. As with the concrete struggles that have been examined above, Marx’s practical answer to this question is no longer in accord with contemporary demands and possibilities. However, understanding his critique of political democracy is a key precondition to developing creative institutional solutions in the changed conditions of globalized liberal-capitalism in the twentyfirst century.

democracy and the material conditions of human freedom In order to understand Marx as a democratic theorist one must begin with his critique of Hegel in Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. As a Young Hegelian, Marx initially believed that the problems of German society could be resolved through a liberal-democratic revolution.1 As Marx’s thinking developed, however, it focused in more depth on the one-sidedness of the classical liberal conception of rights and the consequent need to extend democratic practices into the socioeconomic institutions of liberal-capitalist society. Linking his liberal and revolutionary conceptions of the conditions for human freedom, however, is the master value of Marx’s social theory, humanity as a selfcreative and self-determining species. Marx derives this conception of humanity as self-determining and self-creative from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The dialectic of selfconsciousness, through which individual human beings gain insight 1 For two superb examinations of the philosophical context in which Young Hegelianism arose and how Marx gradually differentiated himself from this context see Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origin of Radical Social Theory, and Kouvelakis, Philosophy and Revolution.

Socialism and Democratic Need Satisfaction

113

into their social nature and through which humanity as a whole gains insight into its essential freedom, forms the deep normative core of Marx’s own conception of human freedom. As Marx writes, “the outstanding achievement of Hegel’s Phenomenology and of its final outcome, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle, is, first, that Hegel conceives the self-generation of man ... as a process ... and thus grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man – true, because real man – as the outcome of man’s own labour.”2 Hegel’s dialectic of negativity is radical in that it reveals human labour, self-making activity, as the dynamic force ultimately responsible for the form of social organization. Human beings are constrained by social objectivity, but because social objectivity is ultimately grounded in their own subjective practices, they are in principle capable of transforming oppressive into free social forms. As soon as people realize that the constraining power of social objectivity is a function of the organization of subjective activity, which it is thus in their power to change, they learn that social organization is ultimately a problem of how people collectively think it ought to be. As he says in the most important thesis on Feuerbach, “the materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that the educator must himself be educated.”3 Human beings are not, therefore, functions of their environment; unlike most other animals humans are capable of actively creating their social world and thus freely determining the conditions of their own life. This understanding of human beings as subjects, rather than objects, of historical forces thus establishes the basis for a critical contrast between the essence of human freedom (our capacity to create our own conditions of life) and social structures in which this essence is alienated rather than realized. Hegel’s essential problem is that he fails to realize the liberatory insights of his dialectical understanding of human development. In The Philosophy of Right Hegel argues that the institutional conditions of human freedom are established when they make possible a conscious identity between the principles that determine the individual will and the principles that determine the universal will (the law). This condition is satisfied when both law and individual will obey rational principles. Individual rational agents recognize their own rational (universal) interests in the content of rational laws. Once individuals understand 2 Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,” 332–3. 3 Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” 615–16.

114

Democratic Society

the law as the universal expression of their own rational will, necessity and freedom are reconciled in a harmonious social order. However, the reciprocity demanded between individual interests and the law depends upon an active relationship between individual citizens and the laws that they must obey. In other words, it presupposes rational consent to the law. Hegel, however, does not argue that democracy is essential to rational consent to the law. Hence, despite his philosophical insights into the principles of a free society, the way in which he institutionalizes these principles contradicts the idea of human freedom that informs them. Freedom is ultimately reduced to simply obeying the law. He writes, “the state is absolutely rational in as much as it is the actuality of the substantial will which it possesses in the particular self-consciousness, once that consciousness has been raised to consciousness of its universality. This substantial unity is an absolute universal end in itself, in which freedom comes into its supreme right. On the other hand, this final end has supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the state.”4 Marx’s critique focuses on the lack of reciprocity between individual and universal. Hegel’s conception of freedom demands that the universal (state power) be the universalization of individual wills (self-consciousness) but his actual conclusion subordinates individual wills to a universal that exists over and above them and rules without their input. Whereas Hegel believes that the universal must be embodied in a single will (a monarch), Marx argues that the particular wills must raise themselves to universality by direct participation in the affairs of state. For the young Marx, then, only a democratic state can be free. If human freedom in general is the collective power to determine the conditions of social life in accordance with a consciously agreed-upon set of principles, goals, and values, and if human beings can exist as individuals only in social formations, then the problem of realizing human freedom is to identify the structural impediments that limit selfdetermination and to achieve conscious agreement among citizens as to how they might be best overcome. Politically, the solution to the problem requires democratic deliberations, movements, and institutions, since it is only through political discourse and debate that conscious agreement can be freely produced. Put more simply, only when individuals participate in the creation of the law can they accept the law as legitimate. Hence Hegel contradicts his own conception of rational 4 Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, 155–6.

Socialism and Democratic Need Satisfaction

115

freedom when he defends monarchy. As Marx argues, “democracy is the truth of monarchy, monarchy is not the truth of democracy. Monarchy cannot be understood in its own terms; democracy can. In democracy none of the elements attains a significance other than what is proper to it. Each is in actual fact only an element of the whole demos ... In monarchy one part determines the character of the whole.”5 In a democracy, law is free because it is the collective product of the associated citizens. In a monarchy it is unfree because its universality is abstract. It is ultimately the product of the decree of one rather than the expressed will of all. In his early work Marx limited his conception of democracy to a republican state in which citizens’ deliberations are the foundation of the laws they will obey. The practices of self-governance define the people as a people, i.e., an internally unified collectivity committed to its own freedom. As Marx explains, “in monarchy the whole, the people, is subsumed under one of its particular modes of being, the political constitution. In democracy the constitution itself appears only as one determination, that is, the self-determination of the people. In monarchy we have the people of the constitution, in democracy the constitution of the people.”6 Thus, for Marx, a people or a nation is not a given fact, it is the outcome of political labour consummated in the act of writing a constitution. The constitution is literally the constitution of the people as a nation. Marx clearly has the French Revolution in mind here. Through the founding act of writing and promulgating a constitution, the citizen body discovers and articulates its universal interests and institutionalizes the values that will govern social life. In other state forms authority is exercised over the people, in a democracy the will of the people alone is authoritative. Thus, only a democracy can claim real legitimacy because only a democracy is the collective product of the self-conscious wills of its citizens. It is legitimate because it is the form of social objectivity that the people have consciously created for themselves through the exercise of their subjective capabilities. Marx’s shift of focus from Hegelian philosophy to English political economy and from the ground of legal legitimacy to the structure of socio-material dynamics soon revealed to him the limitations of this political conception of democracy. He does not thereby reject democracy as nothing but bourgeois ideology. Polemical asides found throughout his 5 Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,” 29. 6 Ibid.

116

Democratic Society

work notwithstanding, I contend that Marx’s subsequent critique of capitalism and the political form of democracy it evolved should be understood as a deepening of his democratic commitments. Capitalist political democracy assumes a contradiction within the individual between his or her public political being and his or her private economic being. The contradiction is a function of the separation of political power (the state) from social and economic power (civil society). In a liberal capitalist society, “civil society and the state are separated. Hence the citizen of the state is also separated from the citizen as member of civil society ... In the latter he stands as a private person outside the state – this social organization does not touch the political state as such.”7 Because civil society lies outside the public life of politics, it is allowed to exert determining force on the content of citizens’ lives. While the citizen is equal in the “heaven” of the political world, he or she is “unequal as regards their earthly existence in civil society.”8 Since it is in civil society that the material conditions of capability development are established, the rights that define the political sphere, since they do not correct for the material coercion that economic forces exert, cannot be sufficient conditions of human freedom. Thus Marx’s argument is not directed against democracy as such but rather against the undemocratic separation of economic from political power. The structure of freedom in the political sphere (political rights to participation) is contradicted by the foundational right of civil society, the exclusive right to own and control productive property without principled concern for the effects on the social whole or the individuals who compose it. As Marx argues, “On what is a political revolution based? On the fact that part of civil society emancipates itself and attains general domination; on the fact that a definite class, proceeding from its particular situation, undertakes the general emancipation of society. This class emancipates the whole of society, but only provided that the whole of society is in the same situation as this class, i.e., possesses money and education and can acquire them at will.”9 Thus, even the universalization of political rights is an insufficient condition for a democratic society. Cut off from need-governed access to “money and education” citizens remain in a state of material dependence on forces that are not shaped according to their collective decisions. Democracy thus must extend into the 7 Ibid., 77. 8 Ibid., 79. 9 Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,” 184.

Socialism and Democratic Need Satisfaction

117

social heart of liberal-capitalist society or remain in contradiction with itself. In order to understand this contradiction more completely it is necessary to examine Marx’s critique of liberal rights.

rights and abstract freedom: a reflection on “on the jewish question” Marx considers the structure and implications of liberal rights in “On the Jewish Question.” He investigates them in light of the difference between political emancipation and human emancipation revealed by the problem of religious freedom for German Jews. While he supports religious freedom (political emancipation), he argues that the separation of church and state and freedom of conscience are not sufficient conditions of human freedom. Human freedom presupposes the resolution of the social contradictions that classical liberal social morality accepts. In other words, the realization of human freedom depends upon the material interdependence of human life becoming a conscious value steering social institutions. The competitive dynamic of liberal-capitalism, in which one person’s or group’s victory is a competing group’s or person’s loss, must give way to forms of co-operation in which, as far as possible, collectively binding decisions advance everyone’s life interest in need satisfaction and capability development. Marx begins by emphasizing the way in which liberal rights presuppose the division of the social whole into public and private spheres. It is just because political rights do not extend into the “private” sphere of civil society that they can be universalized without compromising the historically unique form of dependence on market forces discussed in part 1, chapter 4. He explicates this point by commenting upon the meaning of a property qualification for suffrage. He argues that the property qualification for suffrage is the last political form of giving recognition to private property. Nevertheless, the political annulment of private property not only fails to abolish private property, it even presupposes it. The state abolishes in its own way the distinctions of birth, social rank, education, occupation, when it declares that birth [etc.] are non-political distinctions, when it proclaims without regard to these distinctions that every member of the nation is an equal participant in the national sovereignty. Nevertheless, the 10 state allows private property ... to act in its own way, as private property.

10 Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” 153.

118

Democratic Society

If the state declares private property a nonpolitical distinction it declares that citizenship is not dependent upon a property qualification, but also, and at the same time, that citizenship does not entail legitimate collective power over the socio-economic life of the nation. What it abolishes at one level it preserves at another, with the result that private property retains control over the natural and social wealth of the nation. The result, Marx notes, is that “the state can be a free state with11 out man being a free man.” This does not necessarily mean that Marx is indifferent to political democracy. It does mean that political democracy is grounded in deeper socio-material conditions than are comprehended by the universalization of the rights of citizenship. The political depth of Marx’s critique of rights is ignored by contemporary critics of Marx’s position. Kenneth Baynes, following Claude Lefort, accuses Marx of failing to understand how “rights provide a basis for challenging the boundaries of the political.”12 Herbert Gintis and Samuel Bowles make a similar argument, pointing to the fact that “class and non-class demands alike have generally been framed not in Marxist terms ... but in terms of rights.”13 As the preceding sections of this part make clear, Baynes and Bowles and Gintis are correct that struggles against liberal-capitalism often articulated their demands in the language of rights. But the logical structure of those demands, the range of inferences about democratic society that they made possible, points us toward a deeper social morality of need satisfaction. As will become clear in the next part, the crucial victories the exploited and oppressed have won, when they have taken the form of positive social and economic rights, have proven insufficient to establish the sociomaterial conditions of human freedom. This lends support to Marx’s position, which is not to ignore rights or dismiss the efficacy of “contesting the limits of the political” by demanding legal regulation of the capitalist economy (he supported the struggle for factory legislation, as I revealed in the previous part). What Marx insists upon, and what is crucial for the development of needs-based social morality and a democratic society, is the ultimate necessity of changing the social relations, and the reified forces that govern those social relations, in a capitalist market society. Consider, once again, the “right” to work. To secure a 11 Ibid., 152. 12 Baynes, “Rights as Critique,” Political Theory, 458. 13 Gintis and Bowles, “Rethinking Marxism and Liberalism from a Radical Democratic Perspective,” 39.

Socialism and Democratic Need Satisfaction

119

right to work is one thing and to actually have employment that is both socially valuable and individually meaningful is quite another. Let us suppose that individuals have a right to work and that the government is mandated to protect that right. Let us further suppose that the supply of skilled and meaningful labour outstrips the demand of labour markets. How is the right to be actionable unless the profit motive governing labour markets is changed? If the right is actionable without changing the value governing labour markets then people will end up doing meaningless busy work, not work “suitable to their callings” as the French worker quoted in the previous section said. The human need for meaningful work and the life value of creative capability development can therefore be realized only in changed socio-material conditions, even if, as I would maintain, struggles for legal governance of existing conditions remain important. Marx’s claim that a free state is not necessarily a state of free being must be interpreted in this light. So long as the socio-economic system operates according to a money-grounded system of value, and rightsbased social morality legitimates it, the life-value of human capability development is excluded as a basis of economic decision making. Political institutions can express collective goals in which this life-grounded value is pre-eminent, but if the productive wealth of the nation is controlled by private economic agents for whom profitability is the steering value, the political decisions cannot be translated into effective practice. Liberal-democratic capitalism thus rests upon a series of bifurcations that limit the practical value of political democracy. The universally minded political citizen is divided from the egocentric economic agent, egocentric economic agents are set against other egocentric economic agents, workers are pitted against capitalists, women against men, religious citizens against atheists. All prosecute their agendas against each other in a conflictual field in which everyone asserts their rights against everyone else, all the while failing to understand how each depends on their social association with everyone else and blind to the deeper determining force that economic relations exert. As Marx says in arguably the most important passage in his essay, “where the political state has achieved its true development man, not only in thought, in consciousness, but in reality, in life, leads a two-fold life, a heavenly and an earthly life: life in the political community, in which he conceives of himself as a communal being, and life in civil society, in which he acts as a private individual, regards other men as means, degrades himself into a means, and becomes the plaything of alien pow-

120

Democratic Society 14

ers.” Insofar as the human being is a citizen she recognizes her interdependence with others and conceives of herself as a member of a whole engaged in a collective project. However, at the social level in which she is materially interdependent with others, at the level of fundamental need satisfaction and capability development, she treats herself as a private agent, exploits or is exploited, and is subject to the exigencies of capitalist market forces for the satisfaction of her fundamental needs and the scope and depth of her capability development. Ideally free and materially in chains, each pursues what she takes to be her self-interest. Classical liberal rights not only presuppose social conflict in the form of zero-sum competition, they positively encourage it. The rights of man, Marx contends, are one and all the rights of “egoistic man, of man separated from other men and from the community.”15 Marx thus understands rights as necessary only to the extent that social relations in which one person’s interest is a threat to the interests of others prevail. Freedom in such a society is “the liberty of man as an isolated monad ... based not on the association of man with man but on the separation of man 16 from man.” This real separation alienates human beings from each other, leading to the result that everyone sees in others “not the realization of [one’s] own freedom, but the barrier to it.”17 Since rights safeguard the social relations that cause this perpetual conflict, they cannot solve the problem that one person’s freedom is another person’s servitude. The essence of liberal rights, then, according to Marx, is not freedom, but security. As he argues, “security is the highest social concept of civil society, the concept of police, expressing the fact that the whole of society exists only in order to guarantee to each of its members the pres18 ervation of his person, his rights, and his property.” Security is the secret truth of liberal freedom precisely because its social relations really do make people threats to one another, not in the sense in which the individual criminal is a threat to personal property, but in the deeper social sense that the freedom of the group that exercises private control over productive wealth contradicts the life interests of all in active need satisfaction and capability development. Resolving that contradiction does 14 15 16 17 18

Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” 159. Ibid., 162. Ibid. Ibid., 163. Ibid.

Socialism and Democratic Need Satisfaction

121

not entail that individuals become saintly altruists but rather recognize their interdependence with one another and reorganize their social life such that productive wealth is consciously used to satisfy those universal interests (including the life interests of the controlling class). Thus a needs-grounded social morality does not deny that people have different interests and goals, or that these might conflict. It maintains, however, that a society in which the production, distribution, and appropriation of resources is directly governed by the goal of first satisfying the three fundamental classes of human needs will be in a much better position to resolve individual and group differences than one in which need satisfaction and capability development is reduced to an instrumental value of profitable system expansion. This is the lasting value of Marx’s conception of human freedom in a communist society. However, the way in which Marx tends to confuse needs, wants, and capabilities obscures his genuine insight.

needs, capabilities, and human freedom Whereas the liberal conception of freedom prioritizes freedom of choice within a zone of autonomy secured by rights, Marx’s concept emphasizes self-realization in a consciously co-operative social matrix. Marx’s conception is not antithetical to, but the social realization of, the value of collective self-determination expressed politically in liberalism. As I argued in the previous section, Marx’s critique of freedom in liberal capitalism contends that collective self-determination – the determining value of the political sphere – is contradicted by the rule of market forces in the socio-economic sphere. I do not want to examine that contradiction further here but instead examine the structure and cogency of the idea of human freedom that guides Marx’s critique. While this conception of freedom, I will argue, is intrinsically linked to any conception of democratic society, Marx’s explication of it proves problematic. The essential problem is that Marx tends to conflate needs (as objective requirements of human being and freedom) with subjective wants as well as with capabilities (the types of action which distinguish human beings from other life forms and which, in their realization, express life value). Marx tends to understand historical progress in the realization of essential human freedom in terms of the growth of needs and includes under this conception of needs what are commonly called luxury goods. This ambiguity, I will argue, is especially problematic in contemporary circumstances. Does not consumer society offer to citi-

122

Democratic Society

zens a variety of goods that was quite literally unthinkable in Marx’s day? Can one not trace life-threatening ecological problems to the growth of “needs” for luxuries that can only be satisfied by ever more intensive and extensive demands on energy and resources? Answering these questions in the affirmative, without rigorously distinguishing need from desire and defining historical progress in terms of the growth of capabilities, rather than needs, would undermine the coherence of the conception of democratic society implied by the needs ground. Thus, while I will draw out of Marx’s understanding of nonalienated human activity the positive conception of freedom that democratic society seeks to ground, I will at the same time have to resolve the ambiguities that bedevil Marx’s analysis. The variety of meanings that Marx assigns to the concept of need in his works has been exhaustively catalogued, first by Agnes Heller and more recently by Ian Fraser.19 I do not propose to repeat their excellent work here, but draw on it only insofar as it highlights the problem that concerns me. Heller was the first to rigorously investigate the manifold uses of the term in Marx. She argues, correctly I believe, that the concept of need “plays the hidden but principal role in Marx’s economic categories.”20 However, insofar as Marx means (and Heller supports him in this) that human value is measured by the range, extent, and growth of human needs (demands on the social and natural environment), rather than capabilities, this value ground leads to serious confusions. Marx wants to argue that the tremendous productivity of capitalism establishes the material foundation for the full realization of human freedom. Through capitalist production the extraordinary creativity of the human species is released from the bonds of custom, ignorance, and material deprivation. As he writes, “we have seen what significance, given socialism, the wealth of human needs acquires ... [it expresses] a new manifestation of the forces of human nature and a new enrichment of human nature.” The problem, as he sees it, is that in capitalism this wealth is privately appropriated and dependent for its growth on the exploitation, not only of labour, but of the desires of everyone. He continues, “under private property their significance is reversed: every person speculates on creating a new need in another.”21 This formulation, however, is seriously confused insofar as it fails to distinguish between 19 Heller, The Theory of Need in Marx; Fraser, Hegel and Marx: The Concept of Need. 20 Heller, The Theory of Need in Marx, 27. 21 Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,” 306.

Socialism and Democratic Need Satisfaction

123

needs (objective requirements of life the deprivation of which leads to harm in the form of reduction of organic capabilities) and wants (subjective psychological demands that people are conditioned to desire to satisfy but which do not lead to objective harm if they go unmet). This confusion is rooted in Marx’s highly problematic understanding of what Fraser calls (following Heller) “luxury” needs. Fraser argues that Marx understands luxury needs in contradistinction to necessary needs. Necessary needs, however, are not goods the deprivation of which causes harm to the one who suffers it, but are more like goods that people think that they cannot live without. This important problem becomes clear when one examines them in relation to luxury needs. What counts as necessary or as luxury for Marx is relative to the level of social development. In an undeveloped society certain articles will exist as luxury needs. Advances in social wealth convert luxury into necessary needs. As Fraser explains, “at a certain time luxury goods are those which are out of reach of the working class. However, with increases in productivity and spending power these luxuries can, in time, be made ‘necessary.’”22 So, for example, in 1920 a private automobile in North America would have counted as a luxury need whereas today it would be counted as a necessity. The reason, however, has nothing to do with any harm an agent without an automobile would suffer (assuming there are alternatives such as safe bicycle lanes and public transit) but only with the agent’s feeling deprived because “everyone else has one.” Marx explicitly invokes without criticism this psychology of envious consumeristic desire. His example is housing. He writes, “A house may be large or small, as long as the surrounding houses are equally small it satisfies all social demands for a dwelling. But let a palace arise beside the little house, and it shrinks from a little house to a hut. The little house now shows that its owner has only very slight or no demands to make ... The owner of the small house will feel more and more uncomfortable.”23 Marx fails here to distinguish genuine need from demand stimulation. It is only the psychological discomfort, and not any real inadequacy in the dwelling, that stimulates the demand for a larger house once a neighbour has built a larger one. The rational procedure in such a situation is to examine one’s own dwelling from the perspective of whether it satisfies one’s space requirements or not, and if it does, to rest content as one did before, regardless of what one’s neigh22 Fraser, Hegel and Marx, 134. 23 Marx, “Wage Labour and Capital,” 163.

124

Democratic Society

bour constructs. Unless the psychology of demand stimulation is resisted, then production of ever new luxury needs will continue, people will remain slaves to remunerative work, and massive pressure will be exerted on the natural environment, regardless of the form of society, whether capitalist or socialist.24 So long, therefore, as the growth of needs is not distinguished from the growth of wants and objective necessity is not distinguished from subjective demand, Marx cannot grasp the fundamental problem of capitalism at the proper normative depth. This problem becomes practically important in contemporary conditions. For if political demands are posed solely in terms of increasing the purchasing power of the working class without asking what it is that is available for purchase and what implications this type of life has for the development of capabilities, no really radical and democratic challenge is posed to the existing order. Marcuse understood this point clearly. As he argued, “The definition of the standard of living in terms of automobiles, television sets, airplanes, and tractors is that of the performance principle itself.”25 In other words, the internalization of this definition by workers and other oppressed groups ensures the survival of the system. Again, to criticize Marx for failing to distinguish between needs and wants is not to argue in favour of the desirability of bare subsistence over a world rich in human creations. It is to argue, however, that the richness of human creations must be measured by the growth of need satisfiers, not the growth of needs, as Marx suggests. For example, the need for food is a permanent fact of human organic nature. It does not grow historically. Demand for food does, however, grow historically, both quantitatively (more people need more food) and qualitatively (people demand a varied diet as social development increases). The growth of qualitative demand as such, however, is not the same as the development of new needs for food. The caloric requirements of the 24 I cannot here enter into the very complex discussion of Marx’s significance for a critical understanding of environmental problems. Clearly his critique of the type of growth definitive of capitalism would have to form at least a part of a critique of the causes of ecological problems, but the confusion between needs and desires introduces a limit to Marx’s efficacy for the critique of environmental destruction. A comprehensive discussion of the strengths and limitations of Marxism as the foundation for ecologically sound theory and practice can be found in Benton, ed., The Greening of Marxism. 25 Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 153.

Socialism and Democratic Need Satisfaction

125

human body vary with age, weight, and sex, not historical period. More importantly, however, it is essential to distinguish within the demand for a variegated diet between what is the result of an enriching curiosity about different cuisines and a refinement of taste and what is an advertising-stimulated demand for unhealthy, sugar- and fat-laden foods. Thus, in addition to the difference between wants and needs there is an essential difference between the growth of needs and the growth of need satisfiers (the former are more or less fixed, the latter develop). The essential point is that the value of socialism cannot be understood in terms of the liberation of unrestrained and unreflective consumer demand from its constraints under capitalism. If the mere realization of the demand to consume were the ultimate value of socialism, then it would now exist in microcosm in the lives of the wealthy, for whom no product or service, no matter how trivial, infantile, stupid, or destructive it may be, is out of reach. Unless one defines human value in terms of the growth of capabilities, then the mere quantitative growth of “goods” in abstraction from their contribution to the development of human creative capacities can be counted as “progress” toward freedom. In that case the problems of advanced capitalism would be problems of distribution only, rather than deep structural problems created by its regulating value system and social morality and the whole form of life that they encourage. These implications are in direct contrast to Marx’s own conception of freedom as conscious individuation within a social matrix governed by needs-based social morality. While globalized capitalism does indeed coexist with unjustifiable deprivation for more than one billion human beings, it has proven itself capable, when pushed, of reallocating resources to the most deprived. What it cannot do without negating its motive forces is treat human beings as intrinsically valuable, i.e., make decisions as to what to produce and how to distribute it on the basis of the value of enabling the fullest possible development of vital capabilities. Thus, in order to extract the conception of human freedom presupposed by the concept of democratic society, one must focus on Marx’s understanding of human activity, considering it separately from his problematic understanding of needs. Because Marx does not rigorously distinguish needs from capabilities, his definition of life as activity and the “species being” of humanity as “free, conscious activity” does not make clear the distinction between activity as making demands on the natural and social environment and activity as making unique contributions to the natural and social envi-

126

Democratic Society 26

ronment. Given Marx’s critique of alienated labour, it is clear that he associates free, conscious activity with creation that contributes back to the social wealth that was appropriated in the realization of the act, but making that point explicit depends upon treating needs as instrumental to the growth of capabilities and not an intrinsic value. An examination of his critique of alienation will enable a clearer understanding of this claim. Under capitalism, Marx contends, life (activity) is reduced to a mere means of existence (biological functioning). As he says, “Man makes his life activity itself the object of his will and his consciousness ... Estranged labour reverses this relationship, so that it is just because man is a conscious being that he makes his life activity, his essential being, a mere means to his existence.”27 Human beings are therefore essentially capable of a reflective determination of their life horizons, i.e., of not mere animal behaviour but conscious decision-making and action. The coercive power of market forces, however, limits the scope of reflective determination of life horizons by forcing most people to just find work, regardless of whether the quality of activity that characterizes it befits the dignity and potential of a human being. Thus, in alienated social conditions, objects have a mode of being for the subject different from the mode they would have under free conditions. Because the essence of human life, free activity, is transvaluated (from being an end it becomes a mere means of existence), human subjects relate to the objective world as something that must be owned and controlled in order to have any meaningful reality. The reality of objects is their potential or actual being as private property and their value only their price. As Marx writes, “Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when 28 it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed ... by us.” Such an alienated relationship between subject and object diminishes both. The capabilities of human beings are reduced to the power to acquire and control objects (which include other human beings) which are themselves valued one-dimensionally only in terms of their exchange value. For example, one could imagine a collector of rare books who does not read, or a collector of art who has nothing to say about his or her collections beyond their monetary value. 26 Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,” 276. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 300.

Socialism and Democratic Need Satisfaction

127

This alienation, which robs both subject and object of their inner wealth and complexity, contrasts with the nonalienated relationship in which subject and object relate to one another on the basis of their intrinsic value. Value here means that in the object which makes it an object of care and concern. Defined as such, value can come in many different forms (aesthetic, monetary, sentimental, etc.). Underlying each particular form is what McMurtry calls life value. As I noted earlier, the life value of a human being is its capability to become a unique centre of self- and world-creation. As McMurtry argues, “life means organic movement, sentience and feeling, and thought. Means of life refers to whatever enables life to be preserved or to extend its vital range on these three planes of being alive. Clean air, food, water, shelter, affective interaction, environmental space, and accessible learning conditions are all means of life ... To increase life value is to widen or deepen them to a more comprehensive range.”29 Human beings realize this value as they develop to wider and deeper levels of expression their vital capabilities to move, feel, and think. Nonliving objects, in this view, acquire life value to the extent that they contribute to the growth of these capabilities. They interfere with the growth of life value, however, to the extent that their accumulation distracts from the development of capabilities or is directly harmful of their development. Consumeristic psychology does not make this distinction between developing capabilities and accumulating things. Playing hockey, for example, develops the capabilities for movement and thought, while constantly watching it on television will ultimately reduce one’s ability to play it. If we judge social freedom simply in terms of a given social formation’s ability to satisfy indiscriminate desires, then we lose the ground of the critical distinction between life-developing activity and life-negating passivity. This deep point is implicit in Marx’s critique of alienated social conditions but is obscured by his problematic conflation of needs, desires, and capabilities. Despite this real problem, however, Marx’s attempt to think through the nature of nonalienated social conditions contributes significantly to a life-grounded value system and needs-based social morality. In nonalienated conditions “the manner in which [objects] become his depends on the nature of the objects and on the nature of the essential power corresponding to it ... man is affirmed in the objective world not only in the act of thinking, but with all his senses.”30 In other words, the 29 McMurtry, Unequal Freedoms, 298. 30 Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,” 301.

128

Democratic Society

fully human relationship between humanity and world is one in which the world exists for humans as a wealth of life value, to be developed in life-enhancing ways and otherwise left to be. The overriding end of such a life is the development of our essential powers, which include aesthetic and affective relationships. Human value is then measured by the richness of activity.31 In order to realize the freedom implicit in the capabilities of human beings to reflectively determine their activity in life-value maximizing ways, major social institutions must be subordinated to the general principle of needs-based social morality. Unless democratic decision-making is capable of exercising power over the socio-economic system for the sake of satisfying everyone’s equal interest in need satisfaction, the development of capabilities will be contingent upon the blind outcome of market forces. Regulation of these forces has of course ameliorated the grossest forms of deprivation in the more developed nations, but it does not challenge the ruling value system or its social morality and thus does not secure the conditions for the full realization of human freedom. This fact is especially evident in the case of the temporal conditions of human freedom. In sharp contrast to his ambiguous discussion of needs for things, Marx is absolutely precise when discussing the relationship between free time and a democratic, i.e., self-determining, society. In the following passage from the Grundrisse Marx explains that capitalism is progressive not because it produces absolute increases in the range of goods available for consumption, but because its productivity creates the real possibility of liberating people from the tyranny of forms of labour determined by the imperatives of profitability, not human life value. It is necessary to quote him at length on this point. He writes, The great historical aspect of capital is the creation of surplus labour, superfluous from the point of view of mere use value, of mere subsistence, and its historical mission is fulfilled when, on the one hand, needs are developed to the point where surplus labour beyond what is necessary has itself become a general need and arises from the individual needs themselves; and, on the other, when, by the strict discipline of capital to which successive generations have been subjected, general industriousness has been developed as the universal asset of the new generation; and lastly, when the productive forces of labour ... have been developed to the stage where the possession and preservation of gen-

31 Ibid., 299–300.

Socialism and Democratic Need Satisfaction

129

eral wealth requires from the society only comparatively little labour time on the one hand, and on the other labouring society takes a scientific attitude to the process of its continuing reproduction ... so that the labour in which man 32 does what he can make things do for him has ceased.

In other words, the historical “mission” of capitalism is complete when the development of the forces of production has exceeded the point where all fundamental human needs can be met as a matter of social principle. At the point where survival is no longer dependent upon natural contingencies, human beings have secured for themselves the material conditions for their own freedom. The realization of that freedom then depends on reorganizing the production, distribution, and appropriation of collectively created wealth. Rather than leaving itself hostage to the contingencies of capitalist market forces, collective human intelligence can be applied to the task of determining the goals of economic development and the means of distributing its fruits on the basis of the principle of need satisfaction. Again, I will return to a discussion of practical strategies of institutionalization (many of which already exist in partial or distorted form) in the final part. At this point let me sum up Marx’s contribution to the development of needs-based social morality and democratic society. Marx’s understanding of human freedom is life-grounded to the extent that it recognizes the dialectical interrelationship between individual need satisfaction, social organization, and the possibility of free individuation. Unless the structural forms of capitalist market dependency are overcome, the content of life is not a function of conscious decisions about how it can best be led. Instead, the individual is continually negotiating threats to need satisfaction or, if his income is secure, defining himself through passive consumption of identical products. Individuation of a normatively significant form, by contrast, presupposes conscious co-operation in needs-governed production, distribution, and appropriation of life-sustaining goods. Consumption is limited to what is necessary in order that the range of life-affirmative activities can be expanded beyond what is given toward the ever open horizon of what is possible. The individual is thus neither an atomistic centre of desire nor a mere function of a reified collectivity, but rather the end point realization of life organization on a social level. It is in 32 Karl Marx, “Outline of a Critique of Political Economy,” 250. 33 Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,” 299.

