Radical Democracy and Populism: A Thin Red Line? (Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations, 18) 3030849686, 9783030849689

Citation preview

Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations

Leonardo Fiorespino

Radical Democracy and Populism A Thin Red Line?

Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations Volume 18

Series Editors David M. Rasmussen, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, USA Alessandro Ferrara, Dipartimento di Storia, University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’, Rome, Italy Editorial Board Members Abdullah An-Na’im, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law, Emory University, Atlanta, USA Bruce Ackerman, Sterling Professor of Law, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA Robert Audi, O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA Seyla Benhabib, Eugene Meyer Professor for Political Science and Philosophy, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA Samuel Freeman, Avalon Professor in the Humanities, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA Jürgen Habermas, Professor Emeritus, Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt, Bayern, Germany Axel Honneth, Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany and Columbia University, New York, USA Erin Kelly, Professor of Philosophy, Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA Charles Larmore, W. Duncan MacMillan Family Professor in the Humanities, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA Frank Michelman, Professor Emeritus, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA Tong Shijun, Professor of Philosophy, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China Charles Taylor, Professor Emeritus, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada Michael Walzer, Professor Emeritus, Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, USA

The purpose of Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations is to publish high quality volumes that reflect original research pursued at the juncture of philosophy and politics. Over the past 20 years new important areas of inquiry at the crossroads of philosophy and politics have undergone impressive developments or have emerged anew. Among these, new approaches to human rights, transitional justice, religion and politics and especially the challenges of a post-secular society, global justice, public reason, global constitutionalism, multiple democracies, political liberalism and deliberative democracy can be included. Philosophy and Politics Critical Explorations addresses each and any of these interrelated yet distinct fields as valuable manuscripts and proposal become available, with the aim of both being the forum where single breakthrough studies in one specific subject can be published and at the same time the areas of overlap and the intersecting themes across the various areas can be composed in the coherent image of a highly dynamic disciplinary continent. Some of the studies published are bold theoretical explorations of one specific theme, and thus primarily addressed to specialists, whereas others are suitable for a broader readership and possibly for wide adoption in graduate courses. The series includes monographs focusing on a specific topic, as well as collections of articles covering a theme or collections of articles by one author. Contributions to this series come from scholars on every continent and from a variety of scholarly orientations.

More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/13508

Leonardo Fiorespino

Radical Democracy and Populism A Thin Red Line?

Leonardo Fiorespino University of Rome Tor Vergata Rome, Italy

ISSN 2352-8370 ISSN 2352-8389 (electronic) Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations ISBN 978-3-030-84968-9 ISBN 978-3-030-84969-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84969-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

Among the many and sometimes untraceable suggestions, contributions, interactions from which this book has benefitted, the most conspicuous ones have come from Alessandro Ferrara and Angela Taraborrelli. Their support has been empathic and constant over the years, and I thank them wholeheartedly. In our frequent meetings, Ferrara turned my questions into inspiring conversations and provided essential guidance while leaving me wide room for independent thinking. Less directly, perhaps less consciously, and yet just as importantly, he stood as an eminent exemplar of philosopher, teacher, and restless researcher. Taraborrelli followed my work with precious competence and careful analytic eye. By asking thoughtprovoking questions and not resting content with conclusions which turned out to be only apparently exhaustive, she profitably stimulated me to delve further into my own analyses and arguments. I sincerely thank Gianni Dessì, Pietro Maffettone, Stefano Petrucciani, and Daniele Santoro for having read through the manuscript. They provided several observations on different aspects of my work and, no less importantly, on the prospective research paths that its conclusions may open. I wish to thank the Department of History, Culture, and Society of University of Rome Tor Vergata, as well as the members of my PhD program – from the professors to the whole group of students and researchers taking part in the seminars, especially Valerio Fabbrizi and Celestino Victor Mussomar. The extent to which I benefitted from the collective discussions is hard to measure. Moreover, the “Prague Philosophy and Social Science Colloquium” and the “Braga Meetings on Ethics and Political Philosophy” were essential venues to discuss issues and ideas developed in the book, and I am grateful to the organizers and the participants. Finally, I thank my loving family, dearest friends, and Jana, the sweet demolisher of my self-defeating efforts.

v

Contents

1

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Part I 2

3

1 12

Deliberative Democracy and Democratic Participation

Jürgen Habermas and the Communicative Sovereignty of Citizens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 The Ambiguous Legacy of the French Revolution: Natality and a Philosophy of the Subject . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Beyond the Monads: The Interpenetration of Law and Ordinary Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Communicative Jurisgenesis, the Co-originality Thesis, and the Discourse Principle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 A People Made of Citizens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5 Communicative Sovereignty in a Two-Tracks System . . . . . . . 2.6 The People and the Affected Ones. Problems with Habermas’s Discourse Principle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . John Rawls and the Constitutional Identity of ‘the People’ . . . . . . 3.1 Stability for the Right Reasons and a Problematic Conception of the Person . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Two Pillars of Rawlsian Methodology: Normative Minimalism and Political Constructivism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 The Political Conception of the Person, Fair Cooperation, and the Well-Ordered Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Rawls’s Post-metaphysical Turn: The Reasonable . . . . . . . . . . 3.5 Rawlsian Fundamentals in the Time of the Reasonable . . . . . . 3.6 Stability Revisited: Overlapping Consensus and the Liberal Principle of Legitimacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

.

15

.

16

.

18

. . .

21 28 32

. .

34 39

.

43

.

44

.

52

. . .

55 57 65

.

67

vii

viii

Contents

3.7

Rawlsian Deliberative Democracy: The Unfolding of the Notion of Public Reason . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.8 Bruce Ackerman’s Dualist Constitutionalism and the Exemplar of Public Reason . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.9 The Constitutional Identity of ‘We the People’ . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

The Old Kid in Town: Excursus on Participatory Democracy and a “Participatory Conception of Deliberative Democracy” . . . . 4.1 Participatory Democracy and Beyond: Pateman, Macpherson, and Barber . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 A Paradigm Under Siege: The Protean Critique of Participatory Democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Cristina Lafont and Participation as Deliberative, Not ‘Participatory’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.1 Deep pluralists, Epistocrats, and Lottocrats Under the Lens of “Blind Deference” . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.2 Lafont’s Deliberatively Participating Sovereign People . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Part II 5

6

.

71

. . .

76 78 81

.

85

.

87

.

93

.

99

. 101 . 104 . 108

Contemporary Republicanism

Popular Sovereignty as Popular Control: Philip Pettit’s Republicanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Ulysses at the Mast: Pettit’s Definition of Freedom as Non-domination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Republican Non-domination: A Third Course Between Communitarianism and Liberalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 Popular Control, Its Meanings and Features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 Popular Control and the Shortfalls of Electoral Politics . . . . . . 5.5 The Contestatory Citizenry and the Venues of Contestation . . . 5.6 Deeper into Popular Control: The Norm of Norms and Dual Democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.7 Pettit’s Ambiguous Constitutionalism, or a Problematic Definition of the Sovereign People . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Richard Bellamy and the Political Constitution of the demos . . . . . 6.1 Pervasive Disagreement and Illegitimate Courts . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Bellamy’s Critique of Judicial Review and a Political Conception of Rule of Law . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3 The Right to Have Rights and the Constitution as Political, Not Legal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4 Demoi-Cracy and the Borders of the Sovereign People . . . . . .

. 113 . 114 . . . .

121 126 127 132

. 135 . 138 . 143 . 145 . 146 . 149 . 155 . 162

Contents

ix

6.5

Capitulation to Facticity or Hidden Entrenchment? Problems with Bellamy’s Normativism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168 Part III 7

8

The People as Hegemonic Construction: Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Radical Democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1 Genesis of a Post-Marxist Philosophy: A Critique of the Immanent Rationality of History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2 The “Pulverization of the Social” and the “Discursive” Unification of Heterogeneity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3 Modernity, the Democratic Revolution and the Advent of the Egalitarian Imaginary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4 The Lacanian Subject and the Hegemonic Construction of the People . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.5 The Partial People, or an Antagonistic Articulation of Ruptural Points . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dogmatization and Pluralization: William Connolly’s Sovereign People . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.1 The Second Problem of Evil: The Paradox of Identity, Dogmatization, and Resentment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2 The Ontopolitical Interpretation and the Dogmatism of Contemporary Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.3 Exceeding Identity: Nontheistic Reverence for the Abundance of Life, Cultivation, and Responsiveness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.4 Connolly’s Ethicopolitical Philosophy, the Constitutive Incompleteness of ‘The People’, and a Problematic Understanding of Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Part IV 9

Agonistic Democracy . 173 . 174 . 179 . 185 . 190 . 199 . 206 . 209 . 210 . 217 . 219

. 225 . 235

Populism and Radical Democratic Theories: How Thin Is the Red Line?

Populism in Contemporary Political Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.1 The ‘Meta-definition’ of Populism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.1.1 Populism as a Substantive Political-Ideological Position . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.1.2 Populism as Discursive Style of Political Construction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.1.3 Populism as Strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.1.4 Populism as Ideology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.1.5 Populism as Forma Mentis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. 245 . 245 . 245 . . . .

248 253 254 258

x

Contents

9.2

The Antagonistic Gist of Populism and the Populist Representation of the People . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.2.1 A Pars Pro Toto Logic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.2.2 The People of the Populists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.2.3 A Forerunner of Populism? Demagoguery, the Roman Populus and the Modern Nature of Populism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.3 Three Ideas on Populism’s Democratic Credentials . . . . . . . . . . 9.3.1 The Equation of Populism and Democracy . . . . . . . . . . 9.3.2 The Intersections of Populism and Democracy . . . . . . . . 9.3.3 The Incompatibility of Populism and Democracy . . . . . . 9.4 Populists in Power, Populist Constitutionalism, and the Enemies of Populism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.4.1 Populists in Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.4.2 Populist Constitutionalism: Not Just Constituent Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.4.3 Concluding in Harmony: The (Nearly) Uncontroversial Enemies of Populism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Where the Line Lies, and How Thin It Is . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.1 The Sovereign People of Radical Democrats: A Heterogeneous Unity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.2 Democracy and the Grounds of Desirability, Enabling Conditions, and Constitutive Limits of Popular Sovereignty . . . 10.3 Populism and the Normative Substance of Democratic-Electoral Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.4 The Legitimacy of the People . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.5 Host Ideologies and the Endless Empirical Shades of Populism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

259 259 261

264 268 268 270 277 280 280 282 284 286

. 289 . 289 . 293 . 302 . 307 . 311 . 314

Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317

Chapter 1

Introduction

Abstract Is there a substantive difference between the claims for ‘popular sovereignty’ voiced by ‘populist’ leaders and those defended by political philosophers theorizing radical democracy? And where does the ‘thin red line’ between them lie, if anything separates their shared superficial commitments to the active exercise of sovereignty by ‘the people’ and to the popular involvement in and control over politics and institutions? The intended aim of the book is to address the controversial issue of the distinction between contemporary ‘radical’ theories of democracy and populism as a contemporary political phenomenon, given their overall bottom-up approach to democracy. The introductory chapter frames the subject of the book, defines what it is meant by the controversial expression ‘radical democracy’, offers a set of preliminary methodological considerations, reviews the single chapters, their main arguments, and the final conclusions. Keywords Radical democracy · Populism · Deliberative democracy · Participatory democracy · Contemporary republicanism · Freedom as non-domination · Agonistic democracy · Thin red line “We are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the people [. . .] What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people” (from Donald Trump’s inaugural speech as US President, January 20th 2017); “let’s take back control” (from the pro-Brexit political campaign, 2015–16); “the requirement of guarding against public domination, thereby delivering political legitimacy, turns out to demand a rich array of popular controls over government” (from Philip Pettit’s On the People’s Terms, 2012: 3); “citizens are governors: self-governors, communal governors, masters of their own fates. They need not participate all of the time in all public affairs, but they should participate at least some of the time in at least some public affairs” (from Benjamin Barber’s Strong Democracy, 2003: xxix). Leaving aside the obvious mismatch in conceptual and linguistic sophistication, is there a substantive difference between the first two quotes and the last two? And where does the ‘red line’ between them lie, if anything separates their shared superficial commitments to the active exercise of sovereignty by ‘the people’ and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Fiorespino, Radical Democracy and Populism, Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations 18, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84969-6_1

1

2

1 Introduction

to the popular involvement in and control over politics and institutions? The intended aim of the present book is to address the controversial issue of the distinction between contemporary ‘radical’ theories of democracy and populism as a contemporary political phenomenon, given their overall bottom-up approach to democracy. I shall argue that the difference is profound, and that Pettit and Barber’s understandings of democracy can co-exist with those of Trump and UKIP only in the warped world of rhetoric frills, such as the one above and the like. Yet, before schematically introducing the main contents and claims put forward in what follows, let us briefly make some methodological clarity. The danger of incommensurability between the two objects of the intended comparison is easy to see. In spite of the common broad focus on the ideas of popular sovereignty and grassroots politics, radical democratic proposals and populism are divided by a glaring ontological otherness that can be bridged only if the questions steering the whole comparison highlight their basic commonality ab initio. The menace of incommensurability lies in the gap between what Michael Freeden has identified as ‘political thinking’, or thinking politically, and ‘political theorizing’, or thinking about politics: the former is a specific kind of thinking, characterized by activities such as ranking social phenomena and empirical circumstances, constructing collective ends and establishing the means to pursue them, attributing competences and jurisdictions to social actors, and more;1 the latter is the ensemble of “complex, systematic and perspectival modes of thinking about political thinking” (Freeden 2007: 2). While democracy and republicanism belong in the latter as they are articulated into a myriad of more or less complex theoretical frameworks, addressing “the central issues and challenges that societies encounter collectively” (Freeden and Vincent 2012: 1) by drawing upon varied disciplines, methodological approaches, “concrete and substantive views and beliefs” (Ibid), populism is not theorized in this sense. It appears as a specific form of political thinking, or thinking politically, to which a way of speaking and acting politically corresponds. This typology has of course been identified, branded with a name, and thus descriptively grasped in a sense – otherwise we would remain deaf and blind to it. As reconstructed for instance by Tim Houwen (2011) and Marco D’Eramo (2013),2 populism has been an increasingly used and theorized category throughout the twentieth century, and its general connotation has oscillated according to the political climate in which it was employed.3 However, the attempts at classifying specific empirical phenomena remain clearly distinguished, as a theoretical endeavour, from the systematic theorization of a democratic political order. If this were not enough to worry about incommensurability, one can add that populism also displays a degree of vagueness and shallowness that many scholars deem much higher than that of other products of

1

Cf. Freeden and Vincent 2012, pp. 1–2. D’Eramo (2013) reports a rampant numerical increase in the publications on populism starting from the 1920s, with impressive boosts in the 1990s and the 2000s. 3 Cf. Houwen 2011. 2

1 Introduction

3

‘political thinking’, such as party ideologies: “it [populism] not only falls short of comprehensiveness but short of nuanced specificity in what it does offer” (Freeden 2017: 10). Therefore, in order for my two objects to be compared such a gap must be bridged by a set of questions that at once unearths their commensurability and channels the comparison towards a precise path. The questions are essentially two, somewhat reverberating the Kantian distinction between forma imperii and forma regiminis: who do the advocates of a given term of the comparison mean to empower – i.e., who or what is that people that should be sovereign – and how do they suggest to do so – i.e., what kind of sovereignty should that people exercise, or what does it mean for a ‘people’ to exercise sovereignty. The aim is thus to dissect the concept of ‘popular sovereignty’ as rendered by the political theories and practices explored, by singling out its lexical components and pushing the eye deeper into their fabric. By stating the intriguing resemblance of the two ends of the comparison from the outset, this vantage point allows reducing them to their common denominator, thus securing solid grounds of commensurability. Given the focus of the book, it is necessary to stress that radical democratic theories are just one of two terms contrastively analyzed here. Therefore, their examination will be oriented to and circumscribed by the aim of reconstructing their conceptions of the people and popular sovereignty, so as to move on with the comparative effort. Let us now touch upon the issue of defining what it is meant by radical democratic theory in the context of the present work. In a nutshell, ‘radical’ are taken to be those theories of democracy which advocate a strong bottom-up thrust, and thus a more or less thick popular involvement in the political process, control over institutions, and a significant degree of interaction between the institutional sphere and the ‘popular will’, variously defined and distilled. Moreover, as in Mark E. Warren’s sympathetic formulation, “for the radical democrat, democracy is always more than a means of checking power and distributing values [. . .] Radical democrats hold [. . .] that powerlessness corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Democracy is a way of life, a mode of decision-making that generates its own ethics and values” (1995: 167). As we shall see, this ethical-existential dimension of democracy, echoing John Dewey’s famous definition of the latter as “a personal way of individual life”, resonates more or less loudly in all the theories analyzed, whether in the form of a reasonable political culture or of “constitutional patriotism”, a republican ongoing effort to “hear the other side” or an “egalitarian imaginary”, an “ethos of pluralization” or a commitment to the flourishing of citizens’ psychological and moral qualities. Per viam negationis it may sound even more straightforward: ‘radical’ are those democratic theories clearly distinguished from, if not opposed to, Schumpeterian and market-like understandings of democracy, which not by chance were systematically criticized in the pars destruens of a seminal work in contemporary radical democracy (participatory, in this case), namely Carole

4

1 Introduction

Pateman’s Participation and Democratic Theory (1970).4 The attribute ‘radical’ is thus dissolved whenever democracy is conceived of as a bare “political method”, in which the people’s role is reduced to little more than the elective selection of representatives and the access to independent sources of information. The definition put forward is clearly not meant to compete with others, such as Laclau and Mouffe’s, for the trophy of the best rendition of ‘radical democracy’. Rather, it attempts to pull under the same masthead an array of democratic theories that share core features with each other and – at least superficially – with the populist rhetoric. Those common features hopefully make the purported comparison meaningful and appealing. As to the first strand of contemporary democratic theory, deliberative democracy, the frameworks extensively analyzed are those of Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls, authors of the arguably most influential, systematic and ambitious formulations of the paradigm. Moreover, Habermas and Rawls are also sufficiently different from each other as to allow for the introduction of two alternative understandings of the sovereign people within the paradigm of deliberative democracy. The investigation of Habermas’s thought, after a short overview of Habermasian ‘essentials’ – such as the impossibility of the ‘people’ as a homogeneous subject capable of single-minded action, and the intersubjective rationality operating in the linguistic construction of validity-claims –, starts from the Habermasian overcoming of Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory. The radical incommunicability among social subsystems and their codified languages postulated by Luhmann seems to preclude whatever form of social integration, and thus also any form of political normativity exceeding the bare positivity of law. Habermas’s refutation of Luhmann’s theory of social ‘monadism’, grounded in the “empirically observed interdependencies” between the legal system and ordinary communication, enables him to re-introduce at once a postmetaphysical normative dimension and the viability of social integration. That is, the ongoing interaction of law and ordinary communication simultaneously unveils the factual facet of law, i.e. its effectiveness in binding and stabilizing citizens’ behaviours and expectations, and its internal normativity, reconstructed as a discursivization of the Kantian categorical imperative: if law is shaped not along the lines of abstract moral principles, but by the ordinary communications among citizens exchanging reasons and views, then law is legitimate not when reflecting empty universals, but when enacting the popular voice as emerged from a fair discursive procedure, i.e. one which warrants a norm as valid when discursively approved by all those affected. The discourse principle turns into a “democratic principle”, and the jurisgenerative endeavour becomes the ground of social integration for a people of citizens: the only source of allegiance in highly complex and heterogeneous societies is the collective engagement in the procedurally regulated appropriation of that legal system by which citizens are ruled. Such allegiance takes the name of “constitutional patriotism”. At the end of the chapter, problems are raised with Habermas’s

4

For Pateman’s critique of Schumpeterian democracy, cf. Pateman (1970), Chapter I.

1 Introduction

5

understanding of the sovereign people, with special reference to the “all-affected principle”. In globalized times, the latter exerts a centrifugal force that risks to undermine precisely the social-political integration painstakingly searched for by Habermas in Between Facts and Norms. The discussion will finally focus on Habermas’s more recent doubts on the nation-state as a legitimate political unit, and his interest in the European project, which only partly solve the difficulties mentioned. The main concern of Chap. 3 is to account for the philosophical turn by which Rawls’s political theory has become a leading framework in deliberative democracy, after having played one of the main antagonists in the early explorations of the deliberative paradigm.5 Therefore, the focus of the discussion is directed towards Rawls’s later work, starting from the self-diagnosed problem with the conception of stability formulated in Part III of A Theory of Justice. The claim that “stability for the right reasons” is secured by a supposed congruence between the right and the good, postulated as universally valid, can no longer hold in the context of highly pluralistic societies. Rawls’s groundbreaking introduction of categories such as the reasonable, the “political” conception of justice and of the person, public reason, and overlapping consensus on the conception of justice and the constitutional essentials, is meant to dismiss the remainders of modern moral universalism persisting in A Theory of Justice. The normative foundation of the political order is anchored in the contextual substrate of the ideas on justice, politics, citizenship historically developed in a longstanding democratic community. Rawls’s idealization of this historical-contextual product allows him to forge a “political”, not “comprehensive” normative standpoint, centred upon the idea of the reasonable as respect of the burdens of judgment and fair terms of cooperation. The commitment to reasonableness prevents the democratic citizen from imposing her6 own comprehensive views on the whole political community and its minorities. She is thus inclined to either relegate her partial commitments to the non-public, or formulate them in political terms understandable to all, as required by public reason. The idea of public reason delimits and opens a deliberative space, where citizens face the challenge to find a convergence between their non-public values and public ones, and to reinforce the latter with a reasonable use of the former, in a way that is unpredictable from the objective perspective of the observer. Moreover, public reason, the “background political culture”, the conception of justice “most reasonable for us”, and the constitutional essentials which spell them out, are the non-metaphysical unifying factors of an otherwise heterogeneous people, whose political unity is enshrined in the constitutional text conceived of as an intergenerational project of collective self-government.

5 See, for instance, Bernard Manin (1987), who points to Rawls’s original position as a clear example of solipsistic rationality, which neglects the significance of deliberative intersubjectivity in democratic politics. 6 As to gender neutrality, I shall alternate feminine and masculine forms, and employ the former in the Introduction, Parts I and III, and the latter in Parts II, IV, and Concluding remarks.

6

1 Introduction

Part I ends with an excursus on democratic participation and the participatory conception of democracy, which the reader may expect to find, and which is briefly addressed only there. The main reason for this partial exclusion is the decline of the paradigm, which was overshadowed by the ‘deliberative turn’, and more in general targeted by a variety of criticisms which it does not seem to have survived unscathed. The short reconstruction of the thought of Carole Pateman, C. B. Macpherson and Benjamin Barber reveals an understanding of democratic sovereignty as popular direct decision-making power, which urges its advocates to discard any institutional arrangement departing from the image of the citizens debating in the public forum, each endowed with the same decisional power. The chief victim of this approach is representative democracy, which participatory democrats often portray as a secondbest – if not as “oxymoronic” – and yet half-heartedly integrate in their own theories. The critiques of the participatory model of democracy, protean and not always applicable to all its supporters, touch upon its conception of politics, of popular sovereignty, its model of rationality, its trivialization of political representation, and finally upon empirical considerations. Once discussed the most relevant of them, the conceptual iterations of the notion of ‘participation’ after the deliberative turn are examined, with a curious result: at the end of the analysis, the impression is that the deliberative democratic tradition has appropriated the concept of participation, once distinctive to participatory democracy, and recast it in its own terms, thus contesting its very meaning and application. The reconstruction of Cristina Lafont’s recent work (2020), meant to insert a participatory dimension into deliberative democracy, seems to strengthen such hypothesis. Citizens are said to partake, willingly or unwillingly, in a macrodeliberative process, diluted throughout a decentred public sphere. In this communicative context, not only wills and opinions are formed and epistemically improved, but justifications for laws and policies are fine-tuned in a community-wide effort in mutual reason-giving that – also by appeal to judicial institutions and practices – delivers the justificatory apparatus most suitable for those who must comply with the laws at stake. By participating in this deliberative and contestatory practice, citizens exercise their own sovereignty, and their ‘peoplehood’ is circumscribed by their being subject to a given legal-institutional system; as we shall see, Lafont’s notion of participation is clearly bent in a deliberative, not ‘participatory’, sense. Part II is devoted to the discussion of a second group of ‘radical democratic theories’, namely the contemporary republicanism revolving around the idea of “freedom as non-domination”. Once again, the authors selected, namely Philip Pettit and Richard Bellamy, are considerably different from each other, in spite of their shared commitment to republican non-domination. As we shall see, the meaning of and implications drawn from such central concept vary significantly from one framework to the other. In On the People’s Terms (2012), Pettit devotes an extraordinarily thorough and refined analysis to the concept of domination, as distinguished from “interference” and “frustration”. He thus enriches his previous work by providing a more nuanced taxonomy of freedom, which accounts for the distinction between Hobbesian absolutism, liberalism, populist democracy, and republicanism. Domination is defined by Pettit as a power of arbitrary, or uncontrolled, interference

1 Introduction

7

enjoyed by an actor over others. The translation of the conception of freedom as non-domination into the realm of political legitimacy hinges upon the notion of control, which becomes central to Pettit’s democratic theory, to the extent that it connotes his very understanding of democracy. Legitimate are those political decisions interfering with, but simultaneously controlled by, the citizenry, in a way analogous to Ulysses’s ordering his comrades to tie him at the mast before approaching the sirens. The institutional actors must decide laws and policies by tracking the collective interest from the ongoing popular expressions and debates, and more importantly the decisions enacted must be contestable. In this sense, it is often said that Pettit’s republican democracy tends to value the editorial moment more than the authorial one. The editorial-contestatory practice, however, largely proceeds through the channels of independent courts, in a de-politicizing fashion that has attracted several criticisms, the most frequent of which is the claim that Pettit’s republicanism does not significantly depart from liberal constitutionalism. From the perspective developed in this book, however, Pettit’s framework has its deepest problem in its ambivalent definition of political non-domination. Pettit seems to oscillate between two alternatives, both of which he cherishes, and which nonetheless are prima facie incompatible with each other. In a way, this indecisiveness can be read as a republican version of the classic democratic dilemma: which comes first, individual rights or collective self-determination? At times non-domination seems to apply to the former, hence requiring the non-amendability of given fundamental principles; at times to the latter, thus establishing that “every law must be capable of being amended”. The two alternative meanings of non-domination correspond to two distinct conceptions of constitutionalism and definitions of the people. This precludes the possibility to properly unveil the connection between the ‘people’ and ‘popular sovereignty’ in Pettit’s political theory. Bellamy’s version of freedom as non-domination considerably departs from Pettit’s, mainly due to the intimate connection that Bellamy establishes between freedom and the “circumstances of politics”, i.e. the circumstances of ineradicable and pervasive disagreement constituting politics at its very roots. Bellamy holds that there is no moral, epistemic, political foothold available to arbitrate such radical disagreement. The majoritarian process is the only system capable of securing that every individual be respected in her status of “autonomous reasoner”, and any extrapolitical attempt to tame the democratic process by striking down its outputs amounts to a form of domination. This delegitimizes with a brush stroke constitutional courts, constitutionally entrenched rights and principles, and the practice of their interpretation, namely judicial review. Hence, Bellamy puts forward the ideas of rule of law as guaranteed by equality of vote, majority rule, and the balance of power in the legislature; of citizenship as defined by a “right to have rights”, i.e. the right to an equal say in the majoritarian process of decision-making, rights-shaping, and selection of representatives; of the constitution as overlapping with such democratic process. In this regard, Bellamy promotes and normatively defends the nation-state as the entity most capable of guaranteeing the fairness and integrity of the legislative majoritarian process conducive to politically legitimate decisions.

8

1 Introduction

Hence, the sovereign people can be identified as the ensemble of the “individual citizens who together form a demos through being subject to the power of a particular state” (2019: 17), within which they can exert their sovereignty by partaking in the political process. At the end of the chapter, an important doubt is raised on the normative logic of political constitutionalism: does Bellamy drop any normative aspiration in the pars construens of his framework? Or perhaps his reliance on the empirical functioning of the legislative institutions reveals the attempt to uplift some rights from politics, precisely by sheltering them in the maze of the institutional mechanism? The last strand of democratic theory considered is the ‘agonistic’ paradigm, examined in Part III. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s post-Marxist framework, which places centrality upon the concept of political hegemony as a form of “failed totality”, is juxtaposed to William Connolly’s ethos of generosity, which undergirds – and simultaneously depends on – a normatively substantive democratic ethos. Laclau and Mouffe’s theoretical endeavour is addressed starting from their powerful critique of Marxism, through which the economic determinism reflecting a teleological reading of history is undermined, and the space is left open for a social ontology marked by contingency and heterogeneity. In this context, Laclau and Mouffe argue, social and political construction is only possible antagonistically, through discursive-symbolic articulation and overdetermination of heterogeneous claims and demands affectively unified by their shared opposition to the constructed ‘other’. The theoretical referents undergirding such logic range from Althusser, inspiring mainly Laclau and Mouffe’s earlier work, to Lacan, more central to Laclau’s writings after Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, and arguably to his overall project. According to Laclau and Mouffe, the hegemonic logic becomes predominant with modernity, when the collapse of the ancien régime and the end of theologically structured socio-political orders lay the ground for the rise of a historically stable “egalitarian imaginary”. In the context of this discussion, Laclau and Mouffe’s argument on the contingent nature of liberal democracy is introduced and called into question, also on the grounds of the very egalitarian imaginary they theorize. In the final sections of the chapter, the notion of the people as a “plurality of ruptural points” unified by the symbolic force of equivalential chains and empty signifiers is discussed. Concerns with the self-referentiality of the hegemonic formations are raised, involving both the philosophical plausibility and the democratic credentials of Laclau and Mouffe’s theory. Finally, a hypothesis is provided which seeks to account for why it is that Laclau and Mouffe’s demise of Hegelian-Marxian teleology brings with itself a staunch rejection of normativity, and a theoretical defense of a Nietzschean perpectivism in which radically incompatible formations clash with each other in the attempt to impose their self-referential objectivities. As we shall see in Chap. 8, Connolly agrees with Laclau and Mouffe on the idea that historical and social processes are contingent and open-ended. Moreover, Connolly shares with them the idea that all that is regarded as universally just and true by given societies or social groups at given times is ultimately a “naturalized” contingent product, with no legitimate pretense of universality. What ultimately sets Connolly significantly apart from Laclau and Mouffe is the ethos of cultivation and

1 Introduction

9

responsiveness he develops. Insofar as the normative validity of such ethos ultimately escapes contingency, in that it appears inscribed in the ontological dynamism impregnating Connolly’s whole philosophy, Connolly’s agonistic democracy remains incompatible with that of Laclau and Mouffe. The ethos of generosity, rooted in what Connolly calls a Nietzschean “nontheistic reverence for the abundance of life”, is the antidote to the dogmatizing drives intrinsic to identity, and to the “ressentment” that they bring about. Nonetheless, such “faith” is not self-standing: a major insight from Connolly is that ethics is unthinkable and anachronistic without politics, as much as good politics cannot do without ethics. The “paradox of identity” constituting Connolly’s main philosophical concern can be confronted only if the “ethics of responsiveness” is channelled into an active politicization of the contingent and rooted dogmas that social-political communities perceive as expressions of the natural order of things. As we shall see in the last section of Chap. 8, the Nietzschean and Foucauldian background enabling Connolly to develop a captivating theory of ethics and agonistic democracy also induces him to overlook the normative significance of the “culturalization” of his ethos, which would benefit from becoming the focus of a shared social consensus. The failure at distinguishing the elements of the political culture from ethnic or religious forms of traditionalism, which often do become dogmatic, prevents Connolly from considering the emancipatory potential that a democratic “people” can reflexively find in its own cultural resources. Finally, the second term of the comparison is treated in Part IV, where also the comparison itself is carried out. In Chap. 9, the vast contemporary literature on populism is split into two distinct debates: one focused on what I shall call the ‘metadefinition’ of populism, namely the identification of its philosophical classification – be it a political-ideological position, a form of political construction, a strategy, an ideology, a forma mentis; another concerned with the core contents and claims of the populist rhetoric. This partition is relevant not only because it highlights the different objects of analysis addressed in the debates, but also because it allows capturing the significant variation in the current scholarly consensus on the two distinct issues. Whereas the ‘meta-definition’ is heatedly debated, observers tend to converge on the contents and claims typical of populism, although differences in emphasis exist, as well as discordant implications drawn from similar definitions, e.g. on the relationship between populism and democracy. Therefore, the aim of the critical discussion offered in Chap. 9, rather than to provide one more putatively original definition of populism, is to achieve a compact and consistent definition of the concept by starting from its most settled and conspicuous features, such as the Manichean attitude, the apodictic attribution of moral, political, cultural authoritativeness to an intrinsically virtuous ‘people’, ineffably homogeneous, opposed to an analogously homogeneous elite and endowed with a right to legitimate political authority. The reconstruction attempts to gain in cogency and consistency by critically dispelling the most contradictory implications drawn from the settled core of the populist rhetoric, such as the association of populism with majoritarianism, power and politics, the “democratic myth”, or the democratic language and categories.

10

1 Introduction

Once such operation of conceptual polishing is complete, the comparative endeavour takes off in Chap. 10. Populism, conceived of as an eminently moralistic and seditious claim for legitimate power, appears utterly incompatible with the democratic theories analyzed – and arguably with any democratic practice worth the name. The reason, in a nutshell, is that populism cannot provide any specification of what ‘popular sovereignty’ ultimately means, even at the most intuitive level. On the one hand, radical democratic theories are invariably characterized by an attempt to conciliate the two ineradicable dimensions inherent in the ambivalent and yet momentous idea of the ‘people’, namely homogeneity and heterogeneity, singularity and plurality; hence, they undertake the challenge of accounting for what it means for such entity to exercise collective sovereignty, or how that can be. In doing so, democrats engage in specifying the enabling conditions (or conditions of signification), limits, grounds of desirability, and criteria of inclusion/exclusion of popular sovereignty. By enabling conditions, I mean the conditions that provide with meaning and direction the otherwise indeterminate notion of popular sovereignty, thus making it possible for a plural political entity to share sovereign power. Examples may be the idea that sovereign power be exercised in a deliberative space opened and limited by criteria of public reason, and in accordance with the essential elements of a constitution reflecting the shared political identity of a given community; or that the people is sovereign when non-domination is pursued by a political system allowing citizens to exert individualized control over power and oppressive majorities; or, again, that an “ethos of generosity” animates at least part of the citizenry, and inspires mobilizations capable of pervading the institutional spheres, so as to constantly undermine the established dogmas burdening given individuals and groups; and more, as we shall see especially in Parts I, II, and III. These conditions filling with signification popular sovereignty – that is, illustrating how a plural entity may exercise sovereignty – are simultaneously limits beyond which popular sovereignty dissolves, or at least is infringed. In the context of normative democratic theorizing, such conditions of signification also provide, importantly, grounds of desirability of democracy: they account for why popular sovereignty is desirable – e.g., if democracy is defined by and constructed according to a certain conception of freedom as non-domination, and thus the citizens may be said sovereign when they are structurally free of domination, then the pursuit of freedom thus rendered is also what makes democracy valuable. Finally, democratic theory offers a more or less refined conception of the sovereign people, its unity, and thus of the borders of political inclusion/exclusion. The acceptance of empirical political boundaries hardly amounts to a full capitulation to arbitrariness, but rather is justified by a normative apparatus which provides grounds of contestation of those very boundaries, rather than establishing them as fixed once and for all. On the other hand, populists wholly forsake such essential operation of specification of popular sovereignty. They are doomed to indeterminacy, in that their conception of popular sovereignty merely requires that the uncontroversial will of a popular whole be respected: “most populist references relating the people to democracy have a manipulative rhetorical effect, in which democracy is the abstract rule of the people en masse” (Freeden 2017: 7, my italics). Populists postulate an

1 Introduction

11

organic people, whose monolithic truth is said to be superior, and whose right to unconstrained sovereignty stems from a self-attribution of moral authoritativeness which is independent of any form of external legitimation, such as elections, and performs arbitrary exclusions from ‘peoplehood’. Elections are used as an ex-post confirmation of the intrinsic virtuousness of the people and its leader, rather than as an external legitimating tool the substantive content of which regulates political life. The same holds for constitutional provisions. These pages are written in the chaotic days of the 2020 US Presidential Elections, and hardly a student of populism may ask the real to approximate the ideal any closer. Trump calling for recounting votes in the States where he was defeated, combined with Trump himself calling for blocking vote-counting in the States where his advantage is narrow, could not work better as an example of the delegitimation of the electoral practice, i.e., of its subordination to the ‘will of the people’ as embodied by the leader. In Sect. 10.3 we shall see that populists rhetorically perform a disfigurement of the electoral practice that at times can be found in radical democratic theory; yet, what is essential to point out is that populists tend to praise elections when their pre-existing self-legitimation is confirmed by the ballot. They do not become populists upon electoral validation. Therefore, as long as the populist people is ex-ante assumed as one and sovereign, the democratic practice of establishing how popular sovereignty can occur, what are its limits, and why it is desirable, is neatly cut off. If the term ‘popular’ has to enclose plurality and singularity at once, as in democratic thought, with populism we are left with a concept of sovereign power neglectful of the ‘popular’ dimension. In this sense, I agree and disagree at once with the claim that “the debate over the meaning of populism turns out to be a debate over the interpretation of democracy” (Urbinati 1998: 116). To the extent that populism compels us to further delve into our own presuppositions and ideas on democracy, this is right, and somewhat captures the performative logic of my own work. Yet, as we shall see, I cannot concur with Urbinati on the idea that populism offers an interpretation of democracy, albeit “deeply inimical to political liberty”, in that I conclude precisely that populism lies somewhere outside and beyond the scope of democratic theory – and I would say also of any rudimental practice of popular self-government. Imagine that I receive a few thousand Euros as a deposit for a car I claim to have for sale, and on the day of the purchase I bring to my buyer a barrow instead; can I legitimately contend that I am actually selling a car, and that I interpret ‘car’ as a four-wheeled tool? Metaphor aside, is the mere reference to ‘the (sovereign) people’ enough for qualifying those who utter the phrase as exegetes of democracy? The metaphor has certainly an objectivistic flavour, but it is intended to point out that perhaps the competition over the interpretation of a concept cannot be automatically accessed by anyone employing it, independently of how. Establishing whether or not populism can be subsumed within the umbrella of ‘democracy’ as one of its interpretive variants requires, indeed, an inquiry into the scope and interpretation of democracy. Yet, the inquiry is open-ended, and it cannot aprioristically assume that populism shares some kinship with democracy on the mere grounds of its outspoken commitment to ‘popular sovereignty’; to the contrary, an inquiry of this sort is meant to prove

12

1 Introduction

whether or not it is so.7 That I do in this book, and I conclude that the otherness distinguishing populism and democracy is not merely that between political thinking and political theory; it stretches to the deeper layer of the conceptions of ‘people’ and sovereignty embraced.

References Barber, Benjamin R. 2003. Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age. 20th anniversary ed. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press. Bellamy, Richard. 2019. A Republican Europe of States: Cosmopolitanism, Intergovernmentalism and Democracy in the EU. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. D’Eramo, Marco. 2013. Populism and the New Oligarchy. New Left Review 82: 5–28. Freeden, Michael. 2007. The Comparative Study of Political Thinking. Journal of Political Ideologies 12 (1): 1–9. ———. 2017. After the Brexit Referendum: Revisiting Populism as an Ideology. Journal of Political Ideologies 22 (1): 1–11. Freeden, Michael, and Andrew Vincent. 2012. Introduction: The Study of Comparative Political Thought. In Comparative Political Thought: Theorizing Practices, ed. Michael Freeden and Andrew Vincent, 1–23. London: Routledge. Houwen, Tim. 2011. The Non-European Roots of the Concept of Populism, Sussex European Institute: Working Paper no. 120. https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php? name¼sei-working-paper-no-120.pdf&site¼266. Lafont, Cristina. 2020. Democracy Without Shortcuts: A Participatory Conception of Deliberative Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Manin, Bernard. 1987. On Legitimacy and Political Deliberation. Political Theory 15 (3): 338–368. transl. by Elly Stein and Jane Mansbridge. Pateman, Carole. 1970. Participation and Democratic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pettit, Philip. 2012. On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Urbinati, Nadia. 1998. Democracy and Populism. Constellations 5 (1): 111–124. Warren, Mark E. 1995. The Self in Discursive Democracy. In The Cambridge Companion to Habermas, ed. Stephen K. White, 167–200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

7

The metaphor, therefore, merely aims to remark that attempts to appropriate a concept are not automatically legitimate; it is not meant to establish a direct analogy between populism and the mentioned ‘barrow’, as that would imply assuming populism’s externality to democracy from the outset. This would pre-determine the analysis and contradict the purpose and methodology of the research.

Part I

Deliberative Democracy and Democratic Participation

Chapter 2

Jürgen Habermas and the Communicative Sovereignty of Citizens

Abstract The investigation of Habermas’s thought, after a short overview of Habermasian ‘essentials’, starts from the Habermasian overcoming of Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory. The radical incommunicability among social subsystems postulated by Luhmann seems to preclude whatever form of social integration, and thus also any form of political normativity exceeding the bare positivity of law. Habermas’s refutation of Luhmann’s theory of social ‘monadism’ enables him to re-introduce at once a post-metaphysical normative dimension and the viability of social integration. That is, the ongoing interaction of law and ordinary communication simultaneously unveils the factual facet of law, i.e. its effectiveness in stabilizing citizens’ behaviours, and its internal normativity, reconstructed as a discursivization of the Kantian categorical imperative. If law is shaped by the ordinary communications among citizens exchanging reasons, then its legitimacy rests upon the fairness of the discursive procedure through which the popular voice emerges and is given legal shape. Such jurisgenerative endeavour becomes the ground of social integration for a people of citizens: the only source of allegiance in highly complex societies is the collective engagement in the procedurally regulated appropriation of that legal system by which citizens are ruled. The end of the chapter discusses Habermas’s “all-affected principle” and some of its problems. Keywords Habermas · Discourse principle · Constitutional patriotism · Public sphere · Proceduralism · Communicative power · All-affected principle · Two-tracks system Together with the work of the later John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas’s theory of deliberative democracy, fully elaborated in Between Facts and Norms (1996), is regarded as the apex of an almost forty years path begun with the theories of participatory democracy flourished from the Sixties, and passed through the first formulations of deliberative democracy dating back to the early Eighties (Floridia 2017, 2018). Moreover, Habermas’s procedural theory of democracy constitutes the culmination of his almost half-a-century long (at the time of the publication of Between Facts and Norms) intellectual itinerary, many of the theoretical achievements of which flowed into his reflections on democracy and politics. Therefore, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Fiorespino, Radical Democracy and Populism, Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations 18, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84969-6_2

15

16

2 Jürgen Habermas and the Communicative Sovereignty of Citizens

without losing sight of such impressively wide and deep background, the inquiry will be exclusively focused on the reconstruction of the Habermasian perspective on the set of questions orienting the comparison with populism, namely, in a nutshell, how his democratic theory conceptualizes the ‘sovereign people’. As a first step, it might be useful to proceed from the Habermasian critique of those sociological frameworks and philosophical traditions he aspires to overcome. While the former go so far as to give up the normative dimension in the tension between facticity and validity inherent to modern law, the latter conceptualize the subject of political sovereignty in a way that Habermas regards as philosophically outdated and unequipped at facing “the growing need for regulation and organization in increasingly complex societies” (Habermas 1996: 118). The reconstruction of the Habermasian attempt to synthesize the sociological and the legal-theoretic approaches will lead us to uncover his implicit rejection of our very first question: sovereignty is subjectless, and there is not any ‘who’ holding it. This insight will inevitably inform Habermas’s formulation of the way sovereignty is intersubjectively exercised.

2.1

The Ambiguous Legacy of the French Revolution: Natality and a Philosophy of the Subject

First of all, it is crucial to remark how in the background of the whole Habermasian reflection on law and democracy stands a methodological premise, succinctly expressed in the formulation “the impotence of the ought” (Id: 56): normative political and legal theory cannot be severed from, but rather must be grounded in, the sociological analysis of our socio-political realities. In other words, they must be reconstructed rather than constructed, and the sociological description of society marks off the borders of the horizon within which such normative reconstruction can be developed. This approach is explained by Habermas in two different but complementary ways in the first chapter of Between Facts and Norms (recalling some of the main motifs of his previous work, in particular of The Theory of Communicative Action1) and in “Popular Sovereignty as a Procedure” (Habermas 1988), published in 1988. While the former discussion holds a philosophic-sociological perspective, the latter adds a historico-political dimension; their combination may interestingly elucidate the intertwining between historical articulation of events and philosophical reflection, of history and history of ideas. In the 1988 article, Habermas wonders to what extent our political universe is still informed by the ideas and the spirit of the French Revolution, and identifies the specific heritage of the latter less in the well-known values and ideas fought for and bequeathed to us than in the “revolutionary consciousness” pervading that 1

For an analysis of the continuities between Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms and The Theory of Communicative Action, cf. Kenneth Baynes (1995).

2.1 The Ambiguous Legacy of the French Revolution

17

revolution (Habermas 1988). The French revolutionaries were aware that they were fighting not only to face oppressive historical contingencies, but in order to revolutionize the very roots of the ancien régime, and turn it upside down with new ‘universal’ ideas of freedom and equality. This consciousness marks the origin of a “new concept of political practice”, centred on the idea that politics enshrines an Arendtian moment of ‘natality’, a potential to improve the future by imbuing the present status quo with new ideas. This “new mentality” conceived of history as a teleological abstraction meant to reconstruct the path towards the break from the past and the creation of a new future, that could be directly shaped through “singleminded collective intervention” (Id: 40). Individuals were regarded as citizens actually empowered to personally impact on public life. However, according to Habermas, only part of this heritage survives today: “we still appeal to the readiness to act and to the political-moral orientation to the future [. . .] at the same time, however, we have lost our confidence that conditions can be changed by revolution” (Id: 39). This loss of confidence is the product of both the empirical observation of the historical articulation of post-revolutionary processes – the Jacobin and the Bolshevik degenerations, for instance – and the philosophical reflection springing in parallel, that gradually led to the awareness (a) that precisely because of the increasing destabilization of the sacred-ethical foundations compacting pre-modern societies, the latter have become too complex to be conceived as a unitary subject directly operating on reality by implementing rational principles; and (b) that ideas of practical reason cannot be thought independently of their linguistic structure. The direct application of principles of practical reason to reality implies the representation of a unitary subject acting according to those principles themselves; rather than being analyzed in its complexity, society is fictitiously created a priori in a way that proved itself too simplistic and neglectful of the increasing heterogeneity of modern societies. As the Jacobin age has started making clear since the very aftermath of the Revolution, the ambition to reduce a complex social landscape to a homogeneous subject inspired by a principle of practical reason cannot but encroach on its self-determination. Moreover, as hinted in (b), the linguistic turn occurred in twentieth century philosophy highlighted that neither those abstract principles of reason themselves nor socially shared values can be thought as self-standing mental representations, but only as linguistically structured ones (Habermas 1996). In a nutshell, this detaches the validity of principles or values (and hence their legitimacy, in legal-political terms) from their universal rationality: if they cannot be severed from their linguistic structure, then they must undergo a discursive, intersubjective process of genesis in order to be collectively valid. They cannot be merely monologically constructed by a rational individual, but reflexively reconstructed in the communicative interactions among rational participants “that tie their agreement to the intersubjective recognition of criticizable validity claims” (Id: 4). Thus, the revolutionary approach has been historically and theoretically overcome under different, interconnected respects: on the one hand it lacks descriptive strength, in that an active subject of political sovereignty is abstractly idealized a priori rather than sociologically observed; on the other hand, and consequently, it

18

2 Jürgen Habermas and the Communicative Sovereignty of Citizens

lacks any normative justification, as the evident unavailability of a real subject acting according to principles of practical reason independent of discourse makes those principles heteronomous vis-à-vis the heterogeneity characterizing society, and hence oppressive once they become positive law. With this in mind, the rationale underlying Habermas’s choice of a sociological perspective as his point of departure becomes clearer. The dimension of the “ought” has demonstrated its descriptive and normative “impotence” without a sociological analysis of the social dynamics and realities to which political power is related. A change in the status quo through the concerted action of a homogeneous subject cannot occur (due to the complexity of modern society), and it should not (as long as modern social heterogeneity would be undemocratically oppressed by the implementation of a rational principle neglectful of its cultural-linguistic embeddedness). Self-conscious orientation to change, which is the real heritage of the French Revolution, can and should only be pursued within the complexity and the contradictions of a social reality that in turn claims to be sociologically understood.2 As noted by Kenneth Baynes, “the claim Habermas pursues in his new work [Between Facts and Norms] is that, in the wake of secularization and disenchantment, highly differentiated and pluralist societies are compelled to rely less on traditions and “strong institutions” to bridge the tension between facticity and validity and thus must look elsewhere to fulfil the task of social reproduction and integration” (1995: 204).

2.2

Beyond the Monads: The Interpenetration of Law and Ordinary Language

As a first step, Habermas discusses one of the main paradigms of contemporary sociology, namely the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann. Habermas locates Luhmann at the final stage of a path initiated by Marx, who is identified as the first thinker to describe society as “an anonymous system independent of the intentions of unconsciously sociated individuals, a system that followed its own logic” (Habermas 1996: 45). In other words, in conceptualizing society as an ensemble of structures for the self-reproduction of capital, Marx moves the first 2

Nonetheless, doubts regarding Habermas’s whole approach as expounded here arose. Stefano Petrucciani, for instance, observes that the intermeshing of a normative and a descriptive dimension in Habermas’s thought creates blurs that end up compromising his very notion of legitimacy: the necessity to anchor the political order to a sociological analysis at times appears to weaken the dimension of the ‘ought’ as theorized by Habermas, a dimension that is essential for socio-political critique (Petrucciani 2000: 157–158). Differently, Antonio Floridia regards such organic co-existence of ‘is’ and ‘ought’ as a strength of Habermas’s sociological and political thought. The method of “rising from abstraction to concreteness” (Floridia 2017: 196, my translation), that is, of postulating abstract conceptual models capable of absorbing concrete determinations, provides normative, critical and constructive tools to understand the validity of our politicalinstitutional systems, carry out socio-political critique and design empirical improvements on institutions and practices (Id).

2.2 Beyond the Monads: The Interpenetration of Law and Ordinary Language

19

step out of what Habermas calls a “philosophy of consciousness”. From this perspective, the fiction of a morally autonomous subject founding a social order through a contract by virtue of his natural right to self-determination is regarded as empirically flawed and bound to hinder a sociological analysis of economic and social realities. For Habermas, social contract theorists depict society along somewhat anthropomorphic lines, as either a union of autonomous merchants protected by private rights in the exercise of their self-determination (liberalism) or as an organic macro-subject, provided with intentionality and collectively exercising its own sovereignty (republicanism). However, notwithstanding such first step towards the depersonalization of social reality, Habermas still locates Marx within a holistic horizon, insofar as he still conceives of society as a homogeneous organism (Id). In Habermas’s account, it is Luhmann who completes the path towards a radical objectivation of society – and hence of law, as we shall see –, by decentralizing even the last element of social integration which Marx depicted as the centre around which the constellation of social systems revolved and was held together: the economic system with its capitalistic logic of self-valorization, which for Luhmann gives up its unifying pervasiveness in society, and becomes one of the subsystems “monadically encapsulated in themselves” (Id: 47). Luhmannian social subsystems are autopoietic, self-reproducing entities, within which communication happens through specialized languages, incommensurable with and hence untranslatable into each other. In other words, social integration is impossible inasmuch as the subsystems composing society cannot be integrated. In this framework, the consequence that interests Habermas the most is that law is consistently described as nothing more than a system among others, producing laws through a self-referential mechanism detached from others, and thus valid insofar as positive: Luhmann drops any search for the normative validity of law alternative to outright legal positivism. In the context of an objectivated society devoid of any subject of political action, where the legal system is epistemically self-enclosed and respondent to its own logic and systemic problems, the “participant perspective” is eclipsed. In the functional mechanisms of a society objectively described there is no role for the participants of a self-organizing community, putting forward normatively oriented arguments to justify socially integrating norms. The legal system is exclusively conceived as a means to stabilize expectations, rather than as a socially binding agent. In a nutshell, what Habermas calls into question is the necessary relation implied by Luhmann between the farewells of the subject and the lack of any force of social integration. From this perspective, one might provokingly argue that Luhmann is somehow still trapped inside the remnants of a subjectivistic horizon, according to which society can be integrated only if a self-determining socio-political subject is postulated. His perspective implies that participants acquire the relevance and the power to shape the legal system only if they can be aprioristically depicted as a unitary subject originated through a contract between morally autonomous individuals; this being a sociologically untenable fiction, the ideas of a deontological dimension of law, of people’s self-determination and social integration are eradicated altogether by Luhmann. Habermas starts tackling this nexus from a descriptive insight: “this assumed mutual indifference between law and other social subsystems

20

2 Jürgen Habermas and the Communicative Sovereignty of Citizens

does not correspond with empirically observed interdependencies” (Id: 51, my italics). A normative dimension typical of the participant perspective seems to be lodged in the sociological, descriptive analysis of law: it is possible to empirically observe a connection between law and the other social systems, one that Luhmann’s portrait of society has shadowed. This exclusive connection is something that even the most prominent supporters of the systems theory ended up acknowledging as empirically indisputable, and hence in need of an explanation that maintains the autopoietic character of social systems. However, precisely this acknowledgment (exemplified by Gunther Teubner’s theory) allows Habermas to checkmate the radical atomism of social subsystems in social systems theory, and its corollary subjectivistic implication that social integration can only be achieved by an implausible subject of political action self-determining its legal system. The gist of the “empirical interdependency” between law and other systems lies in the glaring fact that law does not merely regulate other systems from the outside, like in a Searlian Chinese room, nor it is impervious to them; systems appear to communicate with each other, in the sense that a communicative act expressed in the semantics of a system is somewhat translatable into the others, as “all forms of specialized communication [. . .] are at the same time – literally unu actu – forms of general communication as well” (Teubner 1993: 86). That is, the ordinary language pervading the lifeworld is capable of expressing in its own terms the contents of specialized languages, thus allowing communicative interactions from one code to another, and penetrating the circularity of the systems. To support this, Habermas highlights how the progressive specialized differentiation between systems itself cannot but develop from the lifeworld until their subsequent autonomization as selfenclosed “monads” – while the gradual differentiation of the lifeworld’s components is articulated “within the boundaries of a multifunctional language” (Habermas 1996: 55). Thus, multilingual ordinary language is never blind to specialized semantics, and unseals the radical monadism of the Luhmannian systems. This allows Habermas to achieve at once (a) an objective, functional formulation of the legal system that paves the way for the reconstruction of (b) its normative, internal self-understanding. (a) In spite of its status of a social system among others, law has the unparalleled power to influence and bind the other systems in a way that is impossible to ordinary language. Whereas the multifunctionality of the latter does not make for its coercive force, the “facticity” of the former achieves the “stabilization of behavioural expectations”, for which “there does not seem to be any functional equivalent [. . .] in complex societies” (Habermas 1994: 460). (b) On the other hand, if ordinary language works as a Swiss Army knife simultaneously translating any specialized language into another and allowing their intercommunication, then it is clear that law is (by its inner social logic) and should be informed by precisely those messages coming from the communicative fluxes animating the lifeworld, where ideas, claims, expectations are expressed and conveyed through ordinary language. This reintroduces the relevance of the participant-perspective, which does not look at the functional aspects of the legal system, but rather at its internal normative validity for the members of the political community shaping it. Thus, the socially integrating force of a desubjectivized society lies in the

2.3 Communicative Jurisgenesis, Co-originality Thesis, Discourse Principle

21

communicative power “anarchically” circulating in the lifeworld, and complementarily in the legal system that transforms the participants’ validity-claims into coercive laws regulating and binding together the whole ensemble of social systems. This holds together the fragmentation of society into (semi-)autonomous social systems, the corollary diaspora of the fictional “subject of sovereignty”, and the deontological dimension of a legal system informed by the communicative energy flowing within a self-organizing socio-political community.

2.3

Communicative Jurisgenesis, the Co-originality Thesis, and the Discourse Principle

The problem of the normative self-understanding of law has famously led Habermas to bridge the historical cleavage originated within the social contract tradition between individual human rights and popular sovereignty, and to theorize their interpenetration and co-originality. However, the key to this endeavour lies precisely in the sociological understanding of law already adumbrated above. In the third chapter of Between Facts and Norms, Habermas takes the focus back to the subjectivistic ontological horizon informing social contract theories, and hindering their sight from a proper understanding of the complementarity between civic and private autonomy. The frameworks of reference he adopts in order to address the respective traditions are Rousseau’s social contract theory and Kant’s theory of law. Rousseau conceptualizes autonomy as the political autonomy of a selfdetermining macro-subject, which is autonomous insofar as it realizes and governs itself according to its own ethical identity as a people. The consequent subordination of individual rights to the general will emerging from the collective exercise of political sovereignty is balanced by Rousseau through the legal implementation of rights, to which the process of political deliberation should comply.3 On the other hand, Kant takes the opposite path. He derives collective self-determination from the

For an account of the flaws in Habermas’s reading of Rousseau, see Justice and Judgment, pp. 51–52 (Ferrara 1999). Ferrara observes that (a) Rousseau’s constraints guaranteeing an equal and correct formation of the general will do not merely lie upon the semantic content of the law, but also on an equality of social conditions and an individual commitment to the common good; (b) Habermas’s criticism regarding the supposed inadequacy of Rousseau’s homogenizing general will vis-à-vis the heterogeneity of modern societies neglects the idea of the “will of all”, which has a more plural character than the general will, and is rejected by Rousseau “only in the case in which the will of all falsely presents in the guise of the general will” (Id: 52). Moreover, Ferrara highlights that Habermas has “systematically ignored” a whole branch of contemporary republican thought. For an overview of the related literature, see Ch. 2, footnote 21 of Justice and Judgment. In concordance with Ferrara’s suspicion that Habermas’s third path between liberalism and republicanism is largely analogous to a certain contemporary version of republicanism, Charles Larmore has argued that Habermas’s idea of co-originality of individual selfdetermination and collective autonomy ultimately rests on a republican-fashioned priority of the latter: “in reality, popular sovereignty functions for Habermas as the ultimate basis on which our

3

22

2 Jürgen Habermas and the Communicative Sovereignty of Citizens

human right to individual self-determination, which inheres to the individual subject as a natural right. The legal system is originated as the positively implemented face of the monologically interpreted individual human right to autonomy, from which the right of citizens to political self-determination is merely deduced. According to Habermas, such aprioristic construction of society along the anthropomorphic lines of a subject to whom a right to autonomy is attached does not grasp the intersubjective dimension of a discursive construction of meaning that unceasingly specifies those human rights it presupposes as the “enabling conditions” of the discursive process itself. Natural rights cannot be monologically abstracted from the discursive dimension to form the bedrock of the legal system at the expenses of popular sovereignty (Kant), nor crystallized in the “semantic content” of a law by virtue of that political autonomy they should regulate (Rousseau). The modern detachment from the traditional-sacred elements legitimately tying societies together on the one hand, and the philosophical impossibility to extract validity from solipsistic rationality on the other, unveil the intersubjective dimension of modern rights, which are justified and validated within discourses supplying moral, ethical or pragmatic arguments, while simultaneously constituting the condition of existence of those discourses themselves. Law cannot be seen from an exclusively objectivating perspective, i.e. as a self-enclosed system merely functional to the stabilization of expectations (Luhmann), nor from the totally subjectivating standpoint reducing it to the straightforward adoption of a principle of practical reason grounding the legal system (contractarianism). The unilateral adoption of either perspective obscures their complementarity, lying in the power of law to operationalize the contents generated in the discursive fluxes circulating in the lifeworld, which in turn are procedurally regulated by the human rights that they themselves concretely, contextually specify “in response to changing circumstances” (Habermas 1996: 125). The communicative nature of modern jurisgenesis, thus, unveils the interpenetration and co-originality of private and civic autonomy, that solves the problem of their reciprocal encroachment by excluding the derivation of one from the other. This reconnection of the functional, objective role of modern law (facticity) and its claim to legitimacy (validity) implies the overcoming of a further ontological presupposition Habermas identifies in social contract theories, which contributed to open up the gap between private and civic autonomy: the subordination of positive law to natural law. Rather than splitting morality and law into distinct spheres, social contract theorists tend to tie them together according to the genealogical scheme of the principle and its emanation, thus ending up subordinating one of the declensions of the moral principle of autonomy – collective self-realization – to the other – moral self-determination. On the one hand, this obscures the intrinsic differences between law and morality, while on the other it “by no means eliminates the paternalism of the ‘rule of law’ characteristic of political heteronomy” (Id: 121). In order to

political life should be organized, and so as the true source of individual rights, their ultimate justification lying in the way they embody the principle of self-rule” (Larmore 1999: 613).

2.3 Communicative Jurisgenesis, Co-originality Thesis, Discourse Principle

23

disentangle law from morality and ground the distinctiveness of the former, Habermas articulates a threefold stratification involving the discourse principle (D) – stating that a norm is valid when discursively endorsed by all the affected –, the moral principle of universalization (U) and the principle of democracy. If law has to be free from morality, then “the discourse principle must be situated at a level of abstraction that is still neutral vis-à-vis the distinction between morality and law” (Habermas 1994: 459).4 That is, the discourse principle (D) refers to norms of action rather than to moral principles. It establishes the necessary egalitarian and “symmetrical” relations for participants in rational discourses to reach valid action-orienting norms: a given norm of action is valid if all those affected acknowledge it as such within rational discourses. Thus, (D) still does not claim to supply a benchmark for the moral righteousness of a principle or the validity of a law, but constitutes the general communicative condition under which a valid norm of action can be extracted from discourse. It ties validity to the mutual recognition and equality between participants in a discursive process. The moral and the democratic principles stem as two distinct declensions of (D): while the former specifies the condition of the moral validity of rational arguments presented within ordinary discourses – namely, universalizability – the latter refers to the conditions of legal validity of a norm, and thus to its legitimacy: “the principle of democracy derives from the interpenetration of the discourse principle and the legal form” (Habermas 1996: 121). In other words, it establishes (D) as the condition for the legitimacy of a jurisgenerative procedure, by which a discursively valid norm becomes legally binding. If a norm of action is valid when embraced by participants to a rational discursive process, then a legal norm can be valid only if the legislative procedure leading to its enactment is set in a way that allows such collective construction of agreed norms, i.e. democratically. This requires the legal implementation of private and civic rights grounding the validity conditions of jusrisgenerative processes, while on the other hand it is precisely within those discursive processes that the concrete content of those rights is shaped according to specific historical contingencies, identities, collective self-understandings, degree of general sensitivity towards a given issue. The Habermasian discursivization of the Kantian categorical imperative and its moral and political declensions have attracted a variety of criticisms both before and after the publication of Between Facts and Norms. In spite of their different approaches, what most observers share is a scepticism towards Habermas’s definition of the moral sphere and its supposed separation from “das Etische”. Albrecht Wellmer, William Rehg, Seyla Benhabib and Alessandro Ferrara, for example, provide largely different arguments to challenge Habermas’s implied conflation of 4

This sharp separation of law and morality is criticized for instance by Rainer Forst, who argues that the moral and the political justifications of laws and principles should not be conceived of as fully independent of each other and “reified”, although it is accurate to distinguish them: “the two stages of moral and political justification (and construction) of basic principles must be integrated in such a way that the former can be identified as the normative core of the latter, that is, of every justification of a concrete political and social basic structure” (Forst 2011: 174).

24

2 Jürgen Habermas and the Communicative Sovereignty of Citizens

moral validity and conflict adjudication/resolution – that is, the assumption that the morally valid is that which, by being the object of rational-discursive agreement, resolves conflicts. In doing so, they call into question the Habermasian morality/ ethics divide. According to Wellmer, Habermas’s search for a foundation of morality and moral validity collides with the impossibility of actually grounding a distinctively moral validity in what he calls the “linguistification of the sacred”,5 i.e., the process through which the indisputable validity of the sacred, to the totemic force of which primordial argumentative practices appealed, was gradually channelled into the illocutionary force of a discursively shared validity-claim. From Wellmer’s perspective, in no way can Habermas claim that such sort of validity is specifically moral: different types of ‘ought’, that cannot be defined as moral, can be genealogically traced back to the validity of the sacred, which in turn does not result in an eminently moral ought once the process of differentiation takes hold. The Habermasian grounding of rationality in a “moral ought as a pragmatic universal in linguistic terms” (Wellmer 1991: 222) clouds the more dynamic and starkly antifoundationalist understanding of rationality proposed by Wellmer: rather than isolating different kinds of validity and establishing a priority of moral validity as the motor of the progress of reason, Wellmer suggests that such progress can only be reconstructed retrospectively as “not the perfection of sense, but the elimination of nonsense” (Id: 199). Moral progress does not proceed through a cognitive-pragmatic universal eternally operating, but rather through the ongoing elimination of what is not acceptable, or no longer acceptable,6 within broad and long-termed discursive processes where different types of interacting validity-claims can be identified, rather than different types of validity. In other words, aesthetic, theoretical, moral, technical validity-claims concur in the discursive abolition of nonsense, which can be reconstructed ex post as the mark of a “unity of reason”, a unity wherein no kind of validity-claim is attributed priority on others (as Habermas does with moral validity), and thus wherein the partial moments of rationality cannot be ultimately “sublated in the unity of a moral ideal” (Id: 225), consensually achieved and thus valid. Albeit in a different vein, Rehg shares the widespread scepticism towards Habermas’s aspiration to ground a whole theory of moral validity on the bedrock

5

Wellmer rejects from the outset Habermas’s grounding of (U) in the presuppositions of argument, and investigates into the derivation of the principle from the process of “linguistification of the sacred”, which in his view conceals “the central content of the universalization principle [that] is introduced illicitly through a side door” (Wellmer 1991: 182). 6 Similar fallibilistic deflations of the categorical imperative, though not expressly developed in opposition to Habermas’s universalization principle, were devised by Thomas M. Scanlon and Thomas Nagel. The idea that “it is the reasonableness of rejecting a principle, rather than the reasonableness of accepting it, on which the moral argument turns” (Scanlon 1982: 112, my italics), was endorsed and elaborated by Nagel in the insight that “while everyone is obliged to avoid the extremes whose exclusion no one could reasonably reject, within the intermediate range between these extremes one party or the other will be morally justified in resisting or withholding cooperation from whatever arrangement is in effect” (Nagel 1991: 50).

2.3 Communicative Jurisgenesis, Co-originality Thesis, Discourse Principle

25

of the discourse ethics.7 From his perspective, satisfying the conditions spelled out by (U) does produce moral norms, but does not exhaust the entire realm of morality. Therefore, Rehg suggests to “look at moral norms only insofar as they resolve actual or potential conflicts” (Rehg 1994: 32): on the one hand, thus, the model of validity implicit in the discourse ethics, conceived for impartially adjudicating conflict, must be prevented from overlapping with morality as such; on the other hand, one should not go so far as neglecting the moral dimension of the claims and kind of consensus theorized by the discourse ethics. Rehg acknowledges Habermas’s deflation of (D) as a principle concerned with the validity of norms of action, rather than as a criterion of moral validity. However, he observes that the very possibility of achieving a fair, rational consensus grounded in moral arguments of justification is assumed, but cannot be explained and justified by, (D) as a principle for norms of action.8 Thus, the justification and pragmatic enabling condition of (D) must be found in (U), in spite of the diversification of their scope and object. It is precisely the reconstruction of (U)’s justification and functioning as a principle underlying – and regulating – moral argumentation that leads Rehg to question the separation between ethics and morality advocated by Habermas. He observes that Habermas himself identifies two premises from which (U) follows by “material implication”: on the one hand, a norm appealed to by discussants willing to adjudicate a conflict must be capable of binding expectations, so that the interests of the participants can be effectively delimited. On the other hand, for such a binding norm to be agreed upon rationally the speakers have to assume a host of discursive presuppositions and idealizations, such as the openness of discourse to all and the equal right to participation. The hybrid status of those presumptions as simultaneously cognitively concrete and idealized allows defining them as the concrete mechanism regulating those real discourses for which they serve as a diagnostic device, by virtue of their being ideal. Hence, (U) springs as a consequence: given a group of individuals willing to rationally and fairly solve a dispute among interests and desires – which means allowing all the affected into the argumentation and treating them equally – and given that the norm under scrutiny has to bind expectations and constrain individual interests to some (ideally the same) extent, then the norm is valid when “All affected can accept the consequences and the side effects its general observance can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of everyone’s interests” (U) (Habermas 1990a: 65). Although sympathetic with the Habermasian framework so reconstructed, in his pressing analysis of (U) Rehg observes how its reference to consequences, individual needs and interests, side by side with its Kantian genealogy, cannot but strike the reader. The conundrum can be explained, so his argument runs, only by interpreting “consequences” in terms of “action constraints”, and interests in terms of “appetitive

7

For an overview of the literature to which Rehg refers as criticizing the conflation of discourse ethics and morality as such, see Ch. 1, footnote 22 of Insight and Solidarity (Rehg 1994). 8 (D) alone cannot answer, in particular, the question thus formulated by Rehg: “who gets to justify which norms on the basis of what kinds of reasons?” (Rehg 1994: 34).

26

2 Jürgen Habermas and the Communicative Sovereignty of Citizens

structures” that can only find expression within culturally specific value-systems, and thus within their language of reference. In other words, Rehg argues that a given subject’s acceptance of the “consequences” and “side effects” of a norm ultimately means that she endorses the foreseeable constraining effects of a norm – which every norm has by its very nature – from the perspective of that universe of values which conveys the self-representation of her own interests and underlying appetites: consequences can be compared to one’s interests only if they can be weighed within the same value-system. Accordingly, appetites can be communicated to others only if expressed in the form of a culturally recognizable interest, that others can understand and endorse: “moral claims must rather draw all their material from within empirically given appetitive structures” (Rehg 1994: 49). Moral norms are thus nothing more than generalizable interests, meaningful within a culturallinguistic horizon that makes the underlying appetites and needs understandable and shareable. It is clear, however, that this undermines the distinction between moral and ethical discourses: moral discourses can take place only within the shared perspective of a cultural-linguistic tradition embedding some Weltanschauung, that is, only within ethical discourses. However, it is important to stress that this is presented by Rehg as a cognitive process explaining the very possibility of rational agreement. His introduction of cultural contextuality into moral discourse does not involve any departure from Habermas’s cognitive model of moral validity; rather, Rehg shifts both moral and ethical discursive validity to the cognitive sphere.9 Largely different from Rehg’s is Seyla Benhabib’s attempt at reformulating discourse ethics. Her analysis starts from the dilemma, partly inspired from Hegel’s renowned critique of Kant, whether (U) is “at best inconsistent and at worst empty” (Benhabib 1992: 26) – that is, whether it is so minimal as to be irrelevant in moral discourse and judgment, or it conceals substantive – and thus controversial – premises, as Hegel argued about the Kantian categorical imperative. Benhabib claims that the dead end can be overcome through the incorporation into discourse ethics of the hermeneutics theorized by Gadamer, who “so powerfully synthesized Aristotle’s ethical theory and Hegel’s critique of Kant that after his work the two strands of argumentation became almost indistinguishable” (Id: 25). The marked ethical assumptions that do undergird communicative ethics, which according to Benhabib boil down to the two principles of “universal respect” and “egalitarian reciprocity”, should be understood as intuitions widespread in a modern hermeneutic horizon, brewed throughout a historic-cultural development and traceable through a Rawlsian process of reflective equilibrium as one – not the – system of modern moral

9 For a different perspective cf. Mark E. Warren’s critique (1995), which attempts to redeem discourse ethics from Habermas’s focus on the cognitive sphere by highlighting the relevance of the affective and “psychodynamic” dimension in intersubjective relations. In Warren’s view, this is extremely relevant especially for Habermas’s democratic theory: “Habermas’s assumption that the cognitive uses of language can be institutionally separated from noncognitive uses poses a challenge to the ideal of discursive democracy. The assumption implies a particular kind of personality as a condition of discursive resolutions of conflict, namely, an autonomous individual who is capable of cognitive motivation and reflection” (Id: 182).

2.3 Communicative Jurisgenesis, Co-originality Thesis, Discourse Principle

27

presuppositions. Therefore, in evident contrast with Rehg, Benhabib’s amalgamation of discourse ethics and culturally sensitive hermeneutics – i.e., the conflation of morality and ethics – results in a rejection of Habermas’s moral cognitivism. Moreover, Benhabib charges (U) with consequentialism. In its attempt to create consensus, (U) “adds little but consequentialist confusion to (D)” (Id: 37): it ends up reducing moral validity to consensus on a norm’s consequences, whereas the normative source of (D) lies in its procedural moment, where relations of equality and reciprocity are staged which are morally – and ethically – impregnated independently of the achievement of a consensual decision, and which thus make for the validity of the produced norm (Id). Therefore, Benhabib disputes simultaneously Wellmer’s and Rehg’s elaborations of the discourse ethics. On the one hand, she rejects the former’s drift towards an outright commitment to phronesis in moral judgment, which involves forsaking the search for “criteria for distinguishing among the morally permissible from the morally impermissible” (Id: 36); on the other hand, she disagrees with the latter in that she charges Habermas with consequentialism and opposes his cognitivism, which Rehg endorses. A further set of criticisms to the morality/ethics divide comes from Alessandro Ferrara, who observes that Habermas is ultimately unable to overcome the objection according to which the morally valid, that is what is equally good for all, cannot be decided without an ethical determination of what is good, i.e. of some identityrelated conception of the good, broad as it may be. Habermas’s reply, according to which the ethically good is a mere discursive starting point to pursue what is equally good for all, is vulnerable to the objection that the moral must be anchored in the ethical, the universal in the contextual (Ferrara 1999). Moreover, Ferrara goes deeper in analyzing the implications of the discourse theory on politics as developed by Habermas in Between Facts and Norms in particular. The idea that rational consensus among discussants, achieved in the procedurally fair communicative conditions specified by (D), proceeds from the same reasons, theoretically undermines the very roots of pluralism – besides appearing excessively high-demanding and untenable also in empirical terms. It ultimately entails admitting the possibility to draw from a sort of implausible “meta-vocabulary” that overcomes the linguistic incommensurabilities separating the members and groups constituting a pluralistic society (Id). The idea that disagreement occurs due to the imperfect discursive conditions of the empirical world, and that the ‘City of God’ of appropriate communicative conditions is liberated from the burdens of judgment, betrays an understanding of pluralism as stemming from imperfection which clashes with the Wittgensteinian intuitions of the bond tying together social practices and cultural-linguistic worlds.10 A similar problem seems to affect Habermas’s idea that the step from moral argumentation to compromise-oriented fair bargaining is only legitimate when non-generalizable interests are at stake: how can one decide whether an interest is generalizable or not, if not within discourse? And does this not involve some form of contextually informed deliberation, which thus underlies the supposed universality of morality?

10

Cf. Ferrara 2020.

28

2 Jürgen Habermas and the Communicative Sovereignty of Citizens

(Id). Furthermore, Ferrara stresses the circularity vitiating Habermas’s ex ante attribution of given social issues to their corresponding typologies of discourse – say, abortion is enlisted among moral issues, environmental and ecological problems pertain to ethics, and so on. The theorist’s appropriation of what appears to be only determinable within discourse clashes with a deliberative theory of democracy as Habermas’s (Id). Finally, Charles Larmore interprets (D) as an inescapably moral principle undergirded by an idea of equal respect that normatively orients the whole Habermasian conception of political autonomy – which Larmore considers as prior to individual autonomy in Habermas’s framework, as mentioned in footnote 3 above. Habermas’s claim that the normative core of (D) is not necessarily moral is “feeble”, as proved by Habermas’s weak attempts at pinpointing (D)‘s source of normative authority: Larmore is unsatisfied with both Habermas’s insistence on the post-metaphysical conditions of modernity and the foundation of (D) in universal pragmatics. From his perspective, (D) is a substantive moral principle insofar as its validity “is a matter on which people disagree”, and “this disagreement turns on different moral convictions about the conditions under which we may judge others morally and no doubt, too, on different appreciations of the moral ideal of individual autonomy” (Larmore 1999: 620). According to Larmore, Habermas’s whole diagnosis of the modern post-metaphysical age rests “on a comprehensive vision of our place in the world and the nature of reason’s authority” (Id: 614), which led Rawls himself to define Habermas’s theory of democracy as “comprehensive” insofar as grounded in a conception of truth (Rawls 1995). In Larmore’s view, such diagnosis of modernity is precisely intertwined with, and partly informed by, a substantive moral kernel of universal equal respect. A slightly less radical position of this sort comes from Ferrara, who argues that Habermas’s political theoretical framework is open to two competing interpretations, “depending on the source to which one traces the cogency of principle (D) as a test of discursive generalization” (Ferrara 2008: 38): either on a “quasi-transcendental principle, anchored in universal-pragmatic structures”, or in the “communal identity of peoples living within the modern life form” (Ibid).11

2.4

A People Made of Citizens

Before going deeper into this lawmaking procedure and outlining the forma regiminis theorized by Habermas, let us recapitulate and draw some conclusions on the Habermasian people as a subject of sovereignty. As it has hopefully emerged 11

On the relationship between situatedness and universality in Habermas’s philosophy, cf. Max Pensky (1995), who captures a “dialectic of universality and situation in Habermas’s work” (Id: 69), signalled by the rootedness of his universalist thought in the postwar Germany: Habermas “has become a German intellectual precisely by working against the Germanness of the political culture of the Federal Republic” (Ibid).

2.4 A People Made of Citizens

29

from the reconstruction above, one of the cornerstones of Between Facts and Norms is the criticism to the philosophy of the subject as a theoretical paradigm, and in particular to its implications on politics: the assumption of a subject of political action, and hence of sovereignty, is sociologically naive and theoretically problematic in its consequences. While from the sociological perspective it is clear that social differentiation in modern age is too high to allow for a fictionalization of society as a subject, from the normative standpoint a subjectivistic construction of rights entails a conflict between private and civic autonomy, that conceals the spectre of heteronomy. However, although the degree of social differentiation has led prominent sociologists to dismiss any socially integrative force in society, and to imagine the latter as a cluster of autopoietic subsystems (Luhmann in particular, who “has currently gone the farthest along this axis” (Id: 48)), Habermas identifies in the ordinary communicative interactions carried through common language the key to unfetter subsystems from their self-enclosedness. In the never-ending discursive exchanges happening within the lifeworld, rational arguments and volitions are constructed, historical events interpreted and bequeathed, collective representations of social realities are called into question, specialized languages are decoded, and hence opinions on the functioning of given subsystems are developed. The multilinguality of common language allows these contents to be transmitted to the legal system, which in turn is the only instrument capable of coercing and regulating other systems according to the messages springing from the social discursive process. Thus, if common-language communicative exchanges on the one hand, and the legal system on the other, are the factors holding together a particularized society, then ‘the people’ is the anonymous entity, internally fragmented, whose life is regulated by the same legal system that it itself frames discursively, through the intersubjective creation of contents to be turned into binding law. A given ‘people’, in other words, is nothing more than what revolves around its legal system of reference. Such people is not circumscribed to and made organic by any common ethos, religion, culture, teleology, and its particles are scattered throughout systemic spheres which are divided by the self-referentiality of codified vocabularies, and by the incommensurability of their ethical convictions, life experiences, cultural backgrounds in a broad sense. They share with each other nothing more than their common language and the legal system which regulates their co-existence, and into which lifeworld discourses are channelled – in a way that we shall see in the next section, when the Habermasian lawmaking procedure will be analyzed in order to provide an answer to the second of our initial questions. As we have seen, such legal system implements the discourse principle as a democratic principle, thus establishing the procedural conditions for the achievement of valid legal norms: it being necessary for valid arguments to be discursively developed and recognized by all the people affected, those conditions overlap with the bestowal of private and civic rights. However, this does not correspond to the legal implementation of abstract human rights. The democratic principle is contented with illustrating the set of conditions enabling a lawmaking process oriented to validity, a set requiring

30

2 Jürgen Habermas and the Communicative Sovereignty of Citizens

rights that are specified discursively by those who orbit the legal system – namely, the people. In this sense, citizenship and people become indistinguishable. As Habermas stresses in “Citizenship and National Identity” (Habermas 1990b), citizenship can by no means be conceptually tied to nationality or ethnicity; also from the historicophilosophical and historico-political perspectives, this connection had a short life (Id). Citizenship in modern law is tied to the participation in a system of legal rights and duties. The discursive specification of rights and duties by participants entails that they ultimately define the conditions of their own status as citizens. The only “supportive spirit” (Id: 499) that must necessarily pervade at least the bulk of the citizenry, or of the people, is “a liberal political culture [which] is only the common denominator for a constitutional patriotism” (Id: 500). The reference to the concept of patriotism, suggesting a sense of loyalty to one’s country and to its people, goes hand in hand with this reconstruction of the people. If the people is nothing more than the citizens defining and being defined by a legal system, then patriotism can only be constitutional. A patriot can venture no farther than a pledge of allegiance to a legal system intersubjectively constructed – which implies his interior, non-coercible harmonization with a liberal-democratic political culture. This system simultaneously defines people and citizens, and stands out as the only target for patriotic sentiments freed from nationalistic burdens. There is no room for any other anachronistic all-encompassing ground for social integration, such as ethnic affiliation – unless ethnic-based claims pass through the procedural filters and pour into law, which still would not suffice to make them the source of the legal system as a whole. Therefore, the conceptualization of citizenship as anchored to a legal foundation on the one hand, and the description of society as exclusively integrated by the legal system and its communicative genesis on the other, result in the conceptual conflation of people and citizenship. Saying that the people is sovereign, in the final analysis, is tantamount to saying that the citizenry is. Deprived of an all-encompassing ethos, of a homogeneous cultural horizon, and of a historical depth hopelessly encumbered with teleological echoes and nationalistic remnants, the people is defined by nothing more than the participation in the legal system by means of mutually attributed and discursively shaped citizenship rights, as specified by the discourse principle embedded in modern law. The idea of constitutional patriotism as formulated by Habermas, nonetheless, is not without problems. An interesting debate on the issue arose from one broader criticism raised by Frank I. Michelman to the Habermasian idea of co-originality of public autonomy and human rights discussed above. In a nutshell, Michelman objected that co-originality as devised by Habermas cannot account for the democratic substance of the process through which a democratic constitution is historically founded: the act of creation of a political regime where democracy and constitution are co-original in the sense of intertwined with each other like a game with its rules (Ferrara 2001) cannot be retrospectively justified by the democratic quality of the new-born constitutional-democratic order, and thus requires a further democratic legitimation, originating a virtually “infinite regress” (Michelman 1996,

2.4 A People Made of Citizens

31

1999).12 In response, Habermas specified that “a constitution that is democratic [. . .] is a tradition-building project with a clearly marked beginning in time. All the later generations have the task of actualizing the still-untapped normative substance of the system of rights” (Habermas and Rehg 2001: 774). Such reply attracted criticisms, in particular by Ferrara and Honig, which reverberate on the idea of constitutional patriotism. On the one hand, Ferrara stresses that Habermas’s reference to the intrinsic normativity of the foundational act shifts the normative core of the whole Habermasian framework and dissolves its commitment to outright proceduralism: for the constitutional foundation so formulated to be democratic, one must “use the qualification ‘democratic’ not in a fully differentiated legal sense but in a thick evaluative sense in which the moral, the ethical and the legal aspects are still intertwined” (Ferrara 2001: 786). If the nexus of constitution and democracy is not to be oxymoronic, the principles enshrined in the constitution must have their source in the pervasive contextual ideas of a moral, ethical and political culture, ideas which in turn are recognized by the “later generations” not as extrinsic tenets looming over them, but as the core of their own reflexive self-understanding. Therefore, constitutional patriotism should be conceived as the reflexive commitment of a given people to its own distinctive moral and political values. A constitutional patriotism uprooted from such contextual soil and merely informed by (D) as its ultimate normative core would blur the distinctiveness of the different constitutions existing, and undermine the very enabling conditions of such distinctiveness. On the other hand, Bonnie Honig points out that Habermas’s reply to Michelman dissolves co-originality into a predominance of constitutionalism over democracy. From her perspective, the generations of citizens supposed to flesh out and keep alive the project initiated with the foundational act of the constitution are far from autonomous, and constitutional patriotism becomes chimerical: the agency of those who inherit the constitution is limited to the re-appropriation of an already occurred genesis which is now beyond reach, and the product of which is calcified into “the dead letter of the law” (Honig 2001: 800). Democracy and constitution become two parallel lines bound to stay clear from each other, as demonstrated by

12

In his review of Between Facts and Norms, Michelman suggests, on the one hand, that Habermas’s response to the problem of infinite regress is “rationalist”, in that “it is a part of [Habermas’s] own teaching, after all, that a set of abstract principles of right can be derived from the very preconditions of democratic discourse. What is more, exactly such a derivation of the ultimate normative grounds of constitutional law is, by Habermas’s argument, a necessary condition of legal validity down the line” (Michelman 1996: 311). On the other hand, however, Michelman notes that the rationalist solution, “too hastily” rejected by Habermas, is not sufficient, in that in the framework of Between Facts and Norms the dimension of actual intersubjective exchange and acceptance of reasons is essential to legitimacy. Therefore, Michelman argues, “[Habermas] proposes, in effect, to deal with regress not by stopping it but by finding for it a kind of institutional space that can contain it unstopped” (Id: 312), namely the public sphere, by which Habermas establishes “civil society as a proto-legislative constitutional organ” (Id: 313). For a response to this argument, cf. Baynes (1997), according to whom Michelman failed to fully grasp the implications of Habermas’s reconstructive method.

32

2 Jürgen Habermas and the Communicative Sovereignty of Citizens

the “spatialized metaphorics” adopted by Habermas, who places them respectively at the periphery and at the centre of the socio-political framework (Id).13

2.5

Communicative Sovereignty in a Two-Tracks System

Let us now complete the reconstruction of Habermas’s framework by taking a closer look to the lawmaking procedure it theorizes, in order to sketch out the modalities of the people’s exercise of power. The Habermasian jusrisgenerative/legislative system is shaped precisely according to the peculiarities of the ‘people of citizens’ outlined above. The subjectless dimension of the opinion- and will-formation processes is maintained throughout the whole lawmaking process, the seeds of which are planted in the anarchic soil of the public sphere. Habermas defines this concept as a spontaneous phenomenon of delocalization, liquefaction and hence society-wide expansion of the “linguistically constituted public space”, “disclosed” (Habermas 1996: 361) among participants in a standard exchange of speech acts. The web of arguments, claims and opinions communicatively displayed and circulating throughout society in a great variety of forms (normal interactions among common people, daily newspaper articles, specialized journals, TV news, talk-shows, local assemblies, civil society organizations campaigns) opens up a common public space, a disembodied forum permanently vitalized by unrelated actors, where public opinion and will are forged anonymously.14 Again, as long as its crux lies precisely in the random circulation of all the voices generating it, the public sphere cannot be reduced to a subject of concerted political decision and action. Precisely due to such anonymous nature, the public sphere and its actors have no direct decisional power. In a perfect deliberative democratic fashion, Habermas 13

An in-depth defense, genealogical reconstruction and theoretical elaboration of constitutional patriotism was developed by Jan-Werner Müller (2007a, b), who argues that Habermas’s version of the concept “was in no sense culturally neutral, since patriotism also required a particular, highly critical attitude toward national culture” (2007a: 38). Patchen Markell makes a similar point, by claiming that “Habermas himself, especially in his writing on concrete political events in contemporary Germany, offers a better understanding of the meaning of constitutional patriotism, one that takes account of and responds to, rather than denying or repressing, this tense relationship of conflict and interdependence between the universal and the particular” (2000: 40). 14 According to Thomas McCarthy (1994), one issue with this deliberative framework has to do with the criteria for adjudicating hard disagreement. On his reading, Habermas seems to be suspended between two clashing solutions: on the one hand, he leans towards “fair bargaining” as the secondbest option when the issues at stake are not general in scope. In McCarthy’s view, this solution appears inconsistent with the centrality of rational consensus in Habermas’s philosophical project. On the other hand, Habermas seems to embrace a step “towards greater abstraction” when it comes to deep conflict. Nonetheless, according to McCarthy such move “lands Habermas closer to Rawls. That is to say, the level of abstraction at which pluralistic societies could hope to secure general agreement [. . .] might well be similar to that of Rawls’s political conception” (Id: 56). Abstracting from deep cultural-ethical disagreement within collective deliberation, in other words, may be tantamount to seeking shelter into a Rawlsian common space of political agreement.

2.5 Communicative Sovereignty in a Two-Tracks System

33

overcomes elitist and plebiscitary democratic theories at once: the relation between public sphere and institutions can be thought neither along the elitist lines of a political leadership autonomously framing public will, nor as a direct control of a plebiscitary majority on the parliamentary activity. Rather, if on the one hand it is true that “only the political system can act” (Id: 300), on the other hand political decision is nourished by “the communicatively fluid sovereignty of citizens [which] instantiates itself in the power of public discourses that spring from autonomous public spheres but take shape in the decisions of democratically, politically accountable legislative bodies” (Id: 186). From this perspective, the degree to which the public sphere influences the political system and its decisions becomes a normative criterion of legitimacy assessment (Id: 362). The political system operates as a system of “sluices” (Schleusen) filtering, selecting and reshaping the communicative energy unleashing from the public sphere, and transforming it into legally enacted laws. Habermas defines this political system as based on “two tracks” (Id: 314), the one shaping decision and will informally, the other constitutionally. Therefore, the deliberative dimension of politics represents only a “Komponente” of the legislative process, as it overlaps with one of the two tracks, as stressed by Floridia (2017). Once again, the bedrock underlying this framework is the characterization of the public sphere as blind and subjectless: “this thought can be better explained only in a communication model that frees itself of overly concrete notions of ‘the people’ as an entity” (Habermas 1996: 185). If a subjectless web of interactions cannot be granted a direct decisional power, on the other hand the legal system cannot but be pervaded by the communicative power of discursive fluxes expressed in ordinary language. Those fluxes have to influence and direct legislative activity and hence administrative power, which should rationally implement the substance of laws (Id).15 In this context, the judicial branch is deprived of any legislative power on the grounds of the distinction between the rationality of justification and application. For the purposes of this section it is needless to go deeper into the complex Habermasian An alternative version of the public sphere, defined as a “directly-deliberative polyarchy”, was developed by Joshua Cohen and Charles Sabel (1997). They object to Habermas that he polarizes the practices of mutual understanding and effective decision-making, in a way that has paradoxical implications: in Habermas’s view, they claim, collective deliberation in the public sphere cannot hope to be effective if it aspires to justice, and cannot be just if it is institutionally channelled in order to accomplish practical decisions (Id). Hence, a two-tracks system is needed which holds together the substantive fairness of informal reason-giving and the effectiveness of institutional law-making. Cohen and Sabel’s proposal, grounded in the idea that modern democracies are affected less by clashing interests than by lack of social coordination, consists in uncoupling Habermas’s opposed pairs (informal communication-mutual understanding/institutionalizationeffectiveness), and integrating political deliberation with direct participation in a way that goes beyond the classical direct-democratic institutional solutions. The public sphere should be institutionalized in order to benefit from “local learning” while avoiding the insulation of local communities involved in problem-solving, thus creating a broad polyarchal deliberative community fractured into intercommunicating, institutionally recognized and benchmarked local subunits tailored upon specific problems to be solved. The constitutionality of their proposals should be subjected to judicial review (Id). 15

34

2 Jürgen Habermas and the Communicative Sovereignty of Citizens

argument, involving a differentiation between deontological moral principles and teleological ethical values, which paves the ground for the identification of a rationality of application freed from the slippery slope of a hierarchization of norms in the process of adjudication (Id). What matters here is that for Habermas neither judicial adjudication nor judicial review can ever create law. The reason lies in the Habermasian formulation of the separation of powers, which assumes its threefold articulation only on the grounds of the three distinct forms of rationality adopted by the respective powers. Whereas the legislative power is committed to the rational justification of laws under the influence of the reasons shaped in the public sphere, the judicial power “may not [. . .] use these reasons in an implicitly legislative manner that directly elaborates and develops the system of rights” (Id: 262). Although from a different perspective and for different reasons (i.e., justificatory practices pertain to legislation, which should not be diverted from its two-tracks path), Habermas embraces a core claim of political constitutionalists here, according to which judicial legislative activism undermines democratic self-determination. Differently from them, however, he designs a distinctive functional space for the judicial branch, reflecting its inherent rationality: rather than providing rational justifications to laws, the judiciary dissects their pre-given content in order to assess either their applicability to a case (adjudication) or the procedural validity of their discursive and legal elaboration and enactment (constitutional review). Therefore, (a) the adjudicative practice of reconstructing facts and assessing their adherence to the descriptive content of a given norm does not contribute to a justificatory development of law, but establishes at most a legal precedent setting out a criterion of application (Id). (b) Judicial review is nothing more than the “unfolding” of the arguments crystallized into laws, meant to assess the validity of the procedure followed to develop and enact them – in other words, their procedural legitimacy (Id).

2.6

The People and the Affected Ones. Problems with Habermas’s Discourse Principle

The institutional system briefly sketched out has equipped us with the tools to define the forma regiminis traceable in the Habermasian framework. In a nutshell, the popular sovereignty exercised by the ‘people of citizens’ is impersonal and mediated, but at the same time non-delegable. The people is not sovereign in the sense that it directly and organically controls legislation, because that would require some form of overarching identity; nonetheless, its disharmonic voices are neither ignored by a self-referential political elite, nor submitted to a non-elected constitutional court. Popular self-determination is maintained in spite of the desubjectivation of the people precisely by virtue of its proceduralization: if people cannot act as a multifaceted Leviathan, and validity can only be reached through free communicative exchanges, popular self-determination cannot but be fluidified in a democratic

2.6 The People and the Affected Ones

35

procedure guaranteeing the conditions for the production of valid claims and laws. As we have seen, such procedure involves a set of private and civic rights in order for the public sphere to function properly, and a politico-institutional system filtering and elaborating such energy into valid laws: the parliamentary system is justified precisely on the grounds that an anonymous public sphere cannot make decisions. The people cannot access decision-making power, but representatives are accountable for the degree to which they let the public sphere permeate the legal system.16 Thus, citizens define themselves as such – their concrete rights and duties – in a procedurally mediated way, but never give up their role in the jurisgenerative process: Habermas charges with “exceptionalism” the Ackermanian dualist theory of democracy, which in his opinion depicts a “slumbering” people delegating ordinary lawmaking to the Congress, and the protection of the Constitution in regular times to the Supreme Court. From Habermas’s perspective, this requires an ethical substance pre-unifying society, that can be successfully and legitimately guarded even in the hibernation of people’s civic activism. As we shall see at the end of this section, on the one hand Habermas seems to maintain the idea that political communities can only be unified by the interaction of public sphere and legal system, to the extent that a given ‘people’ is virtually eclipsed in the case of a change in the conformation of the public sphere combined with a parallel process of

16

In spite of his commitment to the idea of a permanently active citizenry, which never relinquishes its discursively exercised sovereignty by sinking into lethargic moments of strictly representative politics, Habermas was accused of watering down the radicality of his democratic framework. James Bohman, for instance, complains that the democratic principle of legitimacy sets too high a standard for consensus – that is, unanimity. Hence, he suggests to introduce a “participatory component” in the principle’s formulation, so as to relocate its normative requirement in the participatory process itself, rather than in its outcome (Bohman 1994). For Bohman, this slight modification lays the ground for solving a second difficulty with Habermas’s democratic model, regarding its conceptualization of majority rule as a “mere expedient”. According to Bohman, majority rule is fully legitimate if the deliberative procedure complies with the revised democratic principle, that is, if it fairly includes minorities and anti-majoritarian devices (Id). Finally, Bohman rejects Habermas’s “uncritical acceptance” of systems theory, which compels him to develop too “minimal” and “indirect” a theorization of popular sovereignty, undeserving the predicate of ‘radical’. In his view, the democratic principle should specify that the participatory process “makes the public deliberation of the majority the source of sovereign power” (Id: 925). Analogous issues are raised by John Dryzek, who criticizes Habermas on the grounds that “there is no sense that the administrative state, or economy, should be democratized any further. [. . .] Habermas has turned his back on extra-constitutional agents of both democratic influence and democratic distortion” (Dryzek 2000: 26). According to Dryzek, such blindness to extraconstitutional agents, exclusively replaced by lawmaking and elections as democratic mechanisms, is not only democratically unsatisfactory, but also sociologically, politically and theoretically outdated (Id). Rather differently, Nancy Love argues that “Habermas remains a socialist” (1995: 47), although “his theory of communicative rationality is ultimately more liberal than socialist” (Id: 60). On her reading, in the lifeworld and the public sphere Habermas places his (socialist) hopes that values less abstractly universal, ‘inhuman’, than the liberal ones, grow and deploy their emancipatory potential: “ultimately, what is left of Marx [in Habermas] is the conviction that “people can be more human than their society permits”” (Id: 63).

36

2 Jürgen Habermas and the Communicative Sovereignty of Citizens

international legal integration. On the other hand, however, Habermas seems to embrace the relevance of political cultures in the processes of political unification. A major issue with Habermas’s definition of the people as reconstructed in the present sections has to do with the all-affected principle enclosed in (D), that is, with the idea that all the participants to discourse affected by the debated norm are supposed to rationally and freely accept it in order to make it legitimate. Leaving aside the consequentialist difficulties discussed above and the practical problems that (D) involves as a legitimacy-requirement (see footnote 16 of this chapter), the all-affected principle leaves open a crucial issue for defining the concepts of people and citizenship in Habermas: how can a citizenry with given rights be delimited, and – vice versa – what does a specific legal system ultimately integrate, if the legitimacy of its norms is tied to their acceptability by the virtually world-wide community of the affected? In other words, if the legal system produces legitimate norms only when complying with the rational will of all the affected, then people and citizenry seem to become a fluid entity shifting on a case-by-case basis according to the scope of the issue at stake; accordingly, the affected appear to be occasionally endowed with rights pertaining to citizens when their opinions and interests are an essential legitimacy requirement for a given norm. In this scenario, the political community supposedly integrated by the legal system and ordinary language melts into a magmatic, thousand-faced creature that can hardly be defined as a (sovereign) people and as a citizenry. Nevertheless, Habermas’s framework seems to avoid such a drift by incurring a different difficulty: as observed by Nancy Fraser, since its very beginning Habermas’s intellectual endeavour has “presupposed a nationally inflected variant of the Westphalian frame” (Fraser 2014a: 13), which means that the all-affected principle has its scope circumscribed to the boundaries of the modern sovereign territorial state; however, in an international political scenario characterized by “the fact that public spheres today are not co-extensive with political membership” (Id: 22), this limitation involves nothing less than intrinsically contradicting the principle’s broader normative requirement. One way out of the impasse is to follow Nancy Fraser’s distinction between all-affected and all-subjected principle. According to Fraser, an all-affected principle redeemed from its nation-state dimension and expanded to literally all the potentially affected by a political agenda drifts into a so called “one-size-fits-all-globalism”, that is, a disembodied moral point of view, aspiring to regulate a global public sphere while being substantially detached from any concrete socio-cultural practice and political-economic relation of power. Therefore, Fraser suggests to embrace an all-subjected principle. In her framework, political legitimacy depends on the participation in the decision-making processes of those who are subjected to the given structure of governance (whether national or international, political or financial) that is about to implement a given norm. This would allow overcoming the historical, socio-cultural and political incommensurability between and within the Countries of the Global North and those of the Global South, an incommensurability that highly complicates the creation of shared public spheres: “appealing to all who experience subjection, albeit in different ways and according to different temporalities, such a

2.6 The People and the Affected Ones

37

theory discloses the basis for subaltern counterpublicity on a transnational scale” (Fraser 2014b: 149).17 In spite of the flourishing debate on the issue, however, the difficulties with Habermas’s specific conceptualization of citizenship and the people in Between Facts and Norms stand still. On the one hand, his conscious theoretical limitation to a nation-state dimension thwarts the slippery slope of a dispersion of the people and the citizenry into a multiform issue-based entity. On the other hand, Habermas ultimately cuts off the scope of the all-affected principle, thus undermining his idea of citizenship in the opposite way. If the all-affected principle does not define those who have a right to participate in a deliberative process in order to justify it, but merely specifies the criterion to legitimize decisions made within a pre-structured (national) framework, then Habermas’s idea of citizenship and people is uncritically detached from its normative criterion, and is the mere result of a sociological observation restricted within a nation-state horizon. The all-affected principle is contradicted by its entrenchment into an empirical framework that partially sterilizes its normative requirement, and the borders of citizenship are deprived of a normative content, insofar as the popular discursive appropriation of law is a-normatively determined in its scope. As stressed by Sofia Näsström, “the contemporary conflict on the appropriate boundaries of the people does not allow itself to be analysed in terms of a ‘first, then’ argument: first a global or national community and then differentiation downwards or upwards [. . .] If the all-affected principle is to serve as an arbitrator between such claims it cannot presume the one or the other beforehand” (2011: 127–128). In the years following the publication of Between Facts and Norms, however, Habermas has implicitly acknowledged the problem, and proved himself open to re-discuss his own understanding of citizenship and the role of the nation-state. Despite having assumed the territorial state as a given for his sociological reconstruction of the normative substance of a democratic order, in The Postnational Constellation (2001a) Habermas observes that globalization threatens the very legitimacy of the nation-state, and welcomes the process of European integration that was historically accelerated after the fall of the Eastern Bloc. In this sense, he prospects the consolidation of a European public sphere, and a related process of legal integration. In sum, Habermas recognizes that the nation-state in which he grounded his normative theory of deliberative democracy fails to live up to the very

17 For further debate, see the objections raised by David Owen (2014) to Fraser’s idea of the all-subjected principle, and her prompt response (Fraser 2014b). Although sympathetic with Fraser’s proposal, Owen casts light on the risk that citizens who are not necessarily subjected to a given structure of governance may yet be seriously affected by decisions taken within it. In Fraser’s all-subjected framework, citizens inhabiting such “grey areas” should not be granted participation in those decision procedures in order to legitimize them. Therefore, Owen proposes that the all-affected principle be reintroduced in order to complement the all-subjected principle by operating on the latter’s blind spots (2014). In response, Fraser suggests that “everyone is subject to the overarching regime of global governance, no wild zones exist, and recourse to the all-affected principle is unnecessary” (Fraser 2014b: 152).

38

2 Jürgen Habermas and the Communicative Sovereignty of Citizens

democratic standards (the discourse principle) he found operating in its social-legal mechanisms, and advocates a process of integration in which national citizenship is re-thought as European citizenship, national public spheres and legal systems stretch and combine together, and thus a European people of citizens constitutes itself, possibly by forging a shared constitutional text.18 This point will be further analyzed in Chap. 10, Sect. 10.4.19 Here Habermas’s democratic theory proves powerful in its providing both descriptive categories to grasp the empirical processes of European integration we are witnessing, and normative standards to assess their successes and failures, and to discern between desirable and undesirable paths. Yet, Habermas’s re-negotiation of citizenship does not come without problems. Whereas in Between Facts and Norms he argued, as we saw, that the sole integrative factor for a collective sovereign body lies in the communicative interaction between a legal system and ‘its’ public sphere, and that shared ethos and cultures are incompatible with a post-metaphysical political philosophy, it seems problematic to imagine a European Union merely united by communicative fluxes and increasingly integrated legal-institutional structures. Not by chance, in early 2000s Habermas has not only urged the rise of a European public sphere, but has importantly specified that “a European-wide public sphere needs to be embedded in a political culture shared by all” (Habermas 2001b: 19, my italics). This seems to contradict the idea of a ‘people’ of citizens united by sole communicative fluxes filtered by the institutions and flowing into the legal systems of reference. Moreover, the step from national to European citizenship does not solve all the problems implicit in the all-affected principle; it merely reduces, albeit significantly, the empirical quantity of its infringements. Europe is a wider unity than nationstates, and the decisions made by properly integrated European institutions would be able to involve the broader base of the affected European citizens, whom the nationstates were more prone to excluding, given their limited legal-territorial-discursive scope. In this sense, the respect of (D) would be guaranteed in a larger amount of situations by a European sovereign body. Yet, many other decisions enacted in Europe would travel beyond its borders. Given this and other problems inherent in the all-affected principle,20 it seems difficult to avoid a re-thinking of the 18

Cf. Habermas 2001b. Well-known objections to the Habermasian model of European integration came from Dieter Grimm (1995) and Margaret Canovan (2000, 2005), who observed, respectively, that the absence of a shared European language is a significant obstacle to the rise of a European public sphere, and that Habermas’s project of European integration is basically top-down, and rests upon an understanding of political construction as an artificial process (cf. Canovan 2005, pp. 54–57). Canovan’s critique will be further discussed in Chap. 10, Sect. 10.4. 20 For further discussions on the all-affected principle, its theoretical problems and advantages, cf. Robert Goodin’s (2007) seminal “possibilist” formulation, which indefinitely stretches the scope of democratic inclusion; Eerik Lagerspetz’s (2015) critique, which targets Goodin’s version of the principle and highlights the all-affected logic’s potential exclusivism, egalitarian deficit, and its failure to conceptually provide a “pre-institutional” starting point to re-think democratic boundaries; Mathias Koenig-Archibugi’s (2017) argument in defense of the all-affected principle’s 19

References

39

Habermasian criterion of inclusion, perhaps towards the adoption of an all-subjected principle.

References Baynes, Kenneth. 1995. Democracy and the Rechtsstaat: Habermas’s Faktizität und Geltung. In The Cambridge Companion to Habermas, ed. Stephen K. White, 201–232. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1997. Deliberative Democracy and the Regress Problem: Response to Michelman. The Modern Schoolman 74 (4): 331–336. Benhabib, Seyla. 1992. Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bohman, James. 1994. Complexity, Pluralism and the Constitutional State: On Habermas’s Faktizität und Geltung. Law & Society Review 28 (4): 897–930. Canovan, Margaret. 2000. Patriotism Is Not Enough. British Journal of Political Science 30 (3): 413–432. ———. 2005. The People. Cambridge: Polity Press. Cohen, Joshua, and Charles Sabel. 1997. Directly-Deliberative Polyarchy. European Law Journal 3 (4): 313–342. Dryzek, John S. 2000. Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ferrara, Alessandro. 1999. Justice and Judgment: The Rise and the Prospects of the Judgment Model in Contemporary Political Philosophy. London: Sage. ———. 2001. Of Boats and Principles: Reflections on Habermas’s ‘Constitutional Democracy’. Political Theory 29 (6): 782–791. ———. 2008. The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2020. Habermas e Rawls. Ciò che la controversia intorno al “ragionevole” rivela. Quaderni di Teoria Sociale 1-2: 699–712. Floridia, Antonio. 2017. Un’Idea Deliberativa della Democrazia. Genealogia e Principi. Bologna: Il Mulino. ———. 2018. The Origins of the Deliberative Turn. In The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy, ed. Andre Bächtiger, John S. Dryzek, Jane Mansbridge, and Mark E. Warren, 35–54. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Forst, Rainer. 2011. The Justification of Justice. Rawls and Habermas in Dialogue. In Disputing the Political: Habermas and Rawls, ed. James Gordon Finlayson and Fabian Freyenhagen, 153–180. London/New York, transl. by Jeffrey Flynn: Routledge. Fraser, Nancy. 2014a. Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: On the Legitimacy and Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Post-Westphalian World (2007). In Transnationalizing the Public Sphere, ed. Nancy Fraser and Kate Nash, 8–42. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2014b. Publicity, Subjection, Critique: A Reply to My Critics. In Transnationalizing the Public Sphere, ed. Nancy Fraser and Kate Nash, 129–156. Cambridge: Polity Press. Goodin, Robert E. 2007. Enfranchising All Affected Interests, and Its Alternatives. Philosophy and Public Affairs 35 (1): 40–68. Grimm, Dieter. 1995. Does Europe Need a Constitution? European Law Journal 1 (3): 282–302. effectiveness as a “yardstick for assessing the democratic legitimacy of global policy making” (Id: 178); Johan Karlsson Schaffer’s (2012) discussion, in which the principle is criticized on grounds of practical feasibility and logical cogency, and three possible alternatives are outlined and assessed.

40

2 Jürgen Habermas and the Communicative Sovereignty of Citizens

Habermas, Jürgen. 1988. Popular Sovereignty as a Procedure, in Habermas, Jürgen, 1996. Between Facts and Norms (1992), 463–490. Cambridge: Polity Press, transl. by William Rehg. ———. 1990a. Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification, in Habermas, Jürgen, 1990. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (1983), 45–115. Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, transl. by Christian Lenhardt and Shierry W. Nicholsen. ———. 1990b. Citizenship and National Identity, in Habermas, Jürgen, 1996. Between Facts and Norms (1992), 491–515. Cambridge: Polity Press, transl. by William Rehg. ———. 1994. Postscript, in Habermas, Jürgen, 1996. Between Facts and Norms (1992), 447–462. Cambridge: Polity Press, transl. by William Rehg. ———. 1995. Reconciliation Through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawls’s Political Liberalism. The Journal of Philosophy 92 (3): 109–131. transl. by Ciaran Cronin. ———. 1996. Between Facts and Norms (1992). Cambridge: Polity Press, transl. by William Rehg. ———. 2001a. The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays (1998). Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, ed. and transl. by Max Pensky. ———. 2001b. Why Europe Needs a Constitution. New Left Review 11: 5–26. Habermas, Jürgen, and William Rehg. 2001. Constitutional Democracy: A Paradoxical Union of Contradictory Principles? Political Theory 29 (6): 766–781. Honig, Bonnie. 2001. Dead Rights, Live Futures: A Reply to Habermas’s ‘Constitutional Democracy’. Political Theory 29 (6): 792–805. Koenig-Archibugi, Mathias. 2017. How to Diagnose Democratic Deficits in Global Politics: The Use of the ‘All Affected Principle’. International Theory 9 (2): 171–202. Lagerspetz, Eerik. 2015. Democracy and the All-Affected Principle. Res Cogitans 10 (1): 6–23. Larmore, Charles. 1999. The Moral Basis of Political Liberalism. The Journal of Philosophy 96 (12): 599–625. Love, Nancy. 1995. What’s Left of Marx? In The Cambridge Companion to Habermas, ed. Stephen K. White, 46–66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCarthy, Thomas. 1994. Kantian Constructivism and Reconstructivism: Rawls and Habermas in Dialogue. Ethics 105 (1): 44–63. Markell, Patchen. 2000. Making Affect Safe for Democracy? On ‘Constitutional Patriotism’. Political Theory 28 (1): 38–63. Michelman, Frank I. 1996. Review: Between Facts and Norms by Jürgen Habermas. The Journal of Philosophy 93 (6): 307–315. ———. 1999. Brennan and Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Müller, Jan-Werner. 2007a. Constitutional Patriotism. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press. ———. 2007b. Three Objections to Constitutional Patriotism. Constellations 14 (2): 197–209. Nagel, Thomas. 1991. Equality and Partiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Näsström, Sofia. 2011. The Challenge of the All-Affected Principle. Political Studies 59 (1): 116–134. Owen, David. 2014. Dilemmas of Inclusion: The All-Affected Principle, the All-Subjected Principle, and Transnational Public Spheres. In Transnationalizing the Public Sphere, ed. Nancy Fraser and Kate Nash, 112–128. Cambridge: Polity Press. Pensky, Max. 1995. Universalism and the Situated Critic. In The Cambridge Companion to Habermas, ed. Stephen K. White, 67–94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Petrucciani, Stefano. 2000. Introduzione a Habermas. Roma: Laterza. Rawls, John. 1995. Reply to Habermas, in Rawls, John, 2005. Political Liberalism (1993), expanded ed., 372–434. New York: Columbia University Press. Rehg, William. 1994. Insight and Solidarity: A Study in the Discourse Ethics of Jürgen Habermas. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press. Scanlon, Thomas M. 1982. Contractualism and Utilitarianism. In Utilitarianism and Beyond, ed. Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams, 103–128. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

References

41

Schaffer, Johan Karlsson. 2012. The Boundaries of Transnational Democracy: Alternatives to the All-Affected Principle. Review of International Studies 38 (2): 321–342. Teubner, Gunther. 1993. Law as an Autopoietic System. Oxford: Blackwell. ed. by Zenon Bankowski, transl. by Anne Bankowska and Ruth Adler. Warren, Mark E. 1995. The Self in Discursive Democracy. In The Cambridge Companion to Habermas, ed. Stephen K. White, 167–200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wellmer, Albrecht. 1991. Ethics and Dialogue: Elements of Moral Judgment in Kant and Discourse Ethics. In The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and Postmodernism, ed. Albrecht Wellmer, 113–231. Cambridge, transl. by David Midgley: Polity Press.

Chapter 3

John Rawls and the Constitutional Identity of ‘the People’

Abstract This chapter is mainly focused on Rawls’s later work, starting from the self-diagnosed problem with the conception of stability formulated in Part III of A Theory of Justice. The claim that “stability for the right reasons” is secured by a supposed congruence between the right and the good, postulated as universally valid, can no longer hold in the context of highly pluralistic societies. Rawls’s ground-breaking introduction of categories such as the reasonable, the “political” conception of justice and of the person, public reason, and overlapping consensus on the conception of justice and the constitutional essentials, is meant to dismiss the remainders of modern moral universalism persisting in A Theory of Justice. The normative foundation of the political order is anchored in the contextual substrate of the ideas on justice, politics, citizenship historically developed in a long-standing democratic community. Rawls’s idealization of this historical-contextual product allows him to forge a “political”, not “comprehensive” normative standpoint. Public reason, the “background political culture”, the conception of justice “most reasonable for us”, and the constitutional essentials which spell them out, are the non-metaphysical unifying factors of an otherwise heterogeneous people, whose political unity is enshrined in the constitutional text conceived of as an intergenerational project of collective self-government. Keywords Rawls · Political liberalism · Comprehensive liberalism · Stability · Reasonableness · Public reason · Constitutional essentials · Overlapping consensus · Dualist constitutionalism In introducing Rawls’s thought within the context of deliberative democratic theory, a preliminary remark is necessary, one related to Rawls’s theoretical turn evident in the intellectual trajectory that goes from A Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism. It might be argued that deliberative democracy is a sort of litmus test proving the depth of Rawls’s change of paradigm: from being one of the main polemical targets of the rising reflection on deliberation and democracy in political theory, his conceptual framework came to represent one of its apical models. The differences between the earlier and the later Rawls, and the reasons why the former was criticized by deliberative democrats while the latter constitutes one of the most © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Fiorespino, Radical Democracy and Populism, Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations 18, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84969-6_3

43

44

3 John Rawls and the Constitutional Identity of ‘the People’

articulated contributions to that theoretical branch, will hopefully become clear throughout the present chapter. What must be specified at this preliminary stage is that the following reconstruction of the Rawlsian theory will be focused primarily on the later Rawls, roughly from Political Liberalism (where the main reconsiderations of his initial framework, gradually introduced throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s,1 are formulated organically) to his very latest works. It is only at this stage of his intellectual path that his vast conceptual apparatus can be seen as an outstanding contribution to the growing researches on deliberation and democracy,2 thus being relevant to the present work. Therefore, a Rawlsian reply to the initial set of issues orienting our discussion will be elaborated on the grounds of the analysis of his later work, throughout which both the main continuities and discontinuities with the earlier stages of his thought will hopefully emerge, together with the reasons underlying the reversal of the relation between Rawlsian theory and deliberative democracy. To anticipate some conclusions, this endeavour will lead us to identify the Rawlsian subject of sovereignty as a ‘People’ conceived as a political – in Rawls’s sense – entity, whose deeply rooted features and self-understanding represent a normative source for the whole Rawlsian theoretical framework. Such People exercises its power within the substantive and procedural limits of the constitution that it has historically constructed, and the basic elements of which it is assumed to endorse.

3.1

Stability for the Right Reasons and a Problematic Conception of the Person

Notwithstanding some central continuities holding together the whole Rawlsian intellectual itinerary, his Political Liberalism and following works are underlain by a set of questions suggesting a substantial innovation from the very outset. As stressed by Rawls himself both in the “Introduction” and the “Introduction to the Paperback Edition”, the spark originating the necessity to rethink A Theory of Justice was his dissatisfaction with the formulation of political stability expounded in Part III (Rawls 2005). Before going deeper into that issue, let us briefly recall what Rawls means when he talks about the stability of a political regime. Such specification is important, as there is a way in which Rawls has never changed his understanding of stability. This might appear odd, once we premised that precisely this issue was the Archimedean lever upsetting A Theory of Justice at its roots, and opening the leeway for a deep theoretical turn. However, the same conception of stability echoes unchanged throughout the decades of Rawls’s activity as a philosopher. What

Some of the most relevant steps in this process of theoretical re-definition are “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory” (1980), “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical” (1985), “The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus” (1987), “The Priority of the Right and Ideas of the Good” (1988). 2 See Floridia (2017) on this. 1

3.1 Stability for the Right Reasons and a Problematic Conception of the Person

45

changes is the philosophical context, the awareness that Rawls matures about such conception, and hence the weight it gradually assumes. As stressed by Sebastiano Maffettone (2010), the peculiarity of this conception is precisely the reason why Rawls makes the apparently startling statement that “the problem of stability has played a very little role in the history of moral philosophy” (Rawls 2005: xvii). This statement is hard to defend, if one thinks of stability from a functional perspective. The search for the realistic conditions of the stability of a political order, of its duration over time and of political obligation can be traced back to Hobbes at least. However, this is not what Rawls has in mind. He addresses stability in a somewhat moral fashion, consciously neglecting the general understanding of stability as the mere capacity of a political order of reproducing itself. Rawls ties stability to an idea of legitimacy as the consent of the governed, and forges the concept of “stability for the right reasons”: society is stable if it preserves itself over time, but it is stable for the right reasons only if such preservation is causally connected with the widespread acceptance by citizens of the legal, political, cultural, and institutional order in which they live. In Rawls’s words, “what counts is the kind of stability, the nature of the forces that secure it” (Id: 142). To be true, a remainder of a more classic understanding of stability persists in A Theory of Justice, and can be observed in the premise underlying the first of the two arguments on stability offered by Rawls in Part III: “one conception of justice is more stable than another if the sense of justice that it tends to generate is stronger and more likely to override disruptive inclinations and if the institutions it allows foster weaker impulses and temptations to act unjustly” (Rawls 1999a: 398). Although we shall not be concerned here with Rawls’s attempts to prove the higher potential of justice as fairness to create and spread a sense of justice, the ambiguity of this claim is worth highlighting. Unlike the second argument on stability that will be analyzed shortly, here Rawls does not appear to connect stability to consensus, but merely to a sense of justice that the state and the institutional apparatus should “inculcate” in the citizenry: “several things suggest that the sense of justice corresponding to justice as fairness is stronger than the parallel sentiment inculcated by the other conceptions” (Id: 436–437). The paternalism of this position is partly dissonant both with the Rawlsian conception of stability sketched out above, and with a Hobbesian prudential conception of stability. If, on the one hand, stability is made to rely on a wideranging sense of justice, rather than being derived from the public apprehension of citizens towards their sovereign, on the other hand such sense of justice does not produce stability by virtue of the widespread “firm allegiance to a democratic society’s political (moral) ideals and values” (Rawls 1997: 459), but only by virtue of its producing the best results once inculcated, superimposed by the institutional system. Rawls is suspended between these two stages, and this ambivalent definition of stability appears even more startling when one realizes that it is presented in conjunction with the argument bearing the seeds of stability for the right reasons as outlined above. A similar ambiguity was highlighted by Kukathas and Pettit, who defined it as a tension, looming large in A Theory of Justice, between “feasibility

46

3 John Rawls and the Constitutional Identity of ‘the People’

arguments” and contractarian framework (Kukathas and Pettit 1990).3 In their view Rawls mixes arguments about the feasibility of his theory of justice with arguments on its normative strength, grounded in a theory of contract. The ambiguity generated by the intermeshing of the two levels corresponds precisely to the confusion diagnosed above about the different arguments on stability: whereas the idea that stable is a conception of justice that inculcates virtuous values makes for an argument on its feasibility, the intuition of a morally impregnated stability lays the ground for a normative argument for its feasibility.4 The second point on stability offered in A Theory of Justice represents in fact the first full-fledged attempt to demonstrate that justice as fairness is stable for the right reasons, thus simultaneously binding stability to the moral consensus of citizens. It is no coincidence that this bind originates when Rawls deals systematically with the issue of the conceptions of the good in the framework of justice as fairness. Likewise, it is no coincidence that Political Liberalism has its origin in the re-consideration of precisely this knot. As stressed by some observers, in Political Liberalism Rawls attributes primary importance to the citizen as a self-determining lawmaker, and thus to jurisprudential issues and constitutionalism. This has led readers to highlight under different respects the growth of a republican nuance in Rawls’s thought.5 Rawls’s positions on issues of social justice tend to be maintained

3

See also Ferrara (1999), p. 17. To be precise, it should be disclaimed that Kukathas and Pettit do not put it exactly this way. From their perspective, both the arguments for stability presented in Part III of A Theory of Justice amount to feasibility arguments, while arguments on the normative strength of justice as fairness are made solely within the contractarian setting of the original position, and are ultimately regarded as irrelevant for the defense of the theory: according to Kukathas and Pettit, contractarianism in A Theory of Justice cannot be meant to explain why the parties choose the principles as the best rational choice, because the desirability of the principles for Rawls exclusively depends on feasibility arguments. Rather, in their view the contractarian-normative strategy is ultimately a tool for Rawls to obtain a basic structure with given peculiarities (“general in form, universal in application and publicly recognized as the final court of appeal” (Kukathas and Pettit 1990: 73)) through an exercise of pure procedural justice, that is, in the absence of pre-given standards of rightness. Thus, Kukathas and Pettit relegate the normative arguments for justice as fairness exclusively in the original position, while stating their uselessness for the defense of Rawls’s theory. They do not seem to distinguish between stability and stability for the right reasons, and hence do not see the normative dimension of a conception of stability intrinsically connected to legitimacy. Thus, they regard all the arguments for stability in Part III of A Theory of Justice as feasibility arguments. 5 Carlson (1994), for instance, stresses how the differences between the understanding of the person in the earlier and the later Rawls reveal a reversal of the relation between citizens and law. The understanding of human nature assumed by Rawls in A Theory of Justice implies what Carlson calls a “correlative jurisprudence”, namely the reciprocal attribution among citizens of the same natural rights and duties responding to the same natural desires. In this framework, there is no positive role for the person, who is merely subject to a pre-fixed natural law. On the other hand, in Political Liberalism the person has a “Hegelian” “dual, instable nature” (Id: 1836), that does not allow for a legal system fixed according to a supposed rational, free and equal human nature. Pluralism of comprehensive doctrines and conceptions of the good involves what Carlson calls a “jurisprudence of right”, where citizens exercising their moral powers intervene in shaping the rules of their 4

3.1 Stability for the Right Reasons and a Problematic Conception of the Person

47

as “a background element in Political Liberalism, as one of the premises of his argument” (Maffettone 2010: 212),6 while the central object stems from the problem that he posed and did not solve – at least in his own view – when he tackled the issue

co-existence by “seeking to objectify themselves in the world” (Id: 1840). If the democratic political order is focused on the flourishing of the person’s moral powers, the latter cannot be entangled in a pre-given legal system based on natural law. Similarly, Maffettone (2010) observes that Rawls’s commitment to issues of socio-economic justice is replaced by a focus on legitimacy and its connection with self-determination and constitutionalism. As he puts it, “the consensualist mechanism involved in the social contract ultimately becomes more important than the socio-economic object of the contract” (Id: 221). Differently, Habermas (1995) criticizes Rawls precisely for standing still on the liberal side of the liberal/republican divide, thus failing to achieve a reconciliation between individual autonomy and popular sovereignty. According to Habermas, the original position is an attempt to operationalize the Kantian universalization principle in a way that is inconsistent with pluralism. Agreement among the parties, that allows principles to pass the test of intersubjective recognition and be regarded as right, is achieved by Rawls through the neutralization of the discursive conditions, that ultimately deprives agreement of its intersubjective grounds, and anchors it in a mere rational individual calculation. According to Habermas, this is also evident in the Rawlsian idea of primary goods: rational choice theory is irreconcilable with the intersubjective recognition necessary for parties to mutually attribute rights to each other; rather, it is consistent with the agreement on primary goods that individual citizens rationally pursue. This leads Habermas to denounce an ambiguous co-existence in Rawls of a deontological and a utilitarian dimension. What Habermas seems to overlook is the reformulation of the original position in Political Liberalism, as argued by Rawls himself in “Reply to Habermas” (1995). This will be further analyzed in Sect. 3.5. For a discussion of the debate between Habermas and Rawls, cf. Forst 2011 and Ferrara 2020. 6 The apparent step back on issues of social justice is particularly criticized by Brian Barry (1995), who argues that the socio-egalitarian commitment expressed in the second principle of justice is sacrificed on the altar of the liberal principle of legitimacy and of the inclusive view of public reason, according to which the justification of the political conception of justice at the centre of overlapping consensus can be achieved from within comprehensive doctrines. As Barry puts it, “mainstream Christian denominations have always tolerated socioeconomic inequalities [. . .] Islam and Judaism embrace a similar spread of views, while Hindu and Confucian systems are inegalitarian to the core” (Id: 911). From this perspective, a criterion of legitimacy allowing similar comprehensive views to internally justify the political conception rules out any socio-egalitarian commitment from overlapping consensus. However, Samuel Freeman (2003), Joshua Cohen (1989) and Norman Daniels (2003) variously insist on the egalitarian commitment, which they think Rawls maintains in Political Liberalism. Freeman and Daniels stress that Rawls never diminishes the relevance of the “fair value” of the liberties guaranteed to citizens by both the first principle and the principle of “fair equality of opportunity” (Freeman 2003; Daniels 2003). On their reading, this reveals an unvaried, though perhaps less explicit, commitment to social egalitarianism in the later Rawls. Moreover, as underlined by Freeman, the difference principle is intimately connected with reciprocity (Freeman 2003); thus, notwithstanding the principle’s exclusion from overlapping consensus, it arguably survives in the idea of reciprocity that acquires even greater importance in Political Liberalism. A similar point is further elaborated by Cohen, who clarifies the connections between the principles of justice and the “maximin”. For instance, he demonstrates that the principles of justice, among other things, are framed to foster the person’s self-respect by laying the ground for the institutional conditions creating its economic and social (associational) bases; accordingly, “maximin strengthens the foundations of self-respect” (Cohen 1989: 739), in that its maximization of the minimum resources available to individuals entails that their liberties – on which their self-respect depends – acquire the greatest value as possible. The implication of such internal connection between principles of justice and maximin is that as long as the former are held by Rawls, the difference principle, maximin, and the egalitarianism they embody survive the exclusion from the constitutional essentials operated in Political Liberalism.

48

3 John Rawls and the Constitutional Identity of ‘the People’

of a potential clash between the ‘right’ enshrined in justice as fairness and the particular conceptions of the good scattered throughout a social complex. In other words, Political Liberalism springs from the problems of legitimacy and selfdetermination largely unsolved in A Theory of Justice, where Rawls admittedly failed to avoid anti-pluralistic heteronomy in the foundation of stability for the right reasons.7 Rawls originally identifies the problem as opened up by the possible clash between justice as fairness and what he calls the “thin theory of the good”. Basically, the identification of a thin theory of the good is necessary for him to ground the rationality of the parties in selecting the principles of justice: the parties are rational insofar as they select the principles that are best equipped to provide all the citizens with primary goods, such as liberty, wealth, self-respect, “sure confidence in the sense of one’s own worth” (Rawls 1999a: 348). These primary goods are the objects of a thin conception of the good, one that is “restricted to bare essentials” (Ibid). Although “the rationality of choosing the principles of justice in the original position is not in question” (Id: 497), the problem of the “congruence” between the principles and the satisfaction of the thin theory’s conditions arises when one appreciates that there are people whose conceptions of the good do not hold the core elements of justice as fairness as primary concerns, hence having their primary goods jeopardized by the application of the principles of justice to the basic structure of the society. Rawls’s argument to prove the congruence between the right and the good is threefold. First of all, abiding to justice as fairness is good for everyone, as that is the most rational conception of justice. This means that it provides primary goods to everyone in the most effective way; violating the principles of justice means impairing this mechanism, and thus potentially harming, whether directly or indirectly, people who are affectively tied to the disobedient citizen herself. For Rawls, this is clearly against “natural attitudes” (Id: 499), which thus are intimately connected to acting justly. The second part of the argument has to do with the Aristotelian principle, according to which “participating in the life of a well-ordered society is a great good” (Id: 500), because “given the social nature of humankind” (Ibid), everyone expresses his own potential at best when peacefully co-existing and cooperating with peers. Finally, the third part of the congruence argument is based on the “Kantian interpretation” of justice as fairness, devised by Rawls to underpin the original position and its outcomes from the perspective of his own peculiar reading of Kant. According to Rawls, moral principles in Kant are compatible with the autonomy of the individual only if they are “chosen by him as the most adequate

7

It is worth noting that this is not in contrast, but in line with, an apparently more discontinuist account on the relation between A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, such as that presented by Freeman in his Rawls (2007). Freeman introduces Political Liberalism by highlighting the subject that distinguishes it from A Theory of Justice at the very outset. Roughly, while the subject of the former is political legitimacy and its “practical possibility”, the subject of the latter was social justice (Freeman 2007). However, this difference in subject, that allows reading Political Liberalism as independent of A Theory of Justice, does not cut the genetic thread binding the former to the latter.

3.1 Stability for the Right Reasons and a Problematic Conception of the Person

49

possible expression of his nature as a free and rational human being” (Id: 222). As it will emerge better later, Rawls thinks that Kant starts from a specific perspective of the person to construct a system of moral principles that can neither be borrowed from an external, self-standing ontological order detached from human life and nature, nor can depend on social and historical contingencies, factuality, happenstance. Human nature as free and equal is the only ground for the construction of a moral order, and justice as fairness is constructed from the original position precisely according to these Kantian coordinates. Hence it is said to be good for all, insofar as grounded in a common human nature. From this vantage point, the good and the right are congruent precisely because justice as fairness is devised through a mental experiment leaving aside any contingency and taking as its starting point the Kantian conception of the human being as free, equal and rational. For a person thus conceived, acting justly in the sense of acting according to justice as fairness is congruent to her nature, and hence good. Human nature being common to all, the pursuit of justice as fairness is good to all. What is evident here is Rawls’s implicit adoption of a conception of human nature that is already intrinsically liberal, by virtue of which people are prone to accepting the liberal principles of justice not merely in view of their political orientation, but on the intimate grounds of their human nature. The whole congruence argument is built on a threefold understanding of the nature of human beings conceived of as social animals, free and equal, inclined to promote the good of their loved ones. This is not to say that the moral order of justice as fairness draws from an independent and extrinsic order of values, like the philosophical approach that Rawls calls “rational intuitionism”. The order of values and principles grounding and orienting the political-institutional order is not constructed along the lines of a metaphysical truth independent of the people it has to govern. Not by chance, one of the justificatory strategies of justice as fairness is reflective equilibrium, i.e. the dialectical process of adjusting one’s individual moral perspectives to the conception of justice and vice-versa, until a balance between the two is achieved and the conception of justice is fully justified. The introduction of reflective equilibrium as a justificatory dialectics rules out the possibility to adhere to a Platonic external set of principles. Rather, the starting point of the construction of justice as fairness at this stage of Rawls’s reflection seems to be a liberal account of human nature as a whole. A liberal identity, i.e. an identity made up with liberal-oriented ends and moral commitments, is attached to human nature as such.8 This is why some of the

8

Thomas Nagel (1973) made a similar point few years past the publication of A Theory of Justice: “the original position seems to presuppose not just a neutral theory of the good, but a liberal, individualistic conception according to which the best that can be wished for someone is the unimpeded pursuit of his own path” (Id: 228). Nagel acknowledges the necessity for Rawls to postulate a common ground of choice in order to identify principles of justice shared by all; however, “the selection of that ground inevitably represents a strong assumption” (Id: 229). Gerald Doppelt goes even further in arguing that not only “Rawls’s Kantian conception of persons does base the moral identity of persons and social justice upon a conception of the good and certain values and ends”, but also that “these ends and values are shared, common ends and define a strong

50

3 John Rawls and the Constitutional Identity of ‘the People’

well-known communitarian criticisms to Rawls’s ‘self’ appear to partially miss the target. Let us briefly analyze Charles Taylor’s and Michael Sandel’s arguments of the “unencumbered self”. For what concerns Taylor, his definition of personhood and consciousness is centred on the idea of reflexivity. Consciousness is not the locus of free-standing mental representations, but of representations reflexively interpreted by the individual (Taylor 1985). Those self-representations are made possible by the vocabulary the individual is endowed with, and which she nurtures throughout her life. The more refined the vocabulary, the more the individual is inclined to frame selfrepresentations of what happens around and to her, and the better she grasps the undertones of her resulting emotions, reactions, moral motivations. Thus, a human ‘self’ is an entity whose consciousness is constituted by self-representations shaped by a vocabulary. This leads Taylor to stress the relevance of the community where a given vocabulary, or language, is absorbed by whom grows and lives therein. A ‘self’ cannot be severed from its self-understanding and the self-representations populating its consciousness, which in turn are made possible precisely by a cultural-linguistic horizon. The question itself introducing the path to selfunderstanding (‘who am I?’) cannot but arise in relation to other ‘selves’ (Taylor 1989). Rawls’s person is therefore a repressed self, in Taylor’s view, in that she is severed from the cultural background that intimately shapes her. Moreover, Taylor observes that the subordination of the conceptions of the good to the idea of the ‘right’ contradicts reflective equilibrium (Id). In a similar vein, Sandel reconstructs the Rawlsian understanding of the self underlying the original position, and defines it as a unique identifiable entity, prior to and independent of its ends and capable of voluntarily choosing them. On Sandel’s reading, this allows Rawls to maintain a self that is free from empirical attributes “without lapsing into transcendence” (Sandel 1982: 59). Similarly to Taylor, the problem Sandel identifies has to do with the individualism of such idea of the self. By individualism he does not mean the egoism of a self-focused individual, but rather the idea of an individual abstracted from the intersubjective bonds, dynamics, cultural backgrounds and affiliations that shape her. In this sense the Rawlsian

notion of community in Rawls’s notion of a well-ordered society” (Doppelt 1989: 819). For further elaboration and literature on this point, see Chapter 7 of Rawls. A Theory of Justice and its Critics (Kukathas and Pettit 1990). For a different perspective, defending the congruence argument in A Theory of Justice against Rawls himself, cf. Mendus (1999). On her reading, “the sense of justice can be shown to be for the good of the agent who endorses it without degenerating into absurdity and without invoking an objectionably Kantian doctrine of the true self” (Id: 75). The congruence between the right and the good, Mendus argues, is made possible by a moral psychology which appreciates their interdependence: justice contributes to shaping the good, which is not pre-determined, in that an essential drive of citizens is to justify their own actions to themselves, thus following shared ideas on justice which may contradict, and act upon, their ideas of the good.

3.1 Stability for the Right Reasons and a Problematic Conception of the Person

51

person is “unencumbered”, pre-fixed and incapable of achieving and changing her self-understanding. These arguments, especially Sandel’s, do not fully grasp the strong connotation that Rawls applies to the idea of the person at the basis of his theoretical construction. Rather than disentangling the self from the ends and commitments that constitute it, Rawls universalistically encumbers it with liberal tinges and liberal aims. Thus, it is true that the Rawlsian person as outlined in A Theory of Justice is pre-fixed, asocial, and formed independently of an original community, as Taylor and Sandel claim; nonetheless, it is pre-fixed not as an empty creature preceding its ends, but as chained to specific (liberal) ends by its very nature as a human being. This is why a third renowned communitarian critic to the earlier Rawls’s conception of the self, namely Alasdair MacIntyre, seems to hit the bull’s-eye. MacIntyre (2007) criticizes Rawls in conjunction with Robert Nozick, claiming that their different theories of justice are nothing more than a theoretical operation of disembodiment of conceptions of justice that are not really independent of, but grounded in, historically formed social groups and cultures. According to MacIntyre, Rawls and Nozick share precisely the idea of a pre-social individual possessing a moral perspective independent of her community of origin. What they disagree on are the contents of those moral perspectives – resulting in different conceptions of justice – that according to MacIntyre enshrine “many disparate and rival moral concepts, in this case rival and disparate concepts of justice, and [. . .] the moral resources of the culture allow us no way of settling the issue between them rationally” (MacIntyre 2007: 252). Rawls’s and Nozick’s theories are incompatible with and incapable of harming each other because they draw on two different and incommensurable cultural universes disguised as rational abstractions. Their conceptions of the self are assumed as neutral and “unencumbered” from partial ends, but they are not. In Rawlsian terms, they are rooted in different and incompatible comprehensive doctrines. This is precisely what Rawls himself has gradually recognized in the years following the publication of A Theory of Justice: the conception of the person assumed therein is a comprehensive one,9 and its adoption as the ground of a theory of justice overshadows the existing “plurality of reasonable yet incompatible comprehensive doctrines [which] is the result of the exercise of human reason within the framework of the free institutions of a constitutional democratic regime” (Rawls 2005: xvi). The society theorized in A Theory of Justice is re-defined in Political Liberalism as both “unrealistic” and normatively undesirable, as it is substantially heteronomous towards the non-liberal reasonable comprehensive doctrines and their related understandings of the person. As Freeman aptly puts it, the fact that the principles of justice as fairness “are philosophically justifiable and true does not mean they are publicly justifiable to the members of a democratic society” (Freeman 2007: 325). Rawls’s philosophical turn is urged by this concern with the public justification of a theory of justice in societies marked by “the fact of reasonable pluralism”.

9

This crucial notion will be analyzed shortly in Sect. 3.2.

52

3.2

3 John Rawls and the Constitutional Identity of ‘the People’

Two Pillars of Rawlsian Methodology: Normative Minimalism and Political Constructivism

The acknowledgment of reasonable pluralism as the existence of irreconcilable incompatibilities among varied conceptions of human nature, of justice, of the good, held by individuals and groups co-existing in democratic societies, compels Rawls to devise a new set of questions. Their conflation leads to the famous formulation opening the discussion of Political Liberalism: “how is it possible for there to exist over time a just and stable society of free and equal citizens, who remain profoundly divided by reasonable religious, philosophical and moral doctrines?” (Rawls 2005: 4). Let us begin the reconstruction of Rawls’s framework by briefly introducing two methodological fundamentals of his thought: normative minimalism and political constructivism. As to the former, as stressed by Ferrara, it constitutes one of the points of continuity in Rawls’s theoretical path, and has its crux in the idea that “the less the conflict adjudicating procedure presupposes in terms of moral and metaphysical ideas, the greater chances it has to be acceptable to contending parties who subscribe to different and sometimes rival worldviews and moral outlooks” (Ferrara 1999: 14). As succinctly stated by Rawls at the very beginning of Political Liberalism, “perhaps the most that can be done is to narrow the range of disagreement” (Rawls 2005: 8). Before going deeper into these themes, it might be fruitful to specify one basic assumption underlying this section, regarding the continuity/discontinuity issue in Rawls’s thought. This contention is that every Rawlsian idea continuously maintained throughout his intellectual itinerary requires a deep theoretical discontinuity to be properly reproduced. In other words, for the sake of the continuity of his theoretical and methodological pivotal intuitions (normative minimalism, constructivism, the priority of the right over the good, the original position and the principles of justice), Rawls had to filter them through the lenses of a new theoretical paradigm, philosophically discontinuous from his earlier thought.10 The first methodological point mentioned, namely normative minimalism, undergoes this transformation in a way that will become clearer in the discussion on the second methodological pillar of Political Liberalism: political constructivism. Although the concept does not appear in A Theory of Justice, its seeds are evident in the Kantian interpretation of justice as fairness discussed above. As we have seen, in devising his conception of justice Rawls draws on his own interpretation of the Kantian method, which in his view has its kernel in the idea of constructing the order of moral values for a political society on the grounds of a set of basic assumptions on the person. This involves excluding any contingent factor in order to achieve a In “Sideways at the Entrance of the Cave: A Pluralist Footnote to Plato” (2019), Ferrara reconstructs Plato’s myth of the cave in a Rawlsian key, in order to simultaneously highlight the extent of Rawls’s theoretical turn and the location of his thought within the history of Western political philosophy.

10

3.2 Two Pillars of Rawlsian Methodology

53

conception of justice tailored upon the nature of those who are supposed to abide by it. However, Rawls does not use the term ‘constructivist’ to refer to this method until 1980, with the article “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory” (Rawls 1980), and provides the most mature formulation of it only in the ad hoc chapter of Political Liberalism.11 There he clearly distinguishes his political constructivism from Kantian constructivism, which he regards as the exemplification of a methodology pertaining to a comprehensive doctrine. The introduction of the distinction between the political and the comprehensive constitutes one of the main theoretical turns achieved by Rawls throughout more than two decades, and organically formulated in Political Liberalism. The distinction, Rawls stresses, is a matter of scope: on the one hand, a comprehensive doctrine enshrines, or can enshrine, a complete system of knowledge, whether religious or not, potentially extended to every aspect of human life and nature, displaying moral points of reference connected to anthropological abstractions upon which the theorization of a political order ultimately rests. Roughly speaking, in a vocabulary empathizing with continental philosophy a comprehensive doctrine could be associated with an onto-theological system, and its corollary political framework to a political onto-theology – even though Rawls duly includes a host of doctrines the complexity of which varies on a spectre ranging from “partially comprehensive” to “fully comprehensive”, where the former are clearly more modest than an onto-theological system in terms of width, depth and theoretical sharpness. On the other hand, a political conception has a far narrower scope, the aim of which is precisely to operate that reduction of the possible “range of disagreement” mentioned above as the crux of normative minimalism. A political conception of justice takes as its subject the basic structure of society, i.e., the backbone of social, political and economic institutions shaping a social order; it is “freestanding” of any metaphysical system of values, and grounded exclusively in the ideas pervading the “background culture” of the socio-political context whose basic structure it is meant to regulate. In a nutshell, a political conception of justice regulates the basic structure of a specific society drawing from the political culture inhabiting that society itself. At this point it should start being clear how political constructivism differs from the Kantian constructivism underlying justice as fairness as developed in A Theory of Justice: political constructivism is the method to construct a political conception of justice, in that it substitutes a metaphysical point of departure with some “fundamental ideas” embedded in the social context the political conception of justice is meant to regulate. Those fundamental ideas are taken as the groundwork for construction, which should deliver a conception of justice free of any metaphysical fetter, in line with its non-metaphysical bedrock of initial assumptions. Thus, while Kantian and Rawlsian constructivisms equally differ from “rational intuitionism” in their rejection of an external moral order disentangled from the nature of the people to which it is supposed to apply, they diverge in scope. Both Kantian moral theory

11

For a thorough reconstruction of the evolution of Rawls’s constructivism, see Onora O’Neill (2003: 349–353).

54

3 John Rawls and the Constitutional Identity of ‘the People’

and the earlier justice as fairness, grounded in the same kind of metaphysical constructivism, are placed by Rawls among comprehensive doctrines. Their point of departure lies in a specific, monological conception of human nature tout court, which aspires to universality and cannot be institutionally implemented without lapsing into a form of political oppression on those who hold reasonable comprehensive doctrines enshrining a different, and yet reasonable, conception of the self and human life under any respect. Rawls claims that “the fact of oppression” verifies in the cases of comprehensive doctrines being imposed which “can be maintained only by the oppressive use of state power” (2005: 37). Thus, political constructivism excludes “the point of view of practical reason as such” (Id: 116): the construction takes the principles of practical reason as a complementary ingredient to the fundamental ideas on person and society, contextually extracted, that orient the creation of a political conception of justice. As noted by Ronald Milo (1995), constructivism is jeopardized by the same objections affecting contract theory. For instance, he reports Dworkin’s contention that a constructed moral or political order cannot effectively demonstrate the intrinsic wrongness of a given behaviour, as wrongness in a contractarian framework can be solely made to depend on the moral dishonesty of breaking the mutual promise among contractors.12 However, as argued by Milo, constructivism does not tie the moral wrongness of a behaviour to the higher-level ‘sin’ of dishonouring the contract that forbids it; rather, constructivism defines the morally wrong behaviour as the behaviour rejected and prohibited by the contractors (Milo 1995). Wrongness depends on the intersubjective agreement on the prohibition, rather than on a lack of compliance to the contractual bind, i.e. the breaking of a promise. A further criticism to contractualism which threatens constructivism alike should sound familiar: the principles agreed on, far from being neutral, are affected by the moral burden lingering on the premises of the construction. Moreover, a third objection runs, should not a theory on moral objectivity establish parameters to solve conflicts between principles, provide methods of inquiry, “a concept of correct judgment” (Rawls 2005: 111), and criteria to derive specific and applicable principles from general ones? Finally, “does not contractarian constructivism succeed in underwriting the objective truth of certain moral principles only because it assumes their truth to begin with?” (Milo 1995: 201). Let us briefly look at how Rawls’s political constructivism addresses these issues. The second and the fourth can be conflated into one reply, grounded in Rawls’s distinction between Kantian (comprehensive) and political constructivism, and between comprehensive and political conceptions of justice. Rawls is obviously aware of the non-neutral groundwork of his constructive endeavour, which goes hand in hand with his search for a non-universalistic construction of justice. His aim in Political Liberalism is precisely to “work out” a political conception of justice suitable for the citizens of a liberal-democratic state, depicted according to idealized qualities. Thus, the assumption of a non-neutral, markedly connoted person to begin

12

Cf. Dworkin 1973.