130

Democratic Society 33

this sense that, as Marx says, “the individual is the social being.” McMurtry develops the implications of this point to their deepest extent: “it is not a question ... of reducing the individual into a mere function and element of a social organism in which individuality does not appear as a value in itself ... the social level of life organization in its full life-protective evolution [is] the basis and guardian of individual life from which the individual person differentiates as a unique and 34 unrepeatable bearer of life value.” Individuality is in this way not a given empirical fact but the outcome of a process of individuation through which empirically particular beings become unique centres of life value through the creative appropriation and transformation of natural and social resources. This chapter has now come back to the normative idea of life from which it began. In Winstanley’s critique of private property, the needs ground of social morality was expressed in embryonic form. The material conditions of human freedom that this social morality identifies emerged to consciousness through a series of struggles over the social conditions of life support and the social morality that justified need deprivation. Three classes of fundamental needs have been identified: physical needs for basic material resources, socio-cultural needs for institutions through which specifically human capabilities can be developed, and temporal needs for free time in which those capabilities can be developed freely. A democratic society is one in which collective human intelligence, reasoning within the parameters established by the universal interest of all in need satisfaction, governs all major social institutions which have a determining role in the shaping of concrete life horizons. Democratic society is distinguished from bureaucratic and authoritarian forms of institutionalizing the needs ground on the basis of the ultimate value it serves: free individual capacity development in a co-operative social matrix. Bureaucratic and authoritarian forms of social organization, by establishing a dictatorship over needs destroy the fundamental value of human freedom that needs-based social morality developed to serve. In the next part, I will turn my attention to the ways in which the needs ground of social morality has produced important changes in liberal rights-based social morality and evaluate contemporary democratic theory from the perspective of how well it has understood the lessons of the historical development of democratic social forms. 34 McMurtry, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism, 89.

part three The Evolution of Classical Liberal Social Morality

This page intentionally left blank

10

Social Rights

i n t h e f i r s t t w o p a r t s I have abstracted and contrasted two distinct grounds of social morality. I have treated them as ideal types in order to sharpen their distinct logical structures, that is, their opposed implications for the development of a democratic society. Whereas the classical liberal conception of equality permitted the inclusion of formerly excluded groups to political citizenship, it ruled out the legitimacy of democratic governance of the economy in the interests of need satisfaction and capability development. While political democratization can be understood as the universalization of the right to participate in the process of government, the democratization of society, I have contended, must be understood as the consequence of struggles which, even when they appealed to the idea of countervailing rights against the exclusivity of the right to private property, are grounded in a needsbased social morality. The evidence for this argument is found in the difference between the legal reality of rights and the material reality of need-satisfying resources. A right to material resources in the absence of social structures and dynamics that can be held accountable to the right-bearers leaves the bearers without access to the resource which is the object of the right. Thus positive rights entail more than legally actionable claims; they entail the transformation of democratically unaccountable social and economic power. If they entail the transformation of democratically unaccountable social and economic power by exposing the way the exercise of that power under liberal-capitalism subordinates both need satisfaction and free capability development to the blind outcomes of market forces, they expose a depth structure of unfreedom protected by classical liberal rights-based social morality. Given this opposition of implications, it is best, I have argued, to under-

134

Democratic Society

stand the social morality underlying the demands for satisfaction of the three fundamental classes of human needs as distinct from classical liberal social morality. In emphasizing this difference, however, I do not mean to imply that the struggle for rights, whether for political inclusion, civil protections for the person, or the means of need satisfaction are superficial or counterproductive. What I do mean to say is that if demands for social democratization are understood simply as demands for new legal entitlements then the deeper transformational dynamic they entail can be overlooked and democratic struggles, as a consequence, unduly restrict their demands to the limits of what existing socio-economic power relations will tolerate. If we judge over the long term, from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, a progressive dynamic of the penetration of democratic power into formerly “private” spheres, including especially the economy, is evident. Not only have excluded groups been included in political society, but the coercive power of patriarchal family relations has been exposed and partially transformed, the destructive social implications of racism and other forms of irrational bigotry have been revealed and partially ameliorated, and economic activity has been subjected to a complex network of regulations grounded in the universal interests of human beings in need satisfaction as well as the democratic interests of members of a state in having a meaningful say over the production, distribution, and appropriation of need satisfiers. To focus only on the latter for the moment, the evolved network of regulations governing economic activity implies more than external regulation of the socio-economic system; more deeply, it implies an internal transformation in the values and purposes that steer it. As Pat Devine argues, “Within capitalist societies private decisions over the current use of the means of production are constrained by the legal framework ... [such that] the objective pressures for the socialization of the means of production, for social control over their use, are reflected in capitalist society. However, private ownership remains an insuperable obstacle to the employment of the means of production as a whole in the interests of society, by society.”1 The essential question facing democratic theory and practice today is whether this dynamic of internal transformation of capitalist market forces has reached its zenith in welfare-state regulation or whether it can be pressed further, slowly, through a multigene-

1 Devine, Democracy and Economic Planning, 127

Social Rights

135

rational project of social democratization, until the rule of market forces over human life has been overcome. The arguments of Rawls, Habermas, and Mouffe all converge around an answer to this question that takes an evolved form of liberal social morality to include positive rights to claims on resources as the final step in any possible democratization. While acknowledging the democratic value of positive rights and the great contributions these thinkers have made to understanding deliberative interaction as essential to democratic politics, I will argue that their conceptions of democracy are ultimately self-contradictory. Their democratic theory shifts its focus from the undemocratic coercive power of the capitalist market to the democratic potential of free association in civil society.2 While each focuses on the pluralism of civil society as both the essential condition and value of democratic life, each supports the form of separation of political from economic power typical of liberal-capitalism as a necessary condition of any possible democracy. In so doing, however, they lend support to a social structure that allows market forces to ultimately determine the scope and content of individual and social life according to a monological value system. Hence, failure to challenge the form of separation of political from economic power necessary to capitalism contradicts the value they place on pluralism. Such is the case because without the internal transformation of market forces, everyone’s life remains subject to determining pressures generated undemocratically by the normal operation of market forces. In short, the pluralism of civil society is negated by the monovalue of monetary accumulation as the raison d’être of human activity. This contradiction is preserved, rather than resolved, by their failure to challenge undemocratic social and economic power at an internal level. Before this argument can be developed, however, it is important to link the history of the struggles analyzed in the previous chapter with the twentieth-century developments that concern contemporary democratic theorists. T.H. Marshall’s classic sociology of rights will serve as the required mediation.

2 The heroic struggles of eastern European dissidents were essential to the growth of interest in civil society. One of the first Western theorists to develop democratic theory from the perspective of civil society was John Keane in Democracy and Civil Society. The history of the concept and its changing political implications are comprehensively explored in Arato and Cohen, Civil Society and Political Theory.

136

Democratic Society

t.h. marshall and the evolution of social rights Marshall’s sociology of rights focuses on their conceptual and institutional development in England. While Marshall was one of the first to make a case for the importance of positive (what he calls social) rights to the development of democratic citizenship, he fails to ground their emergence in struggles oriented by needs-based demands. That is, while Marshall explains the difference between negative and positive rights by reference to the latter’s function of securing the material wellbeing of citizens, he ignores the deeper conception of democratic society that animated the struggles over needs to which positive rights were the state’s response. The result, I will argue, is that while Marshall demonstrates that positive rights are necessary conditions of full citizenship in a liberal-capitalist society, he fails to note the ways in which they also serve to restrict the democratic implications of that citizenship. Marshall divides the history of the development of rights in England into three stages, roughly contemporaneous with the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. The gradual extension and expansion of rights is driven by the implications of the value of citizenship, which Marshall defines as “full membership in a community.”3 Citizens are full members of a community when the community’s institutions are organized such that every citizen has equal access to the legal, political, and social (material) conditions of free activity. The originally exclusionary and negative character of rights was incompatible with that idea of citizenship because even their universalization to include workers, women, and oppressed minorities did not extend the power of those groups to actively satisfy their needs and freely develop their capabilities. Total material dependence on market forces was incompatible with the free exercise of civil and political rights. The contradiction between the universality of citizenship and the socio-economic barriers to the realization of that value was the dynamic force impelling the evolution of positive rights. Rights first took the form of civil rights. These rights defined the classical negative liberties (life, property, security of the person, etc.), and the legal rights necessary for their defence. They were originally held only by propertied males. The great reform movements of the nineteenth century attacked the archaism of the English legal and political 3 Marshall, Sociology at the Crossroads and Other Essays, 70.

Social Rights

137

system and generated a new category of political rights, or rights to participate in the informal networks and formal institutions of political power. However, these political rights, even after they were extended to all adult citizens, could not address the misery in which the majority of the population of England lived. Toward the end of the nineteenth century a new class of social rights emerged. These rights were codified fully following World War ii.4 According to Marshall’s influential analysis, the evolution of classical liberal social morality was made possible by the process of social modernization. Modernization refers to the processes of social differentiation by which institutions that were organically united in traditional societies are separated out and subsequently evolve independently. Where there was no judicial system independent of political power and where society as a whole was understood as a microcosmic reflection of a cosmic moral hierarchy, individuals could not be conceived, or even conceive themselves, as autonomous, independent rights holders. The differentiation of rights into different categories, in turn, could not be accomplished until distinct institutions corresponding to their sphere of operation developed. As Marshall notes, prior to the eighteenth century “the rights were blended because the institutions were amalgam5 ated.” The greater the degree of social differentiation, the greater the complexity of the schedule of rights that define citizenship. Thus modernization is the social condition for the development of a schedule of rights that defines full membership in a community. These rights develop in response to participatory deficits created by institutional differentiation. As the feudal system gave way to liberal capitalism, the representative structure of British government ceased to reflect the actual distribution of power and population. This deficit was corrected by the development of new political rights in the nineteenth century. Likewise, the separation of the labouring population from the land and the development of a capitalist market economy created an economic crisis within the emergent working class. Still impoverished and dependent in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, they

4 I cannot provide a detailed history of the development of the English welfare state here. See de Schweinitz, England’s Road to Social Security. For the development of the Canadian welfare state see Moscovitch and Albert, eds, The Benevolent State: The Growth of Welfare in Canada. For related developments in America, Foner, The Story of American Freedom. 5 Marshall, Sociology at the Crossroads and Other Essays, 72.

138

Democratic Society

could not actualize the civil and political rights that they enjoyed. Hence social rights evolved in the twentieth century to balance that deficit. In Marshall’s analysis, therefore, the function of social rights is to meet the legitimate demands of productive propertyless citizens on need-satisfying social resources in such a way as to make their political rights effective. Their role in a developed welfare state is to “adjust real income to the social needs of the citizen.”6 The first such social right to gain recognition was the right to free, comprehensive public education. This right, however, like all social rights in Marshall’s theory, responds not only to the individual’s need for the means of cognitive development, but equally, or perhaps more so, to the system’s need for educated workers. He argues that “[i]t was increasingly recognized as the nineteenth century wore on that political democracy needed an educated electorate, and that scientific manufacture needed educated workers ... the social health of society depended upon the civilization of its members.”7 Without denying the progressive value of positive rights to the individuals who secured them, Marshall also argues that a changed society “needed” a more elaborate schedule of rights in order to continue to reproduce itself. The democratizing and enabling force of social rights is thus attenuated insofar as their need-satisfying function is equally intended to satisfy the socio- economic system’s need for stable social relations. Welfare-state institutions thus pacify struggles over needs without, however, creating the conditions for the full democratization of social reality. Marshall’s conception of full membership in a community does not translate into full democratic control over the institutions of material life, institutions in which all members of the community have an essential, needs-based interest. To be sure, the evolution of social rights is a decisive moment in the development of modern democracy and a watershed in the history of human freedom. Social rights represent, in fact, the moment where the logical structure of liberal rights-based social morality is transformed by the logical structure of needs-based social morality. However important this synthesis has been, it is clear that social rights fail to fully express the socially democratic implications of needs-based claims, since they aim also to ensure system efficiency, do not extend to the internal transformation of market forces and explicitly question its legitimating value system and social morality, and institutionalize a form of passive, rather 6 Ibid., 80. 7 Ibid., 82.

Social Rights

139

than active, need satisfaction. Positive rights ameliorated struggles over needs in historically significant ways, but not by ensuring the conditions in which people, consciously working together, could freely satisfy those needs for themselves. The origin of social rights is thus doubly ambiguous from a normative point of view. On the one hand they recognize the legitimacy of needs as a ground for claims on social resources. On the other hand, they presuppose rather than challenge the domination of capitalist market forces over all natural and social wealth. On the one hand they recognize need satisfaction as an essential requirement of free capability development and socially democratic freedom. On the other hand they take need satisfaction out of the hands of needy individuals and invest it in a bureaucratic apparatus that administers to patients. Social rights address the quantitative dimension of the undemocratic implications of the classical liberal rights ground without comprehending its depth normative dimension or addressing the social presuppositions upon which classical liberal social morality rests. Because the formal separation of political from economic power is not contested, and because the coercive power capitalist market forces exercise over the content of life projects is not treated as undemocratic, Marshall’s understanding of the development of social rights ends up giving priority to their system-stabilizing over their democratic effects. As he argues, social rights helped “social integration spread from the sphere of sentiment and patriotism into that of material enjoyment. The components of a civilized and cultured life, formerly the monopoly of a few, were brought progressively into the reach of the many ... The diminution in inequality strengthened the demand for its abolition, at least with regard to the essentials of social welfare.”8 “Civilized life” here means, essentially, expanded access to consumer goods. It is the capitalist market that “decides” what the content of that life will be insofar as it retains control over the preponderance of natural and social wealth and the right to decide how it is best developed. The problem of quantitative inequality is imperfectly addressed without the deeper democratic problem of capitalism’s coercive social and normative power even being considered. In summation, Marshall’s work is essential for understanding the crucial link between modernity, citizenship, and social rights, but it is more concerned with the problem of how these rights can be institutional8 Ibid., 96.

140

Democratic Society

ized “without upsetting the economic machine” than with the problem of how the radically democratic implications of the needs ground that underlies them can be realized.9 Marshall thus draws attention away from the depth normative content of the social struggles that forced the state to undertake these reforms and instead stresses the functional need of the system to integrate the working class in the name of social stability.10 The idea of democracy is developed to embrace its material foundations, but in such a way that the undemocratic system of power that limits democracy to the political sphere remains unchallenged in essence. Important as positive rights were and are in ameliorating the material condition of the working class and in establishing a limited degree of legitimacy for needs-based claims on resources, they are and remain an insufficient foundation for a fully democratic social order. To the justification of this claim with regard to contemporary democratic theory I now turn, beginning with the epochal reconstruction of liberalism in the work of John Rawls.

9 Ibid., 100. 10 Giddens, Profiles and Critiques in Social Theory, 171. See also Thurman, “Outlines for a Theory of Citizenship,” Dimensions of Radical Democracy, 38.

11

John Rawls: Self-Determination – Moral or Material? ion

m a r s h a l l ’ s c o n c e p t i o n of social rights addresses the failure of classical liberal social morality to satisfy the material conditions of selfdetermination. At the same time, however, the passive mode of need satisfaction that it affirms leads to another contradiction. On the one hand, positive rights recognize that full citizenship is incompatible with mass need deprivation. On the other hand, the institutions of the welfare state left intact the capitalist market as a productive system and simply sought to ameliorate the quantitative asymmetries of wealth and power that its normal operations caused without addressing the deeper forms of coercion and dependence essential to it. The welfare state added to this structure of dependence a new welfare bureaucracy which objectified the people who relied on it and whose interest was as much in social pacification as need satisfaction. Amelioration of the material circumstances of the unemployed and the working poor, the elaboration of public health and educational systems, and government funding for cultural initiatives is thus a contradictory step toward a democratic society. Evolved liberal rights-based social morality does bring those who had been excluded by their material conditions into the civic life of the nation but does not address the fundamental problem generated by the capitalist economy and creates the new problem of dependence on the welfare state. Despite the failure of evolved liberal social morality to distinguish between passive and active need satisfaction and, as a consequence, to challenge the separation of economic from political power that is the main source of anti-democratic coercion in liberal capitalist societies, it has been by far the most influential moral foundation of social reform in the twentieth century. Hence understanding its limitations is essen-

142

Democratic Society

tial for anyone concerned with advancing the democratization of society in the twenty-first century. John Rawls is arguably the most important defender of evolved rights-based social morality in the twentieth century. And so a close and focused critique of his thought will reveal those limitations. His rich and complex theory is sensitive to need as the basis of claims on necessary resources, but it interprets these claims in terms of positive rights. As a result, Rawls believes that the purposes of justice are served when citizens can claim from the government, as a matter of right, the basic goods that they need in order to live as full citizens. However, by accepting that the “free” market is the necessary economic system of any just society, his theory ultimately leaves the governing values and content of citizens’ lives to the contingencies of capitalist market forces, thus contradicting, I will argue, his own conception of the good life for human beings. Thus Rawls work, important as it is, founders on the twin contradictions between his understanding of human freedom and the coercive power of capitalist market forces and between his conception of human beings as morally autonomous and human happiness as grounded in the active realization of capabilities over the course of a self-determined life. My examination of his work will, after a general overview of his theory, concentrate on these two contradictions.1 1 Explicating Rawls’s work is made more difficult by the fact that he revised it in some fundamental respects in the 1990s. The key change that he made was introducing the qualification “political” into his conception of liberalism. In his epochal Theory of Justice he believed that social stability required that citizens incorporate into their conception of the good life the two principles of justice that frame and govern major social institutions. In the 1980s and 90s, struck by the “fact” of pluralism, he abandoned this demand, arguing instead that the two principles form the basis of a political consensus about the justification of legislation, but otherwise left people free to conduct their lives according to whatever reasonable conception of the good they preferred. The two principles formed the basis of an “overlapping” consensus about political life, not the foundation for substantive agreement about life’s ultimate purposes. While I will have occasion to discuss the role of pluralism in Rawls’s theory, I intend to explicate it, as far as possible, as a unified theory of liberal democratic society. I will not reserve any important place for a detailed discussion of the differences between the two periods. Rawls himself discusses those differences in the introduction to the paperback edition of Political Liberalism and in the chapters devoted to an explanation of the difference between political and comprehensive liberalism and the idea of an overlapping consensus. See Rawls, Political Liberalism, xxxvii-lxii, 11–15, 133–58. Brian Barry provides an excellent discussion of the differences between Theory and Political Liberalism. Barry, “John Rawls and the Search for Stability,” 874–915.

Rawls and Self-Determination

143

basic principles Rawls follows Hume in conceiving the need for justice as following from the facts of human social existence. Human beings need each other and desire to pursue their own plans of life. Since not everyone can get everything they want when they want it, agreement on some framework principles governing major institutions and legislation is necessary. Rawls calls the facts of human life that make justice necessary the “circumstances of justice.” As he defines them “the subjective circumstances of justice are the relevant aspects of the subjects of co-operation, that is, of persons working together. Thus, while the parties have roughly similar needs and interests ... they nevertheless have their own plans of life. These plans, or conceptions of the good, lead them to have different ends or purposes, and to make conflicting claims on the material and social resources available.”2 Thus the problem of justice is to devise a method whereby agreement can be reached as to fair terms of co-operation. People are capable of reaching agreement on the problem of justice, Rawls believes, because they are both rational (interested in pursuing their own ends), and reasonable (capable of offering and accepting fair terms of co-operation).3 Political consensus on the basic principles of justice is possible, then, because citizens are capable of recognizing the legal and material conditions of their own self-interested goals and values. He argues that, “any workable political conception of justice that is to serve as the public basis of justification that citizens may reasonably be expected to acknowledge must count human life and the fulfillment of basic human needs as in general good, and endorse rationality as a basic principle of political and 4 social organization.” As rational and reasonable, then, citizens will agree to principles of justice that they judge will best serve their interest in leading the best life of which they are capable. In agreeing to rational principles of justice, citizens act autonomously. Rawls justifies his political argument in Kantian terms (minus Kant’s metaphysical conception of the person). “Kant held, I believe, that a person is acting autonomously when the principles of his action are chosen by him as the most adequate possible expression of his nature as a free and equal rational being. The principles he acts on are not adopted because of his social position or his natural endowments, 2 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 110. 3 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 49, 208. 4 Ibid., 177.

144

Democratic Society 5

or in view of the particular kind of society in which he lives.” The two principles of justice, he believes, would be chosen by rational and reasonable people if they reasoned impartially about what framework prin6 ciples would best enable them to pursue their life projects. Hence the basis of legitimacy of a just society is, according to Rawls, liberal. As he explains, “our exercize of political power is fully proper only when it is exercized in accordance with a constitution the essentials of which all citizens as free and equal may reasonably be expected to endorse in the light of principles and ideals acceptable to their common human reason. This is the liberal principle of legitimacy.”7 The two principles of justice are the deep principles that frame the constitutional and institutional essentials of the society. They apply, as he says, “to the basic structure of society, the arrangement of major social institutions into one scheme of cooperation.”8 He does not think that these principles are the product of pure political philosophizing, but rather that they are implicit in the background beliefs of citizens of actual liberal democracies. Making them explicit, Rawls believes, aids practice in becoming more adequate to principle. Thus, let me turn now to a brief examination of the principles before looking in detail at how Rawls prioritizes them and the problematic implications of that prioritization. Without ever changing the substance of the principles, Rawls continued over the course of his career to refine their formulation. In the final version they are stated as follows: P1: Each person has an indefeasible claim to a fully adequate share of equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same liberties for all, and P2: Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: first, they are to be attached to offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of oppor-

5 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 222. He maintains this Kantian self-understanding in Political Liberalism, while taking care to distinguish his political conception of autonomy from its metaphysical function in Kant’s philosophy. See Political Liberalism, 100–1. 6 The adequacy of Rawls’s conception of the original position and the veil of ignorance as a counterfactual argument about how agreement can be reached in political matters is not central to my main concern here, which is to isolate the deep normative contradictions at the core of his work. Hence I will not discuss it. See Theory of Justice, 118–23 for his explanation of the purpose of the original position. 7 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 137. 8 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 47.

Rawls and Self-Determination

145

tunity and second, they are to be to the greatest advantage of the least advan9 taged members of the society.

As Kenneth Baynes argues, these two principles govern the two dimensions of the basic structure of society, “roughly corresponding to the public (state) and private (market) sphere.”10 The first ensures to all citizens equal civil and political rights while the second ensures their social rights up to the point where further equality would either erode liberty or would lead to sub-optimal conditions for the least-well-off segments of society. These principles would be chosen, Rawls believes, because they offer citizens the best hope of framing and pursuing their individual conceptions of the good.11 In what follows I will assume that Rawls’s argument for these principles is satisfactory and concentrate only on the tensions immanent in the substantive implications that he draws from the principles themselves. The first and most important substantive implication is the priority of the first principle over the second. That priority means that “infringements of the basic equal liberties protected by the first principle cannot be justified, or compensated for, by greater social and economic advantages.”12 Rawls’s justification for this ordering is not the classic liberal argument that private property rights are “sacred and inviolable,” but rather that the essential interest of people as free and equal is in a basic institutional structure that allows them to frame and change their dominant ends. Freedom, in this view, is freedom from permanent attachment to any one ultimate end. Any institutional arrangement that would impede their ability to change their rational plans of life would therefore be rejected by reasonable and rational beings. Thus the priority of the first principle over the second principle is justified by appeal to a conception of the moral freedom of individuals. People are morally free “in that they conceive of themselves and of one another as having the moral power to have a conception of the good. This is not to say that they see themselves as irrevocably tied to the pursuit of the particular conception of the good that they affirm at any time. Rather, as citizens they are seen as capable of changing this conception ... As free persons, citizens claim the right to view their persons 9 Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Re-statement, 42–3. Compare Theory of Justice, 266, and Political Liberalism, 271. 10 Baynes, The Normative Grounds of Social Criticism: Kant, Rawls, Habermas, 63. 11 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 130–3.

146

Democratic Society

as independent from and not identical with any particular such conception.”13 The freedom to form and change their conception of the good is especially important in contemporary circumstances where pluralism is the dominant feature of social life. People cannot accept as legitimate the use of political power to impose conceptions of the good.14 However, people are not simply minds that form conceptions of the good, they are beings that actively strive to realize their conception of the good. Insofar as needs must be met if life projects are to be pursued, social support for need satisfaction is necessary. Here is where the second principle becomes essential. Its function is to ensure the satisfaction of the material dimension of what Rawls calls socially primary goods. Socially primary goods in general are “things that any rational man is presumed to want. These goods normally have a use whatever a person’s rational plan of life.”15 His list includes 1) basic rights and liberties (classical liberal negative rights), 2) freedom of movement and free choice of occupation, 3) powers and prerogatives of office in positions of both economic and political responsibility, 4) income and wealth, and 5) the social bases of self-respect.16 Rawls’s list of socially primary goods does not make any reference to the priority ranking of the two principles. It follows from that ranking, however, that redistributive schemes designed to supplement the income and wealth of the least well-off cannot infringe upon the equal distribution of the first three classes of socially primary goods. I will return to this problem below, when I turn my attention to Rawls’s understanding of a just economic order. For the moment I want to focus on what I take to be a different conception of the person underlying the second principle. The priority of the first principle over the second is justified by reference to the conception of persons as capable of positing and changing the ends according to which they will live. However, as I noted, people do not simply posit ends for themselves, they actively pursue them. In order to pursue those ends they must satisfy definite material preconditions. If one wants to be an artist, for example, one must have access to 12 Ibid., 53–4. 13 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 30. 14 Ibid., 61. 15 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 54. 16 Whether this list does in fact follow from human rationality, or is culturally biased, is a topic of some debate. I cannot enter into a discussion of that problem here. For a criticism of the list’s universality see Graham, “Digging Up Marx,” 38; Graham, Practical Reasoning in a Social World, 154–5.

Rawls and Self-Determination

147

institutions in which artistic capabilities can be cultivated as well as income sufficient to live that life. Rawls not only recognizes that people strive to realize their ends, he maintains that human happiness is essentially determined by success in such endeavours. His “Aristotelian principle” maintains that human happiness is achieved in the actual living of life according to one’s (rationally) self-chosen ends. He argues that “we can think of a person as being happy when they are on the way of successful execution of a rational plan of life drawn up under more or 17 less favorable conditions.” He elaborates on this principle, maintaining that, “other things equal, human beings enjoy their realized capacities (their innate or trained abilities) and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity in question is realized, or the greater its complexity.”18 From the standpoint of the moral view of the person, the structure of rights and liberties that allows citizens to change their ends is of intrinsic value. However, from the standpoint of a citizen as an active being engaged in a definite project, the structure of rights and liberties is of instrumental value. Once the formal conditions for the free positing of ends (the first principle) have been established, the material conditions come to the fore. Thus the “favorable conditions” referred to in Rawls’s definition of happiness should be understood, I argue, as primarily material, given that the mere right to pursue life projects is not a sufficient condition of their being realizable. A single mother who is responsible for her child has the right to pursue a life as a poet, but social conditions in which there is no public income support for single mothers will hardly favour her plan. Thus she can be unhappy even while her civil and political rights are upheld. It is, therefore, the material conditions of capability realization upon which one must focus when trying to interpret the relationship between the Aristotelian principle and the two principles of justice. As I noted above, Rawls does not see any contradiction between the moral conception of the person and the Aristotelian principle. I will now explicate his understanding of the relationship and argue in the next section that there is in fact a deep contradiction at work. Rawls believes that the moral and Aristotelian conceptions of the person are harmonious. He argues that “the Kantian interpretation of the original position means that the desire to do what is right and just is the 17 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 359. 18 Ibid., 374.

148

Democratic Society

main way for persons to express their nature as free and equal rational beings. And from the Aristotelian principle it follows that this expression of their nature is a fundamental element of their good.”19 Thus, from Rawls’s perspective the two principles work together as a comprehensive conception of what it means to be a free and equal person. Being free means being able to give oneself a conception of the good, pursuing it in self-given projects, and changing it if one decides that there is a better project to be realized. The framework of civil, political, and social rights to which individuals assent as rational and reasonable beings follows from this understanding of freedom and equality. Hence Rawls’s conception of the person entails a complex rights-based social morality that satisfies our moral interest in autonomy and our material interest in self-determination. Although an evolved form of rights-based social morality clearly underlies Rawls’s theory, he nowhere defines rights. As Rex Martin comments, Rawls’s conception of right does not distinguish between classic liberal negative rights and social or positive rights, but is instead a comprehensive idea of “an individual’s legitimate expectation as to what he would receive in a just institutional division of socially primary goods.”20 A democracy is a society in which citizens have rationally consented to these principles and in which that consent can be confirmed through free and open debate, free pursuit of individual life projects within the limits of the two principles, and in which political power is not used to rule out legitimate plans of life. “What is fundamental [to democracy],” according to Rawls, “is a political procedure which secures for all citizens a full and equally effective voice in a fair scheme of representation. Such a scheme is fundamental because the adequate protection of other basic rights depends on it. Formal equality is not 21 enough.” Thus Rawls goes beyond classic liberal social morality insofar as he recognizes that democracy is incompatible with gross asymmetries of economic and political power. Furthermore, he recognizes that the mere ability to conceive of a rational plan of life is insufficient for a fully human life. Thus he recognizes, in his complex schedule of rights, the legitimacy of need-based claims on public resources. Judged in abstraction from actual socio-economic conditions, Rawls’s comprehensive conception of freedom appears to be consistent. As 19 Ibid., 390. 20 Martin, Rawls and Rights, 69. 21 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 361.

Rawls and Self-Determination

149

rational and reasonable beings, citizens have an interest in autonomy, in consenting only to those laws that conform to their rationality and reasonability. As active beings they equally have an interest in material conditions that allow them to realize those essential human capabilities that express their positive freedom as self-determining beings. The two principles are designed to secure the conditions for both autonomy and self-determination. When these two conceptions of the person are judged in the concrete contexts of actual liberal-democratic societies, however, a contradiction emerges. I will argue that the satisfaction of the conditions of our moral personhood can be accomplished without the satisfaction of the conditions for our material freedom likewise being satisfied. Because Rawls prioritizes the first over the second principle, this contradiction escapes his notice, even though it is social impediments to the expression of his own Aristotelian principle that generates it. While Rawls’s theory adds democratic social content to classic liberal social morality, it nevertheless betrays its roots in that social morality insofar as it ranks the first principle over the second. Given his “background presumption of a market economy,” the harmony between the two sides of his conception of the person breaks down and citizens find themselves with the right to free pursuit of self-given ends but trapped within an economic system that determines their ends for them.22

the capitalist market and its coercive comprehensive doctrine As I noted in the first section, Rawls, in reworking the argument of Theory of Justice, argued that its main problem lay in its belief that a stable society would require each of its members to accept the two principles of justice as part of a comprehensive doctrine of the good life. By the time of Political Liberalism, Rawls concluded that this requirement was too strong. Modern societies, he now maintained, are characterized by the “fact of pluralism,” which means, negatively, that “there is no reasonable religious, philosophical, or moral doctrine affirmed by all citizens” and, positively, that “opposing comprehensive doctrines belong to an overlapping consensus.”23 In other words, any theory of justice 22 Callinicos, Equality, 50. 23 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 38–9.

150

Democratic Society

that is going to be workable in modern conditions must respect the pluralism of ultimate values and insist only on agreement as to the framework principles within which different life projects are pursued. Rawls believes that people will agree to these conditions, because, as I noted above, they recognize that the two principles of justice give them the best hope of realizing their rational life plans. Despite the fact that it is the realization of life plans that makes people happy, it is the rational acceptability of the basic structure that makes society just. Rawls therefore does not argue that the actual happiness of citizens is the goal of a just society. As he observes, “we might think that equal justice means that society is to make the same proportionate contribution to each person’s realizing the best life of which he is capable. Off hand this might seem an attractive suggestion.”24 Its attractiveness notwithstanding, Rawls rejects it on the grounds that there is no feasible way for society to make such contributions, given the great diversity of ends. Thus, he maintains that “the aim of justice is 25 not to maximize the fulfilment of rational plans” but rather, as Sybil A. Schwarzenbach argues, to secure “those minimal background conditions (both material and social) necessary for the realization of the powers of personality.”26 Securing background conditions, however, and securing the realization of rational plans of life are very different aims. The insidious effects of this difference are clear only when they are considered in the light of the institutionalization of the two principles of justice in a capitalist market economy. Rawls’s recognition of social pluralism entails the rejection of the use of political power to rule out reasonable conceptions of life. His comprehensive theory of rights is designed to ensure that the background conditions for the “realization of the powers of personality” are met. In his conception, then, it would be contrary to justice to legislate, for example, the illegality of a particular philosophy, or political theory, or ways of life that are consistent with rationality and reasonability. Yet he does not connect this critique of political coercion to the normally coercive effects of the capitalist market and its driving forces, legitimating values system, and social morality on the scope and content of lives it is concretely possible to lead. As we have seen, the capitalist market as an economic institution of action-coordination is not self-justifying. It appeals to definite 24 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 446. 25 Ibid., 395. 26 Sibyl A. Schwarzenbach, “Rawls, Hegel, and Communitarianism,” 275.

Rawls and Self-Determination

151

assumptions about human nature, social relations, and proper social and individual purposes. It is not simply a fact, it equally presents itself as a comprehensive value system determining the right and the good way to live. That comprehensive value system maintains that the best life is egoistically self-maximizing and its social morality justifies an institutional structure designed to permit this sort of life and rule out others. Rawls mistakenly treats the capitalist market as simply a system of efficient resource allocation in abstraction from its justifying value system and social morality, and consequently fails to see its depth coercive power. He understands very well the way in which it generates quantitative inequality but overlooks its life-destructive effects on the scope and quality of life activity. This claim requires a careful examination of Rawls’s understanding of the role of the capitalist market in a just society. Rawls, of course, does not defend the classic liberal doctrine of laissez-faire. He is clear that the social and economic system must justify itself against the two principles. He argues openly that the capitalist market is incompetent to provide necessary public goods27 and even suggests that it would be possible to subordinate both principles of justice to a principle that mandates that “citizens’ basic needs be met.”28 Overall, he argues that the economic system must operate within the limits assigned by just background institutions. As he maintains, “unless this structure is appropriately regulated ... an initially just social process will eventually cease to be just, however free and fair particular transactions may look when viewed by themselves. We recognize this fact when we say, for example, that the distribution resulting from voluntary market transactions (even if the ideal conditions for competitive efficiency obtain) is not, in general, fair unless the antecedent distribution of 29 income and wealth, as well as the structure of markets, is fair.” In practice, economic activities and outcomes that violate the two principles of justice will not be permitted. However, despite this important recognition that an unregulated economy does not satisfy citizens’ fundamental needs and produces unjust inequality, Rawls nevertheless maintains that the theory of justice is not only compatible with, but will be based upon, a capitalist market economy. He can maintain this contradictory position because he fails to understand the normally coercive effects of capitalist market forces on the quality of life activity. 27 Rawls, A Theory of Justice 237, 240. 28 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 7. 29 Ibid., p. 266. Compare Theory, 234–7.

152

Democratic Society

It is a peculiarity of Rawls’s argument that he treats the market in abstraction from its capitalist origins and reality. That is, he fails to distinguish between what Devine calls market exchange (of which there are many non-capitalist forms) and market forces, which Devine defines as “a process whereby ... [economic] change occurs ... as a result of atomized decisions, independently taken, motivated solely by the individual decision-maker’s perceptions of their individual self-interest, not consciously coordinated by them in advance.”30 The operation of market forces presupposes a market society, i.e., one in which economic power (even if regulated) is regarded as essentially private. There have been many forms of market exchange relations in human history, but the only market society that history knows is capitalist.31 The reproduction and expansion of a market society cannot be understood by reference to the non-normative coordinating function of market transactions alone but also requires that we understand the value system that individual citizens internalize and the social morality that justifies the separation of political from economic power required for the operation of market forces depends upon. Thus, although Rawls says that the principles of justice are compatible either with a “property owning democracy” in which productive resources are widely held or a “liberal socialist” society in which productive resources are publically (state) owned, in both cases he assumes that the market, i.e., market 32 forces, will be used to allocate resources. Thus, he argues, “all regimes will normally use the market to ration out the consumption goods actually produced.”33 Once market forces are allowed to determine these decisions and outcomes, however, democratic social power is necessarily excluded from the essential material dimensions of life activity. If market forces determine not only what goods will be available, but also what type of life people will lead, and people are supposed to accept these outcomes not only as facts, but as just, then they cannot be understood apart from a comprehensive normative doctrine that justifies the experienced life horizons of citizens. As the last thirty years of globalization of the capitalist market have revealed, the capitalist market is not a neutral instrument of resource allocation but exerts its own specific forms of pressure on public pol30 31 32 33

Devine, Democracy and Economic Planning, 23. See McMurtry, Unequal Freedoms, 13–14. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, xv. Ibid., 239.