3.3 The Political Conception of the Person, Fair Cooperation, and the. . .

55

with is a crucial part of the endeavour, and it would constitute a problem only if the resulting conception of justice had to be proved as somewhat ‘true’. Yet, this is precisely what Rawls rules out: the political conception does not deal with its own truth, nor with the truth of any comprehensive doctrine. As observed by Milo, “the hypothetical contract is not proposed as a way of testing and establishing the objective truth (or justifiability) of certain moral principles, but rather (assuming their truth) as a way of explaining what their truth and objectivity might be thought to consist in” (Id: 202). The product of the construction is a conception of justice that is suitable to the subject for which it was constructed, and precisely for this reason is provides objectivity criteria; neither the claims of that subject, nor the pillars of its suited conception are supposed to pass a test of truth, unless one decides to venture in the redundant challenge to test the truth of a conception of objectivity according to a competing, incommensurable conception of objectivity or truth. Let us now turn to the constructivist criteria of reasoning and judgment invoked by the third objection above. The gist of constructivism is its rootedness in the addressee of the construction, which in Rawls’s case is a specifically designed subject. It is the subject of the constructed moral order, its self-understanding, features and considered consent that constitutes the supreme parameter of correct judgment within that moral order, as well as the criterion steering the specification of contingent guidelines and principles. This will be further analyzed in Sect. 3.5, when we will discuss the issue of the prioritization and regulation of liberties in Rawls. In the case of the objectivity of political claims and reasons, thus, “to say that a political conviction is objective is to say that there are reasons, specified by a reasonable and mutually recognizable political conception [. . .], sufficient to convince all reasonable persons that it is reasonable” (Rawls 2005: 119).

3.3

The Political Conception of the Person, Fair Cooperation, and the Well-Ordered Society

Let us now turn to the fundamental ideas assumed by Rawls as the points of departure for the construction of a political conception of justice: a “political conception of the person”, “society as a fair system of cooperation” and the “idea of a well-ordered society”. These ideas have a somewhat hybrid status: on the one hand they are conceived of as contextual entities, intuitive elements latent in a democratic political culture, while on the other they are highly idealized and cleansed from empirical or ‘comprehensive’ determinations, in order to supply the ground for a political conception of justice. For what regards the former, Rawls firmly rejects the idea that his conception of the person be metaphysical: it does not correspond to an abstraction on human nature as such, borrowed from a metaphysical doctrine; rather, it is limited to describing the basic physiognomy of the political person in a constitutional democracy of the twentieth century, under the exclusive respects pertaining to the construction of a

56

3 John Rawls and the Constitutional Identity of ‘the People’

political conception of justice to be applied to the basic structure of that society. The first features identified by Rawls, which he calls “the two moral powers”, are the capacity for a sense of justice and the capacity to “form, revise, and rationally pursue a conception of the good” (Id: 30). These two powers of moral personality constitute the threshold below which a person cannot be regarded as a “fully cooperating member of society”. Rawls is careful to specify that the adherence to the public conception of justice is not subordinated to the transformations in identity and beliefs undergone by individuals throughout their lifetimes. For his purposes, he describes the individual identity of the person as split into “political” and “nonpolitical”. The non-political identity of the person can radically change throughout her life – as in the story of Saul’s spiritual transformation on the road to Damascus, illustrated by Rawls – without any significant change in her commitment to the public conception of justice, commitment that can always be re-balanced through the method of reflective equilibrium. In other words, the relevance of one person’s conception of the good does and should not impinge on her adherence to the public conception of justice, as those two facets of the individual identity are separate and partly self-standing – and yet partly connected, as we shall see in the discussion on public reason. The second feature of the political conception of the person is the view of citizens as “self-authenticating sources of validity claims” (Id: 32). Rawls explains this feature of the citizen in a constitutional democracy by contrast to a society of slaveholders, where a portion of the citizenry cannot be conceived of, and cannot conceive of itself, as a self-authenticating source of validity claims, free to advance its good as well as public justice in the public forum. Third, citizens are “capable of taking responsibility for their ends” (Id: 33): they are taken as able to formulate ends that can be pursued within the public conception of justice. Finally, Rawls specifies a set of moral motivations constitutive of the democratic person, the most interesting of which is the will of the citizen to be recognized as a fully cooperating member of society, and thus of being socially recognized as holding the two moral powers, the status of self-authenticating source of validity claims, and the responsibility for her ends.13 This point is crucial, as it bridges the political conception of the person with the political conception of justice, thereby unveiling the workings of the constructivist method: the political conception of justice is shaped by and is meant to preserve a given conception of citizenship that democratic citizens themselves are willing to preserve, as it is articulated along the lines of the settled democratic tradition they live in, and hence of their selfunderstanding. Rawls assumes that in a long-established democratic tradition, the self-understanding that citizens aspire to reproduce through the political conception of justice is that of free and equal cooperating members of society. This leads us to the other two fundamental ideas, namely society as a fair system of cooperation and the well-ordered society. For what regards the latter, its point is to

13

Cf. Rawls 2005, pp. 81–86.

3.4 Rawls’s Post-metaphysical Turn: The Reasonable

57

postulate the existence of reasonable pluralism in a long-established democratic political culture: although modern societies are inhabited by holders of non-liberal comprehensive doctrines, resulting from cultural differences and from “the work of free practical reason” (Id: 37), many of those doctrines are still reasonable, and the political conception of justice has to earn their support rather than oppressing them by taking the shape of a liberal comprehensive conception. As we shall see, Rawls assumes that in a well-ordered society characterized by reasonable pluralism citizens accept the same principles of justice, albeit for different reasons, and recognize their effectiveness in regulating the publicly known basic structure of society. The last fundamental idea is that of “society as a fair system cooperation over time, from one generation to the next” (Id: 15). Once again, Rawls starts from the seeds hypothetically born in an established democratic political culture, which lead him to such definition of society and to the following specifications of the concept of cooperation: in order for a society to be set as a system of cooperation, it must have established a set of procedures, publicly known and accepted, which secure that cooperation happens according to fair terms. Although Rawls specifies that “social cooperation requires an idea of each participant’s rational advantage” (Id: 16), in the absence of which an essential moral motivation to cooperate eclipses, fair terms cannot be merely defined by the idea of mutual advantage. Rather, they require an idea of reciprocity, which is half-way between an altruistic commitment to the good of all and the mutual advantage of the individual actors. From the idea of reciprocity starts the thread connecting the fundamental idea of society to the political conception of justice springing from it: whereas the fundamental idea assumed by Rawls requires reciprocity in order to make cooperation among citizens fairly work and effectively reproduce across generations, the principles of justice enshrine precisely reciprocity as “a relation between citizens” (Id: 17). Thus, through the medium of justice as fairness reciprocity pervades the basic structure of society, thereby regulating cooperation according to fair terms. Reciprocity, expressed in the principles of justice and hence institutionally embedded, allows realizing the democratic ideal of society as a fair system of cooperation among citizens, where citizens agree to abide by principles that advantage not merely and not always their contingent individual good, but the structure of cooperative procedures that secures the preservation of their own condition as free and equals, specified by the moral powers and features of the political person.

3.4

Rawls’s Post-metaphysical Turn: The Reasonable

The discussion of the fair terms of cooperation, reciprocity and the way they contribute to ground the political conception of justice allows us to address a further essential element of innovation characterizing Political Liberalism, namely the reasonable. Rawls identifies two respects under which the reasonable can be defined, and which constitute a condition of its predicability. First of all, “the reasonable is an element of the idea of society as a fair system of cooperation and

58

3 John Rawls and the Constitutional Identity of ‘the People’

that its fair terms be reasonable for all to accept is part of its idea of reciprocity” (Id: 49–50). In other words, reasonable are those citizens who accept the fair terms of cooperation, and hence reciprocity, and who propose terms of cooperation that they think may be regarded by their fellow citizens as fair, or reasonable, and hence endorsed. The second concept explaining and substantiating the idea of the reasonable is that of the burdens of judgment. As well as reciprocity and fair terms of cooperation, the acceptance of the burdens of judgment constitutes a condition of the reasonableness of a person or a comprehensive doctrine. The concept is crucial, as it sheds light and better explains two Rawlsian assumptions we mentioned before, namely the “fact of oppression” and reasonable pluralism. The burdens of judgment are identified by Rawls as the reasons why reasonable disagreement arises in a context of free democratic institutions. Basically, he lists a set of common difficulties in formulating judgments of both practical and theoretical reason: the possible complexity of the evidence underpinning assessments, the disagreements about the relevance to be attributed to given aspects of an issue, the indeterminacy of all concepts, the background life-experience of unique individual actors, the incommensurability of normative considerations and the difficulties in setting priorities “among cherished values” (Id: 57) belonging to divergent comprehensive doctrines. The peculiarity of this insistence on the problematic character of expressing judgments is not merely that it explains the origins of reasonable disagreement, but that it unveils the epistemological impossibility to achieve uncontroversial claims to truth. With this, Rawls neither denies nor asserts the truth of any comprehensive doctrine – an effort that he regards as irrelevant from the perspective of the political conception and political constructivism, as discussed in Sect. 3.2 – but rather lays a quite intuitive epistemological basis for ruling out the possibility that a given doctrine can be uncontroversial and universally accepted as true. Thus, reasonable citizens are defined as those who accept that “the burdens of judgment set limits on what can be reasonably justified to others, and so they endorse some form of liberty of conscience and freedom of thought” (Id: 61). As Rawls clarifies, accepting the burdens of judgment is a political choice, in spite of its clear epistemological basis. Like the commitment to reciprocity and fair terms of cooperation, the compliance to the burdens of judgment is the symptom of a “moral sensibility” (Id: 51) that has the public focus and aim to “address the public world of others” (Id: 62). Again, this should not be seen as overlapping with pure altruism, but as the will to realize a society shaped upon the fundamental ideas of its background culture, which in a democratic political culture means a society of free and equals who fairly cooperate over generations. On the other hand, the rational is the capacity of the individual actor to form, prioritize and select her ends and the means to achieve them. Rawls stresses the complementarity of reasonable and rational. He opposes the temptation, common in the history of philosophy, to subordinate the former to the latter, and insists on their self-standing but mutually dependent status: while the reasonable alone lacks the capacity to formulate ends, prioritize them and select the

3.4 Rawls’s Post-metaphysical Turn: The Reasonable

59

proper means to pursue them, the rational alone is unsuitable for creating and reproducing a well-ordered social world. At this point, it might be interesting to briefly unearth the connection between the two main innovations of Political Liberalism hitherto discussed, namely the differentiation between political and comprehensive on the one hand, and the reasonable on the other. The primary role acquired by the reasonable responds precisely to the necessity to weaken the normative core of justice as fairness, unburdening it of its metaphysical roots in the Kantian matrix. The overcoming of the assumption that an idea of human nature common to all should ground the publicly shared conception of justice, so that the latter is congruent with the good of all and hence universally rational, leaves room for a different kind of procedure of construction, one oriented by what is reasonable for us. The ground of the conception of justice shifts from metaphysical to contextual ideas implicit in the background political culture. This eclipse of a metaphysical foundation in favour of a political one coheres with and requires the reasonable defined as the political virtue of recognizing metaphysical foundations as oppressive and blind to the burdens of judgment and reciprocity. The reasonable discursive search for a just and stable political order starts from a contextual hotbed of ideas by which democratic citizens reflexively understand themselves, and produces a political conception of justice tailored upon and meant to preserve and reproduce them. The co-existence of a normative and a descriptive-empirical dimension in the concept of the reasonable attracted a broad spectrum of reactions.14 On the one hand, the reasonable is charged with accusations of epistemic abstinence, or normative weakness: it lacks a normative validity, which is insufficiently replaced by an empirical/contextual one. On the other hand, readers have criticized the allegedly weak grounds on which Rawls justifies political exclusion, and which make such exclusion arbitrary.15 Finally, a number of authors have defended the reasonable from those criticisms on largely divergent, if not opposite, grounds. Let us start with epistemic critics, the first of which is actually an admirer of Rawls’s political liberalism – or of a certain interpretation of it – precisely because of its supposed epistemological emptiness. In the article eloquently titled “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy” (Rorty 2011), Richard Rorty sympathizes with Rawls’s later framework, which he flattens along the lines of a strong contextualism disencumbered from any aspiration to philosophical foundation and justification. Rorty enthusiastically defends political liberalism thus interpreted, which he deems symptomatic of a political theory finally aware of the fact that “social policy needs no more authority than successful accommodation among individuals, individuals who find themselves heir to the same historical traditions and faced with the same 14

In the present account I shall follow Sebastiano Maffettone’s distinction between political and epistemic criticisms to the reasonable (Maffettone 2010). 15 Maffettone identifies Gerald F. Gaus’s argument as conflating the political and the epistemic critiques: given its normative emptiness, the reasonable lacks criteria of inclusion and exclusion, and thus any exclusion it performs amounts to an act of arbitrary discrimination (Maffettone 2010: 245–246 and notes).

60

3 John Rawls and the Constitutional Identity of ‘the People’

problems” (Id: 387). In his view, Rawls’s theory is rightfully devoid of normativity. It does without any idea of human nature, against communitarians, and of any “extrapolitical grounding” for philosophical justification; rather, it is exclusively focused on “history and sociology” (Id: 386), with the aim to extract the contextual political ideas latently working – and concretely endorsed – in the American bicentennial democracy. This is all a democratic political order needs. Among the opponents to this radically anti-foundationalist interpretation, one is our second prominent epistemic critic of Rawls: Habermas, whose point is precisely that Rawls is ambiguously suspended between the contextualism buttressed by Rorty and a more substantive normative aspiration. Habermas criticizes the epistemic weakness of Political Liberalism not because he does not see any normative foundation in it, as Rorty does (“even the present-day Rawls, pace Richard Rorty, has not become a contextualist” (Habermas 1995: 120)), but rather because he thinks that “Rawls must make a sharper distinction between acceptability and acceptance” (Id: 122). The idea of the reasonable conflates descriptive elements with their normative idealization, thus obscuring its normative scope and content and gaining its force merely from its factual acceptance within the real-world societies in which Rawls is interested. On the one hand, Habermas observes that collective deliberation among citizens and their consensus on the conception of justice constitute a legitimacy requirement for Rawls, which reveals a normative core. In this context, one could interpret the reasonable as “a predicate for the validity of normative statements” (Id: 124), meant to objectively recognize valid claims within the deliberative process. Although Habermas sympathizes with this interpretation, he observes, on the other hand, that it does not correspond to the way Rawls employs the reasonable. The reasonable cannot overlap with a standard of validity, according to Habermas, because in Rawls’s view comprehensive doctrines bear truth-claims the assessment of which is distinguished from the assessment of their reasonableness. Their validity is disentangled from their reasonableness, and in turn reasonableness cannot come to represent an external standard of their validity. This entails, in Habermas’s view, that when Rawls predicates the reasonableness of his own conception of justice, he is not defending its normative validity, but rather its consistence with “a kind of tolerance toward worldviews that are not unreasonable” (Id: 125), which is to be found in a long-standing democratic tradition. For Habermas, the connection between truthclaims and comprehensive doctrines, and the related disentanglement of truth and reasonable, hinder Rawls from the adoption of a “moral validity independent of religion and metaphysics” (Id: 126) (such as the discourse principle), which in Habermas’s vocabulary is indispensable for the normative foundation of a theoretical construction. A third epistemic critic is Joseph Raz, whose argument has its gist in the expression “epistemic abstinence”. In formulating his objection, Raz goes so deep as to address the very role, meaning and scope of political philosophy, which in his view cannot do without truth: “to recommend one [theory] as a theory of justice for our societies is to recommend it as a just theory of justice, that is, as a true, or reasonable, or valid theory of justice” (Raz 1990: 15). Unless Rawls has dropped his philosophical engagement and has become a politician, as Raz provokingly

3.4 Rawls’s Post-metaphysical Turn: The Reasonable

61

wonders, his aim cannot be limited to the practical creation of a consensus within society, such as the prudential agreement characterizing a “modus vivendi”; similarly to Habermas, Raz clearly recognizes the normative effort of Rawls in pursuing “a genuinely philosophical conception of justice, not merely a political expediency” (Id: 13). To Raz, this normative core in Rawls’s political liberalism determines the latter’s subsumption under truth-claims, whether Rawls accepts it or not. A fourth epistemic criticism, self-describing as lying between Rawls and Raz, comes from David Estlund (1998). Estlund focuses on the basic principle of acceptability of reasons in Rawls’s theoretical framework: a reason is acceptable when it is assessed as such by reasonable citizens within a political conception of justice. Thus, Estlund stresses, a political conception of justice must identify a category of people whose consent determines the acceptability of the theory. This means that the theory of justice itself must be accepted by such category: if the theory defines validity as the acceptance by the human category it specifies, it defines also its own validity along those lines. However, every group of people that might be singled out by the theory as the judge of validity-claims and of the theory itself must be identified according to some underlying criteria that exceed the will of the selected category of people itself. This is clear when one thinks that hardly a group will grant “rejection rights” to other groups, that is, the right to embody the standard of the acceptability of both the whole conception of justice and the specific claims put forward by those who abide by it. In this sense, Estlund defines such groups as insular: they grant rejections rights to themselves, while conflicting with each other. An external truth becomes necessary in Rawls’s argument in order to break the insularity of the competing groups and provide a parameter to select the one in charge of validating or invalidating political claims and the political conception of justice that sticks its own acceptability to the will of the group. Differently from Raz, Estlund concedes that the political conception of justice can be legitimate without being true: “obligations can sometimes be grounded not in true justice but in a conception which, whether or not it is true, is authoritative for other reasons, such as that it is the only conception that is acceptable to all reasonable citizens” (Id: 274). Nonetheless, in Estlund’s view Rawls cannot exclude truth – “a minimal sense of truth” (Id: 263), which does not intrude on deep and broad moral questions as Raz would claim – in the formulation of the criterion of acceptability grounding his theory. One last epistemic criticism deals with the way Rawls explicitly conceptualizes the relation between facts and principles. This point, advanced by Gerald A. Cohen, does not deal with the relationship between truth and theory, but with the inevitable anchoring of the latter in facts-independent principles: according to Cohen, whether a theory is true or not, its only ground can be a normative principle – whether this principle is true or not (Cohen 2003).Facts can underpin a theory merely due to an underlying, often concealed principle establishing the connection between fact and principle, that is, explaining on which ground the fact does back the principle. The second principle, thus, is prior to the principle supposedly grounded in the fact, as it provides the epistemic ground for their link. According to Cohen, in spite of Rawls’s attempt to adopt an empirical groundwork of construction for his political justice and legitimacy, he fails to avoid an appeal to higher-level principles: the methodological

62

3 John Rawls and the Constitutional Identity of ‘the People’

choice of constructivism must be grounded in a normative source that is prior to and requires its deployment, and that Rawls does not unearth. For what regards ‘political’ critics, a point regarding the intrinsic lack of neutrality in Rawls’s conception of the person as reasonable was put forward by Gerald Doppelt. Doppelt starts from the idea, discussed above in Sect. 3.1, that Rawls’s self, far from being unencumbered as claimed by communitarians, incorporates a clearly Kantian set of features and ends, which Rawls identifies in the political culture of a long-lasting democratic regime.16 Doppelt defines such political culture and its values as a “metavalue” (Doppelt 1989), that is, “a condition which is primarily understood and valued as a precondition or ground of the value accorded to any one of a whole set of concrete ways of life or conceptions of the good” (Id: 823). In Rawls’s terminology, a set of political values, largely shared by the people that nurtured them, and suitable for constructing a political conception of justice that does not oppress the holders of specific comprehensive doctrines. Doppelt endorses this framework. Nonetheless, although he agrees on the idea that the Kant-inspired conception of the person assumed by Rawls has its factual rootedness in the political culture and self-understanding imbuing a democratic tradition, he opposes Rawls’s guiding assumption that it be the only one. According to Doppelt, the Kantian conception of reasonable person is but one among many in a democratic political culture. This means that the political conception of justice drawing on the reasonable, as constructed by Rawls, dramatically neglects alternative political ideals underlying society, and can be accused of arbitrariness in political exclusion. In spite of eliminating contingent elements such as “self-interest, coercion, bias, power, gender-identity” from the search for a conception of justice, “the veil of ignorance does not provide the deliberators in the original position with any automatic reason for rejecting one or more of these ideals” (Id: 845) alternative to that framed by Rawls. A different criticism comes from Sheldon Wolin, who claims that Rawls’s attempt to sterilize social disagreement in advance by excluding contingencies from the original position amounts to turning away from the damaged core of a political community, which yet intimately constitutes it: its “historical burden as part of its identity”, and its “committed past injustices whose remainders still define many of its members” (Wolin 1996: 116). For Wolin, the constraints imposed by reasonableness and the relevance of the political culture attempt to achieve a social homogenization that is sociologically implausible, and therefore highly exclusivist once implemented: the historically established social groups, their identities and mutual relationships constitute the very political issues a theory of justice should address, and the interdiction of antagonisms and struggles for recognition from public discourse is a repressive utopia. The idea of grounding a conception of justice in culturally entrenched political values, therefore, “seems less a theory than a strategy for establishing a liberal political hegemony (Id: 104). The theory digs a cleavage between a theoretically produced consensus and the real-world conflicts. In

16

See footnote 8 above.

3.4 Rawls’s Post-metaphysical Turn: The Reasonable

63

this utopian aspiration for a common ground, Rawls excludes the claims of those who were historically left behind by liberal democracy, and whose identities were shaped by the strife for recognition in liberal democratic regimes. A similar point is developed by Marilyn Friedman, who focuses her attention on socially produced unreasonableness: “real world unreasonableness has a different sociohistorical context than does the ideal-world variety, and this fact surely diminishes the justification for excluding unreasonable persons from the legitimation pool” (Friedman 2000: 18). Political liberalism is coercive as it cannot justify the exclusion of those who were marginalized and made unreasonable by the liberaldemocratic system itself. Moreover, according to Friedman, Rawls provides no criteria to better specify the expression “fair terms of cooperation”, which sets a requirement of reasonableness. If someone is convinced of the inferiority of women, it appears fair to him that women be socially recognized as such. Rawls’s claim that it is not appears arbitrary, as he does not provide a solution to such an impasse. Therefore, “Rawls’s conception of it [unreasonable doctrine], namely, that it is coercively imposed on persons who reject it, turns out to be a feature of the very political liberalism that is supposedly legitimized using Rawls’s method” (Id: 29). It is possible to identify two lines of argument defending Rawls from the objections discussed: one building on an alleged moral gist of Rawls’s political liberalism (Charles Larmore), the other on Rawls’s overcoming of the mainstream philosophical model of judgment (“determinant judgment”), and his partial adoption of reflective judgment with “its core notion of exemplary validity” (Ferrara 2008: 7), more compatible with the philosophical revolution brought about by the linguistic turn (Alessandro Ferrara). Larmore’s analysis of Rawls revolves around the liberal principle of legitimacy, which in his opinion cannot but be grounded in a moral principle of “respect for persons”: “liberalism [. . .] forms a freestanding conception in regard to comprehensive moral visions of the good life, but it cannot coherently claim to be freestanding with respect to morality altogether” (Larmore 1999: 608). According to Larmore, the idea implicit in the liberal principle of legitimacy, namely that the public conception of justice has to be the object of reasonable agreement, is prior to and independent of reasonable agreement itself, and corresponds to a liberal principle of equal respect for persons. In other words, if on the one hand the principles of justice can be the product of a construction the bedrock of which is Rawls’s conception of the person and society, on the other hand the criterion of correctness underlying constructivism itself cannot; it must ultimately appeal to a self-standing moral principle, orienting the whole constructivist method and the construction of political justice, as argued in Gerald Cohen’s objection discussed above. For Larmore, that is the principle of respect for the person, which “require[s] that coercive or political principles be as justifiable to that person as they presumably are to us” (Ibid). From Larmore’s perspective, this moral kernel is central to and distinctive of political liberalism. Nonetheless, Larmore cannot easily reconcile this idea with the normative relevance that Rawls attributes to a country’s background political culture in the construction of political justice and legitimacy. If on the one hand one can sympathize with the claim that political constructivism as a method must be somehow normatively

64

3 John Rawls and the Constitutional Identity of ‘the People’

oriented for its adoption to be justified, on the other hand Larmore’s reduction of constructivism to a principle descending like a deus ex machina sharply contrasts with the primacy Rawls attributes to the political culture in the formation of political justice. The attempt to redeem the self-referentiality of Rawls’ system by means of an external principle seems bound to collide with the situated dimension of political liberalism, unless the alleged orienting principle is said to belong to a democratic political tradition – in which case, however, its heuristic value in unearthing the normative functioning of Rawls’s political theory would grow dim. Differently from Larmore, Ferrara incorporates the reasonable into his own project of foundation of a new kind of normative validity, based on exemplarity and on the liberation of Kantian reflective judgment from its segregation into the realm of aesthetics.17 Precisely on the grounds of Rawls’s achieved overcoming of moral universalistic tendencies typical of determinant judgment, Ferrara defends his later work and the idea of the reasonable, which can be understood within the paradigm of exemplary normativity. Ferrara’s argument opens with the insight that the reasonable and public reason are not merely conflated by Rawls. Claims publicly put forward within the limits of public reason, albeit arguably reasonable, do not exhaust the normative content of reasonableness: a statement can be more reasonable than another. On the other hand, however, the greater reasonableness of an argument cannot depend on its sounder logical deduction from the shared premises of the political construction, along the lines of determinant judgment: a thick deductivist approach would contradict the intersubjective construction of law and politics that Rawls envisions, as it would blindly restrain public deliberation to the cogency of logically achieved conclusions. Likewise, deflating the normativity of reasonableness by postulating propositional criteria to assess whether or not a principle or policy is reasonable seems unviable; whether or not propositions uttered in public forums trespass the limits of public reason would be ascertainable aprioristically, and thus independently of intersubjective exchange. Therefore, the path suggested by Ferrara rests upon the idea that the reasonable enshrines an exemplarist model of normative validity, where “the real normative weight is carried, as in aesthetic judgment, by our judgment as to what can or cannot fit the already established singular normativity of a symbolic whole. [. . .] We call most reasonable what fits best the shared truths that form our starting point” (Ferrara 2008: 74–75). The normative core of political liberalism that Habermas struggles to see is identifiable in Rawls, but in terms of self-oriented reflexivity rather than of an extrinsic conception of truth. Whereas Larmore defends political liberalism from epistemic abstinence and political arbitrariness by morally substantiating it in a way that risks imposing a free-standing principle upon public deliberation, Ferrara identifies a model of normativity underlying the reasonable that seems to reconcile the non-comprehensive effort animating Rawlsian later political philosophy with its normative aspirations. The self-referentiality of the reasonable is neither

17

See Ferrara (1999, 2008).

3.5 Rawlsian Fundamentals in the Time of the Reasonable

65

epistemically empty nor arbitrarily exclusivist, in spite of its lack of a logically structured ontology, in the same way as the assessment of a work of art invokes an ‘ought’ the demonstration of which does not respond to logico-deductive parameters. The absence of a principle from which a deductive chain proceeds does not make for its lack of normativity, and thus does not necessarily result in arbitrariness in political exclusion. In Ferrara’s view, the assessment on the reasonableness of a statement, on which its political acceptability depends, “rests on the aesthetic exemplarity of the object of judgment – where exemplarity can be understood as the ability to set the imagination and all our mental powers into a peculiar ‘selfmaintaining motion’” (Id: 77).

3.5

Rawlsian Fundamentals in the Time of the Reasonable

On the grounds of Political Liberalism’s normative turn from the rational to the reasonable, Rawls re-thinks the mental experiment of the original position and re-founds the two principles of justice, one of which undergoes a change from A Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism. In Lecture VIII of the Political Liberalism, Rawls analyzes at length H. L. A. Hart’s criticisms against the original position, which highlight a lack of clarity in the analysis of the grounds on which the parties adopt the basic liberties. This flaw in turn obscures the criteria to gradually specify the basic liberties when the veil of ignorance is raised. The argument developed by Rawls in response to these claims leads him to partially reformulate the first principle of justice. It is not useful for our purposes to go deep into this discussion. The detail that interests us – in that it shows once again the extent of Rawls’s theoretical turn – is that the criteria indicated by Rawls for the specification of liberties outside the original position, and the related motivation of the parties in selecting and giving priority to them, are the fundamental ideas on the person and society. Once again, Rawls stresses how the conception of justice and the basic liberties regulating the basic structure are the product of a construction rooted in an idea of society and the person implicit in the background political culture. This theoretical innovation allows Rawls to confront Hart’s suspicion that the choices in the original position respond to “consideration of rational interests alone” (Id: 290). Likewise, Rawls stresses that this criterion applies also when it comes to regulating liberties: in case of contingent clashes among them, their hierarchization is supposed to follow the contents of the fundamental ideas, if it is true that the very selection of the basic liberties is substantially meant to create the “essential social conditions for the adequate development and full exercise of the two powers of moral personality over a complete life” (Id: 293). A limitation of liberties otherwise justified is to be considered a restriction rather than a regulation, and hence a form of oppression. The modification of the first principle of justice operated by Rawls in Political Liberalism is in line with this perspective: “each person has an equal right to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties which is compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for all” (Id: 291). Rawls adds the words “a fully adequate scheme” in

66

3 John Rawls and the Constitutional Identity of ‘the People’

place of “the most extensive total system” (Ibid). The new expression is preferred precisely because it better captures the connection between principles of justice and the fundamental idea of the person, where the former have the “initial aim” to produce liberties that are fully adequate to the conception of the person and to the successful exercise of its related moral powers over generations, within the limits imposed by reciprocity. For what regards the original position, Rawls insists on re-defining it as a “device of representation”. As we shall see, this goes hand in hand with the rise of the reasonable in his framework, and it constitutes a further example of a central intuition of Rawls’s thought that had to be filtered through a philosophical paradigm discontinuous with the previous one in order to be preserved.18 At first inspection, the original position appears unchanged: the parties try to rationally advance the good of the represented, despite being unaware of their socio-economic status, personal details, political and moral orientations. What allows Rawls to coherently situate this apparently rationalistic setting within the framework of Political Liberalism is precisely its status of device of representation: the original position becomes an instrument that citizens as they live and breathe, outside the original position, can use in order to fictitiously transfer themselves in ideal conditions disentangled from real-life contingencies, with the aim to search for the principles corresponding to the fundamental ideas of person and society latent in the political culture of the longestablished democratic system they live in. The mutual influence between the outcomes achieved by the citizen in her mental experiment and her basic moral intuitions conveys her towards reflective equilibrium. Thus, one can say that the original position as a device of representation is a means to pursue reflective equilibrium. Although the parties are still imagined as rational agents, the role of rational choice theory in the original position is markedly marginalized: the reasonable citizen willing to immerge in the original position puts “reasonable constraints” on the parties, that is, assumes that the parties have the fundamental ideas of society 18

For a reconstruction of the gradual process leading to the contextualization of the original position, see Chapter 7 of Rawls. A Theory of Justice and its Critics, (Kukathas and Pettit 1990). One outcome of the authors’ account has to do with Rawls’s relation with Kant and Hegel: “Rawls’s developed theory turns out to have a decidedly Hegelian flavour. This is so [. . .] because he takes as his starting point existing social practices [. . .] and looks to examine them in the light of the values embedded in them” (Id: 144). Kukathas and Pettit stress how the Hegelian essential intuition, according to which “the ideal was to be found in the actual” (Ibidem), seems to be central to the later Rawls. In this regard, the original position revisited holds together the Kantian and the Hegelian approaches: it is constellated of and modelled on contextual elements, such as the political conception of the person, and it is meant to discover principles and convictions on justice inhabiting a democratic society; nonetheless, it partly preserves the Kantian intuition – in Rawls’s interpretation – of constructing a moral order on the grounds of the peculiarities of those whose life it is supposed to govern, while ruling out historical, social, economic contingencies. In other words, in the revisited original position Rawls lifts a particular historical product out of history in order to crystallize its physiognomy in the Kantian, contingence-free dimension of the mental experiment. For a further examination of the relationship between the later Rawls and Hegel’s thought, see “Rawls, Hegel and Communitarianism” (Schwarzenbach 1991), and “Rawls and the Embedded Self: Liberalism as an Affective Regime” (Banerjee and Bercuson 2015).

3.6 Stability Revisited

67

as their point of departure: as Rawls puts it, “rational parties are situated in reasonable conditions” (Rawls 1995: 381). The original position is thus compared to a form of “role playing” (Rawls 2005: 27), the aim of which is to identify “principles for the basic structure of the society in which it is assumed that they will lead their life” (Id: 277).19

3.6

Stability Revisited: Overlapping Consensus and the Liberal Principle of Legitimacy

Once analyzed the new foundation that Rawls designs for justice as fairness and its principles, we can turn back to the issue of their stability, the first formulation of which Rawls took as the original sin prompting the philosophical research that led to Political Liberalism. As we shall see, the formulation of stability in Political Liberalism revolves around the concept of overlapping consensus. As highlighted above, there is a sense in which Rawls’s essential understanding of stability for the right reasons does not substantially change between A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism. Although in the former Rawls still mixes it with a more common way of conceiving stability, the gist of his idea is unvaried, to the extent that both his older work (Chapter 8, §76) and his more recent one (Lecture VIII, §6) present the following phrasing defining stability, with only few words changed: “the most stable conception of justice is one that is clear and perspicuous to our reason, congruent with and unconditionally concerned with our good, and rooted not in abnegation but in affirmation of our person” (Id: 317). What changes is Rawls’s awareness that stability so conceived cannot be achieved from within the comprehensive philosophical horizon of A Theory of Justice. Rawls begins with the definition of the “liberal principle of legitimacy”. As hinted above in Sect. 3.1, since the very beginning the idea of stability for the right reasons appeared as resulting from a conflation of stability and some idea of legitimacy as the consent of the governed. Nonetheless, the latter is not developed in A Theory of Justice as it is in Political Liberalism. There Rawls states that our exercise of political power is fully proper only when it is exercised in accordance with a constitution the essentials of which all citizens as free and equals may reasonably be expected to endorse in the light of the principles and ideals acceptable to their common human reason (Id: 137).

19 On Forst’s reading, although in Political Liberalism the principles of justice are no longer imposed on democratic self-determination, they “have a substantive content and are accorded normative priority over it [self-determination]. The political autonomy of popular sovereignty thus remains more an organ for executing principles than the determining form for the active construction and constitution of the political and social basic structure” (2011: 174). Co-originality in Habermas’s sense, in Forst’s view, is not achieved by Rawls, in that the principles of justice are conceived of as “basic rights that only need political implementation” (Ibid), rather than serving as the ground for a process of intersubjective construction of rights and law-making.

68

3 John Rawls and the Constitutional Identity of ‘the People’

This definition enriches with further substance the idea of stability for the right reasons, and provides a more solid criterion for its verifiability: a political order is stable for the right reasons if its stability is causally connected to its legitimacy thus defined. This is consistent with the pursuit of the congruence between right and good, the perspicuity, and the affirmation of the self, as specified in the definition of stability quoted above. Now, two issues are at stake: (a) what is the purpose of the principle of liberal legitimacy as presented by Rawls within the normative paradigm of the reasonable? (b) How can a legitimate and stable political order thus described be achieved? (a) Addressing the former question should be quite straightforward, given the discussion of the reasonable above. To wrap up, reasonableness is postulated by Rawls as the virtue of the citizen socialized in a long-standing democratic context. Being reasonable means that she is ready to accept the burdens of judgment, the pervasiveness of pluralism, and the fair terms of cooperation with her fellows. She therefore refuses to burden the basic structure of the society with partial comprehensive views by which the plural citizenry would be oppressed, and is inclined towards the construction of a political conception of justice, the building blocks of which are the shared political ideas and selfunderstandings to which democratic citizens should intuitively subscribe – such as the citizen as free and equal, endowed with the two moral powers, and on. For Rawls, at least in Political Liberalism, justice as fairness is the most congruent conception of justice with these ideas, and thus the most reasonable – although the first principle is phrased in a slightly different way, as we saw, and the second principle is discarded from overlapping consensus. In this theoretical context, the liberal principle of legitimacy is meant to make the borders of legitimacy co-extensive with those of the reasonable: laws, policies and political principles are legitimate as long as they can be regarded upon intersubjective inspection as reasonable (yet not necessarily the most reasonable), i.e. arguably congruent with the situated identity of the political community. As we shall see below, such identity is crystallized in the constitutional text. Hence the principle’s requirement that legitimate power be exercised “in accordance with a constitution [. . .]”. (b) How does Rawls defend the stability and feasibility of a political order abiding by such standards? As a first step, it is interesting to note how Rawls’s pivotal insight of the priority of the right over the good is redressed and preserved in his more recent framework: rather than anchoring the ‘right’ to the metaphysical fetters of a comprehensive liberal doctrine such as the earlier version of justice as fairness qua comprehensive doctrine, Rawls connects it to the situated substrate of background assumptions on politics, justice, citizenship. He calls such shared commitment to a constellation of basic public values overlapping consensus. This idea, Rawls believes, allows achieving a congruence between the right (the political conception of justice) and the particularized good of the citizens. Thus, stability for the right reasons is made possible, and the priority of the right is preserved.

3.6 Stability Revisited

69

Rawls initially defines overlapping consensus as a “consensus of reasonable (as opposed to unreasonable or irrational) comprehensive doctrines” (Rawls 2005: 144). The focus of such consensus are the political conception of justice and the constitutional essentials. In spite of this first definition, however, it is clear that Rawls opts for introducing the concept negatively, by contrast to what it is not. First of all, overlapping consensus is distinguished from “modus vivendi”. Whereas the latter is a prudential form of agreement, the exemplary model of which is the treaty between nations contingently united by common interests, overlapping consensus does have a moral strength, and hence a morally grounded stability. As stressed by Rawls, overlapping consensus can be regarded as a modus vivendi, i.e. a consensus devoid of moral-affective motivations, only if the sole social basis one can imagine lies in a comprehensive doctrine. In other words, if the only possible source of moral allegiance is a comprehensive doctrine, then overlapping consensus seems doomed to display the same normative emptiness as a modus vivendi, in that no comprehensive doctrine lies at its core. In fact, however, political liberalism refers to another kind of socially integrative basis, worked out from the political, not comprehensive, culture to which reasonable citizens are supposed to adhere. Such moral commitment is overarching in reasonable citizens, and prompts them to pursue a reflective equilibrium between the conception of justice and their comprehensive non-public doctrines. This means that the justification of the political conception, that may also be defined as the congruence between the public ‘right’ and the non-public particular ‘good’, is left to individual citizens in the flesh to provide. Congruence cannot be assumed as the product of a mere rational calculation that can be aprioristically forecast on the grounds of an allegedly universal human nature, resonant with the conception of justice. The only assumption is that in a democratic society populated by reasonable citizens, the latter are motivated by their reasonableness to integrate their shared right and particular good. This is the mechanism through which overlapping consensus acquires a moral stability that cannot be predicated of modus vivendi. Thus, overlapping consensus does not favour any of the reasonable comprehensive doctrines from which its justification can be shaped, and yet it is defined as “not indifferent or sceptical” (Id: 150) towards them. That is, precisely because it does not try to defend the truth of a comprehensive, e.g. liberal, framework, it cannot be defined as indifferent or sceptical towards the multifarious understandings of truth inhabiting modern societies. The possibility for philosophy or religion to achieve truth is neither asserted nor denied, but rather left open, as well as the possibility that a specific comprehensive doctrine succeeds in this endeavour. Rather, the aim of overlapping consensus – in line with normative minimalism – is to eliminate from public discourse all the sources of conflict that come precisely from claims to truth, thus narrowing down the space for harsh disagreement. Finally, Rawls develops an argument to prove that overlapping consensus is not utopian. He reconstructs the path of its gradual genesis, proceeding through three stages: a modus vivendi turns into a constitutional consensus, which in turn flows into an overlapping consensus. Once again, this reconstruction is a sort of hybrid idealization of a historical process leading to a constitutional regime; neither

70

3 John Rawls and the Constitutional Identity of ‘the People’

historically accurate, nor dramatically detached from a historical-empirical anchoring. While the details of this path cannot be analyzed at length here, defining constitutional consensus can be useful to further clarifying the idea of overlapping consensus. Rawls defines constitutional consensus as a superficial consensus of citizens on the basic rights and institutional practices regulating their political order. Citizens are not concerned with the public justification of those rights and practices, and hence their implications and specifications are a matter of disagreement. Roughly, constitutional consensus emerges from a modus vivendi when a constitution “initially accepted reluctantly” (Id: 163) by the citizenry begins to prove beneficial, in particular in terms of stabilizing the uncertain co-existence between citizens which characterizes a modus vivendi: a constitution shields some basic liberties from political turmoil, supplies stable and predictable rules for assessing evidence, and hence encourages cooperation. This suffices for constitutional consensus to be accomplished. The constitution gradually rises at the centre of public debate, as the ‘initially reluctant’ citizens attribute to it growing relevance. In the public forum, actors begin to devise justifications fleshing out the meaning and implications of the constitution, thus identifying its underlying principles and rooting them more in depth into their own comprehensive views. Moreover, the attempt to reduce disagreement and conflict leads citizens to increase the breadth of their consensus, stretching it to more and more portions of the basic structure: the more the political conception covers the backbone of society, the slighter becomes the space for disagreement on basic issues of justice. Finally, wide-ranging disagreement pushes citizens to adjust the conception of justice enshrined in the constitution to the shared political culture to the highest degree of precision. In other words, the consensus is polished from vagueness and ambiguities, thus improving in specificity. Once the depth, breadth and specificity of consensus are significantly developed, overlapping consensus is achieved: citizens share a political conception of justice, the principles of which are highly specified starting from the higher indeterminateness of the background political culture; those principles are justified by citizens according to their own comprehensive views to a proper degree of depth; the conception of justice broadly covers the basic structure, so that profound disagreement about essential matters of justice is narrowed to the highest extent. With this, Rawls secures the stability for the right reasons of a social order based on the political conception of justice. Rawls’s idea, however, was targeted by a spectrum of criticisms patterned after the objections to the reasonable discussed above in Sect. 3.4. On the one hand, critics such as Habermas (1995) and Raz (1990) have equated overlapping consensus and modus vivendi: given the former’s lack of normative foundation, nothing distinguishes it from the normative emptiness and prudential nature typical of a modus vivendi. On the other hand, the above mentioned criticisms highlighting the arbitrariness in political exclusion affecting the reasonable trickle down to the idea of overlapping consensus: by focusing on specific reasonable values and principles of justice, overlapping consensus is said to neglect the broader array of political ideas that can be found in a democratic society (Doppelt), and to arbitrarily exclude the discriminated and unreasonable social groups generated by liberal democracy itself,

3.7 Rawlsian Deliberative Democracy: The Unfolding of the Notion of Public Reason

71

whose struggles against social cleavages and systematic disadvantage are disabled by the requirement of reasonableness (Wolin and Friedman). One last objection, eloquently formulated by Sandel, goes so far as to argue against the priority of the right over the good which structurally underpins overlapping consensus: if reasonable disagreement applies to the good, i.e. to comprehensive doctrines, why are conceptions of justice treated differently? Is not the well-known debate between liberal egalitarians as Rawls and libertarians as Nozick an example of reasonable disagreement on conceptions of justice, and thus on the right (Sandel 1994)? If this is true, then why should a conception of justice be plainly assumed as the focus of an overlapping consensus which excludes conceptions of the good? Rawls’s most convincing response to this shortfall can be found in his “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited” (1997), and in the “Introduction to the Paperback Edition” of Political Liberalism (2005), where he admits the possibility of a plurality of political conceptions of justice at the centre of overlapping consensus, provided that they are inspired by reciprocity and the reasonable. This will be further explored in the following section.

3.7

Rawlsian Deliberative Democracy: The Unfolding of the Notion of Public Reason

A further problem that Rawls has to address arises as a consequence of the partial exclusion of comprehensive doctrines from overlapping consensus. As we saw, the possibility to reach agreement on a comprehensive doctrine is ruled out as a matter of principle by reasonable citizens accepting the fair terms of cooperation and the burdens of judgment. Hence, it becomes evident that comprehensive doctrines represent a problematic ground of argumentation and claim-advocacy, especially when it comes to issues of basic justice. For Rawls, offering partial reasons rooted in comprehensive doctrines when publicly discussing issues of basic justice is an outright unreasonable demeanour. As a matter of fact, given the virtually irreconcilable cleavages separating comprehensive views of the world, comprehensive-based argumentation involves the risk of pushing public discourse into the slippery slope of social conflict; therefore, “questions about constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice are so far as possible to be settled by appeal to political values alone” (Id: 137–138). Thus, Rawls wonders, how can and should citizens conduct public debate? “What kinds of reasons they may reasonably give one another when fundamental political questions are at stake”? (Rawls 1997: 441). To fill this void, Rawls introduces the idea of public reason. Public reason can be defined as a “universe of discourse” (Ferrara 1999: 24) having as its content the principles of justice and some “guidelines of inquiry”, by which the political values and principles are translated into public procedures of deliberation. In order to better clarify public reason, Rawls points out that its opposite is to be found in non-public reason(s), rather than in merely private ones:

72

3 John Rawls and the Constitutional Identity of ‘the People’

overlapping consensus excludes not only private individual reasons, but also all those forms of reason and judgment pertaining to partisan associations, which are neither strictly private nor public, as long as generally grounded in comprehensive doctrines. As well as strictly non-public reasons, they are not inscribed within the limits and values of the constitution, which means that their introduction in the public forum hinders citizens from a legitimate exercise of power. Here Rawls highlights an important connection, namely that between public reason and liberal legitimacy. As stressed above, power is exercised legitimately only within the limits of a constitution that can be endorsed by reasonable citizens. Therefore, restraining the discourses of citizens publicly deliberating on constitutional essentials – i.e., exercising their constitutional power – to the values and principles of the political conception is a necessary requirement for the production of legitimate claims and laws. Public reason corresponds precisely to such limitation, thus creating the discursive conditions for a legitimate exercise of power.20 As it looks obvious, Rawls specifies that the exercise of public reason is not legally compelling (“for in that case it would be incompatible with freedom of speech” (Rawls 1997: 445)), but it is a moral duty that “holds for citizens when they engage in political advocacy in the public forum, and thus for members of political parties and for candidates in their campaigns and for other groups who support them” (Rawls 2005: 215).21

20

In the Rawlsian scholarship, nonetheless, attempts exist to re-define the limits and scope of public reason. On the one hand, for instance, Jonathan Quong (2011) suggests to apply the standard of public reason to every sort of public debate, whether or not involving matters of basic justice. More in general, Quong advocates policies undermining the appeal to and spread of unreasonable doctrines. On the other hand, authors such as Marilyn Friedman (2000), Erin Kelly and Lionel K. McPherson (2001) provide arguments for including degrees of unreasonableness in those public debates which require compliance with public reason. 21 The whole wide range of criticisms addressing public reason ultimately targets this dualism, rigidly separating public and private citizen, and public and non-public political issues. On the one hand, Sandel (1994) and Greenawalt (1998) argue against the empirical plausibility of the idea that citizens relinquish their cultural and moral background, when it comes to discuss issues of basic justice: distinguishing “what they believe because of underlying religious convictions from what they would believe if they relied only on premises of liberal democracy” (Greenawalt 1998: 383) is arguably too demanding for those who do not belong to an elite of highly educated and civically committed citizens. Moreover, the presumption that citizens express themselves merely in terms of public reason once they turn ‘public’ (a) implies assuming “a politically trivial character of the differences” pervading society (Wolin 1996: 103), differences that can hardly be settled within the limits of public reason; (b) entails a “bracketing” of deep moral conflicts, that cannot but impoverish public debate and make it blind both to “grave moral questions” and to the potential that comprehensive doctrines would have for providing answers, if they were not discarded a priori (Sandel 1994). From this last point, a host of objections against the alleged religious exclusion fostered by public reason takes the cue. One criticism of this sort comes from Jeffrey Stout (2005), who claims that Rawls advocates too narrow a conceptualization of the reasonable, as not only the citizens who accept a shared conception of justice and common criteria of inquiry can be regarded as reasonable in the sense of “treating our fellow citizens fairly in matters pertaining to the use of coercive power” (Id: 68). Accordingly, also Rawls’s conceptualization of reasonable disagreement is too narrow, as

3.7 Rawlsian Deliberative Democracy: The Unfolding of the Notion of Public Reason

73

The most problematic point about public reason regards its limits. That is, what are the limits within which the reasons presented by actors in the public forum do not exceed the public values of the political conception of justice? What is the criterion to regard a given validity-claim as compliant with public reason? On this point, Rawls adumbrates a solution that he will elaborate more sharply and extensively only in an important article published four years later, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited” (1997). In Political Liberalism, Rawls envisages an “exclusive” and an “inclusive” view of public reason. The former utterly rules out the possibility that an actor can bring into public debate the moral instances constitutive of her non-political identity. This view prescribes a rigid boundary between the political and non-political identity of citizens. On the other hand, the inclusive view leaves more space for citizens to imbue public discourse with perspectives coming from their comprehensive moral worlds, “provided they do this in ways that strengthen the ideal of public reason itself” (Rawls 2005: 247). This criterion will be called by

the common ground he posits can be reasonably rejected, that is, rejected without violating reciprocity and fair terms of cooperation. Reasonable disagreement does not only occur within the political conception of justice. Therefore, Stout claims that public reason is exclusivist – even in the latest form of the “proviso” – in that it is grounded in too narrow a shared basis of agreement, which neglects the range of reasonable positions that can arise outside and reasonably disagree with it. On the other hand, Habermas, Ferrara and Greenawalt are concerned with Rawls’s aprioristic separation of public and non-public issues. Habermas (1995) points out that such separation is hard to reconcile with the intersubjective dimension of politics as imagined by Rawls: setting a boundary between public and private once and for all means neglecting the import of the democratic process, within which citizens discursively shape the boundaries between what is private and what is public, what should be politicized and what should be left untouched outside politics; setting a boundary from the outset, therefore, appears tantamount to establishing a set of private rights, prior and unavailable to the process of democratic deliberation; in Habermas’s vocabulary, this means subordinating public to private autonomy, that is, failing at reconciling the liberties of the moderns with the liberties of the ancients. Rawls’s tendency to imagine the ‘political’, or ‘public’, as a clearcut terrain that can be discursively enriched, but not substantively transformed or stripped of contents, has been described by Ferrara as the “cumulativity of the political” (1999). Moreover, similarly to Habermas, Ferrara notes that quite often the issue at stake in political debate is precisely whether a given policy affects or not a constitutional essential, that is, whether or not it is public in Rawls’s sense, and hence what are the boundaries between the non-public and the public. In other words, Habermas’s deliberative process testing and determining the borders of the political actually occurs in political arenas, and in those cases a paradox arises: what is the parameter for invoking public reason, if the issue is precisely whether public reason should be applied or not? Finally, Greenawalt observes that the line between ordinary and constitutional politics is more blurred than Rawls depicts it, as “ordinary issues are deeply intertwined with constitutional issues and issues of basic justice” (Greenawalt 1998: 383). Therefore, Greenawalt suggests to re-frame the issue of the comprehensive doctrines’ public exclusion or inclusion along the lines of the distinction between officials and ordinary citizens. Given (a) the impossibility to properly sort out ordinary and constitutional issues, (b) the average citizen’s incapability at distinguishing her own beliefs from the public conception of justice, and (c) the major infringement on collective religious freedom determined by the repression of citizens’ religious motivation, the only category unconditionally required to rule out religion from public discourse and justification, no matter the issue at stake, are the officials.

74

3 John Rawls and the Constitutional Identity of ‘the People’

Rawls the proviso, and will be better articulated in “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited”. At the stage of Political Liberalism, Rawls supplies a contingence-based criterion to assess which of the two views is more valuable: “appropriate limits of public reason vary depending on historical and social conditions” (Id: 251). He argues that whereas in a well-ordered society there is no reason to trespass the limits of public values in the discursive exercise of power, in that the overlapping consensus is considerably deep, broad and specific, in a society fractured by deep sociocultural cleavages the inclusive view becomes necessary. Rawls considers the example of the clash on the matter of slavery between abolitionists and antiabolitionists: in that case, it was reasonable for the former to introduce their own comprehensive doctrines and defend their anti-slavery claims on those grounds, inasmuch as it was necessary to abolish slavery and lay the ground to move towards a democratic political culture and institutional system. As it looks evident, Rawls’s argument is highly problematic. A liberal-democratic political culture could hardly be said to have thrived by and large in the years preceding the American Civil War, which after all is precisely the reason why Rawls picks the example. The controversial implication is that democracy and the reasonable are pictured as self-standing, somewhat metaphysical values, which can be legitimately justified in teleological terms when they happen to be disentangled from a deep-seated public culture and political conception of the person. This seems to undermine the very basis of the reasonable, grounded in collective self-reflexivity. Even though this specific point does not undergo considerable improvements in “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited”, others are remarkably reframed. In particular, by better clarifying the proviso Rawls develops important insights on secularism and the relation between religion and politics. The inclusive view is no longer presented as connected with turbulent historical and social conditions: “reasonable comprehensive doctrines, religious or non-religious, may be introduced in public political discussion at any time, provided that in due course proper political reasons are presented” (Rawls 1997: 462, my italics). Underlying this change, it is easy to glimpse Rawls’s increased awareness of reasonable disagreement as spontaneous and intrinsically rooted in democratic contexts, even when they are “well-ordered”. The resilience of the idea that a well-ordered democracy is so homogeneous that comprehensive doctrines can be excluded from public discourse reveals the remnants of a latent diffidence towards reasonable pluralism, that emerges locally in Political Liberalism and is totally rejected only in “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited”. This further acknowledgment of reasonable pluralism stands at the basis of Rawls’s ultimate admission of comprehensive doctrines in public deliberation, provided that they are expressed in a vocabulary honouring public reason, its values and procedures. This leads Rawls to reject secularism as a comprehensive doctrine, one which believes in and theorizes the outright exclusion of religion from politics on philosophical grounds. In his view, the relation between religion and politics must be framed in an alternative way: “it is also a grave error to think that the separation of church and state is primarily for the protection of secular culture” (Id: 476). In the framework of political liberalism, the reasons of a secular culture have precisely the

3.7 Rawlsian Deliberative Democracy: The Unfolding of the Notion of Public Reason

75

same status and weight as those of a religious one: their being comprehensive equally excludes them from the political conception of justice at the centre of overlapping consensus. Likewise, on the other hand, both religious and secular reasonable claims can access the public forum, if adjusted to the canons of public reason. Similarly, it is within this expanded pluralistic horizon that Rawls operates a decentralization of justice as fairness. Rawls’s landmark conception of justice becomes one way among many possible reasonable formulations: “the content of public reason is given by a family of political conceptions of justice, and not by a single one [. . .] The limiting feature of these forms is the criterion of reciprocity” (Id: 450, my italics). Starting from the fundamental ideas of the person and society, that Rawls holds unchanged, there can be several ways of constructing reasonable conceptions of justice oriented by the public culture and pervaded by a respect for fair terms of cooperation and burdens of judgment. A further innovation detectable in “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited” (and in the “Reply to Habermas”, published two years before) is the appearance of the expression ‘deliberative democracy’ in Rawls’s work: “here I am concerned only with a well-ordered constitutional democracy [. . .] understood also as a deliberative democracy” (Id: 448). In introducing Rawls, we hinted at the fact that his theory was one of the main polemical targets of the first deliberative democratic thinkers. Their main concern regarded the ‘Rousseauvian’ form of rationality implicit in the original position, where the exchange of ideas on justice does not involve a virtuous re-elaboration of individual preferences through confrontation and dialogue, but seems to adopt a form of discursive rationality where actors merely put on the table their preferences, solipsistically formulated on rational-instrumental grounds.22 Hence, the philosopher is able to predict the outcomes of the constructive process, and to sketch a conception of justice that is ultimately monological, rather than actually intersubjectively formulated through discourse. If this can be true of A Theory of Justice, it should be clear that it is precisely what Rawls rejects and overcomes in the later stage of his philosophical path. The idea of public reason is inscribed within and makes possible an open framework of deliberation, where every citizen faces the challenge to find a convergence between his non-public values and public ones, and to reinforce the latter with a reasonable use of the former, in a way that is open and unpredictable from the objective perspective of the observer, to put it in Habermasian terms. The only limit to this deliberative process is the constitutional framework enshrining the public values of the political conception of justice. Public reason represents at once the locus of an open discursive exercise of popular power, and the constitutive limit to its space of action and discourse.

22

Cf. Manin (1987) and Habermas (1995, 1996).

76

3.8

3 John Rawls and the Constitutional Identity of ‘the People’

Bruce Ackerman’s Dualist Constitutionalism and the Exemplar of Public Reason

A further specification of public reason, discussed at length in Lecture VI, §6 of Political Liberalism, is particularly relevant to the argument on the definition of popular sovereignty in Rawls’s political theory. In order to introduce it, it may be useful to devote this section to the brief outline of its underlying theoretical framework, expressly borrowed from Bruce Ackerman’s dualist theory of constitutional democracy. This idea was fully developed in the context of Ackerman’s monumental historical-theoretical research, meant to reconstruct the distinctive spirit and ideas pervading the American Constitution, and to capture the peculiar political identity of the American people from the reflexive elaboration of its constitutional history (Ackerman 1991, 1998, 2014). Ackerman addresses a set of competing paradigms of constitutionalism, which he deems overcome – and partly absorbed – by the dualist democratic framework actually underlying the American Constitution: “monism”, “right foundationalism” and “Burkean historicism”. For what regards the monists, they support a form of democratic constitutionalism that rejects any principled constrains on the power of the democratically elected majority. This means that “during the period between elections, all the institutional checks upon the electoral victors are presumptively antidemocratic” (Ackerman 1991: 8), including the role of the Supreme Court in assessing the constitutionality of enacted laws. By contrast, rights foundationalists deem the Supreme Court an essential device to protect basic constitutional rights, which should be entrenched in the constitution in order to be sheltered from illiberal majorities. Finally, the Burkean historicists think of the constitution as the product of the accumulation of juridical decisions and interpretations (“incrementalism”), which create legal precedents constituting the sole normative source of constitutional interpretation and potential constitutional change. Burkeans firmly exclude “constitutional politics” and “abstract principles” – and thus basic rights – from the range of the criteria according to which the constitution has to be approached. From the perspective of a dualist constitutional democrat, all those frameworks presuppose flawed conceptual associations that should be unravelled: the monists tie democracy to parliamentary sovereignty; rights foundationalists link the protection of basic rights with structural entrenchment; Burkean historicists connect the normative core of the constitution with its historically accumulated juridical practices and interpretations. Dualist constitutionalism as theorized by Ackerman is strongly committed to the first term of the first two associations, while it breaks their ties with their second term. As a consequence, it rejects the reductionist tendency of the third association, while embracing its commitment to the concrete historical articulation of the constitution. In other words, Ackerman’s dualism denies parliamentary sovereignty and structural constitutional entrenchment, while it holds together the primary role of both the democratic process and the protection of basic rights, and includes them among the normative criteria to interpret the constitution in combination with the historical approach of the Burkeans. The intuition lying in the

3.8 Dualist Constitutionalism and the Exemplar of Public Reason

77

background of this position represents the cornerstone of the Ackermanian, and thus Rawlsian, constitutional theory: Ackerman operates a distinction between ordinary lawmaking and higher, or constitutional, lawmaking, and links the latter with the will of “We the People”. Ackerman’s understanding of the American Constitution is dualist because it is structured along the lines of a “two-track system” (Id: 9). On the one hand we have ordinary lawmaking, the main actors of which are the elected representatives and an electorate of private citizens, for whom politics is but one part of their existence. The latter are plausibly devoid of what Ackerman calls “considered judgments” about the matters upon which they are called to express their say. The representatives cyclically elected by these civic privatists legislate within a framework of checks and balances, where every actor tends to express misplaced claims to represent ‘the People’, while actually being nothing more than “stands-in” voted in a lethargic atmosphere of civic privatism, with the mandate to represent nothing more than their electors in normal legislative procedures and activities. In this context of “normal politics, [where] the People simply do not exist” (Id: 263, my italics), the Supreme Court prevents precisely that the representatives attempt to illegitimately jeopardize what the People carves in the constitution as its will. Now, what does Ackerman mean by “We the People”? The question is crucial, as although Rawls absorbs dualist constitutionalism into his own theory in a way that involves some distancing from Ackerman, the latter’s definition of ‘the People’ filters essentially unvaried from one framework to the other. Ackerman does not certainly attempt to define ‘the people’ in general semantic terms; he is concerned with one specific people, held together by one specific force: “in part because Americans differ so radically in other respects, our constitutional narrative constitutes us as a people” (Id: 36, my italics).23 The People to which Ackerman refers is the historical entity that has gradually taken shape through the process of crystallizing its identity and will into the constitution, in order to frame the fundamental rules of the social compact in its image and likeness. The will of the People emerges precisely when the civic passion lacking in ordinary political periods awakens, giving birth to “transformative initiatives [that] inspire mass involvement, passionate commitment, great sacrifice” (Id: 19), devoted to the achievement of a constitutional “revolutionary reform” (Ibid) which, if successfully passing through the strict filters of higher lawmaking path, can be regarded as an emanation of the will of We the People. The logical implication is that the higher lawmaking mechanism is designed in order not to repress or overlook, but rather track, the will of the people once it manifests. Even though it is not rigidly defined in all its formal aspects and it is often based on “unconventional” processes, such mechanism has to satisfy substantive requirements in terms of the duration of the constitutional fervour and the popular commitment to given claims, the institutional checks in place, the evidence and

One might argue, together with Habermas and Rawls, that in our “post-metaphysical condition” that intrinsically excludes the possibility that a comprehensive doctrine may integrate society, the role of the constitution as the sole integrative force of a people is no longer distinctive of the United States.

23

78

3 John Rawls and the Constitutional Identity of ‘the People’

strength of the popular mandate. Only by virtue of those demanding standards can the constitution be amended according to the real will of the People, which protrudes beyond the magma of ordinary politics in a way that the institutional system should be equipped to highlight. In the absence of criteria for higher lawmaking, the constitution regulating society becomes vulnerable to ordinary politics; that is, it is left at the mercy of the unconsidered judgments of “Lockean” private citizens largely detached from politics, who are in turn represented by stand-ins whose action is affected by partial interests, factional enmities, external pressures by economic actors, necessity to win the short-term endorsement of the electorate. In those conditions, manipulation of information by whom has the power and interest to perpetrate it is also common. The higher lawmaking path envisioned by Ackerman – and unveiled by his analysis of American constitutional history – is a means to avoid that partial decisions made in such context affect what Rawls would call the constitutional essentials governing the basic structure of society. In this context, the Supreme Court guarantees that the representatives running ordinary politics stay within those limits. Ackerman makes the interesting point that the verdicts of the Supreme Court are to be taken as an invitation for the stand-ins who force the constitution to go deeper into their criticism to the status quo, in order to awaken public debate and involve it in a virtuous collective deliberation where the initial arguments and aims are fine-tuned to the extent that they effectively ameliorate the constitution. To pull the threads, let us briefly wind back to the Ackermanian distinction between monism, rights foundationalism and Burkeanism. On the one hand, the constitution and its history bear a normative value as such in that they articulate the will of the People both in general terms and in the particular cases interpreted by justices (Burkeanism); on the other hand, however, that history itself is largely shaped by the rare democratic eruptions of civic and political fervour (monism), and thus by the ideas and principles that they have produced (rights foundationalism). Once they permeate the constitution, those ideas are protected as legal rights by the complexity of higher lawmaking, in spite of their non-entrenchment. Both the democratic practice and the rights delivered by it constitute part of the self-understanding of the American People. Thus, the justices interpreting the constitution must keep in mind fundamental rights and the democratic voice and mandates as normative criteria of interpretation, to be balanced with the historical approach of the Burkeans.

3.9

The Constitutional Identity of ‘We the People’

As hinted above, the reason why we brought up Ackerman’s theory lies in its radical impact on Rawls’s framework, in particular under the respects we are interested in. Such impact is unveiled most clearly in the five principles of constitutionalism that Rawls devises: (a) he distinguishes between the people’s constituent power to give birth to a political regime and the ordinary exercise of power by the three

3.9 The Constitutional Identity of ‘We the People’

79

powers and the electorate; (b) likewise, he differentiates between higher and ordinary law, and identifies the former with the constituent power of the People’s will, while the latter is said to lie in the hands of representatives and electorate; (c) “a democratic constitution is a principled expression in higher law of the political ideal of a people to govern itself in a certain way” (Rawls 2005: 232), which is articulated by public reason; (d) citizens carve into the constitution some constitutional essentials modelled upon the values of their own background political culture; “it is through these fixed procedures that the people can express, even if they do not, their reasoned democratic will” (Ibid); (e) power cannot drift into the hands of one of the three governmental branches, which rather must be constantly balanced. The branches are ultimately accountable to the people (Id). From these principles on the relation between the People and the constitution, Rawls’s conflation of Ackerman and his own framework should clearly emerge. Rawls’s People is the historical entity that has gradually developed a public political culture and self-understanding grounded in the reasonable respect for the fair terms of cooperation, which everyone may endorse, and for the burdens of judgment.24 Precisely by virtue of these qualities, the people nurturing and nurtured by such culture converge on the conviction that “the social union is no longer founded on a conception of the good as given by a common religious faith or philosophical doctrine, but on a shared public conception of justice appropriate to the conception of citizens in a democratic state as free and equal persons” (Rawls 2005: 304). Therefore, reasonable people by their very features and self-understanding aspire to shape a social order according to their own public culture itself, and in the resulting political conception of justice, rather than in any comprehensive doctrine neglectful of reasonable pluralism. Their aim, at the centre of an overlapping consensus excluding their personal or group commitments, is to preserve their own selfunderstanding as rational, reasonable, free and equals, and with this spirit they carve into a constitution a suitable public conception of justice. The set of constitutional essentials therein specified enshrines the people’s identity and constitutes the framework of their co-existence in a social world; in other words, constitutional essentials regulate the basic structure of economic, social, political relations and institutions. Therefore, as in Ackerman, in Rawls’s framework the role of the Supreme Court is to preserve the constitution and the political conception of justice it embeds from the potential intrusion of political majorities with the mandate to merely run ordinary politics. In playing this role, Rawls argues, the Supreme Court constitutes the exemplar standard of public reason. In the discursive practice meant

24

This characterization is formulated perhaps most explicitly in The Law of Peoples (Rawls 1999b), where the “liberal” and “decent” peoples are said to be united by institutional and cultural factors, and by “a firm attachment to a political (moral) conception of rights and justice”, expressed in a “written or unwritten constitution” which thus protects the citizens’ “fundamental interests” (Id: 24). In this regard, the people is distinguished from “states”, intended as more rationally-oriented actors, dedicated to the preservation and possibly the accumulation of power: states “are often seen as rational, anxiously concerned with their power – their capacity (military, economic, diplomatic) to influence other states – and always guided by their basic interests” (Id: 28).

80

3 John Rawls and the Constitutional Identity of ‘the People’

to defend and interpret the constitution, the justices are called to abide by its limits by appealing to reasons compatible with the political conception of justice it articulates. Therefore, they interpret public reason at its best, thus operationalizing “the wide, or educative, role of public reason” (Id: 236), and vitalizing it in the public forums.25 Nevertheless, as stressed by the fifth principle mentioned above, the Supreme Court does not have the ultimate say on the constitution and matters of basic justice: as in Ackerman, the justices are supposed to intercept the popular voice, which manifests itself both by procedurally regulating the other institutional branches (e.g., by voting), and by discursive articulation in the public forum. This constitutes a further instantiation of the deliberative democratic framework looming large in Rawls’s political liberalism.26 The role of the justices is anti-majoritarian rather than antidemocratic, as he insists, insofar as they protect the will of the People enclosed in the constitution, and do so with a constant eye on the democratic voice coming from outside the institutional loci. However, the incorporation of Ackerman’s framework into Rawls’s vocabulary also involves one major divergence. Against Ackerman, Rawls denies that constitutional essentials can be amended or abolished even in case of a glaring popular mandate respecting Article V and the Ackermanian higher lawmaking path. From Rawls’s perspective, constitutional essentials are “entrenched in the sense of being validated by historical practice” (Id: 239). Therefore, their abolition or radical amendment is ultimately not a reform, but a “constitutional breakdown” (Rawls 2005: 239). This difference can be read in terms of the different emphasis that Ackerman and Rawls place on democratic deliberation and public culture, an emphasis that is related with their different stance on the ultimate locus of the People’s will. Whereas Ackerman ultimately finds the will of We the People in those popular uprisings that prove sufficiently passionate, stable in time and wideranging to penetrate the institutional armour and complete the higher lawmaking path, Rawls associates the will of the People with that self-understanding undergirding the whole liberal-democratic political and institutional order, historically developed, rooted in the citizens who articulate it in a political conception of justice and crystallize it in a constitution. In other words, Ackerman’s ultimate normative criterion is the popular voice, which – given certain high-demanding conditions – should trump the former self-understanding of the People and commit a radical constitutional transformation. By contrast, Rawls’s ultimate normative

25

For an analysis of the factual and potential penetration of Rawls’s constitutional theory in the judicial practice and “the law of the land”, see Michelman (2003). 26 For a critique of the effectiveness of liberal constitutionalism to foster deliberative democratic politics, cf. Dryzek (2000). From Dryzek’s perspective, it is unrealistic to think that the constitutional framework may delimit and orient the whole deliberation in the public forums: “discourses can be bound up with material forces. For example, material economic constraints on politics now make themselves felt through the discourse of market liberalism” (Id: 18). Discourses abiding by the limits set by the constitution are not only insufficient, but sometimes facilitate, undemocratic politics (Id: 17). Therefore, discourses should be admitted to the public forum independently of their compliance with the constitutional framework.

References

81

lodestar lies precisely in that historical self-understanding that should trump a conflicting democratic bandwagon, whatever its strength. From Rawls’s perspective, if the constitution enshrines the political conception of justice distilled from the public culture integrating the People, then a constitutional breakdown ultimately means nothing less than a collapse of the People itself.

References Ackerman, Bruce. 1991. We the People, Vol. 1: Foundations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1998. We the People, Vol. 2: Transformations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2014. We the People, Vol. 3: The Civil Rights Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Banerjee, Kiran, and Jeffrey Bercuson. 2015. Rawls on the Embedded Self: Liberalism as an Affective Regime. European Journal of Political Theory 14 (2): 209–228. Barry, Brian. 1995. John Rawls and the Search for Stability. Ethics 105 (4): 874–915. Carlson, David G. 1994. Jurisprudence and Personality in the Work of John Rawls. Columbia Law Review 94 (6): 1828–1841. Cohen, Joshua. 1989. Democratic Equality. Ethics 99 (4): 727–751. Cohen, Gerald A. 2003. Facts and Principles. Philosophy and Public Affairs 31 (3): 211–245. Daniels, Norman. 2003. Democratic Equality: Rawls’s Complex Egalitarianism. In The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, ed. Samuel Freeman, 241–276. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Doppelt, Gerald. 1989. Is Rawls’s Liberalism Coherent and Defensible? Ethics 99 (4): 815–851. Dryzek, John S. 2000. Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dworkin, Ronald. 1973. The Original Position. University of Chicago Law Review 40 (3): 500–533. Estlund, David. 1998. The Insularity of the Reasonable. Why Political Liberalism Must Admit the Truth. Ethics 108 (2): 252–275. Ferrara, Alessandro. 1999. Justice and Judgment: The Rise and the Prospects of the Judgment Model in Contemporary Political Philosophy. London: Sage. ———. 2008. The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2019. Sideways at the Entrance of the Cave: A Pluralist Footnote to Plato. Philosophy and Social Criticism 45 (4): 390–402. ———. 2020. Habermas e Rawls. Ciò che la controversia intorno al “ragionevole” rivela. Quaderni di Teoria Sociale 1-2: 699–712. Floridia, Antonio. 2017. Un’Idea Deliberativa della Democrazia. Genealogia e Principi. Bologna: Il Mulino. Forst, Rainer. 2011. The Justification of Justice. Rawls and Habermas in Dialogue. In Disputing the Political: Habermas and Rawls, ed. James Gordon Finlayson and Fabian Freyenhagen, 153–180. London/New York, transl. by Jeffrey Flynn: Routledge. Freeman, Samuel. 2003. Introduction: John Rawls – An Overview. In The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, ed. Samuel Freeman, 1–61. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ———. 2007. Rawls. London: Routledge. Friedman, Marylin. 2000. John Rawls and the Political Coercion of Unreasonable People. In The Idea of Political Liberalism: Essays on Rawls, ed. Victoria Davion and Clark Wolf, 16–33. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Greenawalt, Kent. 1998. Has Religion Any Place in the Politics and Law of Liberal Democracy? Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 142 (3): 378–387.

82

3 John Rawls and the Constitutional Identity of ‘the People’

Habermas, Jürgen. 1995. Reconciliation Through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawls’s Political Liberalism. The Journal of Philosophy 92 (3): 109–131. transl. by Ciaran Cronin. ———. 1996. Between Facts and Norms (1992). Cambridge: Polity Press, transl. by William Rehg. Kelly, Erin, and Lionel K. McPherson. 2001. On Tolerating the Unreasonable. Journal of Political Philosophy 9 (1): 38–55. Kukathas, Chandran, and Philip Pettit. 1990. Rawls: A Theory of Justice and Its Critics. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Larmore, Charles. 1999. The Moral Basis of Political Liberalism. The Journal of Philosophy 96 (12): 599–625. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 2007. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (1981). Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Maffettone, Sebastiano. 2010. Rawls: An Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press. Manin, Bernard. 1987. On Legitimacy and Political Deliberation. Political Theory 15 (3): 338–368. transl. by Elly Stein and Jane Mansbridge. Mendus, Susan. 1999. The Importance of Love in Rawls’s Theory of Justice. British Journal of Political Science 29 (1): 57–75. Michelman, Frank I. 2003. Rawls on Constitutionalism and Constitutional Law. In The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, ed. Samuel Freeman, 394–425. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Milo, Ronald. 1995. Contractarian Constructivism. The Journal of Philosophy 92 (4): 181–204. Nagel, Thomas. 1973. Rawls on Justice. The Philosophical Review 82 (2): 220–234. O’Neill, Onora. 2003. Constructivism in Rawls and Kant. In The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, ed. Samuel Freeman, 347–367. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quong, Jonathan. 2011. Liberalism without Perfection. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rawls, John. 1980. Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory. The Journal of Philosophy 77 (9): 515–572. ———. 1985. Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical. Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (2): 223–251. ———. 1987. The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 7 (1): 1–25. ———. 1988. The Priority of the Right and Ideas of the Good. Philosophy and Public Affairs 17 (4): 251–276. ———. 1995. Reply to Habermas, in Rawls, John, 2005. Political Liberalism (1993), expanded ed., 372–434. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1997. The Idea of Public Reason Revisited, in Rawls, John, 2005. Political Liberalism (1993), expanded ed., 440–490. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1999a. A Theory of Justice (1971), revised ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1999b. The Law of Peoples: With “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited”. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2005. Political Liberalism (1993), expanded ed. New York: Columbia University Press. Raz, Joseph. 1990. Facing Diversity: The Case of Epistemic Abstinence. Philosophy and Public Affairs 19 (1): 3–46. Rorty, Richard. 2011. The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy (1984). In The Pragmatism Reader: From Peirce Through the Present, ed. Robert B. Talisse and Scott F. Aikin, 381–402. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sandel, Michael. 1982. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1994. Political Liberalism by John Rawls. Harvard Law Review 107 (7): 1765–1794. Schwarzenbach, Sibyl. 1991. Rawls, Hegel and Communitarianism. Political Theory 19 (4): 539–571.

References

83

Stout, Jeffrey. 2005. Democracy and Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1985. Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wolin, Sheldon. 1996. The Liberal/Democratic Divide: On Rawls’s Political Liberalism. Political Theory 24 (1): 97–119.

Chapter 4

The Old Kid in Town: Excursus on Participatory Democracy and a “Participatory Conception of Deliberative Democracy”

Abstract Part I ends with an excursus on democratic participation and the participatory conception of democracy. The chapter shortly addresses the thought of Carole Pateman, C. B. Macpherson, and Benjamin Barber. Subsequently, it reconstructs the critiques of the participatory model of democracy, which touch upon its conception of politics, of popular sovereignty, its model of rationality, its trivialization of political representation, and finally upon empirical considerations. Once discussed the most relevant of them, the conceptual iterations of the notion of ‘participation’ after the deliberative turn are examined, with a curious result: at the end of the analysis, the impression is that the deliberative democratic tradition has appropriated the concept of participation, once distinctive to participatory democracy, and recast it in its own terms, thus contesting its very meaning and application. The last section of the chapter is devoted to the reconstruction of Cristina Lafont’s recent work, meant to insert a participatory dimension into deliberative democracy, and to stress the democratic relevance of a macro-deliberative political process in which contestatory practices can find their place, so that the public justification of policies and political decisions is fine-tuned to the greatest possible extent. Keywords Participation · Representation · Deliberative turn · Pateman · Macpherson · Barber · Lafont · Blind deference · Deep pluralism · Epistemic democracy In concluding Part I, let us engage in a short analysis of one last endeavour in deliberative democratic theory, namely Cristina Lafont’s recent attempt (2020) to imbue it with a stronger participatory dimension. Besides the significance inherent to her project, a discussion of the latter will enable us to at least touch upon ‘the old kid in town’, namely a strand of democratic theory that the reader may expect to find in this book, and that will only be briefly discussed in what follows, for reasons that will be elucidated: participatory democracy, which was overshadowed by the ‘deliberative turn’, and which yet was reintroduced – at least nominally – by Lafont in a deliberative democratic framework. Thus, the present chapter will proceed as follows: in the first section, the three most well-known participatory democratic frameworks will be briefly analyzed, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Fiorespino, Radical Democracy and Populism, Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations 18, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84969-6_4

85

86

4 The Old Kid in Town: Excursus on Participatory Democracy

namely those developed by Carole Pateman, Crawford B. Macpherson and Benjamin Barber. The most relevant trait emerging is their conception of democratic sovereignty as popular direct decision-making power – which Barber conflates with pioneering elements anticipating the deliberative turn, especially what he calls “strong democratic talk”. The assumption that seems to underlie those theories is that the democratic ideal at its best is embodied by the image of the public forum, with citizens in the flesh directly contributing to the decision-making process, each with an equal share of decisional power. Any other institutional arrangement, especially representative democracy, is seen as a second-best, a surrogate and “oxymoronic” form of democracy thriving at a time when the physical public forum is not a viable option – and yet, political representation is reluctantly and problematically embraced by all the champions of participatory democracy. In the second section, the main criticisms to participatory democracy will be reconstructed, manifold and varied as they are: participatory democracy was targeted for its conception of politics, of popular sovereignty and people’s empowerment, for its model of rationality, its simplistic understanding of political representation, and finally on empirical grounds. This severe undermining, which participatory democracy does not seem to have survived, is the reason why such strand of democratic theory is only shortly addressed in this book. At the end of this section, the fortunes and iterations of the concept of ‘participation’ after the deliberative turn will be briefly discussed. What is most interesting to the analysis is the impression that the deliberative democratic tradition has appropriated the concept of participation and recast it in its own fashion, thus contesting the very meaning and application of participatory democracy’s distinctive cornerstone. This impression is corroborated in the third section, fully devoted to the examination of Lafont’s “participatory conception of deliberative democracy”, as the subheading of her recent work reads. As we shall see, Lafont employs a notion of the sovereign people as the ensemble of the subjects to the laws enacted by an institutional system, exerting their sovereign power by engaging in a “macro-deliberative” process of will-formation and reason-giving, which is particularly vital when it comes to matters of basic justice. Such process has the epistemic aim to track the best possible justification for the enacted laws and policies, so that citizens may live under laws that they can reasonably accept on grounds of justificatory frameworks which they themselves discursively develop and fine-tune. In Lafont’s theoretical proposal, the deliberative twist impressed on the concept of ‘participation’ is clearly observable.

4.1 Participatory Democracy and Beyond: Pateman, Macpherson, and Barber

4.1

87

Participatory Democracy and Beyond: Pateman, Macpherson, and Barber

The paradigm of participation, extremely lively between the ‘60s and ‘70s, underwent a radical decline which Carole Pateman was among the first to witness.1 In Sect. 4.2 we shall attempt to provide an account of such decline by exploring the main criticisms by which it was touched, and which it struggled to overcome. As to the present section, let us briefly overview the main theoretical expressions of participatory democracy between the ‘60s and the ‘70s, together with Benjamin Barber’s well-known theory of “strong democracy”, which appears to stand somewhat in between a participatory and a deliberative framework.2 The most renowned theorist of participatory democracy is arguably Pateman, whose argument starts off with an ambitious pars destruens, influential not only for the ensuing literature on participatory democracy, but also, to some extent, for the rise of the competing paradigm of deliberative democracy. Pateman targets what she calls “the contemporary theory of democracy” (1970: 13), by which she refers to the paradigm of democratic thought, dominating the political theory of the 1950s and ‘60s, dating back to Schumpeter and further developed by authors such as Dahl and Sartori. On Pateman’s reading, the core trait of such canon lies in the ambition to construct a theory divested of any normative implication, and thus fully ‘objective’ in its definition of ‘democracy’ articulated from the sociological description of empirical politics. Democracy is thus conceived of as “a political method or set of institutional arrangements at the national level” (Id: 14), and generally reduced to a few basic ingredients: free elections for the majoritarian selection of leaders, free ‘market-like’ competition of parties, political responsiveness as propelled by the risk of electoral defeat, political equality as universal suffrage, popular participation as electoral expression. Participation, in particular, is regarded by the advocates of the “contemporary theory of democracy” as simultaneously utopian and undesirable; utopian, because citizens – especially the lower socio-economic segments – have empirically proven a robust proclivity towards political apathy; undesirable, in that precisely those social segments which display higher disinterest in politics are also those which bear “widespread non-democratic or authoritarian attitudes” (Id: 3). Therefore, “an increase in political participation by present non-participants could upset the stability of the democratic system” (Ibid). Against this picture, Pateman aspires to oppose a different understanding of participation, political equality, and political legitimacy: participation is defined as “(equal) participation in the making of decisions, and ‘political equality’ refers to equality of power in determining the outcome of decisions” (Id: 43). As we shall see, this conflation of democratic sovereignty and direct citizen power on decisionmaking reverberates in many a theorization of participatory democracy, and is best

1 2

Cf. Pateman 1982. See Floridia 2017, 2018, and Forst 2012, Ch. 7.

88

4 The Old Kid in Town: Excursus on Participatory Democracy

graphically displayed in Sherry Arnstein’s well-known “ladder of participation”,3 at the highest rung of which lies “citizen control” on policy-making. In order to defend her conception of equality from the supporters of the “contemporary theory of democracy”, however, Pateman has to prove that a more pervasive and intense participation is neither utopian nor dangerous for social stability. She performs this task by putting forward two core claims, which she painstakingly attempts to demonstrate in her book: that participation in a democratic system has a significant educative function for citizens, and that participation in non-institutional loci, such as the workplace and non-governmental entities, is essential to such an educative endeavour. As to the former, Pateman grapples with the idea, expressed most clearly by Sartori,4 that citizens do not “learn how to vote by voting”, or to participate by participating; for Pateman, the opposite is true: “we do learn to participate by participating” (Id: 105) – a perspective that philosophers such as Aristotle and Kant would have endorsed. The central claim of Pateman’s argument for participation is precisely that the latter fosters a considerable moral, political, psychological development in citizens, a development which is essential to democracy: individual flourishing “takes place through the process of participation itself. The major function of participation in the theory of participatory democracy is therefore an educative one, educative in the very widest sense [...] Thus there is no special problem about the stability of a participatory system; it is self-sustaining through the educative impact of the participatory process” (Id: 42, my italics). Thus, the idea of popular sovereignty as direct, participated decision-making no longer conflicts with stability, and can be successfully advocated against the supporters of the “contemporary theory of democracy”, by virtue of the educative effect of the ongoing civic training guaranteed by the collective participation in decision-making. The second of the aforementioned claims from Pateman comes as a complement to the first one: drawing mainly from Mill, Pateman points out that if participation yields positive results in the formation of a virtuous citizenry, then it becomes desirable also in industries and workplaces. The individual engagement with the management of a collective enterprise has the effect of reducing the sense of subordination and lack of control on one’s life, overcoming the widespread sense of political impotence, and developing what Pateman calls “the sense of political efficacy”, or “political competence”, i.e. the perception that one’s action can affect policy to a meaningful extent – and that therefore politics is not an exclusive and impervious realm:5 “society can be seen as being composed of various political 3

Cf. Arnstein 1969; for a discussion, see Floridia 2017, pp. 27–30. Cf. Pateman 1970, pp. 10–11. 5 Pateman has firmly criticized Locke-inspired liberalism precisely for its “reification of the political”. On her reading, the giving up of political rights prescribed by the Lockean social contract results in a fictional understanding of citizenship, in that citizens are merely tied to each other by a shared lack of political rights, thus remaining starkly excluded from the public realm; they are invariably depicted as private individuals who “can only look at such public sphere and not act in it” (Pateman 1975: 457). 4

4.1 Participatory Democracy and Beyond: Pateman, Macpherson, and Barber

89

systems, the structure of authority of which has an important effect on psychological qualities and attitudes of the individuals [...] thus, for the operation of a democratic polity at national level, the necessary qualities in individuals can only be developed through the democratisation of authority structures in all political systems” (Id: 35). Moreover, on Pateman’s reading, democratizing the workplace would also mark a critical step towards the reduction of socio-economic inequalities, which are a notorious obstacle to equal participation. Strikingly, Pateman specifies that, given the size of contemporary nation-states, national politics cannot do without representation, and that therefore participation at the national level often boils down to the selection of leaders, as in the Schumpeterian tradition;6 yet, she stresses that this ineludible similarity with the “contemporary theory of democracy” is only superficial, in that participation at all levels changes the whole picture. In the theory of participatory democracy, the citizens choosing their leaders by election are no longer lethargic, alienated individuals, disheartened by a sense of material and psychological subordination to the powerful, unfamiliar with democratic virtues and practices; rather, “the existence of a participatory society would mean that he [the ordinary citizen] was better able to assess the performance of representatives at the national level, better equipped to take decisions of national scope when the opportunity arose to do so, and better able to weigh up the impact of decisions taken by national representatives” (Id: 110). In a similar vein, C. B. Macpherson argues that representation and elections cannot be banished from a theory of participatory democracy, due both to the size of contemporary nation-states and to a central weakness inherent to direct democracy as such, which Macpherson lucidly captures: even in an imaginary referendumbased polity, “somebody must formulate the questions” (Macpherson 1977: 95) of the referenda, and somebody must organize into an organic policy-line the complex sets of inconsistent demands resulting from the popular direct expression on different and interrelated issues. Therefore, Macpherson concludes, “we cannot do without elected politicians” (Id: 97). Thus, Macpherson goes on to sketch out the essential traits of an institutional structure capable of accommodating a strong participatory dimension within a representation-based national framework. The solution he identifies lies in “a pyramidal system with direct democracy at the base and delegate democracy at every level above that” (Id: 108). A multi-layered structure of councils and assemblies, starting from the neighbourhood and moving up to broader social-territorial unities, is ultimately complemented by “a national council for matters of national concern, and local and regional councils for matters of less than national concern” (Id: 108–109). For this framework to be realistic, however, Macpherson deems it necessary to consider “the weight of tradition and the actual circumstances” (Id: 112); this involves, primarily, the necessity of a party-system, which it would be utopian to ban from a democratic theory for Western societies. Macpherson also acknowledges the effectiveness of parties in articulating ideas, policy-proposals, and

6

Cf. Pateman 1970, pp. 109–110.

90

4 The Old Kid in Town: Excursus on Participatory Democracy

in bringing to the fore given issues. Therefore, he suggests that the system should “rely on the parties themselves to operate by pyramidal participation” (Id: 113), so that party members would be able to act at every level of politics in different ways, and in fruitful co-existence with a participatory environment. There is, however, a further and more fundamental difficulty that Macpherson addresses, one having to do with the very justification of the participatory democratic framework. Among the participatory democrats, especially those examined in this section, Macpherson is the only author who embraces liberalism and argues that his participatory democracy can be fully regarded as a liberal democracy – whereas both Pateman and Barber are overtly sceptical towards liberalism, which on their reading tends to reify citizenship by assuming and perpetuating an understanding of the individual as a “man at rest, inactive, nonparticipating, isolated, uninterfered with, privatized, and thus free” (Barber 2003: 36). Macpherson’s participatory democracy, rather differently, is presented as precisely an attempt to bring liberal democracy closer to its original commitment to equality, and more especially to “the equal right of every man and woman to the full development and use of his or her capabilities” (Macpherson 1977: 114, my italics). Macpherson identifies in the lack of a sense of the community and in the high degree of socio-economic inequality the main stumbling blocks to such egalitarian flourishing of individual capabilities by citizens. Moreover, he tightly connects inequalities with low rates of participation: “low participation and social inequity are so bound up with each other that a more equitable and humane society requires a more participatory political system” (Id: 94). Therefore, he intends participation as precisely linked with the reduction of socio-economic inequalities and the construction of a cooperating community with a sense of social solidarity, and thus with the exercise of the fundamental equal right to self-flourishing. Nevertheless, Macpherson effectively identifies a potential short-circuit in his own reasoning, one which will be addressed also by William Connolly in his work on democracy, as we shall see in Chap. 8: the creation of a sense of community, the elimination of harsh class struggle and of social inequalities are simultaneously the positive outcomes and the enabling requirements of a participatory democracy. That is, Macpherson is consciously caught in a vicious circle: democratic participation is required for social cooperation and equity to thrive, as much as cooperation and equity are needed in order for participatory democracy to be possible. Therefore, Macpherson attempts to identify “loopholes” providing a way out of the impasse, thus accounting for the practical (and logical, in a way) feasibility of a participatory polity. Drawing on Marx and Mill, he observes that slight and partial changes in either of those aspects (political participation and social inequality/community consciousness) may have positive mutual impact on each other, in a spiralling process which may significantly bolster, in the medium-long run, participation, social equity, and a spread sense of social solidarity. Possible steps in this gradual process, in Macpherson’s historical horizon, may be represented by (a) increasing popular awareness of the price to pay for economic growth, such as “the costs of air, water, and earth pollution” (Id: 102); (b) “increasing awareness of the costs of political apathy”, namely “the concentration of corporate power to dominate our

4.1 Participatory Democracy and Beyond: Pateman, Macpherson, and Barber

91

neighbourhoods, our jobs, our security” (Id: 103); (c) growing awareness of the “contradiction within capitalism” (Id: 105): capitalism produces inequalities in order to meet – and stimulate – consumers’ needs and wishes, while narrowing down its own customer base by absorbing wealth and creating inequalities. For Macpherson, therefore, the processes of democratic and social-economic empowerment are mutually reinforcing, through the alternation of relatively modest achievements in either area which play well into the hands of the other. Differently, the “strong” democratic theory developed by Benjamin Barber insists on the priority of the political over the economic, of democratic over social empowerment. On Barber’s reading, “in practice, it is citizenship that confers equality [...] I wish to argue that the way to make good on the promise of citizenship is to make citizenship stand for something more than taxpaying and voting” (2003: xxviii). As hinted above, Barber’s main polemical target is the ‘privatistic’ tendency of liberalism, its understanding of the individual as “privatized and thus free”, and the hollowing out of democratic citizenship resulting from its long-lasting hegemony. Barber’s critique of liberalism is as wide-ranging and deep as to tackle the physicalist vocabulary and conceptual categories informing its theoretical and ‘pre-theoretical’ assumptions, drawn from the scientific revolution that has inspired modern philosophy from Descartes on. Barber points out that the materialism, rationalism, atomism – and hence individualism – pervading liberalism at its very roots7 are the philosophical sources of a political theory which dramatically neglects “the whole subtle complex of social and political relations, which the Greeks thought defined the individual human being from the outset” (Id: 48). The ‘atomization’ of the individual corresponds to a privatization of freedom, which is reduced to the lack of external interference on the self-constituted individual, in a way best expressed in Nozick’s provocative question: “How much room do individual rights and liberty leave for the state?”8 In Barber’s view, it is this conception of politics that is largely responsible for the “pervasive privatization of the respublica” (Id: xxxiv) occurred especially from the 1980s, which goes hand in hand with the gradual reduction of democracy to elections – and thus to a substantive weakening of popular control and involvement, with a consequent widespread detachment from politics signalled by a somewhat endemic poor electoral turnout: from Barber’s perspective, people “are apathetic because they are powerless, not powerless because they are apathetic” (Id: 272). They vote in low percentages in that their power and involvement are squeezed to the bone, i.e. to the mere periodic cast of a ballot. To the ‘liberal’ model, Barber opposes a holistic, communitarian understanding of freedom, which is attainable only when individuals turn into citizens. Whereas “the individual is a solitary rights-bearing being unconnected to a social nexus” (Id: xxvii), by becoming a ‘citizen’ she finds “an expression of self that encompasses both individuality and sociability” (Ibid). Rather than representing a hindrance on freedom, such embeddedness of the individual in the community is an essential

7 8

Cf. Barber 2003, pp. 32–37. Excerpt from Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, quoted in Barber 2003, p. 34.

92

4 The Old Kid in Town: Excursus on Participatory Democracy

condition for her flourishing. Individual freedom and autonomy, therefore, are inextricably tied to an active and collective exercise of democratic citizenship: “autonomy is not the condition of democracy, democracy is the condition of autonomy. Without participating in the common life that defines them and in the decision-making that shapes their social habitat, women and men cannot become individuals” (Id: xxxv). Therefore, Barber criticizes representative democracy as a surrogate form of democracy, a second-best devised to tailor “pure democracy” on the size of the contemporary nation-state: “representation destroys participation and citizenship even as it serves accountability and private rights. Representative democracy is as paradoxical an oxymoron as our political language has produced” (Id: xxxiv). In order to exercise an active citizenship, thus pursuing the form of positive freedom that Barber has in mind, citizens have to be involved in a participatory selfgovernment, i.e. enjoy as much direct power on policy-making as possible. That would bring contemporary democracy in line with the original democratic aspiration to popular self-determination. Nonetheless, Barber is aware of the rootedness of political parties in culture and practice, and more in general of the unfeasibility of pure democracy in contemporary societies; thus, he describes the desirable institutional structure as one which maximizes popular participation while maintaining an inescapable representative dimension, especially at the national level: “citizens are governors: self-governors, communal governors, masters of their own fates. They need not participate all of the time in all public affairs, but they should participate at least some of the time in at least some public affairs” (Id: xxix, my italics). Consistently with the realistic tinge animating his thought, Barber proposes a set of participatory institutions that have precedents in American history, such as neighbourhood assemblies, town meetings, forms of civic education, elections by lot. It is by virtue of this participation in the res publica, which must be limited for mere pragmatic-realistic reasons, that the individual can pursue autonomy and freedom: “in the end, only citizens can be free. The argument for strong democracy, though at times deeply critical of liberalism, is thus an argument on behalf of liberty” (Id: xxxvi). On the one hand, as stressed by Forst (2012) and Floridia (2017), Barber’s theory is groundbreaking in anticipating central ingredients of deliberative democracy. The emphasis on the dimension of public talk and the democratic relevance of the formation and fine-tuning of opinions has led Floridia to introduce Barber as a bridge of sorts between the participative and the deliberative democratic paradigms, and Forst to interpret strong democracy as a “communitarian model” of deliberative democracy. On the other hand, however, Barber’s theory proves to inherit to a great extent a fundamental assumption of participatory democracy, detected in both Pateman and Macpherson: namely, the idea that popular sovereignty ultimately overlaps with an equal share of direct power on decisions;9 this understanding of democratic sovereignty connotes the very concept of participation, which in order to be meaningful

9

Cf. Floridia 2017, pp. 26, 30, 37–38.

4.2 A Paradigm Under Siege: The Protean Critique of Participatory Democracy

93

must be intended as “(equal) participation in the making of decisions”, in Pateman’s words.

4.2

A Paradigm Under Siege: The Protean Critique of Participatory Democracy

The decay of the participatory theory of democracy is undoubtedly related to a significant extent with the change in the political climate brought about by the Thatcher-Reagan era, the conservative upsurge of the 1980s, and the parallel withering away of the participatory spirit characterizing especially the 1960s – although Barber has stressed that, in the world outside the academy, a participatory resurgence occurred during and after the ‘80s: “a decade defined by greed, narcissism, and hostility to big government has produced an interest in community service and an affection for the little government of neighbourhoods and towns” (Barber 2003: xxiii). Nonetheless, participatory democracy as a theoretical project has also suffered the so-called ‘deliberative turn’, and the momentous critiques coming from authors within and outside such rising paradigm. The first critical line is somewhat intertwined with the historical decline of participation as a practice: according to Jane Mansbridge, such decline is at least partly due to the practical and theoretical impossibility for participatory democrats to consistently prove the educative benefits of participation, for two obvious reasons: first of all, “it was hard to find situations for study in which the researcher could measure the quality of people before and after the addition of participation [...] Second, changes in people’s heads are hard to measure” (Mansbridge 1995: 6). One of the bulwarks of participatory democracy, therefore, failed to emerge to significant and verifiable degrees, in spite of the practical realizations of the theory which blossomed between the 1960s and ‘70s. The participatory democrats’ focus on the educative effects of active citizenship, however, was also submitted to severe theoretical scrutiny, especially in Jon Elster’s work. In his view, participatory democracy wallows into a narcissistic selfrepresentation which neglects the primary role of politics, namely the making of collective decisions. From Elster’s perspective, the educative function of democracy to which participatory democrats tend to attach normative priority is better conceived of as a by-product of a democratic regime: “it can indeed be highly satisfactory to engage in political work, but only on the condition that the work is defined by a serious purpose which goes beyond that of achieving this satisfaction. If that condition is not fulfilled, we get a narcissistic view of politics” (Elster 2003: 336), i.e., one which runs in circles without an aim external to the political practice itself.10 An author like Pateman, who figures among the addressees of the critique, may have 10

Cf. also Elster 1983, pp. 91–100, and Larmore 1986, who agrees with Elster’s critique while claiming that Elster could have added to his classification of the “states of mind that are essentially

94

4 The Old Kid in Town: Excursus on Participatory Democracy

well defended herself from this charge, if only she had moved more straightforwardly among the meanders of her own theory. If she had consistently held a clearer normative-argumentative line, Pateman may have pointed out that the educative function of participation is not primary in her theory, as Elster claims; rather, it is offered as a response to the Schumpeterian argument on stability, according to which increasing participation would require the involvement in politics of destabilizing social groups. Pateman may argue, therefore, that the primary normative commitment underlying her theory lies in the notion of equal political power as equal participation in the process of substantive decision-making. On this reading, the educative function of participation, relevant as it may be, would be solely employed to prove that, rather than a destabilizing effect, mass participation has a virtuous educative function, which secures the stability of the participatory polity. Nonetheless, Pateman is less straightforward, and ultimately lays herself open to Elster’s criticism by frequently conferring explicit priority upon the educative function of democracy: “finally, the justification for a democratic system in the participatory theory of democracy rests primarily on the human results that accrue from the participatory process” (Pateman 1970: 43, my italics) – just to mention one textual reference to this tendency among many. Moreover, and perhaps most crucially, the tendency of participatory democrats to equate popular sovereignty with a share of direct decision-making power was significantly undermined by three critiques, targeting such link from three different perspectives. Firstly, as stressed by Michael Menser (2018) and Floridia (2017), participatory democracy ultimately embraces the representative paradigm which it often starkly criticizes. Rather than developing a true alternative to political representation, or attempting to theoretically conciliate its role with the normative centrality of direct participation, participatory democrats maintain it as an unwelcome guest, which yet must be invited. Although it makes participatory democracy more realistic, and thus “more palatable and relevant to political philosophy” (Menser 2018: 38), this choice significantly weakens the theoretical framework, which bears in itself an ‘alien’ doomed to remaining such: political representation is neither plainly excluded nor organically integrated within the theory, thus maintaining an ambiguous role. Moreover, the participatory rejection of representative democracy appears superficial and biased in many ways: as written by Mansbridge in her plainspoken critique of Barber’s most well-known work, “Strong Democracy sometimes reads as a series of polemics against some of Barber’s favorite bugaboos, including representative government and anarchism. In this, as in his past works, he argues by destroying straw monsters” (Mansbridge 1987: 1342). Secondly, the potential social and political equalization on which participatory democrats placed great hopes was empirically called into question in a powerful manner, especially by Mansbridge’s important work Beyond Adversary Democracy (1983). During her long field-research conducted in small-sized participatory

by-products” that kind of by-product attainable only while pursuing a different aim, such as citizens’ education, which is favoured by a participation oriented towards decision-making.

4.2 A Paradigm Under Siege: The Protean Critique of Participatory Democracy

95

environments, Mansbridge has witnessed the rise of inequalities and imbalances of power even in such cohesive communities. From the attempt to account for the reasons behind that apparently inevitable phenomenon, she has developed theoretical categories which cut across the standard polarization ‘representative government vs. direct democracy’, with the former associated with oligarchy and the latter with authentic popular sovereignty. According to Mansbridge, participatory democrats tend to assume a unitary model of democracy, presupposing a collective common interest and social fraternity, while dramatically downplaying the ineradicable pluralism of interests that exists in communities of any and every size. Those interests lie at the origin of an alternative model of democracy, which Mansbridge calls adversary, and which in her view should never be dispelled as normatively inferior to the unitary one, like participatory democrats tend to do. The assumption of the adversary model is that clashing interests are constitutive of human co-existence, and they require procedures capable of selecting among them while treating them fairly and equally. Based on extensive empirical analysis, therefore, Mansbridge concludes that “preserving unitary virtues requires a mixed polity – part adversary, part unitary – in which citizens understand their interests well enough to participate effectively in both forms at once” (1983: 302). The participatory emphasis on a polity united around a shared common good may be noxious to the very political equality praised by the participatory democrats, in that the unrealistic denial of pluralism and the consequent rejection of ‘adversarial’ institutions meant to arbitrate among competing claims pave the way for the rise of imbalances of power.11 Thirdly, the whole model of rationality undergirding the equation of popular sovereignty and participatory decision-making power was called into question, directly and indirectly, by the rise of the deliberative theory of democracy. In this regard, a momentous and full-fledged critique was advanced by Bernard Manin (1987), whose argument starts by questioning the principle of unanimity and its underlying rationale: the idea, shared by liberals and democrats, that the will of the individuals as such be the source of political legitimacy, and thus that a unanimous decision be the most legitimate insofar as it respects every singular will. The distortion, according to Manin, lies in the “assumption that individuals in society, in particular, those having to make a political decision, possess an already formed will, already know exactly what they want, and at most only need to apply their criteria of evaluation to the proposed solutions” (Id: 351). Besides the impracticability inherent to unanimity as a regulatory criterion, therefore, the principle rests on the misplaced attribution of an absolute value to individual will, neglectful of the cognitive and legitimating relevance of will-formation. The latter largely depends upon processes of discursive deliberation explicitly ignored by many classical liberal and democratic thinkers – such as Rousseau, who according to Manin defended a

11

It should be noted that Barber has outspokenly distanced his theory of strong democracy from the unitary model; cf. Barber 2003, pp. 217–229.

96

4 The Old Kid in Town: Excursus on Participatory Democracy

“rigorous exclusion of communication between the citizens” (Id: 345).12 If legitimacy is made to rest merely upon individual will, then (a) we can dismiss as irrelevant the social and institutional infrastructure allowing for intersubjective will-formation, and (b) we must accept as legitimate the popular will independently of how it was shaped. Rather, for Manin “the source of legitimacy is not the predetermined will of individuals, but rather the process of its formation, that is, deliberation itself [...] a legitimate decision does not represent the will of all, but is one that results from the deliberation of all” (Id: 351–352). This critique, and more in general the deliberative turn and its commitment to discursive intersubjectivity as the central model of rationality, target a vast array of political theories, among which figures participatory democracy. In their defences of popular sovereignty as an equal stake in direct decision-making, participatory democrats – except for Barber, who nonetheless embraces that notion of popular sovereignty – show little interest in will-formation, tend to attribute a self-standing value to individual will, and thus downplay the legitimating force of those collective deliberative processes in which wills, interests, and opinions are shaped, fine-tuned, and integrated.13 The notion of participation, however, was not dismissed altogether, but rather retained in a different fashion. Just like the idea of popular sovereignty was recast by deliberative democrats as the discursive interaction among citizens and between citizens and institutions, also the notion of participation was divested of its connection with equal individual decision-making power, and re-interpreted as participation in the deliberative process of the political community. Interestingly, therefore, it is often the underlying understanding of popular sovereignty that shapes the meaning of ‘participation’ and marks the difference between participatory and deliberative democrats, rather than the degree of relevance conferred upon the participatory practice itself: for participatory democrats, participation was intended as a share of decisional power, in line with a conception of popular sovereignty based on the direct expression of citizens, with representation dismissed as a second-best; for deliberative democrats, participation means involvement in an ongoing communicative exchange in which wills and opinions are formed that should be normatively central to law- and policy-making, as Habermas claims.

12

Cf. Rousseau (2002), Book II, Chapter 3, and Book IV, Chapter 3. For a different perspective, infusing participatory democracy with deliberative themes and commitments, cf. Denise Vitale (2006), who argues that the former has at its core a strong intersubjective, dialogic dimension. Although such dimension is not absent from the participatory theory, Vitale’s reading seems possible only retroactively, once the deliberative turn has taken over and provided the theoretical equipment to re-dress participatory democracy in a communicative guise. Differently from Vitale, Diana C. Mutz has argued that participation and deliberation are incompatible ideals, in that they require opposite “social environments”: whereas the former is best served by a homogeneous context, in which individuals have similar views and reinforce each other’s convictions, the latter requires social heterogeneity and transformative exposure to different political perspectives within an ideally “calm, rational exchange of views in near-monotone voices” (Mutz 2006: 17).

13

4.2 A Paradigm Under Siege: The Protean Critique of Participatory Democracy

97

Yet, deliberative democrats tend to diverge in the extent to which they embrace popular participation and the establishment of ad hoc institutions in the deliberative process.14 On the one hand lie theoretical proposals which variously stress the benefits of mass participation in the deliberative process, such as Benhabib’s (1996) and Dryzek’s (2000) formulations of deliberative democracy; Denise Vitale’s claim that “the radical democratization of democracy, which is crucial to reduce the legitimacy deficit of contemporary politics, can succeed only if participation and deliberation are regarded as two key elements in the process of collective decisionmaking” (2006: 759); Donatella della Porta’s defense of “participatory deliberative democracy” (2013); Simone Chambers’s support for a systemic deliberative democracy as opposed to “small scale deliberative venues” (2009); Stephen Elstub’s claim that “the conception of democracy is stronger when participatory and deliberative democracy are combined” (2018: 194); Hélène Landemore’s rejection of representative democracy as an “obsolete” and “fundamentally elitist and antidemocratic construct” (2017: 8), resulting in her project of an “open democracy”, “meant as a more authentically democratic paradigm in which deliberation among free and equal members [...] is made a central institutional principle” (Id: 2). On the other hand of the spectrum stand authors who are overtly sceptical towards widespread participation, such as Dennis Thompson (2008), who highlights potential contradictions between participation and deliberation, such as the virtual conflict between mass involvement and discursive quality, or between the latter and publicity; Mark E. Warren, who defines participation as a “romantic dogma” (1996), and defends softer and less comprehensive forms of deliberation, such as deliberative mini-publics;15 Joshua Cohen, who stresses that “far from being the only

14

A further participation-related debate within deliberative democratic theory is that between those who think that the public sphere should be kept informal, following Habermas, and those who argue that the most active participants in public deliberations, such as NGOs, should be somewhat formally absorbed within the institutional mechanisms. Cf. Eva Erman’s (2018) critique of the “transmission belt model” of deliberative democracy. Whereas such model suggests that the most actively participating agents in the public sphere should formally convey wills, opinions, and issues from the public sphere straight into the institutional loci, Erman stresses that the role and nature of civil society consist of a spontaneous and non-institutionalized transmission of demands from the lifeworld to the public sphere, from the “private” to the “public space” – not from the public to the institutions. On her reading, this is more in line with the epistemic mission of the public sphere, and politically more legitimate: from a normative perspective, it is unclear how unelected active agents are justified to formally represent the citizenry at the institutional level. In Erman’s words, in spite of its crucial role in thematizing and articulating problems and solutions, “civil society has no privileged status vis-à-vis any other citizen or group to further attempt to influence the empowered space by making representative claims” (Id: 151). The participating citizenry, therefore, should remain independent and distanced from the places of power where effective decisions are made, whereas for the transmission belt model the most active players in civil society should access the institutional sphere. 15 Cf. Warren and Gastil (2015); deliberative mini-publics, on the other hand, were criticized in recent times by Pateman precisely on the grounds of their marginality within the broader democratic system: mini-publics “are not integrated into the overall system of representative government or democratic institutions, nor do they become part of the regular political cycle in the life of a

98

4 The Old Kid in Town: Excursus on Participatory Democracy

deliberative scheme, direct democracy may not even be a particularly good arrangement for deliberation” (2003: 355). According to Cohen, local, sectional and issuespecific assemblies are especially undesirable, in that “deliberation in them can be expected at best to produce coherent sectional interests, but no more comprehensive conception of the common good” (Id: 356).16 An extensive empirical critique of participation – with the latter intended both as a share in decision-making and as the involvement in deliberative processes – came from Phil Parvin. In a recent contribution (2018), Parvin has firmly argued against the deliberative democratic engagement with participation, which he deems detrimental to democracy on the grounds of “the nature and scale of the civic and political changes which have given rise to the participatory inequalities which characterise liberal democratic states” (Id: 33). The transformations to which Parvin refers have to do, on the one hand, with alarming degrees of socio-economic inequalities which appear ineradicable, and which undercut the sense of citizenship and belonging of the worse-off. On the other hand, Parvin points to a “reconfiguration of civil society”: public life in Western societies is no longer animated by the more or less spontaneous rise of grassroots associations which all citizens could access, and through which virtually all citizens could participate and be given a hearing to some extent. Civic and political organizations are always more structured as “lobby organisations which serve the interests of their member constituencies not through grassroots activism but through representation at the elite level via sophisticated lobbying and public relations initiatives” (Id: 35). Even political parties have given up the territorial structure and face-to-face politics which used to be central to their nature and modus operandi. Such transformations dramatically contribute to alienating the lowest socio-economic segments from participation and public life. Due to both such growing complexity of civil society and the increasing inequalities in culture and social status, those social strata are no longer provided with “the requisite social, political, civic, and economic environment necessary for citizens to learn to articulate their views in ways that others can understand and accept, think of themselves as citizens joined in a collective political project with others, or

community” (Pateman 2012: 10). For an extensive discussion of mini-publics, which we shall shortly address in Section 3.3, cf. Lafont (2020), Part II. 16 The degree of pervasiveness that deliberation should achieve within democratic systems changed as the concept was elaborated by theorists over the years. For two opposite narratives on such iterations of the deliberative ideal, cf. Kuyper (2015) and Parietti (2019). Kuyper outlines a continuous path, through which the original theoretical construction of deliberative democracy (first phase) flowed into the design of specific, ‘micro-’ institutional devices in which the ideal could be accommodated (second phase); finally, deliberative democracy was formulated as a “large-scale system”, the broader scope of which makes it somewhat more participatory and inclusive (third phase). Differently, Parietti describes the process as discontinuous. On his reading, the focus on micro-deliberative institutions runs against the core commitments of deliberative democracy, and the recent ‘systemic turn’, rather than an innovative third stage, is nothing more than a way of “returning to what critical theorists were doing in the ‘90s” (Parietti 2019: 322) – with the addition, in his view, of problematic “substance”-oriented ingredients, contradicting the proceduralist gist of deliberative democracy.

4.3 Cristina Lafont and Participation as Deliberative, Not ‘Participatory’

99

internalise the norms of reasonableness necessary to engage in productive democratic debates with others” (Id: 38). Parvin fully recognizes the positive cognitive, moral, psychological impact of participation on citizens, which the participatory democrats praised; yet, contra authors like Landemore, he concludes that if the development of the basic cultural and cognitive tools to engage in democratic participation is severely disabled in contemporary liberal-democracies, then the deliberative democrats’ insistence on participation may only have the effect of reproducing existing inequalities between those who are equipped for participation and those who suffer material deprivations, a psychological detachment from citizenship and the public sphere, and a lack of democratic “habits of mind and body”. In spite of the lively discussion, only roughly sketched out, on the complex relation between participation and deliberation, a full-fledged attempt at reconciling the two models – i.e. one which goes beyond the analysis of their compatibilities and incompatibilities – was hardly advanced in the debate. Let us therefore analyze Cristina Lafont’s endeavour in order to extrapolate the understanding of the people and popular sovereignty therein embraced.

4.3

Cristina Lafont and Participation as Deliberative, Not ‘Participatory’

To start from where we left off, let us introduce Lafont’s framework by discussing her response to positions such as Parvin’s, which variously tend to reject popular participation on the grounds of its unfeasibility – often explained by appeal to the alleged incompetence and lack of interest of the average voter, or, as in Parvin, to the structure of contemporary civil society and the import of socio-economic cleavages. Lafont overcomes this set of objections by convincingly putting forward three major claims, the discussion of which introduces some relevant ingredients of her democratic theory. Firstly, she recalls the notorious arguments against women’s rights: if it is empirically verifiable that women are less educated and more irrational than men, then it is legitimate to deny them rights. This argument was variously deployed also against racial equality and democracy in general (‘if citizens are ignorant, then they better be politically inactive’), and it suffers from the evident flaw of mistaking the effect (ignorance) for the cause (subordination): rather than tracking the source of the cultural or cognitive deficits to the historical condition of subordination suffered by given disadvantaged categories, it assumes that the latter are by nature culturally and cognitively inferior, and therefore socially, politically, culturally, and economically disadvantaged; thus, the argument concludes that such categories do not deserve any form of empowerment, and ends up reproducing the inequalities which in fact cause the ignorance. In the specific case of voter ignorance, Lafont adds, the critics of participation are “under no pressure to be politically correct” (2020: 7), in a way that defuses the ‘civilizing force of hypocrisy’, to recall Elster’s felicitous expression.

100

4 The Old Kid in Town: Excursus on Participatory Democracy

Secondly, in a realistic vein, Lafont casts light on an important feature of democracy, namely the restless dynamism of public opinion. Mentioning George Orwell, she observes that the public sphere is always animated with opinions, wills, biases, feelings, aims, independently of the extent to which the institutions are receptive to and interactive with the ‘people’. As we shall see, such participation to collective processes of deliberation and will-formation overlaps with the meaning of ‘participation’ as intended by Lafont. What is relevant, for now, is that if citizens are always involved – whether actively or passively at the individual level, whether or not in ongoing dialogue with decision-makers – then their role can never be reduced to that of quiescent electors, witnessing the changes by which political leaders carve the social world they inhabit. Citizens always contribute to shaping those changes, and when they do not, actual transformation hardly verifies: “it is one thing to get anti-discrimination laws enacted, quite another to achieve the laws’ aim of actually eliminating discriminatory actions and attitudes within a political community” (Id: 27). What William Connolly calls ‘micropolitics’, i.e. the ensemble of convictions ingrained in a political community’s conscious and subconscious layers, determines the fortunes of such community to a significant degree. Participation, therefore, is not only desirable for normative reasons connected with Lafont’s conception of democracy, but it is also necessary on the grounds of empirical considerations: governing without the citizenry is tantamount to not governing. Leaving citizens where they stand, rather than involving them in the transformative processes, ultimately amounts to leaving the whole society where it stands, independently of the virtuous laws that a supposed enlightened minority may enact: “as any political activist knows, political struggles on significant issues ultimately depend on changing the underlying attitudes, beliefs, and value orientations of the majority of the population” (Id: 86). Thirdly, the aim of Lafont’s work is to develop “the most coherent and attractive conception of democratic principles and ideals [...] A compelling conception of democracy is needed at least in order to identify what it is that is worth fighting for or defending [...] it is also needed in order to assess among different political transformations and innovations that are taking place at the transnational level” (Id: 5, footnote 14). A normatively informed conception of democracy, therefore, is deemed essential by Lafont to evaluate the health of empirical institutions, political proposals, transformations, and to point towards paths to democratization. In this regard, her central claim is that the democratic ideal of self-government cannot rest content with the pursuit of political equality; rather, it has to avoid what Lafont calls blind deference, and the political alienation it entails. Blind deference is the expression by which she points to the danger that citizens be coerced by laws and policies to the conception, justification and enactment of which they had no stake whatsoever – a danger especially serious for democracy when it comes to matters of basic justice and fundamental rights.17 The problem with ‘blind deference’ lies in the attribute ‘blind’: deference to decisions made by others is a regular feature of 17

Cf. Lafont 2020, pp. 20–22.

4.3 Cristina Lafont and Participation as Deliberative, Not ‘Participatory’

101

complex societies, which only a utopist would contrast; yet, blind deference means that citizens are subject to laws and policies that they did not have the chance to shape, justify to each other, contest, and thus endorse as “reasonable upon reflection” (Id: 18). In Lafont’s view, bypassing the people and denying them political involvement results in political alienation, which can occur in spite of a fair existing degree of political equality,18 and which leads to dangerous and undemocratic misalignments between public opinion and political agenda. A central element to Lafont’s framework, therefore, is that “being required to blindly defer to political decisions that one cannot reflectively endorse is quintessentially opposed to the ideal of self-government” (Id: 19). As we shall see in what follows, blind deference becomes a sort of litmus test meant to evaluate the democratic credentials of competing political theories – and more in generally, it is presented as a parameter to assess the distance of political practices and regimes from the democratic ideal of self-government.

4.3.1

Deep pluralists, Epistocrats, and Lottocrats Under the Lens of “Blind Deference”

The philosophical competitors addressed by Lafont, and evaluated against the backdrop of ‘blind deference’, are three. The first one, labelled “deep pluralism”, is the main contemporary opponent of the deliberative democratic paradigm, and lies at the intersection of theoretical frameworks which we shall analyze in Chaps. 6 and 7: republicans such as Bellamy and Waldron on the one hand, and agonistic democrats such as Mouffe on the other. The other two competitors addressed by Lafont are internal to deliberative democracy: namely, the “epistemic” and “lottocratic” variants of the deliberative democratic family. As to deep pluralists, “their most distinctive claim is that political disagreement runs so deep that it cannot be reasonably overcome” (Id: 34, footnote 1). Due to both epistemic and political reasons – i.e., having to do with the conflicting ‘nature’ of the political – disagreement is so pervasive as to infiltrate every and any issue, from ordinary legislation to matters of basic rights. Consensus and agreement are fragile, exceptional, if not mere disguises for hegemonic forms of power. Therefore, majoritarian proceduralism is the only way to pursue democracy and individual equality, which would be impaired, for instance, by forms of epistocratic imposition of the substantively ‘best argument’ of the few on the many. We shall delve more in depth into this framework in the following chapters. For now, let us stick to Lafont’s rendition and main critiques of such school of thought, by which she introduces her own participatory conception of deliberative democracy as the one which most approximates the democratic ideal of self-government. Lafont’s critique is threefold.

18

Cf. Lafont 2020, p. 19 and Chap. 5.

102

4 The Old Kid in Town: Excursus on Participatory Democracy

In the first place, she points out that the deep pluralist commitment to the fairness of the procedure, and the related rejection of the relevance of substantive arguments, ends up denying inclusion to minorities. The latter would behave as mere “sore losers”, if they tried to stand up for their reasons after a numerical defeat in a ballot. In other words, if the force of substantive reasons is fully subordinated to procedural fairness, then “it is not clear what resources the pluralist conception of democracy has to offer to citizens rightfully worried about the risk of drastic trade-offs between substantive justice and procedural fairness” (Id: 53).19 The menace of blind deference of minorities to majorities is lodged in this framework, as the strict adherence to the procedural outcomes compels the losers to compliance while disabling them from performing substance-oriented contestations based upon the reasons that they deem critical. Moreover, Lafont argues, such radical subordination of substantive reasons to proceduralism somewhat ironically hollows out the pluralism and dissensus which deep pluralists claim to value: “disagreement would disappear in that citizens would accept that their substantive disagreements are irrelevant to challenging the legitimacy of the laws and policies that have been democratically decided upon” (Id: 42). Therefore, the second objection developed by Lafont is that deep pluralism is “reflectively unstable”: it goes against the most widespread democratic practices and the most heartfelt needs experienced by citizens, such as the drive to deploy the substantive perspective which one deems right against an unwelcome piece of legislation, independently of the procedural fairness by which it was enacted. Waldron himself admits that situations exist in which a citizen challenging a democratically ratified policy may be right. Thus, Lafont argues, “if he [the citizen] may be right that some law or policy is unjust, then it may very well be wrong for him to “transcend” his accurate belief and blindly defer to the majoritarian decision” (Id: 45). An important point raised by Lafont in the context of this critique is that the sharpest contrasts on substantive issues related with fundamental rights may only cool down when a “settled view” consolidates on the matter, one which is largely accepted and reasonably acceptable to all. In the absence of a settled view, the public expression of the view that one takes to be ‘right’ on basic rights is an important and deep-seated practice. Besides being desirable, therefore, such forms of morally oriented displays of dissent are deeply ingrained, and unlikely to vanish; thus, a radical proceduralism which predicates their illegitimacy is hardly “reflectively” sustainable. Thirdly, the deep pluralist framework shows a weak emancipatory potential for the underrepresented and the marginalized. In a nutshell, it is unclear how a permanent social disagreement and a related ongoing need for compromises may In this regard, one of the main defensive strategies to which the ‘deep pluralists’ resort is criticized by Lafont, i.e. the idea of ‘fair compromise’: substantive reasons should never be discussed, even when basic rights are at stake, in that decisions are often the outcome of a fair compromise in which the perspectives of each political group are included. As we shall see better in Chap. 6, Lafont aptly observes that the strategy of fair compromise welcomes precisely those substantive evaluations which clash with pure proceduralism as advocated by deep pluralists.

19

4.3 Cristina Lafont and Participation as Deliberative, Not ‘Participatory’

103

help the socially and economically disadvantaged to achieve empowerment: “bargaining and negotiation are forms of political action among empowered parties” (Id: 67); an exclusive focus on such practices virtually deepens the existing gaps among social groups, and hence the danger of blind deference to the powerful. As we shall see shortly, Lafont opposes to this framework a notion of deliberative democracy meant to provide more effective emancipatory tools, by virtue of the “communicative power of citizens to shape public opinion and enlarge the public sphere” (Id: 68). As to the competing democratic frameworks internal to the deliberative front, Lafont discusses the epistemic and the ‘lottocratic’ variants. The former, Lafont stresses, problematically co-exists with democracy: simply put, if the guiding criterion of deliberation is the extraction of the epistemically best argument, then there is little reason for deliberation to be democratic. Therefore, Lafont focuses on those attempts, such as Landemore’s, which purport to defend deliberative democracy in epistemic terms, i.e. as the best system to track the truth, by appeal to arguments hinging upon the superiority of diversity and high numbers to individual expertise and ability.20 In Lafont’s view, this approach conceals two major flaws, the overcoming of which overlaps with an essential and intriguing ingredient of Lafont’s own theoretical proposal. In the first place, arguments such as Landemore’s provide problematic criteria of inclusion: if democracy is justified on epistemic grounds, democratic inclusion also is, and the borders of the political community end up overlapping with the set of knowers. Hence, non-knowing citizens of the community at stake may be ruled out, and knowers from all over the wide world may be oddly welcomed in the agora, unless one accepts an alternative and independent democratic justification for inclusion which normatively conflicts with the epistemic one. In the second place, and more importantly, Lafont argues that “by reducing the epistemic function of deliberation to the aim of tracking the truth, another epistemic function of deliberation is disregarded, namely, tracking the justifiability of the policies in question to those who must comply with them” (Id: 98). With a brush stroke, Lafont simultaneously provides a criterion of democratic inclusion attuned with a crucial and all-too-underestimated epistemic function of deliberation, i.e. the search for the justification of laws best suited for and most understandable to those who are subject to it. She embraces a form of all-subjected principle in which those subjected are included as members of a community that deliberates by recursively engaging in practices of discursive contestation, until a settled view on specific issues of fundamental rights comes into being – if ever. The connection of deliberation and justification is defended by Lafont also with reference to the ‘lottocratic’ conceptions of deliberative democracy, i.e. those suggesting to endow mini-publics with decision-making power. Such claim is defended by two lines of argument, one epistemic and one democratic, both of which Lafont rejects. On the one hand, in her view, if mini-publics have a decisional status on the grounds of the higher knowledge of their members, then it becomes

20

Cf. Lafont 2020, pp. 90–91.

104

4 The Old Kid in Town: Excursus on Participatory Democracy

unclear in which sense the opinions and wills of citizens as they live and breathe matter, and lottocrats fall back into an epistocratic framework in which average citizens blindly defer to the mini-publics’ conclusions. On the other hand, Lafont claims, mini-publics can hardly be deemed democratically representative in a satisfactory sense. Mini-publics do not properly represent anyone because they are specifically designed to be counterfactual. They are devised to craft a “better self” of the participants, thus showing to citizens that the policies enacted stem from the opinions that normal individuals like them have developed in the best cognitive environment. Yet, Lafont observes that no one can be sure whether or not their better self would rank among the winning majority of a mini-public; in this inexorable uncertainty blind deference to the mini-public’s majority would thrive, perhaps even more dramatically than in the epistocratic scenario: “even those who think that it is rational to defer to the opinions of their better selves may find the idea of deferring to the opinions of the better selves of random others to be problematic” (Id: 123). Both epistocrats and lottocrats, therefore, slip into that blind deference which Lafont takes as the most severe democratic deficit, in that it brings about a disconnect between institutions and people, and a misalignment between the content of enacted laws and public opinion which flies in the face of the democratic ideal of popular self-government. Moreover, as we saw above, Lafont stresses that in a democratic system a government marching on without the people is ultimately giving up government. Epistocrats overlook that the misalignment produced by blind deference undermines any possible virtuous transformation achieved by an enlightened exercise of sovereignty: “inserting the outputs of high-quality deliberation into a highly deficient deliberative context cannot elicit the transformation of views and opinions that a genuine deliberative experience is supposed to provide” (Id: 135). Therefore, Lafont introduces the notion of participation, and of “diachronic, macro-deliberative processes of political opinion- and will-formation in which citizens (actively and/or passively) participate over time” (Id: 28), in an ongoing process of mutual justification. Let us briefly overview her proposal and the understanding of the people underlying.

4.3.2

Lafont’s Deliberatively Participating Sovereign People

The discussion above is useful to introduce some key ingredients of Lafont’s framework: the feasibility of ‘settled views’ on issues of fundamental rights; the idea that deliberation serves as an epistemic tool to track not only the best argument, but the justifiability of political decisions to those subject to them; the idea of a diachronic, macro-deliberative process of will-formation and transformation. Let us pull these threads, and shortly analyze how they are integrated within Lafont’s theoretical project. The core of Lafont’s critique to competing democratic theories is that the shortcuts meant to bypass a wide popular involvement in politics, such as the majoritarian and the epistocratic ones, fail to live up to democratic standards, thus

4.3 Cristina Lafont and Participation as Deliberative, Not ‘Participatory’

105

proving themselves self-defeating. They foster an uncoupling of public opinion and decision-making which has little in common with democracy as self-government, and which has the practical effect of sterilizing the possible formal transformations that an enlightened government may enact. Thus, Lafont claims, democracy must live with the complex and long road of ongoing popular involvement and participation. What Lafont means by participation, however, is markedly inflected in a deliberative fashion. As we saw, she insists that every citizen is a participant in the public sphere where public opinion is shaped, whether actively or passively, wilfully or not. Participation, therefore, is intended “not in the sense of requiring citizens to be involved in all political decisions” (Id: 23), but rather as participation in the community-wide deliberative process of will-formation, reason-giving, circulation of information, exchange of ideas, contestatory practices. Participation thus rendered is observed by Lafont – in a Habermasian vein, i.e. with an empirically oriented eye – as an essential feature of any decently democratic regime, and thus as an element that it is simply naive to rule out from democratic theory. As we saw, such deliberative participation has a central epistemic function for Lafont, which goes beyond the search for the best argument: tracking the justifiability of laws to those who must comply with them. The discursive confrontation on the merits of laws and policies prompts an ongoing fine-tuning and mutual clarification of arguments meant to make them intelligible to the interlocutor, and thus acceptable: “public deliberation essentially contributes to democratic legitimacy by enabling citizens to endorse the laws and policies to which they are subject on their own accord instead of being coerced into blind obedience” (Id: 168). Therefore, an equal and inclusive popular participation in a macro-deliberative process, temporally and spatially extended across the community, and normatively expected to “decisively influence political decision-making” (Id: 28), as in Habermas’s two-tracks system, is the antidote to political alienation and disconnect. From a wide-ranging deliberative process, political wills and policy proposals emerge that are both epistemically refined – Lafont never disavows the importance of tracking the best argument – and undergirded by a justificatory apparatus which was tailored within ongoing debates among citizens persuading each other, and thus as intelligible as possible by their own lights. Therefore, Lafont insists that the institutional system be oriented towards the improvement of this already and always existing deliberation. She discusses a set of institutions the features and purpose of which should be bent towards the emergence of considered public opinion, and the flourishing of an inclusive and egalitarian discursive space for mutual reason-giving in which citizens elaborate justifications for legislation. Local assemblies’ desirability “depends on whether their general implementation would have beneficial or deleterious impacts on the ongoing processes of opinion- and will-formation” (Id: 31), and the same holds for mini-publics themselves: rather than an epistocratic or a representation-based foundation, they should be justified on the grounds of their potential in stirring up institutional responsiveness and in improving the quality of deliberation, by making “the most relevant arguments for and against the political decisions at stake available to them [the citizenry]”, “filtering out irrelevant or patently manipulative considerations

106

4 The Old Kid in Town: Excursus on Participatory Democracy

while weighing the key information, potential trade-offs, and long-term consequences of available alternatives” (Id: 141). Therefore, the relentless search for the grounds of acceptability carried out within a proper socio-institutional environment by participating citizens themselves contrasts blind obedience to laws, and thus is essential to the ideal of democracy as selfgovernment. Yet, Lafont importantly espouses one of the landmark innovations of Rawlsian political philosophy, and adds an important specification to her own scheme: democratic legitimacy is tied to consensus not on every and any issue, but on matters of basic justice and constitutional essentials – or, to phrase it in Lafont’s own terms, blind deference must be avoided when it comes to such matters: “of course, many other aspects of legislation are open to political debates among the citizenry. But only the higher-stakes debate on the compatibility of legislation with the protection of equal rights and freedoms of all citizens requires an inclusive process of mutual justification in public deliberation among the citizenry” (Id: 179). Here the problem of the pervasiveness of disagreement in complex societies comes back into play. As we saw, Lafont defends the feasibility of settled views on given issues, and argues that contested issues will always be such, independently of their procedural validity, until a settled view on them comes to light. More in general, she points out that “disagreement presupposes agreement”. Contested issues are always discussed on the background of shared assumptions, as in the example she provides: gay marriages are still a matter of social disagreement which nonetheless rests upon the settled and rarely questioned view that homosexual relations among consenting adults are perfectly legit.21 Yet, how can such settled consensus, which is crucial to avoid blind deference, materialize in complex and culturally heterogeneous societies? Lafont addresses the problem by introducing “a participatory conception of public reason”. The gist of her rendition of this Rawlsian concept is that reasons drawn from specific conceptions of the good are acceptable in the public forum, whether institutional or non-institutional, even when the discussion turns on matters of fundamental rights: “the arguments and reasons geared to show the point or rationale of a given practice cannot be “neutral” or independent of conceptions of the good, be they religious or secular, since their aim is to show why the practice in question is good” (Id: 206). Nonetheless, Lafont maintains the priority of public reason by demanding that the justification of the policy advocated be expressed in terms of democratic constitutional rights: supporters of a policy must be willing to take up the burden of proving that it is “compatible with the democratic commitment to treat all citizens as free and equal” (Id: 207), and hence legitimate. In this way, Lafont argues, “the priority of public reasons can be defended without the additional burden of a commitment to neutrality” (Ibid), in that the ‘comprehensive’, non-neutral reasons brought to the fore require a constitutional, rights-based justification. The epistemic function of tracking the best justifications for the subjects to laws in search for a settled view, therefore, is not only fulfilled by the deliberative process of reason-giving, but also,

21

Cf. Lafont 2020, p. 62.

4.3 Cristina Lafont and Participation as Deliberative, Not ‘Participatory’

107

and most effectively, by the practice of spelling such justifications in the language of basic rights understandable to all, which involves an ongoing vivification of the constitution as a collective project. By employing the language of constitutional rights reflectively endorsed by the democratic citizenry in the discursive practice of mutual justification, the consolidation of settled views becomes much more likely than deep pluralists claim. In this sense, Lafont observes, legal contestation provides an essential avenue for the “constitutionalization of political debate” (Id: 228), which confers a central democratic significance upon constitutional courts and judicial review. Arguably, those are the most relevant among the practices and institutions which Lafont bends in a deliberative democratic direction. On Lafont’s account, the courts play an essential role as a locus of contestation, in which dissenting citizens, such as minorities feeling threatened or substantively disadvantaged by enacted legislation, can turn moral and political debates into matters of constitutional principles; in Lafont’s words, they can “structure the political debate as a constitutional debate about fundamental rights” (Id: 215), even after the enactment of parliamentary decisions or the approval of judicial verdicts. This allows conversations upon controversial matters to be opened and re-opened, in an ongoing discursive search for a settled view resulting reasonably acceptable to all. Given their central function in such diachronic deliberation, the constitutional courts’ democratic contribution “has nothing to do with isolating their decision from political debate among all citizens in the public sphere” (Id: 238). Rather, courts are “conversation initiators” (Id: 237), through whose work “a sustained national debate begins, in newspapers and other media, in law schools and classrooms, in public meetings and around dinner tables” (Id: 238); their legitimacy is built by Lafont on such democratic, as opposed to epistemic, grounds. This justification of courts is not without problems, in that it strives to account for their power to make legally binding decisions for all. True, courts play the essential deliberative role that Lafont has brilliantly depicted, namely an avenue for contestation and for the translation of moral and political debates into conversations on constitutional rights. Yet, courts also enforce decisions to which citizens must comply, sometimes by striking down the will of parliamentary majorities representing large portions of the electorate, for instance. Their verdicts often reflect views which are not settled yet, or which are no longer settled. Where that authority comes from is not fully clear from Lafont’s account. As observed by Ferrara,22 the democratic foundations of courts need to be searched without losing sight of their democratic authority to make binding decisions – foundations that he tracks in their representing the people as an intergenerational project, as opposed to the electorate. Moreover, it seems important to stress that the concept of liberal neutrality is not dispelled from Lafont’s framework, although she argues for the acceptance in the public forum of non-neutral arguments translated into the language of basic rights. True, absolute neutrality is not demanded to citizens in the public forum, but the

22

Cf. Ferrara 2021. For Lafont’s reply on this point, cf. Lafont 2021, p. 80.

108

4 The Old Kid in Town: Excursus on Participatory Democracy

requirement to formulate political debates in the language of constitutional rights reasonable to all democratic citizens, and the related priority of public reasons, arguably overlap with a post-metaphysical understanding of liberal neutrality, in which a situated collective identity crystallized in essential constitutional rights guarantees against the state’s adoption of one-sided perspectives. Lafont’s framework reveals an understanding of the sovereign people as the community of the subjects to the laws enforced by a legal-institutional system. Such community exerts discursive pressure on the institutional sphere and elicits responsiveness also by legal means, in order to assure that its considered opinion and fine-tuned justifications for policies are listened to and implemented. In exercising such pressure by discursive and legal roads, citizens are said by Lafont to participate in the political life of their community. This attests for the significant twist that the deliberative democratic tradition has impressed on the concept of participation, and that appears especially visible in Lafont’s theoretical framework.

References Arnstein, Sherry R. 1969. A Ladder of Citizen Participation. Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35 (4): 216–224. Barber, Benjamin R. 2003. Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age. 20th anniversary ed. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press. Benhabib, Seyla. 1996. Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Borders of the Political. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chambers, Simone. 2009. Rhetoric and the Public Sphere: Has Deliberative Democracy Abandoned Mass Democracy? Political Theory 37 (3): 323–350. Cohen, Joshua. 2003. Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy (1989). In Debates in Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology, ed. Derek Matravers and Jon Pike, 342–360. London: Routledge. Della Porta, Donatella. 2013. Can Democracy Be Saved? Cambridge: Polity Press. Dryzek, John S. 2000. Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Elster, Jon. 1983. Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2003. The Market and the Forum: Three Varieties of Political Theory (1986). In Debates in Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology, ed. Derek Matravers and Jon Pike, 325–341. London: Routledge. Elstub, Stephen. 2018. Deliberative and Participatory Democracy. In The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy, ed. Andre Bächtiger, John S. Dryzek, Jane Mansbridge, and Mark E. Warren, 187–202. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Erman, Eva. 2018. The Political Legitimacy of Global Governance and the Proper Role of Civil Society Actors. Res Publica 24 (1): 133–155. Ferrara, Alessandro. 2021. The People and the Voters. Philosophy and Social Criticism 47 (1): 45–53. Floridia, Antonio. 2017. Un’Idea Deliberativa della Democrazia. Genealogia e Principi. Bologna: Il Mulino. ———. 2018. The Origins of the Deliberative Turn. In The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy, ed. Andre Bächtiger, John S. Dryzek, Jane Mansbridge, and Mark E. Warren, 35–54. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

References

109

Forst, Rainer. 2012. The Right to Justification: Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice (2007). New York: Columbia University Press, transl. by Jeffrey Flynn. Kuyper, Jonathan. 2015. Democratic Deliberation in the Modern World: The Systemic Turn. Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 27 (1): 49–63. Lafont, Cristina. 2020. Democracy Without Shortcuts: A Participatory Conception of Deliberative Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2021. A Militant Defence of Democracy: A Few Replies to My Critics. Philosophy and Social Criticism 47 (1): 69–82. Landemore, Hélène. 2017. Deliberative Democracy as Open, not (Just) Representative Democracy. Dædalus 146 (3): 1–13. Larmore, Charles. 1986. Review: Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality by Jon Elster. The American Political Science Review 80 (2): 645–647. Macpherson, Crawford B. 1977. The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Manin, Bernard. 1987. On Legitimacy and Political Deliberation. Political Theory 15 (3): 338–368. transl. by Elly Stein and Jane Mansbridge. Mansbridge, Jane. 1983. Beyond Adversary Democracy (1980). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 1987. Review: Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age by Benjamin Barber. The American Political Science Review 81 (4): 1341–1342. ———. 1995. Does Participation Make Better Citizens? The Good Society 5 (2): 1. 4–7. Menser, Michael. 2018. We Decide! Theories and Cases in Participatory Democracy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Mutz, Diana C. 2006. Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative versus Participatory Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parietti, Guido. 2019. Deliberative Democracy and the ‘Turns’ That Were Not. Politica & Società 3: 317–338. Parvin, Phil. 2018. Democracy Without Participation: A New Politics for a Disengaged Era. Res Publica 24 (1): 31–52. Pateman, Carole. 1970. Participation and Democratic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1975. Sublimation and Reification: Locke, Wolin and the Liberal Democratic Conception of the Political. Politics & Society 5 (4): 441–467. ———. 1982. Introduction. In Participatory and Workplace Democracy: A Theoretical Development in Critique of Liberalism, ed. Ronald M. Mason. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 2012. Participatory Democracy Revisited. Perspectives on Politics 10 (1): 7–19. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 2002. The Social Contract and The First and Second Discourses (1762, 1750, 1755). New Haven/London: Yale University Press, ed. and transl. by Susan Dunn. Thompson, Dennis F. 2008. Deliberative Democratic Theory and Empirical Political Science. Annual Review of Political Science 11: 497–520. Vitale, Denise. 2006. Between Deliberative and Participatory Democracy: A Contribution on Habermas. Philosophy and Social Criticism 32 (6): 739–766. Warren, Mark E. 1996. What Should We Expect from More Democracy? Radically Democratic Responses to Politics. Political Theory 24 (2): 241–270. Warren, Mark E., and John Gastil. 2015. Can Deliberative Minipublics Address the Cognitive Challenges of Democratic Citizenship? The Journal of Politics 77 (2): 562–574.

Part II

Contemporary Republicanism

Chapter 5

Popular Sovereignty as Popular Control: Philip Pettit’s Republicanism

Abstract In On the People’s Terms (2012), Pettit devotes an extraordinarily thorough and refined analysis to the concept of domination, as distinguished from “interference” and “frustration”. He thus enriches his previous work by providing a more nuanced taxonomy of freedom. Domination is defined by Pettit as a power of uncontrolled interference enjoyed by an actor over others. The translation of the conception of freedom as non-domination into the realm of political legitimacy hinges upon the notion of control, which becomes central to Pettit’s democratic theory. Legitimate are those political decisions interfering with, but simultaneously controlled by, the citizenry, in a way analogous to Ulysses’s ordering his comrades to tie him at the mast before approaching the sirens. The institutional actors must decide laws and policies by tracking the collective interest from the ongoing popular expressions and debates, and more importantly the decisions enacted must be contestable. In this sense, it is often said that Pettit’s republican democracy tends to value the editorial moment more than the authorial one. The analysis of Pettit’s theory leads to an aporetic conclusion when it comes to defining his ‘sovereign people’. The last sections of this chapter are devoted to the analysis of the two possible definitions of ‘people’ that one may reconstruct from Pettit’s republicanism. Keywords Pettit · Freedom · Non-domination · Republicanism · Control · Contestation · Norm of norms · Neo-Roman liberty Philip Pettit is known as the heir to a long-lasting tradition of political thought, stretching over two thousand years, which was revived from a century-long hibernation by John Pocock’s groundbreaking researches on Machiavelli and the English early modern republicans, starting from the 1970s. Pettit’s republican theory, fully elaborated for the first time in Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (1997), constitutes the most complex and articulated attempt to build a political theoretical framework inspired from the ideals and the historico-theoretical genealogy rediscovered and reconstructed by Pocock and Quentin Skinner, and as such his work represents the pinnacle, at least in terms of normative theoretical systematization, of the neo-Roman republican school. The examination of Pettit’s intellectual path in search of his conceptualization of the people and popular sovereignty will © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Fiorespino, Radical Democracy and Populism, Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations 18, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84969-6_5

113

114

5

Popular Sovereignty as Popular Control: Philip Pettit’s Republicanism

start from his idea of domination as “exemplified by the relationship of master to slave or master to servant” (Id: 22), hence proceeding through his following conceptualization of political legitimacy and finally to the theory of democracy he outlines. The trajectory of analysis roughly sketched out will lead to the conclusion that Pettit’s framework lacks a clear understanding of ‘the people’, and that such shortfall signals his failure at determining what non-domination ultimately means – notwithstanding the undisputable fascination and helpfulness of his theory of freedom. To anticipate some conclusions, therefore, the epilogue of this chapter is aporetic. Pettit’s oscillations between two definitions of non-domination’s meaning, corresponding to two distinct definitions of the people, do not allow properly unveiling the connection between the ‘people’ and ‘popular sovereignty’ in Pettit’s political theory.