Rawls and Self-Determination

153

34

icy. One cannot simply use capitalist markets to allocate resources to socially desirable ends since market allocation has its own ends. Capital must be allowed to flow out of unproductive enterprises and into productive enterprises, which means, among other things, that what work is available follows from the direction of capital flow and not from collective democratic decisions. For Rawls’s theory, this fact entails a contradiction between the actual functioning of capitalist markets and the Aristotelian principle. The choice between “capitalism” and “socialism,” if it is framed as a choice between forms of ownership, is therefore too superficial. The real choice, as the second part began to make evident, is between social moralities and their underlying value systems. One cannot regulate a capitalist market in the interests of free capability development without ruining the “efficiency” that, as I will discuss in a moment, Rawls sees as its key advantage Failure to understand the choice between capitalism and socialism as a choice between distinct normative systems has led interpreters like Amy Gutmann to overestimate the radicality of Rawls’s theory. Indeed, Gutmann goes so far as to argue that Rawls is in fact a socialist.35 One cannot, however, simultaneously be a socialist and accept the competence of the capitalist market, even as highly regulated a market as Rawls demands, to allocate resources, because in allocating resources the market is also allocating time, the content of life activity, and the values of the natural world, activity, and other people. Thomas Pogge might be correct to draw attention to the radical re-distributive implications of Rawls’s theory, but these fall short of directly criticizing the form of coercion and the value system essential to the capitalist market.36 Consider, for example, Rawls’s explanation of the reason why a “free” market is the best possible economic system. He writes that one of the main advantages of a free market is “efficiency.” Under certain conditions, competitive prices select the goods to be produced and allocate resources to their production in such a manner that there is no way to improve upon either the choice of productive methods by firms or the distribution of goods that arises from the purchases of households. I will abstract from the fact that such conditions have been met with only in economics text books (the reality of market economies being pervasive need deprivation in one or more of the fundamental classes of hu34 I will examine the key problems that these pressures have created in part 4. 35 Gutman, “The Central Role of Rawls’ Theory,” 17. 36 Pogge, Realizing Rawls, 9, 215–18, 227–39.

154

Democratic Society

man need) and focus instead on the consequences of this model of efficiency for the content of citizens’ lives. Note that Rawls implies that in a market society the “market” is an agent that selects for both what is consumed and how the goods that are consumed are produced. He goes further and argues that there is no way to improve upon the outcome of what the market selects for. Here efficiency is measured solely in terms of the price of the goods that are available to be consumed, but there is no mention of what effect the methods used by firms in producing those goods have on the content of the lives of the people who do the producing. He does note that in a just society “the worst effects of the division of labour can be surmounted: no one need be servilely dependent on others and made to choose between monotonous and routine occupations which are deadening to human thought and sensibility,” but he does not explain how, if the market is going to distribute labour, these effects can be prevented.37 At present, labour markets produce mostly jobs that are “monotonous and routine” and deadening to human capabilities, but rather than demand meaningful work, people are forced to reduce their demands on the quality of their life activity just in order to survive. Rawls, however, does not trace this consequence to the normal operation of even highly regulated capitalist markets. Perhaps even more problematically he does not note that, under the value system and social morality of capitalist market society, the allocation of labour is not simply a fact but a justified norm. That is, this value system and social morality assume that the social position one ends up with is the social position one deserves. Instead he contents himself with the assumption that (regulated) market outcomes are optimal. He simply notes, without criticism, that “the market” selects for the type of goods to be produced and “firms” determine the method of production. From a democratic perspective, however, this reliance upon the capitalist market contradicts the value of self-determination that legitimates democratic society. For workers whose life activity produces those goods, the content of their lives is determined by market forces and the firms for which they work. Since firms are not democratic and, in a market society cannot be democratic (to be “efficient” they must govern themselves according to market signals), the lives of workers are determined by the economic system and the companies for which they work, not by their reasoned decisions about how best to live their lives. As both producers 37 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 463–4.

Rawls and Self-Determination

155

and consumers, then, they find their lives determined by forces that take no interest whatsoever in the quality of the activities that define their lives. Even those who own the firms that dominate the economy are not self-determining, insofar as they must make business decisions not in their own human self-interest but rather in their abstract selfinterest as owners and managers of capital. In a market society, then, it is market forces that ultimately rule over the value of life. But the problem with a market society runs deeper than the determination of the content of life by reified economic forces. The capitalist market not only rules as a coordinating mechanism, its justifying value system and social morality assert that its rule ought to extend over every material dimension of human existence. Whether one focuses on the distribution of labour, its nature and intensity, the provision of social services, the nature and content of education, or the proper plan of an individual’s life, the market provides a value principle by which to decide between alternatives: choose that policy or life project that will provide maximum monetary return. It is in this sense that the capitalist market depends upon the social power of a coercive comprehensive doctrine. It claims the legitimate right to decide for social wholes and the individuals whose lives are determined within them how to allocate resources and shape individual life projects. As McMurtry argues, the deep “law” of market society “is to redistribute society’s wealth from the protection of citizens’ lives to the protection of the market’s money accumulations.”38 This law is able to rule because it is internalized by citizens in the very construction of their life projects. The ideal realization of market society is then not a society where citizens freely dispose over their time in the development of their human capacities but rather one in which “all people enact its prescriptions and functions as presupposed norms of what they ought to do. All assume its value designations and exclusions as givens. They seek only to climb its ladders of available positions to achieve their deserved award as their due. Lives are valued, or not valued, in terms of the system’s differentials and measure39 ments.” If this is the deep value principle of a market society then it is clearly incompatible with the Aristotelian principle which Rawls himself argues is the primary motivation of a rational and reasonable life. Unless one wants to argue that justice is compatible with widespread unhappiness, for which the social cause is evident, then one must conclude that 38 McMurtry, Unequal Freedoms, 245. 39 Ibid., 6.

156

Democratic Society

the capitalist market and its justifying value system and social morality is incompatible with the value served by the Aristotelian principle. The Aristotelian principle, recall, maintains that people are happy when they are in the process of realizing a rational plan of life and that their happiness increases the more challenging and complex that life plan is. The capitalist market, however, does not generally enable people to pursue complex and challenging life plans but rather produces mostly low-paying and unskilled jobs and compensates for the loss of quality and meaning of life activity with the passive satisfactions of consuming. The capitalist market, then, produces social pressures toward conformity through passive consumption rather than free individuation through active need satisfaction and vital capability development. These outcomes, however, contradict Rawls’s own definition of the good in terms of the Aristotelian principle and thus his commitment to democratic forms of social organization. They do not, however, contradict his principles of justice and especially the prioritization of the first over the second principle. Since Rawls prioritizes justice over the good, he also prioritizes the moral over the Aristotelian conception of the person. Since the normal operations of the capitalist market, in a just institutional framework, do not contradict the moral conception of the person, Rawls fails to see the deeper contradiction in his own work. As I noted above, Rawls’s conception of justice does not demand that life plans be realized, but only that they not be made impossible by the basic structure of society. Legally, this demand requires a full slate of basic rights and liberties, while materially it requires democratic equality.40 Democratic equality goes beyond classic liberal formal equality insofar as it recognizes that there are material grounds to the free choice of life projects. Institutionally, democratic equality requires “equal chances of education and culture through subsidized or public schooling, ... equality of opportunity in economic activities by policing the conduct of firms, and ... a social minimum income.”41 While these measures represent an important democratization of rights-based social morality, they are insufficient to check the deeper undemocratic power exerted by the capitalist market. Ensuring every citizen’s right to a fair share of socially primary goods is an important acknowledgment of the role that need satisfaction plays in a democratic society, but because the theory prioritizes passive satisfaction of rights over the active development of capacities, citizens in a just 40 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 69. 41 Kukathas and Petit, Rawls: A Theory of Justice and its Critics, 51.

Rawls and Self-Determination

157

society would still find that the horizons of their lives are determined by coercive forces beyond their control. Recall that the ultimate value served by democratic society is self- determination, where self-determination means that the content of citizen’s life project is a function of free, conscious decision. The material conditions of self-determination in this strong sense go beyond the scope of positive rights to include democratic control over the institutions in which human life activity and the extent of free time are determined. As Rawls himself acknowledges, inequalities are legitimate if and only if they are rationally justifiable to the disadvantaged. In order to be rationally justifiable, however, those disadvantaged by certain outcomes must have some input into determining those outcomes. In the case of the allocation of resources in a capitalist market society, those affected by the outcome have no direct input into the decisions that affect them, even if it is the case that such decisions are undertaken within a regulatory framework established by law. Since it is not a part of justice to ensure that freely chosen life projects are realized, but only that they are possible to choose, no one can claim that their rights are violated if their workplace closes and they become dependent upon social assistance, even though such a result would reduce the value of their lives if judged by reference to the Aristotelian principle. Since the principles of justice mandate only a regulated market and not a democratic economy, the coercive power that the capitalist market exerts is not subordinated to rational and democratic power in Rawls’s system. The democratic limitations of his complex rights-grounded theory appear only from the life-grounded perspective of the Aristotelian principle. The Aristotelian principle, however, is not the basis of institutional legitimacy. Since choice rather than realization of life projects is the ultimate test of legitimacy for Rawls, his theory is blind as well to a deeper a problem confronting his moral view of the person. In the conditions of existing liberal-democratic societies, many people, perhaps a large majority, do not even recognize that their lives are coercively determined by market forces. As both Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum have argued, Rawls fails to understand the problem of preference adaptation. In situations where oppression has been pervasive and long-standing, the preferences of the oppressed tend to adapt in such a way that they willingly accept the meager portion of social wealth to which they have access.42 An analogous phenomenon operates in social contexts where basic need 42 See Sen, Development as Freedom, 62; Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice, 152.

158

Democratic Society

satisfaction has been secured at the cost of meaningful life activity. Citizens who spend most of their lives working at thought- and sensibilitydeadening tasks will accept this condition provided that they are able to access at least some of the substitute satisfactions the market in consumer products supplies. If it is the case, however, that these preferences are adaptations to a situation that they have deemed irremediable, then they cannot be accepted as legitimate from the perspective of the Aristotelian principle. If it is true that the form of happiness that befits a human being is a function of demanding life projects, then compulsive shopping cannot be accepted as a legitimate form of human activity. The happiness that it provides is ultimately ephemeral and self-undermining, both for the person’s human capabilities and the ecological health of the planet. Ultimately Rawls’s theory, while cognizant of the limitations of classic liberal rights-based social morality, falls back on its understanding of political legitimacy and its superficial understanding of pluralism. Rather than grounding a democratic conception of society in his life-grounded Aristotelian principle and a corresponding needs-based social morality, Rawls contents himself with a political conception of democracy as deliberation between citizens in a social context where no substantive theory of the good is allowed to prevail. As he says, “a well- ordered democracy has no final ends in the way persons or associations do.”43 If a wellordered democracy has no final ends in the way persons or associations do, then it is a competition between persons and associations who do have final ends. While Rawls argues that comprehensive doctrines cannot legitimately be imposed through legislation, the reality of life under conditions of globalized capitalism is such that the value system that underlies the capitalist market is imposed on ever-new areas of human life. A democratic response to this undemocratic determination of human life cannot be to simply demand that no comprehensive doctrine prevail, but rather that a democratic comprehensive doctrine prevail. A democratic society, I will contend in the fourth part, does indeed have a final end, the creation and maintenance of the conditions for self-determination, and unless that end is clear, democratic struggles will continually founder against the undemocratic power of capitalist market forces. For the moment, however, it is necessary to examine the related problems that beset Habermas’s attempt to reconstruct the legitimacy of liberal democracy from a discourse-theoretic perspective. 43 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 41.

12

Habermas’s One-Dimensional Democracy

onal Democracy

m y e x a m i n a t i o n of Habermas’s work will not concern itself with negotiating between the myriad criticisms and defences his oeuvre has generated over the past thirty years and will steer clear of questions relating to the intrinsic soundness of his theory of communicative action and philosophy of language. I will confine my arguments regarding his theory of modernization and communicative action to their implications for his theory of democracy. The hermeneutic thread that I will follow is determined by the links Habermas himself establishes between his sociology of modernity, his theory of communicative action, and his discourse-theoretic reconstruction of democratic theory and practice. My aim is to expose a contradiction between his conception of democracy as grounded in the value of self-legislation and his limitation of democratic practice to the political public sphere and parliamentary bodies. As with Rawls, Habermas separates and elevates the value of autonomy over the value of well-being (self-determination) in such a way that he ultimately contradicts his own understanding of democracy. Habermas’s discourse-theoretic reconstruction of democracy also points to a growing consensus in contemporary democratic theory that the liberal form of democracy is unsurpassable. Indeed, Habermas himself has noted the points of continuity between his work and that of Rawls. The core point of agreement concerns the essentially Kantian foundations of their understanding of democratic legitimacy. Both rely on an “intersubjective version of Kant’s principle of autonomy: we act autonomously when we obey those laws that could be accepted by all concerned on the basis of a public use of their reason.”1 While there are 1 Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, 49.

160

Democratic Society

differences in their respective interpretations of this principle, Habermas nevertheless writes that he “admires the project and regards its essential results as correct.”2 Central to both projects is a political interpretation of autonomy that frees the normative content of the principle from the metaphysical implications of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. For both, this aim is accomplished by shifting the focus from moral principles to legal principles and emphasizing the irreducible role of rational debate in the production of legitimate law.3 For both, it is the rationality of law that recommends it as the basis of legitimacy of liberal-democratic political forms. Rational law is legitimate because it is autonomy-preserving, and it is autonomy-preserving because citizens themselves contribute to its production and test its legitimacy in their public deliberations.4 There is thus a shared commitment in each to a version of deliberative democracy.5 Rational debate among citizens as to the framework principles that they will obey is essential because, in modern conditions, agreement on the substance of the good life cannot be assumed. Thus Habermas, like Rawls, conceives his version of democratic theory as a response 2 Ibid., 50. 3 The main focus of my argument is not the shared concerns of Rawls and Habermas. These are important only insofar as they demonstrate a convergence in democratic theory around an evolved version of the liberal rights ground of social morality. For more thorough discussions of the links between Kant, Rawls, and Habermas see Baynes, The Normative Grounds of Social Criticism: Kant, Rawls, and Habermas; McCarthy, “Kantian Constructivism and Reconstructivism: Rawls and Habermas in Dialogue,” 44–63; Benhabib, “Deliberative Rationality and Models of Democratic Legitimacy,” 26–51. 4 Baynes, The Normative Grounds of Social Criticism, 5–7. 5 A full discussion of the differences between deliberative and liberal representative democracy would again take the argument beyond its established parameters. The key difference is that classic liberal representative democracy takes preferences as fixed and law as legitimate if a majority of people vote for it, voting being understood as preference tallying. Deliberative democracy, on the other hand, stresses the responsiveness of preferences to rational argument and thus grounds the legitimacy of law in its rational acceptability, not merely the brute fact that people vote in favour of it. For a discussion of the shared commitments to and the differences between Habermas and Rawls on the nature of deliberation see Bohman, Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, Democracy. For fuller accounts of deliberative democracy see Gutman and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement; Bohman and Rehg, eds, Deliberative Democracy. For criticism of deliberation’s democratic potential see Young, “Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy,” 670–90; Weinstock, “Saving Democracy From Deliberation,” 78–91.

Habermas’s One-Dimensional Democracy

161

to the fact of modern value pluralism. In sum, Habermas’s work is perhaps the strongest evidence in support of Kymlicka’s and Norman’s contention that “the reconciliation of the left with liberal rights is one of the major theoretical phenomena of our times.”6 Where Habermas differs fundamentally from Rawls is in the role of actual argument in the production of legitimate law. Habermas argues that there is an unresolved ambiguity in Rawls’s work that centres on the basis of legal legitimacy. Rawls grounds legitimacy both in the monological reflection that citizens undertake in the Original Position and in the dialogical exercise of public reason that typifies political life in liberal democracies. These grounds are, Habermas maintains, inconsistent. If emphasis is placed on the Original Position then the legitimacy of laws that conform to the two principles is presupposed, regardless of the course actual debates take. If emphasis is placed on the exercise of public reason, then the legitimacy of any prospective law is always held in suspense pending the outcome of actual debates.7 Habermas’s reconstruction of legal legitimacy hopes to avoid this ambiguity by doing away with the instrument of the Original Position and instead seeking out the basis of legal legitimacy immanent to the procedures of rational debate. This difference notwithstanding, Habermas shares with Rawls a concern to justify democracy as the political form best able to reconcile private moral autonomy with the need for publically agreed- upon laws that define the scope of legitimate individual life plans. Given this shared commitment, it is unsurprising that Habermas’s conception of democracy results in a contradiction similar to that which I disclosed in Rawls’s work.

modernization, pluralism, and communicative action Like Rawls, Habermas believes that democracy is made possible and necessary by the pluralistic character of modern society. Unlike Rawls, however, he grounds this conclusion in a sophisticated sociological model of the evolution of reason. This evolution is marked by the differentiation of reason into different forms, on the one hand, and differentiation of social spheres and institutions, on the other hand. The result of this double differentiation is the creation of new spaces for the 6 Kymlicka and Norman, “Return of the Citizen,” 359n. 7 Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, 61–3.

162

Democratic Society

development of personality and individual life projects and crises of legitimation for all state forms that rest upon an assumed or imposed agreement on substantive principles of social organization. Where individuals can no longer be expected to obey authority just because it is authority, a new basis of legal legitimacy is needed. Two such bases, which Habermas intends to synthesize, have emerged from the liberal and republican traditions: human (individual) rights on the one hand and popular sovereignty (collective self-determination) on the other. As he argues, “human rights and the idea of popular sovereignty still constitute the sole ideas that can justify modern law. These two ideas represent the precipitate left behind, so to speak, once the normative substance of an ethos embedded in religious and metaphysical traditions has been forced through the filter of postraditional justification.”8 In order to understand his reconstruction of democracy, it is thus necessary to first reflect briefly on his understanding of modernization and the self-differentiation of reason. Habermas’s understanding of modernization develops in detail what Marshall treated in summary fashion, the process of system differentiation. Behind the differentiation of social systems (politics from economy, law from morality, etc.,), and driving it, is the differentiation of reason into distinct forms. The key moment in this evolution is the emergence of what Weber called “formal” rationality. Formal rationality is exclusively focused on those aspects of the real that can be quantified and measured, and its primary aim is efficiency.9 It enabled the growth of both natural science and modern bureaucracies, but it also broke the spell of metaphysical and religious world views. Cook observes that “as the process of rationalization advanced ... the religious and metaphysical worldviews that had served the state ... started to lose their binding 10 and blinding force.” In breaking their hold over people’s consciousness, formal rationality created the conditions in which a new, communicative form of reason could develop. As Habermas argues, “the more the structural components of the life world and the processes that contribute to maintaining them get differentiated, the more the interaction contexts come under conditions of rationally motivated mutual understanding, that is, consensus formation that relies on the authority of the better argument.”11 8 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 99. 9 Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, 184–6. 10 Cook, Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society, 17. 11 Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2, 145.

Habermas’s One-Dimensional Democracy

163

Communicative rationality is, to put it simply, expressed in the giveand-take of arguments between social beings who share a life world (shared background beliefs that are presupposed by communicative interactions) and is thus dependent upon language as the medium of reaching mutual understanding. “The concept of communicative action,” Habermas writes, “presupposes language as the medium for a kind of reaching understanding in the course of which participants, through relating to a world, reciprocally raise validity claims that can be accepted or contested.”12 Instead of simply accepting that law is as it must be, given that it conforms to some transcendent standard or value, citizens, freed from the constraints of substantive reason, now demand that the law conform to their private reason. Since, however, the exercise of private reason always occurs in a social context, some means of arriving at agreement around laws is necessary. Communicative reason thus fills the void of legitimacy caused by the evacuation of binding beliefs in substantive universals. The development of this new form of communicative legitimacy is fraught with difficulty, however, precisely because of the moral freedom individuals gain once the social power of substantive universal values has been superseded. The progress of modernization expands individual “capacities for action” in three spheres: “latitude for a reflective appropriation of identity forming traditions; for autonomy in interactions with others and in relating to the norms of social life; and for the individual sphere of shaping one’s own life.”13 The newly released capacity for individual determination of life projects seems to cut against the possibility of any binding social constraint. The moral autonomy of individuals seems to mitigate against the legitimacy of any legal constraint on its exercise. Indeed, in the classical liberal development of individual moral autonomy, those individuals who had sufficient social power to press their interests against both the state from above and society from below did attempt to use the law to exclude any interference in what they deemed their “private” affairs. However, the very use of public power to define a private sphere paradoxically created the conditions for a new form of democratic power. To comprehend how that happened it is necessary to examine briefly Habermas’s understanding of the historical evolution of the public sphere.

12 Ibid., 88. 13 Habermas, The Postnational Constellation, 83.

164

Democratic Society

According to Habermas, modern democracy evolves on the basis of a historically unique differentiation of society into a public and a private sphere. Indeed, the public sphere initially follows from the unique status of the private person in early bourgeois Europe. As an entrepreneur and a family man, the bourgeois citizen of eighteenth-century Europe took himself to be uniquely capable of governing his own affairs. He also recognized this capacity in his fellow liberal citizens. This moment of recognition thus constituted a basis for what we could call, without being tendentiously Marxist, a class interest in keeping both family life and questions of the use and disposal of property a matter of private concern. The public sphere, paradoxically, is thus, in its origin, a function of the rising bourgeoisie’s overriding interest in keeping economic questions in the private sphere, i.e., under their exclusive control. As Habermas notes, “The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public.”14 Their goal as a public was to maintain the privacy of family and economic life. While this move did create the social space necessary for the freer elaboration of bourgeois male personality, for women and workers it simultaneously established new relations of coercion and dependence.15 Habermas acknowledges the undemocratic ends of bourgeois public life. “The political task of the bourgeois public sphere,” he writes, “was the regulation of civil society (in contradistinction to the res publica).”16 Bourgeois citizens thus constituted themselves as a self-defining shadow government claiming exclusive competence to decide for the whole of society how its productive resources would be utilized and how the sexual division of labour would be organized. He furthermore acknowledges the legitimating role classic liberal social morality played in justifying this use of public power to exclude democratic intervention in the economic system and family life. “In the first modern constitutions,” he notes, “subdivisions in the catalogue of basic rights were the very image of the bourgeois public sphere. They grounded society as a sphere of 17 private autonomy.” Habermas thus concurs with Hegel, who argued in an early political work that “in states of the modern world, security of 14 In contrast to his later usage, Habermas here uses “civil society” in Marx’s sense, to designate the economic system. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 27. 15 For a feminist critique of the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere and its impact on domestic life for women see Jagger, Feminist Theory and Human Nature. 16 Habermas, Structural Transformation, 52. 17 Ibid., 222.

Habermas’s One-Dimensional Democracy

165

property is the axis around which all legislation turns and to which most of the rights of the citizenry pertain.”18 It was understood at the time, of course, that citizens were exclusively men of independent means. Nevertheless, despite the undemocratic use of power in the original public sphere, the notion of individual rationality to which the bourgeoisie appealed contained democratic implications which, Habermas argues, subsequent political struggles unfolded. Thus the bourgeois public sphere is characterized by a contradiction. On the one hand it was a public sphere of private individuals reasoning together about how to keep the masses out of their affairs. On the other hand, it was a public network of private individuals joined together by reason, and thus implicitly relying on universal grounds of legitimation. Once these universal grounds were recognized by excluded groups, they were able to exploit the contradiction between the asserted universality of rights and the social realty of particularistic exclusion. Democracy thus advanced by the gradual resolution of this contradiction. Excluded groups recognized the contradiction and demanded constitutional recognition of the rights they ought to have had by logical implication from liberal premises. Insofar as the early bourgeoisie invoked the universal value of rationality as the justification for their exclusivity they could not resist demands for inclusivity once it had been demonstrated that those on the outside were as rational as those within. Habermas explains this universalizing drive by reference to the Kantian idea of publicity. Publicity means that “in all matters concerning universal duties, each individual requires to be convinced by reason that the coercion which prevails is lawful, otherwise he could be in con19 tradiction with himself [as a rational agent].” The Kantian idea of publicity thus foregrounds not the exclusive right of economic agents to control private property but, rather, the need for every rational agent to insist upon rational justification of the laws that she will be expected to obey. Habermas, like Rawls, identifies the democratic thrust of the bourgeois public sphere as its commitment to the rational legitimacy of law. If everyone (of a given age) is assumed rational, then it follows that laws are legitimate if and only if they are rationally justifiable in the minds of each citizen reasoning, not as a concretely situated social actor, but as a rational being.

18 Hegel, quoted in Lukacs, The Young Hegel, 43. 19 Habermas, Structural Transformation, 107.

166

Democratic Society

Even in this early text Habermas links the “degree of democratization” to the “extent to which social and political authority is ‘rationalized.’”20 Looking back over thirty years of work, he reaffirms this essential link between democratization and rationalization. In the bourgeois public sphere, “the burden of proof shifts from the morality of citizens to the conduciveness of specific processes for the democratic formation of opinion and will, presumed to have potential for generating rational outcomes ... That is why ‘political public sphere’ is appropriate as the quintessential concept denoting all those conditions of communication under which there came into being a discursive formation of will on the part of the citizens of a state.”21 Democratization is thus coincident, for Habermas, with rationalization, and rationalization with the gradual extension of the public sphere to embrace formerly excluded groups. Democracy began with the undemocratic assertion of the moral autonomy of individuals against the power of the state to define the parameters and substance of life activity. Democratization synthesizes private moral autonomy with public political autonomy; a democracy is, for Habermas, a political system in which morally autonomous individuals collectively legislate for themselves in matters of shared, public concern. Thus, in order to understand Habermas’s conception of democracy, it is necessary to understand this dialectical relation between private and public autonomy.

autonomy, self-legislation, and democracy The political public sphere central to Habermas’s conception of democracy is one moment of a broader network of free association that Habermas now, following the lead of thinkers like John Keane and 20 Ibid., 232. 21 Habermas, “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere,” 446. If the public sphere is going to play this central role in a democracy, it must be the case that the information upon which citizens draw to provide the substance of their positions is undistorted. Whether undistorted information is readily available is an empirical question of profound importance, but one that cannot be decided here. Habermas himself seems to have changed his mind over the course of his career. In Structural Transformation he is critical of the commodification of the news media and suggests that it cannot be relied upon as a source of undistorted information. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 142. In his later works, however, he weakens this criticisms significantly. See Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 376–7. Cook notes and criticizes this shift of position. See Cook, Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society, 60.

Habermas’s One-Dimensional Democracy

167 22

Andrew Arato and Jean Cohen, designates by the term civil society. Catalysed by the struggles against Stalinism in the ussr and Eastern Europe, the redefinition of civil society placed renewed emphasis on the political and cultural elements of democracy and drew attention away from the importance of socio-economic self-determination. The pluralism that is crucial to modern democracy is a product of civil society, which in turn presupposes a liberal culture and a legally defined private sphere. As he writes, “a robust civil society can develop only in the context of a liberal political culture and ... on the basis of an integral private sphere.”23 Private individuals are able to posit autonomous life plans, associate with others who share those aims, come into conflict with different projects, and, crucially, reason together about how to construct legal frameworks that are binding on all yet at the same time preserve private autonomy. Civil society is thus neither the state nor the economy but a mediating system of networks between them. In order to function democratically, as I will show in detail below, Habermas believes that civil society must resist both incorporation by the state and incorporation of the economic system into itself. As he says, “like the liberal model, discourse theory respects the boundaries between ‘state’ and society, but it distinguishes civil society as the social basis of autonomous public spheres from both the economic system and public administration.”24 As a component of civil society, the political public sphere is charged with the important task of avoiding the legislative paralysis that pluralism threatens. That is, if the differences that develop in civil society as a whole conflict, they threaten to undermine the viability of society by making agreement on shared frameworks of law impossible. Since particular differences under modern conditions are no longer understood as articulations of an underlying substantive good, there is always the possibility of destructive conflict between them. Fortunately, the modern political public sphere is also implicitly rational. It is thus reason, in particular communicative reason, that takes over the legitimation functions formerly played by metaphysical or theological universals. Through dialogic interaction, citizens debating together in the public sphere can arrive at framework principles that define the formal conditions for the expres22 See Keane, Democracy and Civil Society; Arato and Cohen, Civil Society and Political Theory. 23 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 371. 24 Ibid., 299.

168

Democratic Society

sion of different conceptions of the good life without having to appeal to any particular conception of the good life itself as a premise from which those principles would be derived as a necessary conclusion. Rational people, reflecting upon what they could reasonably accept, and relating to others as equally rational, implicitly rely upon what Habermas calls the principle of democratic legitimacy. This principle states that “only those statutes may claim legitimacy that can meet with the assent of all citizens in a discursive process of legislation that has been legally constituted.”25 This principle is the political form of a more general principle of what Habermas earlier called “discourse ethics.” The general principle holds that “just those norms are valid to which all possibly affected could agree as participants in a rational discourse.”26 The general principles holds for all norms, moral or legal. The second principle, which for present purposes is the only one that concerns me, governs legal norms alone.27 Both assume that since people are rational, and since rational discourse proceeds via the exchange of reasons (grounds for accepting the truth of a claim that are in principle acceptable to a third party whose opinion differs from the speaker), principles that rely upon coercive power can never be legitimate since they can never convince the groups that they exclude of their rational acceptability. The debate around gay marriage is an example from recent Canadian history illustrating how the principle of democratic legitimacy functions. If it is a matter of public knowledge that some citizens are gay and lesbian, and that some gays and lesbians want to get married, and that they will therefore be affected by a law that bans gay and lesbian marriage, then it follows by implication from the principle of democratic legitimacy that such an exclusionary law could never be valid because it will not be acceptable to at least some gays and lesbians. Privately, dissenting citizens could maintain the immorality of gay and lesbian marriage, but they cannot legitimately use coercive political power to legislate against it. Since banning gay marriage limits the permissible range of activities for a definite group of citizens, while permitting it

25 Ibid., 110. 26 Ibid., 107. For its original formulation and ethical justification see Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. 27 Habermas’s distinction between moral and legal norms has proven controversial. I cannot enter into the controversy here. See Lynch, “Distinguishing between Legal and Moral Norms: A Central Problem in Habermas’ Between Facts and Norms.” 67–72.

Habermas’s One-Dimensional Democracy

169

does not correspondingly limit the permissible range of activities of the opposed groups, it is inconsistent with democratic politics to ban gay marriage. Moreover, the evidence marshalled in support of such an exclusionary law is only acceptable if one treats epistemically dubitable texts as revealed truth. Such a move is not legitimate in democratic deliberations because supposed “revealed truths” could not be rationally acceptable to a third party not already convinced by the religious argument. Thus even citizens who are privately convinced of homosexuality’s immorality will not, if they reason about the issue, recommend legislation banning the practice. Without this mediating role of reason, the way in which destructive conflict and social paralysis could set in is obvious. Habermas’s stress on communicative reason as the mediation between moral autonomy and legitimate law attempts to reconcile the classic liberal value of legitimate self-interest with the republican value of popular sovereignty. The rational kernel of classical liberalism’s abstract conception of the person is the idea of individuals’ moral autonomy, i.e., their capacity to determine their ends for themselves, and the limiting effect this capacity has on state and social power. As Habermas says, people are morally autonomous insofar as they do not “have to give others an account or give publically acceptable reasons for [their] action plans.”28 Classic liberal negative rights follow from the private autonomy of individuals. However, not all action plans are private, as shown above. When these action plans conflict with one another, as they inevitably must, the need for legitimate law arises. If the law is to be more than coercive power, a norm as well as a fact, it too must be rationally defensible. The idea of the morally autonomous individual is thus not a sufficient normative basis to justify democratic law. Habermas continues, “even if each legal subject realizes, in the role of moral person, that she herself could have given herself certain basic rights, this moral approval in hindsight will not do; it by no means eliminates the paternalism of the ‘rule of law’ characteristic of political heteronomy. It is only participation in the practice of politically autonomous lawmaking that makes it possible for the addressees of law to have a correct understanding of the legal order as created by themselves.”29 The simple compatibility between the law and individual rights is not sufficient to guarantee the political autonomy of citizens since, for 28 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 120. 29 Ibid., 121.

170

Democratic Society

example, an enlightened despot could safeguard the moral autonomy of citizens and yet deny them all political power. Such a structure, however, is inconsistent with the rationality of citizens, which must exercise itself in both the private and public spheres. Thus Habermas’s discourse-theoretic reconstruction of democracy unites the liberal value of moral autonomy with the republican value of popular sovereignty (collective self-legislation). As he argues, “discourse theory takes elements from both and integrates them in an ideal procedure for decision making. Democratic procedure, which establishes a network of pragmatic considerations, compromises, and discourses of self-understanding and justice, grounds the presumption that reasonable and fair results may be obtained in so far as the flow of information and its proper handling have not been obstructed.”30 Morally autonomous persons act as citizens of a democratic society when they engage their private reason communicatively in actual discourses whose substance is the legal structure that will govern them. This legal structure, however, is not simply the framework within which citizens act, it is a framework whose existence is essential to their being citizens at all. As I noted above, the framework of legitimate law does not follow straightforwardly from the classic liberal conception of the person as morally autonomous. That moral autonomy becomes politically relevant only within a legitimate constitutional order. Private autonomy is not the foundation of public autonomy for Habermas; rather, the two forms are dialectically linked. As he observes, “the cooriginality of private and public autonomy reveals itself when we decipher, in discourse theoretic terms, the motif of self-legislation according to which the addressees of law are simultaneously the authors of their rights.”31 Private autonomy and public autonomy cannot be separated, then, because citizens are privately autonomous only if the law protects privacy and the law protects privacy only if it coheres with the citizens’ being free and equal persons. The key to democracy is the selflegislating power that citizens have. This conception of democracy, he argues, is “tacitly presupposed” by citizens of actual liberal democratic states insofar as they think of themselves and each other as citizens.32 The foundation of democracy is thus the legal structure that institutionalizes the private and public autonomy of citizens. The schedule of 30 Ibid., 296. 31 Ibid., 104. 32 Carlheden and Gabriels, “An Interview with Jurgen Habermas,” 2.

Habermas’s One-Dimensional Democracy

171

democratic rights at the core of democratic law is determined by considering the conditions in which the procedures for self-legislation can be institutionalized. As Habermas says, “the principle of democracy is what then confers legitimating force on the legislative process. The key idea is that the principle of democracy derives from the interpretation of the discourse principle and the legal form. I understand this inter33 pretation as the logical genesis of rights.” Given my overriding interest in understanding the democratic limitations of evolved rights-based social morality, it is crucial that this logical genesis be examined carefully. Rights follow from the principle of democratic legitimacy as just those guarantees that citizens would accord one another if they reasoned together as free and equal beings. It is thus clearly incorrect, Habermas argues, to understand the logical structure of rights in terms of pre-social entitlements of abstract individuals. Instead, even rights to privacy must be regarded as historical achievements grounded in the evolution of communicative rationality and dependent for their existence on legitimate legal orders. As he argues, “at a conceptual level rights do not immediately refer to atomistic and estranged individuals who are possessively set against one another. On the contrary, as elements of a legal order they presuppose collaboration amongst subjects who recognize one another, in their reciprocally related rights and duties, as free and equal citizens. This mutual recognition is constitutive for a legal order from which actionable rights are derived.”34 Habermas thus reverses the logical and historical development of rights. Historically, as he argued in Structural Transformation, rights were treated by the bourgeoisie as individual entitlements to be used in the pursuit of their projects against social and political barriers. It was this historical aspect of rights that Marx criticized and which was examined in the previous part. What Marx failed to understand, Habermas implies, was the logical structure implicit in the concept of right itself which would eventually undermine its historically undemocratic use. Undemocratic in origin, the logical structure of rights is, nevertheless, Habermas maintains, “radical[ly] democratic.”35 He believes that rights are radically democratic because they constitute the ground of possibility of a selflegislating society, a society where, as far as possible, the rationally artic33 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 121. 34 Ibid., 88. 35 Ibid., 252.

172

Democratic Society

ulated interests of citizens are institutionalized as laws that the citizens have given themselves. In other words, the essential function of rights is not to secure the private interests of the abstract individual against the state or society. Their essential function is rather to institutionalize the public sphere as a framework for the free and rational development of political opinions and demands. The system of rights, he argues, “should institutionalize the communicative framework for a rational political will formation, and it should ensure the very medium in which alone this will formation can express itself as the common will of freely associated legal persons.”36 The system creates the conditions for free formation of a common will by protecting a private sphere within which citizens can reflect about matters of public concern and maintaining a public sphere in which citizens can debate together about how those matters can best be regulated. The law is thus autonomy-preserving in both senses of autonomy, even though it also has a coercive side. Cook concludes, “as factually existing, the laws of democratic states have a coercive character that allows order to be maintained ... [a]t the same time, law also has normative validity to the extent that it is recognized by citi37 zens as worthy of respect.” It is recognized as worthy of respect because the citizens can regard it as their own creation, and they can regard it as their own creation because the structure of rights within which they live ensures both their private and public autonomy. The extent of the system of rights enjoyed by citizens of liberal democracies is ideally determined by the requirements of rational formation of will. Habermas explicates five classes of rights necessary to a well-formed democracy. The first class is similar to Rawls’s first principle and ensures the greatest range of liberties compatible with an equal share for all citizens. The second class contains basic rights that follow from the nature of the person as an equal citizen under the law. The third class contains basic rights to individual legal protection. The fourth class contains rights to political participation. Finally, a fifth class of rights ensures access to the basics of life-maintenance and the social, technological, and ecological safeguarding of life-conditions.38 This fifth class of rights was developed as a response to the exclusionary and undemocratic effects of the classic liberal interpretation. As Habermas 36 Ibid., 110. 37 Cook, Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society, 123. 38 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 122–3.

Habermas’s One-Dimensional Democracy

173

argues, “under the conditions of organized capitalism dependent on the provision of public infrastructure and planning, and with a growing inequality in economic power, assets, and social situations, the objective legal content of subjective private rights – that is, their substantive implications for public law – became visible. In such a changed social context the universal right to equal liberties could no longer be guaranteed through the negative status of the legal subject. Rather, it proved necessary, on the one hand, to specify the content of existing norms of public law and, on the other, to introduce a new category of basic rights governing claims to a more just distribution of social wealth.”39 Thus, like Rawls, Habermas interprets needs-based claims as positive rights and looks to the institutionalization of the fifth class of rights as the means whereby the material conditions of a society of self-legislating citizens are satisfied up to the point where further institutionalization of that class of rights would impair autonomy.40 This system of rights defines a legitimate democratic order: “A legal order is legitimate to the extent that it equally secures the co-original private and public autonomy of its citizens; at the same time, however, it owes its legitimacy to the forms of communication in which alone this autonomy can express and prove itself. In the final analysis, the legitimacy of law depends upon undistorted forms of public communication.”41 In essence Habermas understands by democracy a society in which a complex schedule of rights satisfies the formal and material conditions for self-legislation. In a democracy the law is not an alien burden borne as a yoke by the citizens. It is a legitimate system of coercion whose legitimacy stems from its rationality which in turn derives from civic participation in its formulation and testing. While there are empirical barriers to the undistorted communication that a legitimate democratic order requires, it remains the case that Habermas regards existing liberal democracies as legitimate and democratic in essential respects. Free debate in the political public sphere, regular and formalized mechanisms whereby political parties can be held accountable, the maintenance of informal channels of popular influence on the political system, and satisfaction of the basic material conditions of civic participation are the essential characteristics of liberal democracy. Beyond this structure democracy cannot go, Habermas argues, because social complexity rules out the complete 39 Ibid., 402–3. 40 Ibid., 407. 41 Ibid., 409.

174

Democratic Society

democratization of all social spheres. “Under modern conditions of complex societies, which require self-interested and hence normatively neutralized action in broad spheres, the paradoxical situation arises in which unfettered communicative action can [not] ... bear the burden of social integration falling to it.”42 Communicative reason must withdraw from the socio-economic life of society and confine its (politically relevant) operations to civil society and the political public sphere. While Habermas’s stress on the importance of social complexity must be recognized (I will return to that problem in the final chapter), it is nevertheless the case, I will now argue, that his idea of self-limiting democracy, a democracy that preserves the liberal-capitalist form of the separation of political from economic power, contradicts his own conception of democracy as a self-legislating society of free and equal citizens.

the contradictions of self-limiting democracy Habermas, like Rawls, regards the capitalist market as a zone of “normfree sociality” whose essential function is the efficient production of goods and services.43 Given its efficiencies, the form of action coordination the market makes possible unburdens, so he believes, communicative reason from the (now) impossible task of democratically managing and regulating economic affairs. I will return to the problem of democratic governance of the economy in the final part. For the moment I want to argue that Habermas overlooks the way in which the market, by “unburdening” communicative reason from overseeing the economic system, simultaneously burdens individual citizens and social life as a whole with the value system and social morality that justifies the decisions of powerful market agents as well as social policy. That does not mean that Habermas is oblivious to certain undemocratic implications of market forces. His colonization thesis long ago alerted democratic theory to the undemocratic implications of market forces if they escaped beyond their proper sphere of action. More recently, without reviving the colonization thesis per se, he has commented on the deep impediment capitalist globalization poses for democracy. Before explicating the contradiction at the heart of Habermas’s conception of democracy, it is thus necessary to first consider his understanding of the market in 42 Ibid., 37. 43 Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2, 171.

Habermas’s One-Dimensional Democracy

175

somewhat more detail, beginning with the way in which it can illegitimately limit democracy. As I noted above, Habermas understands society as governed by two different steering mechanisms: the formal rationality of the economic and administrative systems and the communicative rationality of the life world. According to the colonization thesis, the formal rationality of the economic system is not a threat to democracy in itself but only becomes problematic when it invades areas of life that are properly steered by communicative rationality. As he says, “capitalist modernization follows a pattern such that cognitive-instrumental rationality surges beyond the bounds of the economy and state into other, communicatively structured areas of life and achieves dominance there.”44 The globalization of this colonizing logic presents the biggest challenge to democracy today. Globalization, which he defines in normatively neutral terms as “a process that characterizes the increasing scope and intensity of commercial, communicative, and exchange relationships beyond national 45 borders,” is a threat to democratic society because it threatens the material conditions of democratic legitimacy. “The infrastructure of public and private life,” he contends, are threatened with “collapse, if they are given over to the power of the market.”46 When the institutions which ensure democratic legitimacy and material need satisfaction are subordinated to the formal rationality of the market, more and more citizens simply fall below the level at which they can, and indeed, desire to, participate in the life of the nation. As he argues, “the indicators of a rise in poverty and income disparities are unmistakable, as are the tendencies towards social disintegration. ‘Underclasses’ arise wherever exclusions – from the employment system, from higher education, from housing markets, from family resources, and so on – are compounded ... In the long run, a loss of solidarity such as this will inevitably destroy a liberal political culture whose universalistic self-understanding demo47 cratic societies depend on.” Despite this precise demonstration of the consequences of the globalization of capitalist market forces – consequences which are not pathological but the result of tendencies present from the beginning of capitalism – Habermas does not conclude that the system of value and social morality at the heart of the capitalist mar44 45 46 47

Ibid., 304. Habermas, The Postnational Constellation, 67. Ibid., 77. Ibid., 50.

176

Democratic Society

ket as such is incompatible with democracy. Instead, he maintains that the problem facing democrats today is the same as it has been from the beginning of the capitalist system, namely, “how to make the most effective use of the allocative and innovative functions of self-regulating markets while simultaneously avoiding unequal distributions and other social costs incompatible with the conditions for social integration in 48 liberal democratic states” [emphasis added]. As with Rawls, Habermas too concerns himself only with the quantitative, distributional asymmetries produced by the capitalist market, not with their deeper coercive effects on the content of life activity and value orientations. Whereas in Rawls this result was a consequence of his failure to draw the social and political conclusions consistent with his Aristotelian principle, in Habermas it is a consequence of the subordination of the material to the symbolic dimension of human life. This key point must be established before the contradiction at the heart of his work can be properly understood. Habermas, as is clear from the foregoing sections, places overriding emphasis on the rational foundations of democracy. Rationality is, in its most politically significant expression, intersubjective and communicative. It is in intersubjective communication that Habermas believes our humanity is most fully and freely expressed. As Cook comments, for Habermas, humans “are the bearers of a reason that has removed us completely from the natural realm.”49 As a consequence, I will argue, Habermas judges any form of activity that connects the human to the material objective world, in particular the material, self-realizing activity that takes the form of labour under capitalism, as nothing but an instrument of the creation of symbolic value in any possible society. Thus he does not seek to free human activity from the instrumentalizing clutches of the market since any economic system, he believes, must treat labouring activity as a mere means to the satisfaction of needs with no intrinsic links to the human value of capability development. Marx’s idea of human material activity as the normative foundation of a critique of capitalism, as well as any argument that would hold on to that idea while freeing it from its politically archaic elements, is thus doomed to self-contradiction, because it seeks to derive normative meaning from a 50 merely natural, “metabolic process between society and nature.” 48 Ibid., 49. 49 Cook, Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society, 86. 50 Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 79.

Habermas’s One-Dimensional Democracy

177

If it is the case that the capacities that human beings develop through their material interchange with the natural world are devoid of intrinsic value in any possible social formation, then it follows that if there is any human practice of intrinsic value it must be rooted in our cognitive and symbolic capacities. Values are not grounded in the material life capacities of the human being (feeling, sensing, acting on the material world, and thinking and communicating), but rather exclusively in the interchange of ideas about what human needs are and how they can best be satisfied in a way that enables us to communicate more completely. Under modern conditions, value pluralism is to be expected. It is both wrong and dangerous to seek for purportedly objective, universal values anchored in our organic constitution. Habermas initially developed this argument in a debate with Marcuse in the late 1970s. Against Marcuse’s attempt to link reason to the maximum realization of life capabilities Habermas argued that “the rational is not located as much in this type of everyday conceptualization [that it is better to live than not to live] as it is in the organization of a free, general articulation of will. That is, in the telos of non-violent intersubjectivity of communication. The rational is not located in, shall we say, an interest structure that is oppressed, deformed, or set free in certain social relations.”51 Thus freedom is not to be measured by the extent to which social relations permit or constrict the development of the organic capabilities of the human being as a social and potentially self-determining living being, because, insofar as these capabilities are merely elements of our physical nature, they have no normative value. It is only insofar as humanity “rises above” mere nature and can consciously argue about its needs and goals that its forms of social organization and activity take on any value. Once the problem of basic need satisfaction has been solved, the material dimension of life is superseded by the symbolic. Democracy need not make any reference to social and economic institutions once those institutions have been developed and regulated to the point where everyone’s physical needs are met. Democracy is thus not grounded in material social practices but symbolic structures of communication anchored in a life world defined not as the material and institutional world of life, but rather the background of successful communication rigorously

51 Habermas, “Theory and Politics: A Conversation with Herbert Marcuse, Jurgen Habermas, Heinz Lubasz, and Telman Spengler,” 139.

178

Democratic Society

distinguished from the material practices upon which its continued existence ultimately depends. The life world proper is defined by Habermas as the “interactions woven into the fabric of everyday communicative practice [that] constitute the medium through which culture, society, and person get reproduced. These representative processes cover the symbolic structure of the lifeworld. We have to distinguish this from the maintenance of the material substratum of the lifeworld.”52 Thus the activity of life is but a “material substratum” for the maintenance of symbolic interactions which are alone meaningful and subject to the epithets free or unfree. Even needs are ultimately symbolic products of intersubjective debate rather than organic elements of human beings.53 The examination of the importance of political democracy in part 2 also concluded that debate over needs is essential in a democratic society. However, it is one thing to stress that needs and how to satisfy them must be the subject of political debate and quite another to argue that 54 needs are themselves products of communicative interchange. Again, the values proper to a fully human life have an irreducible symbolic and intersubjective dimension. Unless, however, that symbolic dimension is understood as grounded in the organic capabilities of humans conceived as integrally active beings, and our needs understood as non-voluntary, objective requirements of human existence, in the physical and normative senses of existence, democracy is reduced to a political form only and thus cut off from transforming the essential forms of normative coercion on the scope and content of life activity that capitalist market forces normally produce. This normative coercion, as I have illustrated, takes two essential forms. Human beings confuse needs with wants, becoming locked into a nihilistic cycle of consumption and waste, and adopt the values underlying the capitalist economy (growth 52 Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2, 138. 53 Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1, 89. See also McCarthy, “Practical Discourse and the Relation between Morality and Politics,” 463. 54 Positing needs as communicatively constructed also opens Habermas to the objections of neo-liberals, who reject even economic redistribution on the basis of their rejection of the objectivity of needs. Needs are nothing more or less than what people spend their money on. Hence political authority has no right to redistribute income in order to satisfy peoples’ basic needs because there is no such thing as basic needs, needs being reduced to consumer preferences, and the degree to which anyone can satisfy their preferences a matter of social luck. See Doyal and Gough, A Theory of Human Need, 9–12.

Habermas’s One-Dimensional Democracy

179

of money as growth of value as such) at the expense of the health of the natural world, human societies, and their own individual existence. Yet Habermas ignores the normative foundations of the capitalist market economy, and thus also its essentially coercive effects. As a result, he does not see the deeply undemocratic consequences of the surprisingly strong separation between political and economic power his theory of democracy permits. Because Habermas treats the capitalist market as a sphere of “norm free” sociality, he believes that once it is confined to its proper sphere of operation it poses no threat to democracy. Habermas does not rest content with insisting on the capitalist market’s norm free character, however. He positively stresses the need to ensure that political movements do not interfere with its functions once it has been suitably framed by the system of rights. Indeed, the system of democratic rights presupposes the social differentiation of state, civil society, and a capitalist market. As he argues, “the separation of state and society also means the differentiation of a market economy institutionalized via the principle of individual private rights. The individualistic model of the legal system represents a functional imperative of self-regulating markets, which depend upon the decentralized decisions of market participants.”55 The political implications of this argument are clear in an essay Habermas wrote immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He argues that “complex societies cannot reproduce themselves if they do not leave the logic of an economy that regulates itself through the market intact.”56 The strength of Habermas’s insistence that once markets are regulated by positive rights they be left “free” to operate according to their own principles has not escaped the notice of surprised critics. William E. Forbath, for example, argues that Habermas “hews to a sophisticated, contemporary version of the view that the economy is a self-regulating system, which must be sealed off from the polity or else be derailed.”57 Cook goes further, maintaining that Habermas’s functionalist understanding of the capitalist market as nothing but an efficient system of production and distribution “recalls Adam Smith’s essentially benign Invisible Hand which is beyond the control – and justifiably remains 55 Habermas, The Postnational Constellation, 63. 56 Habermas, “What Does Socialism Mean Today?” 40. 57 Forbath, “Short-Circuit: A Critique of Habermas’ Understanding of Law, Politics, and Economic Life,” 272.

180

Democratic Society 58

beyond the control of – any individual or group of individuals.” As I have argued, however, the consequences of the normal operations of the capitalist economy, “free” under the classic liberal rights ground or regulated under the evolved liberal rights ground of social morality, are not benign. The amelioration of the quantitative inequalities in the advanced capitalist world notwithstanding, the value system that underlies the capitalist economy and the social morality that protects it as a private sphere generates undemocratic social power essentially damaging to the values of a fully human life. Habermas, however, seems more concerned to highlight the dangers of the bureaucratization of need satisfaction than to diagnose the univocal and life-destructive normative principles of the market. Like Rawls, he ultimately affirms the liberal value of autonomy over the democratic value of collective self-determination in the service of the end of individual capacity realization. As he argues, “the idea of a just society is connected with the promise of emancipation and human dignity. The distributive aspect of equal legal status and equal treatment – the just distribution of social benefits – is simply what results from the universalistic character of law intended to guarantee the freedom and integrity of each. The normative key is autonomy – not well-being.”59 Yet, if autonomy refers to the power of human beings to posit ends for themselves, it cannot be understood, save as an abstract moral power, outside of social relations in which the socio-economic system and its justifying values have been subordinated to needs-based social morality and its underlying idea of life value as full and free capability development. Wellbeing, in turn, does not simply refer to the quantity of goods available for consumption, but rather the degree to which the lives of human beings are governed by forces and values of their own rational choosing. Values cannot be rationally chosen in a social context dominated by the imperatives of the capitalist market, however, since it selects for, and uses political power to enforce, those choices alone that are judged likely to maximize profit, regardless of their implications for the range of choices this leaves for citizens who want to govern their lives otherwise (or would choose to govern their lives otherwise if they became aware of alternatives). Rather than spell out the principles of a social alternative more consonant with his own understanding of democracy as a society of self58 Cook, Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society, 18. 59 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 418.

Habermas’s One-Dimensional Democracy

181

legislating citizens, Habermas converts the “laws” of the capitalist economy into a permanent structural condition of democracy. Discourse theory, he notes, “like the liberal model ... respects the boundaries between ‘state’ and ‘society.’”60 He makes abundantly clear the democratic implications of this respect. He maintains that “political steering mechanisms can often take only an indirect approach and must ... leave intact the modes of operation internal to highly organized systems of action. As a result, democratic movements emerging from civil society must give up holistic aspirations to a self-organizing society.”61 As it turns out, the colonization thesis cuts both ways, against the invasion of the life world by economic rationality and against the invasion of economic rationality by communicative reason. As Ricardo Blaug argues, “at times it seems that Habermas is more concerned to describe the dangers of too much democratic counter-steering than those of an inadequately regulated market.”62 Cook furthers Blaug’s argument. She concludes that Habermas, “concerned that activists might take liberal democracy’s normative core of self-empowerment too literally ... offers stern reminders that, in the final analysis, control over the economy must ultimately be left to the Invisible Hand.”63 In fact, however, it is not only the economy that must be steered by principles that are divorced from democratic power, but the political system as well. Like the economy, the administrative system is too complex to be democratically managed, according to Habermas. He argues that “discourse theory does not make the success of deliberative politics depend upon a collectively acting citizenry, but on the institutionalization of the corresponding procedures.”64 Thus a deliberative democracy can exist even if there are no deliberators, i.e., even if the citizen body remains silent and passive, driven to acquiescence by repeated defeats and the indifference of the authorities.65 Democracy, shut out 60 Ibid., 299. 61 Ibid., 372. 62 Blaug, Democracy: Real and Ideal, 152. 63 Deborah Cook, “The Talking Cure in Habermas’ Republic,” 148. 64 Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, 248. 65 Examples abound, but two in particular come to mind. In 1995–96, in response to draconian cutbacks to social services and hateful demonization of the province’s poor by the right-wing Harris government, unions and progressive social movements across Ontario organized a series of Days of Action culminating in a quarter-million strong demonstration in Toronto. The government simply acted as if nothing had happened and the Days of Action movement slowly lost strength. On

182

Democratic Society

from the economic system and the political system and resting ultimately on the procedural legitimacy of law, reduces, in the experience of citizens, to the freedom to debate among themselves about how society ought to be governed, with no guarantee that their ideas will be incorporated into law. He argues clearly that political discourses “which, for technical reasons must be conducted by representatives, must not be construed in terms of the deputy or proxy model; they simply form the organized mid-point or focus of the society-wide circulation of informal communication. Discourses conducted by representatives can meet the condition of equal participation on the part of all members only if they remain porous, sensitive, or receptive to suggestions, issues, and contributions, information, and arguments that flow in from a discursively structured public sphere.”66 However, a government can be receptive to information flowing in from civil society without ever being obliged to act on it. Indeed, the same “technical” reasons that necessitate representation can be cited as reasons why government cannot be receptive to information flows from civil society. If the content of that information contradicts the ruling value system and social morality that political representatives uphold, they can simply argue, as indeed they tend to do, that “international competitive pressures” make it impossible to grant the demands of democratic activists. As Konstantinos Tsoukalas argues, under conditions of globalized capitalism “all apparatuses of the state (schools, media, parties, mainstream intellectuals, trade unions, etc.,) are systematically geared towards the dominant developmental tenets ... international ‘productivity’ and ‘competition’

15 February 2003, the global day of protest against the Bush administration’s planned war against Iraq attracted 500 000 people to the streets of New York City, nearly 1 million to the streets of London, and 1.3 million to the streets of Barcelona. These unprecedented mobilizations were simply ignored by the respective administrations, and the illegal invasion of Iraq went ahead as planned, just over one month later, beginning on 19 March. Nothing in Habermas’s conception of deliberative democracy rules out this increasingly common strategy of non- response. So long as the institutions of free discourse are in place, it matters not whether anyone uses them or anyone in power responds when they are used. 66 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 182. For a discussion of the ‘technical reasons’ that make representative democracy the only viable form, and a critique of delegate models of democracy, see Bobbio, The Future of Democracy. For another version of the argument that the equal participation condition of democracy can be fulfilled in the absence of equal participation see Bohman, Public Deliberation, 28–9.

Habermas’s One-Dimensional Democracy

183

67

now appear as the new objectivised gods.” Far from reconciling facts and norms, Habermas’s democratic theory simply converts established facts into unchallengeable norms by confusing liberal structures of open communication with democracy. The meaning of this last point can be illustrated by considering the example of a university classroom. It is imperative that the professor be open and responsive to information flowing back to him or her from the students. No one would thereby suggest that the classroom is democratic, because the professor’s pedagogical decisions are not determined by that information flowing back to him or her. The fertile exchange of arguments is essential to a healthy classroom but in no way makes it a democracy. It would be democratic only if all important pedagogical decisions were arrived at through collective decision-making. Habermas’s understanding of democracy is precisely analogous to the healthy classroom. There is open debate and a free flow of information, but just as the professor is under no obligation to have his or her decisions determined by the collective, so too the political authorities are under no obligation to have their agenda determined by the deliberatively emergent popular will. If one agrees that the classroom is liberal but not democratic, one must also agree that Habermas’s model is liberal but not for that reason fully democratic. While Habermas is clearly not a classical liberal, his conception of democracy concedes to democracy’s liberal opponents the point that democracy cannot be grounded in a substantive conception of the human good such that ethical limits are established in which the law is to be framed and to which all social institutions, especially the economy, must answer. Habermas, like Rawls, confuses a condition of liberal-democracy with a condition of democracy as such. He, like Rawls, ignores the historical and principled opposition between the value system, social morality, and social power of capitalist market forces and democratic social structures. Habermas’s understanding of democracy is thus beset by a profound contradiction. On the one hand, he defines democracy as a society of self-legislating citizens, while on the other he argues that actual legislation is the work of political representatives who are hemmed in by the demands of social complexity and efficiency from extending the reach of democratic law into the value system and institutions of the capitalist 67 Tsoukalas, “Globalization and the Executive Committee: The Contemporary Capitalist State,” 66.

184

Democratic Society

market. The limits the economic and administrative system imposes on democratic practice thus mean that, in the material and symbolic dimensions of human life, citizens do not relate to laws as their own rational creations but rather as coercive facts to which they must conform or suffer the consequences of both material deprivation and normative ostracism. Habermas believes that the democratic deficit caused by social complexity is made good by moral autonomy, social pluralism, and the procedural legitimacy of law, but he overlooks the totalitarian manner in which the social power generated by capitalist market forces insidiously determines people’s life horizons and conceptions of what is possible. While social complexity is a real challenge, it can be met, I will argue, by understanding the democratization of society as a long-term, multi-generational human project. Habermas provides no arguments that would refute the plausibility of a long-term project of social democratization. In sum, then, Habermas’s discourse-theoretic reconstruction of democracy, as rich in theoretical and normative insights as it is, proves contradictory. More than contradictory, however, it ultimately reveals itself to be practically impoverished insofar as it bars democratic activists from projects that seek to democratize functional systems of power. But as Andrew Feenburg argues, “bounding the system [with a system of rights] is not enough, it must also be layered with demands corresponding to a publically debated conception of the good life.”68 Articulating and defending a life-grounded conception of the good life, from which general principles of institutional transformation can be derived, is, I will argue in the final part, the most pressing task of democratic theory and practice today. Before turning to that task, however, the continuity of the postmodern conception of democracy with the liberal rights ground must be demonstrated. This demonstration completes the argument that the evolved liberal rights ground has established hegemony over democratic theory today and that, whatever permutation it takes, it results in a contradictory theory and practice of democracy. Once that argument is complete, the normative grounds and general principles of an alternative conception of democratic society will appear more plausible.

68 Feenberg, “Marcuse or Habermas: Two Critiques of Technology,” 67–8.

13

Chantal Mouffe: The Self-Contradictions of “Political” Democracy ocracy

e v o l v e d r i g h t s - b a s e d social morality focuses theoretical attention on the relationship between pluralism and democracy. Given the differences that characterize conceptions of the good life in modern society, legitimate authority must reconcile binding public law with private moral autonomy. Democracy is thus understood as the political system most compatible with the structure of modern society. By engaging the rationality of citizens in the production and testing of laws, democratic political structures are able to preserve autonomy and elicit respect for the law. Given this twin stress on pluralism and autonomy, contemporary democratic theory has concentrated on civil society as the structural sphere most essential to a vital democracy. The socio-economic system, while acknowledged as a locus of undemocratic power if the quantitative inequalities it produces are left unregulated, is not understood as a source of normative uniformity or coercive social power. Its internal dynamics, therefore, are not judged to be a fit subject for democratic transformation. As a consequence, as I have argued, the very pluralism championed by contemporary democratic theorists is steadily undermined by the value system that determines economic decision-making, the creation of public policy, and, increasingly, the goals that direct individual life projects. In this final section I will expose how an analogous form of this contradiction undermines the coherence of Chantal Mouffe’s postmodern concept of radical democracy. If Habermas’s work is a sign of a growing accommodation between the Marxist-inspired traditions of critical theory and the underlying principles of liberal political philosophy, then Mouffe’s work charts the gradual dissolution of the outré postmodern affirmation of difference into a conception of pluralistic civil society substantively indistinguish-

186

Democratic Society

able from its liberal interpretation. Despite the affirmation of pluralism as a key value of democratic society, the overall effect of this convergence tendency in contemporary democratic theory is, ironically, to squeeze out as anachronistic or utopian any conception of democracy that exceeds the conceptual and institutional limits of its current liberal theorization. Thus, the point of uncovering the self-contradictions of these permutations of the evolved liberal rights ground of social morality is to create a theoretical space in which an alternative conception of democracy becomes plausible. As with my examination of the work of Rawls and Habermas, I will concern myself with those elements of Mouffe’s work that exemplify the underlying operation of liberal rights-based social morality as its structuring principle. Thus I will not investigate the internal contradictions of her deconstruction of traditional Marxism or the conception of radical postmodern democracy that oriented her work in the 1980s.1 I will touch on that work only insofar as it reveals latent liberal tendencies that later emerge. The contradictions those tendencies imply for her conception of radical democracy will form the bulk of this final section.

pluralism and the political Mouffe’s thought first came to prominence in a joint work with Ernesto Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. The stated goal of that text was to deconstruct the essentialism that informed traditional Marxism and entailed its dogmatic relationship with other emancipatory social movements. By exposing the exclusionary implications of Marxism’s philosophical foundations, Laclau and Mouffe hoped to create the theoretical conditions for new modes of interaction between oppressed groups toward the practical end of producing new forms of emancipatory struggle. The goal was no longer a socialist society under the leadership of the proletariat but rather a radically pluralistic society in which no particular group could master the entire social order. The maximization of social differences rather than the subordination of all identities and institutions to a single governing principle or social order was the object of struggle. As they argued, “the rejection of privileged points of rupture and the confluence of struggles into a unified political space, and the acceptance, on the contrary, of plurality and indeterminacy of 1 For a detailed critique of that position see Noonan, Critical Humanism and the Politics of Difference, 82–6.

Mouffe on “Political” Democracy

187

the social, seem to us the two fundamental bases from which a new political imaginary can be constructed, radically libertarian and infinitely more ambitious than that of the classical left.”2 Their aim was to free subaltern groups from both the normalizing institutions of liberalcapitalism and the equally normalizing political practices of the Marxist left. “The proposal for a radical and plural democracy,” they wrote, “is nothing other than the struggle for a maximum autonomization of spheres on the basis of the generalization of the equivalential egalitarian logic.”3 Yet even in this most rhetorically excessive example of postmodern political theory, the systematic influence of essentially liberal philosophical principles makes itself felt. What they mean by the impenetrable phrase “generalization of the equivalential egalitarian logic” is essentially the completion of the liberal project of removing formal barriers to the free self-definition of different social groups. As they argue, “the conversion of liberal-democratic ideology into the ‘common sense’ of Western societies laid the foundations for that progressive challenge to the hierarchical principle ... It is the permanence of the egalitarian imaginary which permits us to establish a continuity between the strug4 gles of the nineteenth century ... and the social movements of today.” The problem with this argument is not that establishing the formal conditions for the free self-development of formerly oppressed social groups is not a radically democratic goal, but rather that there is no reflection on the adequacy of the normative vehicle of these struggles – the liberal concept of rights – to the goal of free self-realization. In a text ruthless in its deconstruction of Marxism, there is no critique whatsoever of the concept of right as the master category of emancipatory, democratic struggle. Mouffe and Laclau argue explicitly that “the task of the left cannot be to renounce liberal-democratic ideology but, on the contrary, to deepen and expand it in the direction of a radical and plural democracy.”5 The means of this expansion is primarily the creation of more complex schedules of positive rights. The development of positive rights, they claim, “profoundly transformed” the common sense of the liberal world, establishing the legitimacy of claims on the

2 3 4 5

Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 152. Ibid., 167. Ibid., 160. Ibid., 176.

188

Democratic Society 6

material grounds of self-realization. As I have already acknowledged, the development of positive rights is a key moment in the evolution of classical liberal social morality and an essential step in the development of democratic social forms. Their development fails to address, however, the deepest structural and normative impediments to human selfrealization. The liberal elevation of rights over needs and the postmodern elevation of social difference over human identity combine in Mouffe’s later work to produce a contradiction in her understanding of democracy analogous to that which I have found in the work of Habermas and Rawls. The focus of Mouffe’s later work is the specific logic of what she calls “the political.” She defines the political as “the dimension of antagonism that is inherent to all human societies,” and distinguishes it from “politics” which she defines as “the ensemble of practices, discourses, and institutions that seek to establish a certain order and to organize human coexistence in conditions that are always potentially conflicted, because they are affected by the dimension of the political.”7 The point of politics is to transform the antagonisms that characterize the political into agonism, domesticated debates between co-citizens.8 This focus is consistent with the argument of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy to the extent that Mouffe maintains the (unassailable) position that complex societies contain people with different perspectives and that political struggle is necessary to achieve political aims. Yet in her later work the focus is less and less on movement building for radical change and more and more on generating a dialogue within existing social and political structures. Mouffe develops her concept of the political through a selective read9 ing of the work of the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt. What interests Mouffe in Schmitt’s work is the contrast he draws between democracy and liberalism, a contrast that highlights the way in which liberalism has historically downplayed the dimension of the “political.” As she argues, “the liberal idea that the general interest results from the free play of private interests, and that a universal rational consensus could come

6 Ibid., 163. 7 Mouffe, “Decision, Deliberation, and Democratic Ethos,” 26. 8 Ibid. 9 I cannot digress into a full examination and critique of Schmidt’s work here. For an excellent criticism of it see Desai, “Fetishizing Phantoms: Carl Schmitt, Chantal Mouffe, and ‘The Political,’” 387–408.

Mouffe on “Political” Democracy

189

out of free discussions, blinds liberalism to the phenomenon of the political, which, for Schmitt, can be understood only in the context of the ever present possibility of the friend and the enemy grouping.”10 In Schmitt the maintenance of friend and enemy groupings is necessary for the maintenance of national solidarity, which is in turn necessary for the maintenance of the willingness of citizens to sacrifice themselves in war for the “good” of the nation.11 Mouffe brackets the essential role state violence plays in Schmitt and instead domesticates the idea of antagonism central to the idea of the political. The domestication of Schmitt’s concept of the political is achieved by reading it through the lens of Derrida’s conception of the “constitutive outside.” Mouffe writes, “one of Derrida’s central ideas is that the constitution of any identity is always based on exceeding something and establishing a violent hierarchy between the resulting two poles ... This reveals that there is no identity that is self-present to itself and not constituted as difference, and that any social objectivity is constituted through acts of power. It means that any social objectivity is ultimately political and has to show traces of the exclusion which governs its con12 stitution, what we can call its ‘constitutive outside.’” This central principle of deconstruction holds that a concept derives its meaning through a paradoxical relationship with another concept that appears to be the opposite but is in fact constitutive of the meaning of the first. The paradox lies in the fact that the hierarchical relationship of meaning that exists between opposed concepts is always reversed when their relationship is understood deconstructively. Thus, in classical metaphysics the concept of essence designates the truth of the object of thought in contradistinction to the mere appearance of the object. But the meaning of the concept of essence depends upon its relation to the opposed concept of appearance. If everything were essence and nothing appearance then essence would be an empty category. But if the concept of appearance is necessary to the meaning of the concept of essence, then it is in fact essential. Hence, the hierarchy of essence over appearance is reversed. For Mouffe, the function of the constitutive outside is to reveal that the friend and enemy grouping is not a zero sum game but rather a relation of mutual implication. There are no friends without enemies 10 Mouffe, The Return of the Political, 111. 11 Desai, “Fetishizing Phantoms,” 392–3. 12 Ibid., 141.