5.1

Ulysses at the Mast: Pettit’s Definition of Freedom as Non-domination

In the Preface to his Liberty Before Liberalism, Quentin Skinner claimed that “during the nineteenth century, however, the neo-roman theory increasingly slipped from sight”, as “the ideological triumph of liberalism left the neo-roman theory largely discredited” (1998: ix–x). If the redemption of such long-lasting tradition in terms of history of ideas was carried out by Pocock and Skinner, Pettit employed the republican narration in order to construct a conception of freedom aspiring to undergird a fully developed republican theory of politics, democracy and government for contemporary times. This understanding of freedom, in Pettit’s account, sinks its roots in ancient Ciceronian republicanism, passing through Machiavelli’s Discorsi sopra la Prima Deca di Tito Livio and inspiring the political theory and civic activism of the English seventeenth and eighteenth century republicans, such as James Harrington, Algernon Sidney and Richard Price; finally, it crossed the Atlantic Ocean and permeated the ideas of James Madison, the authors of the Federalist, the American revolutionaries and the authors of the Cato’s Letters (Pettit 1997, 2012). Moreover, its core commitment is traceable in classical authors such as Montesquieu, Tocqueville and even Locke. Let us now give a closer look at the theory of freedom as non-domination that Pettit links to such a pantheon of thinkers and schools of thought. As a matter of preliminary observation, it may be worth highlighting that Pettit’s third path among opposing conceptions of freedom is not achieved as a conceptual synthesis of a dichotomous pair. There clearly is a great deal of conceptual effort in his analysis, but the aim is not the production of an abstract concept synthetically overcoming the positive/negative freedom divide, or the freedom as non-frustration/freedom as non-interference divide. And precisely the fact that freedom as non-domination is presented as a third course between two different opposing pairs – rather than logically stemming from one single synthetic operation – seems to demonstrate

5.1 Ulysses at the Mast: Pettit’s Definition of Freedom as Non-domination

115

that its inspiration is not to be found in pure conceptual speculation, but in the soil of a historical tradition of political thought that enshrined and conveyed ideas living in our basic intuitions about politics, justice, legitimacy, freedom and democracy. Pettit avowedly appeals to a “historical linkage” to a republican tradition, which requires reflective equilibrium as a method for being reconstructed: “the philosophical methodology I follow is that which John Rawls described as reflective equilibrium. The idea is to set out general principles for the domain investigated [. . .]; to see how those implications fit with what we find credible on reflection [. . .]; and to go back and forth in the search of adjustments at either end that can promote overall coherence” (2012: 20). Thus, Pettit presents the idea of freedom as non-domination as (a) a third path between positive and negative freedoms (in Republicanism (1997)), and (b) an evolution of what he terms “freedom as non-frustration” and “freedom as non-interference” (in On the People’s Terms (2012)). (a) Pettit reconstructs and explores in depth Isaiah Berlin’s famous taxonomy: on the one hand negative freedom, echoing Constant’s ‘liberties of the moderns’, places freedom in the residual spaces left untouched by the law, where the citizen – or subject, in a Hobbesian vocabulary – can act according to his own will. Negative freedom, therefore, is defined as a freedom from interference, “where interference is a more or less intentional intervention of the sort exemplified, not just by the physical coercion of kidnap and imprisonment, but also by the coercion of the credible threat” (1997: 17). This is the conception that was born in Hobbes’s thought and was widely spread by Jeremy Bentham and William Paley, through whose work and influence it permeated modern liberal theory.1 The central implication of the notion of freedom as the absence of constraints is exemplified in Hobbes’s provocative comparison between the citizens of the republican Lucca and the subjects of the Ottoman Empire living in Constantinople: as long as they are equally compelled to abide by the law, Hobbes argues, they are equally unfree, as law is intrinsically interfering with and thus inimical to freedom. On the other hand, positive freedom, cognate to Constant’s ‘liberties of the ancients’, defines freedom as self-mastery, self-determination, being in the condition of controlling one’s own fate. On Pettit’s reading, following Berlin, the idea of a selfmastering individual can hardly be detached from the communitarian and populist tendencies to identify the realization of the individual with his amalgamation with the substance of a collective organism pursuing a common good, which in turn is amenable to being consistently affected by any single individual through direct political participation. In Pettit’s narrative, this “romantic picture of the tirelessly engaged public figure” (2012: 18) runs on a trail connecting Jean-Jacques Rousseau

1 See Republicanism (1997), pp. 45–49, where Pettit discusses the process through which freedom as non-interference was absorbed even by the reformist liberals as a consequence of Bentham’s increasing reformism and Paley’s influential utilitarianism, which redeemed it from its authoritarian origin.

116

5

Popular Sovereignty as Popular Control: Philip Pettit’s Republicanism

with Hannah Arendt,2 up to Michael Sandel in contemporary times (Id). Precisely on the grounds of a vulgarized reading of Rousseau, republicanism was equated with such orientation, and therefore bound to a version of freedom as “nothing more or less than the possession or exercise of the right to participate in popular decisionmaking” (Id: 16).3 Freedom as non-domination is thus presented by Pettit as a third path between negative and positive liberty, i.e. as “the intermediate possibility that freedom consists in an absence, as the negative conception has it, but in an absence of mastering by others, not in an absence of interference” (1997: 21–22).4 In putting this formula on the table, Pettit quickly dismisses the possibility that a similar intermediate path can be associated with positive freedom,5 and goes on to prove 2

For a strongly dissenting interpretation of Arendt’s thought, see Andrew Fraser’s review of Republicanism (Fraser 1997). In particular, Fraser starkly rejects Pettit’s reading of Arendt as a communitarian, romantic, normatively oriented to social and political homogeneity: “in fact, Arendt rejected the political theology of popular sovereignty. In the realm of human affairs, she wrote, ‘sovereignty and tyranny are the same’” (Id: 600). Moreover, Fraser stresses that Arendt was concerned about domination to the extent that she developed a more sophisticated analysis of the issue than Pettit’s, as we shall see better in Sect. 5.2. 3 Cf. Richard Bellamy (2016) for a reading seeking to reconcile those two views of republicanism, grounded in the idea that “the mixed constitution and contestation [. . .] have a different theoretical status to the first core idea, that of freedom as non-domination. They offer possible institutional arrangements that might be needed in certain circumstances to realize the main normative criteria” (Id: 670). According to Bellamy, more central to Pettit’s framework are the ideas of individualized, unconditioned and efficacious influence and equal control. On these grounds, Pettit’s and Rousseau’s republicanisms are placed closer to each other by Bellamy. 4 See also Pettit (1993), where he advocates a sort of ancestor of freedom as non-domination, namely freedom as “resilient non-interference”, which is opposed to the liberal, fragile notion of non-interference, defined as “quantity-centred so far as it hails non-interference of any kind as attractive” (Id: 28). 5 This claim was contested by Gopal Sreenivasan (2001). In his review to Pettit’s work, Sreenivasan goes back to the old objection raised by William Paley: freedom as non-domination is nothing but a means of securing freedom from interference, and thus promoting it as a self-standing conception of freedom is tantamount to confusing means with ends. According to Sreenivasan, although Pettit’s reply to Paley (see Republicanism, pp. 73–74) holds, the problem re-emerges when Paley’s perspective is turned upside down, and freedom as non-domination is seen as a means of securing positive freedom. In that case, Pettit’s argument against Paley does not apply, and freedom as non-domination is unveiled as being “strictly a constituent of positive liberty, and not merely an entailment of it” (Id: 235): “it is only by vesting individuals with an immunity that one fully succeeds in protecting their positive liberty” (Id: 232). In concordance with this view, Sreenivasan argues that Pettit’s central concern for political contestation is ultimately a commitment to political participation; and if it is true that, according to Pettit himself, participatory direct democracy is entwined with positive freedom, then Pettit’s commitment to participatory contestation is the proof of his substantive allegiance to positive freedom. This argument seems to overlook the different normative orientations that distinguish Pettit from a democrat supporting positive freedom and participation: as written by Nadia Urbinati, paraphrasing Pettit, for a democrat civic participation “is in a ‘definitional connection with liberty’ and not merely ‘a means of furthering liberty’” (2012: 608). The different perspective on the foundational role of democratic participation can hardly be underestimated when comparing Pettit to more radical democrats. As we shall see, Pettit is often said to subordinate the ‘authorial’ moment of democracy to the ‘editorial’ one; moreover, if

5.1 Ulysses at the Mast: Pettit’s Definition of Freedom as Non-domination

117

its distinctiveness from freedom as non-interference. The whole demonstration lies on the insight, rife with consequences, that domination can be non-interfering as well as interference can be non-dominating. That is, a servant can be subjected to the dominium of his master even if his master does not actually practice interference, and even if his master is unwilling to interfere, as well as a freeman can be hindered by an agent that nonetheless lacks a substantive “power of uncontrolled interference”, i.e. a power of domination, on him. According to Pettit the second condition, that is the absence of domination, is both necessary and sufficient to define freedom: it is necessary because “if a person is dominated in certain activities [. . .] then there is a sense in which that person is not free”; it is sufficient because “if a person is not dominated in certain activities [. . .], there is a sense in which they retain their freedom” (Id: 26). Moreover, conceptualizing freedom as non-domination has a number of advantages for freedom as non-interference, which can be better highlighted by briefly reviewing the alternative exposition of domination provided by Pettit in On the People’s Terms. (b) In the second account, freedom as non-domination is expounded in relation to two different understandings of negative freedom. This diversification allows Pettit to achieve a more nuanced taxonomy of freedom, the fourfold structure of which accounts for the difference between Hobbes’s absolutism and the “broad church” of the liberal tradition that Pettit has in mind. In On the People’s Terms (2012) Hobbes is still the pioneer of negative freedom, but his position is more radical than its following liberal evolution. On this reading, Hobbes is contented with freedom as non-frustration, which sets as the basic requirement of freedom the lack of any hindrance to the preferred choice of the individual: freedom is encroached upon only if the preferred option of the individual is obstructed. If this is true, however, Hobbes has to concede that a person is free when he finds his preferred option available by virtue of mere coincidence, and more crucially that his freedom holds when he changes his favoured option after gaining awareness of a hindrance, or after being expressly forced to change it. It is far too easy for Pettit to observe, in unison with Berlin, that “you cannot make yourself free in the choice just by accommodating yourself to my disposition to hinder your choice” (Id: 31).6 On the grounds of these objections Berlin articulates and defends freedom as non-interference, arguing that it is not enough for freedom that the preferred choice is unhindered: all choices should contestation by appeal to independent courts is a mark of positive freedom, then most liberal theory embraces positive freedom alike. Not by chance, Sreenivasan’s is one of the very few readings which thickens the democratic-participatory substance of Pettit’s republicanism beyond the author’s own intentions. The mainstream position, examples of which will be mentioned later, places Pettit much closer to liberals than to participatory democrats. This departure from positive freedom, however, does not rule out the democratic character of Pettit’s theory, which indeed he vindicates: in his framework, republican democracy is defined by non-domination, as well as non-domination is constituted by democratic control over power: “the requirement of guarding against public domination, thereby delivering political legitimacy, turns out to demand a rich array of popular controls over government: in effect, a distinctive form of democracy” (2012: 3, my italics). 6 As the exchange with Bishop Bramhall shows, Hobbes was partly aware of such problems (see On the People’s Terms, p. 29).

118

5

Popular Sovereignty as Popular Control: Philip Pettit’s Republicanism

be available, that is, no one should interfere with any choices. Nonetheless, Pettit observes, this argument is vulnerable to a line of criticism akin to the objection to Hobbes: stipulating that freedom is the mere lack of interference on any option implies admitting that a servant retains his freedom when he is not hindered by his master. Therefore, the best way he has to secure his freedom is “ingratiating” his master and relying on the latter’s goodwill (2011, 2012). This clashes with any basic intuitions about freedom: “ingratiating yourself with me in order to win my permission for you to do what you want takes my power of interference, and so your own subjection, as a given, and tries to secure a somewhat better but still second-best result: the avoidance of actual interference” (2012: 65). Domination, therefore, is defined as a power of arbitrary, or uncontrolled, interference. For the sake of accuracy, however, it should be noted that in On the People’s Terms Pettit dismisses the use of the term ‘arbitrary’ due to the conceptual ambiguities connected with its polysemy, which attracted criticisms in particular from Christopher McMahon (2005) and Patchen Markell (2008). McMahon’s core contention is that “in a central class of cases, the value of freedom as nondomination does not yield any determinate conclusions about the policies that a society ought to adopt” (2005: 68). According to his line of argument, if domination is defined by arbitrary interference, and arbitrariness in interference occurs when the interests of the interferee are not tracked, then a definition of common interest has to be achieved by the legislature determining policies. Nonetheless, defining the common interest is precisely the crux of politics. The common interest is the main matter of disagreement in the political life of a community, and quite often such disagreement can be defined as reasonable (Id). It is clear, McMahon argues, that the procedure in charge of identifying non-dominating policies will hardly be capable of “tracking the truth about the common interest at the substantive level” (Id: 76), and it will only be able to single out a number of policies that can be reasonably defended as expressions of the common interest. Once those policies have passed the procedure and are put on the government’s table, “the concept of non-domination cannot by itself provide determinate guidance concerning the policies that ought to be adopted” (Id: 80): the requirement of non-domination in the sense of not neglecting the common interest is already fulfilled by the procedural praxis, and the government can select at pleasure among the resulting policies unless other values are brought into play. A similar concern grounded in a scepticism towards Pettit’s use of ‘arbitrariness’ comes from Markell (2008). Also in his view, Pettit’s non-domination is insufficient as a self-standing value, and “the insufficiency is located in the idea of ‘domination’ itself, and the pictures of power and agency that that term carries with it” (Id: 11). According to Markell, Pettit tacitly charges the expression ‘arbitrary’ with two different meanings, only one of which has to do with domination: arbitrary interference simultaneously means “interference at whim” and “interference neglectful of the interests of the affected”. While the former meaning can be legitimately equated to domination, the latter has ultimately to do with usurpation, i.e. that detachment from involvement in decision-making processes which characterizes paternalistic relations between the governors and the governed. According to Markell, Pettit’s exclusive focus on domination blinds his eyes to the slippery-slope of

5.1 Ulysses at the Mast: Pettit’s Definition of Freedom as Non-domination

119

“institutionalized” paternalism, or rule-bound usurpation, as he does not see that “the very mechanisms by which we effectively avoid certain forms of domination (like majoritarian tyranny) may simultaneously have the effect of undermining citizen involvement in everyday practice of governance” (Id: 29). The lack of commitment to the evil of usurpation deflects Pettit’s sight from those forms of imperialism which, while apparently bound by rules established by the colonialist governance – and thus apparently following laws and not whim – take the possibility of action and involvement away from the colonized people. If Pettit does not incorporate non-usurpation into his framework, thus taking more seriously his own professed commitment to tackling arbitrariness in its second meaning, he cannot but remain silent before similar forms of imperialistic invasion, and his own political philosophical framework risks entrapping the democratic life in a depoliticized web of institutions. In response, Pettit clarifies that “the question of whether domination occurs in a given case, then, does not depend on whether the interference possible or perpetrated enjoys a normative license; it depends on the factual question of whether the interference is subject to suitable controls” (2006: 279); this means that the device to secure non-domination is the government’s factual constraint to track the common interest, rather than McMahon’s procedure identifying adequately non-dominating policies (Id). Moreover, implicitly addressing Markell’s argument, Pettit specifies that “interference that conforms to rules, and is non-arbitrary in that sense, may still be uncontrolled by you and can count as arbitrary in our sense” (2012: 58). Notwithstanding the terminological shift, therefore, the central idea stands still: domination occurs when someone is in the position to impose his own will on the will of another at pleasure, or at whim. The essential flip side of the idea is that, in order for that power to be taken away from the master and non-domination to be achieved, there must be checks on the powerful assuring that he is unable to impose his own will, and that when interference occurs the interferer is “forced to track the interests and ideas of the person suffering interference” (1997: 55). Acting on whim and neglecting the interests of the affected are not different meanings of ‘arbitrary’, therefore, but two sides of a coin. In Pettit’s framework, therefore, forms of interference complying with the will of the interferee and subject to his control are accepted as non-dominating: Pettit recalls the classic example of Ulysses ordering his fellows to bind him to the mast before venturing into the seas of the Sirens, or the alcoholic entrusting the keys of the cupboard with alcohol to a friend, with the pledge to keep them out of his reach. Neither Ulysses’s fellows nor the friend of the alcoholic would exercise domination on them, if they were begged to interrupt the interference they were asked to perform (2012). As we shall see in Sect. 5.3, such dynamics are exemplary of Pettit’s definition of political legitimacy. Before going deeper into Pettit’s political theory, it may be worthwhile briefly reviewing the varied range of objections that were addressed by observers to several aspects of Pettit’s genealogical reconstruction of freedom as non-domination. According to Roger Boesche (1998), for instance, a serious inaccuracy is represented by Pettit’s assimilation of the authors of the Federalist Papers and those of the Cato’s Letters. Boesche claims that their interpretations of the American Revolution

120

5

Popular Sovereignty as Popular Control: Philip Pettit’s Republicanism

were diametrically opposed under several respects, as exemplified by the controversy on the centralization of power: while “Trenchard and Gordon feared any centralization of power as inevitably encroaching on people’s liberties and rights”, “Madison and Hamilton defended the extensive powers of a central government to protect property from democratic social movements” (Id: 865). Moreover, Boesche complains about Pettit’s rendition of Hobbes’ and Locke’s theories on freedom, which cannot be put on two different tracks: they share the core idea that law creates freedom. Pettit’s interpretation of Hobbes as the forefather of negative freedom is thus erroneous. This specific criticism, however, sounds rather unfair to Pettit, as it is grounded in a dubious interpretation of Hobbes as a supporter of ‘freedom by the law’.7 Finally, according to Boesche Pettit pretends to harmonize the ideas of Machiavelli and Madison in the same tradition, neglecting the fact that “Machiavelli praised what Madison feared” (Id: 864): the civic involvement, agitation and even “tumult” supported by the former are glaringly at odds with the latter’s preoccupation about the impulsiveness and potential for tyranny implicit to direct, plebiscitary democracy. Such contentions about the interpretation of Machiavelli and Madison are raised also by John McCormick (2003, 2011). In concordance with Boesche, McCormick observes that Pettit has largely underestimated the participatorydemocratic core of Machiavelli’s thought in the Discorsi. Even though Machiavelli defines himself as a republican, in a more updated technical vocabulary he can be described as “alternately, an elite-wary minimalist democrat or an elite-realistic participatory democrat” (2003: 619). In this sense, Machiavelli’s thought is hopelessly irreconcilable with the neo-roman republican tradition to which Madison belongs, and which McCormick regards as the ancestor of minimalist democracy, and thus a form of oligarchy: “Madison is, of course, the intellectual conduit for the transition from traditional to modern popularly constrained oligarchy, or from republicanism to minimalist democracy” (Id: 618). The oligarchic overtones of neo-roman republicanism were identified also by Nadia Urbinati, in a cogent analysis of Ciceronian republicanism compared to the Athenian democracy (2012). According to Urbinati, “whereas Athenian democracy was based on the single assembly of citizens and each citizen counted as one and sat in the assembly as an equal, the place of the people in the Roman Republic was structured according to social differences and a plurality of assemblies (gathered for different purposes and operating with different procedures) within which votes were taken” (Id: 616). In other words, republicanism in Rome did not envision a shared space of debate and confrontation where ideas could come into being and be fine-tuned; rather, the Roman people was fractured into voting assemblies organized along socio-economic boundaries, and called to “determine the winning opinion rather than to express and

7 Nonetheless, Boesche is not alone in providing a ‘liberal-republican’ reading of Hobbes and his idea of freedom. For an authoritative and well-developed defence of this position, cf. David Dyzenhaus’s “How Hobbes Met the ‘Hobbes Challenge’” (2009). According to Dyzenhaus, Hobbes is much closer to freedom as non-domination than most of his interpreters have seen.

5.2 Republican Non-domination

121

debate opinions” (Ibid). The highest aspiration of the people was to avoid domination from the nobles, rather than to take part in the collective, egalitarian process of deliberation in the agora. As we shall see later, in spite of their common interpretation of the neo-Roman republican tradition Urbinati and McCormick slightly diverge in their evaluations of Pettit’s democratic framework. While the former straightforwardly places Pettit in line with the republican-oligarchic tradition from which he claims to descend, the latter sees Pettit as the author of an unfortunate mixture of two opposing commitments, one democratic and one elitist, which make him discontinuous with both the Madisonian republican-oligarchic tradition and the Machiavellian one. Besides the objections targeting the internal consistence of the republican tradition as reconstructed by Pettit and the authors of the “Cambridge school”, a number of critics highlighted the haziness of its borders: if on the one hand philosophers that were placed within the tradition should actually fall outside it, or at least should not be assimilated with each other, on the other hand authors that cannot be regarded as republicans appear to side with freedom as non-domination. The most exemplary case is Locke, who was expressly included by Pettit within the tradition of freedom as non-domination in spite of his indisputable prominence in the tradition of liberal political thought. In Ferrara’s words, “the republican difference, with respect to liberalism, cannot be captured adequately on the terrain of the conception of freedom” (2008: 115). For the sake of exposition, this group of criticisms will be treated in greater detail at the end of Sect. 5.2.

5.2

Republican Non-domination: A Third Course Between Communitarianism and Liberalism

Let us briefly summarize the advantages that freedom as non-domination has, according to Pettit, when compared to the rival understandings of freedom and their related traditions of political thought. Regarding positive freedom-inspired “Continental” republicanism, which he defines as populist and communitarian, Pettit pinpoints two main differences from his own republicanism: first of all, political participation and direct democracy are not an independent and foundational value in his framework: “democratic control is certainly important in the (republican) tradition, but its importance comes, not from any definitional connection with liberty, but from the fact that it is a means of furthering liberty” (1997: 30). Accordingly, freedom as non-domination does not drift in the shallows where the tradition of populist democrats, starting from Rousseau, run aground. According to Pettit, “in an extraordinary reversal of received ideas, the cause of freedom as non-domination, from which Rousseau starts, is now linked with a new, communitarian form of the very absolutism that republican doctrine has always challenged” (2012: 15). The exclusive focus on the idea of freedom as democratic participation and positive selfdetermination, in tandem with the acceptance of a Hobbesian idea of absoluteness

122

5

Popular Sovereignty as Popular Control: Philip Pettit’s Republicanism

and indivisibility of power, led Rousseau and the following tradition to the theorization of an absolutist democracy, where the citizens are subjected to the will of the assembly and are devoid of any means of political contestation: in Pettit’s words, they are “law-makers” rather than “law-checkers”. Nonetheless, Pettit also highlights one important similarity between communitarianism and freedom as non-domination: in his view, “communitarians focus on communitarian goods, assuming that such ideals are invariably tied up with particular sectarian conceptions of how people should live” (1997: 120). A communitarian good can be described as a “social” and a “common” good: a good that cannot be achieved in a state of nature, but only within a social and political community (social), and which cannot be taken away from some without being taken away from all (common). While freedom as non-domination is plainly social, as it is unthinkable in a state of nature, Pettit’s argument to demonstrate its being “common” is more problematic. Starkly put, it seems clear that a given social group can be advantaged by the domination of another. To overcome this problem, Pettit introduces “vulnerability classes”, i.e. classes of citizens vulnerable to the same danger, within which freedom as non-domination is a common good in his sense: in the absence of laws against women abuse, for instance, women are all equally dominated, independently of the various factual interferences perpetrated on them by their respective husbands. Nonetheless, Pettit argues, such vulnerability classes are “permutable”: people are “permutable in the vulnerability stakes, so that if one sees another suffer interference, they can truly say, ‘There but for the will of god – there but for brute fortune – go I’” (Id: 124). In other words, a sort of collective identification with each other among individuals qua vulnerable people, the occurrence of which is contingent on empirical conditions, is in charge of bridging the gap between members of different vulnerability classes, thus rising non-domination to a “perfectly common good”. However, that is an outcome that Pettit may wish for, but it does not account theoretically for the definition of non-domination as a common good. Pettit postulates the pervasiveness of an empathy by which every kind of value, right, principle, freedom, might be defined as “a common good” in the sense of being reduced for all when it is reduced for one – not just freedom as non-domination. The predicate of “common good” does not stem from the internal conceptual resources of freedom as non-domination specifically, but from Pettit’s generic assumption of a widespread social empathy by which every and any act of oppression on anyone oppresses everyone, in that all citizens are somewhat ‘on the same boat’. Whilst freedom as non-domination can be defined as a “social good”, therefore, its status of “common good” appears questionable. This perhaps partly undermines Pettit’s attempt to conciliate non-domination and communitarianism in order to forge a third path between the latter and liberalism. As to liberal theory, which Pettit associates with negative freedom, Pettit highlights, in particular, that although the so-called “left-of-centre liberals”, such as Rawls or Dworkin, may be more similar to a republican than they are to a libertarian à-la Nozick, his taxonomy of freedom holds still, as leftist liberals share the conception of freedom with libertarians rather than with republicans. Compared to those liberal theories, therefore, republicanism offers a “rival axiomization of many

5.2 Republican Non-domination

123

of their intuitions”, which “starts from a base that is less contentious than the base that leftist liberals generally espouse”, and “develops even shared intuitions in a highly distinctive and yet compelling way” (Id: 12). First of all, freedom as non-interference is the liberty characterizing the state of nature, ultimately unthinkable in the current “state-bound world”. According to Pettit, the tendency to define freedom as the absence of constraints creates serious problems to liberals, as it prevents them from theorizing and justifying core concepts of modern political philosophy, as for instance democratic legitimacy; how can a liberal deem state power legitimate, if its laws are intrinsically interfering and hence encroaching on freedom? The only way is “continuing consent” to the interfering law, which Pettit dismisses as “utterly impossible”, in that citizens “will not consent to it in the sense of adopting it voluntarily: that is, adopting it in preference to an otherwise acceptable alternative” (2012: 151). Differently, non-domination is inherently a social and intersubjective ideal. The existence of a socio-political community regulated by laws and institutions operating as “mutually interactive agents” is constitutive of non-domination “like the immunity produced by antibodies in the blood” (1997: 274). The absence or presence of domination is a “salient” fact, most of the times easy to assess and clearly perceptible, and hence matter of common knowledge: non-domination is a publicly, intersubjectively recognized status which involves “being able to look the other in the eye, confident in the shared knowledge that it is not by their leave that you pursue your innocent, non-interfering choices” (Id: 71). Non-domination, in other words, ties the rule of law to the shared awareness of it, the liberties to their mutual acknowledgment among peers. This entails three benefits that Pettit points out: it eliminates the sense of uncertainty deriving from the danger of domination, the related strategic necessity to constantly “practise deference and anticipation” (Id: 87) on the powerful, and the feeling of vulnerability and subjection. Pettit’s taxonomy, definition of domination, and the assimilation he operated between a given conception of freedom and a tradition of political thought, attracted a wide host of criticisms. On the one hand, several observers argued, in Boesche’s terms, that “his [Pettit’s] whole ideal of freedom as nondomination is simply one variant of liberalism” (Boesche 1998: 863). Pettit’s attempt to characterize liberalism as incorporating a notion of freedom as mere absence of actual, and not potential, interference, can hardly be defended when thinking about even the most rightist liberals: as noted by Dyzenhaus (2012), even Hayek “was worried that giving an extensive role to the state to combat such domination was likely to backfire by multiplying the amount of state interference in our lives and thus increase the number of occasions when we might find ourselves subject to the coercive and arbitrary (because unpredictable) judgment of some state official” (Id: 341). This insight seems to match with Boesche’s claim that the institutional framework developed by Pettit does not logically stem from freedom as non-domination: in Dyzenhaus’s reading, Hayek devised his political theory, radically at odds with Pettit’s, with the same preoccupation for political domination. In a similar fashion, Ferrara argued that “a whole area of liberalism – probably the one most representative and dynamic of our times – cannot be easily situated on the

124

5

Popular Sovereignty as Popular Control: Philip Pettit’s Republicanism

same side of the dichotomy” (Ferrara 2008: 109) – that is, on the side of non-interference. Concordantly, Larmore observed that “it is not right to suppose that the liberal tradition displays a monolithic allegiance to the notion of freedom as non-interference” (2001: 234). Both Ferrara and Larmore carry out analyses of landmark liberal authors such as Locke, Constant, Mills, Dewey, Rawls, Dworkin and even Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal,8 in order to unearth the proximity of liberal theory and non-domination, which does not allow distinguishing liberalism from republicanism along the lines of a theory of freedom. However, despite writing that “Pettit’s republican concerns become fully intelligible only within a liberal framework” (Larmore 2003: 117), Larmore concedes that arguing for Rawls’s – or any other liberal’s – clear-cut alignment to non-domination would be implausible: “a well-defined distinction between the two views of freedom was not available, when he [Rawls] wrote A Theory of Justice or Political Liberalism [. . .] Here lies the great merit of Pettit’s work. Casting light on these points of obscurity, it forces us to be more explicit about what we mean when we say that freedom is ‘freedom from’” (2001: 239). On a different page, a further interesting line of debate comes from Gerald Lang (2012). Put briefly, Lang argues that there is nothing that freedom as non-domination achieves at which freedom as non-interference fails; the former is, in his view, a sort of paranoid excess, which he calls the “Neurotic Worry”. Lang starts from arguing that “if one cares about the loss of liberty, then it is rational to care about the probable loss of liberty, and it is also rational to take steps to eliminate or reduce the probability of that loss” (Id: 284). Liberal commitment to non-interference, thus, does have a concern for probable interference. From this perspective, Pettit’s implied definition of “every possibility of interference as actual interference” (Id: 282) signals that “neurotic worry” which does not fare better than liberalism in protecting individuals from interference. To this, Pettit replied (2008, 2012) that applying probabilistic reasoning to the issue of freedom is misplaced in principle, as the probabilities that a person be interfered with decrease with ingratiation or adaptation: if I adapt my choice or ingratiate my master, I will decrease the probabilities of their interference. Therefore, defining freedom as the lack of interference on probable choices is misleading. However, Lang argues that Pettit cannot really avoid a probabilistic approach to freedom: when claiming that A is free insofar as he does not have to ingratiate B (that is, A is free from B’s domination), Pettit neglects the fact that it is only probable that A and B’s life-situation will not change in a way that requires A to ingratiate B. According to Lang, this reintroduction of probability from the backdoor ultimately demonstrates that freedom can be preserved by simply securing people from actual and probable interference, like liberals 8

For the comparison between non-domination and the ideas of Locke, Mill, Constant, Dewey, Rawls, Dworkin and Roosevelt, see The Force of the Example, pp. 109–115 (Ferrara 2008); for Larmore’s version of the same operation with Locke, Constant and Rawls see “A Critique of Philip Pettit’s Republicanism”, pp. 235–239 (Larmore 2001). For McMahon’s response to Larmore on Rawls and non-domination, see “The Indeterminacy of Republican Policy”, p. 71 (McMahon 2005).

5.2 Republican Non-domination

125

claim: “liberals do not have to employ anything more elaborate than negative liberty, because a commitment to negative liberty makes room for the condemnation of arrangements which fail to uphold liberty for the right reasons” (Id: 289). Quite significantly, thinkers philosophically closer to that strand of thought which Pettit labels as populist and communitarian democracy criticize Pettit’s conception of freedom with precisely the same contention put forward by more liberal-oriented thinkers: freedom as non-domination is liberal in its core. From their perspective, this entails its failure at coming to grips with civic freedom and democracy. In Urbinati’s words, “a secure liberty includes not only the binding quality of legal norms, as neo-roman republicans argue, but also the process of opinion and will formation in which citizens participate as equals in rights” (2012: 608). A conceptualization of freedom cannot exclude civic freedom, whereas Pettit reduces it to the absence of domination. Similarly, Andrew Fraser contends that freedom as non-domination presupposes, or at least does not exclude, a world of detached social relations. Pettit’s theory is neglectful of the common space where interacting individuals freely shape and determine their will, and is contented with the alienated status of being relieved from domination: “what is the point of being free of domination if we remain estranged from our fellow citizens? [. . .] The citizens of Pettit’s republic, however, have no particular interest in the joys of public happiness” (1997: 600). As we saw above, also Patchen Markell (2008) casts doubts on Pettit’s excessive focus on avoiding interference at whim, which in his view obscures and at times facilitates the danger of usurpation. The obsessive institutional checks introduced by Pettit in order to avoid domination ultimately suffocate the democratic voice by imposing elitist fetters on bottom-up involvement in the political life. Therefore, in Markell’s view, Pettit should abandon his unilateral perspective and incorporate non-usurpation in the normative structure of republicanism. Moreover, Fraser raised objections against Pettit’s analysis of domination, which he regards as outdated and inadequate to capture and respond to contemporary forms of domination. According to Fraser, a deeper analysis of domination was developed precisely by one of the authors that Pettit dismisses as populist democrats: Hannah Arendt, who glimpsed the dominating forces of contemporary world in “the impersonal structures of the corporate welfare state” (Fraser 1997: 602), dangerously concealed behind the veil of a “no-man rule”. Pettit, on the other hand, “ignores just about every critique of domination to emerge since the abolition of slavery” (Id: 603). His model, grounded in the obsolete opposition between master and servant, is unequipped at facing forms of domination that exceed the realm of the nation-state and of politics itself, and within which responsibility is not as immediately detectable as it happens in the dynamics between master and servant. One further objection comes from a supporter of an alternative version of non-domination, namely Ian Shapiro. From his perspective, non-domination should be conceptually uncoupled from freedom: “to treat non-domination as the instrument for achieving freedom, as Pettit does, undersells non-domination’s importance as a normative ideal in its own right rather than an instrument to achieve some other benefit” (2012: 309). Non-domination, in Shapiro’s agenda, cannot be constrained within the limits of the diatribe on the best conception of freedom. The

126

5

Popular Sovereignty as Popular Control: Philip Pettit’s Republicanism

freedom-based analysis of domination compels to assess the degree of freedom enjoyed by citizens according to criteria specified by one or another conception of freedom, intrinsically partial in character. This hinders sight from the factual phenomena of domination, which can be observed more lucidly by focussing “on the conditions in the world that shape not only the status of agents but also the actions they might aspire to perform and the resources and constraints affecting those aspirations” (Id: 320). Domination has to be factually analyzed and searched for, then, rather than tied to an inescapably partial conception of freedom through the lenses of which to determine whether domination occurs or not. As we shall see, this host of criticisms bears important implications for the political theory and the institutional arrangements that Pettit derives from his understanding of freedom as non-domination.

5.3

Popular Control, Its Meanings and Features

What is the conception of political legitimacy that Pettit connects with non-domination? How does political submission – which Pettit calls imperium in its dominating form – coexist with individual non-domination? In reconstructing Pettit’s solution to these issues, we shall mainly follow his more recent work, On the People’s Terms, which presents some innovations and appears more well-structured and conceptually focused than Republicanism. One main difference is connected with the terminological shift in the definition of domination discussed above: domination is a power of uncontrolled, rather than arbitrary, interference – although it can still be defined as arbitrary, in Pettit’s sense. As a consequence, the definition of legitimacy and the foundation of democracy become strictly tied to that of control, which is addressed at length by Pettit. What this change brings with itself is a more clear-cut theoretical definition of legitimacy, uncontaminated by pragmatic considerations of institutional design. This becomes evident at a first glance at the structure of the book, in which the issue of legitimacy is dealt with in a separate chapter, and does not mix up with the elaboration of a theory of democracy and its institutional translation. Pettit’s definition of political legitimacy is analogically drawn from the myth of Ulysses and the sirens, as well as from the above-mentioned story about the alcoholic and the locked cupboard. Those images exemplarily stage the idea, central to non-domination, of “controlled interference”: If the people governed by a state control the interference practised by government – if they control the laws imposed, the policies pursued, the taxes levied – then they may not suffer domination at the hands of their rulers and may continue to enjoy freedom in relation to the state. A state that was suitably controlled would be legitimate in the required sense of not exercising domination over its people. It would practise interference, for sure [. . .] but it would only interfere with them on their terms, not at its own will or pleasure (2012: 153).

Therefore, Pettit’s next step is to go deeper into the concepts of control and popular control, in order to theoretically clarify the meaning of his own principle of

5.4 Popular Control and the Shortfalls of Electoral Politics

127

legitimacy. Let us schematically review the conceptual tools that he draws from the dissection of such ideas, in order to lay the ground for the discussion of his theory of democracy. First of all, “control” in his rendition is split into two components, influence and direction: “the influence must not only make a difference, as any form of influence will do; it must make a designed difference” (Id: 154). Having control means influencing in a way that actually gives to a process a direction consistent with the influence exerted, rather than influencing the process in the mere sense of producing undesired, incidental outcomes. For what regards popular control, it incorporates three features: (a) individualization, requiring that all have an “equal share” in control; (b) unconditionedness, establishing that popular influence has to be successfully exerted “independently of the willingness of the government to go along and independently of the willingness of any other agency to have the government to go along” (Id: 172); c) efficaciousness, suggesting that people have to perceive that the decisions made by the government (or by a judge, or state officer) follow equally shared and accepted rules, rather than particularized interests or individual whim. Therefore, “putting the implications of legitimacy in a slogan, we may say that people have to enjoy an equally accessible form of influence that imposes an equally acceptable direction on the state” (Id: 179). There is, however, an element conspicuous by its absence in Pettit’s definition of legitimacy, especially in the ears of a liberal reader: the idea of consent is consciously removed from the requirements of legitimacy. Consent, in Pettit’s reading, “can play no role in guarding against arbitrary or uncontrolled interference” (Id: 158). The consent to a contract, for instance, does not make for its fairness from the perspective of freedom as non-domination, as it can lay the ground for dominating practices (“at the limit, you may have consented to a slave contract” (Id: 157)), while on the other hand control can be exerted on practices to which people do not consent, thus empowering them with the freedom to change what they do not endorse. As hinted above in Sect. 5.2, this is one of the reasons why Pettit argues that liberals are ultimately compelled to dismiss the concept of political legitimacy: either they regard it as intrinsically incompatible with their idea of freedom from law, or they end up adopting an implausible notion of “continuing consent”. As we shall see at the end of the chapter, however, there is a sense in which Pettit cannot actually do without a notion of consensus, rather than consent, which assumes pre-eminence in his normative framework.

5.4

Popular Control and the Shortfalls of Electoral Politics

From the two lexical components and the three features of control, substantiating the meaning of political legitimacy as controlled interference, Pettit’s whole democratic theory flows. All the three features articulate different requirements when coupled with either of the two different components of control, namely influence and direction. Democracy, therefore, results from control: “any system that satisfies such conditions deserves to be described as a democracy, since it gives the demos,

128

5

Popular Sovereignty as Popular Control: Philip Pettit’s Republicanism

or ‘people’, an equally shared, independently supported and intuitively efficacious degree of kratos, or ‘control’, over the state” (Id: 179–180). As often stressed by Pettit, democratic participation is not a value in itself as it is for the “Continental” republicanism initiated by Rousseau. It is not “definitional” of liberty (as non-domination), but merely a means for its pursuit. Therefore, he defines his democratic framework as more sympathetic with deliberative democracy, with which it shares the commitment to an institutional system mediating the democratic process of deliberation.9 Pettit constructs his theory of democracy upon two main complementary building blocks, one oriented to securing popular influence, the other popular direction over government. Regarding popular influence, Pettit starts from characterizing the model of a public forum fitting the republican aims and commitments. The system he finally upholds is, in his phrasing, a “responsive representative assembly”. His argument, which cannot be explored at length here, proceeds as follows. The idea of a “plenary assembly” involving all citizens is rejected on the grounds of the “discursive dilemma”: either the decisions taken on every issue follow from the will of the majority, or they are consistent with each other. An assembly of individually voting people will not produce a coherent ensemble of policies when expressing their preferences on different issues, and conversely the design of a consistent policyline cannot but give up the preferences of the individual voters to some extent. Therefore, Pettit argues that “any plausible alternative is going to require an assembly that represents the people in some way. In taking this line, I reject the view that representation is in any way inimical, as is sometimes said, to the ideal of democracy” (Id: 195). Having identified two models of representation, he favours a responsively representative assembly over an indicatively representative one10 for the purpose of popular influence. While the former is elected by the people, the latter

9

Nevertheless, Pettit specifies that he refers to some deliberative democrats and not to others. According to him, authors such as Habermas “go hypothetical” and “move closer to Rawls” when they formulate principles identifying legitimacy in those laws and decisions that might be endorsed by all (see On the People’s Terms, Chapter 3, footnote 13, p. 145). Moreover, he argues that those deliberative democrats differ from him as long as they retain “a foundational commitment to the value of deliberation as such” (2012: 267), and pretend to apply deliberation “at every site and on every occasion” (2012: 268). While the second and third claim appear rather misplaced with regards to the thinkers to whom Pettit refers, or at least would require further argument, for what regards the first point it seems that Pettit overlooks the proximity of his own framework to precisely the deliberative democratic authors he addresses. This will become clearer during the present chapter. 10 In this regard, Pettit’s position seems to have shifted from the times of Republicanism. In that work he appeared to lean towards a statistical body, when he argued that “the reliably inclusive legislature will have to incorporate, in their own right, all the voices of difference that are found within the community” (2012: 191). Although he does not recognize it explicitly, this is a move towards statistic representation. The range of “voices of difference” inhabiting a twenty-first century society is virtually as broad as to require an institutional transposition that would embrace the whole parliament, or most of it. As Pettit himself claims, nearly every individual belongs to at least one “vulnerability class”. Not by chance, in the following pages he expressly claims for the partial introduction of statistic representation in the judiciary and administrative bodies (cf. Republicanism, pp. 192–193).

5.4 Popular Control and the Shortfalls of Electoral Politics

129

is a statistically constructed organism, “a microcosm of the society”. Pettit supplies four arguments drawn from political science to defend his choice: responsive assembly guarantees “continuity of experience and expertise”; it involves elections, which intrinsically buttress several liberties; it makes it more likely for the people to impose direction over government, as elected representatives have compelling reasons to listen to the electoral bases and avoid false negatives and false positives; indicative assemblies bear more potential for domination, because their members do not aspire to be re-elected.11 The most interesting part of such discussion, however, starts with Pettit’s observation that elections have shortfalls under all the requirements of control discussed above – individualization, unconditionedness and efficaciousness. In the search for solutions to such shortfalls, Pettit elaborates some of the cornerstones of his theory of democracy. Individualization, i.e. the equality among individuals in the access to influence, clearly requires some reconciliation with the electoral practice. In this regard, two problems arise, one broader and one more specific. First of all, how can the idea that people individually have an equal access to influence be defended within an electionbased system, considering that the policy follows the will of the winners, not of the losers? And secondly, how to deal with the tyranny of the majority? That is, how can those who are on the losing side of what Pettit calls “sticky divide” be guaranteed individualized access to influence? While Pettit’s reply to the first issue is rather predictable, as he limits to clarify that an equal share in the access to influence is tantamount to “an equal chance of being on the winning side” (Id: 211), the latter bears more interesting implications. Pettit calls “sticky divides” those cleavages, be they cultural, political, gender-based, religious, in which one side systematically constitutes as majority and the other as minority. In similar cases, it is clear that the minority does not enjoy equal chances of winning elections or polls on any matters of disagreement with the majority, thereby falling prey to its tyranny, or domination. The solutions outlined by Pettit reveal a fundamental blind spot in his thought, which may be worth briefly introducing, although it will be fully addressed at the end of the chapter. First of all, Pettit advocates special contestatory channels for minorities, running parallel to the established system of contestation and enabling them “to contest the appropriateness of majority voting in a referendum or via a legislature for determining issues” (Id: 214). Those minorities, Pettit clarifies, have to be identified 11

For a dissenting voice on this, see McCormick’s Machiavellian Democracy (2011). In his view, in defining electoral representative systems as more accountable than ancient democratic systems attributing public offices through lotteries, Pettit forgets that “in practice, virtually every popular government that deployed lotteries also subjected officeholders to strict post-tenure public scrutinies where former magistrates gave account of their actions and faced serious punishment for misconduct. There is certainly no reliable evidence available that demonstrates the superiority of election/reelection schemes in securing greater elite accountability for citizenries to those characterized by lottery/scrutiny” (2011: 149). Moreover, McCormick observes that Pettit is somewhat inconsistent in recommending elections as the most accountable system, considering the effort he puts at devising a theory of popular control on precisely the elected stands-in. For a similar point, see Shapiro (2012), pp. 329–330.

130

5

Popular Sovereignty as Popular Control: Philip Pettit’s Republicanism

not on the grounds of their particular choices at the polls, but of a pre-commitment which determines their choices in a way that systematically turns them into a minority in the hands of a majority; this requires a special right for them to test the laws. Secondly – and controversially – Pettit points out a solution to the sticky divide which strongly resembles the entrenchment of constitutional rights: “another resolution would be to take the issue out of the domain of popular voting altogether [. . .] The effect of constitutionally protected rights would be to put various issues off the popular agenda, as with familiar measures that disallow majority voting on whether to set up an established religion, on whether to give special rights to heterosexuals” (Id: 216–217). Something similar is advocated also in Republicanism, where Pettit explicitly mentions Ackerman and claims that “every law must be capable of being amended, of course, since there is no guarantee, even with the most plausible of laws, that it will continue to make republican sense [. . .] But we should require democracy to work on different tracks and insist, with Bruce Ackerman, that amendments to the more basic and important laws should have to pass along a particularly difficult route” (1997: 180–181). The problem, as it may start being clear from the two quotes above, is with the amendability of laws, and hence with the very understanding of the people and popular sovereignty: are all laws really amendable, as Pettit has it in the second quote? Or are the constitutional rights discussed in the first quote beyond the democratic reach for good? As we shall see, Pettit is stuck at this crossroad, and he may hardly overcome it. Non-domination alone cannot provide a way out, in that Pettit ultimately fails at providing a sharp definition of the concept. Regarding the unconditionedness of popular influence, Pettit puts forward two solutions, central to his democratic theory: the mixed constitution and the contestatory citizenry. The latter will be discussed at length in the next section. The argument for the mixed constitution starts with the extensive elaboration of a polemic running underground throughout On the People’s Terms, and targeting Bodin and Hobbes’s idea of the indivisibility and absoluteness of power, which Rousseau inherits. Their assumption is that power can be properly held and exercised by one homogeneous and undivided entity, be it an absolute monarch or a democratic assembly, as in Rousseau’s reformulation. As a consequence of the nature of power thus defined, sovereignty is tantamount to tyranny, and its true exercise cannot but be absolute and unconstrained. While it is self-evident that from Pettit’s perspective similar ideas are harbingers of domination, the republican argument against the philosophical conception of state agency shared by Bodin, Hobbes and Rousseau is worth being examined. Pettit is unconcerned by the idea of the state as a single agent. In his definition, “to be an agent in the appropriate sense is to be an individual or body that can recognize demands like those of consistency and prove responsive to them. It is to be susceptible to the constraints and challenges of reason in the adoption of ends and in the formation of judgements as to how best to promote those ends” (2012: 224). From Pettit’s perspective, therefore, the state can be defined as an identifiable source of agency. Yet, Pettit correctly detaches his idea of the state’s agential status from the idea of the indivisibility of power. Bodin and Hobbes attribute an indivisible nature to power, and hence demand that who holds power has

5.4 Popular Control and the Shortfalls of Electoral Politics

131

to be an absolute sovereign and a single-minded actor. In arguing that the state acts as a single agent, Pettit has to break such link connecting state’s agency as singular and the indivisible nature of power: that is, he cannot argue, as Bodin and Hobbes do, that the state has to act as a uniform entity because power is indivisible by its nature. If Pettit went down that way, he would put political power in the hands of the state rather than of the people, with puzzling outcomes on his theory of popular control. Therefore, he distances himself from absolutist thinkers by arguing that single agency can still be ‘single’ if it is pluralistically decentralized, and that power can remain such if it is pluralistically exercised. The justification underlying the claim for single agency cannot be found in a legal-positivistic allocation of sovereign power to the state, and is rather offered by non-domination: the state has its raison d’être in the implementation of a system of justice,12 a task that cannot be adequately addressed by an impersonal agent. Pettit claims, in particular, that a model of state agency drawing from the market, for instance, would be unable to identify basic liberties, to resource them properly in case they were identified – in that “unregulated by the agency of a state, wealth and power tend to accumulate in fewer and fewer hands” (Id: 135) – and to properly protect all the people living within its impersonal purview. This is even more compelling when considering that the ideal of justice advanced by Pettit revolves around non-domination, an ideal which, as we saw above, is defined by Pettit as constitutively related with state institutions. That intimate tie is only possible if the state is characterized as intentionally acting with the aim of preventing domination, and institutionally structured accordingly. The mixed constitution thus involves a state that is at once a single agent endowed with intentionality and an ensemble of interacting and mutually checking and balancing bodies, contra the absolutist philosophers and their assumption that “in order for a state to assume such an agential or personal status, there has to be a spokesperson available to speak for it. This spokesperson [. . .] has to be a spatio-temporally concrete entity, not an entity that exists on the basis of how different individuals or bodies operate and coordinate” (Id: 224). Finally, Pettit approaches the electoral shortfalls in efficaciousness of influence starting from the observation that the pervasiveness of popular control should suffice to guarantee that government does not act arbitrarily, and thus that decisions disadvantaging given individuals – or simply contrary to their will – are the result of mere tough luck. In making such point, Pettit goes farther with his analysis of

In spite of Pettit’s established link between ‘justice’ in general and state agency, he is clearly referring to his own conception of justice, which is especially connected with the existence of an agential state. For the full discussion of Pettit’s conception of social justice, cf. his On the People’s Terms (2012), Ch. 2. For an alternative version of a conception of justice for Pettit’s framework, cf. Forst (2013), who argues that republicanism can benefit from an understanding of justice grounded in “the principle of general and reciprocal justification, which states that every claim to rule as well as to goods, rights or liberties must be justified in a reciprocal or general manner, where one side may not simply project its reasons onto the other but has to justify itself discursively” (Id: 159). 12

132

5

Popular Sovereignty as Popular Control: Philip Pettit’s Republicanism

control, in order to stress that the kind of control involved in the electoral practice is relevant but insufficient. People exert not only the sort of active influence operating in the “electoral-cum-contestatory system”, but also virtual and reserve influence. The former is the power to influence government by virtue of a shared awareness of both the people’s specific will on a given issue and their readiness to react in case that will is neglected. The representatives, in other words, know how the people want them to act, and also know that dismissing such desiderata would entail popular reactions; therefore, they are pushed to comply. Reserve influence is the power to influence government by virtue of a shared awareness of the people’s readiness to intervene if their will is violated, even though they do not have a specific will on a given issue. Moreover, in order to bolster efficaciousness and prove the plausibility of non-domination, Pettit briefly deals with notorious dangers to democratic control, lying in the spaces of arbitrariness left to elected politicians, private lobbies and unelected authorities. The practical solutions at which he points involve the establishment of independent bodies taking given areas of power away from politicians (such as electoral commissions, central banks, independent and authoritative research centres), the reinforcement of independent broadcasters, the limitation of private financing to parties in favour of public funding, the enhancement of transparency and exposure to public contestation of unelected bodies.

5.5

The Contestatory Citizenry and the Venues of Contestation

As hinted above, the second guarantee of popular unconditioned influence is the contestatory citizenry, based on the idea that “the price of liberty, in the republican adage, is eternal vigilance” (Id: 5). In Republicanism, Pettit introduces contestation as a device for contrasting the dangers concealed in the unavoidable discretionary power that even a republican framework has to bestow on stands-in and state officers. In this sense, the motivations underlying the contestatory practice remain constant throughout Pettit’s philosophical path, as the discretionary space precisely encumbers that unconditioned power of influence which specifies control. Influence cannot be unconditioned, in other words, if the grey areas of administrative/legislative discretion are precluded to the popular reach. Therefore, Pettit argues that unconditioned control on the state is secured by “the fact that we can more or less effectively contest the decision, if we find that it does not answer to our relevant interests or relevant ideas” (1997: 185). Only if citizens are empowered to contest every law implemented and decision made can they arguably benefit from a capacity of influence independent of external conditions and wills. What characterizes Republicanism and the writings of the following years,13 however, is a tendency to 13

For a telling example, see Pettit’s “Depoliticizing Democracy” (2004).

5.5 The Contestatory Citizenry and the Venues of Contestation

133

tangle up the contestatory impetus in a web of procedural channels and institutional arrangements that appear to considerably reduce the space for action by engaged citizens. The contestatory citizenry is portrayed as a passive voice filtered through institutions. People are represented by stands-in amplifying “all the voices of difference” in the parliament, given hearings by statistically selected officials in the judiciary and administrative apparatuses, assisted with their complaints by depoliticized bodies: “in such instances, democracy requires recourse to the relative quiet of the parliamentary, cross-party committee, or the formal bureaucratic inquiry, or the standing appeals board, or the quasi-judicial tribunal, or the autonomous, professionalized body” (Id: 196). Such portrayal of the contestatory citizenry attracted several critics. McCormick, as we saw above, is discontented with Pettit’s affiliation to a republican tradition the elitist shades of which affect Pettit’s theory itself, and contradict its more democratic intents. McCormick identifies several presuppositions misguiding Pettit’s democratic thought: first of all, “Pettit is generally much more wary of the people than he is of the elites, and he frequently goes to great lengths to generate rationales for why elites can be expected to act on behalf of the common good, while he tends to accept as a fact the notion that the people simply cannot” (2011: 158). On this reading, in other words, Pettit is more wary of the tyranny of the majority than of the political and administrative elites usurping and abusing power, and therefore he relegates contestation to such practices as “writing to members of parliament (MPs), asking ombudsmen to conduct inquiries, and appealing judicial decisions to higher courts” (Id: 154).14 Differently from the tribunes in republican Rome, moreover, Pettit’s ombudsmen do not have a power to initiate legislation, and they are entitled to represent individuals or minority groups, but not “common citizens as a whole, that is, the plebeians of modern republics” (Id: 150). According to McCormick, the assumption that the “real danger” be constituted by majorities and popular direct empowerment and not by representative elites in office is ungrounded in Pettit’s thought. As Machiavelli claimed, there is no reason to think that the people, properly informed and enabled to produce judgments in a way similar to the contemporary mini-publics, would produce worse and more dangerous decisions than the professionalized elites advocated by Pettit: “ultimately, which is more utopian: to expect such minipublics to make generally good decisions, or to expect elites to behave in a consistently impartial and depoliticized fashion?” (Id: 162). In a different vein, Shapiro observed that Pettit is worried enough from the abuse of institutional power, whereas he underestimates the dangers coming from unofficial forms of power: in Pettit’s work, “the power wielded by governments is more malevolent than the powers wielded by other actors – whether powerful individuals or other corporate agents” (2012: 329). 14

It should be noted, however, that at different places McCormick viewed Pettit’s contestation in a more optimistic vein, as when he argued that “the indirectness of strict electoral democracy allows the space for the discretion of political elites [. . .] It is this space that both Machiavellian democracy and contestatory democracy seek to fill with mechanisms by which the disadvantaged, marginalized or exploited might bring elites more directly to account” (2003: 636).

134

5

Popular Sovereignty as Popular Control: Philip Pettit’s Republicanism

From the assumption that majority rule is the greatest danger to freedom, rather than abuses and misuses of power, McCormick derives a further shortfall in Pettit’s thought, also highlighted by Urbinati (2012) and Shapiro (2012). In defining contestation, Pettit appears to assume that the quantitative majority does not have a special need for contestation, as it can impose its will through the force of its number at elections and polls. For McCormick, the main drawback of this idea is that contestation is not at the hands of socio-economically disadvantaged groups, which normally outnumber the economically privileged and nonetheless are victims of stark asymmetries of power.15 In this sense, “Pettit’s extra-electoral, contestatory institutions function more like the countermajoritarian ones typifying liberal constitutionalism [. . .] than they do popularly contestatory ones such as the Roman tribunate” (McCormick 2011: 155). On the same note, Lars Vinx interestingly observes that Pettit ends up espousing liberal constitutionalism, although non-domination alone would push him towards a Hobbesian “constitutional indifferentism”; just as Hobbes’s idea of absolute sovereignty does not bear intrinsic connections with any constitutional form, its sole requirement being that power be absolute and undivided, so Pettit’s non-domination does not actually call for a democratic constitution,16 as every regime, including democracy, can involve forms of domination – unless one adopts a “watered-down conception of non-domination that does not constitute a fundamental challenge to liberal constitutional thought” (Vinx 2010: 817). In Vinx’s view, the demands of non-domination do not pave the ground for an innovative constitutional framework, and “have mostly been met by modern liberal and constitutional democracies” (Id: 830). Going back to our main theme, contestation, Vinx highlights that precisely the fact that Pettit’s contestation is institutionally mediated, and the fact that it is the institutional system to decide whether the contestation is publicly avowable or not, signal Pettit’s alignment with liberal constitutionalism, in that he shares with the latter “the call for a robust scheme of judicial review of legislative or administrative decisions [. . .] to limit the dangers of a tyranny of the majority” (Id: 827).17 As a consequence of this plethora of issues inhering to the institutionalization of contestation, or the depoliticization of democracy, both McCormick and Urbinati contend that Pettit subordinates the authorial, active dimension of democracy to the

15 Pettit’s scarce commitment to socio-economic equality was also highlighted by Urbinati, who observed that “republicanism is not as strongly committed to end poverty as it is to end direct types of domination [. . .] A republican social policy, when activated, should aim at restoring the equilibrium among socially unequal parties, rather than countering social inequalities themselves” (2012: 614). Similarly, Shapiro complains that Pettit’s “myopic focus on the number of choices ignores how important the choices are from the point of view of avoiding domination, and it is also innocent of the ways in which material resources are often integral to resisting domination” (2012: 323). For further objections on the issue of socio-economic equality, see also Alan Thomas (2016), pp. 304–306. 16 For a similar perspective, see Boesche (1998), p. 865, who argues that there is no strict logical connection between freedom as non-domination and the democratic theory devised by Pettit. 17 For a similar perspective, cf. Goldoni 2013.

5.6 Deeper into Popular Control: The Norm of Norms and Dual Democracy

135

editorial, passive one.18 In his framework, so the objection goes, the former manifests itself merely in the practice of elections, while the latter is construed as a proceduralized sphere in which a passive citizenry is demoted from the contestatory activity by a complex network of courts, boards, officials, ombudsmen. In Urbinati’s words, “while this rendering of liberty reconciles republicanism with liberalism, it puts it in competition with democracy, which entails authorship, not simply editorial judgment” (2012: 607). As we saw earlier, similar challenges to Pettit’s theory were raised by Markell, who pointed at the effects of Pettit’s overabundant institutionalization of democracy on bottom-up involvement, and by Shapiro, who expressively described Pettit’s approach as a “fulsome embrace of institutional sclerosis” (2012: 331). The immediate consequence which Pettit does not see, according to Shapiro, is that excessive vetoes on state action advantage those who have the resources to “wait out opponents” (Id: 329), thus preserving the status quo and reproducing dominating patterns, rather than empowering the dominated and marginalized. On the same page, Dyzenhaus regards as “naive” the idea that “the more the institutional opportunities given to citizens to contest public decisions, the better” (2012: 341).

5.6

Deeper into Popular Control: The Norm of Norms and Dual Democracy

A central move in Pettit’s more recent On the People’s Terms, therefore, is to partly disentangle the contestatory practice from the institutional labyrinths and the depoliticized dimension in which it was entrapped. Although in a footnote, Pettit explicitly mentions McCormick and clearly states that “where I wrote there of the need to depoliticize democracy, however, I now tend to avoid this talk. It has helped to bolster the criticism that republicanism, as I interpret it, does not give people a proper, democratic role” (2012: 231, footnote 44). As we saw, in this work contestation is presented as the tool to achieve a popular, unconditioned, “designed influence” on government, in tandem with the mixed constitution. In this new version, contestation still needs an institutional infrastructure in order to be practiced, therefore Pettit does not relinquish the institutional loci giving a hearing to contesters, such as “channels of consultation and appeal between the public and the legislature”, “systems of courts and other tribunals in which challenges to laws can be heard and decided”, “independent officials and bodies in ombudsman or auditor roles”, “constraints of rule of law and due process” (Id: 216). However, while this dimension remains solidly incorporated in Pettit’s formulation of contestation, especially with regards to the contestatory channels available to the victims of the “sticky divides”, a more bottom-up and civically active approach to contestation

18

Cf. Forst (2013) for a critique of the separation of the editorial and authorial moments, and for the outline of a Kantian republicanism allowing to have such moments “combined under that heading” (Id: 162).

136

5

Popular Sovereignty as Popular Control: Philip Pettit’s Republicanism

surfaces in On the People’s Terms. Pettit argues that “vigilance requires a high aggregate level of civic engagement”, and that democratic life “has to have an agonistic – better perhaps, an antagonistic – character” (Id: 226). He suggests a form of “division of labour in the exercise of civic vigilance”, where the role of protagonist is played by social movements, non-governmental organizations, groups of civic activists focused on specific issues and ready to contest the government’s action under those respects.19 The role of such realities was mentioned by Pettit also in Republicanism, but it appeared obscured by the lengthy elaboration of the institutional sluices of contestation. Although a separation is maintained between his ‘soft’ idea of civic virtue and the quixotic, “other-worldly” Rousseauvian participatory ideal, Pettit goes so far as to define the contestatory practice as “nourished by what Adam Ferguson described as the ‘refractory and turbulent zeal’ of ordinary people” (Id: 227). This more vital and debate-based shape assumed by contestation, which Pettit comes to dubiously characterize as agonistic or antagonistic,20 becomes even more evident when he goes deeper into the meaning of directing, rather than influencing, control. As we saw above, by the directive side of control Pettit refers to the correspondence between the influence exerted and the direction concretely taken by state action: influence “might impose a large range of constraints, but only with the effect of inducing a series of showdowns and stalemates in the interaction of people and government” (Id: 240), for instance. Yet, how can the process through which citizens actively direct politics fulfil the three requirements of individualization, unconditionedness and efficaciousness, given the complexity of contemporary society? Pettit attempts to better construct the meaning of ‘direction’ by seeking to reconcile two opposite models of collective control on politics: one non-intentional, Schumpeterian in inspiration, and one intentional, drawing on Rousseau. He conflates those models in what he calls a “dual-aspect democracy”, thus seeking to preserve their respective benefits in a two-level structure which simultaneously neutralizes their flaws. The materialization of the dual-aspect model flows directly from the requirements of individualized, unconditioned and efficacious influence. It should be carefully noted, however, that this occurs only on the grounds of a crucial new predicate that Pettit attributes to public deliberation and contestation, a predicate which undergoes much deeper elaboration and acquires higher relevance in On the 19

For an objection to the role of social movements and NGOs, cf. Shapiro (2012). His contention is that such organizations are not always “organized in support of change that Pettit regards as progressive” (Id: 326). He mentions movements such as the Tea Party in order to demonstrate the danger that such entities may have for the ideals that Pettit himself would foster. Nonetheless, the objection appears misplaced; if NGOs are not reliable because some of them are enemies to democracy and progress, then democracy as such collapses, as its enemies obviously rank among elected deputies and ordinary citizens as well. It is almost platitudinous to stress that democracy can silence its own law-abiding opponents only at the cost of disavowing its own nature – whether those opponents are NGOs, social movements, members of the parliament, ordinary citizens. Therefore, Pettit’s attribution of a primary contestatory role to social movements and the like cannot be contrasted on these grounds. 20 Cf. footnote 24 below.

5.6 Deeper into Popular Control: The Norm of Norms and Dual Democracy

137

People’s Terms than it had in Republicanism and the subsequent works. That is, Pettit specifies that in order for influence to satisfy its three requirements, public deliberation and contestation must occur in the form of acceptability games. A group of individuals aiming to establish patterns of co-existence through discourse can debate with each other with the underlying assumption that all will try to maximize their own benefits, thus aspiring to “grant the smallest concession that they can get away with” (Id: 253); such rational choice model is called by Pettit an “acceptance game”. Alternatively, participants can discuss with the proviso that the reasons mutually offered in argumentation “should count as relevant by the lights of all” (Ibid), that is, they are supposed to draw on commonly shared and broadly understandable ideas, rather than on sectarian doctrines or particularized interests. This model of collective decision-making corresponds to Pettit’s “acceptability games”. In this deliberative horizon, discourse is supposed to flow within the tracks of what he calls the “norm of norms” (Id: 255), that is, the overarching demand for mutual exchange of relevant reasons. In order for influence to actually be individualized, unconditioned and efficacious, therefore, contestation and collective processes of deliberation have to stick to the norm of the norms: “the multi-dimensional, multi-centred pattern of contestation required for a suitable system of popular influence ensures that acceptability games must dominate the operations of that system” (Id: 260). This focus on the discursive dimension of contestation further demonstrates the more markedly bottom-up, “deliberative” nuance assumed by contestation in Pettit’s more recent framework. From this commandment, the dual-aspect democracy stems: at a first level – “in the short haul”, in Pettit’s terms – the Rousseauvian model of direct control prevails. That is the level of ordinary, day-to-day debate and contestation on a landscape of specific and disparate issues, often unrelated with each other, where civic activists, social movements, politicians, institutions of adjudication and appeal, ordinary citizens and the media system contribute to influencing the decision-making processes. What guarantees “the directive or shaping role” (Id: 264) of such short-haul process is the umbrella of the norm of the norms: if contestation happens within its boundaries, then citizens can claim that independently of the final decisions made, they “will have achieved an important goal together: the compliance of their policies and policy-making with norms that are shared amongst them” (Id: 266). The long-term effect of this kind of deliberation is the piecemeal evolution and specification of the norm of norms, which becomes gradually articulated through its ongoing implementation into a set of policy-making norms, the first of which is “equality of influence”, likely – in Pettit’s account – to be followed by a form of “equal respect”, the acceptance of which in turn “is likely then to generate a series of more specific egalitarian norms” (Id: 262). The second level of Pettit’s dual-aspect democracy, therefore, resembles the Schumpeterian impersonal kind of control in that the policy-norms, refined through the short-haul deliberative and contestatory processes, gain specificity and relevance “in the long haul process, as silently as gravity” (Id: 270). The gradual constitutionalization, whether formal or informal, of the original content of the norms of argument that all share is the precious long-haul sediment of the short-haul processes. Debating and contesting citizens do not

138

5

Popular Sovereignty as Popular Control: Philip Pettit’s Republicanism

directly control such process of specification and constitutionalization, as it results as the epiphenomenon of short-haul deliberation. Hence, they enjoy a form of longhaul impersonal, indirect control, which yet is directive, as it constrains the decisionmaking processes within rules that all share, and that make the citizens undominated insofar as in control of the interferences imposed on them – which in turn are legitimate interferences, or legitimate laws.

5.7

Pettit’s Ambiguous Constitutionalism, or a Problematic Definition of the Sovereign People

The overview of such complex framework of legitimacy and democracy should finally enable us to draw conclusions on Pettit’s conceptualization of the people and its sovereignty. The disconcerting outcome, nonetheless, is that Pettit’s theory of popular sovereignty leaves the reader’s expectation of being offered a definition of the people hanging in mid-air. That is, the reader is left with the puzzle, apparently unsolvable, whether Pettit has or has not an understanding of the people which goes beyond the assimilation of people and citizens of a nation-state. The oscillation is evident also from simple textual confrontation, and can be introduced starting from Pettit’s position on the amendability of laws, at which we hinted above in Sect. 5.4. Let us quote a few excerpts from his work, one of which was already included in the discussion above: every law must be capable of being amended, of course, since there is no guarantee, even with the most plausible of laws, that it will continue to make republican sense [. . .] But we should require democracy to work on different tracks and insist, with Bruce Ackerman, that amendments to the more basic and important laws should have to pass along a particularly difficult route (1997: 180–181). The constituting people will be responsible for it [the shape of the constitution] to the degree that not only can they change it under those rules of amendment, they can also change it by non-constitutional means: they can replace the old constitution with a new one, thereby establishing a novel state and a novel constituted people. [. . .] In John Locke’s phrase, they continue ‘to be always the supreme power’ (2012: 292). This position entails a commitment to democracy that, paradoxically, is not itself subject to that democratic proviso. [. . .] The population might vote unanimously, to take an extreme example, to deny votes to women. Since such a possibility would be anathema from the republican viewpoint, it follows that we ought to exempt the recommendation to do things democratically, and that recommendation alone, from the democratic proviso. We ought not to recommend that our society should give people an equal share in control of government, provided this proposal is itself democratically endorsed. We ought to recommend that our society should give people an equal share of control, period (Id: 25, my italics).

5.7 A Problematic Definition of the Sovereign People

139

The cleavage between the first two excerpts and the third21 should be evident: whereas the former preach all-amendability and supreme power to the people, the latter sets a constraint on the amendability of laws: the status of women is established as beyond the reach of the people’s sovereign will. As it will emerge in what follows, it is precisely the lack of a clear definition of non-domination to leave Pettit on this edge. That is, he is not in the position to specify what precisely constitutes non-domination. My contention is that such indecisiveness is due to the double threat haunting Pettit’s political theory: tyranny of the majority on the one hand, and elite’s power abuse on the people on the other. Not by chance, among Pettit’s critics we found both authors who claim that he overemphasizes the danger of majoritarian oppression, while neglecting the menace of power abuse by elites (McCormick), and authors who stress that Pettit is all too focused on the abuses by institutional elites, whereas he should be more aware of non-institutional forms of power and domination (A. Fraser, Shapiro). Pettit’s double preoccupation results in theoretical (and textual) oscillations on the amendability of laws, and hence on the very addressee of non-domination: when Pettit is worried about the elite’s domination on the people, he argues for all-amendability, in that any top-down limit to the bottom-up determination of the sovereign people would result in domination; when he worries about the majoritarian oppression of minorities, the respect of basic rights and policy-norms becomes the object of non-domination, and not all laws can be amended – namely, not those securing the rights of given categories. As we shall see in what follows, such oscillations on non-domination’s meaning and field of application entail aporias on the definition of the sovereign people. Let us start the examination of the two possible scenarios from the latter, in which not every law can be amended. Women cannot be denied suffrage, not even via unanimous vote. As a preliminary observation, it should be noted that this interpretation is much more consistent with the dual-aspect model, which establishes the conditions for popular directive control over government. Directive control, as we saw, is achieved by the people both directly and indirectly in the short and the long run by virtue of a shared commitment to the “norm of norms” and its subsequent articulation into egalitarian policy-norms. What Pettit seems to overlook is that in this framework non-domination comes to conflate with consensus on shared rules of deliberation.22 That is, citizens are free of domination and the political order is legitimate because everyone consents to the shared norm of norms and its contextual ramifications; however, ‘because’ here does not establish a causal, but a constitutive The choice of selecting two excerpts expressing the first view is only intended to show that such an ambiguity does not depend on Pettit’s reconsideration of the issue between 1997 and 2012, but rather pervades his thought throughout that whole time-span. 22 Pettit’s public reason of sorts has attracted objections. For instance, Marco Goldoni (2013) argues that he somewhat juridifies conflict, thus picturing it as always internal to, solvable by, and expressible in the terms of the shared reasons codified into law. Thus, Pettit’s conflict is always aprioristically domesticated, and the fundamental aspects of the political order ultimately cannot be modified by the “constituting people”. 21

140

5

Popular Sovereignty as Popular Control: Philip Pettit’s Republicanism

relation: non-domination, once applied to the political order of a community, turns into the citizens’ shared consensus on egalitarian norms of deliberation and the compliance of legislation with such norms. As Pettit interestingly specifies, this requires that “the considerations adduced should count as relevant according to everyone’s views but according to everyone’s views as they actually are or can brought to be, not according to everyone’s views as in some sense they ought ideally to be” (Id: 253). The reference to the “views as they actually are or can brought to be” reinforces the resemblance of Pettit’s model to Rawls’s overlapping consensus; despite Pettit’s reference to Habermas as the closest kin to acceptability games, and despite also his outspoken distance from Rawls’s public reason,23 Pettit moves strikingly close to overlapping consensus with the dual-aspect democratic model. The slow development of a consensus on increasingly specifying norms which delimit deliberation and contestation recalls Rawls’s description of the gradual constitutionalization of a country’s public culture through the growing depth, breadth and specificity of their consensus, which lays out a common ground within which reasons can be provided that all can understand from the perspective of their “views as they actually are” – with the obvious difference that Pettit does not explicitly connect the norm of the norms with a public culture, nor with a possible constitution that legally articulates it. Nonetheless, he expressly recognizes the contextual nature of the process through which the norm acquires specification: “these interpretations [of the demands of equal respect] may vary across societies, of course, and indeed across eras” (Id: 262). On this reading, therefore, non-domination is constituted by the abidance of legislation by the norm of norms to which citizens subscribe, and to its more specific developments. Pettit’s supposed supreme value, that is non-domination, retreats into a form of consensus over shared policy-norms, and the normative core of the whole framework migrates towards the widespread acceptance and vitality of the norm of norms within the political community in which it is commonly appealed to, and articulated through ongoing political and contestatory practice into norms of deliberation. If legitimacy corresponds to controlled interference, and control is guaranteed by overall consensus on egalitarian norms, then republican legitimacy comes to conflate with such consensus. In this sense, not all the laws are amendable precisely because some of them, the precipitate of the norm of the norms, are constitutive of non-domination, that is, are constitutive of the collective, situated political identity to which all subscribe, and which establishes basic norms of discourse and policy-making.24 This interpretation delivers to Pettit an understanding of the people which does not simply assimilate the people to the inhabitants of a nation-state, and which thus

23

Cf. footnote 5, p. 253 of On the People’s Terms. It should now become clearer why I hinted above at the fact that Pettit’s definition of the contestatory practice as agonistic, or even antagonistic, is misplaced. Agonistic democratic thinkers may hardly accept the idea that the conflicting nature and fundamental dissensus constituting politics be underlain by a shared consensus on basic norms. 24

5.7 A Problematic Definition of the Sovereign People

141

forges an organic connection between the people and the sovereignty they exercise, in the sense that their political normativity stems from self-reflection rather than from abstractly universal principles. On this reading, the people is an intergenerational entity, cohesive around a set of historically developed norms protecting the basic rights of all. Such entity exercises sovereign power by producing laws abiding by such shared system of norms, so that all citizens may identify with them and achieve a form of control on legislation. If this reading prevails, Ferrara is right in observing that Pettit’s republicanism “hinges around the normativity of situated identity” (2008: 115); on the other hand, Larmore would fail at grasping the contextual dimension of this interpretation, when he claims that a “fundamental principle of respect for persons turns out therefore to constitute the deepest stratum in Pettit’s republican theory” (2001: 241). What Larmore would not see, in this case, is that in this reading it is the contextual consensus on and identification with the principle of respect for persons, rather than the principle itself as self-standing, to constitute the “deepest stratum in Pettit’s republican theory”. This reading, however, is challenged by the interpretive path based on ‘allamendability’. The ideas that “every law must be capable of being amended”, and that the people have the supreme power to change the constitution “by non-constitutional means”, loom large in Pettit’s work until the very last pages of On the People’s Terms. Now, it goes without saying that Pettit would not allow for easy constitutional changes, even on this reading. The cleavage between the two proposed interpretations of Pettit is more similar in width to that between Rawls and Ackerman than to that dividing, say, Rawls and a thinker like Richard Bellamy. That is, in spite of a shared, strong commitment to serious checks on constitutional amendment, there are constitutional laws that Rawls would refuse to amend, contra Ackerman. The controversy on the First Amendment, discussed in the previous chapter, speaks for itself in this sense. According to Ackerman, there is a point – albeit hard to reach – at which the people are entitled to appropriate the constitution in the way they have fervently and durably showed to wish. Our second reading of Pettit resembles Ackerman in this sense (not by chance, Pettit mentions him explicitly), but with a major difference that affects precisely his conception of the people. On this reading, in fact, Pettit lacks a reflexive understanding of popular sovereignty, equates the people to the citizens of a nation-state and adopts as his normative bedrock a principle that is ultimately extrinsic to the political communities it is supposed to govern – though arguably not “comprehensive” in a Rawlsian sense. In the Ackermanian constitutionalism, the idea that all laws must ultimately be amendable results from the analysis of the American bicentennial constitutional practice. The American people, in Ackerman’s reading, have historically manifested their will through heated and long-lasting processes, which satisfied the demanding constitutional requirements for amendment or proceeded through “unconventional adaptations” – or both – until the change desired by one part could not be avoided. In such rare manifestations of fervour and civic activism, in which citizens are engaged and well-informed, and the long-lasting and wide-spanning debates sharpen (also epistemically) the positions and volitions at stake, the will of We the People surfaces, and its implementation is legitimate independently of its moral quality. Ackerman,

142

5

Popular Sovereignty as Popular Control: Philip Pettit’s Republicanism

therefore, grounds his support for all-amendability in a self-reflexive interpretation of the American constitutional practice and its related political identity. Our second version of Pettit, on the other hand, does not make any such move. In his framework, if all laws are amendable, that may only be on the grounds of non-domination as a self-standing normative principle, which Pettit traces in his reconstruction of the republican tradition throughout the centuries – whereas in the previous version laws were not all amendable on the grounds of non-domination intended as the adherence of legislation to deep-seated, reflexively endorsed norms. Non-domination in what sense, then? And what does control mean in this context? If all laws are amendable, non-domination here must extrinsically apply to the members of a nation-state as participants in a collective process of self-determination. Non-domination and popular control here do not mean that laws must abide by the shared norms historically developed by a political community, but that citizens must enjoy an individualized and directive control on legislation so that the will of their majority is ultimately enacted, even when it calls for amendments affecting the basic rights of given categories. If everything is amendable, what does not have to be dominated is the democratic process of the community. Even deploying all the possible checks and constraints on amendments, a point must come at which one part imposes on the other(s). The idea that all laws must be amendable, therefore, can only be connected with the idea that domination requires that the people as the electorate involved in an ongoing democratic process must have their will fulfilled, given certain conditions which Pettit seems to draw from Ackerman, such as the temporal extension of proposals of and civic struggles for significant amendments. In a way, ‘control’ as the compliance with shared political norms, which must be maintained in this interpretive path, becomes subordinated to the ‘direct control’ of a popular majoritarian will on legislation, required by an understanding of freedom as non-domination on the citizens’ right to shape laws and policies, whatever the will of the majority is. This is where the all-amendability path seems to lead. This version of Pettit’s theory, therefore, appears to confirm David Estlund’s (2014) doubts: “how is it that any collective’s control – but not my control – of the state power over me justifies, or permits, or legitimates it? [. . .] Unless our control is my control, the collective’s power to interfere with me is not under my control even in a democracy” (Id: 801–802). In a way, Pettit’s indecisiveness can be read as a republican variant of the classic democratic dilemma: which comes first, individual rights or collective self-determination? The present inquiry is thus aporetic. Pettit cannot easily reconcile the two variants of constitutionalism which apparently inhabit his framework. In the absence of a reconciliation, or of a clearer affiliation by Pettit to either of them, it is impossible to conceptualize his understanding of the people and the way it relates to his theory of popular sovereignty.