190

Democratic Society

but also no enemies without friends. Victory can never be absolute. Instead, what counts is the ongoing play of argument between these groups, the content of which is always shifting but which would be meaningless outside a relation to its opposite. Democracy, as will become clear, is understood essentially as ongoing debate between opposed political groups whose opposition never hardens into the absolute incompatibility of their respective positions. It is, in other words, the very liberal idea of difference within an agreed-upon framework of rules she purportedly rejects in the name of the political. Before teasing out that contradiction, I will consider an example as an aid to clarifying what Mouffe understands as democratic practice. An argument in favour of public health care presupposes that a different party is arguing for privatized health care. The pro-public health care position only becomes meaningful in an antagonistic relationship to pro-privatization forces. The vitality of politics depends upon there being a constant supply of antagonisms to be resolved without any finally stabilized consensus on institutional forms being achieved. It is clear that such a concept of political antagonism presupposes that what Rawls called the basic structure of society is just. If it were not, then some political antagonisms, namely those that concerned the legitimacy of the basic structure, could not be resolved within it. Mouffe argues that liberalism ignores the antagonistic character of politics to the extent that it treats political positions as merely ready-made preferences, but she fails to understand how her questioning of liberalism as a political philosophy presupposes liberal society as a fundamentally legitimate social reality. Rather than call that society into question, her concept of the political concurs with the basic social premise of liberal society as “disagreement about the ranking of values.”13 As in Rawls and Habermas, this form of disagreement follows from the collapse of socially binding agreements on any “substantive and unique vision of the common good.”14 Thus she, like Habermas and Rawls, argues that pluralism is “constitutive of modern democracy” without at the same time acknowledging, as they did, the essential role that liberalism played in this development.15 Even though Mouffe rightly notes that liberalism and democracy have been opposed historically, this insight does not fundamentally dis13 Mouffe, “Politics, Democratic Action, and Solidarity,” 106. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 100.

Mouffe on “Political” Democracy

191

tinguish her democratic theory from the deeper principles of the liberal interpretation.16 In contrast to liberalism, she argues that a democracy “calls for a violent clash of political positions and an open conflict of interests.”17 She goes so far as to say that “to realize a true democracy would lead to its destruction.”18 That is, a society in which there was a basic and shared normative agreement could not be democratic. Yet, it is equally true that she assumes that the framework within which the “violent” clash of political opinions takes place is accepted by all parties to the debate as just. Opponents of public health care, therefore, do not call for the expulsion from the state of defenders of a public system. Her concept of the political, then, does not really differ in any significant degree from the liberal interpretation of the legitimacy of the given institutional reality. An examination of her critique of Rawls and Habermas supports this claim. As will be clear, she presupposes the very idea of underlying consensus that she criticizes them for using. Against Rawls, Mouffe argues that his conception of public reason, by ruling out arguments grounded in comprehensive doctrines, negates the antagonistic character of the political. She contends that “Rawls has been using a mode of reasoning which is specific to moral discourse and whose effects when applied to politics is to reduce it to a rational process of legitimation among private interests under the constraints of uncertainty ... conflicts, antagonisms, relations of power ... simply disappear and we are faced with a typically liberal vision of a plurality that can be regulated without need for a level superior to political decision and where the question of sovereignty is evacuated.”19 In other words, the problem of meaningful contestation between different interpretations of rights and freedoms never arises in Rawls’s just society, because the two principles set once for all the basic self-understanding of the citizens in the state. Thus, questions of application, not contestation, are prioritized in Rawls’s philosophy, with the result that no differences really make a (political) difference. What party rules, what economic policy is hegemonic are matters of indifference, since the basic premise of the society is that questions of justice have been resolved. As Seyla Benhabib comments in reference to Mouffe, “the symbolic ordering [of democracy] is characterized not just by a pluralism of values and 16 17 18 19

Mouffe, The Return of the Political, 10. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 128. Ibid., 49.

192

Democratic Society

worldviews, as John Rawls would maintain; rather this is a pluralism at the “axiological level” which recognizes the impossibility of ever adjudicating without contest and without residue among competing visions of the good, of justice, and of the political.”20 For Rawls, by contrast, theories of the good life (comprehensive doctrines) must be kept out of politics. Agreement about the principles of justice purportedly negates the antagonistic character of the political. Whereas her critique of Rawls focuses on the absence of meaningful value pluralism, her critique of Habermas centres on the negation of the dimension of the political by the goal of consensus formation. She is concerned to argue against both the utopian character of communication undistorted by power and the absolute valorization of reason in political interactions. She argues that “if we adopt Schmitt’s insights about the relations of inclusion-exclusion which are necessarily inscribed in the political constitution of ‘the people’ – which is required by the exercise of democracy – we have to acknowledge that the obstacles to the redemption of the ideal speech situation – and to the consensus without exclusion that it would bring about – are inscribed in the democratic logic itself. Indeed, the free and unconstrained deliberation of all on matters of common concern goes against the democratic requisite of drawing a frontier between us and them.”21 It seems as if Mouffe is arguing that democracy requires factionalization and radical divergence of outlook and program in order to be genuinely pluralistic and therefore democratic. Thus she claims that the problem with both Rawls and Habermas is that their belief that democratic pluralism must be framed by formal principles regulating political interactions in the public sphere entails that such deep-seated differences as Mouffe (apparently) thinks necessary be kept out of politics. More deeply, Mouffe’s argument would seem to imply that both fail to note the difference between democracy and liberalism and simply re-code democracy to fit with their essentially liberal premises and thus simply apologize for “the 22 institutions and practices of the rich North Atlantic democracies.” The problem is that a close examination of her alternative reveals that it is essentially indistinguishable from the Rawlsian and Habermasian arguments that she criticizes.

20 Benhabib, “The Democratic Moment and the Problem of Difference,” 8. 21 Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 48. 22 Mouffe, The Return of the Political, 10.

Mouffe on “Political” Democracy

193

First, as I have already noted, she draws an essential link, as do Rawls and Habermas, between democracy and pluralism. The apparent difference is that her version of pluralism accepts dissension over the question of basic values whereas Rawls and Habermas purportedly insist on unity. She thus notes that “understanding the nature of pluralism also requires a vision of the political as a discursively constructed ensemble of social relations, a vision that is at odds with liberalism.”23 It is at odds with liberalism to the extent that discursive construction means that there are no foundational rational interests at the root of political interests. While this claim might be at odds with classic liberalism, it is hardly at odds with Rawls’s and Habermas’s more complex interpretation, in which rational interests are precisely constructions of political debate, not presupposed natural properties of human beings. Second, and more damaging to the coherence of her position, is that, when it comes to the actual moment of political antagonism she unconsciously but manifestly constructs it in liberal terms. The domestication of Schmitt’s concept of the friend-enemy grouping negates the fundamental character of antagonism she nevertheless appeals to as the distinguishing character of her concept of democracy. Ultimately, her agonistic pluralism rests on the principle, familiar from Voltaire, of disagreeing with what one’s opponent says but struggling to the death for her or his right to say it. In other words, when it comes down to the actual exchange of political differences no difference really makes a difference because everyone is engaged in the same democratic dialogue. No position can have initially stronger moral grounds or be in the objective interests of human being because, as in classical liberalism, human beings do not have objective interests. She calls interests “discursively constructed ensembles” rather than wants or preferences, but the political implications are the same: all social values, even anti-social values expressed in society, are initially equal in normative weight. She writes, “Envisaged from the point of view of agonistic pluralism the aim of democratic politics is to construct the ‘them’ in such a way that it is no longer an enemy to be destroyed, but an adversary, that is somebody whose ideas we contest but whose right to defend those ideas we do not put in question.”24 Thus a very classic liberal conception of the right to free speech bears the preponderance of weight in supporting her conception of democracy. Her invocation of antagonism as fundamental 23 Mouffe, Dimensions of Radical Democracy, 11. 24 Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 101–2.

194

Democratic Society

notwithstanding, it becomes impossible from within her position to understand expressed political differences as irreconcilably opposed. Thus, even those whose agenda is to dismantle long-won positive rights and social infrastructure and who are willing to use force to impose that agenda are treated as simple “antagonists” in the game of democracy. From the point of view of defenders of the life-destructive value system at the base of the capitalist economy, democratic opponents are real enemies to be attacked. Rather than respond with a call for new forms of radical opposition, Mouffe offers only the familiar, and essentially liberal, reply that, since agreement on fundamental values is impossible, democracy must insist that all disputes be resolved through compromise. This conclusion, however, ignores the radical idea behind democracy: there are common life interests (need satisfaction and free capability development) that different forms of oppression ignore but that democratic social power advances. I will develop this point in the final part. For the moment, I want to pursue at a deeper level the selfcontradiction that runs through Mouffe’s understanding of democracy.

self-confuting radicalism Mouffe’s work, like that of Rawls and Habermas, contains embryonic forms of a conception of democratic society. Indeed, at one point she recognizes the connection between forms of social organization and pluralism. Rather than simply accept pluralism as a fact of modern life, she recognizes that it is a product of social organization. She thus links its growth to the transformation of basic social institutions. “Pluralism lies at the very core of modern democracy,” she states, and if we “want a more democratic society we need to increase pluralism and make room for a multiplicity of democratically managed forms of association and 25 community.” Rather than develop this genuine democratic insight into the material conditions of self-determination, however, Mouffe continually slides back into the essentially liberal understanding of democracy as political discussion within existing legal and institutional frameworks. She thus fails to see the contradiction between the goal of creating the conditions for deeper forms of pluralism and the onesided political conception of democracy that she champions. The truth of this claim is first evidenced by the way in which she condemns the postmodern conception of radical pluralism that her work 25 Ibid., 98–9.

Mouffe on “Political” Democracy

195

once celebrated. On the one hand, this shift in her position recognizes the incoherence of an affirmation of difference as such as emancipatory. On the other hand, however, she does not state any clear democratic criteria according to which legitimate and illegitimate life projects can be distinguished. Specifying such criteria would have to involve some reference to universal interests and values and her lingering postmodernism prevents her from doing so. She argues that “it is important to recognize the limits to pluralism which are required by a democratic society that aims at challenging a wide range of relations of subordination. It is therefore necessary to distinguish the position I am defending from the type of extreme pluralism that emphasizes heterogeneity and incommensurability and according to which pluralism – understood as valorization of all differences – should have no limits.”26 These limits, however, must be linked to the universal value of human capability development if they are to serve deeply democratic (as opposed to liberal or consumeristic) ends. Without that linkage (which I will develop in the final part) her conception of pluralism ultimately reduces to the liberal interpretation she decries. Mouffe thus fails to realize the promise implicit in her own affirmation of the self-organizing capacity of oppressed groups. She argues in favour of a “solidaristic economy” that would include an “associational” sector along with the state and the market. The associational sector of the economy would be driven by self-organizing communities in 27 need-governed relation to the resources of self-development. These are all excellent ideas, but the essentially universal challenge that they pose to the value system underlying the present order is not recognized because that value system is not uncovered or criticized directly. Rather than elaborating the radical challenge that the associational sphere poses to the values of the market, and rather than arguing that it should replace rather than coexist with it (there is no coexisting with the market because by its nature it colonizes and reprograms), Mouffe ends up simply repeating the familiar themes of evolved rights-based social morality. Seemingly forgetting her diagnosis of the opposition between democracy and liberalism and her critique of liberalism’s apolitical essence, she invokes the shared values of citizenship as the core of her understanding of democracy. She argues that “the principle task of a modern and democratic political philosophy is precisely the articula26 Ibid., 20. 27 Ibid., 126–7.

196

Democratic Society

tion of individual liberty and political liberty, for it is there that the question of pluralistic and democratic citizenship is rooted.”28 Furthermore, she contends that “what we all share and what makes us fellow citizens in a liberal-democratic regime is not a substantive idea of the good but a set of political principles specific to such a tradition: the principles of freedom and equality for all ... To be a citizen is to recognize the authority of such principles and the rules in which they are embodied ... To be associated in terms of the recognition of liberaldemocratic principles: this is the meaning of citizenship that I put for29 ward.” The idea of a solidaristic economy serving the life interests of all human beings, however, is a substantive idea of the good and democratic theorists must be concerned with defending its necessity precisely because it is not shared by the class that controls and benefits from the current form of globalized capitalism. The problem democracy faces today is that the liberal conception of full citizenship has proven itself unable to govern those dynamics that determine the material and normative horizons of human life. What democracy confronts is not free debate between mutually recognizing citizens but conscious steering of the economy toward life-destructive ends. Mouffe’s position implies a critique of this life-destructive value system but her presentation of the problem presupposes the legitimacy of the basic structures that serve it. The radical insights that her work contains fade behind a conception of shared citizenship and a prioritization of reciprocally granted formal rights over the substantive values of need satisfaction and capability enablement. Thus, it is no surprise to see Mouffe emphasize (as Rawls and Habermas also did) the limits rather than the future potential of democracy. She concludes that “for democratic politics to exist no social agent should be able to claim mastery of the foundation of society. The relations between social agents can only be termed democratic in so far as they accept the particularity and the limitations of their claim – that is, only in so far as they recognize their mutual relations as ones from which power is irreducible.”30 This argument is true insofar as “social agent” refers to particular groups using political power to universalize their private interests. It is not true, however, if “social agent” refers to human beings active in pursuit of their universal interests against par28 Mouffe, The Return of the Political, 38. 29 Ibid., 65. 30 Ibid., 151.

Mouffe on “Political” Democracy

197

ticular interests whose control over social and natural wealth allows them to coercively determine the content of everyone else’s life. Unless this basic conflict of interests is foregrounded, democracy appears compatible with social structures that negate rather than develop the social pluralism that is purportedly the very essence of modern democracy. Mouffe, like Rawls and Habermas, implicitly recognizes this conflict of interests but fails to draw the properly democratic conclusion: the further democratization of the globe depends upon articulating and vindicating a universal conception of the human good as full and free capability development institutionalized in a solidaristic society governed by the principles of needs-based social morality and the life ground of value. The triumph of that politics is predicated upon the defence of the universally human over theories that deny its existence and practices that impede its full development. To the explication of the meaning of the universally human and the general principles implied by any project of institutionalizing it I now turn.

This page intentionally left blank

part four A Project for Social Democratization

This page intentionally left blank

14

The Reaction Against Social Democratization

al Democratization

t h e f i r s t t h r e e p a r t s of this book have reconstructed, from the standpoint of their respective social moralities, the debate between liberals and democrats “about the kind of social agenda necessary to make the principle of political control by equal citizens properly effective.”1 Judging over the long term, democrats have been successful in transforming the strong form of separation of political and economic power justified by classical liberal rights-based social morality. The high point reached thus far by that trend is the external regulation of economic power by laws enacted by duly elected governments. Those regulations include health and safety legislation, affirmative action programs to ameliorate racial and sexual inequalities in the distribution of work and rates of pay, environmental legislation to protect ecosystems and human health, as well as progressive taxation systems designed to create pools of funds for investment in social infrastructure and public goods. Still, without denying the reality of democratic development, the external regulation of market forces has not yet successfully supplanted their control over natural and social wealth with an internally democratic economic system. In this final chapter I will argue that external regulation must progressively become internal democratization, explicate the normative principles that would justify such a transformation, and provide the outlines of an institutional structure that could realize it. The argument will have to contend with two serious objections, both of which are implicit in the democratic theories examined in the previous part. The first argument, which I will call the objection from pluralism, maintains that any political theory that claims to be both democratic and 1 Beetham, Democracy and Human Rights, 37.

202

Democratic Society

grounded in a universal conception of the human good will be caught on the horns of a dilemma. If the position insists on its universal conception of the good then it will have to abandon its democratic goals. This result is inevitable because the universal conception of the good will have to confront different conceptions of the good in a pluralistic society and thus will be forced to use coercive power against them. On the other hand, if it sticks by its democratic values and refuses to use coercive power to secure commitment to its conception of the good, then it will, in effect, admit that there is no universal good but only competing goods in a pluralistic civil society. The second objection is equally if not more serious. I will call it the objection from possibility. It maintains that the history of the socialist movement has itself proven that social democratization can go no further than external regulation of market forces. Attempts to do away with their allocative and coordinating function through the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist society have resulted in murderous totalitarian states and grossly inefficient and ecocidal economies. The project for full social democratization, therefore, ignores the most important lessons of twentieth-century history and cannot be taken seriously by anyone committed to the health, well-being, and freedom of people on the planet. Responding to these objections will form the bulk of the final chapter. In regard to the objection from pluralism, I will respond that the conception of the human good implied by needs-based social morality is not opposed to pluralism. Robust pluralism in fact presupposes such a conception of the good. Particular conceptions of the good that guide different life projects are the concrete content of a universal form of the good as free individuation by means of the development of vital human capabilities. The material conditions for free individuation, and thus pluralism of a robust form, are defined by a social commitment to the satisfaction of the three classes of fundamental need developed in part 2. This conception of the good is rationally defensible to groups and individuals who do not immediately recognize their conception of the good in it. While it does rule out the legitimacy of certain life projects (those that depend upon social dynamics that deprive others of the means of satisfying their fundamental needs and thus freely individuating themselves), this does not mean that it must rely on coercive political authority for its institutionalization. First, no normative political theory regards every form of life as legitimate, so the mere fact of opposition between particular conceptions of the good and the universal

The Reaction Against Social Democratization

203

human good does not entail that the latter must lead to the coercive use of authority. Second, and more importantly, the types of life that would be ruled out are not the types of life that are genuinely in the human interests of the people who lead them. Self-transformation, which humans have repeatedly proven themselves capable of, is thus the means whereby destructive forms of life practice will be progressively overcome. In regard to the second objection, I will admit that the revolutionary path to democratic society has imposed inhuman costs, especially upon those in whose name it was undertaken, and cannot be repeated. It does not follow, however, that the failure of revolutionary socialism entails the failure of the internal democratization of the economic system. The long-term trend toward external regulation is itself already implicitly democratic, insofar as it subordinates economic power to the legitimate political power of democratic government. The model for the synthesis of economic and political power I will explicate, the model of “negotiated coordination” developed by Pat Devine, does not require ex nihilo creation of a new social order but works with trends toward planning and negotiation already at work in advanced capitalist societies. The means of transformation are not revolutionary but evolutionary. That is, they seek to include currently excluded groups in the planning of socio-economic priorities and to gradually supplant the allocation of resources and coordination of productive activity by market forces with allocation and coordination by democratic negotiation. The major obstacle to social democratization, the sheer complexity of contemporary social life, is overcome by greatly expanding the time frame of transformation. Working with the long-term trend noted above toward a definite goal but within an open temporal horizon lends much greater plausibility to the project. I will expand upon these responses in the second and third sections of this part. First, however, it is essential to ask the question, Why should internal transformation of the socio-economic system be a priority for democrats? The answer is that the last thirty years have witnessed the intensification of the globalization of market forces. This development threatens the long-term trend toward social democratization (and therefore political democratization) as well as the health and diversity of human and planetary life. These results are not accidental externalities but the consequence of capitalist globalization’s guiding social morality (a neo-liberal, corporate rights-based repetition of classical liberal social morality) and money-grounded value-system. In principle

204

Democratic Society

globalization represents a totalitarian form of socio-economic power and a reaction against social democratization. Internal democratization is necessary, therefore, both to protect the gains of the past and to secure a positively free future. The development of capitalist societies depended upon the success of a new social morality which justified a form of separation between political and economic power, thereby preventing democratic governance of the economy. As a result, the satisfaction of fundamental human needs and the free development of vital human capabilities were subordinated to the accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of a minority class. Since life activity is fundamentally damaged when needs are not met and freedom is absent, and this damage is normally experienced (over the long term) as intolerable, the groups who suffered most during the period of liberal-capitalist consolidation organized themselves in democratic movements of social transformation. They struggled for the universalization of civil and political rights as well as for the democratic governance of socio-economic power. Judged over the long term, these struggles have been successful, not only in universalizing the rights of citizenship, but also in securing recognition of the principle (if not the practice) that the legitimacy of socioeconomic power is contingent upon its contribution to the well-being and quality of life of all citizens. The evidence of this long-term tendency toward social democratization is found at both the political and socio-economic level. National economic priorities are set out in a budget and voted on by duly elected political parties; workers have the legal right to organize and negotiate the terms of their employment; the internal structure of workplaces is governed by law; there is at least formal recognition that the terms of employment cannot discriminate on the basis of sex, race, sexuality, or range of physiological ability; environmental legislation (in the most developed countries) constrains the costs imposed on the natural and social worlds by productive activity; and private earnings are (in principle) taxed to fund public goods and social infrastructure. All these changes, I have suggested, are best understood as the outcome of struggles rooted in needs-based social morality. Together they represent the social content of democracy. In the last thirty years, these achievements have been challenged and rolled back by the intensified globalization of capitalist market forces. This assault on the principle that economic performance is to be judged not simply by profit and loss but by contribution to the wellbeing and quality of life activity of citizens has been justified by a neo-

The Reaction Against Social Democratization

205

liberal version of classical liberal rights-based social morality. In terms familiar to anyone who pays even passing attention to social developments, this neo-liberal rights-based social morality has been deployed to justify reductions in public spending; privatization of public services and goods-provision; deregulation of the business environment; weakening of employee protections, anti-discrimination legislation, and environmental protection; opening up of national economies to direct foreign investment; and reduction of funds for public expenditure through massive tax cuts to business and the wealthy. Underlying this reaction against the evolved social content of democracy is a value system which reduces the human value of life activity to the life-blind economic value of private accumulation of money in the hands of those who own and control productive property. Its principle is succinctly stated by McMurtry: “Maximum growth and development of the human species demands globalization of this free market across all of the “earth, air and water, and outer space as it is accessed.”2 In practice the globalization of this value program entails that the satisfaction of the material conditions for the “growth and development” of the human species passes from the (at least partial) control of democratic governments to unaccountable multinational corporations steered in their decisions by their private interest in maximizing profitable returns on investment. The new subject of rights to control and exploit natural and social wealth is the corporation, not the particular individual of classical liberal philosophy. Gary Teeple correctly summarizes the implications of intensified globalization: “corporate right at the transnational level is pre-eminent and overrides all other rights; indeed, to the tncs [transnational corporations] and the wto [World Trade Organization], imf [International Monetary Fund], and World Bank, all other rights appear as nothing but impediments to capital accumulation. Their ideal is a world that approximates a marketplace society in which the right of private property prevails.”3 Viewed in relation to the long-term tendency toward social democratization the vigorous assertion of the neo-liberal rights-based social morality and its value system is an attack on the democratic principle that social outcomes are legitimate only to the extent that citizens are able to participate in the processes that generate them. Yet, from within neo-liberalism’s social morality, the deregulation of market forces is 2 McMurtry, Value Wars, 50. 3 Teeple, The Riddle of Human Rights, 151.

206

Democratic Society

understood to be a condition of democracy. As with its classical liberal predecessor, this understanding presupposes a conception of democracy as empty of social content and confined to (at best) the passive enjoyment of equal citizenship rights. This point is made clearly by one of the doyen’s of the neo-liberal New Right in the United States, Samuel Huntington. Commenting in the 1970s on the implications of the social struggles of the 1960s, he argued, “the vitality of democracy in the 1960s produced a substantial increase in government activity and a substantial decrease in government authority ... The apparent vitality of democracy in the 1960s raises questions about the governability of democracy in the 1970s.”4 Notice how Huntington subtly shifts from his description of democracy in the 1960s as “vital” to “apparent[ly]” vital. This shift is of profound importance. In order to mask the undemocratic implications of the New Right’s privatization-globalization agenda, it was necessary to argue that the socially democratic struggles of the 1960s, struggles which led to world-historic changes in the social position of marginalized and oppressed groups like women, AfricanAmericans, and gays and lesbians, were not really democratic. Instead they were socially disruptive “special interests” overburdening government with coercive demands to re-engineer society to accommodate their private concerns. “Real” democracy, by implication, could only be 5 passive acquiescence in the enjoyment of civil and political rights. Viewed from the material perspective of need satisfaction, the consequences of the roll-backs to the social content of democracy have been stark. To cite only one indicator – the social distribution of national income – inequality in the United States during the period of neo-lib6 eral hegemony has grown faster than at an time since the 1920s. Viewed from the deep normative standpoint of neo-liberalism’s justifying social morality and value system, the reactionary trend toward privatization and systematic withdrawal of funds from public goods is darker still than growing inequality. It represents, at the level of these justifying principles, a totalitarian drive to subordinate human and planetary life to an omnipresent monovalue, corporate gain and loss, as the only legitimate regulator of value and meaning. The epithet “totalitarian” might seem rhetorically excessive. It is so only if one takes a superficial view of the meaning of the term or if one 4 Huntington, The American Commonwealth, 11. 5 Ibid. 6 Barry, Why Social Justice Matters, 11.

The Reaction Against Social Democratization

207

confuses what I am claiming with the quite different view that social organization as it stands in developed liberal-capitalist countries is actually totalitarian. I am not asserting the latter but only that the value system and social morality of neo-liberalism are totalitarian in principle. That is, if they were allowed free scope, they would subsume and govern every facet of individual human life and social organization. They assume themselves to be omnicompetent not only to decide on the proper allocation of resources and activities, but also to determine the legitimate range of government activity, the proper content of cultural life (what is “good” is what sells), the means of delivery of basic needsatisfiers, the organization of institutions in which human intelligence is cultivated, when and when not to go to war, and the motivational structures of individual citizens (always choose the career path that will maximize monetary returns to self). In order to obviate charges of rhetorical hyperbole, however, these claims need to be spelled out in more detail. An anti-intellectual and anti-philosophical culture teaches its young to think in terms of images and examples, thus incapacitating the vital cognitive capability to reason on the basis of principled discriminations. Citizens of liberal-democratic societies are taught to think of totalitarianism in terms of images of uniformed mass conformity, for example, Riefenstahl’s unforgettable pictures of Nazis robotically cheering Hitler’s mania at the Nuremburg Rally. The consequence of superficial picture thinking is that where corresponding images are not apparent, there is no possibility of conscious recognition of identity of principle. I am not arguing that liberal-capitalist society is identical to Nazi Germany, but rather the quite different point that Nazi Germany (or Stalinist Russia) is not identical to totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is not identical to uniformed hyper-conformity of the social body to an authoritarian political party, but is essentially a form of value-disorder in which nominally individual selves cease to reason independently about the legitimacy of their social world because the structure of power typical of that world makes them feel helpless to influence it. On the individual level, this value disorder takes the form of what Erich Fromm called “automation conformity.” As Fromm argues, the assumption that the ‘normal’ way of overcoming aloneness is to become an automaton contradicts one of the most widespread ideas concerning man in our culture. The majority of us are supposed to be individuals who are free to think, feel, act as they please ... this is not only the general opinion on the subject of modern individualism, but also each person sincerely believes that his

208

Democratic Society

thoughts ... are ‘his’ ... this belief is an illusion in most cases and a dangerous one ... as it blocks removal of those conditions that are responsible for this state 7 of affairs.

Aldous Huxley presciently observed in 1946, immediately after the victory over the Nazis, referring to the Western powers who had just conquered “totalitarianism,” “a really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”8 Again, I am not contending that Huxley here describes our actual conditions, but rather a real tendency at war with a deeper understanding of democratic freedom. The conditions that are responsible for this state of affairs are those that make individuals and collectives of individuals actually powerless. At the deepest level, those conditions are the rule of a value system that brooks no opposition and entertains no possibility of any alternative to itself. Totalitarian principles operate where a particular interest presents itself as universal and aggressively seeks to dominate over the whole field (totality) of social institutions, policies, interests, practices, ways of life, and goals. In the twentieth century’s two major forms of totalitarian politics, it was the particular interest of a party that came to dominate the totality of the social. But the connection between party and totalitarianism is contingent. A value system connected to the socio-economic dynamics of the social whole can also be totalitarian in its principle when its few beneficiaries enforce policies (through military force if necessary) whose net effect is the subordination of all public wealth, all public institutions, and all individual aspirations to the self-expansion of profitability as the sole recognized value. As McMurtry argues, “totality of rule is not the only parameter of totalitarianism. In Hannah Arendt’s phrase, limitlessness of power also proceeds from an “omnipresent centre.” In the new totalitarian movement ... the regulating principle is to multiply by ever more deregulation and new financial instruments the monetised circuits of power through which directive control of all the world’s means of existence increasingly pass.”9 This regulating principle is totalitarian, even in the absence of a ubiquitous uniformed cadre, because all ruling parties serve it and enact its prescriptions, with 7 Fromm, Escape from Freedom, 184. 8 Huxley, “Forward,” Brave New World, 12. 9 McMurtry, Value Wars, 83.

The Reaction Against Social Democratization

209

the result that more and more sectors of life activity end up serving the global market or are eliminated. As Gary Teeple elaborates, “the growing capitalization of the world represents at the same time the gradual usurpation of all other forms of wealth and the transformation of all other property relations into private corporate relations.”10 In other words, the globalization of capitalist market forces reduces, wherever it succeeds in implanting itself, the measure of all values to the monovalue of corporate gain and loss. Its justifying social morality and value system legitimate this consequence. Both are therefore centralized powers that would, if they were able, rule over all dimensions of social and individual (and planetary) life. They are, thus, in the strict definition of the term, totalitarian. One does not have to appeal to critics of globalization in order to see its totalitarian effects. It is perhaps more effective to examine the words of its most ardent supporters. Consider then the words of Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, one of the more prominent champions of the untrammeled expansion of market relations. He describes the effect of globalization as the placing of nations in a “golden straightjacket.” As he explains, “two things tend to happen: your economy grows and your politics shrink ... The golden straightjacket narrows the political and economic choices of those in power to relatively tight parameters. That is why it is increasingly difficult to find any real difference between ruling and opposition parties in those countries that have put on the Golden Straightjacket ... its political choices get reduced to Pepsi or Coke – to slight nuances of policy ... but never any deviation from the core golden rules.”11 When Friedman says that the economy grows, he means that the gross domestic product tends to rise. But as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has demonstrated, the growth of gdp tells one nothing about the performance of an economy from the standpoint of satisfying the life needs and enabling the life capacities of its citizens.12 Since economic “growth” whose benefits overwhelmingly redound to transnational corporations and local elites leaves the majority of citizens in dire circumstances that invite collective

10 Teeple, The Riddle of Human Rights, 91. 11 Friedman, quoted in McNally, Another World Is Possible, 196. 12 Sen, Development as Freedom, 290–2. Moreover, even measured by growth of gdp, the claims of globalization’s supporters that “putting on the golden straightjacket” leads to higher levels of economic growth can be challenged. See McNally, Another World Is Possible, 29–56.

210

Democratic Society

political responses, Friedman goes on to remind opponents that behind the golden straightjacket lies the unprecedented power to murder of the United States military. He bluntly states, “this hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist – McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F–15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is the United States Army, Air Force, and Marine Corps.”13 Generally, however, the competitive pressures of the global market are sufficient to prevent recalcitrants from even attempting alternatives. The general policy implication everywhere is that all public investments and individual life projects are expected to be justifiable in terms of their economic impacts for private market agents. As Andre Gorz notes, the default assumption of the most powerful interests in liberal-capitalist society is that “the economic goal of the maximization of productivity cannot be subordinated to any non-economic, social, cultural, or religious goals; it must be pursued ruthlessly.”14 Once again Friedman lays bear the practical consequences. Commenting on rejection of the European Constitution by French voters in June 2005, Friedman dismisses their concerns about the erosion of social infrastructure and living standards by comparing it to a desire to leave the planet. He writes, “workers in the ‘old Europe’ – France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy – seem to be saying to their leaders ‘stop the world, we want to get off.’” What is the utopian ideal of their demands? The desire to “preserve a thirty-five hour work week [when] Indian engineers are ready to work a 35 hour day.” Just as in his “Golden Straightjacket” metaphor, so too here Friedman illustrates the totalitarian implications of the globalization of market forces. There are no options. Any democratic demand that runs counter to the developmental tendencies of deregulated market forces are absurd. It is good that the hard-won democratic gains of the advanced West are being eroded. The workers in the industrious, newly emergent economies like India will not be so utopian as to demand that increased wealth should imply, in a civilized democratic society, increased free time for self-development. Instead the desire (born of long, colonial-imposed poverty) to work oneself to death is to be not only celebrated but used as a wedge to speed the further erosion of the social content of democracy where it still exists. The social and political imagination is not to be permitted to envisage a model of democratic 13 Friedman, quoted in McNally, Another World Is Possible, 147. 14 Gorz, Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology, 68.

The Reaction Against Social Democratization

211

development in which India, China, and other emerging economies achieve the same levels of social development as “old Europe.” Instead they will develop according to the zero-sum competitive dynamic of globalized capitalism in which only some can gain, and always at the expense of others, and in such a way that the gains in one place erode the achieved democratic gains in other places. This dynamic is clearly regressive, not progressive, totalitarian, not liberating. The drive toward global hegemony of market forces and their justifying value system and social morality does not stop at the macroscopic levels of individual and social life-organization. Patents on the microscopic genetic sequences of plants, animals, and human beings is the latest battlefield of corporate commodification. This battle represents, in Pat Roy Mooney’s apt phrase, a “new enclosure movement” directed not just against common lands and public wealth, but against the chemical bases of life itself.15 The trajectory of this value system is thus toward, to borrow a phrase from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “full spectrum dominance” of the material and symbolic dimensions of human and planetary life. If this development is unchecked, its consequences for the planetary body of natural and human life are strictly analogous to consequences for a living individual body of developing cancer. To my knowledge, the first critic to apply the idea of cancer to capitalism was Murray Bookchin. Writing in 1987 he observed that “capitalism, I would argue, is the cancer of society ... Like all uncontrollable cancers, capitalism has shown that it can grow indefinitely and spread into every social domain that harbored ties of mutuality and collective concern.”16 The defining feature of cancer, in the individual and social senses, is the channelling of resources away from functions committed to the growth of life’s capacities toward the growth of a system programmed to expand regardless of its implications for life. Bookchin, despite the acuity of his diagnosis, did not develop his insight systematically. That task was taken up by John McMurtry. McMurtry’s pioneering arguments from the late 1990s argued that the crisis faced by the globe today cannot be understood in either politi15 Mooney, “The ETC Century: Concentration Is Corporate Power,” 74–114. Mooney’s particular concern is nanotechnology, pharmaceutical industries, and genetic engineering. Corporate control over these technologies and industries threatens the possibility of the private control – through patent law – of the atomic and chemical foundations of nature and life. 16 Bookchin, The Modern Crisis, 30.

212

Democratic Society

cal or economic terms alone. Instead it is a crisis of fundamental valuedisorder in which public policy and economic investment have become increasingly detached from contributing to the satisfaction of basic human needs as a result of the exclusive identification of value with private monetary returns to investors. The cancer stage of capitalism is reached when the value system underlying the capitalist economy no longer recognizes its foundations in the living natural and social world; its products are not produced and distributed in accordance with needs-based social morality, its life-destructive effects are not recognized by the social body, ever new sectors of life-organization are subordinated to the life-blind value system, and this metastasis is mis-recognized as normal and legitimate. Just as the blood stream unwittingly brings nutrients to cancerous tissue, hastening the demise of the body, so too social institutions and the citizens who staff them continue to supply nutrients (public wealth and shared resources) to the social cancer, hastening the demise of the social body.17 Understood in its cancerous normative essence, the value system and social morality underlying the globalization of market forces can thus hardly be said to promote pluralism. What appears as pluralism in wealthy liberal countries is better understood, to return to Fromm, as deep-value automation conformity appearing as difference of life-style consumables. Viewed from a superficial empirical standpoint, two lives, one incorporating religious convictions and the other thoroughly secular, appear different, and the society that respects both pluralistic. But if after critical scrutiny it turns out that neither involves reflective questioning of the given world, and that the deepest motivating principle of each is the desire to accumulate as much money as possible, the one seeing success as a consequence of hard work, the other of divine favour, then these lives are not essentially different and the society that encourages the adoption of the deeper motivating principle as the conditio sine qua non of happiness is not essentially pluralistic. The same argument holds with regard to the variety of lifestyles permissible in modern liberal-capitalism. This diversity appears pluralistic, but its deeper principle is, in Wood’s terms “the ultimate commodity fetishism, the triumph of consumer society [which] disguises the underlying systemic unity ... imposing a deeper and more global homogeneity.”18 What distinguishes genuine pluralism is not the range of consumer 17 McMurtry, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism, 114. 18 Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism, 261.

The Reaction Against Social Democratization

213

goods available to those who can afford them, or political choices between parties who silently concur on foundational issues of resource production and distribution, or mere tolerance for religion and countercultures, but rather the conscious and democratic use of social wealth to enable individual human beings to really decide the projects that will define their lives. Since the external regulation of market forces has proven insufficient to check the imperious spread of globalized market forces, since the spread of those forces is in contradiction to the long-term developmental tendency toward democratization, and since democratization remains the only accepted norm of social change, it follows that democracy’s genuine supporters must insist not only upon protection for existing rights (negative and positive) but on the transformation of external regulation of market forces into internal democratic modes of socio-economic activity. However, such a project, like any major social-political project, requires justifying grounds that all could, if they reflected rationally upon them, in principle accept. In the next section I will defend a life-grounded conception of equal life interests and a universal concept of the good that follows from them as the justifying normative grounds of a revitalized project of social democratization.

15

Needs-Based Social Morality, the Life Ground of Values and the Good for Human Beings ty

o n e m i g h t a g r e e that the principles of the value system and social morality underlying the globalization of market forces are totalitarian in their implications and yet reasonably fear that plans for a fundamental alternative run at least as strong a risk of totalitarian implications. This fear would appear to be sharpened if the normative justification of that alternative is ultimately a universal conception of the human good. Globalization itself, after all, has expanded the communication links between cultures, further sensitizing political philosophers to the reality of differences in the values that govern cultural wholes and individual lives. Does not the fact of pluralism, on a national and international scale, expose the folly of searching for universal values that are stronger and deeper than formalistic conceptions of equal human dignity? How can it not be totalitarian to argue, in the face of manifest differences, that there is a universal conception of the good and that it would be in everyone’s interest, regardless of class, race, sex, sexuality, and any other important concrete difference, to understand it and reorient one’s life according to its implications? The “objection from pluralism” noted in the introduction to this chapter would answer that any conception of the good that extends beyond the recognition of the formally equal dignity of human beings does indeed run the risk of becoming totalitarian. This objection from pluralism is implied in the democratic theories examined in part 3. Wherever we look, whether to our own societies or the globe as a whole, we are struck by the fact of disagreement as to the ultimate values that ought to guide a human life. I am using “ultimate values” or “ultimate value orientation” as synonymous with “good,” (“what all souls aim at” in its classical definition in Western philosophy). Given this “fact” of pluralism it seems impossible to insist on both a uni-

Needs-Based Social Morality

215

versal conception of the human good and democratic means of choosing it. Unless the conception of the good is vacuous it will rule out some private conceptions of the good, conceptions to which those who hold them are strongly attached. If those conceptions conflict with the implications of the proposed universal conception then one is incompatible with the other. If a democratic society is said to depend upon citizens adopting a universal conception of the good, and this cannot be accomplished without some people or groups giving up their conception, to which they are strongly attached, then it would seem that coercive power of some sort would have to be used to change their behaviour, if not their minds. In that case it would seem to follow that a universal conception of the good is incompatible with free determination of life projects, and therefore in conflict with its own purported democratic values. If the proponent maintains that coercive force cannot be legitimately employed to secure agreement about the proper content of the good then she in effect admits that there is no real universal human good and the theory thus fails to take us beyond what already exists. Setting aside the argument that I made in part 3 for the moment (that what appears to be pluralism on the surface quite often turns out, on deeper analysis, to be depth normative conformity) and granting for the sake of argument that pluralism of individual value orientation (private conceptions of the good) is a fact, what follows? As I noted in the introduction to this chapter, no normative political philosophy, not even the most tolerant liberalism, can admit the equal legitimacy of any possible conception of the good. Pluralism might indeed be a fact, but whether that fact is equally a value depends upon the implications of the fact for the lives of others. That is, there is no necessary identity between the demand to justify one’s private conception of the good in the court of public philosophical rationality and illegitimate coercion. No normative political philosophy of which I am aware rules it illegitimately coercive to insist that those who cannot satisfy the demands of public philosophical reason, when called upon to justify their ultimate value orientation, change it or be subject to duly decided sanctions. No society tolerates (or ought to) murder, rape, wilful neglect of freely assumed duties to others, theft of personal property, or wilful destruction of natural and social wealth. The guiding hope of philosophy is that people can be convinced not to transgress the legitimate interests of others, but when argument fails, law fills the breech. Thus the key to obviating the objection from pluralism is to identify and establish through argument a principle or criterion of legitimate

216

Democratic Society

inclusion and exclusion of ultimate value orientations. The best criterion would reconcile the maximum of different particular forms of life with the social institutions necessary for their equal development and the natural conditions necessary for planetary health. This criterion would be conceptually linked to a concrete rather than abstract universal conception of the good. The terminology is Hegelian. An abstract universal is a mental conception whose unity is established by ignoring particular differences. The concept red, formed by abstracting the colour of the T-shirt I am wearing, the table upon which my computer sits, and the pack of cigarettes on the table, is a simple example. A concrete universal, by contrast, is not a mental abstraction but the expressed reality of an internally unified principle. The constitutions that define liberalcapitalist democracies are different from the perspective of the nation whose laws they define, the natural language in which they are written, and the manner of expression through which the rights that they define are expressed. Yet, from the standpoint of the principle they articulate, they are identical or unified. A concrete universal is like these constitutions – unity of principle (form) expressed as difference of content. I will first establish the criterion of legitimate inclusion and exclusion and then return to the definition of the universal human good. The classical liberal principle of legitimate inclusion and exclusion derives from its rights-based social morality. Human beings are understood as rights-bearers and the range of one person’s rights defines the limits of another person’s rights. Kant spells out the abstract implications of this understanding of the rights-based principle of legitimate inclusion and exclusion by defining the perfect form of social freedom as an institutional structure which reconciles “mutual opposition” with individual freedom, i.e., where the freedom of one individual to act extends just so far as the freedom of others to do likewise.1 Mill added content to this abstraction by defining the limits of freedom as direct harm to others. The harm principle maintains that “the only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own interest in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their effort to obtain it ... mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.”2 Mill here stresses, note, harm to others and not harm to self. Law is mandated to rule out only those ultimate 1 Kant, “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” 16. 2 Mill, On Liberty, 14.

Needs-Based Social Morality

217

value orientations that can reasonably be proven to harm the ability of others to live according to their conception of the good. What I will call the life-grounded principle of legitimate inclusion and exclusion accepts the criterion of harm as, in general, the sole legitimate basis for ruling out some life projects. It goes beyond Mill, however, insofar as it is designed to identify the ways in which social dynamics and their justifying value systems and social moralities are the cause of harm. Mill’s principle is limited in its efficacy because it is focused only on individual intentional action. It thus misses the forms of unintentional harm which, I have argued, are the necessary consequences of the operation of market forces outside conscious democratic governance. What, then, is harmed by the normal operation of even regulated market forces? Our rights? Yes, but that depends upon the rights that are actually recognized in given constitutions and the historical interpretation of them. As I sit writing, the Supreme Court of Canada has just ruled that the Quebec government violated the constitution by banning private medical provision. It thus opens the door to expanded private provision. If private provision does expand it will necessarily draw resources out of the public system (there is nowhere else to go). If resources are drained out of the public system two tiers of care will gradually emerge. Those who cannot afford private care will not be harmed because their right to health care is violated (they will still have access to the public system) but they will nevertheless be harmed as quality gaps slowly emerge. What will be harmed, then, is their health. To put that point more generally, the equal life interest of mortal beings liable to ill health will be violated by the gradual development of tiers of quality in the health-care system. Even though no rights are harmed, and even though neither the justices of the Supreme Court nor private health care providers individually intend it, harm to the life interests of the poor and working class will be the long-term result. Once market forces are allowed to determine the allocation of healthcare resources they will flow to the most profitable sectors.3 That will

3 The deleterious consequences for social health of a private health care system are spelled out and proven in Armstrong, Armstrong, Bourgeault, Choniere, Lexchin, Mykhalovsky, Peters, and White, “Market Principles, Business Practices, and Health Care: Comparing the U.S. and Canadian Experiences,” 13–38. Of course, this argument does not preclude changes to public health care to make it more efficient. Here, however, I am concerned only with the general principle.

218

Democratic Society

inevitably mean that they will flow toward servicing the wealthy, given that the poor cannot afford to enter into the market. Thus, to arrive at the criterion of legitimate inclusion and exclusion of ultimate value orientations we must begin from the equal life interests of human beings as given in the three fundamental classes of need defined in part 2. Needs, in short, form the foundation of equal life interest. Recalling McMurtry’s criterion of need (n is a need if and only if, and to the extent that, deprivation of n always leads to a reduction of organic capabilities) aids in understanding why needs are the foundation of equal life interests and the best candidates from which a criterion of legitimate inclusion and exclusion can be derived. First, the interest in need satisfaction is equal across all differences. When I say “equal” I mean qualitatively and not quantitatively equal. Women and men, for example, have needs for different forms of health care, given the physiological differences of their bodies. The need for health care as such, however, is qualitatively equal insofar as men and women will both suffer the harm of reduced capability if they do not receive it. Likewise, the need for democratic political and social organization is qualitatively equal across cultures, since where it does not exist the human capability for conscious self-determination cannot fully develop. It does not follow from this need, however, that there is some one particular and invariant institutional structure that can satisfy it. Second, all human beings are capable, if they open themselves to the state of other human beings, of recognizing and responding to the harms that other human beings suffer. That is, the reality of sympathetic response is strong evidence that every human being can understand the fundamental forms of harm that every other human is liable to suffer. When millions of people marched on 15 February 2003, on every continent save Antarctica, against the impending war in Iraq, they did not affirm the sovereign right of Saddam Hussein to continue to abuse Iraqis, they rejected bombing Iraqis as a means of their liberation because they understood that bombing kills innocent people. When people awoke in horror to the tsunami of December 2004 and made massive contributions to relief efforts, they did so on the basis of human solidarity, i.e., the recognition that lives and livelihoods had been destroyed. When people avert their eyes from a homeless person on a cold winter night in a Canadian city, they prove by their aversion that the suffering of others affects them, even when they do nothing to help. In sum, the ordinary responses of human consciousness regularly recognize the reality of need deprivation as fundamental harm to equal

Needs-Based Social Morality

219

life interests. As McMurtry argues, sympathetic responses to the needs of others, “cross classes, races, and genders, and are grounded in a civil commons identification which admits of any degree of development or breadth of range. If people observe or know of the destruction or brutal reduction of vital life ranges ... they rebel from within as if there were an acquired structure of thought which put them ‘in common’ with the lost life, and the life that remains.”4 This capacity for conscious identification across differences in response to fundamental harm leads to the third and final reason why equal life interest in need satisfaction is the best criterion for legitimate inclusion and exclusion of ultimate value orientations. The legitimacy of ruling out certain conceptions of the good as valid depends upon demonstrating to the person who lives by them that such a value orientation is based on social dynamics that demonstrably cause harm to others. Since every human whose cognitive and affective development is not fundamentally damaged is capable of recognizing harm and reconstructing the causes of it (assuming available information), and since to recognize that harm is in fact occurring is to recognize that a wrong is being done to the harmed person, individuals themselves are capable of understanding their position in the causal chain and learning to want to change their role. People are often blinded to the reality of harm because the value system and social morality from within which they judge the world is blind to it (the social morality of classical liberalism, for example, blamed the poor for their plight), but humans have repeatedly proven capable of self-transformations such that the scope of their concern for others widens and deepens. Thus there is an argument to be made to those who live according to life-blind systems of value that they are part of a causal chain that adds up to harm of the equal life interests of others. To such a person, then, a question is posed: Do you have a counter-argument as to why your purely private interests should take precedence over the life interests of others (assuming that there is sufficient social wealth in principle for the satisfaction of fundamental needs)? If she does not, then she stands convicted of unreasonably elevating her private interests over the universal interests of everyone, including herself, as human beings, in living in a world where no one suffers avoidable harm. Such an argument is not coercive but rather an invitation to selfreflection out of which expanded consciousness of human identity 4 McMurtry, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism, 214.

220

Democratic Society

might grow. Philosophical argument at its best exposes contradictions in given conceptual and normative frames of experience such that deeper and wider understanding can grow. The hope, therefore, is that reflection on such an argument promotes self-transformation in those whose private ultimate value orientations implicate them in causal webs of social power that lead to fundamental forms of harm to others. Barring self-transformation, I contend, democratic political action would be justified in undertaking social transformations such that the causal webs were altered so as to better satisfy equal life interests. Such changes as were mandated by democratic deliberation would not violate the life interest of those whose private conception of the good was ruled out, and thus they could not legitimately complain that they were harmed by such social changes as would be undertaken. Proponents of private health care, to stay with that example, would not be deprived of health care because they opposed a public system. Change would be oriented to satisfying the equal life interest of all, denying some only their limited private interests to the extent that their satisfaction depended upon social dynamics that were demonstrably harmful to the life interests of others. Thus, it is false, I believe, to maintain that coercion would be the inevitable result of basing a conception of democratic society on a universal conception of the good. Thus far, however, I have stressed the basis of this universal conception of the good in the equal life interests of all in need satisfaction without developing a positive account of its form. As I have noted, however, need satisfaction is not an intrinsic good, but only instrumental to the development of vital capabilities. I will now turn to the task of explicating free capability development as the universal good of human being, beginning with a philosophical interpretation of life activity. The historical roots of the position to be defended here may be traced to Aristotle’s idea that the good for any life form is grounded in the range of capabilities its form (soul) makes possible.5 In the contemporary world it has been Nussbaum who has done the most to explicate the significance of Aristotle’s work as a defence of the intuition that “human capabilities exert a moral claim that they should be developed.”6 As with the Hegelian idea of abstract and concrete universality, however, I cannot detour through an explication of the classical texts, but only acknowledge the debt and move on. The beauty and genius of 5 Aristotle, On the Soul, 554–67. 6 Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice, 143.

Needs-Based Social Morality

221

Aristotle’s understanding of the soul is that it recognized that there is no principled contradiction between a scientific and a philosophicalnormative understanding of life activity. Human cognition is capable of and entitled to ask two distinct but equally important questions: How does it happen, and what does it mean? The biologist is interested first and foremost in the causes and inner workings of life as a metabolic process, while the philosopher is interested in the meaning and value of the expressed life activity that those processes make possible. That ancient metaphysics, including Aristotle’s, tended to ultimately subsume both under a universal metaphysical theory of nature as governed by a master telos realizing itself in material structures is beside the point. Modern natural science undermined ancient metaphysics by demonstrating that what the ancients believed could be explained only by the action of an intelligence at work in nature could better be accounted for on the basis of evolutionary dynamics operating over billions of years. Natural science, however, if left to itself to define the whole field of what it is important for humans to understand, tends to make the opposite mistake, excluding all questions of meaning because of the non-quantifiable content of the answers. My approach is different. It does not depend upon any anti-scientific conception of a master telos, but neither does it accept that nature is nothing but the sum of its quantifiable law-like relations. Nature is both law-like and meaningful because its evolutionary processes have produced living beings for whom their activity, as well as the world of matter and life in which they live, is meaningful and valuable. At the highest level of valuable life activity is the human being who, given that it can take its own and others’ (not necessarily human) lives as objects of concern, is entitled to inquire after and generate universal accounts of life itself as meaningful activity. Even the worm struggles against the fisher’s fingers. The biologist can explain this as stimulus response, and is within his rights to do so, but the life-grounded philosopher is equally within his rights to add that, viewed normatively, the worm is active in a struggle to return to its conditions of existence. The fact that it does not intend its actions in the same way a human does is not the main issue. What counts is that it strives in whatever way it can to keep itself alive. Viewed positively, then, the struggles of life forms to survive proves that life is a value for the things that have it. One does not need to maintain, then, with Anaxagoras, that all things are steered by nous (mind, intelligence) to agree that natural history traces developments from formlessness to structure, from lifelessness to

222

Democratic Society

life, from stimulus recognition to consciousness, and from consciousness to self-consciousness (human being, perhaps some higher mammals). The material evolution of life is at the same time the material evolution of beings who care about maintaining their lives, and thus the material evolution of the possibility of value. By value I mean “that in the object which makes it an object of care and concern.” Value thus depends upon both the existence of objects that are valued and a subject (consciousness) capable of judging and recognizing it. Value can come in many forms: art objects have aesthetic value, food has nutritional value, money has economic value, mementos have sentimental value, etc. In all these cases, however, the value of the object is intrinsically related to the living subject that judges and partakes in the value of the object. Thus underlying the value of all that is of value is McMurtry’s idea of life value. That idea, recall, maintains that “all life whatever has value in itself ... insofar as it moves, feels, or thinks. The value metric here is that x is of value to the extent of its range of life on these parameters, the more parameters the better, and the more range on each and all together the better.”7 Human life, therefore, is not uniquely valuable but it is, to the best of our current knowledge, the most valuable. It is the most valuable not only because it is capable of the greatest breadth and range of activity, but also because it is capable of universal consciousness and concern for its own life and the lives of others. If we now connect this discussion of life value to the idea of the good (ultimate value orientation, what all souls aim at) we can see that the good for all life, but in particular conscious human life, is the maximal development of its capabilities in its own way. For human beings, beings that are conscious of their capabilities, this definition of the good (free development of capabilities) can be rephrased as free individuation. Since the good equals the realization of life value, and life value means the vital capabilities of the being in question, and, since, when the being in question is a human being we are dealing with a conscious, self-reflective and self-projective being, then a life which is coerced into automation conformity cannot be a good life. Since also, on the other hand, the development of a good individual life for humans depends upon need satisfaction, which in turn depends upon social organization, which is justified by a social morality and a governing value system, the extent to which a life is maximally good or not has social and not merely individual conditions. If individual life depends upon social 7 McMurtry, “The Value of All Values,” 3.

Needs-Based Social Morality

223

organization then a universal definition of the social good parallels the universal definition of the individual good. The best conception of the social good is one from which a value system and social morality follow that maximally satisfy the conditions for the realization in each individual life of the universal good for human beings, i.e., free individuation. As McMurtry elaborates, “the social level of life-organization in its full life-protective evolution [is] the basis and guardian of individual life from which the individual person differentiates as a unique and unrepeatable bearer of life-value.”8 Thus, this universal conception of the good, in its social and individual modalities, insofar as it entails an institutional structure that satisfies the material conditions for free individual development, is maximally inclusive of different particular forms of life, since it permits all activities that do not violate the life-grounded harm principle, and thus violates no one’s deep human interests. More than that, however, it secures the social grounds for modes of individual good lives that not only do not interfere with, but positively contribute to the good of others. Our conscious identification with others has a positive as well as a negative moment. We not only recoil from suffering, we delight in the achievements of others. We cheer a great play in sports, lose ourselves in contemplation of works of art and creative intelligence, and celebrate the achievements of science for their contribution to collective understanding of our world and ourselves. We do not, however, normally think of all the background contributions without which these great achievements would not have been realized. World-historical figures all had to be born and cared for, educated and trained. Thus everyone who contributes to the satisfaction of the needs of others, everyone who labours, in other words, whether in the home or in the extra-domestic economy, has played a role in the unfolding of human capabilities. To realize one’s own capabilities in a way that positively enables others to develop their capabilities is thus the best life of all. To be confined to only ever playing a supporting role, not by choice but because of socially structured need deprivation, is, in general, a worse form of life which worsens in proportion to the degree of socially imposed capability disablement. Let me begin to conclude this argument by considering the counterexample of someone whose particular ultimate value orientation would be damaged by the gradual move toward a democratic society. Let us consider the case of a factory owner who orients her life by the goal of 8 McMurtry, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism, 89.

224

Democratic Society

making her factory as profitable as possible. Let us further suppose that at present environmental standards are weak in the area where the factory is located. The owner understands that damage is being done both to her workers and the local ecosystem, but decides that, since it is her right to organize production as she sees fit, and the value metric according to which she judges is maximum profitability, she persists in practices that damage health and the environment. Let us now suppose that workers and environmental groups coalesce around demands that it is irrational over the long term to produce in destructive ways, and they pressure the government to enact stricter regulations. The factory owner might object that imposition of tougher standards would violate her property rights. Indeed, it would violate a strong interpretation of those rights. But the factory owner is also a human being, with organs that are damaged by long-term exposure to toxins, who (let us suppose) has children who will have to suffer the consequences of the “free” exercise of their parent’s property rights, and, most importantly, who has a brain that is capable of listening to reason and thinking beyond her own skin (or, better, wallet). While stricter regulations might damage her private interest in profit maximization, it would, and at the same time, expand her long-term human interest, not only in her own health, but also in the health of her family, her workers, and the flora and fauna of the local ecosystem. To accept this reasoning one does not have to subordinate self-interest to a self-denying altruism, but rather open one’s consciousness to the wider field of social institutions and natural life in which it is situated and with which it is interdependent. Since the deeper life interest is preserved for both the owner and everyone else by the adoption of stricter regulations, the owner cannot be said to be harmed if the regulations are democratically legislated and imposed on her factory. Since the decision eliminates harms without imposing new harms in turn, its imposition cannot be judged illegitimately coercive. Thus, I conclude that the universal form of the good defended here can (in principle) reconcile universality and free determination of individual life horizons, substantive governing principles of social organization and democracy. This life-grounded position opens up human consciousness to the deepest grounds of pluralism in life activity. Unless one’s conception of social pluralism is consciously rooted in this understanding of living pluralism, it is easy to lose sight of the different conditions that each requires. As I have been arguing, liberal-capitalist society respects the rights of individual humans to conceive of different life projects at the

Needs-Based Social Morality

225

same time as it progressively undermines the natural and social conditions for a plurality of life activities. Under conditions of capitalist globalization, corporate power arrogates to itself the exclusive right to determine what natural resources will be exploited and how quickly; what the level of investment in social infrastructure and public goods will be; and the content of life activity within and outside the workplace. The conditions of democratic resistance to this usurpation of life value reach beyond the constitutional protection of negative and positive rights into the socio-economic dynamics that structure the human relation to the natural world and define the limits within which human life is lived. At present the world faces a three-pronged extinction crisis: of non-human living species, of indigenous cultures, and of genuinely individuated life projects, all as a result of loss of habitat (natural or social) caused by the globalization of capitalist market forces, justified by neo-liberal social morality and a money-grounded, life-blind value system.9 When the economy is treated, in Habermas’s words, as a sphere of “norm free sociality” the reason why it has life-destructive effects is masked. It has life-destructive effects not simply because individual market agents acting in their own interest cannot calculate the long-range implications of market forces as a whole. If that were the reason why a globalized market is life destructive then local, national, and international regulations alone would be sufficient to correct the problem. The reason the global market is life destructive, however, is deeper. It is the fact that the value system and social morality according to which the market makes investment decisions regard life as an instrument of the production of monetary value. The market regards this value system and social morality as omnicompetent to decide every issue of general social importance, including one’s relationship to one’s own individual life. The major problem that the globe faces, then, is not abstractly economic, but reaches to the normative foundations of social organization on a global scale. Habermas is thus profoundly in error when he treats the economy as norm free and he, as well as the other major democratic

9 For details of the natural extinction crisis see the report of the World Conservation Union, which argues that market incursions into natural habitats have accelerated the extinction rate to between 1000 and 10,000 times its natural pace. “Confirming the Global Extinction Crisis,” (http://www.iucn.org/redlist/2000/ news.html). For the details of the loss of cultural pluralism as a result of the destruction of indigenous life ways, see Davis, “Vanishing Cultures,” 62–89.

226

Democratic Society

theorists that I have examined, is blind to the causes of the colonization effect he rightly decries. A democratic society cannot coexist over the long term with this lifeblind value system because it measures value according to the opposite standard. Rather than regarding life as instrumental to economic growth, it regards economic growth as instrumental to the growth of the intrinsically valuable capacities of organic life, justifiable only on that basis and within the limits imposed on human activity by the legitimate needs and interests of other living things. This life-grounded value system cannot in principle accept the separation of political from economic power, because the economy produces (or not) the resources through which needs are satisfied and selects for the range of capabilities judged worth developing, thus contradicting the conditions for the free development of capabilities which is, as I have argued, the universal form of the good life for human beings. The realization of this form for everyone as far as is possible thus demands the reordering of economic imperatives toward active need satisfaction as the guiding principle. As McMurtry elaborates, “Production and distribution for life-need, and that, in turn, for life-capacity and experience in more comprehensive enjoyment and expression – this is the only ultimate value on earth. Any sane economy is there to serve it in opening horizons of lifeworth.”10 Of course, no economy can fully break with the life ground and survive. The point is not that no creative capabilities are developed today, but rather that capability development is not the end of the global market economy; the production of profit is, and life, both its existence and quality, is regularly sacrificed for profitability’s sake. Ending that sacrifice demands that the universal life ground of value be translated into socio-economic reality through the democratic institutionalization of needs-based social morality. In the concluding section I will explicate Pat Devine’s model of a democratic economy based upon negotiated coordination as a plausible and realizable way to accomplish this task.

10 McMurtry, Value Wars, 124.

16

Negotiated Coordination and the Project for a Democratic Society

atic Society

The previous chapter argued that human beings have proven themselves capable, over the long term, of distinguishing their universal life interests from socially contingent private interests. While we are far from a society in which sexism, racism, and inequality are overcome, naturalistic explanations of those forms of unfreedom no longer convince. Few people in the liberal-capitalist world would want to publically argue that women are the natural inferiors of men or that the poor deserve their fate because they cannot control their sexual desires. Judged against the long-term tendencies of social development, neo-liberal social morality appears as a reaction against processes of social democratization. That does not mean that it might not be successful in consolidating itself as the start of a new, long-term trend toward dedemocratization, just as the fact that humans have proven themselves capable of expanding their consciousness of moral identity does not prove that they will continue to do so. No normative political philosophy, however, can reasonably aim at absolute certainty for its conclusions. The best any can hope for is rigorous plausibility, that is, the construction of an argument in favour of its conclusions that cannot be dismissed but invites counter-argument. In the best-case scenario, the argument that guides public policy and the evolution of social institutions is the most reasonable and secures the social and material conditions for the maximum scope of legitimate life projects. The argument of the preceding chapter contended that needs-based social morality and the life-grounded conception of the universal human good is a rigorously plausible basis for a new mode of social solidarity that would underlie new political movements to further the project of a democratic society. If the movement for democracy is to be

228

Democratic Society

itself democratic this new basis of solidarity cannot be imposed but must be freely constructed by philosophical argument and tolerant political practice. It does not rule out legitimate modes of political struggle because not every life-blind social interest can be expected to yield to the force of the better argument. Those modes of political struggle, however, must aim at projects that ultimately include transformed interests on the part of parties that initially stand opposed to deeper social democratic transformation. In short, if the project of social democratization really can produce a society that does a better job of satisfying people’s equal life interests, and thus increases the scope and depth of free capability development, then it must prove itself, not only in theory, but equally in practice. When the argument shifts from the theoretical to the practical plane, however, decisive problems appear. The “objection from possibility,” as I called it, argues that socio-economic dynamics, on the national and international scale, have reached such a degree of complexity that they cannot be governed from within in a democratic way. The information burdens that would be imposed on democratic planning agencies would be impossible to bear. Habermas presents the most sophisticated version of this argument. Not only does he maintain that internal democratization of the socio-economic system is impossible, he also believes that it would be undesirable, even if it were possible. Allowing market forces to steer economic development (assuming that they are suitably regulated) “unburdens” public reason from the need to constantly monitor and choose between alternative courses of action. It has also produced spectacular productivity gains that have created the material conditions for more equal levels of civic participation. He counters traditional Marxist hopes of internal democratization of economic forces by observing that “the question of whether media-guided subsystems manifest properties that have their own functional value is not even posed.”1 Because the question is not posed, the functional values (greater productivity and unburdening public reason from having to cope with an impossible-to-bear information burden) is ignored. Political energy was, as a consequence, wasted in a revolutionary project that could never realize its democratic hopes. Thus the question that must be faced in this final section is whether there is any reason to believe that any project for the internal democratization of the socio-economic system can meet the objection from pos1 Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 67.

The Project for a Democratic Society

229

sibility. It is still necessary to answer this question for the reason given in the first section of the previous chapter: neo-liberal social morality is presently undermining the achievements of external regulation of market forces. Protecting, consolidating, and deepening democratic institutions therefore requires the transformation of market forces and their legitimating social morality and value system. Unless the object of argument and struggle is the internal transformation of those forces and values, society will remain in contradiction with itself (it is politically democratic and socially undemocratic). The reality of this contradiction for human and planetary life is growing inequality, rapid loss of living pluralism, and erosion in the level of achieved democratic development. Reigniting the power of long-term tendencies toward social democratization should not, therefore, attempt to repeat what has already been tried with only partial success – external regulation of market forces – but press forward with strategies that will generate social pressures toward their gradual replacement with internally democratic modes of governance. I believe that Pat Devine’s model of democratic planning spelled out in his theory of negotiated coordination provides a rigorously plausible alternative to the rule of market forces over socio-economic life and life interests. The rigorous plausibility of this alternative depends upon its being able to satisfy three criteria. First, it must explain how a model of democratic planning could cope with the information burdens that destroyed the one attempt known to humanity of a planned economy, the Soviet model of centralized bureaucratic planning. That is, it must provide a credible explanation of what information would substitute for the price mechanism in signalling to planners and productive units what the most efficient allocation of resources would be. Second, it must prove that it would not invest preponderant political and social power in an authoritarian party or movement. That is, it must provide a credible model of social and political organization that would transform the separation of political from economic power typical of capitalism in such a way that society was democratized without damaging the equal life interests of citizens. Third, it must prove that the process of transformation does not rely upon utopian theories of revolutionary reconstruction of society but is intrinsically linked to practices and processes that actually exist but are only partially realized today. I will treat each of these points in turn. I will focus on explaining the framework principles of the model and link them to the perspective of needs-based social morality and the universal conception of the human good I have

230

Democratic Society

been defending. The reader should consult Devine’s texts for the intricate details of his model.

the democratic determination of economic priorities Devine interprets his model of negotiated coordination of economic life as a middle path between the extremes of laissez-faire freedom from external regulation and central bureaucratic control over the totality of social life. Both, Devine believes, have proven to be historic failures. Laissez-faire, while encouraging innovation and ingenuity, leaves the power to determine the content and quality of human life in the hands of democratically unaccountable forces, creates illegitimate inequalities of wealth and power, justifies the exclusion of democratic power from economic life, and generates forms of economic growth that are blind to human and ecological costs. The failures of centralized planning are well known in the case of the Soviet Union. Centralized planning was slow and monolithic; it could not cope with the information burdens imposed upon it, failed to produce high-quality products in sufficient quantities to satisfy demand, and thus failed to generate the social solidarity necessary for legitimate rule. The consequence was an undemocratic and totalitarian state ruling over a miserable citizenry amid a devastated landscape. The collapse of the centralized command economy has been interpreted, however, not only as a practical refutation of actually existing socialism but further, as a practical refutation of the possibility of an efficient and innovative planned economy of any form. The core of this objection, as Habermas demonstrated, is the claim that planning agencies simply cannot cope with the mass of information flowing into them with sufficient speed and flexibility to enable producers to make the most efficient and innovative use of resources. Devine agrees with this criticism insofar as it applies to the model of central planning. “The complexity of a modern economy means that it is not possible for the centre to gather in all the local information in the real economy, construct a model on the basis of it that is an exact replica of the whole economy, work out a set of interlocking transfers that is consistent and optimal, and instruct each production unit what to do in order to fit it.”2 What Devine rejects is the inference from the failure of centralized planning to the impossibility of decentralized, democratic planning. 2 Devine, Democracy and Economic Planning, 61.