References

143

References Bellamy, Richard. 2016. Which Republicanism, Whose Freedom? Political Theory 44 (5): 669–678. Boesche, Roger. 1998. Review: Thinking about Freedom. Political Theory 26 (6): 855–873. Dyzenhaus, David. 2009. How Hobbes Met the ‘Hobbes Challenge’. The Modern Law Review 72 (3): 488–506. ———. 2012. Response to Ian Shapiro, ‘On Non-Domination’. The University of Toronto Law Journal 62 (3): 337–346. Estlund, David. 2014. On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy, by Philip Pettit. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (4): 799–802. Ferrara, Alessandro. 2008. The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment. New York: Columbia University Press. Forst, Rainer. 2013. A Kantian Republican Conception of Justice as Nondomination. In Republican Democracy: Liberty, Law and Politics, ed. Andreas Niederberger and Philipp Schink, 154–168. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Fraser, Andrew. 1997. Review: Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government by Philip Pettit. Journal of Law and Society 24 (4): 599–603. Goldoni, Marco. 2013. Repubblicanesimo Riflessivo. Politica & Società 3: 475–492. Lang, Gerald. 2012. Invigilating Republican Liberty. The Philosophical Quarterly 62 (247): 273–293. Larmore, Charles. 2001. A Critique of Philip Pettit’s Republicanism. Philosophical Issues 11: 229–243. ———. 2003. Liberal and Republican Conceptions of Freedom. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 6 (1): 96–119. McCormick, John P. 2003. Machiavelli against Republicanism: On the Cambridge School’s ‘Guicciardinian Moments’. Political Theory 31 (5): 615–643. ———. 2011. Machiavellian Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Markell, Patchen. 2008. The Insufficiency of Non-Domination. Political Theory 36 (1): 9–36. McMahon, Christopher. 2005. The Indeterminacy of Republican Policy. Philosophy & Public Affairs 33 (1): 67–93. Pettit, Philip. 1993. Negative Liberty, Liberal and Republican. European Journal of Philosophy 1 (1): 15–38. ———. 1997. Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2004. Depoliticizing Democracy. Ratio Juris 17 (1): 52–65. ———. 2006. The Determinacy of Republican Policy: A Reply to McMahon. Philosophy and Public Affairs 34 (3): 275–283. ———. 2008. Freedom and Probability: A Comment on Goodin and Jackson. Philosophy and Public Affairs 36 (2): 206–220. ———. 2011. The Instability of Freedom as Noninterference: The Case of Isaiah Berlin. Ethics 121 (4): 693–716. ———. 2012. On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shapiro, Ian. 2012. On Non-Domination. The University of Toronto Law Journal 62 (3): 293–335. Skinner, Quentin. 1998. Liberty Before Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sreenivasan, Gopal. 2001. A Proliferation of Liberties. International Phenomenological Society 63 (1): 229–237. Thomas, Alan. 2016. Review: On the People’s Terms by Philip Pettit. Ethics 127 (1): 302–306. Urbinati, Nadia. 2012. Competing for Liberty: The Republican Critique of Democracy. The American Political Science Review 106 (3): 607–621. Vinx, Lars. 2010. Constitutional Indifferentism and Republican Freedom. Political Theory 38 (6): 809–837.

Chapter 6

Richard Bellamy and the Political Constitution of the demos

Abstract Bellamy’s version of freedom as non-domination considerably departs from Pettit’s, mainly due to the intimate connection that Bellamy establishes between freedom and the “circumstances of politics”, i.e. the circumstances of ineradicable disagreement constituting politics at its very roots. Bellamy holds that there is no moral, epistemic, political foothold available to arbitrate such radical disagreement. The majoritarian process is the only system capable of securing that every individual be respected in her status of “autonomous reasoner”. This delegitimizes constitutional courts, constitutionally entrenched rights, and the practice of their interpretation, namely judicial review. Hence, Bellamy puts forward the ideas of rule of law as guaranteed by equality of vote, majority rule, and the “balance of power”; of citizenship as defined by a “right to have rights”; of the constitution as overlapping with such democratic process. In this regard, Bellamy normatively defends the nation-state as the entity most capable of guaranteeing the fairness of the legislative majoritarian process. He clearly defines the sovereign people as the ensemble of the “individual citizens who together form a demos through being subject to the power of a particular state”. At the end of the chapter, doubts are raised on the normative logic of political constitutionalism. Keywords Bellamy · Republicanism · Circumstances of politics · Non-domination · Disagreement · Political constitutionalism · Majoritarian politics · Judicial review In spite of the adoption of a republican understanding of freedom as non-domination, Richard Bellamy’s framework is the ideal counterpoint to Pettit’s political theory. A reformulation of the latter’s theory of freedom under the light of the “circumstances of politics” enables the former to carry out a powerful critique of legal constitutionalism and the legal conceptions of the rule of law from an allegedly republican perspective – i.e., a perspective hinging on freedom as non-domination, which is transfigured and turned upside down, under some respects, by its conflation with the idea of disagreement drawn from Jeremy Waldron. The centrality of moral and political disagreement in Bellamy’s normative theory leads him to rebuff any appeal to a shared consensus on a set of values translatable into constitutionally entrenched rights, and to provide a different foundation and meaning to the notions of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Fiorespino, Radical Democracy and Populism, Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations 18, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84969-6_6

145

146

6 Richard Bellamy and the Political Constitution of the demos

citizenship, rights, rule of law, and popular sovereignty. As we shall see from an analysis of Bellamy’s most recent work, A Republican Union of States (2019), Bellamy’s belief that contemporary democratic systems are well-equipped to establish the conditions for non-domination brings him to a normative understanding of the people as the ensemble of the individuals – the citizens – inhabiting a modern nation-state. Nonetheless, in the final section (Sect. 6.5) doubts will be raised concerning the foundations of Bellamy’s notion of the people and of popular sovereignty, connected with his ambiguous attempt to reconcile his radical notion of disagreement with the idea that the citizens are supposed to be ruled by a democratic procedure that all accept as reasonable. A related doubt is raised concerning the normative logic of Bellamy’s framework: is there any space left in his pars construens for any normative aspiration? Does his reliance on the empirical functioning of the legislative institutions reveal a capitulation to facticity, or the attempt to shelter some basic rights in the maze of the institutional mechanism?

6.1

Pervasive Disagreement and Illegitimate Courts

It may be useful to introduce Bellamy’s political philosophy from its very core element, which arguably grounds his whole intellectual endeavour. Bellamy’s main concern has to do with the idea of the “circumstances of politics”, which he draws from Jeremy Waldron and Albert Weale.1 In Political Constitutionalism (2007), Bellamy offers a detailed account of politics as the theatre of an inescapable disagreement among people, a disagreement that is “unlikely in practice” to be settled within a commonly endorsed framework of justice. In a way that appears problematic to justify from his theoretical stand, as it will become clear later, Bellamy takes pains to define such disagreement as “reasonable”. The connection with the reasonable, and in particular with the reasonable as intended by Rawls, is all the more evident in the role that the idea of the burdens of judgment plays in Bellamy’s characterization of the circumstances of politics. The burdens of judgment as reflecting “the practical limits of human reason” (Id: 23) generate disagreement among reasonable people, according to Bellamy, with regard not only to conceptions of the good, but also to conceptions of the right, as in Michael Sandel’s famous objection to Rawls’s political liberalism, mentioned in Chap. 3 above.2 Politics

1

See, for instance, Waldron’s The Dignity of Legislation (1999), where he defines the concept in these terms: “like scarcity and limited altruism in the case of justice, the circumstances of politics are a coupled pair: disagreement wouldn’t matter if people didn’t prefer a common decision; and the need for a common decision would not give rise to politics as we know it if there wasn’t at least the potential for disagreement about what the common decision should be. On this account, imagining away the persistence of disagreement is like wishing away scarcity in an account of distributive justice” (Id: 154). 2 Cf. Michael Sandel’s “Review of Political Liberalism” (1994). See also Bellamy and Hollis’s “Liberal Justice: Political and Metaphysical” (1995), where the authors call into question Rawls’s

6.1 Pervasive Disagreement and Illegitimate Courts

147

happens and has to be thought within a dimension in which disagreement reigns at every level of specificity and on any sorts of matters, from the good to the right, from political to moral and ethical issues. Yet, “none of these differences need be attributed to self-interest, lack of knowledge, bias or bad faith” (Ibid): the main source of discord among people lies in the limits intrinsic to moral reasoning as captured by the six burdens of judgment. The puzzling aspect of Bellamy’s use of Rawlsian concepts, however, does not lie in the extension of burdens of judgmentrelated disagreement to justice, which is consistent not only with Bellamy’s theory, but also with Rawls’s latest reflections, albeit within a different normative framework.3 Rather, as it will become clearer later, what is confusing is Bellamy’s appeal to a reasonable disagreement, which is hard to reconcile with the professed unavailability of any theoretical instruments for setting boundaries between reasonableness and unreasonableness. It is from this insight on the nature of the political, however, that Bellamy articulates his whole political philosophy. The relevance of this portrait of politics in Bellamy’s theory is related with the consequences it has on the theory of rights, of rule of law, and on the relationship between rights, constitution and democracy. The all-encompassing scope of disagreement as depicted by Bellamy entails that “a consensus on rights cannot be said to stand somehow outside politics” (Id: 25). As long as rights are part and parcel of the circumstances of politics, they cannot provide a framework within the rules of which politics displays; rather, they are the object of politics as well as any ordinary decree. Bellamy provides a threefold argument to prove the political nature of rights and their intrinsic entrenchment in the circumstances of politics: (a) “debates over the interpretation of rights often mirror many political arguments amongst the wider public” (Id: 23–24); that is, within the different worldviews clashing in the political arena, different conceptualizations of rights are embedded, which thus are but one object of discord among many; (b) those cleavages among worldviews are so deep as to be rooted in “different accounts of the nature of the political” (Id: 24). Therefore, different sets of rights correspond to different and often irreconcilable understandings of the very meaning of politics; (c) views of ‘the political’, and the conceptualizations of rights built therein, are often “incompatible and incommensurable”, to the extent that “one cannot overcome this dilemma by trying to identify either a minimal set of ‘core’ rights [...] or a maximal set that somehow finds a place for all combinations of rights” (Id: 25).

attempt at “trying to turn metaphysical water into political wine” (Id: 3). Despite praising the general idea of separating politics from metaphysics, Bellamy and Hollis develop a twofold critique: on the one hand, they argue that Rawls failed to shun metaphysics, as for example he needs “some transcendental reason why a liberal convergence should occur” (Id: 14) among reasonable conceptions of the good, so as to form an overlapping consensus around liberaldemocratic ideas; on the other, Bellamy and Hollis seem to claim that such failure is beneficial, even though discordant with Rawls’s intentions, in that metaphysical arguments have still a role to play in political philosophy. 3 Cf., in particular, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited” (Rawls 1997).

148

6 Richard Bellamy and the Political Constitution of the demos

The dimensions of politics and disagreement, therefore, appear equi-extensive. The pervasiveness and homogeneity of disagreement prevent any appeal to extrapolitical principles as a self-standing source of validity, which implies “shifting the focus from morality to politics by adopting an agnostic attitude toward morality” (Goldoni 2013: 929). Politics becomes omni-pervasive to the extent that disagreement is. From this landscape, Bellamy derives the normative standpoint from which he carries out his critique of judicial review and legal constitutions. Before going deeper into this critique it is therefore important to complete the reconstruction of the normative position from which it is developed, i.e. a version of the theory of freedom as non-domination that simultaneously draws from and contrasts Philip Pettit’s seminal formulation. While substantially absorbing Pettit’s whole theorization of freedom as non-domination as theoretically distinct from positive freedom, freedom as non-interference and as non-frustration, Bellamy contends that Pettit has failed to take the circumstances of politics seriously, and that he has thus translated his admirable principle of freedom as non-domination into a dominating political theory. Given the pervasiveness of disagreement in contemporary pluralistic societies, so Bellamy’s argument runs, “the risk of domination always raises when the putatively ‘great and the good’ trespass into the moral and political sphere, for no more or less agreed epistemology to that of the natural sciences exists for adjudicating the claims of rival moral and political theorists” (Bellamy 2007: 169). Domination, in other words, occurs when disagreement is settled from outside the political arena. In the absence of an epistemological possibility for uncontroversial shared yardsticks of the validity of moral and political claims, judicial intervention in the democratic process is as arbitrary as the action of a Leviathan. Disagreement on the very roots of politics and rights, from Bellamy’s standpoint, entails that domination can only be curbed if the political process “treats all views as deserving equal respect in the authorising, if not literally in the authorship, of the decision” (Id: 167). Any intervention interfering on and regulating political disputes from the outside is arbitrary insofar as operating in the absence of a broadly accepted standard of validity. And if a power of arbitrary interference corresponds to domination, as Pettit claims and Bellamy endorses, then courts are dominating. In the desolate epistemic scenario depicted by Bellamy, therefore, whether a constraint on democratic self-determination comes from a court of justices or from an absolute monarch’s throne room makes no difference. Bellamy expresses this issue in the so called “Hobbes challenge”: how is it possible to avoid that power be ultimately held by one entity, whether a monarch or nine judges, that exercises it in an uncontrolled and uncontrollable manner, according to a law that he is entitled to interpret and apply arbitrarily? According to Bellamy, there are two possible solutions to the conundrum. One is considering law as capable of ruling by virtue of its formal qualities, or of its inner uncontroversial morality. Although this would certainly minimize the space for arbitrariness and discretion to some extent, Bellamy rejects this perspective as practically and theoretically undesirable, for reasons that will be explained in what follows. The other way to confront the Hobbes challenge involves the appeal to a democratic political procedure in which every citizen has an

6.2 Bellamy’s Critique of Judicial Review

149

equal say in making collective decisions, hence being treated with equal respect rather than being politically and morally subordinated to the will of a final decisionmaker: “it is the political system that de-sovereigntises democracy” (Id: 57). This is the path that Bellamy takes, a path where courts and constitutional rights play no role.

6.2

Bellamy’s Critique of Judicial Review and a Political Conception of Rule of Law

It is from the normative standpoint hitherto reconstructed that Bellamy lays siege to legal constitutionalism and judicial review, and to the notions of legal rule and higher law. The characterization of disagreement provided by Bellamy prompts him to picture courts, judges and constitutional provisions as domineering foreign bodies, suffocating the democratic processes of self-determination. In a nutshell, if the meaning of every right is contestable and no form of expertise can claim interpretive authoritativeness, then judges are equated with average citizens and politicians, and their pronunciations are mere political opinions, akin to those expressed in ordinary political debate. In Bellamy’s own words, “judges and the politicians think and act in similar ways” (Id: 53). Such understanding of constitutional adjudication and its democratic meaning, however, is not uncontroversial, and was criticized as simplistic. As aptly put by Lars Vinx, the implication underlying Bellamy’s whole critique is that “there could not possibly be any other interesting difference between adjudication and legislation than the fact that judges are few, drawn from a particular professional background, and usually unelected while legislators are many, elected, and more representative of the people” (Vinx 2009: 595). This equalization of the logic and tasks of legislation and adjudication is at the origin of Bellamy’s depiction of the two branches as competing with each other, which was contrasted by several observers from different theoretical backgrounds. Vinx stresses that only a simplistic account of the separation of powers can ground the claim that legislation and adjudication are analogous and opposed to each other. Moreover, Vinx notes, the practice of adjudication remains crucial even in the absence of constitutional courts, as law always requires interpretation: “once we recognize that such interpretation and application will frequently require interstitial judicial legislation or demand that judges appeal to a moral principle, it is hard to see why ordinary adjudication should not [...] be as problematic, from Bellamy’s point of view, as full-blown constitutional review” (Vinx 2009: 596). Also Bellamy’s claim that constitutional adjudication limits popular self-determination to a set of readymade ‘right’ outcomes was contested: Vinx, for instance, argues that the unavailability of a pre-given set of right outcomes does not disable the construction of procedures oriented to forestalling highly undesirable or arbitrary outcomes. Finally, Bellamy’s assumption that the only justification of judicial review is the epistemic superiority of judges and constitutionally entrenched rights was regarded

150

6 Richard Bellamy and the Political Constitution of the demos

as altogether reductive. As stressed by Vinx, its justification should rather be grounded in the duty of the judges to comply with a procedure preventing arbitrariness.4 Similarly, David Dyzenhaus notes that judges “must, as legal theorists from Hobbes to the present have seen, understand their role as deciding according to law, where ‘law’ includes both positive law and unwritten fundamental principles” (Dyzenhaus 2009: 505).5 On a different note, Annabelle Lever, Marco Goldoni and Cristina Lafont highlight further distinctive functions of the judiciary that Bellamy tends to neglect: first of all, judicial review “enables citizens to challenge their governments in the same ways and on the same grounds through which they challenge individual and collective agents” (Lever 2009: 813). In other words, as Goldoni claims, judicial review stretches democracy beyond the mere electoral moments, important as they may be, by promoting a space for deliberation and contestation that empowers citizens in the years between one election and another. The courts’ activities often create vivid public debates, have a broad scope which helps transforming political cultures and mentalities, guarantee that authoritarian drifts be prevented – or at least work as a strong constraint – and in general constitute a further forum for “hearing the other side”, one which operates between elections: “constitutional politics concerns not only lawyers and politicians, but also civic and popular cultures” (Goldoni 2013: 947). As we saw, very similar arguments are essential to Lafont’s “participatory conception of deliberative democracy”, in which the courts act as “conversation initiators”. Moreover, according to Lever, judges “can see themselves as striving to personify what is best in their society, or in its legal system and judiciary; and their actions and deliberations may reflect an ethos of equality and a democratic regard for the rights of all people” (Lever 2009: 809). In other words, the form of representativeness associated with elections and stands-in is not the only form of representativeness we can conceive of. Judges can be said to be representative, albeit in a different manner. From Lever’s perspective, therefore, Waldron and Bellamy’s assumption according to which representativeness is only connected to being elected by a majority is ungrounded. Once surveyed its guiding assumptions and their flaws, let us explore further Bellamy’s strategy to anchor not only rights, but also judicial review and law in the circumstances of politics. His purpose is to demonstrate that the whole normative arsenal of legal constitutionalists amounts to nothing more than an arbitrary set of controversial ideas lifted beyond the realm of politics and protected by dominating institutions wielding ultimate power and illegitimately keeping it away from ordinary citizens – from ‘the people’.6 See also “Judicial Review and the Defence of (Democratic) Constitutionality – A Critique of the Argument from Disagreement” (Vinx 2011). 5 The constellation of possible justifications for the practice of constitutional adjudication is certainly broader, and there is no room here for further discussion of this point. 6 For a thorough reconstruction of the quarrel between legal and political constitutionalists, cf. Valerio Fabbrizi’s “Normativism and Realism Within Contemporary Democratic Constitutionalism” (2018). 4

6.2 Bellamy’s Critique of Judicial Review

151

Regarding judicial review, Bellamy provides two grounds to prove that it is inimical to rights, rather than a tool for protecting them. First of all, in adjudicating on specific cases judges “create public policy”, but “to devise a collective policy on some abstract question of rights on the basis of a single case produces all sorts of distortions” (Id: 30). The reasoning of adjudicating judges, Bellamy claims, goes far beyond the contingencies of the cases at stake. It involves an interpretation of the common good that is necessarily biased towards a specific worldview, deformed by the specificity of the case examined, and that nonetheless substantively contributes to shaping public policy in the name of the people as a whole. In Bellamy’s view, rather than being dealt with by a meagre and scarcely representative group of jurists, issues of rights should be addressed by a legislature running the gamut of the ideas and interests of the citizens to the greatest possible extent: “focus on the legal interpretation of a form of words may unnecessarily narrow and distort the full range of moral arguments that need to be raised” (Id: 33, my italics). From similar statements, Bellamy’s reductive view of adjudication manifests clearly. Judicial practice is taken to be the strict textual interpretation of the written words of the Constitution, a method that Bruce Ackerman calls “hypertextualism”. In Ackerman’s constitutionalism, constitutional textualism is not rejected as such, but it is regarded as reductive when adopted in isolation from other approaches. A fullfledged theorization of judicial practice cannot neglect the relevance of the historically recorded constitutional precedents, the reconstruction of the historical reasons and contexts underlying the origin of laws, and the commitment to hearing the democratic voice outside the court, together with the Zeitgeist it is capable of conveying.7 The second flaw of judicial review as pointed out by Bellamy has to do with the judges’ “assumed isolation from populist pressures and consequent ability to deliberate and reason on the basis of moral principle and the law, rather than simply bargaining to maximise their constituents’ interests” (Id: 34). On the one hand, Bellamy claims, the commitment to pursuing interests that are somehow partisan is not an evil in itself. It was the fuel of several great civic movements for rights, such as those related with women’s and workers’ enfranchisement. Legislation, therefore, should not be dismissed as morally inferior and politically dangerous on the grounds of its proclivity to shape politics along the lines of the “mere interests” of the represented and representatives. Moreover, from Bellamy’s perspective, it is also disputable that legislation be driven by interest alone: predicting the outcomes of a policy in complex societies is often so difficult that legislators tend to “seek instead for what seems as fair and right as they see it” (Id: 35). Finally, given the difficulties in shaping large majorities capable of structural constitutional changes, legislatures are “much less prone to oscillating majorities”, and “rarely go beyond incremental reforms unless there is an overwhelming popular mandate for change” (Id: 36). On the other hand, whereas legislatures are not as morally deplorable and unreliable as they are often thought of, courts are not as immaculate as widespread

7

See Bruce Ackerman’s We the People: Foundations (1991).

152

6 Richard Bellamy and the Political Constitution of the demos

idealized depictions may suggest. First of all, Bellamy notes, disagreements within them are often settled by majority vote, as it happens in legislatures, although such mechanism is rarely assimilated with tyranny when employed by the judiciary. Precisely like legislatures, judges voting in courts do not necessarily express their preference for the best argument after a fair and rational discussion, as also in their case “numbers are what matters” (Id: 38), rather than the quality of the reasons offered. Like legislatures, if not more, courts are susceptible to voting cycles and the arbitrariness they entail, and their members reflect and are affected by a “more general culture of the polity” (Id: 39) that may blind their eyes from the needs of the oppressed minorities to an even greater extent than legislatures. Courts are therefore far from being insulated from the surrounding context. Contra widespread common places, they do not operate in pristine conditions, due both to the influence that their cultural origins and moral perspectives exert on their own judgment and to their tendency “not to be out of step with the popular will for long”. For Bellamy, this is shown by the “little evidence of constitutional courts holding out for an extended period against sustained, national majorities” (Id: 40–41). If on the one hand this frequent compliance of the courts with the will of the majority is a felicitous attitude for Bellamy, on the other it is a further proof that courts are ultimately analogous to legislatures, besides being dramatically less representative. Bellamy denies, therefore, that courts protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority, and contends that legislatures are better equipped for such endeavour: the limited access to courts enjoyed by average citizens, the necessary biases affecting courts’ members, and their greater manipulability by the powerful – given their limited dimensions – make them less appealing than legislatures at a practical and normative level. Legislatures are harder to manipulate as a whole, both because of their dimensions and because they are elected by millions of citizens with an equal power to vote.8 Moreover, they tend to be more multifaceted in their composition, and thus more inclusive and representative of social groups, including minorities, who therefore have a voice and a bargaining power to avoid oppression from majorities. A major conviction of Bellamy is precisely that “majority rule is rarely the result of a single, homogeneous group dominating the rest, but a coalition among a heterogeneous grouping of minorities” (Id: 43). Rather than being oppressed by majorities, minorities in the parliament can become part of them, or at least benefit from a power of bargaining with them as peers. Judges, therefore, operate within the circumstances of politics and produce verdicts heavily affected by their own moral and cultural perspectives, and by the political and cultural majorities pressing on them. They are part and parcel of the

8

This argument was opposed by Annabelle Lever. In her view, courts can be highly accountable if the records of the judicial decisions and the reasoning underlying are transparent: “the explanatory role of judicial decisions is often doubtful, but their role in justifying a decision is clear, and fosters accountability regardless of the motivations that actually drive a decision [...] By contrast, records of legislative debate are less informative” (Lever 2009: 811). During legislative processes not all the voters join the debate, and decisions are often explainable in terms of strategic calculations rather than rational justifications.

6.2 Bellamy’s Critique of Judicial Review

153

political clashes constituting social disagreement, rather than enjoying an epistemological superiority which underpins and justifies their institutional authority. Their power, therefore, is illegitimate and dominating insofar as their judgments are potentially as arbitrary as those of legislators and ordinary citizens debating on politics and law – only far less representative than theirs. As hinted above, Bellamy defends the view that not only rights and courts, but also law is part of the circumstances of politics in a way that does not allow legal constitutionalists to properly distinguish between higher and ordinary law. If this is true, then the distinction between legal and democratic rule cannot but collapse, and an alternative conceptualization of the rule of law has to be found that supplants the legalistic one.9 Bellamy’s argument proceeds by criticizing two different theories of law, which establish different connections between law and rule of law. On the one hand, Friedrich A. von Hayek’s framework hinging on the formal qualities of law – distinguished from legislation – as intrinsically capable of satisfying a standard of fairness is targeted by Bellamy on different grounds. Firstly, formal qualities can account neither for major social changes, often requiring parallel legal changes, nor for all the spectrum of potential specific cases that cannot be fairly accommodated by a blind application of law. The stability, generality and universality of rules can ensure equality to some extent, but there is plenty of cases that law cannot predict, and plenty in which discrimination is required in view of different claims and needs that differently situated citizens may advance. A legal system satisfying formal requirements can still be arbitrary and authoritarian, and formal qualities themselves can even turn useful to a despot: “even tyrants will want traffic laws to be obeyed. They will also wish to provide citizens with regular incentives to comply with some of their more iniquitous policies and to coordinate the actions of officials responsible for their implementation” (Id: 63). Thus, the formality of law cannot work as a normative bedrock to ground non-domination. Moreover, and crucially, Bellamy stresses that law cannot eliminate judicial discretion, as “rules build on far more assumptions that can ever be expressed in the rule itself” (Id: 71). Their vagueness, generality and universality, albeit formally essential, require a context-aware interpretation that must operate in the absence of objective guidelines gliding beyond the realm of disagreement. Once again, therefore, the circumstances of politics absorb law. The legal system is devoid of a set of meta-principles for its own interpretation, one that would enable judges to apply its rules uncontroversially and have their own power justified. The meaning of law and its applications to specific cases are matters of unsettled disagreement that cannot be removed from the political arena. Therefore, the boundaries that Hayek sets between law and legislation collapse, as the In older writings, Bellamy appears to advocate softer versions of these ideas. In “Constitutionalism and Democracy – Political Theory and the American Constitution” (Bellamy and Castiglione 1997a), for instance, Bellamy and Castiglione argue that constitutional law “would need to be the preserve of a wider legislative body, such as a federal legislature, and might require special democratic protection, such as approval by a higher than average majority, or even, in cases of radical reform, the calling of a constitutional convention or referendum” (Id: 616).

9

154

6 Richard Bellamy and the Political Constitution of the demos

alleged peculiar features of the former fail to effectively distinguish it from the latter. Rather than being abstract, context- and goal-independent, rules are applied with an awareness of circumstances, an eye to outcomes and an idea of desirable outcomes that lapse law back into the terrain of disagreement among views on the right, the good, the meaning of politics – that is, the terrain that Hayek associates with legislation. On the other hand, Ronald Dworkin locates the normativity of law in constitutional rights anchored in moral principles, rather than in its formal properties. Nonetheless, Bellamy stresses that Dworkin shares with Hayek the idea of a distinction between higher and ordinary law. Bellamy’s aim, therefore, is to highlight how this further legal account of the rule of law fails to adequately distinguish law from legislation, and thus from democratic self-determination. Unsurprisingly, Bellamy grapples with Dworkin’s idea that in adjudicative processes “a ‘right’ answer may be discerned by consulting the moral principles that underpin the legal system. These principles consist of rights rather than policy goals. As such they constrain legislation” (Id: 74–75). In Dworkin’s framework, law is undergirded by a moral universe that the judge has to reconstruct in the process of application, in concordance with the established essentials of legal doctrine. The availability of such moral foundations of law is precisely what Bellamy contests. First of all, achieving a pervasive understanding of law that embraces all its different ramifications and areas is “Herculean” by Dworkin’s very admission. Therefore, “Dworkin’s holistic approach may force a coherence that does not and should not obtain, by treating very different areas as if they were the same” (Id: 76). Furthermore, grounding decisions in rights often entails indeterminacy, in that rights might clash, and Dworkin’s claim that a prioritization is always possible reveals his implausible assumption of commensurability among rights. Moreover, an application of constitutional rights guided by their supposed internal morality cannot rule out considerations of interest (both individual and collective), goals and consequences: “when rights clash, interests and considerations of the general welfare may help determine which right is stronger in the particular circumstances” (Id: 78). As with Hayek, this seriously blurs the boundary between legislation and constitutional law. Finally, given the circumstances of politics and the objective difficulty at grasping a consistent account of the legal system as a whole, the courts’ interpretations are likely to be arbitrary, and their disagreements arguably reflect the disagreements animating the public sphere and the legislative processes. Judges hardly restrain their moral stand from affecting their judgment in adjudication, thus becoming “advocates like other citizens of a particular view of how society could best be organised” (Id: 79). Bellamy thus leaves no space for judicial review. In Chapter 3 of Political Constitutionalism, he carries out an extensive critique of a broad gamut of defenders of judicial review, ranging from supporters of thick versions, such as Rawls and Dworkin, to advocates of thinner views, like Habermas and Ely. There is no room to go at length into the details of such critique. What is important to observe is that the flaw pointed out by Bellamy as bringing all those frameworks together is their shared propensity to operate a “conflation of democratic ends and means” (Id: 96). Protecting given rights by insulating them from the political debate, from Bellamy’s

6.3 The Right to Have Rights and the Constitution as Political, Not Legal

155

radical perspective, ultimately means pursuing democratic ends via non-democratic means, thus impairing democracy at the outset. Even procedural theories such as Jürgen Habermas’s, John Hart Ely’s or Robert Burt’s, which contrast the idea that substantive fundamental values may underpin the constitution, are rebuffed on the grounds that “the only coherent way to adjudicate on the justice of democratic ‘inputs’ is to have some notion of what counts as a just ‘result’. As a result, the distinction between substantive and procedural approaches to judicial review collapses” (Id: 111). Rule of law and the protection of rights, therefore, require a different conceptualization. They are re-interpreted under the light of an understanding of freedom as non-domination aware of the circumstances of politics, which does not rest content with defining rule of law with legal rule in any of the versions discussed above. Law is underlain by “a set of values that go deeper than anything law in itself can provide. It is an inherent property of rules that they treat people in the same way” (Id: 65). Such deeper set of values has its source in the notion of non-domination discussed above, establishing that citizens’ rights are best secured and respected when the former have an equal say in shaping the latter. Rule of law, therefore, “lies within the circumstances of politics” (Id: 54), and must be seen in political, rather than legal, terms.10 As we shall see, this involves a pre-eminence of legislation, a peculiar understanding of public reason and of the separation of powers – which Bellamy supplants with what he calls the balance of power.

6.3

The Right to Have Rights and the Constitution as Political, Not Legal

Rather than being a supermajoritarian device meant to shelter rights from politics, therefore, in Bellamy’s framework the constitution is the democratic process. The resulting principle of legitimacy establishes that “the legitimacy of any constitutional or legislative rights will rest on the fairness of the procedures employed to resolve people’s disagreements about them and their coherence as a package” (Id: 21). If disagreement is inevitable and pervasive and no common metrics to settle it is available, any external constraint on the substantive outcomes of the political process is an arbitrary infringement on people’s sovereign power, and the only way to treat people with equal respect is setting a fair legislative procedure. Democratic fairness, in Bellamy’s terms, must be applied to the inputs, not the outputs, of the political process. Bellamy identifies such status of procedural political equality in policy- and

10

According to Dyzenhaus, there is actually no meaningful space for the rule of law in Bellamy’s framework: “because majoritarian democracy serves equality, and because the rule of law aims to secure the same value, once one has democracy, the rule of law is redundant” (Dyzenhaus 2009: 505). The rule by law is thus detached from the rule of law, and this signals the authoritarian character of Bellamy’s solution to the “Hobbes challenge”.

156

6 Richard Bellamy and the Political Constitution of the demos

rights-shaping in the idea of citizenship, which is thus central to his framework. According to Bellamy, citizenship is not merely defined by the legal attribution of rights, as in the Roman imperial model,11 but rather its substance is constituted by a “right to have rights”. The status of citizen is defined by Bellamy in opposition to that of permanent resident: by virtue of the set of rights that the latter may enjoy in a democratic country, “she may express her views, but is not entitled to have them heard on an equal basis to citizens” (Bellamy 2008: 12). Citizenship displays three features that reciprocally implicate each other and define the citizen as entitled to participate in a fair process of political decision-making: membership, rights and participation. Membership to a political community with specific boundaries entails “the capacity to participate in both the political and the socio-economic life of the community” (Id: 13). However, such capacity cannot be exhausted by the possession of individual rights, because the ubiquity of disagreement imposes that rights be shaped, and not merely enjoyed, by the members of the community. The membership status enclosed in citizenship can have an equal value for all members only if no prefabricated version of rights is imposed on any of them, and rights are forged within a collective endeavour in which all have an equal say and access in terms of participation. This threefold complex is defined by Bellamy as citizenship, or the right to have rights: being a citizen means enjoying a special status of membership granting an equal right to participate in policies- and rights-shaping. In a scenario in which no specific right is secured for citizens and disagreement is rampant, Bellamy’s evident need is to find functional equivalents of (a) public reasons and standards of validity and (b) mechanisms for protecting the weaker minorities from tyrannical majorities, or more in general for guaranteeing that the core elements defining a democracy hold. As we shall see in what follows, Bellamy introduces a procedural understanding of public reason to address the former, and a theory of the balance of power to deal with the latter. For what regards the former, Bellamy’s contention is that for a public way of reasoning to be non-dominating, it has to be independent of any predetermined value, moral/epistemological order or set of defined reasons. Public reason, that is, cannot be associated with public standards of validity that judges are able to scientifically master, as “without an epistemological theory which explains why their deliberations are likely to be more accurate or track the moral truth, their ontological claims provide no basis for their assertions of judicial expertise” (Bellamy 2007: 183). Unlike mathematics or pure science, where reasoning can be defined as public “without being undertaken by and for the public” (Id: 180), moral and political reasoning cannot benefit from collectively recognized standards of truth or validity. Therefore, public reason has to be conceived in procedural terms, rather than being circumscribed to a specific moral-epistemic horizon that would make it dominating, and thus intrinsically non-public. In order to be truly public, in

See Bellamy’s Citizenship: A Very Short Introduction (2008), pp. 38–39: “the version of Roman citizenship given was of a legal rather than a political kind – ‘civitas sine suffragio’, or ‘citizenship without the vote’” (Id: 39).

11

6.3 The Right to Have Rights and the Constitution as Political, Not Legal

157

other words, reasons in politics have to be by and for the public. For this to happen they have to simultaneously display seven meanings of publicity specified by Bellamy.12 The only institutional devices within which such parameter can be satisfied are democratic procedures involving nothing more than equal votes and majority rule. Democratic fairness, that is, has to be embedded in procedures that show “citizens equal concern and respect as autonomous reasoners” (Id: 191). Equal voting is an open and transparent collective practice that grants an equal weight to all according to public rules. The alleged self-interest of voters, which according to Bellamy is more of a bias eliciting misplaced anti-majoritarian preoccupations, is dismissed by Bellamy on the grounds of the “rational voters paradox”: purely self-interested citizens do not bother with voting, as it is unlikely that their aims can be achieved through such practice, and therefore voters are generally public-spirited. Even when dominating distortions of equal voting occur, such as the intimidation of given groups or a practice like gerrymandering, bottom-up democratic practices fare better than courts in fostering non-domination: “campaigns by disenfranchised and disadvantaged groups to acquire the vote and render the deployment more effective have been far more effective in extending and reforming democracy than judicial action” (Id: 223). As to majority rule, Bellamy advocates its centrality by arguing that it avoids that political decisions be oriented by alleged “best” arguments, which in the circumstances of politics cannot but be arbitrary and thus dominating. Majority rule sets a “mechanical” procedure that assumes the equality of all the single individuals involved, without subordinating some to others on the grounds of their moral, intellectual, or cultural inferiority. Bellamy follows Waldron13 in arguing that “majority rule offers a method that accords respect to millions of individuals by giving equal weight to each person’s views” (Id: 226). In order to bolster his claim, he provides a number of empirical arguments in defence of majority rule. Drawing on Kenneth May, he stresses that majority rule (a) respects anonymity and voter equality, as no voter is favoured in principle; (b) respects “neutrality of status quo”, in that it is not biased in favour of status quo in the way counter-majoritarian institutions are;14 (c) is “positively responsive”, in the sense that it reflects the will Those involve openness, transparency, public-spiritedness, adoption of public rules “intrinsic to participation”, focus on the public good, equal accessibility to all, adoption by the public, commitment towards “decisions all members of the public will find mutually acceptable” (Bellamy 2007: 179). 13 See The Dignity of Legislation (Waldron 1999). 14 This argument was contested by Marco Goldoni, who pointed out that “not only countermajoritarian institutions are biased towards the status quo, but the same often happens to political parties that are usually interested in maintaining and even fostering a determinate political framework. Well established political parties do not have an interest in letting other alternative voices enter the political process” (Goldoni 2013: 941). This clearly opposes also Bellamy’s idea that a democratic system consistently stimulates political parties to engage in constructive dialogue and co-operation, thus preventing the oppression of minorities by tyrannical majorities. With regards to the proclivity of legislative bodies to preserve the status quo, Bellamy seems also contradictory: on the one hand he claims that legislatures are less biased than courts towards the status quo; on the 12

158

6 Richard Bellamy and the Political Constitution of the demos

of individuals to the highest degree of precision; (d) is capable of producing determinate results, rather than falling prey to the indeterminacy of deliberative democracy. The danger of voting cycles highlighted by Arrow and his followers, and more in general the risk of arbitrary decisions in all the ballots involving more than two alternatives, is dismissed by Bellamy on the grounds that “socialisation and other behavioural constraints [...] serve to make individual preferences resemble each other sufficiently for cycling to be rare and eliminable by fair voting rules. Nor is manipulation so frequent or irremediable, or disequilibrium that common” (Id: 228). Moreover, the Arrovian critique assumes that democracy is meant to produce “maximal social utility”, while Bellamy’s democratic theory defends the view that democracy is meant to bestow an equal share of power on any individual, so that domination is thwarted. Regarding the second functional equivalent mentioned above, the balance of power, Bellamy introduces it as an alternative to the separation of powers, the foundations of which he confutes. On his reading, the principle of the separation of powers originates from the legitimate need to “prevent those charged with the formulation of the law from being responsible for its interpretation, enforcement and application” (Id: 201). Despite the significance of such task, the principle is underlain by a “segmental” notion of pluralism, in which society is fractured into groups characterized by an internal verticality of power, involving elitism, selfreferentiality, lack of interaction both within and between groups. First of all, Bellamy points out the difficulties emerging when trying to neatly distinguish the functions of the three powers: if it is true that legislators can hardly be exempt from adjudicating, and that both judges and officials contribute in shaping legislation, then the boundaries between the powers blur, together with their usefulness and legitimacy. Moreover, “the separation will be undermined if those controlling the various agencies all belong to the same group” (Id: 202): if a political faction wins the majority of the seats in all the branches of power, then the task of mutual checking is seriously jeopardized. Finally, and most importantly for Bellamy, “the separation of powers fails to provide incentives that ensure these agents serve their principals – the citizens” (Ibid). The vertical distribution within the three powers makes them less accountable and less inclined to “hear the other side”, as suggested by the republican adage cherished by Bellamy. As an alternative to remedy such shortfalls, therefore, Bellamy develops the proposal of a balance of powers. The crux of the idea is the above-mentioned empirical insight that in modern societies “most majorities are actually winning coalitions of minorities, with legislative programmes reflecting a compromise between them” (Id: 244). Bellamy suggests that in the context of a socially crosscutting pluralism, in which boundaries among parts are fluid and issue-based, political leaders are forced to mediate and include each other, in order to design

other, he appears resistant to significant changes of the status quo, when he argues that legislatures “rarely go beyond incremental reforms unless there is an overwhelming popular mandate for change” (2007: 36).

6.3 The Right to Have Rights and the Constitution as Political, Not Legal

159

credible policy packages that embrace the largest portion of citizenry as possible. Parties, in other words, are incentivized to dialogue and deliberate, and are restrained from oppressing or simply dismissing groups that may be crucial for success in present or future times, or that may prospectively enjoy positions of power in spite of their relative weakness. The struggle for power among multiple parties in a context characterized by a fluid electorate divided by a cross-cutting disagreement generates a “dynamic equilibrium” in which “power checks power”: “parties bring together broad coalitions of opinions and interests within a general programme of government. As a result, they oblige citizens to relate their concerns to those of others” (Id: 232). Bellamy’s hope, mainly grounded in empirical reasoning and examples, is that a legislature-based system so constructed may foster the stabilization of “rules of the game”, which politicians desire in view of the fact that “they will spend periods out of as well as in office” (Ibid). Moreover, Bellamy believes that such system encourages a commitment to minorities, to more proportional electoral systems and even more local forms of government in countries populated by minorities, as also majorities need to make compromises in the struggle for power. The necessity to create coalitions and alliances also diminishes the danger of voting cycles, as policy proposals tend to be aggregated rather than being loosely put on the table in a multiplication of the options available to citizens. According to Bellamy, therefore, the arbitrary domination of courts on the people as autonomous reasoners is thwarted without jeopardizing the status of individual citizens, who can express their views on an equal basis in a legislative process that is truly public in a procedural sense, and the substantive decisions of which are unlikely to be oppressive by virtue of the mutual checks and pressures that political parties exert on each other in their competition for power. As hinted above in Sect. 6.1, from this perspective it is extremely puzzling to witness references to reasonable and unreasonable disagreement in Bellamy’s work. Reasonableness, especially if intended in a Rawlsian fashion, is a standard to assess the validity of a claim, while Bellamy grounds much of his political theory in the idea that no collective standard of validity can legitimately stand out in politics. The disagreement characterizing Bellamy’s circumstances of politics can only be an unqualified one, in which every position, claim, statement has the same validity, or no validity whatsoever. The democratic framework built by Bellamy raised several doubts among scholars. As argued by Vinx, drawing on Thomas Christiano,15 the theory of disagreement is somewhat self-defeating: “if the argument from disagreement is applied to reasonable disagreement about the basic integrity of the democratic process itself, it thus becomes self-defeating” (Vinx 2009: 593). The only way out of the impasse, Vinx notes, is to admit that a basic democratic framework involving majority vote and equal rights to vote cannot be reasonably rejected, and that therefore those who are dramatically disadvantaged by the outcomes of the legislative process should accept those outcomes as stemming from a procedure the validity of which is beyond any reasonable doubt. This is clearly unacceptable, as for

15

Cf. “Waldron on Law and Disagreement” (Christiano 2000).

160

6 Richard Bellamy and the Political Constitution of the demos

instance “it would imply that laws that discriminate on the basis of race or gender are legitimate provided that they are brought about through a democratic mechanism” (Id: 594). Moreover, it should be added to Vinx’s well-developed critique that Bellamy would theatrically contradict disagreement if he postulated the universal acceptability of “a procedure that is ‘democratic’ in the thinnest descriptive sense” (Ibid). Finally, Vinx points out that also discrimination against minorities denies them an equal status, not only the intervention of courts on democratic decisionmaking. This form of suppression of equality is oddly overlooked by Bellamy, who tends to dismiss dangers such as the tyranny of the majority “in too cavalier a fashion” (Id: 597), i.e. by resorting to empirical arguments hoping to prove their remoteness in a twentieth century democracy.16 A further critique of Bellamy’s democratic theory comes from Dyzenhaus, who targets its authoritarian inclinations from the peculiar perspective of an unusual reading of Hobbes’s thought. According to Dyzenhaus, Hobbes’s response to the “Hobbes challenge” is strikingly less authoritarian than Bellamy’s: in the dichotomy postulated by Hobbes between thinkers who incline towards too much authority and thinkers who claim for too much freedom, “Bellamy errs on the side of those who contend for too much authority” (Dyzenhaus 2009: 506). In Dyzenhaus’s view, Hobbes himself recognized that the power of the Leviathan has constraints, which he identifies with the laws of nature. On this reading, the Leviathan has to enact laws that are publicly justifiable as complying with the laws of nature, and in turn the laws of nature must guide the magistrates in the interpretation of positive laws. There is no room here to explore Dyzenhaus’s stimulating argument to subsume Hobbes’s thought under freedom as non-domination, hence rehabilitating him among republicans. The gist of his critique to Bellamy is that the equation of non-domination and a minimal conception of political equality leaves the supposedly non-dominated citizens with merely “the hope that officials and judges will converge on a particular content, given institutional pressures that conduce to conformity” (Ibid). It is selfevident to Dyzenhaus that such condition of blind and complete reliance on the will of legislating officials, stands-in and judges betrays republicanism, and comes very close to domination in the sense of subjection to an alien will. A similar point is highlighted by Goldoni, who argues that Bellamy’s “dry” view of representative democracy as merely defined by party competition and majority rule, and the related role attributed to elections, risk transforming representatives and officials into a sort of “political clergy” (Goldoni 2013: 940), on the goodwill of which the citizens have to rely in a way that has little in common with republicanism. Drawing on authors such as Nadia Urbinati and Pierre Rosanvallon, one of Goldoni’s key claims is that “the act of voting needs to be placed in a more complex setting” (Id: 939), where not only the will of the people as expressed in elections is taken into account as normatively central, but also their judgment, which is intrinsically inter-subjective and requires a framework of collective deliberation:

Cf. also “Judicial Review and the Defence of (Democratic) Constitutionality – A Critique of the Argument from Disagreement” (Vinx 2011).

16

6.3 The Right to Have Rights and the Constitution as Political, Not Legal

161

“recognizing the link between will and judgment entails understanding the act of voting as part of a larger constellation of political activities that are critical to the shaping of public opinion” (Id: 940). Democratic sovereignty, therefore, should be captured in its “Janus-like profile” (Id: 942), in which the relevance of voting cannot be maintained as independent of the processes of deliberation occurring between electoral moments. Similarly to Lever (2009), therefore, Goldoni underscores “the idea that the citizenry does not delegate everything on the day of the election, but they retain power to investigate, judge, and control their representatives” (Goldoni 2013: 942). As we saw above, in these moments of ordinary politics courts can play a crucial role in vitalizing and preserving democracy and empowering the citizens “to vindicate their rights against legislators in just the same way that they would against other people” (Lever 2009: 813). Goldoni concedes to political constitutionalists that grassroots processes should play a primary role in bringing about major constitutional changes and enhancements of rights; yet, he claims, thinkers like Bellamy overlook that few legal constitutionalists would deny that “there is a layer of constituent power that cannot be completely tamed by the principle of legality. In that sense, constitutional politics can open new channels for unheard voices” (Goldoni 2013: 946). From Goldoni’s perspective, moreover, Bellamy’s narrow view of democratic legislation is partly grounded in a flawed and somewhat naive understanding of the political. Recalling Arendt, Goldoni points out that politics does not operate in a vacuum, but rather in an Arendtian “world” characterized by “a temporal-extended conception which entails a before and an after” (Id: 945). The new generations are necessarily constrained in their action by existing laws and status quo, and it is unrealistic to suggest that an egalitarian democratic process suffices for a generation (and for all its individual members) to self-determine and emancipate from its predecessors. On a different note, Cristina Lafont has criticized Bellamy and the “deep pluralists’” argument of ‘compromise’, by which they argue that legislative processes are likely to be inclusive of all the competing positions, in that their actors should be prompted by prudential and strategic reasons to listen to the other side and find middle grounds. As hinted in Chap. 4, Lafont unveils a contradiction in this line reasoning. If fair compromises are relevant and desired, then a form of substantive judgment is welcomed, in open contrast with the stark proceduralism supported by Bellamy and the ‘deep pluralists’. The fairness of a compromise cannot be evaluated through a majoritarian procedure without being subordinated to it, and thus becoming completely irrelevant: it is unclear how deep pluralism can combine the substantive fairness of “deep” compromises, where the aim is to count everyone’s views equally in the sense that each side is included in a compromise solution [...] with the procedural fairness of majoritarianism whose aim is to count everyone’s views equally in the sense that the views of each citizen have equal weight in the decision-making process even if this means that, as a result, the views of the outvoted minority are not reflected in the settled decision at all (Lafont 2020: 50).

Moreover, Lafont stresses, the model of compromise fails to account for “how, under conditions of pervasive disagreement, political developments that issue in

162

6 Richard Bellamy and the Political Constitution of the demos

settled decisions that simply favor one side (e.g., desegregation laws or the right to same-sex marriage) could be legitimate” (Ibid). Finally, as we saw in Chap. 4, Lafont identifies a “status quo bias” in the model of compromise, in that oppressed groups are often minorities with scarce bargaining power, and thus hardly capable of undermining the sources of their oppression via the venues provided by Bellamy’s framework.17

6.4

Demoi-Cracy and the Borders of the Sovereign People

Before drawing conclusions on the merits of Bellamy’s argument and on its implied understandings of the people and popular sovereignty, it may be interesting to briefly linger over the transposition of his framework at the international level. Bellamy firstly addressed issues related to supra- and trans-national forms of power, cosmopolitanism and globalization in general terms in Citizenship (2008). There he sketched out a framework that was subsequently expanded and employed for a theoretical-political analysis of the European Union in his latest work, A Republican Union of States (2019). In Citizenship, Bellamy notes that a gap exists between citizenship as the right to have rights within a specific nation-state and the idea of human rights as pertaining to every individual as such. The commitment of a state to pursue the good and the interests of its own citizens, and to respect their established rights and the general “right to have rights”, has an inescapably partial dimension that clashes with the universality commonly associated with the idea of human rights. The quandary grows worse once Bellamy recognizes that, from his own normative perspective, citizenship cannot be grounded in legally entrenched rights like in the imperial Roman model, as that would likely entail domination. In Citizenship, therefore, the issue is formulated in binary terms: “a legal form of rights-based citizenship risks being too controversial to command the legitimacy and support needed for it to work, while a form of political citizenship that might provide it with the necessary authority seems unworkable on a world scale” (Bellamy 2008: 87). In A Republican Union of States, the categorization of the possible solutions to reconcile cosmopolitan with national citizenship is more nuanced. It involves four groups of theories, each internally distinguished into a thin and a thick version: “pure cosmopolitanism”, “pure statism”, “statist cosmopolitanism” and “cosmopolitan statism”.18 Although there is no room to go at length with Bellamy’s multifaceted schematization, it is important to observe the normative viewpoint from which he assesses the worth of those positions, hence selecting and fleshing out the most promising of them. Once again, Bellamy’s inquiry is oriented by the disagreement-aware notion of non-domination, which involves a subordination of

17

Cf. Lafont 2020, pp. 50–53. Bellamy provides a full account of those positions in A Republican Union of States (2019), pp. 49–51. 18

6.4 Demoi-Cracy and the Borders of the Sovereign People

163

justice to legitimacy, and hence a restatement of the idea that “politics comes first”: “a legitimate political process for determining a collective policy on justice will be one that instantiates non-dominating relations among those involved in, and subject to, it. This approach centres not on social and economic inequalities per se, so much as the power relations lying behind such inequalities” (Bellamy 2019: 55). If individuals are properly politically empowered, therefore, they will have the tools to tackle any sort of domination, from political to economic, social and cultural. As we saw above, such political empowerment corresponds to non-domination, in that in securing equal rights to participation it guarantees that the “circumstances of domination” do not materialize at the outset. In a Pettitian fashion, Bellamy claims that the institutional structure has to be constitutively oriented towards non-domination, rather than functionally, in order for non-domination to be achieved: “one should regard the realisation of a condition of non domination as not only a key purpose of political institutions, but also as one that can only be brought about through the way they function, and as intimately connected to their legitimacy” (Id: 63). The quest, therefore, is for a political arrangement the existence of which eliminates the very roots and prospects of domination. From this normative perspective, the tension between the partiality of citizenship rights and the universality of human rights is reformulated as the peril that states or private actors undermine the rights of other states or individuals (that is, enjoy a dominating power on them) in order to pursue the interests of their own citizens, or their own: “in an increasingly interconnected world, states are likely to interact so intensely and frequently that there will be ample scope for some to exert various forms of domination over others” (Id: 68). Legislation at the national level and its related citizenship rights as formulated in Bellamy’s work, therefore, are challenged by the growing interdependency among countries worldwide. The effectiveness of national governments in securing non-domination and protecting the rights of their citizens is threatened by the complex and fluid web of economic and political relations in which countries are co-implicated. The challenge that the groups of theories mentioned above address, therefore, is to find a foundation for rights capable of answering “the functional challenge posed by globalisation and the moral challenge posed by cosmopolitanism” (Id: 4). With the exception of the thin and the thick versions of “pure statism”,19 all the theories identified by Bellamy are vulnerable to either of the following critiques: they lean towards supranational democratic arrangements, thus risking not being responsive to the social, political, economic heterogeneity of the forms of life encompassed by a European-wide constituency, or they advocate a transnational democratic order, thus jeopardizing the cohesion, unity and decision-making effectiveness of the political system. The only solution that fulfils the criteria established by the disagreement-aware notion of non-domination, according to Bellamy, is the thick version of cosmopolitan statism, which he calls a form of republican

Bellamy defines pure statism “thin” when it envisions an “autarchic system of states”, and “thick” when it adopts an “imperial ‘Napoleonic’ conception of Europe” (Bellamy 2019: 49).

19

164

6 Richard Bellamy and the Political Constitution of the demos

intergovernmentalism, or a demoi-cracy. From this perspective, the only way to simultaneously contrast political domination, achieve effectiveness in decisionmaking, and maintain the stability of the political system, is a “two-level” system that essentially replicates at the international level the democratic framework designed by Bellamy for domestic purposes: whereas in a nation-state individuals must enjoy equal rights to participation in the political processes of policy-making, in an international system the states, or the demoi, have to equally take part through their highest representatives in the processes shaping the common policies of the community. The EU, therefore, has to be thought of as a “republican union of states”, in which every state maintains its sovereignty while (and through) partaking in the creation of common rules and policies, thus securing its citizens from external dominating agents and protecting their rights according to their own mandate and will. This allows maintaining the non-dominating legitimate structure of the nationstate as devised by Bellamy and reproducing it at the international level, thus obtaining a framework the very functioning of which produces non-domination: if non-domination is achieved when citizens have an equal right to political participation, then a two-level structure that empowers them equally both nationally and internationally undermines the circumstances of domination. In this scenario, citizenship becomes the condition not only for membership-based rights, but rather “even basic human rights are properly conceived as the entitlements of citizens rather than of individuals pure and simple” (Id: 14): if citizenship guarantees the membership in an international community of equal states legislating through fair democratic mechanisms, then the shades of international domination are foiled, and the rights enclosed in the status of citizenship become the rights of all the individuals qua equal citizens of equal states.20 From this framework, Bellamy’s understanding of the people emerges quite neatly as the ensemble of the individuals who are members – citizens – of a nation-state: in Bellamy’s own words, the people is made by the “individual citizens who together form a demos through being subject to the power of a particular state” (Id: 17). Although it echoes the assimilation between people and citizenship identified above in Habermas’s political philosophy, however, Bellamy’s

20

Such commitment to the sovereignty of the European nation-states as legitimate political units has always informed Bellamy’s political theory. In an article published in 2006, he claimed that the project of a European constitution failed because “citizens want the EU to relate better to their various domestic political arrangements” (2006: 182). Neither those who aim to integrate the European political cultures into a shared set of (constitutional) values, nor those who argue that citizens merely want European technocrats to bolster the economy as they see fit, realize that claims for European representation do come from national units, and can be bypassed neither by economic technicians, nor in the name of a constitution forged out of a mixture of national political values. Rather, for Bellamy a European constitutionalism must give pride of place to “its essentially international foundations” (Id: 188). For further evidence of Bellamy’s early defense of what he later called a “demoi-cracy”, cf. Bellamy and Castiglione (1997b), where they support the idea, perhaps slightly more ambiguous, that “the European Demos, formed on the basis of universalistic values and principles, [...] should not supplant the national Demoi, but only act as a civilizing force keeping under control the emotional drive and particularist focus of national citizenship” (Id: 442).

6.4 Demoi-Cracy and the Borders of the Sovereign People

165

characterization of the people bears a sharper normative scope, which is evident in his avowed support for the conflation of people and citizens of a nation-state. Habermas reconstructs the normative validity of modern law as operating according to a communicative logic which unearths the co-originality of private autonomy and political rights in modern legal systems, and in doing so he opens a crack between the fundamental normative principle (D) he adopts and the empirically identifiable “people” he accepts. The contours of such people, that is, are not framed by (D) itself, which by virtue of its in-built all-affected principle turns out to be broader in scope than the nation-states in the law of which it was unveiled by Habermas’s sociological-philosophical analysis. Differently, modern citizenship and the twentieth century nation-state as an empirical entity (historically arisen “as the product of the interrelated processes of state-building, the emergence of commercial and industrial society, and the construction of a national consciousness, with all three driven forward in various ways by class struggle and war” (Bellamy 2008: 46)) meet Bellamy’s criteria of legitimacy, and are thus normatively accepted by him. Rather than, for instance, adopting a cosmopolitan post-sovereigntist view of the demoi as “a variety of different sub-state, state, trans-state and supra-state political organizations and bodies” (Bellamy 2019: 87), Bellamy argues that the demos should be limited to its current factual nation state-based physiognomy, even vis-à-vis the menaces of globalization and the demands of cosmopolitanism – or precisely because of them. It is within such system that the conditions for non-domination can be created through a fair legislative process in which every single individual is treated equally, and which in turn is accepted by the individuals themselves in its core features and underlying political-cultural ideas: “citizens are already constituted as peoples within a sovereign polity, which are capable of offering them valuable ways of living that possess moral worth” (Id: 86). The reproduction of Bellamy’s democratic framework at the international level, with the states as the actors participating equally in decision-making, allows avoiding the potential shortfalls that it may suffer in a globalized political and economic scenario.21

21

Although irrelevant to the present inquiry, it should be noted that Bellamy’s argument for a republican union of states is also grounded in his contention that the EU’s very structural features point to that solution, rather than to any other form of supra-, trans-, or post-national system: “the EU’s associational character is evident in the way intergovernmental arrangements remain crucial in deciding the scope of the EU. After all, the goals of the EU are defined by the Treaties, which require unanimity to be agreed and where national governments naturally take the lead [...] Constituencies are allocated on a national basis employing degressive proportionality, thereby allowing each member state to be represented by a range of parties, with European parties essentially parliamentary coalitions of national parties” (Bellamy 2019: 92–93).

166

6.5

6 Richard Bellamy and the Political Constitution of the demos

Capitulation to Facticity or Hidden Entrenchment? Problems with Bellamy’s Normativism

Let us tie up the ends of the discussion in order to take a closer look at some problematic aspects of Bellamy’s work. In particular, his pars destruens is affected by theoretical difficulties, some of which emerged in the discussion above, that appear to hinder him from properly developing a pars construens for his theory. The “moral agnosticism” imbuing the disagreement-aware version of freedom as non-domination leaves Bellamy unarmed when it comes to integrating his theory of legitimacy with the construction of a political order. This is made evident from his pursuit of an awkward co-existence between the establishment of “a procedure that all accept” (Bellamy 2007: 26) and the pervasiveness of disagreement, which creates a tension running through Bellamy’s whole intellectual endeavour. As aptly highlighted by Lars Vinx in the criticism mentioned above, it is unclear why in the circumstances of politics as portrayed by Bellamy, marked by enduring disagreement, there should be widespread acceptance of a specific democratic majoritarian procedure. This inconsistency reverberates widely in Bellamy’s framework, and emerges vividly from his classification and prioritization of rights. In his account, rights are divided into three classes: justice-related ones (habeas corpus, liberty of thought and action), consistency-related ones (due process and equality before the law) and fairness-related ones (political rights associated with democratic rules). Bellamy notes that legal constitutionalists tend to ground the second and third classes of rights in a theorization of the first one, and contends that such genealogy should be turned upside down: consistency- and fairness-related rights should ground justice-related ones, as the elevation of a specific account of justice-related rights beyond the reach of the people is arbitrary, disrespectful of their status of equals, and thus dominating.22 Given the pervasiveness of the circumstances of politics, however, it should follow that the second and third classes of rights fall prey to disagreement in precisely the same fashion as justice, thus hindering the foundation of a democratic order grounded in a fair procedure which is widely accepted as such. The difficulty appears even more clearly in A Republican Union of States, and in particular in an excerpt which is worth quoting extensively: Democratic procedures will not operate legitimately, that is in a non-dominating fashion, unless they likewise function according to norms and serve ends that can be commonly avowed by those involved. The criterion of ‘commonly avowed’ should not be understood as entailing universal consent, which would be impossible to meet, but rather the weaker notion of equal respect for the views of the governed by virtue of the existence of a plausibly democratic system that gives citizens equal participation in decision-making. Nevertheless, to meet even this weaker condition it will not be sufficient that democratic processes merely involve the public. Rather, they must do so on a basis that can be publically acknowledged by those to whom they apply as fair and appropriate (Bellamy 2019: 64).

22

Cf. Political Constitutionalism, pp. 17–20.

6.5 Capitulation to Facticity or Hidden Entrenchment?

167

Bellamy’s to-and-fro is palpable in these words, and it blatantly reflects the difficulties affecting his position, that can be summarized in the following question: what is a fair procedure? One that guarantees equality to disagreeing individuals in a process of policy-shaping, or one that is acknowledged by those individuals to do so? What is the normative benchmark, in other words? If the latter, then disagreement is betrayed by the requirement of a consensus on the procedures. If the former, then the consensus of the governed on the procedures through which they are supposed to legislate is normatively irrelevant. The only way for Bellamy to be loyal to his own disagreement-centred normative framework is to reject the idea of a consensus on the procedures, and establish that a non-dominating procedure is one that guarantees a certain degree of equal concern and respect to all citizens, independently of their support. Such radical adherence to the implications of disagreement, however, unearths an interesting feature of Bellamy’s political theory. If non-domination requires that no epistemic view predominates on others, Bellamy seems ineluctably compelled to forsake his own normative framework in the constructive phase of his thought, a tendency which is clear in much of his writing. Once postulated the desirability of a political system which guarantees equal concern and respect by equipping citizens with equal votes and majority rule, Bellamy’s pars construens seems to take the form of a capitulation to facticity, propelled by the rejection of any standard of validity for the political order, and signalled by the large deployment of empirical arguments meant to prove that the real-world twentieth century democratic legislative systems can fend for themselves, avoid their own collapse and consistently secure rights for their citizens, notwithstanding the absence of the separation of powers and constitutional constraints. In other words, the normative requirement of the disagreement-aware version of freedom as non-domination amounts to demanding a retreat of normativity from political life. Bellamy’s own normative stance is called to bail out. The legislating demos that he envisions can and should act unconstrained, thus virtually undermining even the very pillars of Bellamy’s democracy, as his normative logic is self-annihilating: it requires itself to turn away from the political system in order to not epistocratically encumber and dominate individuals, on the grounds that “no institutional actor can claim to possess the best way to detect or track moral truths more accurately” (Goldoni 2013: 929). Even procedures are ultimately exempt from checks and constraints, in that any evaluation of their fairness requires substantive considerations provided by actors external to the democratic process. Therefore, Bellamy seems to leave the field open for an unbridled political struggle, which is desirable only insofar as the factual contemporary democratic systems are – supposedly – provided with the antibodies to thwart their own threats, thus being able to guarantee their own survival in the absence of a collective source of normativity. All the arguments put forward by Bellamy in his positive construction of the political order display such empirical tinge: voters are generally publicspirited, powerful majorities are coalitions of weaker minorities, competing parties striving for power balance each other and prevent major infringements on rights, manipulations and voting cycles are rare, politicians have an interest in the

168

6 Richard Bellamy and the Political Constitution of the demos

stabilization of common rules, the achievement of rights generally comes from bottom-up processes, the legislature is difficult to manipulate. This plethora of arguments is to be read as a reassurance that a democratic political order can stand on its feet despite lacking any tool for assessing the substantive validity of a claim, or the reasonableness of the disagreement animating the public sphere. This may appear as a surrender of the political philosopher to an epistemic anarchy in which the individuals are equal on the grounds of the ineffable equality of their claims, and in which therefore legitimacy overlaps with the political victory of the majority. Nevertheless, precisely the relevance that Bellamy confers upon the role of the institutions in protecting democratic rights points to an alternative interpretive path, more promising and consistent than the ‘capitulation to facticity’ scenario. It seems more appropriate to conclude that Bellamy’s aim is to protect the normative substance he supports by lodging it into the meanders of the legislative institutional system. The central right to an equal say, the related defense of majority rule and equality of vote, and the possible further rights implied, are lifted beyond people’s reach not by means of legal-constitutional protection, but by means of the complex functioning of the legislative institutional mechanisms, to which Bellamy always resorts when he addresses the danger of anti-democratic majoritarian tides. Yet, the song remains quite the same: Bellamy attempts to bulletproof the form of normativity and the related set of rights that he deems definitional of democracy, thus securing them from the people’s reach, in a hidden entrenchment of sorts. This contradiction will be further addressed in Chap. 10, Sect. 10.3, where it will be explained in combination with Bellamy’s tendency to depict the electoral practice as somewhat value-free. That is, so the argument will go, Bellamy does not see that he is imposing a normative (cultural, moral, epistemic) content on the citizenry because he sees majority rule as the morally/epistemically unencumbered venue for the people to express unimpeded, rather than as a value-laden practice meant to guide and constrain the expression of the popular will, thus shaping it according to its own criteria. This tendency Bellamy shares with the populists, although the latter do not embrace elections as central to their own narrative, as we shall see.

References Ackerman, Bruce. 1991. We the People, Vol. 1: Foundations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bellamy, Richard. 2006. The European Constitution is Dead, Long Live European Constitutionalism. Constellations 13 (2): 181–189. ———. 2007. Political Constitutionalism: A Republican Defense of the Constitutionality of Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2008. Citizenship: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2019. A Republican Europe of States: Cosmopolitanism, Intergovernmentalism and Democracy in the EU. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bellamy, Richard, and Dario Castiglione. 1997a. Constitutionalism and Democracy – Political Theory and the American Constitution. British Journal of Political Science 27 (4): 595–618.