The Project for a Democratic Society

231

The first point that must be understood about his model is the distinction between market forces and market exchange. This distinction above all sets Devine’s model apart from the theory of market socialism and, in my view, makes Devine’s proposal a more robust alternative to globalized capitalism. The most well-developed model of market socialism, that of Alec Nove, can see no middle ground between centralized bureaucratic planning and market forces as determinants of economic activity. While Nove seeks to embed market forces in more democratically dispersed forms of ownership, he does not seek to replace the rule of market forces with conscious democratic planning of the economy. Nove dismisses the possibilty of ex ante coordination of the economy as an illusion, without fully considering the possibility of an evolving, 3 decentralized form of planning based on the process of negotiation. Devine’s model, by contrast, seeks to replace the rule of market forces over economic life without replacing market exchange between productive units. Market forces are the unintended outcomes of individual productive units making decisions in their own self-interest in an economy typified by zero-sum competition (someone’s gain is someone else’s loss). Individual producers use price signals to decide what and how much to produce. In theory, supply and demand will balance each other out such that an optimal allocation and distribution of resources and wealth is achieved without any central authority’s conscious intervention. In reality, of course, optimal allocations and distributions are not achieved, with the result that external intervention is necessary to correct for problems generated by the blind, unintended outcomes of an economy steered by market forces. The problems generated by blind market forces, however, are the consequence of atomized decision-making and are independent, in principle, of market exchange. Market exchanges are simply interactions between economic agents in which mutual interests are coordinated and satisfied. There is no incompatibility, Devine argues, between market exchange and a democratically planned economy. The difference between a negotiated coordination economy and a capitalist market economy is that the decisions of individual productive units would be coordinated with other social interests within the framework of a democratically determined set of economic and social priorities. Within that framework, however, individual units of production would be free to make their own decisions about how to best produce their output. 3 Nove, The Economics of Feasible Socialism, 39–43.

232

Democratic Society

Overall economic activity would be coordinated within an agreed upon plan but most decision-making power would be, as far as possible, decentralized. Decentralized decision-making power is the key to avoiding the information deficits that destroyed centrally administered systems. The model of organization that Devine envisages relies upon a feedback loop between local producers and higher level bodies of political authority. In simplified form the model would look like this. Societywide deliberations would begin at the local level and generate a set of national socio-economic priorities. These deliberations would involve all parties with an interest in their outcome and the final choice would be the outcome of political negotiation. The final decision as to the national priorities would be made by the national assembly, which would then inform the national planning commission. Macroeconomic goals (the rate of savings, the distribution of income between wages, taxes, and revenue for individual production units, rent on use of natural resources, etc.) would be determined centrally. The national planning commission would then produce a range of alternative plans that would be deliberated and one would be chosen. Responsibility for realizing the objectives of the plan, however, would be decentralized. Individual production units would be free to govern themselves within the broad objectives established by the plan. Thus Devine’s model combines quantitative and qualitative information that would be used by production units, planning authorities, political institutions, and social interests to determine the match (or lack thereof) between planned and actual economic performance. As he argues, “Claims on resources in the form of purchasing power and prices that reflect costs of production are indispensable quantitative indicators of what constitutes socially useful production. However, qualitative considerations are equally indispensable. The interaction of representative institutions, community interests, and consumer/user interests would generate the qualitative knowledge that has to be taken into consideration ... when deciding on what constitutes the social interest in any given situation.”4 Devine does not propose that price signals be abolished in favour of pure technocratic planning of the economy. Rather, he seeks to embed price signals in a richer institutional environment in which interests that currently have to bang at the negotiation door to gain a hearing are formally incorporated from the beginning. 4 Devine, Democracy and Economic Planning, 217.

The Project for a Democratic Society

233

Thus the governance of economic life would gradually be democratized as inclusive negotiation spread. The gradual effect of the spread of negotiated coordination would be to supplant private self-interest with solidaristic commitment to democratically determined economic goals. Individual units of production would still be expected to strive to produce as efficiently as possible and to generate revenue sufficient to cover costs plus produce a surplus. Part of the surplus would be taxed (to fund investment in public goods and social infrastructure) while the rest would be used to cover investments in plant and equipment. The economy would be dynamic, therefore, but dynamic in a planned way oriented by a deliberatively achieved set of overall objectives that advance the deep value of maximizing the free development of vital human capabilities. Devine understands perfectly well that this model clashes with established theories of economic motivation. It takes seriously the problem of information deficits and proposes as the means of solving them democratic deliberation of the general goals of economic life and decentralized implementation. Problems encountered at the local level are fed back into the negotiated coordination of economic life locally and then passed on to the higher levels of decision-making authority. Failure thus generates the information necessary for improvement. As he argues, “If agreement cannot be reached ... there will be adverse consequences. There will be what may be called social crises, major or minor ... It is precisely the experience of such crises that contributes to the social learning process. The alternative is the imposition of a solution by the most powerful, which requires inequality and is incompatible with selfgovernment.”5 As this cost would be experienced as unacceptable to citizens equally committed to democratic self-government, novel ways of moving beyond these impasses would be found. Gradually, as economic life is internally transformed, the motivations of people would begin to widen beyond the narrow self-interest assumed “natural” by classical and neo-classical economic theory. The aims of production would slowly shift from profit-maximization for individual units of production with no conscious commitment to the overall health of the economy toward efficient production for the sake of maximizing the satisfaction of the fundamental classes of need (and especially the need for free time) and thus the creation of the material conditions of free capability development. 5 Ibid., 201.

234

Democratic Society

The key institution required for the transformation of atomized decision-making on the basis of narrow self-interest into conscious democratic decision-making in the interests of creating the socio-material conditions for free development of vital capabilities is what Devine calls the “negotiated coordination body.” These bodies would mediate between individual production units and the political and planning institutions in which overall priorities are democratically generated and decided upon. As he describes them, “the composition of the negotiated coordination bodies would be determined by applying the principle of self-government – representation of all affected interests ... [they] would be responsible for deciding how changes in the capacity of their branch of production should be achieved and how differential performance between units within each branch should be dealt with.”6 In an unregulated capitalist system, production units open and close according to profitability. When a unit becomes unprofitable, the decision to close is taken by management and simply imposed on the workers and the broader community. In reality, however, the decision to close a plant involves the owners in a complex set of negotiations with workers and different levels of government. The reality of negotiations in a complex modern economy lends plausibility to Devine’s argument. What he is proposing is an extension of processes that already exist, not ex nihilo creation of a new social order. The difference between the type of negotiation that goes on now and what Devine proposes is thus a difference of degree, not kind. Negotiated coordination bodies would not only involve representatives of the unit of production but wider community interests and representatives of higher-level planning and government bodies. Let us say, for example, that there are five steel mills in a country but that cheaper imports have created surplus domestic capacity such that there is need for only three plants.7 In a laissez-faire economy the two most unprofitable plants would 6 Ibid., 261. 7 The problem of imports raises the important question of how Devine’s model could accommodate problems generated by the internationalization of market forces. To be sure, this problem adds another layer of complexity to his model but not an insuperable layer. The solution to this problem would have to involve two factors. First, the major international economic and political institutions – the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization – would have to be democratized. A realistic and realizable model of democratization has been proposed by David Held in Democracy and the Global Order. Second, a democratically agreed upon set of international priorities would have to

The Project for a Democratic Society

235

be closed. In a command economy all might be kept going artificially in order to maintain full employment. In an actual economy the decision would be the outcome of complex negotiations between management, workers, and governments, but the final decision would ultimately rest with management, which retains the right to cease to use its property. In Devine’s model all affected interests would be represented, not just workers and management but the wider community interests as well. Arguments and proposals would be made in the negotiated coordination body and competing interests balanced and smoothed out. Let us suppose that an unproductive factory is located in a region that is historically poorer than the national average and has fewer prospects for economic revitalization. By the logic of market forces that historical asymmetry would not factor into the decision. In a negotiated coordination, however, local interests could argue that the unproductive plant be allocated the resources to improve efficiency and thus become competitive. One of the more productive plants in a region where it would be easier to shift employees to other activities could be closed, solving the problem of domestic overcapacity while not unfairly burdening the interests in the wealthier region. In this way a hard decision can be made but, since all affected interests are equally represented, the costs could be actively consented to and social solidarity maintained. In the next section I will consider the plausibility of Devine’s claim that it is reasonable to hope that a commitment to democratic self-government will be strong enough to resist the danger of over-centralization and authoritarianism.

self-government and social solidarity In liberal-capitalist democracy the principle of self-government – that all parties ought to be represented in decisions that affect them such that any costs imposed upon them can be freely accepted – is limited to the public sphere of politics and law. Self-government does not extend be generated. This set of goals would have to be modest and quite general initially. A good starting point would be the Millenium Goals spelled out in the 2004 United Nations Development Report combined with reforms to the international trade system designed to remove the crushing barriers to the export- based economies of the world’s poorest nations. These are the best starting points because there is already broad-based verbal agreement to their necessity and desirability. As with the transformation of the national economy, the key to success is not overnight revolutionization but the unlocking of evolutionary forces that contribute to new institutional frameworks for the gradual solution of practical complexities.

236

Democratic Society

into the structure of forces that determine socio-economic life. People thus find that their life horizons are determined by the outcomes of market forces over which they have no formal control. The existence of binding legal constraints on those forces has not proven sufficient to prevent them from spilling over into the political and cultural spheres of social life and thus exerting their coercive power over increasingly wide ranges of human existence. If a society justifies itself as a democracy, however, it cannot tolerate this contradiction between a principled commitment to self-government and the reality of coercive determination of social and individual priorities by unaccountable and uncontrolled market forces. The alternative to such coercion is a democratic economic system governed through conscious negotiated coordination. Yet it seems doubtful whether the type of conscious commitment to social priorities Devine’s model requires is a real possibility given the inevitability of differences of opinion and interest actually operative in society. The great strength of Devine’s proposal, however, is precisely that he is not a utopian in the pejorative sense of the word, naively hoping that different interests can immediately transform themselves and concur around a binding set of goals and values. What he does commit himself to is the belief – evidenced by actual negotiations today – that people are capable of being open to arguments made from opposed perspectives, listening and making reasonable counter-arguments, uncovering identities of interest that are initially hidden by one-sidedness or misunderstanding, and thus producing, over time, sets of social objectives that are in everyone’s interest, as far as possible. There will be costs, but the costs, since they will be freely accepted and compensated, will be experienced as bearable and not coercive and unjust. Although he does not cite Habermas, his conception of negotiated coordination is really nothing but communicative power extended into the socio-economic sphere of human life. Thus Devine assumes nothing more (or less) about the capacity of human intelligence to reach rational consensus than does Habermas. “[T]he model of negotiated coordination is prefigurative, in that it anticipates a society in which people in principle wish to act in the social interest and the problem for them is to decide together what that means in practice. At the same time, the model is able to accommodate situations in which this principle is not fully operative ... It cannot legislate self-interest away, but neither does it reward it. Instead it institutionalizes the requirement that specific interests be brought up against one another, confronted with representatives of

The Project for a Democratic Society

237

more general interests, and encouraged to arrive at an integrated view through negotiation.”8 Just as planning failures generate the information necessary to spur the creative intelligence necessary to move beyond the impasses, so too the experience of confronting one’s interests with other interests is capable of producing the reflective understanding necessary to recognize partiality of perspective and broaden self-interest outward toward more comprehensive values. In short, Devine relies upon experience to cultivate the skills and capabilities necessary for successful negotiated coordination and points to the feminist movement as an example of self-transformation. Women, long derided as incapable of self-government, proved capable of transforming themselves. From being the objects of patriarchal power, women became the subjects of their own liberation and produced, through this self-transformation, social, political, and cultural changes that would have been dismissed as impossible two or three centuries previously.9 It was not lack of capability for self-rule that held women back, but rather lack of opportunity to develop the capability. The same holds true in principle for workers and other groups now prevented from exercising any democratic control over the economy. It is not that the problems are too technical for non-experts to make any valuable contribution but rather that current power relations impede the development of the talents necessary to actively participate in the governance of economic life. Thus the spread of democratic institutions into the governance of economic life can be envisaged as possible and realistic if it is gradual and evolutionary. However, social democratization is not simply a matter of establishing “workers’ control” over production. It is his sensitivity to the complexity of contemporary social and political relations that makes Devine’s theory superior to its closest analogue, the participatory economics of Michael Albert. While analogous in terms of his theoretical understanding of the way in which decentralized planning can solve the information problems posed by developed economies, Albert tends to see people only in terms of their role as consumers and producers. Consequently, he does not reserve a formal place in his institutional model for extra-economic political interests, i.e., women, environmental activists, etc.10 Yet, without such formal representation, the con8 Devine, Democracy and Economic Planning, 249. 9 Ibid., 156–7. 10 Michael Albert, Parecon, 91–102.

238

Democratic Society

cretely different insights of marginalized and excluded groups threaten to remain submerged, with the result that the generation of new modes of solidarity would be impeded. Devine counts the interests of workers as a centrally important interest, but not, as Marx did, representative of the universal interest of humanity. Production units would be self-governing as far as possible, but the interests of workers would have to be meshed with wider community interests in any fully democratic social organization. He further recognizes the importance of representing consumer interests in the planning process. He also understands, however, that economic life affects the totality of social relations, and thus involves interests that, while not strictly economic, have a legitimate say in how resources will be produced and utilized. Let us return to the example of the unproductive steel mill. Facing closure, it is reasonable to assume that the workers at the plant would vote in favour of keeping it open. Let us suppose that as part of the package of reforms they submit to the negotiated coordination body is a plan to reduce costs by using fuel in the coke ovens that is less expensive because it has a higher sulphur content. This plan would have to be defended against broader community long-term interests in a healthy environment. It is thus highly unlikely that such a proposal could generate the broad-based agreement necessary to have it passed by the legislative bodies that are ultimately responsible for deciding upon the allocation of funds. The workers would thus be obliged to submit a new proposal or face closure. These processes of negotiation at local and national levels can thus in principle avoid the authoritarian coercion typical of Stalinist societies by involving representatives of concrete social interests at each stage of planning and decision-making. Final decision-making authority, as I noted above, lies in the national assembly. Unlike present federal systems, however, in which power at each level (national, provincial-state, municipal) is separated, Devine’s model of negotiated coordination relies upon the pyramidal form of power discussed in chapter 9. The basic level of political organization is local. Power and information are first generated at the local level and then articulated into more general interests by deliberations at a higher level. These generalized interests then form the basis for the national plan. The objectives of the national plan are in turn disseminated down the pyramid to local political and negotiated coordination bodies for implementation. Those affected by decisions are involved at every step of the process such that the national objectives and the local modes of implementation are legitimated by

The Project for a Democratic Society

239

the actual consent of all affected interests. Hence democratic legitimacy is in principle reconciled with planning. The concrete problems experienced in the course of the implementation of the plan once again serve as the occasion for processes of social learning. In principle, then, Devine’s model can solve the problems of information deficits and bureaucratic authoritarianism. It still opens itself to the objection, however, that, like other models of participatory democracy, it would place such severe demands on citizens’ time that they would be either unable or unwilling to participate. Devine is aware of the objection. He stresses throughout that he accepts the necessity of representative institutions. While there would be an increase in the number of representative bodies and more extensive interaction between them, the absolute increase on demands on any particular citizen’s time would be minimal and more than balanced by the increased free time democratically planned production could be expected to create. Once the satisfaction of equal life interests and not growth of profit is the orienting goal of production, the necessary labour time in a democratic society would be reduced. Necessary but intrinsically unsatisfying labour could be shared. A principle of rotation of representatives could be worked out in order to prevent public office from becoming the preserve of careerists as well as to ensure that the capabilities required for self-government were gradually widely spread throughout the society. To be sure, the practical problems would be formidable, but there seems no reason to conclude that they are insoluble. Just as civilization did not collapse, as the Times feared it would, when workers were given the vote so too it is unlikely that the gradual evolution of new representative bodies would prove fatal to a complex society. Societies have become complex in part because people have proven themselves ingenious in the solution of practical problems when the health of their society is understood to be at stake. Expanding the number of people actively involved, and thus affectively invested in the outcomes, could only be expected to develop more creative intelligence in the face of practical obstacles to fuller democratic development. If we compare Eastern Europe immediately after the fall of the Soviet Bloc to contemporary liberal capitalism we can find evidence for the position that people value participation when they feel that their contributions can make a vital difference. People become apathetic about politics only when they decide that their contribution makes no real difference to major decisions. In a more democratic society, political participation, far from being viewed as a burden or a waste of time, would be a vital context in

240

Democratic Society

which the capability for self-determination would be developed. The real question raised by Devine’s model, however, is not whether people would participate in a society that was in fact democratic, but whether it is reasonable to argue with them that they need to take political steps now to initiate processes of democratic social change. What real grounds are there for accepting that Devine’s argument is rigorously plausible? Answering that question brings me to the final step in the argument.

elements of negotiated coordination today Central planning and market forces are antithetical. A society cannot be both centrally planned and steered by market forces. It does not follow from this disjunct, however, that market forces rule out the operation of planning as such. Planning is ubiquitous in actual capitalist societies. Corporations do not make investment or divestment decisions overnight. They generate long-term forecasts and determine future courses of action accordingly. National budgets set out economic priorities and encourage or discourage different forms of economic activity through tax rates and other sorts of non-monetary regulation. Political parties and social movements plan activities in accordance with agreedupon objectives. Negotiation too is an ubiquitous reality. Governments, unions, social movements, and businesses are constantly negotiating and renegotiating the terms of economic life, who will benefit and who will suffer increased costs, as well as which values ought to govern society. Devine’s model for a self-governing society is intended as transformational intensification of planning and negotiating strategies that already exist. On analogy with the universalization of civil and political rights, it argues that those currently shut out of negotiation and planning, or those whose voices are effectively marginalized when decisions are made, are formally and substantively included. Judged in the light of three centuries of contesting the form of separation of economic from political power, the neo-liberal social morality and value system represents a short-term deviation away from increased social democratization. Not only is it a deviation from long-term democratizing tendencies, it is also a departure from the most successful forms of capitalist economic development. As Devine concludes, “in the most successful capitalist countries, even those apparently most ... market-oriented, the long-run development of the economy is not left primarily to the determination of market forces. Some degree of ex ante

The Project for a Democratic Society

241

coordination is attempted, both within and between industries and sectors.”11 What Devine argues is that these exclusive planning and negotiating models and external modes of regulation ought gradually to be transformed into inclusive planning and negotiation and internal democratic governance. Devine’s proposal runs with, rather than against, the grain of history and success. Hence, the means of transformation favoured by Devine lends his proposal credibility. Time is the philosopher’s stone that changes impossibility into possibility. Devine does not ignore complexity, as Habermas charged Marx with doing, but instead locates the actual practices of negotiation and planning that make complexity work for human beings (to the extent that it does) and proposes the means of extending and internalizing them. The more those processes are extended and internalized, the more the form of separation of economic and political power typical of capitalism is overcome, the greater the democratization of social relations. Success depends not upon the discipline of a revolutionary cadre or a class of philosopher-kings, but on the spread of a new basis of social solidarity. This new basis of solidarity joins needs-based social morality and the life ground of value to Devine’s model of a democratic economy. Devine stresses repeatedly the need for a new basis of social solidarity that binds human beings together across differences. Yet he never explicitly identifies the foundation of this shared humanity or demonstrates how it might be used to construct an argument that could in principle convince groups whose short-term private interests lie with maintaining the rule of life-blind market forces and their justifying values and social morality. As I explained earlier, needs-based social morality and the universal conception of the human good affirm nonsectarian values that reach across differences as invitations for selftransformation. Devine emphasizes the power of the democratic ideal to promote change, but does not confront head-on the problem of conceptions of democracy that limit it to the political public sphere. The advantage of needs-based social morality and the universal conception of the human good over a straightforward defence of democracy is the life-grounded harm-principle they employ. Ordinary human consciousness is capable of recognizing harm to equal life interests as well as its social causes. Democracy, as a basis of solidarity, is abstract and subject to differences of interpretation. Harm is more concrete insofar as nor11 Devine, Democracy and Economic Planning, 52.

242

Democratic Society

mal human intelligence and feeling do not want to be the direct cause, or implicated as an indirect cause, of it. If the structure of liberalcapitalist society and its justifying social morality and value system can be proven to be the social cause of harm to equal life interests, then people whose individual conceptions of the good can be linked to the social cause of harm may prove more receptive to self-transformation. The further democratization of society along Devine’s model would function as the solution to this problem rather than the basis of solidarity necessary for its success. The basis of solidarity would be conscious human fellow-feeling in its negative and positive modalities. The negative modality is the inability to bear the consciousness of suffering of others while the positive modality is the cultivated capability to delight and celebrate the well-being of others. Interpreted socially, the life-grounded principle of harm would function as a principle of prior constraint on the range of legitimate planning options. Devine does not always clearly distinguish between need satisfaction and demand satisfaction, although such a distinction is absolutely central to his project. Unless demand itself is transformed in such a way that need satisfaction is given priority over the satisfaction of demand regardless of its content, the solidarity necessary for successful social democratization will be held in check by the unreflective and private nature of demand as it exists. A democratic society cannot, of course, be indifferent to what people want, but what people want must ultimately be brought in line (through argument and self-transformation) with what is in everyone’s equal life interests. Thus the three fundamental classes of human need, interpreted as the material conditions for free individuation, would function as framing principles of deliberation, analogous to constitutional principles in actual liberal democracies. Any proposal that could be demonstrated to violate the equal life interests of all would be unconstitutional and therefore automatically rejected. Of course, like constitutional principles, the adoption of any proposal would also have to come about through democratic means. Recent experience of constitution building, in Canada in 1982 or in Europe in 2005, prove just how excruciatingly difficult agreement can be. If the subject matter is equal life interests of which anyone can become conscious, rather than amending formulas and other legal abstractions, people might involve themselves more fully and keep in check their less reflective and obstructionist tendencies. In any case, there can be no harm in making the argument, to existing political parties or within newly developed ones, that there is a long-term tendency

The Project for a Democratic Society

243

toward social democratization that has proven to be in everyone’s equal life interest and that any verbal commitment to such interests obligates those who make it to seek practical ways to resist the erosion of achievements and create the conditions for further democratic protest. Thus the idea of a democratic society can be advanced today (or not) through the transformation of existing political parties or the creation of new ones. Platforms would be contextually determined, of course, but would be unified around demands that could be proven through political argument to be in the equal life interests of all citizens. Existing institutional frameworks would be modified to increase the range of voices involved in planning and negotiation, and new institutions would be created where necessary. The long-term aim would be to internalize the democratic tendencies that today take the form of external economic regulations. Such a strategy is realistic, constructive, and runs with the grain of history. As Brian Barry rightly notes in the preface to his most recent work, socialists and other critics of global injustice and inequality have suffered from lack of positive alternatives.12 However inspiring mass protests may be, they end after a few hours or days leaving everything as it was. It is thus time for socialists to return to progressive and realizable demands that can generate the forms of solidarity necessary as the basis of support for ever more democratic transformations. I will conclude with some examples of concrete struggles that have proven the ability of ordinary people to free themselves from coercive dependence of market forces and welfare-state bureaucracies. These examples are intended to prove only that people are capable of self-government. They are not intended as models for a future social order (although they might be that as well). One of the most inspiring of these struggles was in Cochambamba, Bolivia. In July 1999, the World Bank ordered Bolivia to end public subsidies aimed at making water affordable to the local population. In response the government sold the town’s water supply to the Bechtel corporation. Rather than accept assurances that “market forces” would establish a more efficient distribution of water, peasants and workers pointed out that they would not be able to afford water under the privatized regime. They consequently united to retake control of the most basic resource of life. Osea Olivera, a leader of the resistence, articulated clearly its guiding principle: “We’re questioning that others, the World Bank, international business, should be deciding these basic 12 Barry, Why Social Justice Matters, viii.

244

Democratic Society 13

issues for us. For us, this is democracy.” Democracy is clearly linked to an institutional structure that safeguards equal life interests. It is violated when those interests are violated, even if no formally recognized right is thereby transgressed. The implied aim of the movement is the synthesis of political and economic power in a need-satisfying and capability-developing democratic society. As the recent (and brilliant) Canadian documentary The Corporation (2004) shows, the workers and peasants of Cochambamba have succeeded in administering the water supply according to needs-grounded principles. South America offers many further examples of political movements working toward the institutionalization of the needs ground of social morality. In Brazil, the Landless Workers Movement has also concluded that for them, the “norm-free sociality” of the market means destruction of their conditions of life, and have responded accordingly. Where the workers and peasants of Bolivia took back control over their water, the Landless Workers have, as their name implies, retaken the land. On a much larger scale than their British spiritual allies, the Diggers, 300 years previously, the Landless Workers have occupied land in the vicinity of forty-two cities in the Brazilian interior since their campaign began in May 2000.14 They have succeeded in settling and employing 250,000 people. The motivation to organize social life in the equal life interest of all is clear. As one activist explained, “our struggle is not only to win the land ... we are building a new way of life.”15 Again, the implication is clear. The new way of life is based upon a synthetic conception of democracy as the unity of economic and political power in self-governing, needs-satisfying, capabilty-developing institutions. Movements seeking new models of needs-grounded institutions are not limited to indigenous populations, although their leadership in this regard must be acknowledged. In Argentina parallel movements among the unemployed have resulted in the take-over of factories and their collective control. The Argentine crisis began in 2000 as a direct result of the implementation of International Monetary Fund demands for structural reform at the end of a decade of disastrous neo-liberal economic policy-making.16 The spectacular street protests that began in 13 Jim Schultz, “Bolivia’s War Over Water,” The Democracy Centre, 4 February 2000, http://www.democracyctr.org. 14 Http://isreview.org/issues/18/Brazil.html 15 Quoted in McNally, Another World Is Possible, 201. 16 Ibid., 49–50.

The Project for a Democratic Society

245

December 2001 and eventually brought down three successive governments garnered most of the press coverage in North America. But of more long-term significance are the principles that underlie the movement of the unemployed to establish direct local control over places of production. Rather than acquiesce in unemployment or rest content with passive forms of need satisfaction, workers organized their communities to democratically reorganize production in their IMF-closed factories. Alberto, a local organizer of the Moviemiento de Trabajadores Desocupados in Solano explains the principle guiding their practice. The neighbourhood has its proper form of organization. The assemblies occur weekly. From these assemblies there are groups of companions who are elected, but all are on rotation. So they are not permanent, and it is in accordance with responsibility and commitment, and this is in the area of social bonds and with the input from the rest of neighbourhood ... We ... want to protect our space so that never will liberty be restrained ... this transformation has to do with commitment to participation, which also has to do with a certain type of dignity. No one is going to give you a free ride; you are the one that is 17 going to obtain things fighting alongside your companions.

Here again one sees democracy conceptualized as a social system and not simply a political form. What links these movements together is thus a commitment to a conception of democracy that transcends, in the name of the material conditions of human freedom, the formal separation of political and economic power. As McNally argues, “these movements rightly insist that it is anti-democratic for powerful private interests to dictate what happens to the quality of life of millions of people.”18 What they all indicate is the capability of ordinary people to understand their equal life interests and to create new modes of social interaction that satisfy those equal life interests better than life-blind market forces. In addition to the South American movements noted above, I would like to mention one example of a life-grounded transformation of productive resources from North America. It is a housing project recently created in Toronto by the Parkdale Area Recreation Centre (PARC). PARC works with poor ex-psychiatric patients in one of Toronto’s most impoverished neighbourhoods. With few “marketable” skills and the stigma of mental illness, PARC’s clients face a bleak future in the official 17 Khorasanee, “The Movement of the Unemployed Workers in Solano,” 14–15.

246

Democratic Society

economy. Rather than simply insist on passive support from bureaucratic welfare programs, PARC organized its clients to transform surplus office space into a self-governing small community. PARC enabled the clients to decided what criteria would be used to judge how the living space would be organized, employed the clients to help renovate the space (thus developing their creative capacities), and allowed the clients to draw up the constitution that would govern the responsibilities of the people who would occupy the new development. Once again we see the radical synthesis of political and economic spheres made possible by a politics oriented by the goal of active need satisfaction.19 Confronted with a homelessness crisis that in Canada alone affects about one million people, the achievements of parc may seem trivial. That judgment, however, would be hostage to a superficial empiricism that simply compares numbers helped to numbers in need. The importance of PARC is as an example to all people who find themselves radically need deprived in the current world order. What the example teaches is that the resources needed to cure the deprivations exist, that they can be appropriated and developed democratically, and that a different set of principles from the life-blind dynamics of globalized capitalism can be realized in the here-and-now. Devine’s model of negotiated coordination provides the concept necessary to connect these partial experiments to the long-term tendencies toward social democratization. The principles of needs-based social democracy and the universal human good supply the framing principles for a new mode of social solidarity that could underlie new movements for everdeeper democratization. The capability of people to govern themselves is present, the resources necessary to satisfy our equal life interests exist, and the arguments to justify necessary changes are ready to hand. What is lacking above all, perhaps, is the belief that a more democratic society is possible. When Icarus spread his wings and soared above humanity’s “natural” earth-bound place, the sun punished him for seeking to transgress humanity’s natural limitations. But had Icarus had access to aluminum, the god’s efforts would have been in vain. Perhaps the lesson of history is that the gods do not so much punish transgressions of “natural limits” as arrogant neglect of complexity. The argument for a democratic soci18 McNally, Another World Is Possible, 195. 19 The information about parc was obtained in private conversations with Victor Willis, the director of the centre.

The Project for a Democratic Society

247

ety defended here respects complexity and tries to work with long-term historical trends. It requires imagination and hope, and trusts that the master philosophical assumption of substantive human rationality is sound, but beyond that it leaves the process of transformation to creative human intelligence working on problems in the context in which they develop, guided by a defensible conception of equal life interests and a universal value connecting every human being to every other and the wider field of life on earth.

This page intentionally left blank

Bibliography

Albert, Michael. Parecon. London: Verso, 2003. Alston, T.H, and C.H.E. Philpin, eds. The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Arato, Andrew and Jean Cohen. Civil Society and Political Theory. Cambridge: mit Press, 1992. Aristotle. “On the Soul.” In The Basic Works of Aristotle. Edited by Richard Mckeon. New York: Random House, 1966. Armstrong, Pat, Hugh Armstrong, Ivy Lynn Bourgeault, Jacqueline Choniere, Joel Lexchin, Eric Mykhalovsky, Suzanne Peters, and Jerry P. White. “Market Principles, Business Practices, and Health Care: Comparing the U.S. and Canadian Experiences.” International Journal of Canadian Studies, 28 (Fall 2004), 13–38. Aulard, A. The French Revolution: A Political History, 4 vols. New York: Scribner and Sons, 1910. Avalon Project of the Yale Law School. The English Bill of Rights, www.yale. edu/lawweb/avalon/englan.htm, 1999. Barry, Brian. “John Rawls and the Search for Stability.” Ethics 105 (July, 1995), 874–915. – Why Social Justice Matters. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Baynes, Kenneth. The Normative Grounds of Social Criticism: Kant, Rawls, Habermas. Albany: SUNY Press, 1992. – “Rights as Critique.” Political Theory 28, no. 4 (August, 2000), 451–68. Beetham, David. Democracy and Human Rights. Cambridge: Polity, 2004. Benhabib, Seyla. “Deliberative Rationality and Models of Democratic Legitimacy.” Constellations 1, no. 1 (1994), 26–51.

250

Bibliography

– “The Democratic Moment and the Problem of Difference.” In Democracy and Difference. Edited by Seyla Benhabib. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Bentham, Jeremy. “Defence of Usury.” In McMaster University Archive for the History of Economic Thought, http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ ugem/3113/bentham.hme – Fragment on Government. London: Oxford University Press, 1951. – Principles of Morals and Legislation. New York: Hafner Publishing, 1948. Benton, Ted, ed. The Greening of Marxism. New York: Guilford, 1996. Blaug, Ricardo. Democracy: Real and Ideal. Albany: SUNY Press, 1994. Bobbio, Noberto. The Future of Democracy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Bohman, James. Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. Bookchin, Murray. The Modern Crisis. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1987. Brecher, Bob. Getting What You Want? A Critique of Liberal Morality. London: Routledge, 1998. Breckman, Warren. Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origin of Radical Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Bury, J.P.T. “The Second Republic.” In 1848: A Turning Point? Edited by Melvin Kransberg. Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1958. Callinicos, Alex. Equality. Cambridge: Polity, 2000. Carlheden, Mikael, and Rene Gabriels. “An Interview with Jurgen Habermas.” Theory, Culture, and Society 13, no. 3 (August, 1996), 1–16. Cobban, Alfred. The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964. Condorcet. Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humaine. Paris: Flammarion, 1988. “Confirming the Global Extinction Crisis,” http://www.iucn.org/redlist/ 2000/news.html. Cook, Deborah. Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society. London: Routledge, 2004. – “The Talking Cure in Habermas’ Republic.” New Left Review, November– December 2001, 135–51. Cournaud, Abbé. De la propriété, ou la cause du pauvre, plaidée devant la tribune de la raison. Paris: S. Benoit, 1791, http://humanities.uchicago.edu/ images/ prop/. Davis, Wade. “Vanishing Cultures.” National Geographic 196, no. 2 (August, 1999), 62–89.

Bibliography

251

Déclaration des droits de l’homme et citoyen, http://www.premier-ministre.gouv. fr/HIST/DDHC.HTM Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen (1793), http://perso.club. internet.fr/sneuf/S/1793.html, Desai, Radika. “Fetishizing Phantoms: Carl Schmitt, Chantal Mouffe, and ‘The Political.’” In Critical Political Studies: Debates and Dialogues from the Left. Edited by Abigail B. Bakan and Eleanor MacDonald. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002, 387–408. de Schweinitz, Karl. England’s Road to Social Security. New York: A.S. Barnes and Company, 1972. de Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. New York: Mentor, 1956. Devine, Pat. Democracy and Economic Planning. Boulder: Westview Press, 1988. Dickinson, H.T. Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain. London: Methuen, 1977. Diderot, Denis. “Refutation of the Work of Helvetius Entitled, ‘On Man.’” In Selected Writings. Edited by L.G. Crocker. New York: MacMillan, 1966. DiZerega, Gus. “Democracy as a Spontaneous Order.” Critical Review, Spring 1989, 206–237. Donisthorpe, Wordsworth. “The Limits of Liberty.” In A Plea for Liberty. Edited by Thomas McKay. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981. Doyal, Ian, and Len Gough. A Theory of Human Need. New York: Guilford, 1991. Duveau, Georges. 1848: The Making of a Revolution. New York: Vintage Books, 1967. Dworkin, Ronald. “Foundations of Liberal Equality.” In Equal Freedom: Selected Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Edited by Stephen Darwall. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Feenberg, Andrew. “Marcuse or Habermas: Two Critiques of Technology.” Inquiry 39, 1996, 45–70. Feher, Ferenc, Agnes Heller, and Georg Marcus. Dictatorship Over Needs. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983. Foner, Eric. The Story of American Freedom. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998. Forbath, William E. “Short-Circuit: A Critique of Habermas’ Understanding of Law, Politics, and Economic Life. “ Habermas on Law and Democracy. Edited by Andrew Arato and Michael Rosenfeld. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Forrest, Alan. The French Revolution and the Poor. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981.

252

Bibliography

Fraser, Ian. Hegel and Marx: The Concept of Need. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1998. Fromm, Erich. Escape from Freedom, New York: Owl Books, 1994. Gauthier, David. Moral Dealings. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. Giddens, Anthony. Profiles and Critiques in Social Theory. London: MacMillan, 1982. Gintis, Herbert, and Samuel Bowles. “Rethinking Marxism and Liberalism from a Radical Democratic Perspective.” Rethinking Marxism 3, nos. 3–4 (Fall-Winter 1990), 37–44. Gooch, G.P. Political Thought in England, Bacon to Halifax. London: Oxford University Press, 1950. Gorz, Andre. Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology. London: Verso, 1994. Graham, Keith. “Digging Up Marx.” In Reconstituting Social Criticism. Edited by I. Mackenzie and S. O’Neill. London: MacMillan, 1999. – Practical Reasoning in a Social World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Gutman, Amy. “The Central Role of Rawls’ Theory.” In The Philosophy of Rawls. Vol. 1, Development and Main Outlines of Rawls’ Theory of Justice. Edited by Henry S. Richardson and Paul J. Weithman. New York: Garland Publishing, 1999. Gutman, Amy and Dennis Thompson. Democracy and Disagreement. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. Habermas, Jurgen. Between Facts and Norms. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. – “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere.” In Habermas on the Public Sphere. Edited by Craig Calhoun. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. – The Inclusion of the Other. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998. – Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. – The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. – “Popular Sovereignty as Procedure.” In Deliberative Democracy. Edited by James Bohman and William Rehg. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997. – The Postnational Constellation. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. – The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998. – The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1, Boston: Beacon Press, 1984. – The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2. Boston: Beacon Press, 1987. – “Theory and Politics: A Conversation with Herbert Marcuse, Jurgen Habermas, Heinz Lubasz, and Telman Spengler.” Telos 38 (Winter 1978–79), 128–43.

Bibliography

253

– “What Does Socialism Mean Today?” In After the Fall. Edited by Robin Blackburn. London: Verso, 1991. Halévy, Elie. History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century. Vol. 3, The Triumph of Reform (1830–1841). London: Ernest Benn, 1961. Hampton, Christopher. A Radical Reader: The Struggle for Change in England 1381–1914. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. Hayek, Friedrich. “Freedom, Reason, and Tradition.” In Keeping the Tablets. Edited by William F. Buckley and Charles Kesler. New York: Harper and Row, 1988. – The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Hegel, G.W.F. The Philosophy of Right. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. Held, David. Democracy and the Global Order. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Held, David, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt, and Jonathon Perraton. Global Transformations: Politics, Economics, and Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Heller, Agnes. The Theory of Need in Marx. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976. Hill, Christopher. Century of Revolution. New York: Norton, 1975. – Liberty Against the Law. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996. – Reformation to Industrial Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin,1967. – The World Turned Upside Down. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994. Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Revolution. London: Sphere Books, 1977. Horne, Alastair. The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870–1871. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. Hume, David. “On Commerce.” In McMaster University Archive for the History of Economic Thought, http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/ 3113/hume/commerce.hme. – “On the First Principles of Government.” In McMaster University Archive for the History of Economic Thought, http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/ ~econ/ugcm/3113/hume/firstpri.hme. – An Inquiry into the Principles of Morals. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983. – A Treatise on Human Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. Huntington, Samuel. The American Commonwealth. New York: Harper and Row, 1976. Huxley, Aldous. “Forward.” In Brave New World. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970. Jagger, Alison. Feminist Politics and Human Nature. Lanham, Md: Rowman and Littlefield, 1987.

254

Bibliography

Jones, Peter. The 1848 Revolutions. Harlow, UK: Longman, 1981. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. London: MacMillan, 1987. – “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View.” In On History. Edited by Lewis White Beck. New York: MacMillan, 1963. Keane, John. Democracy and Civil Society. London: Verso, 1988. Khorasanee, Dina. “The Movement of the Unemployed Workers in Solano.” New Socialist, January–February 2004, no. 45, 14–5. Kouvelakis, Stathis. Philosophy and Revolution. London: Verso, 2003. Kukathas, Chandran, and Phillip Petit. Rawls: A Theory of Justice and its Critics. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Kymlicka, Will, and Wayne Norman. “Return of the Citizen.” Ethics 104 (1994), 356–71. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso, 1985. Lebowitz, Michael. Beyond Capital. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Lecky, William E.H. Democracy and Liberty, Vol. 1. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981. Lefebvre, George. The Coming of the French Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. Locke, John. A Letter Concerning Toleration. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983. – Second Treatise of Government. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980. – A Treatise on Human Nature. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1995. Lukacs, Georg. The Young Hegel. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976. Lynch, Richard A. “Distinguishing between Legal and Moral Norms: A Central Problem in Habermas’ Between Facts and Norms.” Philosophy Today, Supplement, 1997, 67–72. MacPherson, C.B. The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. – The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962. Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. Boston: Beacon Press, 1966. Marshall, T.H. Sociology at the Crossroads and Other Essays. London: Heinemann, 1964. Martin, Rex. Rawls and Rights. Lawrence, KA: University of Kansas Press, 1985. Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. 1. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1986. – The Civil War in France. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977. – The Class Struggles in France 1848–1850. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972.

Bibliography

255

– “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law.” In Collected Works, Vol. 3, 1843–44. New York: International Publishers. 1975. – “Critique of the Gotha Program.” In Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy. Edited by Lewis S. Feuer. New York: Anchor Books, 1959. – “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.” In Collected Works. Vol. 3, 1843–1844. New York: International Publishers, 1975 – “On the Jewish Question.” In Collected Works. Vol. 3, 1843–1844. New York: International Publishers, 1975. – “Outline of a Critique of Political Economy.” In Collected Works. Vol. 28, 1857–61. New York: International Publishers, 1986. – “Theses on Feuerbach.” In The German Ideology. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976. – “Wage Labour and Capital.” In Marx and Engels: Selected Works Vol. 1. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973. McCarthy, Thomas. “Kantian Constructivism and Reconstructivism: Rawls and Habermas in Dialogue.” Ethics 105 (1994), 44–63. – “Practical Discourse and the Relation between Morality and Politics.” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 4 (1995), 461–81. McMurtry, John. The Cancer Stage of Capitalism. London: Pluto, 1999. – Unequal Freedoms: The Global Market as an Ethical System. Toronto: Garamond, 1998. – “The Value of All Values.” In Encyclopaedia of Life Support Systems. Oxford: EOLSS Publishers and UNESCO, 2005. – Value Wars. London: Pluto, 2002. McNally, David. Another World Is Possible. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Press, 2002. – Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Mill, James. An Essay on Government. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1955. Mill. J.S. On Liberty. New York: W.W. Norton, 1975. Mooney, Pat Roy. “The ETC Century: Concentration in Corporate Power.” Development Dialogue, nos. 1–2, 1999, 74–114 Moore, Jr., Barrington. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1966. Moores, Colin. The Making of Bourgeois Europe. London: Verso, 1991. Moscovitch, Allan, and Jim Albert. The Benevolent State: The Growth of Welfare in Canada. Toronto: Garamond, 1987. Mouffe, Chantal. “Decision, Deliberation, and Democratic Ethos.” Philosophy Today, Spring 1997, 24–30.

256

Bibliography

– The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso, 2000. – Dimensions of Radical Democracy. London: Verso, 1992. – “Politics, Democratic Action, and Solidarity.” Inquiry 38 (1995), 99–108. – The Return of the Political. London: Verso, 1993. Noonan, Jeff. Critical Humanism and the Politics of Difference. Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2003. – “Protest, Socialism and Social Peace.” Bad Subjects, no. 65 (January 2004) 1–13. Http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2004/65. Nove, Alec. The Economics of Feasible Socialism. London: Allen and Unwin, 1983. Nussbaum, Martha. Sex and Social Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. O’Brian, M.D. “Free Libraries.” In A Plea for Liberty, edited by Thomas McKay. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981. Paul, Jeffrey. “Forward.” In A Plea for Liberty. Edited by Thomas McKay. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981. Petras, James, and Henry Veltmeyer. Globalization Unmasked. New York: Zed Books, 2001. Plato, Republic. In Collected Dialogues. Edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961. Pogge, Thomas. Realizing Rawls. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1962. Postone, Moishe. Time, Labor, and Social Domination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Rafalovich, Arthur. “The Housing of the Working Classes and the Poor.” In A Plea for Liberty. Edited by Thomas McKay. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981. Rawls, John. Justice as Fairness: A Re-statement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. – Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. – A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1999. Robinson, Edward Stanley. “The Impracticability of Socialism.” In A Plea for Liberty. Edited by Thomas McKay. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981. Rousseau, Jean Jacques. The Social Contract and Other Writings. London: Dent and Sons, 1973. Sabine, George. The Works of Gerrard Winstanley. New York: Russel and Russel, 1965. Sadler, Michael. “Speech of Michael Sadler in the House of Commons on the Second Reading of the Factories Regulation Bill (13 March 1832).”

Bibliography

257

A Web of English History, http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/terrace/ adw03/peel/factmine/sadler.htm Schultz, Jim. “Bolivia’s War over Water.” The Democracy Centre, 4 February 2000 http://www.democracyctr.org Schwarzenbach, Sybil A. “Rawls, Hegel, and Communitarianism.” In Philosophy of Rawls. Vol. 4, Moral Psychology and Community. Edited by Henry S. Richardson and Paul J. Weithman. New York: Garland Publishing, 1999. Sen, Amartya. Commodities and Capability. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999. Sen, Amartya. Development as Freedom. New York: Knopf, 1999. Smith, Adam. A Theory of Moral Sentiments. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1976. – Wealth of Nations. London: Penguin, 1979. Soboul, Alfred. A Short History of the French Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. Spencer, Herbert. “From Freedom to Bondage.” In A Plea for Liberty. Edited by Thomas McKay. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981. Stearns, Peter N. “The European Labour Movement and the Working Classes, 1890–1914.” In Workers and Protest. Edited by Harvey Mitchell and Peter N. Stearns. Itasca, IL: Peacock Publishers, 1971. Teeple, Gary. The Riddle of Human Rights. Toronto: Garamond, 2004. Thompson, David. Democracy in France since 1870. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969. Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980. Thurman, Bryan. “Outlines for a Theory of Citizenship.” In Dimensions of Radical Democracy. Edited by Chantal Mouffe. London: Verso, 1992. Tsoukalas, Konstantinos. “Globalisation and the Executive Committee: The Contemporary Capitalist State.” In Global Capitalism Versus Democracy: Socialist Register 1999. Edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys. Rendelsham: Merlin Press, 1999. United Nations. Human Development Report 1999. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. – Human Development Report 2003. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Weber, Max. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. New York: The Free Press, 1964. Weinstock, Daniel. “Saving Democracy from Deliberation.” In Canadian Political Philosophy. Edited by Ronald Beiner and Wayne Norman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, 78–91.

258

Bibliography

Winstanley, Gerrard. The Law of Freedom and Other Writings. Edited by Christopher Hill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Peterborough: Broadview Books, 2001. Wood, Ellen Meiksins. Democracy Against Capitalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. – The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. London: Verso, 2002. Wood, Ellen Meiksins and Neal Wood. A Trumpet of Sedition. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Wood, Neal. John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Young, Iris Marion. “Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy.” Political Theory, 29, no. 5 (Oct. 2001), 670–90.

Index

Albert, Michael, 237 alienation, 120, 126–8 Anaxagoras, 221 anti-war movement, xi, 218 Arato, Andrew, 167 Arendt, Hannah, 208 Aristotle, 220–1. See also Rawls on Aristotelian Principle ateliers nationaux, 103 Aulard, A., 70, 78 automation conformity, 207–8, 222 autonomy, 143, 148, 149, 159–60, 166–74, 180, 181. See also Habermas on; Rawls on Babeuf, 69, 87–9 Barry, Brian, 142n1, 243 Baynes, Kenneth, 118, 145 Beetham, David, 105 Benhabib, Seyla, 191 Bentham, Jeremy, 31–4; on happiness, 33; on principle of public policy, 33; on redistribution of wealth, 33–4; relation to Hume, 32 Blanc, Louis, 103–4 Blaug, Ricardo, 181 Boissy d=Anglas, 86 Bookchin, Murray, 211 Bowels, Samuel, 118 Byron, Lord, 96, 97 capabilities, xix, 55; as distinctive of life, 66, 221–2; human good, xv, 58, 125,

127, 197, 202–3, 221–3; as intrinsic value, 54–6, 125, 127, 176–7, 195, 222; realization of, 45, 68, 90, 116, 120, 127, 146–7, 222, 232, 240. See also freedom; good; human nature, lifegrounded conception of; individuation; self-determination capitalism: cancer stage of, 211–13, 226; and democracy, xvi, 137, 228; development of, 3–9; instrumentalization of labour under, 100–1, 126, 128, 176; as negation of human freedom, xviii, 29–30, 95, 126, 135; progressive nature of, 128–9; and rights, xii, xvi; and time, 100–1; value system of, xvii, xix, 3–4, 19, 27, 46–8, 98, 101–2, 108, 124–6, 135, 150–2, 154–5, 174, 180, 185, 196, 203–5, 225. See also globalization of market forces; Habermas on capitalist market; power, separation of economic and political; private property; Rawls on capitalist market; regulation of market forces; rights-based social morality capitalist market forces, 152; as constraint on freedom, 30, 43, 133, 156, 174, 176, 178, 226; dependence of humans on, 44–5, 54, 68, 86, 95, 116–17, 119, 126, 135, 136, 139, 154, 243; necessity of, 202; as ruling power in liberal-democracy, 37, 40, 47, 49, 152, 203, 211, 230–2, 236; and unintentional harm, 217–19

260

Index

central planning, 40, 229, 230–1, 232, 235, 240 Chartism, 92–5 civil society, 116, 119, 120, 167; and democracy, 135, 202. See also Habermas on public sphere. Cobban, Alfred, 74 Cohen, Jean, 167 Comité de mendicité, 84 Comité de secours publique, 84 Condorcet, 70–1 Conspiracy of Equals, 69, 87–9 consumerism, 57, 123–5, 127, 156, 178, 212 Cook, Deborah, 162, 166n21, 172, 176, 179 Cournaud, Abbe, 75–7, 79, 80, 89 Déclaration des droits de l=homme et du citoyen (1789), 69, 71–4, 82 Déclaration des droits de l=homme et du citoyen (1793), 69, 82–5 democracy: classical liberal critique of, 38–42; deliberation and, xii, 46, 108, 114, 160n5, 181–3, 220, 233, 242; liberal (political) conception of, xvi-xvii, xx, xxii, 20, 31, 37, 45, 70, 112, 133, 178, 185 (see also rights-based social morality); link between political and social, 106–7, 128, 194, 244–5; material conditions of, xii, xviii, 43, 48, 54, 58, 84 (see also democracy, as social form; freedom, material conditions of; needs-based social morality, institutionalization of; self-determination, material conditions of); neo-liberal understanding of, 206; postmodern conception of, 184, 185–97 (see also Mouffe, Chantal); rights and, xi-xii, 20, 31, 37, 45 (see also rights, of citizenship; rights, political; rights-based social morality); as social form, xii, xvi, xxii, 38, 48–9, 55, 58, 60, 68, 77, 80, 83–4, 88–9, 94, 105, 112, 116–17, 128, 130, 133, 138–9, 154, 194, 202–47, 226, 229–47 (see also freedom, material conditions of; individuation, material conditions of; needs-based social morality;

needs-based social morality, institutionalization of); and socialism, 38–9 (see also democracy, as social form; democratic planning; democratization of economy; Marx, on democracy; need satisfaction, democratic form of; needs-based social morality, institutionalization of; negotiated coordination); struggles for, xii, xv, xvi, 20, 48, 50, 68, 88, 89, 110, 134, 158, 204, 225, 228, 243–7 democratic planning, 230–5. See also negotiated coordination democratic theory, xi-xii, xvi-xvii, xxii, 38, 134–6, 159–60, 184, 185–6 democratization of economy, xx, 40, 42, 94, 105, 112, 128, 133–5, 184, 185, 201, 203, 213, 225, 229–47. See also democracy; as social form; needs-based social morality, institutionalization of; need satisfaction, democratic form of; negotiated coordination; self-determination, material conditions of; socialism) Derrida, Jacques, 189 Devine, Pat xx, xxii, 134, 152, 203–229–43. See also negotiated coordination Donisthorpe, Wordsworth, 39 Doyal, Len, 48 Dworkin, Ronald, xiv enclosure movement, 3–5, 7, 17, 58, 60–61; new, 211 English Bill of Rights, 6–7 English Civil War, 6–7, 59–69 Enlightenment, 75–6 equality: of citizenship, 136; democratic, 156; liberal conception of, 31, 49, 71, 86, 88, 156, 196 (see also individualism, classical liberal conception of; liberalism, classical; rights, of citizenship; rights, political; rights-based social morality); of life interests, xiii, 55, 62–4, 68, 72, 74, 76–7, 80, 84, 88, 90, 117, 120, 128, 134, 213, 214, 217–19, 220, 239, 242, 244, 247 (see also good, human; life ground of value; needs;

Index needs-based social morality); substantive, 89; utilitarian conception of, 33 essence (essentialism), 186, 189 Feenberg, Andrew, 184 Forbath, William E., 179 Forrest, Alan, 84 freedom, xii, xxi; as capability realization, 55–8, 118–19, 127–8, 146; of contract, 39; dialectic of interdependence and, 67, 98–9, 119–20, 121, 124, 222–3; as essential nature of life, 66; material conditions of, xii, xv, 25, 54–5, 60–4, 66, 67, 69, 74, 94, 99, 118, 120, 128–9, 146, 213, 223 (see also democracy, as social form; democratization of economy; individuation, material conditions of; negotiated coordination; needsbased social morality, institutionalization of); and non-interference, 67, 120, 216; positive, xii, xv, 66–9, 122, 204. See also self-determination, capabilities, realization of French Revolution, 58, 69–90, 115; and citizenship, 71, 73, 78, 83, 87–8; democracy and, 70–1, 78, 83–6, 88, 90; development of needs-based social morality in, 75–7, 78, 82–90; development of rights in, 70–5; opposition between liberals and republicans in, 77–8, 83–4, 86–8, 89; and welfare provision, 84–7 Fraser, Ian, 122–3 Friedman, Thomas L., 209–10 Fromm, Erich, 207–8, 212 general will, 79, 82–3 Gintis, Herbert, 118 globalization, xvi, xviii, xviiin7, 112, 204–6; contrary to pluralism, 212, 225; and cultural difference, 214; as totalitarian, 206–7, 209–10; and undermining of freedom, 46, 152–3, 158, 174–5, 182, 203, 205, 208–10, 225, 246. See also Habermas, and globalization Good: concrete versus abstract conception of, 216; criterion of, 216; defined, xiii, 214–15; and democracy, xx, 183,

261

213, 215–26; human, 36, 183, 184, 196, 202–3, 214–26, 229, 241; life-grounded conception of, 189, 220–26 (see also life ground of value); universal, xxii, 79, 214–15, 241. See also capabilities, as intrinsic value; capabilities, realization of; life-ground of value Gorz, Andre, 210 Gough, Ian, 48 Gutmann, Amy, 153 Habermas, Jurgen, xvii, xxii, 44, 159–84, 225, 241; and autonomy, 159–60, 163, 166–74, 180, 184; and capitalist market, 167, 174–6, 178–80, 228–9, 230; and colonization of life world, 174–6, 181, 226; and communicative reason, 159, 162–3, 167–70, 171–2, 174, 176, 181–2; contradictions of, 174–84; and democracy, 159, 161, 165–6, 167–74, 175, 176–7, 180–2, 236; and globalization, 174–5; and liberalism, 160, 162, 163, 165, 167, 169–70, 173, 175, 180, 183; and life world, 162–3, 175, 177–8; links with Rawls, 159–61, 165, 172–3, 176, 180, 183; and modernization, 161–6, 175; and needs, 177–8, 178n54, 180; and pluralism, 161–7, 176, 184; and principle of democratic legitimacy, 168, 171, 173; and private sphere, 163, 170; and public sphere (civil society), 159, 164–7, 171–2, 174, 181; and republicanism, 162, 169–70; and rights, 162, 164–5, 170–3, 179; and separation of political from economic power, 164, 167, 173–4, 179, 181 harm, xiii-xiv, 56; basic form of, 56–7, 61–3, 68 harm principle, 216–17; life-grounded interpretation of, 217–18, 223, 241–2 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 112–14, 164, 216, 220 Held, David, 108, 234n7 Heller, Agnes, 122 Hill, Christopher, 53 Hobbes, Thomas, 11–15, 16, 20, 21, 29; conception of Good in, 11–12; and

262

Index

desire, 12–13; and law, 14; and natural rights, 13, 15; and reason, 12–13 Hobsbawm, Eric, 70 Human Nature, xiii; liberal conception of, 15, 16, 44–5, 76 (see also equality, liberal conception of; individuality, liberal understanding of); life-grounded conception of, defined; 4, 56–8, 76, 80, 98–9, 110, 112, 178 (see also capabilities, intrinsic value of; individuality, life-grounded conception of; needs, defined; needs, distinguished from wants/desires; needs, intrinsic limits of; needs, physical, socio-cultural, and temporal; value, of human life); utilitarian conception of, 32–3, 34–5, 98 Hume, David, 20–25, 28, 29, 34, 72, 143; and desire, 22; and justice, 22–3; and origin of moral concepts, 21–2; and private property, 22–4; and reason, 12–13; and rights, 23; and society as spontaneous order, 23–4 Hussein, Saddam, 218 Huntington, Samuel, 206 Huxley, Aldous, 208 individuality: liberal conception of, 11, 42–3, 44–5, 48, 98, 120, 121, 163, 169, 171, 216, 224–5 (see also equality, liberal conception of; human nature, liberal conception of); life-grounded conception of, 54, 67, 119–20, 129, 222–3 (see also human nature, life-grounded conception of) individuation, material conditions of, 46, 48, 54, 129–30, 156, 202–3, 223, 242 Irish Land Reform Act, 39 Iraq war, 218 Jacobins, 69, 77–87, 90, 91; and democratic society, 83, 85–6; social policy, 84–7 Kant, Immanuel, xx, 143, 159–60, 165–6, 216. See also Habermas, and autonomy; Rawls, and autonomy Keane, John, 166 Kymlicka, Will, 161

Laclau, Ernesto, 187–9 Landless Workers Movement, 244 Lebowitz, Michael, 102 Lefebvre, Georges, 75 Lefort, Claude, 118 Levellers, 59–60; True (Diggers) 59, 244 Liability Act Amendments Bill, 39 liberal democracy: contradictions of, 112, 116, 117–21 liberalism: classical, xv, xvii-xviii, xxi, 10–37, 193 (see also liberal (political) democracy); evolved form of, xv, 133, 161, 133–97 (see also liberal rightsbased social morality, evolved form of) liberal social theory, 11, 20, 67 liberal rights-based social morality, xiv-xv, xx, 4, 6–7, 17, 19–20, 25, 32, 34, 38, 41, 43, 96, 101, 103, 156, 180, 186; evolved form of, xvii, 20, 135–97, 201–2; and good, 216 (see also good, classical liberal conception of); (neo-liberal) form of, 203–4, 205–6, 225, 227, 229, 240; social presupposition of, 44–50, 117–18, 120 life, value of human, xi, xiii, 36, 101–2, 118, 127, 178–9, 180, 195, 212, 221–2, 226 life ground of value, xii, 19, 23, 49, 54–5, 57, 101–2, 119, 127–30, 199, 214–26, 241–2, 247; as basis of political legitimacy, 55, 102, 181 Locke, John, 15–20, 21, 29, 36, 91; life-grounded elements in, 16–16, 19, 23; and natural law, 16–17; and origin of money, 17–18; and origin of private property, 17; and separation of political from economic power, 15, 19–20 Luddites, 95–8 Luxembourg Commission, 107 MacPherson, C.B., 14, 16 market exchange, difference from market forces, 152, 231 market society, 152, 154–5 Marshall, T.H., 136–40 Martin, Rex, 148 Marx, Karl, xix, 58, 238, 240; and capabilities, 121–30; contribution to life-

Index grounded understanding of freedom, 127–9; and critique of liberal rights, 111, 117–21, 171; and democracy, 111–17; and free time, 99–101, 128–9; and human freedom, 112–14, 121, 125, 128–9; and human labour, 113, 122, 126–8, 176; and needs, 54, 111, 121–30; and Paris Commune, 108–10; and Revolution of 1848, 104–5, 106–7 Marxism, 186–9 McMurtry, John, xiii-xvi, 54–7, 127, 130, 155, 205, 208, 21–13, 218–19, 223, 226 McNally, David, xviii, 4, 6, 28, 201n12, 245 Mill, James, 31, 34–7; and democracy, 24–6; and human nature, 34–5; and redistribution of wealth, 36 Mill, John Stuart, 216–17 Mooney, Pat Roy, 211 Mouffe, Chantal, xvii, xxii; and Carl Scmitt, 188–90, 192, 193; contradiction of, 190–4, 195–7; critique of Marxism, 186–8; and democracy, 188, 190–6; and Derrida, 189; elements of theory of democratic society in, 194; against Habermas and Rawls, 191–2, 196; and liberalism, 187, 190–1, 192–6; links with Habermas and Rawls, 190–1, 194; and pluralism, 185, 186–95; and rights, 187, 195–6 Nazis, 207–8 needs, xi, 54, 98, 178, 218; in contrast to wants/desires, xiv-xv, 13, 48, 56–8, 102, 121–4, 178, 242; defined, xiv, 56, 123, 218; as foundation of equal life interests, 218; intrinsic limits of, 55–6, 76; luxury, 122–4; moral equality of, 61–2, 81, 87, 218 (see also equality of life interests); as non-voluntary, 60–1, 64, 76–7; physical, xxi, 56, 58, 83, 89–90, 101, 109, 130, 243; social deprivation of, 8, 53, 61, 72–3, 84; socio-cultural, xxii, 56, 58, 83, 90, 95–8, 101, 104–5, 109, 130; struggles for, 53–4, 102, 104; temporal, xxii, 56, 58, 98–103, 110, 128–30, 210, 233, 239

263

needs-based social morality, xiv-xv, xxi-xxii, 43, 49, 53–7, 69, 76–7, 78, 89, 96, 109, 121, 127–8, 197, 212, 214–26, 229, 241; institutionalization of, 91–2, 129, 180, 204, 228–47 (see also freedom, material conditions of; democracy, as social form; negotiated coordination); political implications of, 54, 81, 118, 138 need satisfaction: democratic, 85, 91, 93, 105, 107–9, 130, 134, 218; difference between active and passive, 85, 109, 111, 136, 138–9, 141, 245 need satisfiers, 63 negotiated coordination, xx, 203, 229, 230–5; and democracy, 236–40; difference from capitalism, 231–2; difference from market socialism, 231; elements of today, 234, 240; process of, 232 New Right, 206 Norman, Wayne, 161 Nove, Alec, 231 Nussbaum, Martha, 157, 220 objection from pluralism, 201–2, 203, 214–16 objection from possibility, 202, 203, 228–47 oppression: movements against, xv, xixn12, 106, 118, 157, 186–7, 237 Paris Commune (1870), 107–11 Parkdale Area Recreation centre (PARC), 245–6 Plato, 10 pluralism, xvii, xxii, 15, 185, 202; and human good, 202–3, 214–15, 224; material conditions of, 194–6, 229. See also Habermas and; Mouffe and; Rawls and Pogge, Thomas, 153 Poor Law Reform Act (1834), 36 postmodernism, 186–97 Postone, Moishe, 30, 47, 100 power, xxi, 189, 196, 207; economic, xvi, xix-xx, 6, 95, 133, 135, 152, 244; political, xvi, xix-xx, 6, 20, 36, 47, 94–5, 108, 110, 111–12, 238, 244; separation of

264

Index

economic from political in liberalism, 9, 14, 19–20, 21, 25, 31, 37, 42, 46–50, 64, 67–8, 71, 73, 93, 104–5, 106, 110, 116, 135, 139, 141, 179, 181, 201, 204, 226, 229, 230, 240 (see also capitalist market forces, as constraint on freedom; capitalist market forces, as ruling power in liberal democracy; democracy, liberal (political) form of; rights, undemocratic implications of) preference adaptation, 157–8 private property: as basis of political power, 6–8, 19–20, 42, 45, 53, 71, 74, 117–18; liberal theories of origin of, 17–18, 22–3; as negation of truth of objects, 126; personal, 74, 120, 215; productive, 74, 116. See also rights, to private property private sphere, xii, xvi, 19–20, 31, 45–6, 54, 110, 112, 117–18 Property Defence League, 38–43 Quebec, 217 Rawls, John, xvii, xxii; and Aristotelian Principle, 147, 149, 153, 155–6, 157–8, 176; and autonomy, 143, 148, 149; and capabilities, 146–9, 156; and capitalist market, 142, 149, 150–7; contradictions of, 142, 147, 149, 151–2, 153, 155–9; and democracy, 148, 158; and good of human life, 142, 143, 145–6, 148, 156, 158; and human freedom, 145, 147–8; and justice, 142, 143–50, 155–7, 190; and liberalism, 144–9; life-grounded elements in, 157–8; links with Habermas, 159–61, 165, 172–3, 176, 180, 183; and needs, 142, 143, 146, 151; and Original Position, 144n6, 161; and pluralism, 142n1, 146, 149–50, 158; and reason and rationality, 143–5, 148–9, 150; and veil of ignorance, 144n6 Reform Act (1832), 36, 93 regulation: of capitalist economy, xvi, xx, 36, 128, 153, 201, 213, 228 (see also liberal rights-based social morality, evolved form of; welfare state)

republicanism, 69, 73, 89, 93, 109, 115 revolution, xix, 203, 228, 229, 241 Revolution of 1848, 103–7 rights, xi, xx, 118, 148; of citizenship, 46, 118, 133, 136–40, 165, 206; civil, 54, 206, 254; classical liberal, xvi, xx, 49, 171; defined, xiv, 80, 103; economic, xii, 118, 133–40; to existence, 78, 80, 87–8, 89; and free market, 25, 46; individual, xi, 59–60; logical structure of, 49, 118, 171; moral exclusivity of, 61–2; natural, 7, 8, 11, 13, 15, 21, 23, 70, 72, 95; necessity of, xxi, 45, 120, 134, 204; origins of liberal, 5–8, 136–39; political, xii, 31, 36, 38, 42, 45, 54, 71, 116, 133–40, 206, 240; to private property, xi, xv, 17, 31, 37, 45, 63–4, 69, 79, 97, 117–18, 205; relation to material conditions of freedom, xvi, 133–4, 136, 141, 188; social, xii, 118, 133–40, 157, 173, 187, 194; struggles for, xv-xvi, 17, 118, 133, 165, 188; undemocratic implications of, xxi, 11, 20, 24–5, 37, 38–44, 47–8, 60–1, 67, 69, 75–7, 83, 86, 89, 93, 110, 116, 136 (see also liberal democracy, contradictions of). See also liberal rights-based social morality Robespierre, 80–2 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 77, 79–80, 82 sans cullotes, 69, 78, 87–8 Schwarzenbach, Sybil A., 150 self-determination, xvii, xxiii, 24–5, 29, 31, 154, 157, 177, 180, 240; material conditions of, 25, 41, 48, 86, 102, 104, 110, 111–12, 114, 157, 184 (see also democracy, as social form; individuation, material conditions of). See also freedom; good, human self-government, 235–40. See also democracy, as social form Sen, Amartya, 56, 157, 209 Sieyès, Abbe, 71–2 Smith, Adam, 25–31, 72, 179; and desire, 27–8; and division of labour, 29, 30; and free market, 25; and invisible hand, 26–7, 30; life-grounded elements

Index in, 25, 27; and natural justice, 28; and sympathy, 25–6 Soboul, Alfred, 78, 88 social democratization, long term tendency toward, 203, 205, 213, 227, 240–1, 243 social justice, 63, 64, 76–7 social morality, 8, 38, 59, 61, 65, 71; contrast between needs-based and rights-based, xvi-xvii, 17, 25, 61–2, 67, 69, 71, 81–2, 85–6, 89–90, 102, 110, 133–4, 139, 183, 201–2, 204, 225, 242; defined, xiii, xix. See also capitalism, value system of; needs-based social morality; rights-based social morality social order: contractarian understanding of, 14, 16–17; life-grounded, 77; as spontaneous, 20, 21, 23–4, 39–40; traditional basis of, 10 socialism, xix, 38, 39, 122, 153, 230, 243; and democracy, 38, 39, 202, 203, 243 (see also democracy, as social form); and needs-based social morality, 54–5, 125; value of, 125 solidarity, xxii, 218, 235–40, 242 Speenhamland Act, 36 Spencer, Herbert, 39–41 Stalinism, xii, 91, 167, 238 state: classical liberal, 38, 116, 117–18 State Resistance Union, 39 Teeple, Gary, 205, 209 Thompson, Edward, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99 time, 99–100. See also needs, temporal; capitalism and; Marx and totalitarianism, xii, 55, 184, 202, 208–11, 230; defined, 207–8; and needs-based social morality, 216–17. See also globalization, as totalitarian

265

ultimate value orientations, 215–17, 226 union movement, 39, 98–99; and struggle for free time, 99–101 utilitarianism, 31–7; basic principles of, 32–3; conception of equality, 33–4; conception of happiness, 33; political implications of, 34–7 utility, 23, 24, 72 value, xi, 177, 180, 214; defined, 127, 222; of human life, 101–2, 118, 127, 178–9, 180, 195, 212, 226 (see also human nature, life-grounded conception of); of neo-liberalism, 207 (see also capitalism, value system of); system, xii, 208. See also life-ground of value Voltaire, 193 Weber, Max, 162 welfare state, xx, 134, 138, 141; contradictory relationship to democracy, 138, 141, 243, 246 Wemys, Earl of, 39 Winstanley, Gerrard, 59–68, 69, 75, 80, 89, 130; and critique of rights-based social morality, 61–4; and freedom, 66–9; and law, 64–6; and love, 63–4, 67; against money, 63–4; and needs-based social morality, 60–4; against private property, 61–3; and social peace, 66–7 Wood, Ellen Meiksins, 3–4, 8, 212; and undemocratic nature of capitalism, 46–7 workers (working class), xixn12, 30, 35–6, 53, 58, 123; and democratic society, 103–7; and struggles for need satisfaction, 91–110