References

169

———. 1997b. Building the Union: The Nature of Sovereignty in the Political Architecture of the Union. Law and Philosophy 16: 421–445. Bellamy, Richard, and Martin Hollis. 1995. Liberal Justice: Political and Metaphysical. The Philosophical Quarterly 45 (178): 1–19. Christiano, Thomas. 2000. Waldron on Law and Disagreement. Law and Philosophy 19 (4): 513–543. Dyzenhaus, David. 2009. How Hobbes Met the ‘Hobbes Challenge’. The Modern Law Review 72 (3): 488–506. Fabbrizi, Valerio. 2018. Normativism and Realism Within Contemporary Democratic Constitutionalism. Philosophy and Social Criticism 44 (6): 1–21. Goldoni, Marco. 2013. Two Internal Critiques of Political Constitutionalism. International Journal of Constitutional Law 10 (4): 926–949. Lafont, Cristina. 2020. Democracy Without Shortcuts: A Participatory Conception of Deliberative Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lever, Annabelle. 2009. Democracy and Judicial Review: Are They Really Incompatible? Perspectives on Politics 7 (4): 805–822. Rawls, John. 1997. The Idea of Public Reason Revisited, in Rawls, John, 2005. Political Liberalism (1993), expanded ed., 440–490. New York: Columbia University Press. Sandel, Michael. 1994. Political Liberalism by John Rawls. Harvard Law Review 107 (7): 1765–1794. Vinx, Lars. 2009. Republicanism and Judicial Review. The University of Toronto Law Journal 59 (4): 591–597. ———. 2011. Judicial Review and the Defence of (Democratic) Constitutionality – A Critique of the Argument from Disagreement. In Hope, Reluctance or Fear? The Democratic Consequences of the Case Law of the European Court Justice, ARENA Report Series, ed. John E. Fossum and Agustin J. Menendez, 7–42. Oslo: University of Oslo. Waldron, Jeremy. 1999. The Dignity of Legislation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Part III

Agonistic Democracy

Chapter 7

The People as Hegemonic Construction: Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Radical Democracy

Abstract Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s post-Marxist framework, which places centrality upon the concept of political hegemony as a form of “failed totality”, is the object of in this chapter. Laclau and Mouffe’s theoretical endeavour is addressed starting from their powerful critique of Marxism, through which economic determinism is undermined, and the space is left open for a social ontology marked by contingency and heterogeneity. In this context, Laclau and Mouffe argue, social and political construction is only possible antagonistically, through discursive-symbolic articulation of heterogeneous demands affectively unified by their shared opposition to the constructed ‘other’. According to Laclau and Mouffe, the hegemonic logic becomes predominant with the end of theologically structured socio-political orders, and the modern rise of an “egalitarian imaginary”. In the context of this discussion, Laclau and Mouffe’s argument on the contingent nature of liberal democracy is introduced and called into question. In the final sections of the chapter, the notion of the people as a “plurality of ruptural points” unified by the symbolic force of equivalential chains and empty signifiers is critically discussed. Finally, a hypothesis is provided which seeks to account for why it is that Laclau and Mouffe’s demise of Hegelian-Marxian teleology brings with itself a staunch rejection of normativity. Keywords Agonistic democracy · Laclau · Mouffe · Left populism · Equivalential chain · Empty signifier · Discourse · Antagonism · Egalitarian imaginary · Hegemony Since the publication of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy in 1985, Laclau and Mouffe’s “post-Marxist” theory of radical democracy has evolved through the integration of an impressive ensemble of theoretical sources, mixing together Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Saussurean structuralism, Derridean poststructuralism, formal linguistics, Hegelianism, Marxism, and much more. The result is a complex theoretical framework, which preserves its structure, key ingredients and philosophical stands in spite of the fact that Laclau and Mouffe have mostly elaborated its evolutions and applications in autonomous works. In what follows, I shall attempt at reconstructing this ramified intellectual path, with a special eye on the definition of the people that Laclau and Mouffe advocate – in this case © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Fiorespino, Radical Democracy and Populism, Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations 18, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84969-6_7

173

174

7 Laclau, Mouffe, and the People as Hegemonic Construction

outspokenly, given its central role. The exploration will start from their critique of determinism in Marxist thought, which lays the ground for the disintegration of the social, the irruption of “radical heterogeneity”, and the theorization of identityconstruction as an intrinsically antagonistic process, which, in Linda Zerilli’s words, “complicates the binary opposition of “true universal” versus “false universal” by refusing the notion that there could be an ideal universality which really was fully divested of any trace of particularity” (1998: 10). The main difficulties with such framework will be addressed, in particular its circularity and the problems with its democratic strength and definition of legitimacy; finally, I shall attempt to explain Laclau and Mouffe’s rejection of political normativity, and to show that such conclusion and its important consequences are ultimately unnecessary to the task of preserving a relational, “negative” conception of identity indebted to Hegel.

7.1

Genesis of a Post-Marxist Philosophy: A Critique of the Immanent Rationality of History

In order to properly grasp Laclau and Mouffe’s theorization of “agonistic” or “radical” democracy, it is important to elucidate the critique of Marxism from which it springs, and which somehow conditions their way of conceptualizing the relation between universality and partiality, as well as between universality and the “openness” of the social. In Laclau and Mouffe’s narration, a form of essentialism pervades Marxist thought from its origins, and goes so far as to affect the theories of those thinkers who covered a good deal of ground in cleansing Marxism from its economic determinism and historical teleologism – Sorel and Gramsci in particular. The three kernels of such essentialism as identified by Laclau and Mouffe are the following: the “ontological centrality of the working class”, “the role of the Revolution, with a capital ‘r’, as the founding moment in a transition from one type of society to another”, and finally “the illusory prospect of a perfectly unitary and homogeneous collective will that will render pointless the moment of politics” (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 2). It is from the theoretical confutation of those tenets, buttressed by the empirical-historical evidence of their inadequacy, that Laclau and Mouffe develop their project of radical democracy. The core of their critique can be traced to their refutation of Hegelian and Marxist dialectics between partiality and universality, contingency and necessity. As it will become clearer at the end of this chapter, however, it is the relevance of the Hegelian-Marxist background that contributes to clouding the quest for an alternative form of universality, which Laclau pursued more in depth in his subsequent work. On Laclau and Mouffe’s rendition, a “topographical” approach to the social was bequeathed within the Marxist tradition: social subjects were depicted as having “a precise location within a totality” (Id: 15), totality which in turn corresponded to “History as a coherent story unified by a single logic: the development of the

7.1 Genesis of a Post-Marxist Philosophy

175

productive forces, to which corresponds, at each of its stages, a certain system of relations of production” (Laclau 2007: 141). Society and its historical evolution were understood by Marxists under the light of a “founding rational substratum” (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 38), which absorbed singular determinations – that is, real-life clashing historical actors – into an underlying dialectical movement, the teleology of which would result in the necessary triumph of an ontologically privileged and universally fixed social category, that is, the working class. History, in other words, was a scenario with predefined characters bound to their roles and acting according to necessary laws. The economic system of production operating in a given historical time shaped the relations between productive forces, thereby determining the dialectics among them. Laclau and Mouffe observe that this framework undergirds, to a different degree and with different nuances, the thought of all Marxist theorists, from Rosa Luxemburg to Kautsky and the “Marxist orthodoxy”, from the “Austro-Marxists” to Labriola, from Bernstein to Sorel and Gramsci,1 from Trotsky to Lenin.2 Parallel to such tendency, however, runs its reverse: Laclau and Mouffe argue that the same theorists of the deterministic approach outlined took effort at counterbalancing its radicalism. To different degrees and through different strategies, they attempted to embrace a dimension of spontaneity, indeterminacy, contingency, autonomy of the political actors, which eludes the grasp of historical necessity. Nonetheless, Laclau and Mouffe claim, what may appear as the virtuous aspiration to integrate contingency in a highly deterministic philosophical framework is precisely the ultimate clue of the fundamental theoretical inadequacy affecting not only Marxist thought, but the Hegelian philosophy in which it sinks its roots. Hegelian dialectics, on Laclau and Mouffe’s reading,3 is pervaded by an irresolvable tension between necessity and contingency, which can only be overcome by relinquishing the former: “history and society, therefore, have a rational and intelligible structure. But, in a second sense, this synthesis contains all the seeds of

1

For a defence of Gramsci from the charges of essentialism, cf. Robert Miklitsch (1995), pp. 178–179, and John Rosenthal (1988), who points out that “where Gramsci undertakes to investigate the moment of hegemony, as it involves the identity constituted by the process of hegemonic articulation, there is not any assumption of the necessary fixity of class identities, or even – and this is the more pertinent point – of the necessary fixation of identities in terms of class” (Id: 45). 2 Especially instructive is the illustration of the proximity of the working class’s ontological centrality and communist authoritarianism: “the centrality attributed to the working class is not a practical but an ontological centrality, which is, at the same time, the seat of an epistemological privilege: as the ‘universal’ class, the proletariat – or rather its party – is the depository of science” (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 56–57). This perspective was strongly opposed by Michael Rustin, who observed that “it hardly seems plausible to attribute the disasters of Stalinism to the inherent essentialism of the Marxist theory of history. One might indeed argue that it was the Bolshevik’s suppression of rational debate about the objective problems of Soviet society which marked the disintegration of Leninism into Stalinism” (Rustin 1988: 152). 3 Undergirded by Trendelenburg’s interpretation of Hegel (cf. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. 95).

176

7 Laclau, Mouffe, and the People as Hegemonic Construction

its dissolution, as the rationality of history can be affirmed only at the price of introducing contradiction into the field of reason” (Id: 95). The point here is that if the identity of a historical actor is intrinsically relational, then it cannot be assimilated to a logic of necessity. If the relation between two objects is predetermined by an underlying logic, then those two objects are not properly separate: otherness collapses on the terrain they share, on which they are already fused as necessary parts of a logically structured whole.4 Far from being complementary, therefore, necessity and contingency are radically incompatible: “the determinate, in establishing its specificity as necessary, sets the limits of variation of the indeterminate. The indeterminate is thus reduced to a mere supplement of the determinate” (Id: 47–48). The tension intrinsic to the Marxist theories attempting to square the necessity/contingency circle, therefore, manifests itself as a “double void”: rather than supporting each other in an integrated explanatory model of society, necessity and contingency are “the purely negative reverse of the other” (Id: 13), thus limiting each other. The attempt at conflating the two logics can only have the effect of subordinating the exterior, the contingent, that which cannot be explained by the historico-economic laws, to precisely those laws, as the indeterminate “is reduced to a contingently variant terrain of relations between agents constituted outside itself” (Id: 51). As we shall see, this dismissal of contingency as a sort of unintelligible, irrational set of dynamics external to the system corresponds to the attitude towards populism and the masses criticized by Laclau (the crowd’s “modus operandi is treated as the mere negative reverse of rationality conceived in its strict and narrow sense” (Laclau 2007: 28)). The clearest illustration of the inconsistencies affecting Hegelian-Marxist dialectics, which will introduce us to Laclau and Mouffe’s positive overcoming of Marxism, is probably Laclau’s discussion of the lumpenproletariat. As it started becoming clear with the colonial struggles, the idea of history as class history is deeply endangered by the so called “peoples without history”, as Amilcar Cabral fervently pointed out in his famous 1966 speech “The Weapon of Theory”: does history begin only with the development of the phenomenon of ‘class’, and consequently of class struggle? To reply in the affirmative would be to place outside history the whole period of life of human groups from the discovery of hunting [. . .] It would also be to consider — and this we refuse to accept — that various human groups in Africa, Asia, and Latin America were living without history, or outside history, at the time when they were subjected to the yoke of imperialism. It would be to consider that the peoples of our countries, such as the Balantes of Guinea, the Coaniamas of Angola and the Macondes of Mozambique, are still living today — if we abstract the slight influence of colonialism to which they have been subjected — outside history, or that they have no history (Cabral 1966).

“To reply in the affirmative”, Laclau adds, would be to overlook those social categories, such as the lumpenproletariat, that exceed the totalizing logic of capitalism and thereby call into question its very cogency as an explanatory model of In Laclau’s own words, “the ‘other’ cannot be a real other [. . .] The characteristic of an objective process is that it reduces to its own logic the totality of its constitutive moments” (Laclau 1996a: 3).

4

7.1 Genesis of a Post-Marxist Philosophy

177

history and society. The radical heterogeneity of the lumpenproletariat demolishes the necessary logics of economic history, insofar as it cannot be subsumed within it: their very theorists, Marx and Engels, conceptualize it as an entity doomed to exteriority, and what Laclau aims to prove is that such exteriority is irreconcilable with the laws internal to a teleology. The only possible defence amounts to demoting out of history not only the lumpenproletariat, but also Cabral’s “various human groups in Africa, Asia and Latin America”, “the Balantes of Guinea, the Coaniamas of Angola and the Macondes of Mozambique”. On the one hand, however, the strategy appears empirically implausible, to the extent that an ambiguity starts surfacing in the writings of Marx himself. The “rabble” of the cities is not the only unproductive social group: the same is true of aristocracy (and, one might add, of rentier economies in general), the parasitic class par excellence, which thus eludes the logic of capitalism in precisely the same fashion as the lumpenproletariat. “Once the ‘outside’ of production is conceived at this level of generality, it is difficult to exclude it from the field of historicity” (Laclau 2007: 145), even for Marx. On the other hand, Laclau’s point is more theoretical than empirical: if the lumpenproletariat, independently of its sociohistorical relevance, is radically heterogeneous, then Hegelian dialectics can no longer rest upon a totalizing logic that synthesizes singular determinations. The radical otherness of the lumpenproletariat, stressed by Marx and Engels, ends up asserting “a heterogeneity which cannot be subsumed under any single ‘inside’ logic. The construction of any ‘inside’ is going to be only a partial attempt to master an ‘outside’ which will always exceed those attempts. In a globalized world, this is becoming ever more evident” (Id: 147–148). The collapse of established social frontiers brought about by globalization, in other words, merely unveils the point: the presence of subjects exterior to the system inevitably dissolves it,5 and contingency, heterogeneity and political construction irrupt even in those areas that were conceived of as necessarily determined by rational laws. The social cannot be read through the lenses of economic determinism, as it is constituted by spontaneous dynamics among dislocated and fluid social actors, whose identities are open and relational,6 and whose relationships to each other are purely heterogeneous insofar as not mediated by any underlying telos.7 This theoretical achievement, according to Laclau and Mouffe, is empirically verifiable by and large: if we try to expand the

5

Kierkegaard’s critique of the system in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments comes to mind: “system and conclusiveness are just about one and the same, so that if the system is not finished, there is not any system” (1992: 107). 6 Laclau and Mouffe stress that not only the relationships among social groups should be considered as open to contingency, but also those within social groups. The latter cannot be regarded as positively self-enclosed without drifting “from an essentialism of the totality to an essentialism of the elements; we have merely replaced Spinoza with Leibniz” (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 103). 7 According to Miklitsch, Laclau and Mouffe’s critique of Marxism leads them to a “‘logical’ and, ultimately, super-rationalist ‘pulverization of the social’” (1995: 185), grounded in the mere deconstruction of Hegelian and Marxist teleological determinism, which ends up leaving the realworld forms of oppression “untouched”.

178

7 Laclau, Mouffe, and the People as Hegemonic Construction

logic of contingency at the expenses of that of necessity, “the spectacle that appears before our eyes is not at all imaginary: it is the original forms of overdetermination assumed by social struggles in the Third World, with the construction of political identities having little to do with strict class boundaries” (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 13). Laclau and Mouffe’s pars destruens was tackled by a number of observers, who targeted them for misrepresenting Marxism in various ways. According to Allen Hunter, the force of economics in constructing the social is downplayed by Laclau and Mouffe, who thence lose any foothold from which “to account for the way in which these durable, powerful features of modern western societies (commodification and bureaucratization) constrain indeterminacy while reproducing undemocratic social arrangements” (Hunter 1988: 896). In a similar vein, Rustin points out that Laclau and Mouffe confuse “logical and causal relations”: “Marxists no more need presuppose the existence of a priori laws more than Newtonians or Darwinians do” (Rustin 1988: 154–155). Marxist theories are “vulnerable to challenge from rival theories” (Id: 155), and their actual aim is to search for explanatory laws of society as exhaustive and powerful as possible, so that relations of oppression can be tackled once properly identified. Therefore, Laclau and Mouffe err in proceeding “from the fact that no institutions are wholly thing-like or crystalline in their structure and process (which is true) to the conclusion that no analysis in terms of structures and processes is possible” (Id: 172). On the same page, Rosenthal stresses that the concept of class in much of Marxism is not the abstraction of a real-world collective subject, it has no empirical referential unity. Laclau and Mouffe’s thought is wholly underlain by the assumption that “the objects of theory are nothing more than real objects theorized” (Rosenthal 1988: 31), but the working class is a category, a concept which is useful to explain the political, contingent relations unfolding within the capitalist system of production: “proletarian class politics does not then emerge triumphantly on the basis of economy; proletarian class politics is the politics of the base” (Id: 52). Thus, the “proletariat” as a concept cannot be thought in terms of subjectivity; rather, the working class “is precisely what requires us to reject not only “the category of the unified subject” but the category of the subject altogether as the unifying foundation of all analysis” (Id: 50). It is a structural category, inscribed within a conceptual explanatory apparatus attempting to make sense of an economic system that creates its own social actors and their antagonistic relations – of exploitation, oppression, emancipation – but that does not determine teleologically the whole course of history.

7.2 The “Pulverization of the Social”

7.2

179

The “Pulverization of the Social” and the “Discursive” Unification of Heterogeneity

Society, therefore, is described by Laclau and Mouffe as lacking any final “suture”, a concept that they borrow from psychoanalysis and is referred to the fulfilling of an “original lack”, the achievement of a fullness which is ultimately unattainable. That society is “unsutured” means, therefore, that it lacks a unifying principle, so that contingency and heterogeneity prevail as the constitutive dimensions of the social: “non-fixity has become the condition of every social identity” (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 85). This is the essential insight resulting from the critique of Marxist determinism, the implications of which Laclau and Mouffe elaborate into a set of categories which structure their full-fledged description of society, power and politics. If society is the reign of a radical heterogeneity among dislocated individuals and social actors, the problem arises of how it is constituted and delimited, and thus of how subjects are socially and politically unified without the homogenizing terrain of history as class struggle. Laclau and Mouffe’s answer starts from the concepts of political articulation and discourse: “we will call articulation any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice. The structured totality resulting from the articulatory practice, we will call discourse” (Id: 105). Given the centrality of the category of discourse, let us start from its characterization. Society is portrayed by Laclau and Mouffe as an ever-changing, constitutively fragmentary and unfixed “field of discursivity”, in which entities unrelated to each other (defined, in a post-structuralist fashion, as “differences” or “differential positions”) interact, and linguistically construct and re-construct representations of reality and of themselves as subjects. On Laclau and Mouffe’s rendition, discourse has the following properties: (a) it dissolves in itself the distinction between the linguistic and the behavioural; (b) it shapes reality and objectivity, i.e. interprets and informs facts (thus dismantling the separation between thought and reality); (c) it is material rather than mental, in Wittgenstein’s sense. In a nutshell, nothing exceeds discursive representation. In Laclau and Mouffe’s view, any step back from the level of discourse would bring us back to some underlying form of universalism, of overarching objectivity that would obscure the openness of the social and deny its contingency. If the gap between thought and reality was maintained, for instance, we would lose “the possibility of conceptually specifying a wide range of relations among objects in the social and political field” (Id: 110). This is because a thought applied to reality, but external to it, constitutes an objective lens that fails to capture the specificities of the real. Social and institutional practices, therefore, cannot be separated from their specific discursive articulation,8 independently of how stable 8

The conflation of behavioural and linguistic, discursive and material/institutional, is a matter of controversy. Miklitsch, for instance, argued in favour of their distinction, which “not only recognizes the discursive “nature” of institutions [. . .] but preserves the ontological distinction between the order of things and the order of discourse as well” (1995: 188). From his perspective, it is

180

7 Laclau, Mouffe, and the People as Hegemonic Construction

and authentic such articulation is; the objectivity of facts cannot be found outside their discursive interpretive appropriation9; and social subjects, with their discursive positions, are themselves discursively shaped and intrinsically relational, rather than positively self-enclosed. Subjects are thus supplanted by “subject positions”: “the material character of discourse cannot be unified in the experience or consciousness of a founding subject; on the contrary, diverse subject positions appear dispersed within a discursive formation” (Id: 109). The totalizing scope of this new social logic, which appears to assume disintegration as the distinctive trait of the whole “social”, led Benjamin Bertram to argue that Laclau and Mouffe are still entrapped in holistic delusions: “they seem to be suggesting that the essence of modernity lies in the death of “unconditional order” and the birth of a new pluralistic universe. They have not travelled beyond the romantic desire for wholeness or plenitude [. . .] Instead, they have merely inverted this nostalgia by dismembering the social” (Bertram 1995: 91). However, the risk of a radical discursive perspectivism,10 which as we shall see is ultimately hard to

critical to identify the cultural specificity of institutions, rather than pretending that their nature and logic can be exhausted by their discursive constructions. The meta-representation of society as an “impossible” field of differential discourses entails the inability to identify and criticize the material institutions of capitalism grounded in a capitalist culture, living and being articulated within civil society; whereas for Miklitsch it is crucial for socio-political analysis to “traverse and reclaim the “culture of capitalism”, those all-too-real, material-discursive institutions that constitute the heart of civil society” (Id: 189). Similarly, Rustin points out that “if there is no difference between the material and the mental, or between the linguistic and the behavioral aspect of a social practice, or between the discursive and the non-discursive, then we are trapped in a one dimensional hermeneutic universe” (1988: 158). As we shall see later, Rustin expressly links this problem with Laclau and Mouffe’s unilateral conception of language, mostly adopted in its paradigmatic function. On the same note, Geoff Boucher observes that the conflation of discourse and empirical world “confuses an epistemological condition with the ontological constitution of the object” (2008: 97), and makes Laclau and Mouffe practically “unable to specify why discursive regimes are historically transformed” (Id: 94). On Boucher’s reading, the primacy of discourse implies that “the disarticulation of a structure results from political conflict (through ideological articulations) – meaning that, for instance, economic crisis results from political conflict” (Id: 99). For a similar perspective, cf. Stavrakakis 1999, p. 67. On the other hand, Linda M. G. Zerilli defends the fusion of the ‘material’ and the ‘mental’ into discourse: “there is nothing that we all share by virtue of being human or of living in a particular community that guarantees a common view of the world; there is nothing extralinguistic in the world that guarantees that we all share a common experience” (Zerilli 1998: 8). 9 “An earthquake or the falling of a brick is an event that certainly exists [. . .] But whether their specificity as objects is constructed in terms of ‘natural phenomena’ or ‘expressions of the wrath of God’, depends upon the structuring of a discursive field” (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 108). 10 The allegation of perspectivism comes from a number of observers, disappointed by the pervasive “risk of a kind of “normative deficit” in the theory of hegemony” (Critchley 1998: 809). According to Simon Critchley, Laclau is trapped in an unsolvable dilemma: either he postulates a normative element, thus welcoming a de-politicized area in the theory of hegemony, or the whole theory is a mere description, which considerably cuts off its critical strength. Both the options “leave Laclau sitting uncomfortably on the horns of the dilemma” (Id: 808). Similarly, Hunter and Rustin stress that Laclau and Mouffe “have not clarified why hegemonic politics is desirable or necessary” (Hunter 1988: 897); Rustin notes that “the position outlined seems at best relativist” (Rustin 1988:

7.2 The “Pulverization of the Social”

181

dismiss, is detected by Laclau and Mouffe. They are aware of the self-contradictory fixation on non-fixity that their framework seems to embrace,11 and counterbalance it with a phenomenology of socio-political articulation, of construction of collective identities, which is the necessary complement to non-fixity: as we shall see, Laclau and Mouffe aim to demonstrate that “neither absolute fixity nor absolute non-fixity is possible” (2001: 111). In On Populist Reason, Laclau specifies clearly that the “minimal unit of analysis would not be the group, as a referent, but the socio-political demand” (Laclau 2007: 224). The reason why this is so should be evident: in the absence of essentialist reconstructions of society which take the positive existence of neatly defined groups – or classes – as a given, it is precisely the associative process leading to the contingent, indeterminate political articulation of a group, and possibly of a number of groups, that calls for an explanation. The starting point of such explanation, therefore, is the social demand, i.e. a popular request – or claim, once it becomes more intensely voiced12 – expressing a need, a disadvantage, a malfunction, experienced by an individual or a group. Social fixation, that is the construction of a relatively stable and broad social-political group, stems as a political articulation of heterogeneous and initially independent social demands within an equivalential chain, that is, a discursively condensed whole in which different demands become equivalent. The element, that is the “difference that is not discursively articulated” (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 105), is turned into a moment, i.e., “the differential positions insofar as they appear articulated within a discourse” (Ibid). It is here that the psychoanalytical category of overdeterminaton, already integrated in the Marxist tradition by Louis Althusser,13 comes into play.

173), and Boucher complains that “Laclau and Mouffe relapse into a perspectival relativism, whereby there is no appeal to any reality beyond one’s discursive universe” (2008: 104). Miklitsch defines the theory of hegemony as a form of “cognitive agnosticism [. . .] The result (in a nutshell) is an order of discourse that appears to be able to generate endless descriptions of the “social” order yet cannot explain how, or why, any one description might be more preferable than another” (1995: 185–6). Finally, Bertram claims that “by advocating a universal perspectivism, the pluralistic thinker takes a nonperspectival view” (Bertram 1995: 90). However, it is Bertram himself to observe that “this pragmatic view of politics (the end of ideology) universalizes its own perspectivism while debunking those who do not follow the banner of anti-essentialism” (Id: 109). This is an important point, as it helps highlighting that, due to their rejection of a normative standpoint, Laclau and Mouffe adopt a precise and ‘universal’ view of politics (in Mouffe’s own words, “the ‘true’ understanding of the political” (2005a: 4)) as the field of an unregulated, arbitrary clash among social groups. In the acceptance of such Schmittian core, Laclau and Mouffe ultimately take a stance. 11 “Were the decentring operation to be concluded at this point, we would only have managed to affirm a new form of fixity: that of the various decentred subject positions” (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 87). 12 See On Populist Reason, pp. 73–74, for the semantic oscillation of the English term “demand” between “request” and “claim”. 13 Although in a way that Laclau and Mouffe regard as disappointing, as trapped in the ambivalence between determinism and spontaneism that characterized Marxism, as discussed above. Cf. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, pp. 97–105

182

7 Laclau, Mouffe, and the People as Hegemonic Construction

Overdetermination is the symbolic condensation of a plurality of instances into a whole, a process exemplified by Freud’s theorization of the dream. Once again, such symbolic whole is self-referential, and cannot be observed from an objective, external perspective: “the concept of overdetermination is constituted in the field of the symbolic, and has no meaning whatsoever outside it” (Id: 97). An ensemble of discourses and demands is overdetermined into a whole, a hegemonic discursive formation, with its own symbolism, hierarchy of aims and values, selfrepresentation. An example among many provided by Laclau and Mouffe is feminism: the plurality of claims, institutions and practices against women subordination takes different forms and tackles different targets, but is ultimately overdetermined into feminism as a movement which “invariably constructs the feminine as a pole subordinated to the masculine” (Id: 118).14 Partiality thus becomes totality through a process of political articulation of differences, that is, through their entering an equivalential relation which always bears the symbolic character of overdetermination. Totality and social fixation, therefore, stem from partiality and social non-fixity in a bidirectional relation of continuity. Totality is nothing more than a temporary fixation of differences, a fixation that in turn is bound to be disintegrated by the “constant overflowing of every discourse by the infinitude of the field of discursivity” (Id: 113). Such field is, therefore, simultaneously the condition of the rise and the fall of every identity.15 Let us go more in depth into the concepts of equivalence and difference as developed by Laclau and Mouffe. What does it mean that different demands become equivalent? Once again, we have to start with social indeterminacy, the pervasiveness of discourse, and the related lack of pre-constituted groups with boundaries set once and for all. As observed above, the centrality of the “demand” stems precisely from the impossibility of conceiving of the social actor as a positive, non-relational subject. Rather, a political subject is constructed through the contingent articulation of unsatisfied demands into an equivalential chain, that is, through a process in which demands become equivalent. That demands have to become equivalent, however, implies that they are different, in the sense of being heterogeneous and irreducible to each other. If they were amenable to dialectical mediation, they would be merely identical, underlain by the same positive principle, and hence they would serve as the basis for the construction of a necessary, self-enclosed identity. Therefore, equivalence is always equivalence among different elements that cannot be

14

For discussions on the fruitfulness of Laclau and Mouffe’s theory applied to feminism, see Zerilli (1998) and Thien (2007). 15 For the differences between Laclau’s and Žižek’s notions of overdetermination, cf. Laclau (2007), pp. 232–239, and Žižek (2000), p. 320. According to Žižek, social movements are not ontologically undifferentiated as Laclau pretends: “in the series of struggles (economic, political, feminist, ecological, ethnic, etc.) there is always one (class struggle) which, while it is part of the chain, secretly overdetermines its very horizon [. . .] It structures in advance the very terrain on which the multitude of particular contents fight for hegemony” (Id: 320). For a discussion of the differences between Althusser’s and Laclau and Mouffe’s renditions of overdetermination, cf. Boucher (2008), pp. 90–93.

7.2 The “Pulverization of the Social”

183

fused, synthesized into a positive determination. From this “ambiguity penetrating every relation of equivalence” (Id: 128) follows that the concept of equivalence, and thus of hegemony, can only be marked by negativity: “if all the differential features of an object have to become equivalent, it is impossible to express anything positive concerning that object; this can only imply that through the equivalence something is expressed which the object is not” (Ibid). In other words, an equivalential chain and the social group condensed around it can only exist through the construction of an antagonism, which thus represents its own boundaries, its Derridean “constitutive outside” (Mouffe 2000: 12). It is in this sense that Laclau argues that “antagonism and exclusion are constitutive of all identity” (Laclau 1996c: 52).16 The omni-presence of discourse, the related impossibility of ontologically determined positive identities, and thus the implausibility of a dialectical mediation among differences, leave negativity as the sole ground of socio-political construction. An equivalential chain grounding the identity and objectivity of a hegemonic formation can only be obtained from the construction of a common object of exclusion. If this is true, however, then it is also true that identity can only arise from unfulfilled entities, unsatisfied empirical actors whose “full being” is hindered by a form of radical Otherness, which thus is constructed as the limit of the social formation developed from the articulation of the demands that oppose it: “it is because a peasant cannot be a peasant that an antagonism exists with the landowner17 expelling him from his land” (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 125).18 The antagonistic relation as the sole ground of socio-political Such a constitutive role of concepts such as ‘hegemony’, ‘discursive practice’, ‘social antagonism’ prompted scholars to see them as “quasi-transcendentals” in Laclau and Mouffe’s framework; cf. Boucher 2008, p. 88. This reading is hard to dismiss, given Laclau’s definition of populism (and thus of the hegemonic practice) as “an ontological and not an ontic category – i.e., its meaning is not to be found in any political or ideological content entering into the description of the practices of any particular group, but in a particular mode of articulation of whatever social, political or ideological contents” (2005: 34). 17 Cf. Andrew Norris (2002) for a thorough analysis of this example, casting doubts on Laclau and Mouffe’s notion of antagonism, and depicting it as ultimately “apolitical”. 18 According to some readers, given the constitutive nature of fragmentation in Laclau and Mouffe’s portrait of the social, it is ultimately difficult to grasp an emancipatory dimension in the theory of hegemony. Bertram observes that the latter “still fails to answer the question that is crucial to the formation of ideology: Why is there something rather than nothing? Nodal points can only function as an “ideological quilt”, a partial stabilization of the social (the requirement for every political activity), if we have at least some explanation of the desire for political intersubjectivity” (1995: 104). The fuzziness of the processes of group formation, thus, ends up obscuring the conditions for emancipatory projects to rise: “it is unclear how this “new pluralism” is the basis of our “liberation”” (Id: 99). According to Maeve Cooke, from Laclau’s framework “it is unclear how critique of ideology is supposed to be possible”, in that it lacks “an account of the social conditions that impede human flourishing, through reference to an emancipatory projection of the good society” (2006: 15–16). Hunter unveils the same difficulty: “it is hard to see how hegemonic projects can be elaborated without some reference to relatively durable social dilemmas shared by various elements in the social bloc” (1988: 898). Similarly, Miklitsch points out that Laclau and Mouffe “may have gotten where they wanted to go but that they are nonetheless still “lost in a forest”, that this strategic “end” is a dead end, nowhere rather than “somewhere”” (1995: 171). Again, thus, it is unclear how 16

184

7 Laclau, Mouffe, and the People as Hegemonic Construction

identity, therefore, “arises not from full totalities, but from the impossibility of their constitution” (Ibid), consistently with the anti-essentialist reading of social groups. Here lies the intrinsically ambiguous nature of identity as theorized by Laclau and Mouffe: the “Other” constitutes a threat to one’s “full presence”, but precisely such threat is the sole possible ground of a precarious social identity: “we are left with the paradoxical situation that what constitutes the condition of possibility of a signifying system – its limits – is also what constitutes its condition of impossibility – a blockage of the continuous expansion of the process of signification” (Laclau 1996b: 37).19 In this sense, there is no such thing as ‘context’, or ‘culture’, unless antagonistically constructed. Laclau stresses this point in his response to Judith Butler, who observes that all political constructions are ultimately context-dependent, anchored in the roots of the culture. The assertions of universality, or ‘validity-claims’, in Habermasian terms, would not even be recognizable as such, and thus communicable, in the absence of shared cultural codes. For Laclau, things are the other way around: context is not the ground of construction, but it is only possible as the product of the articulation of partial determinations, which is the only way in which forms of “universal” positivity may emerge from radical heterogeneity.20 In other

the theory of hegemony could serve, if not strictly classic Marxist struggles, at least any liberating struggle. For a similar perspective, see also Purvis and Hunt (1993). For a further critique of agonistic democracy as displaying a weak emancipatory potential, cf. Lafont (2020), Ch. 2. 19 The same logic applies to the concept of emancipation as framed by Laclau in Emancipation(s): the emancipatory act cannot be seen simultaneously as a rational act of foundation capable of representing society as a whole, and as a radical protest against a dichotomic “Other”. If the Other has to be such, then the full representation of society yearned for by the revolutionaries is impossible. Therefore, “emancipation means at one and the same time radical foundation and radical exclusion; that is, it postulates, at the same time, both a ground of the social and its impossibility” (Laclau 1996a: 6). The new beginning cannot fully subsume society, as it is marked by the partiality characterizing every antagonism, where a form of objectivity irreducibly clashes with its “constitutive other”. 20 This commitment to radical indeterminacy was criticized as “monistic” and reductionist by several authors. In a nutshell, as expressed by Bertram, the problem is that “Laclau and Mouffe fetishize ‘dislocation’” (1995: 82), and that dislocation itself is a trait of contemporary “consumer society”, thus resulting historical and unfixed. Hunter puts forward the same concerns. On his reading, Laclau and Mouffe’s theory is unable to grasp the complexity of the real-world historical and stable forms of economic exploitation, because “the turn to discourse theory [. . .] is a form of reductionism even if it is embraced to reject other reductionist perspectives” (1988: 891). A further criticism of this sort is voiced by Rustin: Laclau and Mouffe “substitute an equally one-dimensional theory of ideological determination for the monistic theory of economic determinism” (1988: 154). Similarly, Boucher observes that Laclau and Mouffe ultimately reduce both politics and economics to ideological discourse, thus finding a mere substitute for Marxist economistic monism: they “substitute the ideological mechanisms of subject-formation for the materialist principles of social production, as rules for the composition of the social field” (Boucher 2008: 92). Laclau and Mouffe’s “reductionism” was also linked to a sort of scepticism towards authority. According to Miklitsch, “not unlike Derrida, L&M [Laclau and Mouffe] are fixated, as it were, on the concept of fixation, as if literality were somehow always already protofascist. . .” (1995: 182). Concordantly, Stanley Aronowitz observes that “making sense of the world entails determination” (1986: 10), and

7.3 Modernity, Democratic Revolution, Egalitarian Imaginary

185

words, from the fact that “antagonism constitutes the limit of every objectivity” (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 125) derives that the substance of contexts and culture, as forms of “universality”, is nothing more than “the product of political practice” (Zerilli 1998: 19), of antagonistic logics.21

7.3

Modernity, the Democratic Revolution and the Advent of the Egalitarian Imaginary

Let us briefly examine the historical dimension underlying the framework hitherto outlined. As we shall see shortly, this is the source of some difficulties, the resolution of which would likely require a reappraisal of some core knots of the theory of hegemony. Laclau and Mouffe are transparent about the historical situatedness of their theory. Relations of subordination, in their argument, are conceived of as oppressive relations and thus called into question only when they are discursively represented as such from a perspective external to that of the oppressor, i.e. when the latter is constructed as the antagonist. If such is the power of discourse, it is clear that the historical rise of democracy as the locus of expression of the sovereign people comes into play as a central actor in the theory of hegemony: “it is only from the moment when the democratic discourse becomes available to articulate the different forms of resistance to subordination that the conditions will exist to make possible the struggle against different types of inequality” (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 154). The moment of irruption of the democratic discourse is identified in what Laclau and Mouffe call, borrowing from Tocqueville, the “democratic revolution”, historically introduced by the French Revolution. The collapse of a theologically grounded political power, and of forms of social organization hinging upon given and immutable hierarchical structures, paved the ground for the “invention of the democratic

that Laclau and Mouffe’s stubborn negation of this fact signals a “confusion of authority with authoritarianism” (Id: 14). Finally, Wendy Brown (1995) and John Rosenthal (1988) identified Laclau and Mouffe’s reductionism (and misplaced optimism) in their tendency to insulate politics from economics: “the optimism of the radical (social) democratic vision is fuelled by that dimension of liberalism which presumes social and political forms to have relative autonomy from economic ones, to be that which can be tinkered with independently of developments in the forces of capitalism” (Brown 1995: 11). 21 Cf. the discussion in Laclau (2000b). This relevance conferred upon the term ‘construction’, and more in general upon the logic of articulation, prompted some observers to highlight a form of voluntarism in the theory of hegemony. In Fred Dallmayr’s words, “the term construction seems to place hegemony in the rubric of a “purposive” and voluntaristic type of action (in the Weberian sense) – in a manner obfuscating the distinction between praxis (or practical conduct) and technicalinstrumental behavior” (1989: 131). The charge of voluntarism comes also from Boucher, who observes that Laclau and Mouffe conflate the different moments of a process of political transformation “into a specious unity, generating a political voluntarism” (2008: 102) in which a single actor masterminds complex transformative processes, potentially in a manipulative way.

186

7 Laclau, Mouffe, and the People as Hegemonic Construction

culture” (Id: 155, my italics), or the emergence of an “egalitarian imaginary” which envisioned liberty and equality as “the new matrix of the social imaginary” (Ibid). It is such democratic, egalitarian cultural imaginary that constitutes the ground of the radical social non-fixity within which the theory of hegemony is developed as a tool for social explanation. The pervasiveness of discourse discussed above is precisely linked with the collapse of the theological foundations of power and the following rise of an egalitarian imaginary in the collective consciousness of the moderns, which entailed that “the logic of equivalence was transformed into the fundamental instrument of production of the social” (Ibid). The egalitarian-democratic culture is thus the background which determined the flourishing of discourse as the intrinsically indeterminate mode of socio-political construction, which as we saw cannot go beyond the partial hegemonic fixations achieved through equivalential chains. Before drawing conclusions on this matter, let us dwell on a further aspect emerging from the discussion of the democratic revolution, which has to do with what Laclau and Mouffe call the “liberal-democratic articulation”, that is, the “‘democratization’ of liberalism, which was the result of multiple struggles” (Id: 171). The liberal-democratic articulation is characterized by the assumption that political freedom and a certain degree of socio-economic equality are intrinsic to the definition of liberty.22 As argued mainly by Mouffe, especially in The Democratic Paradox, such a mixture does not hinge on an intrinsic, conceptual interdependency of private and civic autonomy à la Habermas, but rather is nothing more than a contingent articulation which arose and survived in spite of the incompatibility between liberalism and democracy. As we shall see in what follows, the two are described as undergirded by two radically heterogeneous logics. This idea echoes throughout all of Laclau and Mouffe’s production. Besides being a core theme in much of Mouffe’s work,23 the expression “liberal-democratic ideology”, or “articulation”, can be easily traced by and large in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and is explicitly advocated in On Populist Reason. What catches the eye is that in the discussion on the democratic revolution this articulation seems to substantially overlap with the egalitarian imaginary itself. That is, the “liberaldemocratic ideology” appears as the ideological elaboration of the democratic culture which allows the logics of discursive hegemonic articulation to unfold. This conflation is diffusely manifest in the text: in Laclau and Mouffe’s discussion, the liberal-democratic articulation informed the resistance against the ancien régime; its integration with social rights, occurred in the twentieth century, determined a “deepening of the democratic revolution” (Id: 163) (that is, it strengthened the conditions of discursive openness by dismantling the relations of power which suffocated discourse and its hegemonic logics); the hegemonic formation of the new right, starting with Thatcher, is described as not merely a threat to “the very articulation between liberalism and democracy” (Id: 171), but to the egalitarian

22 23

Cf. Laclau and Mouffe (2001), pp. 171–172. Cf. Mouffe (2000, 2005a, b, 2018).

7.3 Modernity, Democratic Revolution, Egalitarian Imaginary

187

democratic imaginary itself as the enabling condition of discourse.24 The interconnection between such imaginary underlying modernity and the liberal-democratic ideology is especially evident in an excerpt that it is worth quoting extensively: the conversion of the liberal-democratic ideology into the ‘common sense’ of Western societies laid the foundation for that progressive challenge to the hierarchical principle which Tocqueville called the ‘equalization of conditions’. It is the permanence of this egalitarian imaginary which permits us to establish a continuity between the struggles of the nineteenth century against the inequalities bequeathed by the ancien régime and the social movements of the present (Id: 160, my italics).

The liberal-democratic ideology appears thus as the ideological articulation, historically evolving through the discursive reformulation of its core knots, of the “common sense of Western societies”, rather than as one hegemonic articulation among many. It is configured as the ideology corroborating and elaborating that very cultural imaginary which constitutes the terrain for the openness, indeterminacy, and discursive character of modern society, where even hegemonic formations potentially contrasting its very egalitarianism can brew.25 From this perspective, it is clear that portraying liberal-democracy and its underlying democratic imaginary in the shades of contingency and partiality arises concerns. To what extent an almost two-hundred-and-fifty years cultural horizon, spread throughout three continents at the very least, informing the whole theorization of democracy and power proposed by Laclau and Mouffe themselves, can be regarded as contingent and be equated with any ephemeral political bandwagon? To what extent such a durable and pervasive matrix of social indeterminacy and openness – though broad and largely indeterminate as an imaginary can be – can be overlooked as a form of totality, albeit not abstractly universal? What I am pointing out here is not that Laclau and Mouffe fall back into determinism. It is clear that the sort of “fixity”, or totality, potentially represented by the cultural precipitate of the democratic revolution has nothing to do with determinism, and that it does not represent an objective point of view allowing for an external, objectifying, transparent explanation of society. Nevertheless, it bears the potential to constitute a broad framework grounding a shared form of political objectivity which eludes the partiality, or “partial universality”, of a given hegemonic See Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, pp. 169–175: “this effort to restrict the terrain of democratic struggle [. . .] demands the defence of a hierarchical and anti-egalitarian principle which had been endangered by liberalism itself” (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 175). 25 In this sense, according to Rustin, Laclau and Mouffe contradictorily constrain indeterminacy. The definition of the neo-conservative movement as incompatible with the pillars of the democratic revolution implies a bias (descriptive or normative?) in favour of liberal-democracy: “it seems that the conservatives must be forced to contradict themselves in their resort to authoritarian and inegalitarian logics [. . .] In reformulating the socialist project, Laclau and Mouffe seem unwilling to forswear, if not guarantees, then at least a big helping hand from the immanent logic of democratic revolution, while condemning such quasi-essentialist logic everywhere else [. . .] The idea of contending discourses produces an indeterminacy more profound than that which Laclau and Mouffe seem willing to contemplate, and to provide few grounds of reassurance for radical democrats” (Rustin 1988: 165). 24

188

7 Laclau, Mouffe, and the People as Hegemonic Construction

articulation, as it is the ground for any other form of objectivity to rise. Although unable to provide an objective explanatory model, the egalitarian cultural imaginary and the related “establishment of a new legitimacy” (Id: 155) constitute the groundwork for the possible construction of a normative standpoint that Laclau and Mouffe overlook. The postulation of a “democratic culture” elaborated into a liberal-democratic ideology as the condition for the open, discursive, democratic character of the social lands Laclau and Mouffe strikingly closer to Habermas, Rawls and their respective scholarships. The fact that a liberal-democratic ideology and its related egalitarian spirit ground “the discursive conditions which made it possible to propose the different forms of inequality as illegitimate and anti-natural” (Ibid) ironically appears to provide a historical foundation for Habermas’s conceptualization of the co-originality of private and civic autonomy, rather than an argument for the paradoxical nature of their interaction as theorized by Mouffe. As hinted above, although she is a supporter of the liberal-democratic articulation, Mouffe draws from Schmitt and argues that democracy and liberalism are undergirded by two different, incompatible logics. The former hinges on the idea that “if the people are to rule, it is necessary to determine who belongs to the people [. . .] The logic of democracy does indeed imply a moment of closure which is required by the very process of constituting the ‘people’” (Mouffe 2000: 43). Regarding the latter, “as Schmitt indicates, the central concept of liberal discourse is ‘humanity’” (Ibid). What strikes the reader here is Mouffe’s adoption of the same understandings of liberalism and democracy discussed by Schmitt one century ago. Whereas Schmitt’s insights on the necessary closure of the sovereign people still trouble the nights of contemporary political theorists,26 Mouffe’s outspoken appeals to a liberalism of natural rights is hardly understandable. And if one element of the opposition changes, the opposition itself loses its cogency. If liberalism is, like in Habermas, made up by rights which are never natural, but rather require a discursive, democratic specification – and hence civic rights – and a subsequent legal positivization in order to acquire determinateness and legitimacy, how can the theory of the intrinsic gap between liberalism and democracy hold? And how can it hold if liberalism is intended, with Rawls, in the political sense of the historically developed and constitutionalized contextual values of reciprocity, fair cooperation, respect of the burdens of judgment? And, on the other hand, how would this ‘humanity-oriented liberalism’ fit with, say, Hayek’s or Nozick’s ultimate acceptance of socio-economic inequalities? Even older forms of liberalism concur in undermining Mouffe’s analysis: utilitarian liberalism as developed in eighteenth and nineteenth century English political philosophy has its bedrock in the consequentialist commitment to the maximization of collective happiness, rather than in universal natural rights. The dichotomy established by Mouffe can only be maintained at the cost of sacrificing the plurality of liberalisms flourishing especially throughout the twentieth century, thus simplifying their variety into the vague equation of liberalism and the

26

See, for instance, S. Näsström, “The Legitimacy of the People” (2007).

7.3 Modernity, Democratic Revolution, Egalitarian Imaginary

189

commitment to “humanity”. It is the very theoretical framework developed in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy that seems to contradict such equation. The egalitarian imaginary, expressly connected with liberal-democracy, is identified as the condition for the openness of the social, for the proliferation of discourse and the disestablishment of structural subordination and inequalities, on a scale of almost two-hundred-and-fifty years. Whereas Mouffe’s incompatibility thesis rests upon an impoverished and outdated notion of liberalism, the necessity of the interaction of liberalism and democracy seems to be proven within the very framework developed by Laclau and Mouffe: neither democracy nor liberalism would be faithful to their own core commitments once uncoupled, in that it was their bond which, once rooted into the collective imaginary, opened the path for “the progressive challenge to the hierarchical principle which Tocqueville called the ‘equalization of conditions’” (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 160). The elimination of what can be seen as unjust from both a liberal and a democratic perspective appears to require their combined action, the workings of which have grounded the more than bicentennial social logic advocated by Laclau and Mouffe. Laclau and Mouffe appear to capture the exceptional nature of the democratic culture, i.e., its potential for representing a form of totality underlying the non-fixity of the social and the partiality of hegemonic formations. In fact, they take pains to clarify that the democratic revolution “does not predetermine the direction in which this imaginary will operate. If this direction were predetermined we should simply have constructed a new teleology [. . .] But in that case there would be no room at all for a hegemonic practice” (Id: 168). By distinguishing the democratic culture from a deterministic form of totalization, they prove themselves aware of the tinge of ‘universality’ that a democratic culture might bear. And by illustrating its non-deterministic dimension, they come close to identifying its non-teleological normative potential, thus achieving a form of universality that is not just another fixation of partialities, a “failed totality” (Laclau 2007: 70). Nevertheless, they never take such step. The reason lies, I think, in an unnecessary conflation of Hegelianism and post-structuralism, which seems to stem from the attempt to refute Hegelian teleology while maintaining a Hegelian relational conception of identity. This hypothesis will be developed in Sect. 7.5.

190

7.4

7 Laclau, Mouffe, and the People as Hegemonic Construction

The Lacanian Subject and the Hegemonic Construction of the People

The following discussion will proceed by analyzing the two major integrations to this framework, which were especially developed in a number of works independently authored by Laclau and Mouffe,27 and finally systematized in Laclau’s On Populist Reason. Both those innovations involve problematic implications, which Hegemony and Socialist Strategy already contained to some extent. The first is a form of psychoanalytical naturalism, that Laclau employs to illustrate the democratic process. The second is the conflation of the hegemonic formation and the people, with its problematic effects on the theorization of political legitimacy. Let us start from the psychoanalytical tinge that slowly becomes predominant in Laclau’s thought, and that is fully expressed in On Populist Reason. In order to explain the affective bonds operating in politics and in the construction of a hegemonic formation, Laclau adopts a strong definition of human subjectivity as a basis of his whole explanative model of society, politics and democracy. Such definition is borrowed from Lacan’s psychoanalysis, and assumes that the subject is constitutively and eternally entangled in the longing for the “mythical fullness” represented by “the primordial mother”. Such longing lies at the origin of the death drive, which is ultimately underlain by precisely the desire to retrieve an original fullness theorized by Lacan as “not an impossibility of thought, but a void of Being” (Id: 112). In other words, “fullness” is not a noumenal object which our transcendental categories cannot grasp, but a “jouissance” which was once fully experienced – the relation with the mother – and which is not lost forever only because “traces of it remain in the partial objects” (Id: 113). Partial objects, once invested by the subject, do not merely represent or evoke das Ding, the mythical fullness, but become das Ding, thus satisfying the subject, fulfilling her intimate split from the mythical object and becoming “the primary ontological category” (Id: 114) in the constitution of the real, of objectivity, in her experience. It is important to stress that, for Lacan – and Laclau – the name of the object fixes its identity: the signified does not have any positive and transparent identity, but rather can only be held together and identified by “the retroactive effect of naming” (Id: 102). This, according to Laclau, does not mean that the signified is empty, or non-existing (as in Žižek’s “signifier without a signified”), but that it is irrepresentable and thus requires a name to unify the irreducible density and openness of its meaning. The object invested by the subject, therefore, (“object petit a”) condenses in its name the irrepresentability of das Ding. According to Laclau, identical dynamics underlie hegemony and the creation of socio-political unity. As we saw, the equivalential chains that constitute the unity of a collective identity can only rise through their shared negation of a discursively 27

In particular, Emancipation(s) (Laclau 1996a, b, c), Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (Butler, Laclau and Žižek 2000), The Democratic Paradox (Mouffe 2000) and On the Political (Mouffe 2005a).

7.4 The Lacanian Subject and the Hegemonic Construction of the People

191

constructed object, which hence constitutes them. The relentless multitude of significations produced by the pervasiveness of discourse is thus fixed, temporarily, in the discursive definition of the border. Such tie, however, is defined by Laclau as weak, as a mere initial step towards a social union that is actually achieved only when the irreducible differential moments are brought together by a signifier capable of incorporating them all.28 Such unification has to occur at the symbolic level, rather than conceptual, otherwise differences would be homogenized into a positive entity, that is, made identical: “given that this embodied totality or universality is, as we have seen, an impossible object, the hegemonic identity becomes something of the order of an empty signifier, its own particularity embodying an unachievable fullness” (Id: 71). That is, precisely like the impossible fullness represented by the “primordial mother” persists in partial objects which happen to embody it, the empty signifier (which originally is nothing more than one difference among many) absorbs symbolically the heterogeneity of the demands involved in a differential chain, thus becoming “not a part of a whole but a part which is the whole” (Id: 113). The unattainable fullness of an unsatisfied ensemble of social agents – a “deficient being” – is embodied, ultimately, by a name, which leads Laclau to the conclusion that “the unity of the equivalential ensemble, of the irreducibly new collective will, in which particular equivalences crystallize, depends entirely on the social productivity of a name” (Id: 108) – be it the name of a leader, a slogan, a movement, a specific policy-demand. The empty signifier, once a difference among many, becomes the object of a “cathexis”, or “radical investment”, in the same way as the Lacanian object petit a happens to provide das Ding with new flesh. This allows Laclau to stress the affective nature of every social bond and of every possible objectivity. The intimate lack experienced by the individual is the same suffered by those social actors that the socio-political system marginalizes, and it can be filled only through the radical, affective investment on a partial object which thus becomes universal by virtue of its incarnating the absent, mythical fullness: “the logic of the object petit a and the hegemonic logic are not just similar: they are simply identical [. . .] The only possible totalizing horizon is given by a partiality (the hegemonic force) which assumes the representation of a mythical totality” (Id: 116).29

Cf. also Laclau’s “Why do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?” (1996b) and “Populism: What’s in a Name?” (2005). 29 In a recent article, Samir Gandesha observed that Laclau picks selectively from psychoanalysis, and surreptitiously jettisons the aspects which clash with his theory. In particular, Gandesha stresses that Laclau’s adoption of Lacan’s framework as the ontological condition of the theory of hegemony problematically overlooks that psychoanalysis should also be intended “substantively in terms of a method for working through the stubborn persistence of effects of past traumas, which is profoundly at odds with Laclau’s seemingly voluntarist emphasis on the radical contingency of the social” (2018: 60). Furthermore, Gandesha claims that even the later Freud, whose theory inspires Laclau in On Populist Reason, accepted the existence of some “minimal conditions shared by all societies, such as the necessity of the labour of material production and social reproduction” (Ibid). Such conditions are important for Freud to deal with “the dynamics of civilization, repression, and the nature of resentment they generate” (Ibid). This casts doubts on the compatibility between 28

192

7 Laclau, Mouffe, and the People as Hegemonic Construction

In this sense, Laclau stresses the crucial role played by rhetoric and language. The hegemonic process clearly hinges on rhetorical figures such as synecdoche and catachresis,30 and more in general on the creativity and indeterminateness of language, through which associations can be performed, at both the semantic and the morphological level, which contribute to the discursive creation of a new sociopolitical objectivity. What Laclau insists upon, in particular, is the primary character of the paradigmatic dimension of language. Linguistic associations are not merely derivative, i.e. logically subordinated to language as a system grounded upon the denotative correspondence of signifier and signified: “we cannot simply differentiate the ‘true’ meaning of a term (which would necessarily be permanent) from a series of images connotatively associated with it, for the associative networks are an integral part of the very structure of language” (Id: 26). Language is depicted by Laclau as somewhat infinitely open to new signifying processes, forcing the boundaries of its own rules and of its own denotative signifier/signified relations. Such process of ongoing creation of “associative networks” has an affective matrix, as the associations “are governed by the unconscious [. . .] So affect is required if signification is going to be possible” (Id: 111).31 Thus, the discourses and demands elaborated by disadvantaged groups are affectively loaded, and such affects are expressed through linguistic dislocations which create the peculiar linguistic apparatus of a hegemonic group, condense heterogeneous demands into equivalential chains, and finally invest a (empty) signifier with the power of representing the totality. The impression of the vague and rhetorical approach to politics that allegedly characterizes populism, Laclau observes, is thus due to the very nature of language, and of linguistic-affective representation as the “absolutely primary level in the constitution of objectivity” (Id: 115). Every political movement, not only populist ones, is pervaded by

Laclau’s radical indeterminacy and Freudian psychoanalysis, which does not rule out basic material conditions from its schema. 30 Respectively, the part which represents the whole and “a figural term which cannot be substituted by a literal one” (Laclau 2007: 71) – such as the ‘leg’ of a chair, in Laclau’s example. For the sake of thoroughness, one may point out that the analogy between the latter (catachresis) and the hegemonic process is imperfect. Whereas in the hegemonic process the empty signifier refers to a complexity which cannot intrinsically be signified, in catachresis we have a figural signifier referring to a signified which lacks a specific, direct signifier, but which may plainly have it in principle. It is not irrepresentable in the way society is in Laclau’s theory. 31 In Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (Butler et al. 2000a, b), Butler expresses concerns about the potentially essentialist role that the formal features of language risk assuming in Laclau’s framework: “the notion that all identity is posited in a field of differential relations is clear enough, but if these relations are pre-social, or if they constitute a structural level of differentiation which conditions and structures the social but is distinct from it, we have located the universal yet in another domain: in the structural features of any and all languages” (Butler 2000a: 34). To this, Laclau objects that “the possibility of generalizing the use of linguistic categories to various levels of social organization is as valid as it was in the 1960s” (Laclau 2000b: 190), and that the deployment of such categories in no way means that language is pre-social. Linguistic categories themselves are not just taken “as formal entities which remain selfsame independently of the context of their operation, but as being contaminated and partially deformed by those contexts” (Ibid).

7.4 The Lacanian Subject and the Hegemonic Construction of the People

193

vagueness and rhetorically articulated, insofar as every political movement is involved in the hegemonic process of signifying a heterogeneity which lacks an underlying unity, of fixing what cannot be fixed. Being fullness always mythical and conceptually unattainable, it invariably requires a symbolic embodiment.32 In spite of its appeal, the framework outlined drifts into essentialism and circularity. Laclau ends up grounding a whole theory of politics, history and objectivity in the Lacanian subject. Although he explicitly denies that in his response to Judith Butler’s concerns,33 the centrality of Lacan’s psychoanalysis to the framework offered 8 years later by Laclau can hardly be overlooked. The Lacanian subject as intimately “deficient” and constitutively yearning for an original fullness is expressly identified by Laclau as “the ontological possibility of such a relationship [the hegemonic one]” (Id: 111). It is a somewhat universalist reading of human nature,34 psychoanalytical in character, which lies at the basis of the political and democratic processes shaping history, and which ends up fusing political objectivity, or the objectivity of a socio-political (hegemonic) formation, with objectivity tout court. One may be tempted to argue that Laclau drifts into self-contradiction, insofar as the historical reading of the rise of democracy and the democratic culture may appear

32 According to Volker Kaul (2020), such symbolic creation of unity requires the appeal to a pre-existing cultural substrate, a mythical imaginary that somewhat resembles those exploited by the nationalists: “what else could justify the myth than the common history of individuals making social demands? Laclau’s theory cannot do without ‘the image of a pre-given totality’, be it of ethnic, racial, or religious origin” (Id: 35). 33 Cf. “The Uses of Equality”, where Laclau clarifies: “Now, you think that this involves, as far as I’m concerned, taking a Lacanian viewpoint. I am not entirely sure about that. What I am trying to do is to detect the multiplicity of discursive surfaces in which this irreducible “ontological difference” shows itself in modern and postmodern philosophy and political theory. Lacan’s theory is certainly one of those surfaces. But I would not claim that it is the main – let alone the only – one” (Butler et al. 1997: 11). 34 José Luis Villacañas Berlanga devoted an interesting article to the political implications resulting from Laclau’s assumption of the Lacanian subject (2010). On his reading, Laclau’s “entire analysis started from the concept of demand [. . .] The liberal basis of his approach is obvious. For Laclau the political subject is above all a liberal subject and, to a certain extent, is seen as a consumer of certain goods. When Laclau has to justify why social actions are demands, he withdraws into liberalist certainties about human nature” (Id: 166–167). From this perspective, Villacañas goes on to argue, Laclau should admit that neoliberalism is better equipped than the populist logic to satisfy the “political economy of desire that cannot be closed” (Id: 167). However, the recent failures of neoliberalism and the return of ‘politics’ in Laclau’s sense stand to prove that Villacañas is only partly right: the Lacanian subject can well be served by neoliberalism, but it can also prompt its very rejection. The point with the Lacanian subject is the perpetual experience of a lack which it suffers; but the object invested as a consequence of such lack is episodic, indeterminate and connected with contingent discursive constructions. Today it is the insatiable accumulation and consumption of advertised commodity, tomorrow it is the political subversion of the political and economic elites. Thus, neoliberalism is not necessarily more appealing than populism for the Lacanian desiring subject; nonetheless, Villacañas’s analysis has a point when it unveils the same logic of desire underlying both Laclau’s populism and neoliberalism.

194

7 Laclau, Mouffe, and the People as Hegemonic Construction

to collide with a human subject substantively determined in a Lacanian sense.35 Nonetheless, this is not the case; quite the opposite, one of the strengths of Laclau’s theory lies precisely in his successful conflation of a somewhat ‘natural’, universal subject, a conception of democracy as a historical product, and a conception of history as the contingent and unpredictable interplay of uncountable factors, undetermined by any essential law. The Lacanian subject entails neither a) a resurgence of teleological determinism (of a psychoanalytical rather than economic sort) in Laclau’s thought, nor b) a negation of the historical nature of democracy. (a) Regarding the former, it is clear that the Lacanian subject does not determine anything a priori, thus leaving history to unfold indeterminately – unless one regards as deterministic the quite minimal assertion that wherever a relation of unjust subordination or discontent arises, and conditions for its discursive elaboration exist in any form, there is at least the possibility that a group grows which aspires to subvert the injustice and establish a regime informed by a different constellation of values. This is certainly an unavoidable consequence of the adoption of a Lacanian subject, insofar as the latter constructs objectivity from an experienced lack; but it can hardly raise anti-determinist sentiments. (b) With regards to the latter, the fact that the logic of hegemony is backed by an ontological, a-historical enabling condition does not clash with its rootedness in the modern context of the democratic revolution. On the one hand, the distinctively modern demise of a political-theological foundation of power and the related pervasiveness of discourse lay the ground for a society that cannot be positively represented, thus introducing the logics of hegemony as the privileged device to fill such constitutive void; on the other hand, this does not exclude that human subjectivity was ‘Lacanian’ well before the hegemonic social logic appeared. Laclau may easily point out that premodern societies were “ruled by a theological-political logic in which the social order had its foundation in divine will” (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 155), and that therefore society could be “sutured” by the faith in God and the collective political submission to the related forms of authorities and institutions. Those were, arguably, the Lacanian objects of radical investment in premodern ages. In a nutshell, the fact that the Lacanian subject is the “ontological possibility” of hegemony does not exclude that it be the ontological possibility of other social arrangements.36 Ultimately, what in Laclau and Mouffe’s thought seems to be the very distinctive feature of Judith Butler, for instance, framed the issue as follows: “can the ahistorical recourse to the Lacanian bar be reconciled with the strategic question that hegemony poses, or does it stand as a quasi-transcendental limitation on all possible subject-formation and, hence, as indifferent to politics?” (Butler, Laclau and Žižek 2000: 5). 36 Laclau himself defended his “Lacanian bar” from Butler’s concerns. In his own words, “is it a bar whose function consists in showing the ultimate impossibility of full representation, a limit on what can be represented, or, rather, does it expand the relation of representation [. . .] beyond all limitation? If this were the case, it would open the way to a more radical historicism” (Laclau 2000a: 65). 35

7.4 The Lacanian Subject and the Hegemonic Construction of the People

195

different socio-political organizations in different historical ages is something of the order of a culture, collectively shared, rooted in consciousnesses.37 The problem with Laclau’s form of psychoanalytical essentialism, therefore, is a different one, and has to do with circularity.38 Here is the circle: it is because the Lacanian subject is unable to embrace any objectivity external to that which she constructs in order to fill her original lack, that democracy can only be conceived in terms of an unrestrained antagonism, where hegemonic formations strive with each other in the absence of any external point of reference. It is because language is adopted mostly in its paradigmatic, rhetorical dimension, that the hegemonic formations are ensnared in their rhetorically constructed vocabularies, with no chance to appeal to the different, underlying objectivity of language intended as a system of denotative associations, or of connotative associations with deeper roots in history, culture, and society. It is by virtue of a philosophy that is intimately Nietzschean in its anchoring all objectivity in the drives of the subject – be it individual or collective – that the epistemic authority of any science vanishes, and every statement 37

Cf. Cooke (2006), p. 17, where she highlights the relevance of Sittlichkeit in Laclau’s democratic thought. This is an important point, as it helps elucidating the relations between different strands of Laclau and Mouffe’s theory. Their critique of Marxism aims to show that necessary and contingent logics cannot co-exist in the same explanatory model, and that the former are theoretically flawed insofar as there is always some form of otherness which undermines their presumed cogency – as we saw above with the conundrums engendered by the lumpenproletariat and the “peoples without history”. The critique of such form of universalism, therefore, has a strictly philosophical foothold and a descriptive-empirical dimension: on the one hand, rational necessity cannot co-exist with contingency and radical heterogeneity without excluding it from its explanative paradigm. On the other hand, the failures of Marx-inspired theory and practice, and the social heterogeneity of a globalized world, unveil the irreducible character of such heterogeneity and the lack of any rational teleology directing history, thus condemning Marxism as incapable of accounting for it: “the ‘peoples without history’ have occupied centre stage to the point of shattering the very notion of a teleological historicity” (Laclau 2007: 148). It is here that the cultural dimension which I think underlies the whole analysis of Laclau and Mouffe comes into play. While stating that there has never been an underlying rationality unifying individuals and mediating their otherness into identity, Laclau and Mouffe provide reasons for why holistic delusions have been possible for long centuries: communities in premodern ages were united around fixed hierarchical structures undergirded by the divine law. Totalizing delusions were possible, therefore, insofar as a religious consciousness and its political-institutional translation had an effective totalizing power, which empirically clouded the irreducible absence of a universal mediation among heterogeneous entities. As a consequence of the collapse of such foundations, “the area of articulatory practices is immensely broadened. Thus the conditions and the possibility of a pure fixing of differences recede; every social identity becomes the meeting point for a multiplicity of articulatory practices” (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 138). As we saw above, however, also the rise of this new hegemonic logic has its cultural background, non-religious in this case, which Laclau and Mouffe call the egalitarian imaginary, or the democratic culture. Laclau and Mouffe thus appeal to the force of “epochal” collective cultures more than their commitment to indeterminateness and perspectivism might suggest. 38 The problem of circularity was detected also by Jon Beasley-Murray, who observed that “the structure of Laclau’s own discourse mimics the structure that it claims to discover in the social world that it purports to explain [. . .] Laclau’s theory of populism never escapes from the logic it sets out to analyze” (2006: 366–367).

196

7 Laclau, Mouffe, and the People as Hegemonic Construction

becomes possible and legitimate in principle.39 Antagonistic democracy and the related logic of hegemony rest upon a partial understanding of the subject disguised as universal, which is incapable of (a) accounting for the objectivity of any science, which has as its corollary the equalization of informed and uninformed opinions, of truth and lie; (b) explaining why it is the case that different hegemonic positions can engage in dialogue and confrontation in spite of their alleged linguistic incommensurability, and that one can even happen to persuade the other with the force of argument and by the appeal to a language which they share; (c) taking seriously the democratic imaginary theorized by Laclau and Mouffe themselves, the potential implications of which are discarded in too quick a manner, partly because they are clouded by the Lacanian subject. Let me spend a few words on each of these matters. (a) If the subject is Lacanian, then the epistemic superiority of science becomes the mere delusion of its devotees. It becomes impossible to explain, for instance, why the ecological bandwagon can rely upon arguments that are simply incomparable with those of the global warming deniers,40 as the two groups can merely be portrayed as antagonists with their own constructed universes; it becomes impossible to set limits to the use of language, so that every interpretation is legitimate insofar as any word can take on a given meaning in a given context. If a social movement succeeds in recasting the verb ‘to think’ with a connotation of ‘protest’, ‘dissent’, then Descartes can be interpreted as a famous seventeenth century political dissident suggesting that “I protest therefore I am”. Laclau cannot restrain this sort of manipulations, the objectivity of philosophy and philology being the mere belief of its partisans. Likewise, the distinction between informed and uninformed opinions collapses, as well as the boundary between

39

Even a theorist highly sympathetic with Laclau like Zerilli is uncomfortable with the infiltration of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the theory of hegemony. Well before the publication of On Populist Reason she tried to ring the alarms against the perils of psychological reductionism, and insisted that Laclau’s theory of democracy did not need such foundation to work: “although Laclau and Mouffe [. . .] in no way foreclose a reference to the original division of the subject, their emphasis on the political dimension of antagonism deprives that reference of the all-important status that it has in Žižek’s approach [. . .] The original division of the subject no more produces the specific form that social antagonisms take than the latter determine the original Spaltung through which the unconscious is constituted [. . .] At stake in maintaining the distinction between the Lacanian and the Laclau-Mouffe notions of antagonism, then, is a democratic theory that does not collapse into sociological or psychological reductionism” (1998: 13). 40 The issue was addressed by Aronowitz by means of a fitting example: the Chernobyl catastrophe was certainly the product of “discourses in which “nature” becomes constituted entirely through technology [. . .] But the events themselves attest to a revolt of dominated nature” (1986: 13). Laclau and Mouffe fail to account for the dangerous gaps that at times exist between discourses and the irreducible objectivity of the external world. Michael Rustin’s example sarcastically runs on the same track: “when the dentist attends to Laclau’s teeth, admittedly through an articulated practice, we must hope that factual judgments [. . .] have a distinct place, and that Laclau is not subjected to performances in which such facts are “indissolubly mixed up” with whatever other projects the dentist may have in mind” (1988: 160).

7.4 The Lacanian Subject and the Hegemonic Construction of the People

197

judgments based on verifiable, if not ‘true’, information, and judgments vitiated by inaccuracy or utter lie. It is true that Laclau takes pains to retrieve a form of “crowd rationality”, thus tackling a bias which he calls the “denigration of the masses”, and which he traces in much of Western philosophy. Its core assumption is the idea that “there is nothing we can conceive as a specific way of crowd reasoning: its modus operandi is treated as the mere negative reverse of rationality conceived in its strict and narrow sense” (Laclau 2007: 28). Therefore, Laclau devotes the whole Part One of On Populist Reason to the reconstruction of the history of such bias, to its confutation, and to the quest for a model of crowd rationality. The latter is provided by the “Freudian breakthrough”. Roughly, the members of a group substitute their ego ideal with the figure of the same leader, and by virtue of this common operation they identify with each other’s ego. The closer their ego to their ego ideal, the more the leader is a primus inter pares; the farther, the more the leader is “narcissistic”, and the bond irrational and prone to top-down manipulation. Therefore, Laclau concludes, “the fully organized group and the purely narcissistic leader are simply the reductio ad absurdum – that is, impossible – extremes of a continuum in which the two social logics are articulated in various ways” (Id: 58).41 What is baffling in this otherwise stimulating framework is that Laclau is not in the position to express any kind of evaluative judgment on the hegemonic formations which display a high degree of “irrationality”, or of “narcissism” of the leader, and on possible the irrational elements affecting the more egalitarian groups. Benjamin Arditi rightfully highlights how Laclau invariably tends to avoid the “potential underside of the argument” as voiced by those “who see in the populist mode of unification unedifying traits such as the infallibility of the leader, her being beyond good and evil” (2010: 490). In redeeming the rationality of the crowd, Laclau appears to accept with Olympian calm its irrationality and the lack of criteria to assess and make distinction among competing hegemonic claims. Thus, a hegemonic formation largely grounded in lie, mystification, and oppression in no way differs from one centred on the promotion, say, of basic human rights: the two are simply forms of objectivity among others.42 This is confirmed by those who tried to integrate the defence of human rights in a Laclauian framework. Samuel

41

This aspect of Laclau’s theory will be further analyzed in Chap. 9, together with Villacañas’s critique. 42 As stressed by Cooke, “by emptying the transcendent object of ethical content, Laclau posits a relation between the transcendent object and its incarnations that is ethically invariable; in consequence, all incarnations of the transcendent object are ethically indifferent. The result is a critical theory that is unable to allow for ethical progress” (2006: 17). Moreover, Beasley-Murray observes that even when it comes to distinguishing and categorizing populist movements, not only Laclau is in no position for providing evaluations which go beyond the superficial dimension of the personal preference; he also has to contradict his own theory, insofar as he “can only distinguish between populist movements by abandoning his theory of populism and appealing to an extra-theoretical common sense; from within the theory itself, he is condemned to repeat the populist gesture that blurs all such political distinctions” (2006: 367).

198

7 Laclau, Mouffe, and the People as Hegemonic Construction

A. Chambers, for instance, states that the theory of hegemony and human rights are in a relation of interdependency: whilst the former allows for an enlarged understanding of the latter, it cannot do without a discourse on rights: “in and of themselves, rights signify nothing more than this absent fullness [. . .] But only the particular political demands – that is, the hegemonic articulation – of some group or groups can perform the function of filling this empty universal with a particular (but therefore never permanent) content”; on the other hand, “the discourse of rights offers the only viable option for playing the role of the universal as the empty signifier” (2004: 198). This is certainly a way to conceive of rights, one which does justice to their intrinsic vagueness and lack of specificity. Nonetheless, in a fully Laclauian fashion, Chambers makes no attempt at providing any philosophical rationale for the desirability of rights and the undesirability of their dismissal, on the grounds of which it may become possible to identify the non-acceptable contents by which the “empty universal” is filled. (b) From statements such as “there is no beyond the play of differences” (2007: 69), or “representation is the absolutely primary level in the constitution of objectivity” (Id: 115), it is hard to grasp how the self-referentiality of the affectively loaded language games performed by every hegemonic formation can be broken, and different constructions of objectivity can dialogue.43 The Habermasian critique of Luhmann’s “monadic” social subsystems springs to mind: the encoded vocabulary of specialized and apparently incommensurable subsystems can be deciphered by the “ordinary language”, the language of the lifeworld, constructed upon both simple syntagmatic44 relations and language games reflecting a shared cultural horizon, enshrining fragments of a communal world the meaning of which goes well beyond the play of differences, pace Laclau. The worlds of meaning that a “deficient being” can create through language can, at least in principle and at least in part, be redeemed from their insularity by language as a pre-existing entity which is independent of them. Laclau’s subject (individual or collective) appears unconvincingly incapable of performing critical self-scrutiny by appeal to moral, cultural and epistemic tools

43

The necessity of a cultural bedrock as the basis of dialogue is highlighted by Butler, whose recurring objection to Laclau, as hinted above, is that no consensus is possible if the holders of different understandings of universality do not have “a critical notion of translation at hand” (2000b: 163), allowing different and incompatible claims to be recognized as such and to be retrieved from their otherwise entrapping linguistic horizon. The aim of social movements, therefore, should be “one of establishing practices of translation among competing notions of universality which, despite any apparent logical incompatibility, may nevertheless belong to an overlapping set of social and political aims” (Id: 167). For a further objection on political incommunicability, cf. Boucher (2008), pp. 104–105. 44 As observed by Rustin, who claims that a central philosophical mistake affecting Laclau and Mouffe’s theory is that “it misrepresents the functions of language”. This is clear from the privileged status enjoyed by its paradigmatic function, which leads Laclau and Mouffe to “to reject the idea of language having a distinct referential function, not “indissolubly mixed up” with its other purposes” (1988: 160, my italics).

7.5 The Partial People, or an Antagonistic Articulation of Ruptural Points

199

posited beyond the antagonistic struggles in which she may happen to be involved. As observed by Maeve Cooke, “Laclau moves too hastily from the thesis of the necessity of the transcendent object to the thesis of the necessity of the belief in its attainability. It is not clear that desire for the transcendent object implies belief in its attainability – the false consciousness that leads to closure of the process of critical interrogation” (2006: 12). (c) In this scenario, it is hard to find a location for the egalitarian imaginary: either it is the invested object of the whole era in which it operates, which appears implausible vis-à-vis the flourishing of different hegemonic formations, or it is not the invested object, in which case its status is unclear. Laclau and Mouffe do not address the issue.

7.5

The Partial People, or an Antagonistic Articulation of Ruptural Points

The second problematic aspect which affects the theory of hegemony, and which is fully unveiled by Laclau’s terminology in On Populist Reason, has to do with the democratic legitimacy of the political order. In his latest work, with a move that makes explicit what was implicit in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau conflates hegemony, people, and politics so that the construction of a hegemonic formation overlaps with the construction of a people, the hegemonic logic with the populist one, both of which being the eminently political logic.45 Thus, Laclau and Mouffe’s46 definition of the people is already at hand: “‘the people’ is not something of the nature of an ideological expression, but a real relation between social agents. It is, in other terms, one way of constituting the unity of the group” (Laclau 2007: 73); “the ‘people’ is conceived as the articulation of a plurality of ruptural points” (Id: 122). The problems with the idea of the people as corresponding to a hegemonic formation should be clear at first sight. Laclau seems to constantly overlook the nature of the universality he theorizes, which is partial in at least two ways. First of

45

This equalization is identified by Arditi, who then goes on to argue that the assimilation of politics and populism entails reducing politics to a derivative, rather than constitutive, moment. If it is true that populism stems from the collapse of an order, so Arditi’s argument runs, then it is such collapse and its causal factors which become primary, whereas the populist – i.e., political – moment is marginalized as its epiphenomenon: “if the political has a primary structuring role, then it must also be able to trigger a de-institutionalization of the given system” (2010: 494). If this is not the case, then the ontological primacy of politics advocated by Laclau is contradicted. 46 It may be worthy to stress that Laclau and Mouffe’s work has remained deeply intertwined throughout the decades following the publication of their co-authored book. Laclau quotes and relies on Mouffe when dealing with the relation between liberalism, democracy, and populism (cf., for instance, On Populist Reason, in particular pp. 166–171); likewise, Mouffe grounds her discussions of populism in Laclau’s theory (see, for instance, her For a Left Populism (2018)), and more in general draws on Laclau’s theorization of universality/partiality for her theory of agonistic democracy.

200

7 Laclau, Mouffe, and the People as Hegemonic Construction

all, it is the product of the fixation of partial elements achieved “at the nominal, not the conceptual, level” (Id: 118), thus being potentially ephemeral, prone to dissolution, and incapable of durable reflexive endorsement by the citizenry. Secondly, and more importantly, the universality of a hegemonic formation does not overlap with the totality of a political order. Unless they argue against fixed juridical borders for collective sovereign subjects, which would be a conclusion consistent with their framework,47 Laclau and Mouffe have to accept the existence of political communities which do not overlap with the politically majoritarian formation.48 Therefore, when Laclau defines the empty signifier as “not a part of a whole but a part which is the whole” (Id: 113), the “whole” to which he is referring is, tautologically, the hegemonic formation performatively condensed by the empty signifier itself; not the whole of the political community at stake, but the whole of the partialities that the empty signifier has been capable of grouping, that is, a partial whole in a broader socio-political landscape. If such partiality is honoured with the rank of ‘the people’ as the holder of sovereignty, problems with the legitimacy and the limits of political power obviously arise. Are the losers not part of the people? Those who dissent from the plebs “which claims hegemonically to constitute a populus” (Id: 107), are they not the people? Moreover, one may add, are the past and future inhabitants of the given political community not part of the people?49 Laclau’s response to the issue, albeit rather confusing, appears to take that path. Contra Claude Lefort, who defines democracy as the emptiness of the place of power and totalitarianism as its embodiment by a uniform entity, Laclau stresses that the

Recall Laclau’s “construction of context” mentioned above. Mouffe does it explicitly, when she states, quite surprisingly, that “the hegemonic struggle to recover democracy needs to start at the level of the nation state [. . .] This is where a collective will to resist the post-democratic effects of neoliberal globalization should be constructed. It is only when this collective will has been consolidated that collaboration with similar movements in other countries can be productive” (Mouffe 2018: 71). Such statements would be probably justified by Mouffe as the practical guidelines for a real struggle in today’s world, but they are hard to explain from her theoretical viewpoint. It is enough to recall that in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy the relationship between national borders and collective identities was treated as follows: “either the political limits are considered as a simple external datum – in which case terms such as ‘French social formation’ or ‘English social formation’ designate hardly more than ‘France’ or ‘England’, and the term ‘formation’ is clearly excessive; or else the agents are reintegrated into the various formations constituting them – and in that case there is no reason why these should coincide with national frontiers” (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 144). Compared to Mouffe’s recent focus on the nation state, this move is somewhat more in line with the conception of the people as a contingent political construction – despite being highly problematic for other reasons, such as the inability to account for the centuries-long durability and stability of the nation-states’ borders and the collective identities therein developing. This issue is completely overlooked by Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of hegemony. 49 Those are just a few intuitive connotations attached to the idea of ‘people’, which hardly displays the “semiotic openness” assumed by Laclau, as Gandesha properly observes: “what the approach seems to elide is the diachronic continuity of this figure [the people]. The idea of ‘the people’ (demos) has a rich and semantically charged history [. . .] which surely must counter-balance the semiotic openness proposed by Laclau” (2018: 59). 47 48

7.5 The Partial People, or an Antagonistic Articulation of Ruptural Points

201

place of power is always occupied at the symbolic level by some hegemonic formation, the nature of which can range from highly democratic to totalitarian. In opposing Lefort, Laclau aims to represent democracy and totalitarianism as two opposite shades on the same spectre: the place of power is always occupied, insofar as “even the most democratic of societies would have symbolic limits to determine who has to occupy the place of power” (Id: 166); nonetheless, the nature of the occupier can stretch from extreme openness to extreme closure. Even in the case of a democratic force occupying the place of power, however, concerns arise. What puzzles is the impression of a quick sleight of hand operated by Laclau, visible in the line of reasoning which leads him to conclusions about the legitimacy of a seizure of power. Laclau highlights the existence of an insurmountable abyss between the particularity of groups integrating a community – often in conflict with one another – and the community as a whole [. . .] We also know that such an abyss can be hegemonically mediated, through a particularity which, at some point, assumes the representation of a totality which is incommensurable with it. But for this to be possible, the hegemonic force has to present its own particularity as the incarnation of an empty universality that transcends it (Id: 170, my italics).

Now, it is not immediately clear, from Laclau’s argument, in which sense the logic of hegemony would play this mediating role, when we know that it only mediates at a symbolical level the partialities belonging to the self-same group it creates, a group which is still partial in the broader context of a political community, as highlighted by Laclau himself: “the ‘people’, in that case [the case of populism], is something less than the totality of the members of the community: it is a partial component which nevertheless aspires to be conceived as the only legitimate totality” (Id: 81). There is no mediation of all the heterogeneous community, but rather the creation of a partial, albeit potentially very broad, “people”, through the mediation of the different demands it brings together. To put it differently, it is quite nebulous what enables the transition from the empty signifier being the symbolic unifier of a hegemonic formation to the hegemonic formation becoming the representative of “an empty universality that transcends it” – which corresponds to “the community”, as it becomes clear shortly thereafter in Laclau’s text. How exactly would it be that the ‘losers’ in the hegemonic struggle, the minorities of all sorts, happen to be absorbed into the symbolic universe of the hegemonic formation which defeated it, and by which they are represented as foes? It should be recalled that Laclau’s is an antagonistic understanding of hegemony, where two objectivities clash in the lack of any shared cultural, linguistic, scientific/epistemic, affective background. There seem to be no tools for them to come to terms,50 and if there were, radical antagonism as depicted by Laclau would be contradicted, in that the two opposing formations would not be fully antagonistic: there would be something

As in Boucher’s rhetorical question, “if discourses fix meaning, then how can there be social dialogue between discourses? How can the observer communicate their judgment to the antagonistic parties? What happens when conflicts arise between alliance partners?” (Boucher 2008: 105).

50

202

7 Laclau, Mouffe, and the People as Hegemonic Construction

they share ab initio. Given the radicality of antagonism, it is unclear how the ‘enemy’ can be subsumed by the hegemonic group. If re-conciliation seems impossible, the only viable alternative is arbitrary exclusion: if the two antagonistic camps into which the background political “community” is split lack any shared terrain, the hegemonic front appears structurally unable to provide whatever justificatory ground of exclusion understandable to its incommensurable foe. The empty signifier integrates the whole community, therefore, because its excluded object (its “constitutive outside”) is excluded from ‘the people’ as such as a consequence of its political defeat, and is maintained within the community as a renegade, or as its “limit”, in Laclau’s own terms. The words following the excerpt above seem to corroborate this reading: “it is not the case that there is a particularity which simply occupies an empty place, but a particularity which, because it has succeeded, through a hegemonic struggle, in becoming the empty signifier of the community, has a legitimate claim to occupy the place” (Ibid, my italics). The point, consistently with antagonism, is the victory in the agonistic field of politics, which legitimizes the occupation of the place of power by a formation cohesive around a symbolic whole. In such interpretive key, it is clear how an empty signifier hegemonizes all the social, while the sense in which one should welcome this as legitimate becomes explicable in the light of a Schmittian understanding of legitimacy, one in which the latter merely results from power dynamics. Such unwarranted form of exclusion is not only taken as a possible scenario – which it is, indeed; it is also said to be somewhat necessary, intrinsic to every political construction, as “antagonism and exclusion are constitutive of all identity”, according to Laclau and Mouffe’s “ontology of the social”. Moreover, going back to the issue of the relationship between democracy and totalitarianism, Laclau and Mouffe’s notion of legitimacy seems to prevent normative evaluation even in the case of totalitarian drifts. They stress, in concordance with Lefort, that the two regimes also share the same condition of possibility, which corresponds to the openness characterizing the social in the modern era: “we see then, paradoxically, that it is the very logic of openness and of the democratic subversion of differences which creates, in the societies of today, the possibility of a closure far more radical than in the past” (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 186). What is puzzling, again, is that totalitarianism is described by Laclau and Mouffe as “one of the dangers which threatens democracy”, or as the imposition of “immutable articulations in an authoritarian manner” (Id: 188), and it is obviously a repulsive scenario from the authors’ perspective; but that repulsion stems more from an individual ethical preference than from the categories of a theory which ultimately, in Ferrara’s words, “forfeits all possibility of distinguishing between coercive and noncoercive forms of political order and, consequently, loses the possibility of identifying any foothold on which a critique of existing hegemonic practices, existing grammars of the political, existing patterns of exclusion could rest its claim to constitute something other than an irrelevantly different (and possibly even more oppressive) form of hegemony” (2014: 94).

7.5 The Partial People, or an Antagonistic Articulation of Ruptural Points

203

In this sense, Mouffe’s avowed appeals to the distinction between agonism and antagonism are a cold comfort. In her argument, “while antagonism is a we/they relation in which the two sides are enemies who do not share any common ground, agonism is a we/they relation where the conflicting parties, although acknowledging that there is no rational solution to their conflict, nevertheless recognize the legitimacy of their opponents” (Mouffe 2005a: 20). As a consequence, in agonism confrontation is “played out under conditions regulated by a set of democratic procedures accepted by the adversaries” (Id: 21). The reason why this is a cold comfort is that “agonism” ends up being nothing more than the partisan tenet of a hegemonic group-to-be, the rise of which Mouffe supports. She recognizes this one-sidedness explicitly in the opening of For a Left Populism: “this book is meant to be a political intervention and it openly acknowledges its partisan nature” (Mouffe 2018: 9). Therefore, the same partiality marks the other central ingredients of Mouffe’s thought, such as the distinction between “the political” and “politics”. Whereas the former corresponds to the condition of antagonism intrinsic to the social, theorized since the times of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, the latter is “the ensemble of practices, discourses and institutions which seek to establish a certain order and organize human coexistence” (Mouffe 2000: 101). Again, Mouffe insists that “domesticating hostility” should be the mission of politics from the perspective of “agonistic pluralism”. This goes hand in hand with the promotion of adversarial, rather than inimical, relations among social actors, where the former assume that “we have a common ground because we have a shared adhesion to the ethico-political principles of democracy: liberty and equality” (Id: 102). With this move, Mouffe outlines a form of consensus which certainly rises from the negation of its antagonists, as every form of consensus must do from her standpoint, but which on the other hand guarantees a high degree of “healthy” dissent, or agonism, within its own borders. She calls it a “conflictual consensus” (Mouffe 2018: 91), and it belongs to the strategy that she sketches out to support and define “left populism”, intended as a movement opposing what she calls “post-democracy”: the vanishing of the democratic dimension from the political orders and narratives from the ‘80s to early 2000s, and the related increasing hegemony of “economic liberalism with its defence of the free market” (Id: 16). On Mouffe’s reading, it has been such tendency to determine the rise of right-wing, authoritarian populisms, which she aspires to counter by means of the theoretical apparatus briefly sketched out.51 Once again, therefore, all the categories she puts on the table52 are conceived as partisan claims to be imposed hegemonically on the holders of alternative positions: in the absence of any “beyond the play of difference”, every act of exclusion is political, and those

51

For further discussion by Mouffe, cf. Mouffe 2005b. It should be observed, at least en passant, that the categories employed by Mouffe are at times strikingly similar to Rawls’s, from a view of politics as meant to narrow down the space of disagreement to overlapping consensus as the collective agreement on some essentials, within which pluralism and discord are possible and welcome. 52

204

7 Laclau, Mouffe, and the People as Hegemonic Construction

who pretend to provide normative grounds for given forms of exclusion are criticized for “moralizing” them while disguising their political nature.53 According to Geoff Boucher, such partisan-minded approach is rooted in Laclau and Mouffe’s work, which has been pervaded since the times of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy by a tension between “hegemony as a neutral frame of description of the politics of modernity and radical democracy as a partisan political project” (Boucher 2008: 84). That is, radical democracy is simultaneously an attempt to descriptively capture the (hegemonic) logic of modern society after the rise of the democratic imaginary and the fall of theologically unified societies, and a partisan project to wage a hegemonic battle against the opponents to the core intuitions of the democratic imaginary itself – such as the conservative Right represented by Thatcher and Reagan, the contemporary Right-wing populists or, more radically, totalitarianisms.54 As stressed by Boucher, from Laclau and Mouffe’s perspective the support for democratic egalitarianism can only be justified on the partial grounds of a notion of ethics, rather than of a normative framework, which would be “depoliticising – in Laclau’s terms – because it admits a basis for political decisions outside of politics” (Id: 111).55 Speaking of normativity, and by way of conclusion, let us briefly dwell on an aspect that constitutes, in my view, an unwarranted and unnecessary move by Laclau and Mouffe, which vitiates the theory of hegemony and raises doubts that I have already partly pointed out above. Laclau and Mouffe’s thought is underlain by the adoption of a Hegelian notion of identity as purely relational and in need of dialectical completion. Once Hegel’s teleological dialectics is rejected, such purely relational identities are said to lack the underlying rational substratum which held them together, and are unwarrantedly depicted as “differences”, “elements”, devoid of any form of autonomy, positivity, solely defined by relations, and therefore capable of integration only through the antagonistic logic. In other words, they seem to lack any shared ground until they join together against an antagonist, with which they share nothing. Therefore, it may be partly true, as Butler claims, that “Laclau’s point of reference here is Saussure rather than Hegel” (Butler 2000a: 31); yet, Laclau and Mouffe’s post-structuralism here seems to dovetail with the recasting of Hegel’s theory of the subject in a

53

For a counter-argument to Mouffe’s critique of Rawls as moralizing exclusion, cf. Ferrara (2014), who points out that “the idea of a “moralization” of the exclusion of the unreasonable from overlapping consensus [. . .] flies in the face of the distinction, drawn by Rawls, of moral versus political constructivism” (2014: 94). Accordingly, Ferrara remarks that the reasonable in no way favours a liberal conception of the good, its constitutive elements being “the acceptance of the burdens of judgment and the willingness to take part in a cooperation with others “on terms that all can accept” – two qualities that people from all sorts of comprehensive conceptions, religious and secular, can embrace” (Ibid). 54 Cf. Boucher 2008, pp. 111–113. 55 For a critique of Laclau’s understanding of ethics and its relationship with politics, cf. Boucher 2008, pp. 111–113.

7.5 The Partial People, or an Antagonistic Articulation of Ruptural Points

205

non-teleological, non-dialectical fashion. This reading is confirmed in the following excerpt on Hegel: For him, identity is never positive and closed in itself, but is constituted as transition, relation, difference. If, however, Hegel’s logical relations become contingent transitions, the connections between them cannot be fixed as moments of an underlying sutured totality. This means that they are articulations (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 95).

The Laclauian antagonistic articulation is the non-necessary form of social construction available to negatively conceived social actors who, in the absence of a unifying Hegelian dialectics, have become pure differences; it is the way to construct identity once there is no longer an integrating rational substratum, and the “elements” of history seem no longer integrated at all. In other words, Laclau and Mouffe assume that either we have, with Hegel, rational necessity, or we have purely differential entities. As Samir Gandesha aptly notices, “it seems that Laclau thinks either we must conceive of necessity in terms of a Hegelian or Marxian philosophy of history that offers the possibility of a closed historical totality in terms either of Absolute Spirit or Communism, or the social dissolves completely into an infinite, quasi-deconstructive play of radical difference” (Gandesha 2018: 59). Hence it is clear, as we saw, that such a post-structuralist twist of Hegelian identity56 paves the way for not only a logic of pure contingency, but also one of pure perspectivism. Laclau and Mouffe’s theoretical struggle for liberating history from the straitjacket of immanent universalism does not only arrive at the acknowledgment of the contingent nature of history and social processes, but also at the pulverization of all objectivity. Once the Hegelian-Marxist doctrine is divested of its original teleology, we are left with history as the indeterminate unfolding of contingent struggles on the one hand, and with a radical perspectivism on the other, as we saw. By virtue of the latter, history, society, and politics are depicted in a Schmittian fashion as the arena of a real-world clash among partial hegemonic formations which can only rhetorically construct their objectivities in opposition to a ‘foe’ with whom it seems constitutively impossible to come to terms. From pure relationality and the social as a field of differences, the perspectivist idea that objectivity and identity can only be constructed negatively, via conflict and exclusion, follows. The point is that Laclau and Mouffe undermine the prospects of normative thought as such, and more generally welcome implausible conclusions, in order to maintain a conception of identity that does not seem necessary to the preservation of a Hegelian idea of relationality divested of dialectics. They do so because they seem to think that either the integration of relational identities is secured by a Hegelian immanent rationality of history, or we are left with an indefinite “play of radical differences”, bridgeable only by antagonism. But cannot identity be relational, incomplete, intersubjective, without being purely negative and constructed only by the force of exclusion? For instance, at many places throughout his writings Laclau mentions Sittlichkeit, and claims that “outside any discursive structure, it is In Dallmayr’s words, Laclau and Mouffe’s theory is a “Hegelianism with a deconstructive twist” (1989: 127).

56

206

7 Laclau, Mouffe, and the People as Hegemonic Construction

obviously not possible to speak of fragmentation, not even to specify elements” (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 96); but if a Sittlichkeit exists, as well as a “discursive structure” within which elements are thinkable, why do not they constitute a partly shared background constellation enabling, in principle, mutual understanding, the construction of non-antagonistic identities, of paradigms of judgment and objectivity which precede and bridge the incompatible objectivities of struggling groups, thus deflating antagonism? And, as argued above with reference to Habermas, why cannot ordinary language provide a further common ground which defuses antagonism and supplies non-antagonistic tools for construction? Furthermore, why, in order to preserve a relational conception of identity, do we have to depict affects in politics so poorly as to admit the sole logic of desire and exclusion as nourishing political construction? Cannot emotions work more variously, and, again, virtually mitigate antagonism and inspire the construction of an objectivity (and normativity) which precedes and exceeds those informing the clashing formations aspiring to hegemony? Just to make an example, as we shall see in the next chapter, essential to William Connolly’s ethical and political thought is the idea that it is possible, at least in principle, that feelings such as a “shared experience of finitude”, of sufferance, of death, generate generosity and mutual empathy across conflicts and antagonisms. Laclau and Mouffe’s insistence on a conception of identity as radically negative and defined by sole differences seems conducive to a dull, monochromatic rendition of affects in politics too. The idea of “contaminated universality”, or “contingent stabilization of partialities”, is a form of universality crafted upon exclusion, and can hardly compensate for Laclau and Mouffe’s demise of normativity and their refusal to provide grounds for critique and judgment. The demise of normativity, in turn, appears to ultimately rest on a conception of identity the defense of which forfeits much of the attractiveness of the theory of hegemony.

References Arditi, Benjamin. 2010. Populism is Hegemony Is Politics? On Ernesto Laclau’s on Populist Reason. Constellations 17 (3): 488–497. Aronowitz, Stanley. 1986. Theory and Socialist Strategy. Social Text 16: 1–16. Beasley-Murray, Jon. 2006. Review: On Populist Reason and Populism and the Mirror of Democracy. Contemporary Political Theory 5: 362–367. Bertram, Benjamin. 1995. New Reflections on the “Revolutionary Politics” of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. boundary 2 29 (3): 81–110. Boucher, Geoff. 2008. The Charmed Circle of Ideology: A Critique of Laclau and Mouffe, Butler and Žižek. Melbourne: re.press. Brown, Wendy. 1995. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Butler, Judith. 2000a. Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism. In Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, ed. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, 11–43. London: Verso.

References

207

———. 2000b. Competing Universalities. In Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, ed. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, 136–181. London: Verso. Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclau, and Reinaldo Laddaga. 1997. The Uses of Equality. Diacritics 27 (1): 3–12. Cabral, Amilcar. 1966. The Weapon of Theory. https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/1 966/weapon-theory.htm. Chambers, Samuel A. 2004. Giving up (on) Rights? The Future of Rights and the Project of Radical Democracy. American Journal of Political Science 48 (2): 185–200. Cooke, Maeve. 2006. Resurrecting the Rationality of Ideology Critique: Reflections on Laclau on Ideology. Constellations 13 (1): 4–20. Critchley, Simon. 1998. Metaphysics in the Dark: A Response to Richard Rorty and Ernesto Laclau. Political Theory 26 (6): 803–817. Dallmayr, Fred R. 1989. Margins of Political Discourse. New York: SUNY Press. Ferrara, Alessandro. 2014. The Democratic Horizon: Hyperpluralism and the Renewal of Political Liberalism. New York: Cambridge University Press. Gandesha, Samir. 2018. Understanding Right and Left Populism. In Critical Theory and Authoritarian Populism, ed. Jeremiah Morelock, 49–70. London: University of Westminster Press. Hunter, Allen. 1988. Post-Marxism and the New Social Movements. Theory and Society 17 (6): 885–900. Kaul, Volker. 2020. On How to Deal with Populism. In Minorities and Populism – Critical Perspectives from South Asia and Europe, ed. Volker Kaul and Ananya Vajpeyi, 29–37. Dordrecht: Springer. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1992. Kierkegaard’s Writings, XII, Vol. 1: Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (1846). Princeton: Princeton University Press, ed. and transl. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Laclau, Ernesto. 1996a. Beyond Emancipation (1992), in Laclau, Ernesto, 1996. Emancipation(s), 2–19. London: Verso. ———. 1996b. Why Do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics? (1994), in Laclau, Ernesto, 1996. Emancipation(s), 36–46. London: Verso. ———. 1996c. Subject of Politics, Politics of the Subject (1995), in Laclau, Ernesto, 1996. Emancipation(s), 47–65. London: Verso. ———. 2000a. Identity and Hegemony: The Role of Universality in the Constitution of Political Logics. In Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, ed. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, 44–89. London: Verso. ———. 2000b. Structure, History and the Political. In Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, ed. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, 182–212. London: Verso. ———. 2005. Populism: What’s in a Name? In Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, ed. Francisco Panizza, 32–49. London: Verso. ———. 2007. On Populist Reason (2005). London: Verso. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. 2001. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985). London: Verso. Lafont, Cristina. 2020. Democracy Without Shortcuts: A Participatory Conception of Deliberative Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miklitsch, Robert. 1995. The Rhetoric of Post-Marxism: Discourse and Institutionality in Laclau and Mouffe, Resnick and Wolff. Social Text 45: 167–196. Mouffe, Chantal. 2000. The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso. ———. 2005a. On the Political. London: Routledge. ———. 2005b. The ‘End of Politics’ and the Challenge of Right-wing Populism. In Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, ed. Francisco Panizza, 50–71. London: Verso. ———. 2018. For a Left Populism. London: Verso. Näsström, Sofia. 2007. The Legitimacy of the People. Political Theory 35 (5): 624–658.

208

7 Laclau, Mouffe, and the People as Hegemonic Construction

Norris, Andrew. 2002. Against Antagonism: On Ernesto Laclau’s Political Thought. Constellations 9 (4): 554–573. Purvis, Trevor, and Allan Hunt. 1993. Discourse, Ideology, Discourse, Ideology, Discourse, Ideology. The British Journal of Sociology 44 (3): 473–499. Rosenthal, John. 1988. Who Practices Hegemony? Cultural Critique 9: 25–52. Rustin, Michael. 1988. Absolute Voluntarism: Critique of a Post-Marxist Conception of Hegemony. New German Critique 43: 146–173. Stavrakakis, Yannis. 1999. Lacan and the Political. London/New York: Routledge. Thien, Deborah. 2007. Disenchanting Democracy. Area 39 (1): 134–135. Villacañas Berlanga, José Luis. 2010. The Liberal Roots of Populism: A Critique of Laclau. The New Centennial Review 10 (2): 151–182. transl. by Jorge Ledo. Zerilli, Linda. 1998. This Universalism Which Is Not One. Diacritics 28 (2): 2–20. Žižek, Slavoj. 2000. Holding the Place. In Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, ed. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, 308–329. London: Verso.

Chapter 8

Dogmatization and Pluralization: William Connolly’s Sovereign People

Abstract This chapter is devoted to the analysis of William Connolly’s agonistic democratic theory, based on the “ethos of pluralization”. Connolly agrees with Laclau and Mouffe on the idea that historical and social processes are contingent and open-ended. Moreover, he shares with them the idea that all that is regarded as universally just and true by given societies at given times is ultimately a “naturalized” contingent product, with no legitimate pretense of universality. What ultimately sets Connolly significantly apart from Laclau and Mouffe is the ethos of cultivation and responsiveness he develops. Insofar as the normative validity of such ethos ultimately escapes contingency, as it results clearly from his pages, Connolly’s agonistic democracy remains incompatible with that of Laclau and Mouffe. The ethos of generosity is the antidote to the dogmatizing drives intrinsic to identity. Nonetheless, such “faith” is not self-standing: a major insight from Connolly is that ethics is unthinkable and anachronistic without politics. Ethics, therefore, must be translated into a democratic ethos, committed to the ongoing politicization of established dogmas. At the end of the chapter, Connolly’s conception of the people is defined, and doubts are raised on his diffidence towards the idea of a shared political culture. Keywords Connolly · Agonistic democracy · Ethos of pluralization · Identity · Difference · Nontheistic faith · Contingency · Dogmatization · Ressentment · Generosity In introducing Connolly’s thought, it is important to highlight that its main cornerstones have not undergone substantive changes throughout the decades. The same framework has been expanded, further articulated and applied to new domains in the years between The Terms of Political Discourse, first published in 1974, and the recent Aspirational Fascism (2017).1 Thus, in the following account I will try to offer the most complete version of Connolly’s ethical and political thought as possible – albeit limited to my own research purposes – by putting next to each

1

For a thorough analysis of the consistence among Connolly’s main works, cf. Schoolman (2008).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Fiorespino, Radical Democracy and Populism, Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations 18, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84969-6_8

209

210

8 Dogmatization and Pluralization: William Connolly’s Sovereign People

other the works he has written during a longer than twenty-years time-span, which harmonically reinforce and clarify each other. An essential core of Connolly’s thought is the indissoluble bond tying ethics and politics: ethics is unthinkable and anachronistic without politics, while good politics cannot do without ethics. The “paradox of identity” constituting Connolly’s main philosophical concern can be solved only if an “ethics of responsiveness” grounded in a Nietzschean appreciation for “life” flows into an active politicization of the established dogmas that social-political communities tend to take as fixed and immutable. As we shall see, the Nietzschean and Foucauldian background enabling Connolly to develop a fascinating theory of ethics and agonistic democracy also contributes to prevent him from acknowledging the normative importance of the ‘culturalization’ of his ethos, which would benefit from becoming the object of a shared consensus. Such background results in the lack of a dualistic perspective on politics, that affects also the definition of the ‘people’ emerging from the analysis of Connolly’s ethicopolitical framework. The failure at distinguishing the elements of the political culture from the ethnic, religious, and historical forms of traditionalism, which often do become dogmatic, prevents Connolly from capturing the liberating potential that a democratic ‘people’ can find in its own cultural resources.

8.1

The Second Problem of Evil: The Paradox of Identity, Dogmatization, and Resentment

The fundamental problem igniting Connolly’s ethical/political thought is what he calls “the second problem of evil”. Whereas the first problem of evil is formulated as the classical issue of theodicy (“the question of how a benevolent, omnipotent God could allow intense suffering in the world” (2002: xv)), the second one “flows from the social logic of identity/difference relations” (Ibid). The core idea, reverberating throughout much of Connolly’s work, is that an internal dissonance lies at the core of identity, at both the conceptual and the empirical/experiential level, which are hardly separable in Connolly’s thinking. Indeed, it is precisely the lived, inescapable experience of having an identity that Connolly aims to conceptualize and dissect in its ethical, social and political implications.2 Before introducing the “paradox of identity” at the basis of the second problem of evil, therefore, let us dig into Connolly’s definition of identity. Identity is described as an entrenched ensemble of unchosen psychic, cultural and bodily dispositions, “the dense self from which choosing, wanting, and consenting proceed” (Id: 64, my italics). The diachronic process of identity formation is partly determined by the identification of differences without which identity could not be defined; yet, differences are not as constitutive of identity as they are in Laclau and 2

Cf. Finlayson (2010).

8.1 The Second Problem of Evil: Identity, Dogmatization, Resentment

211

Mouffe’s thought. The first words in Connolly’s discussion on identity are “My identity is what I am and how I am recognized” (Id: 64), a statement which may hardly be ascribed to the authors of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, in that it implies a higher degree of positivity and determinateness than Laclau and Mouffe may be prone to acknowledge.3 In their framework, identity springs from the quest for a fullness that is precluded by a discursively constructed entity. This entity thus becomes “the antagonist”, the “constitutive outside” which keeps the given identity together. On Connolly’s account, identity is formed throughout a lengthy and contingent process of interaction between the individual – with her physical and psychic features, her socio-economic background and culture – and the sociohistorical context surrounding her. ‘Contingency’ connotes the dynamics of identity formation in four ways: contingent are (a) the “different pool of genes, time of birth, family setting, education, cultural lineup” (Id: 174); (b) the “complex history of parental relations, historical events, disparate experiences” (Ibid); (c) the slow crystallization of dividing lines between elements regarded as relevant to the definition of identity and secondary traits; (d) the relation of interdependence and intertwining between self-representation and collective, socially rooted representations of given identity traits (e.g., being a white male). It is clear that the logic of the constitutive outside in a notion of identity thus framed is only one ingredient among many; the construction of the ‘other’ is one out of a plurality of actors in the complex formation of the self, and thus the self is not the mere consequence of the desirebased construction of objectivity. It has a depth which encompasses the biological dimension, the personal life-history, and the established cultural common sense and collective worldviews that individual identity absorbs, repels and reframes in contingent manners. In Connolly’s words, identity is “relational and collective” (Id: xiv), in that it “is defined through the collective constituencies with which I identify or am identified by others [. . .]; it is further specified by comparison to a variety of things I am not” (Ibid, my italics). According to Chambers, Connolly does not actually go as far as Laclau and Mouffe in recognizing the relational nature of identity, insofar as he tends to depict it as “self-same and autonomous”, thus failing to acknowledge that “within relations of identity/difference, identity itself is always already transformed” (Chambers 2003: 28). Laclau and Mouffe’s propensity to play

3

This can hardly mean, however, that identity-formation is a fully self-conscious process in Connolly’s framework, as Samuel Chambers’s critique of Connolly attempts to prove. On Chambers’s reading, “for Connolly, identity actively creates differences by seeking out its own self-security, but this analysis obscures the ways in which the relational categories of identity and difference are constituted apart from that subject who seeks his or her own identity” (Chambers 2003: 28). This reading of Connolly’s theory on identity is puzzling, given Connolly’s effort at showing how identities are formed throughout lengthy and indeterminate processes, gradually encapsulated in institutional, cultural, discursive, judicial practices (cf. especially ch. 2 of The Ethos of Pluralization), and turned into dogmas in a way that is largely unconscious. The point of the dogmatization of identity is precisely the slow, blind, unwitting establishment of contingent formations which become so entrenched as to appear parts of the natural order of things, thus being hard to dispel.

212

8 Dogmatization and Pluralization: William Connolly’s Sovereign People

down the solidity and rootedness of the ‘already given’, of the established, seems to surface in Chambers’s critique. Connolly thus establishes a connection between the two central attributes of identity, namely depth and contingency. Whereas the two dimensions are often conceived as incompatible, Connolly defends an idea of identity as a deeply entrenched contingent construction, which as we saw is affected by and grounded in genes, education, parental relations, life episodes, socio-cultural environments. This characterization of contingency enables Connolly to reply to the critics who turn his use of the category into the royal road to downplay the depth of the notion of identity he develops: if identity is contingent, so the argument runs, then it has not deep roots in the subject, and can be changed at will. However, if identity is contingent in the sense of resulting from the deep sedimentation of random factors randomly intertwined, then Connolly is in the position to specify that “the term “contingency” as used here in no way implies that a contingency is something that can be changed through will or decision” (2002: 176). On the other hand, Connolly is eager to clarify that such an entrenchment by no means corresponds to a biologization of identity that would hopelessly frustrate reflexive elaboration and (partial) self-restructuring: “to me, identity is biocultural. It mixes nature and culture into corporeal sensibilities” (Id: xvii). The “visceral” dimension of identity does not go so far as to sink it into the quicksand of determinism, condemning the individual to live side by side with a biological configuration which cannot be refashioned. Connolly leaves open a space for the individual to re-work parts of her bio-cultural stances and sensibilities “through artfully devised tactics of the self” (Id: xvi). As we shall see in Sect. 8.3, such a philosophical anthropology constitutes the enabling condition of Connolly’s ethics and theory of democracy. Thus, identity is deeply entrenched though being contingent, and yet is “malleable” in spite of its depth.4 Once briefly portrayed identity as framed by Connolly, let us introduce his formulation of the paradoxical dimension he deems intrinsic to it: “you need identity to act and to be ethical, but there is a drive to diminish difference to complete itself inside the pursuit of identity” (Id: xv). Here the “second problem of evil” lies: identity is a virtuous dimension, essential for the pursuit of an ethical life and for basic human practices such as judgment, cooperative action, self-understanding and comprehension of the world around; nonetheless, it conceals a tendency to sanctify itself by demonizing difference, which is turned into otherness and hence heresy. Precisely the depth of identity as depicted above is the source of such proclivity to take the constitutive features of one’s identity, with their set of assumptions and emotional/corporeal sensibilities, as “the true order of things” (Id: 64), thus projecting “the egoism of identity into the idealism of morality” (Id: 178). This contingently built assemblage is easily construed as the sole source of a universal

For a similar understanding of identity and the self, cf. Ferrara’s “Authenticity Without a True Self” (2009). He advocates a notion of “authenticity” capable of “provid[ing] us with ways of thinking of limits to the self-shaping power of the self without either locating these limits outside the self or invoking the dubious notion of an essential self to be true to” (Id: 34–35).

4

8.1 The Second Problem of Evil: Identity, Dogmatization, Resentment

213

truth, with the effect of marginalizing and dismissing differences as the ontological evil to suppress. This logic operates at the individual and the collective level alike: Connolly takes as “self-evident” the facts “that each individual needs an identity; that every stable way of life invokes claims to collective identity” (Id: 158). Thus, he is careful to stress that a “normalizing society” gratifying repressive tendencies of this sort, far from eliminating differences, “proliferates abnormalities [. . .] Its consummate irony is that if fosters the world of antagonism, violence, and fragmentation to which it purports to be the corrective” (1995: 90). In a Nietzschean fashion (or post-Nietzschean, as he defines his own approach), Connolly captures a spirit of revenge, or resentment, in the naturalization of identity and exclusion of difference that an individual, a group or a whole social order can – and often tend to – pursue. On his account, it is somewhat intrinsic to the human condition that the cornerstones of identity be made to stand as strongholds to be defended from forms of otherness potentially threatening them, and more in general from the fragility of existence. Thrown in a “world of becoming”, or a “messy universe”, humans resent the transiency, suffering, and uncertainty of redemption that mark the human condition. We suffer from the problem of our meaning, and demand that meaning be given to existential suffering. So when the idea of a purpose in existence residing in nature or a god loses its credibility, the insistence that we are rational, responsible agents comes into its own. For if these previous sources of responsibility are dead, some new agency must be created (2002: 79).

Within the strongholds of identity, individuals and communities are enabled to explain evil and sufferance, track the responsible, and revenge by punishing. This is why resentment goes hand in hand with the “demand that the world contain agency” (Id: 79), so that human vicissitudes and evil are explicable as the product of actions for which someone is accountable. Although it is clear from the excerpt that the argument is presented by Connolly as inherent in the logic of identity – which reverberates on “the human condition” as such – his main polemic targets are the two historically developed embodiments of the spirit of revenge in the Western world and culture: Christianity and “liberal individualism”. The former provided a long-lasting ontological reassurance (Nietzsche’s “metaphysical consolation”) against the haziness and fragility of the human experience in the world. Once it exhausted its reassuring and normalizing energy, one of its seeds survived the modern process of secularization and was maintained in the subsequent dominant “doctrine of normalization”, i.e. what Connolly calls the “model of the normal or rational individual” assumed by “liberal individualism”. In this model, one can discern the traces of the old idea that someone has to be responsible for the hardships and meaninglessness troubling human existence, and that therefore “an equivalence between evil and responsibility” (Ibid) must exist. As we shall see in what follows, Connolly aims to redeem liberalism from this cumbersome legacy (in Morton Schoolman’s words, his central question is “can the achievements of liberalism be preserved once its subject is discarded?” (Schoolman 2008: 19)). The target of his critique, however, is not the general tendency of normative philosophy to forge an abstract theorization of the rational individual to

214

8 Dogmatization and Pluralization: William Connolly’s Sovereign People

be used as a benchmark against which to evaluate empirical distortions. Rather, Connolly takes issue with the infiltration of “standards, conventions and expectations into the identity of the normal self” (2002: 74) which are uncritically borrowed from an established cultural substratum that bears undetected seeds of marginalization and exclusion.5 In other words, a given contingent identity establishes itself by naturalizing its own truth and defining forms of otherness as untruth. The idea of a self-responsible rational agent follows this logic: heir to the age-old tradition of a world infused with agency, it emanates from a set of largely arbitrary though culturally entrenched presumptions about what a normal individual is. From Connolly’s perspective, this idea today “provides the ground for a theory of rights, justice, responsibility, freedom, obligation” (Id: 74). At times, Connolly’s elegant prose tends to obscure the double origin of this conception guiding contemporary legal practice and moral sentiments: ‘universal’ on the one hand, historical on the other. As we saw, on the one hand, the need for standards of normality and for a “world with agency” are intrinsic to the naturalization of identity, which in turn is a risk inherent in identity as such: haunted by the precariousness of life, humans invariably tend to dogmatize the elements of their own identity, which make evil meaningful and allow identifying the responsible. On the other hand, the theory of the rational and responsible agent is the peculiar form this necessity has assumed throughout the historical process of secularization in the West. Once divine laws and interpretive paradigms dissolved, Westerners (Connolly has chiefly in mind Northern Americans)6 slowly fossilized the tools of their own culture – including momentous innovations in moral theory such as the Enlightened appreciation of human reason against religious dogmatism – into a set of standards of normalization. The normal individual defined as “unambiguous”, rational and responsible is a culturalhistorical product which allows “treating that in itself and other selves which falls below the threshold of responsibility as a natural defect in need of conquest or conversion, punishment or love” (Id: 80). Connolly devotes the entire Chapter 2 of The Ethos of Pluralization to the exploration of this normalizing device operating in the American society and legal practice. His aim is to unveil how the logic of responsibility, which has permeated the legal, juridical and moral commonsense, conceals the same spirit of revenge often animating the criminals who violate the standards of normality set by the 5

This critique provides Connolly with a foothold to target a varied array of authors, from Rawls to Walzer and Taylor (cf., respectively, Identity/Difference, p. 73, and Ch. 5 of The Ethos of Pluralization; Identity/Difference, pp. 89–92. For a critique of all their approaches as neglecting the “ontopolitical interpretation”, cf. Ch. 1 of The Ethos of Pluralization). Concordantly, Connolly openly objects with both liberal individualism and communitarianism, in that “the individualist seeks to minimize such modes of action [collective and inter-constituency action] while the communitarian demands a strong cultural consensus as its necessary basis” (Connolly 2005: xx). 6 The relation tying Connolly’s thought with his own historical and social context of origin is highlighted by Alan Finlayson, who notes that Connolly’s philosophical endeavour is impelled by the bitter perception of “the failure of America to live up to a certain kind of democratic promise. Connolly’s philosophical question might be ‘Why has America not yet become what it might and how can it finally do so?’” (Finlayson 2010: 18).

8.1 The Second Problem of Evil: Identity, Dogmatization, Resentment

215

paradigm of the responsible agent itself. Just as the criminal resents and seeks revenge against the hardships, marginalization, even violence she may have suffered, likewise the innocent spectators of a crime experience a sense of astonishment and moral repugnance which awakens their desire to punish. The socially recognized – and yet arbitrary – idea that individuals are fully rational agents, “morally responsible for willful deviations from normal identities” (Ibid), unleashes such vengeful feelings, thus legitimating the demonization of those who violate the standards of rationality, who are irredeemably identified with evil as such. Patterns of desire, therefore, animate all the actors implicated in a trial: “some of these desires are authoritatively dressed in the categories of law, agency, responsibility, and justice, while others are authoritatively reduced to myth, manipulation, devilishness, and delusion” (1995: 45). Thus, punishment of criminals is turned into a “revenge through the law” (Id: 48) against them, the criterion and justification of which is more the degree of outrage they elicited than the prevention against possible future crimes and the social re-integration of criminals. The discussion provides a meaningful and insightful exemplification of the consequences that the moralization of contingent identities, intrinsic to the logic of identity as rendered by Connolly, can and still does bring about in contemporary world; yet, Connolly’s argument appears at times too radical. To start with, when it comes to the legal sphere, mitigating circumstances do exist which reduce the culpability of a criminal, thus proving to assume the individual to be more multifaceted than a pristine bearer of rationality. Certainly more can be done in such sense, and certainly every legal system has flaws and grey areas within which a spirit of revenge and a rationalistic notion of responsibility thrive; nonetheless, the higher complexity that legal systems, theories and practices embrace is also manifest in the diffidence with which they generally regard the spectacularization and ‘democratization’ of criminal trials. The potential rise of emotional bandwagons affecting the phases of investigation and trial is feared precisely because the legal sphere is at least to some extent immune to that commonsense which demands that the individual penalty be proportional to the collective moral shock. Therefore, it sounds excessive to chain the extant legal practices and the doctrines of justice and rights to a notion of the responsible and rational individual which allows for the ontological disparagement of transgressors. Nonetheless, when it comes to the critique of precisely that commonsense, or cultural identity, which ignites the spirit of revenge and demands for correspondence between punishment and public outrage, Connolly’s analysis and solutions are certainly of great interest. We shall focus on the latter in Sect. 8.3. In his explicit polemic with post-War American pluralists, Connolly glimpses an anti-pluralist drive also in the contemporary “culture of pluralism”: “a conventional pluralist celebrates diversity within settled contexts of conflict and collective action [. . .] But what about the larger contexts within which the pattern of diversity is set? How plural or monistic are they?” (Id: xiii). Static conceptions of pluralism as the mere celebration of diversity, on Connolly’s reading, tend to clash with the everpresent drives to pluralization, which attempt to stretch and negotiate the limits within which diversity is thinkable and acceptable. Pluralism is fully developed only when it appreciates the dynamic nature of life and society, thereby acknowledging

216

8 Dogmatization and Pluralization: William Connolly’s Sovereign People

that an established, stagnant “culture of pluralism also engenders obstacles to new drives to pluralization that must recurrently be challenged” (Id: xiv). One interesting implication of Connolly’s framework on identity as discussed thus far, which provides a first hint of his philosophical standing, is the outspoken rejection of a view of politics as a bare battlefield for “totalistic identities engaged in implacable struggles against those differences that threaten their hegemony and exclusivity” (Id: xxi). The theory of politics as antagonism, portrayed by Connolly in this excerpt, is rejected in lieu of a form of normativism that takes the respect for otherness as essential. From such vantage point, Connolly can discern and evaluate the worst outgrowths of the logic of identity, and thereby attempt to redeem the latter. This opposition of “conventional” pluralism and Connolly’s NietzscheanFoucauldian pluralism was contrasted by Mark Wenman’s analysis of the philosophical similarities between the two, meant to “overturn the received view of Dahl and others, and to show how they anticipate the major themes of Connolly’s iteration on pluralism” (Wenman 2015: 56). Wenman’s discussion aims to unveil three core ingredients which Connolly and the old pluralists share: (a) a normative core animating their thinking, which yet does not adopt stability as its central value, as the contemporary vulgate on American pluralism pretends. Rather, “the purpose of pluralist democracy is (with Dahl) to prevent domination or, conversely (with Lindblom), to facilitate self-government in the form of the immanent self-direction of the social process” (Id: 62); (b) a commitment to change marked by openness and responsiveness towards the disadvantaged, and an acknowledgment of the “constant and irreconcilable tension between equilibrium and disequilibrium” (Id: 68) characterizing socio-political systems. To prove this point, Wenman deconstructs two commonsense ideas on American pluralism: firstly, that it underplays the constitutive exclusions of pluralism – as Connolly claims –, and secondly, that it attaches to the social an “inbuilt tendency” towards equilibrium, which reproduces stability and inhibits conflict and social change; (c) a dynamic ontology of complex chaos, which moves away from efficient causality and the “chronological idea of time”, and which is explicitly inspired from William James – and from Nietzsche, as we shall see in Sect. 8.3. According to Wenman, Connolly has this framework in common not with the post-War pluralists, but with the very first American pluralists writing seminal works at the beginning of the twentieth century, such as Harold Laski, Mary Parker Follett and Arthur F. Bentley. Before digging deeper into Connolly’s alternative formulation of pluralism, which overlaps with his proposed solution to the paradox of identity as such, let us briefly introduce the philosophical counterpart of the logic of identity/difference.

8.2 The Ontopolitical Interpretation and the Dogmatism of Contemporary Philosophy

8.2

217

The Ontopolitical Interpretation and the Dogmatism of Contemporary Philosophy

“We are attuned to an ugly history of moral certainty” (2017: 91). On Connolly’s reading, the logic of identity has tacitly forged and has been fostered also by much of Western philosophy. The misplaced tendency to confuse philosophical foundations (which Connolly deems inescapable) with ontological, universal foundations, i.e. to universalize contingent foundations as in the logic of identity, characterized pre-modern, modern and contemporary thought alike. Whereas this approach is evident in pre-modern philosophies such as “Aristotelian teleology and Christian doctrines of creation” (1995: 2), it appears more disputable once attributed to contemporary philosophies. Nonetheless, Connolly’s main polemic object is precisely the contemporary claim, expressed by philosophers by and large, that their own speculations are not grounded in any thick ontological set of assumptions. According to Connolly, it is precisely such claim that conceals the universalization of a particular and contestable stance: the more a presumption is taken as universal and inherent in the natural order of things, the more invisible it becomes, and the more the perception of assuming a minimal ontology is enhanced. Connolly identifies three possible strategies pursued by contemporary philosophers to defend the idea that their own thinking is free from ontology: (a) in late-modernity, the starting point of the philosophical inquiry is finally “the world as it is” (Ibid), liberated from the burdens of strong onto-theological assumptions; (b) once the old-fashioned paradigms interpreting the world lost their credibility, we are left with “a world without intrinsic purpose, indifferent to human concerns” (Id: 3), which finally human reason can master and control; (c) even if we embrace contestable presumptions, they are not the sources of the deep conflicts of modernity, and thus should not be the object of our inquiries. In order to tackle such widespread biases and prove that every “political interpretation is ontopolitical” (Id: 1, my italics), in the sense of being inescapably grounded in ontological considerations, Connolly takes pains to identify the presumptions underlying “Anglo-American discourse in the late-modern time” (Id: 16). On his account, contemporary philosophers can be roughly divided into supporters of “mastery” (“the drive to subject nature to human control” (Id: 17)) and “attunement” (“a strategy by which members of a community become more closely oriented to a higher direction in being and to a more harmonious life” (Ibid)).7 Both such views can be further divided according to whether priority is given to the individual or to the community. What lies outside the boundaries enclosing these two mutually acknowledging stances is regarded by Connolly as “the untruth of contemporary political discourse” (Id: 18), that is, that which exceeds and thus is concealed by the evaluating criteria and standards of correctness of our epoch.

7

The authors that Connolly has in mind are Rawls, Habermas, Benhabib, Rorty, Walzer, Sandel, MacIntyre, and others.

218

8 Dogmatization and Pluralization: William Connolly’s Sovereign People

Connolly identifies five core presumptions that the holders of the disparate positions identified share: (a) an ontology that compensates for the loss of pre-modern foundations by postulating a sort of principle governing the world, which is constructed as either an intrinsic “pliability” of the world and nature or an intrinsic telos to which we can “attune”; (b) the scarce propensity to investigate their own ontological presumptions, which are taken as natural and provide the “ultimate standards to be natural, rational, established by common sense” (Id: 20); (c) the above mentioned assumption of a “unified model of the world” (Id: 21), which engenders a tendency to trivialize the value of agonistic contestation and disturbance in the political life of a community; (d) the “domestication of contingency”, by which Connolly means that contingency is downplayed and possibly denied, as it exceeds and forces boundaries and presumptions taken as natural; (e) the simplistic dismissal of post-Nietzschean thought and thinkers, such as Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Butler, Laclau and others, who are systematically banned from the philosophical orthodoxy of contemporary times. According to Connolly, dominant authors are blind and deaf to the post-Nietzscheans’ deconstructions of their certainties regarding rationality, agency, responsibility, which post-Nietzscheans replace with an anthropology of desire and affection (somewhat Hobbesian in character) framing the subject as constitutively “double”: “the transcendental doublet is a being whose role as governing subject of action and inquiry is perpetually chased by the compulsion to clarify opaque elements in its desire, perception, and judgment” (Id: 11). Post-Nietzscheans are thus easily ignored and labelled as nihilistic, relativist, anarchic, and more, by all the authors in the contrasting but mutually acknowledging dominant schools of thought. They are the “untruth” which the contemporary dogmatism cannot but rule out, insofar as, like Nietzsche, they disturb “every attempt to ground morality in something necessary, automatic, or final” (Id: 26). So much for Connolly’s strategy to demonstrate that contemporary political theory is impregnated with ontological presumptions, in spite of its protagonists’ “pretenses to nonfoundationalism, ontological minimalism, antiessentialism, and overlapping metaphysical consensus” (Id: 5). Ontopolitical schemes necessarily guide and affect every form of thought and every philosophical method.8

8

In an earlier work, written in 1974, Connolly takes the issue from a different angle, and attempts to prove that no neutral descriptive judgments can be provided in politics, as the concepts and words through which we pretend to describe are morally impregnated and “essentially contested”, in that the moral kernels they embed inform their criteria of application. Therefore, adopting a concept to describe a political scenario implies simultaneously an evaluation of the scenario and a definition of the concept’s scope – definition which must become more conscious and explicit when the application is contested by others. We think that the concept applies precisely when we deem the scenario consistent with the moral perspective enfolded in the concept. Connolly’s conclusion is that “these contests over the correct use of partly shared appraisal concepts are themselves an intrinsic part of politics” (2008a: 277). As highlighted by Schoolman, “with the thesis of essentially contested concepts we glimpse a contingent world governed by an ethic considerate of the pluralization of life in all its normative forms, the ontological starting point from which Connolly never wavers” (Schoolman 2008: 24). According to Sophia J. Mihic, on the other hand, Connolly

8.3 Exceeding Identity

219

Connolly’s demarcation does not come without problems. More specifically, it seems important to contextualize the boundary between the “dominant” philosophical canon and the ‘underdogs’ who tirelessly seek “to awaken thought from this “anthropological” sleep” (Id: 12), a scheme which risks to sound awkward and arbitrary today. Genealogy, deconstruction and psychoanalysis gained momentum in the Anglo-American philosophical context much more than it was true in 1995; and so did the varied multitude of political philosophers inspired by them, from Rancière to Laclau, from Žižek to Butler, from Agamben to Mouffe, whose populist cogitations are even fashionable nowadays. Connolly’s matrix would hardly hold now, and it must be understood in the academic context of the ‘90s. It is worth noting, however, that Connolly’s list of “dominant” thinkers was not much longer than the list of the post-Nietzscheans, even in 1995.9 Be that as it may, what is relevant to stress is that Connolly’s thought constantly insists on the hiatus between philosophical foundationalism and philosophical foundations, which echoes the gap between the naturalization of identity and identity as such: “nothing is fundamental”, but all thought and all order demand foundation; no specific identity is ontologically fundamental, but all thought and all order demand identity. Let us now explore Connolly’s attempt to fill this “space between the indispensability of identity and its drive to dogmatism” (2002: 159).

8.3

Exceeding Identity: Nontheistic Reverence for the Abundance of Life, Cultivation, and Responsiveness

To start with, a broad philosophical premise. Connolly defines his own relationship to Nietzsche as one of “agonistic indebtedness” (1995: 30), in that his adoption of central Nietzschean themes and perspectives cannot but come with a rejection of others, such as Nietzsche’s outspoken anti-democratic and aristocratic sentiments. Among Nietzsche’s core ingredients that Connolly undoubtedly inherits is the (together with Charles Taylor) fails to fully explore the consequences of his own framework, as he does not see that the very interdependence of normative evaluation and facticity he advocates entails that “we cannot neatly package our values and list our biases as a propaedeutic to inquiry, because their elucidation and discovery are among the fruits of the inquiry” (Mihic 2010: 101, my italics). Therefore, Connolly’s focus on the “evaluating self” and the clarification of its evaluative perspective betrays a “hegemony of normative theorizing” in his philosophy. Connolly fails to live up to the consequences of his framework in that he overlooks that the priority he concedes to evaluation and the self is inconsistent: if pure description is impossible, the impossibility of pure evaluation follows. Evaluation is intertwined with an explanatory-descriptive dimension through which concepts are fine-tuned. As a consequence of such self-centrism in his philosophical analysis, Connolly is unable to “theorize an interpretive political science advanced from the perspective of either language as itself a constitutive force or from the perspective of worldly events as themselves constitutive forces” (Id: 108). 9 Cf. The Ethos of Pluralization, pp. 4 and 25.

220

8 Dogmatization and Pluralization: William Connolly’s Sovereign People

ontological dynamism, which in Connolly’s framework trickles down to the social sphere so as to deliver him a social ontology connoted by dynamism. That life and vital forces, drives and desires flow perpetually in “a world of becoming”, or “a messy universe”,10 is a guiding assumption for Connolly’s whole philosophical inquiry, and this idea is ultimately crystallized into the normative stance he develops, which he defines, not by chance, as “a new “essentialism”, if you wish, one that construes its “ground” as contestable, fugitive, and ambiguous rather than fixed, solid and harmonious” (2002: 182). The dogmatism of identity is certainly problematic because it paves the ground for conflict among settled constituencies; but what seems to concern Connolly even more is that the dogmatism of identity represses and tends to take revenge against the flux of life and the irruption of the new. Thus, his whole ‘research question’ (how to escape the dogmatization of identity) is moved by the assumption of an ontological dynamism, and his answer can ultimately be tracked to the same source.11 Therefore, differently from Laclau and Mouffe’s analysis of the historical rise of social movements from the ashes of the ancien régime, for Connolly social “non-fixity” is a a-historical condition, pertaining to the world and the human communities as such; the world is “messy” and dynamic, life overabundant, and new identities tirelessly arise in human social formations.12 Precisely such “tenacity and multifariousness of life” (Id: 170), or the “rich diversity of being” (1995: 31), have the power of eliciting a feeling that Connolly defines as “the most basic ethical source I confess” (2002: xx, my italics). Such affective orientation, or “operative faith”, is once again inherited from the “Nietzschean affirmation of the “abundance of life”” (2002: 10), or the claim that “goodness proceeds from abundance rather than a transcendental command” (1995: 28).

10 For Connolly’s discussion on and indebtedness to William James’s “philosophy of a pluralistic universe”, cf. Chapter 3 of Pluralism (Connolly 2005). 11 Cf. Wenman (2015), Valentine (2010), Schoolman (2008). 12 What Connolly shares with Laclau and Mouffe, however, is the idea of the contingency and openendedness of social processes. This commonality was stressed by David R. Howarth, whose Laclauian-Derridean project theorizing “social, political, and fantasmatic logics” working as explanatory devices is said to benefit from Connolly’s notion of contingency: “in accordance with Connolly’s critique of mainstream political science, logics stand opposed to lawlike explanations, deep interpretations, or causal mechanisms conceived in terms of efficient causality [. . .] Logics bring something to the explanation that is not simply given by the practices or interpretations of agents, but they are always anchored in some way in the latter” (Howarth 2010: 31). Moreover, Connolly shares with Laclau and Mouffe the idea that all that is regarded as universally just and true by given societies or social actors at given times is ultimately a “naturalized” contingent construction, with no legitimate pretense of universality. What ultimately sets Connolly radically apart from Laclau and Mouffe is the ethos of cultivation and responsiveness he develops, which will be the object of the following analysis. Insofar as the normative validity of such ethos ultimately escapes contingency, Connolly’s philosophy and theory of agonistic democracy are starkly incompatible with Laclau and Mouffe’s. Jeremy Valentine criticizes Connolly precisely on the grounds that his ontological framework ultimately contradicts contingency: the ontology of “becoming” eludes contingency and indeterminacy by virtue of its being “the real essence of what is” (Valentine 2010: 215). Moreover, as we shall see, Valentine points out that the essential dimension ascribed to becoming is biased towards democracy and globalization.

8.3 Exceeding Identity

221

This spiritual disposition is evoked by Connolly through many formulations: “generosity”, “presumptive generosity”, “nontheistic reverence”, or “gratitude”, for the abundance of being, “care” or “love” for the earth and “the rich diversity of life,” “operative faith”, “operative attachment to life as a protean set of energies” (Ibid). In a nutshell, the point is that a configuration of ‘being’ as abundant, diversified and in a perpetual motion prevents the construction of a transcendental basis of morality capable of exhausting it. Rationalistic foundations end up dogmatizing their own tenets, thus repressing life and its polymorphic manifestations, that irreducibly exceed the boundaries of transcendental systems and principles of morality. Thus, drawing mainly from Nietzsche and Foucault, Connolly suggests to “oppose to the authoritarianism of the various commands of ethics that have populated western thought an ethic of cultivation” (2002: 10). Ethics stems thus from a faith, a reverence, a gratitude, a sense of awe impressed by the beauty and diversity of life and its multiform expressions, which a single life-form can never enclose: although identity is “indispensable”, “yet it does not exhaust the tenacity and multifariousness of life” (Id: 170). The forms of otherness that the individuals encounter attest for such abundance, and elicit the curiosity, admiration, and a feeling of openness and respect which dismantles the spirit of self-preservation and revenge inhabiting entrenched identities. Connolly specifies that this “attachment to life flows deeper than the commands of identity and the phenomenology of decision” (Id: 168). What this means is that every human being bears in herself the seeds of such nontheistic faith, below and before the pressures of her contingently constructed identity. Connolly’s ethical source is not one identity among many, but an underlying human virtue, “a strain coursing through most people – if they have not been beaten down too severely by the world” (Id: xxvi). Only a blind spirit of revenge, a desire to punish stemming from too “severe” and miserable a life, can drain the flow of an otherwise essentially human sense of “impious reverence” (1995: 31) for life’s plenitude. This is all the clearer in Connolly’s more recent discussion on how to deal with those who neglect or reject nontheistic reverence: he prompts the reader to “listen more closely” (2013: 131) to the claims of those who deny diversity; as a second step, one can “dramatize more vibrantly this seed of existential attachment so that it may become enlarged” (Ibid); as a third and last step, only political resistance remains against extreme and “ruthless” forms of closure and fundamentalism. The lack of ethicality appears as a sort of anomaly, albeit frequent, which affects those who did not have the “luck” to develop it throughout the contingent unfolding of their lives. Far from being a specific form of ethics pertaining to a given identity, Connolly takes ethics as something preceding and underlying identity, a “sense of obligation” (Id: 133) that can contribute to intervene positively on the possible dogmas of identity. As we shall see later, this aspect of Connolly’s thinking was criticized especially by Moya Lloyd, who claims that in tying pluralism so steadfastly to the virtuous ethos of cultivation, Connolly neglects to “consider how those in a less favourable position, those who are culturally unintelligible and unreal, might be able to engage democratically” (Lloyd 2010: 123).

222

8 Dogmatization and Pluralization: William Connolly’s Sovereign People

From nontheistic faith, a two-sided ethics flows, which is well summarized in the following formula: “the key may be to turn disturbance of what you are into critical responsiveness to what you are not” (1995: xviii). On the one hand, thus, stands selfreflexivity, or an ethos of cultivation: grateful individuals towards the abundance and diversity of being are inclined to “disturb what they are”, that is, to adopt a selfreflexive posture of ongoing examination of their own contestable certainties which foreclose diversity. Connolly envisions the virtuous idea of a “mature self” pursuing “a practice of the self as a work of art” (Id: 69), in which the individual is willing to rework her own entrenched convictions and horizons. Connolly himself highlights how the notion – and normative requirement – of self-reflexivity marks a further considerable element distinguishing him from “Girard, Lacan, and, say, Levinas, as theorists of desire”,13 who “meet Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze, Irigaray, and, sometimes, Derrida, as those who seek to overcome ressentiment in desire by working on the demand for fullness in the structure of desire” (Id: 55, my italics). As we saw, the dimension of desire often animates the criminal and the judge alike, so that for Connolly they are opposed by their different drives to revenge, rather than being posed on the extremes of a Manichean polarity. Desire is thus an essential dimension of individual and collective life, decisionmaking, and even judgment. Nonetheless, drawing mainly on Nietzsche and Foucault’s “ideals of self as work of art” (Ibid: 55), Connolly points out that a self-reflexively oriented individual can work on her desire, rather than being forever entrapped in the relentless quest for a fullness that will never be attained: “the mature subject [. . .] becomes more ironical about destructive tendencies built into this very mode of identification” (Id: 54–55). The awareness of and gratitude for the abundance of life endow the mature self with the awareness that her own desire is nothing but a yearning for a fullness which is unattainable, and that life always exceeds the partial forms of identification fuelling desire. As we saw above, this work of “craftsmanship” on the self is made possible by Connolly’s anthropology: his notion of identity as “biocultural” puts him in the position to imagine an individual that “patiently applies tactics to itself to modify itself” (1995: 69) in spite of the depth, even corporeal, of her identity. Thus, for Connolly objectivity is not a straightforward product of desire, as in the Lacanian ontology undergirding Laclau and Mouffe’s agonistic democracy. On the other hand, and consequently, self-reflexivity comes with “responsiveness to what you are not”. The idea that “to be ethical is often to put identity, to some degree, at risk” (2002: xix), brings with itself a posture of commitment to and care for the forms of otherness that call into question the pillars of identity, and that thus are often an object of revenge. The ethic of cultivation is thus also an ethos of critical responsiveness, or receptivity, in which differences and new realities are listened to, notwithstanding their potential to jeopardize the established identities and constituencies. The “mature self” who cares for the plurality of being takes for granted the contingency and fallibility of her own certainties and is willing to “coming to terms 13

Also cf. The Ethos of Pluralization (Connolly 1995), note 16, p. 213.

8.3 Exceeding Identity

223

affirmatively with the comparative contestability of the faith each constituency brings to politics” (Id: xxii). The ethos of critical responsiveness thus competes with fundamentalism as two opposite forms of “responses to the same movements of difference” (1995: xvii): whereas the latter sanctifies identity and demonizes difference, the former taps the underlying source of ethics as faith in the abundance of being, and takes on a critically receptive posture. That is why Connolly stresses that although the ethical relationship connecting members of a constituency is essential, “the most important ethical bond is that formed between constituencies engaged in intensive relations of interdependence and strife” (Id: xviii).14 Such bond is named by Connolly agonistic respect, and regarded as an essential “reciprocal” civic virtue allowing citizens who “confess different sources of morality” (2002: xxv) to contest and strive with each other while acknowledging “the dignity of those who embrace different sources of respect” (Id: xvi). As we shall see, Connolly’s agonistic democracy hinges on the civic virtue of agonistic respect and the ethics of cultivation and responsiveness underlying. Stephen White has observed two respects under which Connolly’s ethics and insights on identity are a “signal contribution” to ethical and political philosophy. Firstly, his distinction “between the ontological relation of identity/difference that is constitutive for human being, on the one hand, and the psychological-political relations between them, on the other” (White 2010: 50), has unveiled the necessary, ontological dimension of identity, while capturing the possibility of psychological-political interventions on identity itself by means of the above mentioned “tactics of the self”. Secondly, White argues that Connolly’s ethos is preferable to alternative versions, such as Derrida’s “hospitality”, in that it is somewhat more multi-faceted and flexible: it can be honoured and pursued through a broad and diversified range of political and individual actions or dispositions, more or less suitable “at different times and with different movements” (Id: 57). Critical self-reflexivity is also Connolly’s response to the issue of ontopolitics discussed above: how to avoid the assumption of an ontological, ‘authoritarian’ foundation for thought while maintaining as indispensable the centrality of a set of presumptions grounding thought and judgment? The strategy pursued by Connolly, which he calls “positive ontopolitical interpretation”, amounts to an admission of fallibility: the thinker engaged in any sort of analysis of the real is demanded to affirm “the contestable character of [her] own projections” (1995: 36). Admitting the contingency, instability and non-conclusive nature of one’s presumptions is to avoid precisely that dogmatization, or naturalization, of the grounds of thought which Connolly aims to elude. Crucial to the practice of self-reflexivity, Connolly stresses, are two pivotal strategies of critical detachment from one’s own projections: genealogy and deconstruction. Whereas the genealogist is devoted – not differently than Adorno’s

14

In a discussion on Connolly, however, Stephen White has mentioned Romand Coles’s emphasis on “how valuable such presumptive generosity can be in the internal workings of coalition building, as opposed to its value as one initially reacts to the appearance of some novel political movement” (White 2010: 57).

224

8 Dogmatization and Pluralization: William Connolly’s Sovereign People

“critical theorist” – to the construction of “counter-histories of normality” (2002: 181) which dismantle naturalized biases, standards of normality, settled institutions and practices, the deconstructionist highlights “the element of undecidability” and ambiguity residing in rationality, thus unveiling the inadequacy, constitutive incompleteness and repressive potential of “current definitions of rationality, identity and normality” (1995: 36).15 Let us shortly dwell further on the kind of philosophical stance assumed by Connolly. At many places, he stresses the groundless character of his notion of ethics, which cannot be derived from “a common source certain or deep enough to sustain the very ethical perspective it embraces” (2002: xix). Against the Kantian scholarship, which ties ethics to an imperative principle and tends to “project forward an assumption of “unbroken progress”” (2013: 130), and more in general against Western philosophy’s quest for an “epistemic ground for ethics” (2002: 10), Connolly insists, as in much of Lebensphilosophie, that ethics cannot be conceptually and authoritatively grounded, as it coincides with precisely that feeling of “fervency for life” that the imposition of an epistemic principle tends to foreclose. “Post-Nietzscheans”, Connolly stresses, “cannot prove their case by rising above the level of reason [. . .] Of course our own presuppositions acquire the status of quasitranscendentals. But we then seek to problematize these too” (1995: 28). His solution, once again, is a critical self-reflexivity, by which one’s presumptions, or the certainties of one’s identity,16 are always taken as non-conclusive and contestable for the sake of the responsiveness to difference prompted by the feeling of gratitude towards “life and the earth”.17 This advocated lack of rational foundations for ethics, however, does not mean that Connolly’s is not a markedly normative and universalistic stance. The normative element is clear in his postulation of a capacity for ethicality underlying every individual who had the “luck”18 to develop it “from those caresses, exemplars, teachings, social connections” (2013: 132), and which can still be awakened in those to whom life turned its back. Such “spirituality” is cross-cultural, and can be underpinned and subscribed to by many different moral perspectives and cultures which contest each other without calling into question the underlying feeling of

15 For Connolly’s critique of the limits of genealogy and deconstruction, see The Ethos of Pluralization, pp. 34–36. The most interesting insight, consistent with Connolly’s claim that all thinking requires foundations, is that Foucault fails to see that genealogy itself requires a precise evaluative perspective in order to be carried out: “Foucault sometimes acts as if genealogy can proceed simply by bracketing ontological assumptions in established perspectives” (1995: 35). 16 Cf. Chapter 3 of Pluralism, where Connolly recalls and endorses William James’s claim that an inextricable nexus exists between a philosopher’s “lived experience of the world, the existential hopes and fears that he invests in those experiences, and his fundamental philosophy” (2005: 69). As Connolly reports, those who believe the opposite are called “intellectualists” by James. 17 Connolly insists on self-reflexivity also in a more recent work, The Fragility of Things (2013). Cf. p. 139. 18 For Connolly’s brief discussion on the “element of luck folded right into the sources of ethical life” (Connolly 2013: 132), cf. The Fragility of Things (Id), p. 132.

8.4 Connolly’s Ethicopolitical Philosophy

225

reciprocal respect which unites them in an ethical bond. Rather than proceeding “from universal premises through argumentation to necessary conclusions, an interpretive ethics of discursive cultivation is highly unlikely to generate unavoidable implications” (2002: 167); yet, on the grounds of an affective/fideistic disposition it establishes a multi-sourced set of “maxims of practical wisdom” (2013: 138) which is “noble in itself” (2017: 84), such as critical responsiveness, self-reflexivity, mutual listening.19 Although freed from the strict requirements of logical cogency, Connolly’s ethics embeds an ensemble of requirements that is far from arbitrary or indeterminate and defines what is right, just, or preferable; not by chance, he calls fundamentalism and dogmatism “wrong ways of living identity” (2002: 172). In doing so, Connolly attains a critical/evaluative universal foothold and is able to design an array of limitations to the political democratic process, which will be the focus of the analysis in what follows. Now, the framework outlined so far has certainly much less to do with political philosophy and democracy than with ethics. The political element comes into play when Connolly casts light on the indissoluble bond connecting the ethical and the political dimensions, which will be explored in the next section. The analysis of Connolly’s political theory will reveal a further trace of the normative character of his philosophical endeavour, detectable in the constraints he poses on the democratic process, or the “borders of pluralization”.

8.4

Connolly’s Ethicopolitical Philosophy, the Constitutive Incompleteness of ‘The People’, and a Problematic Understanding of Culture

In his reflections on Nietzsche, Connolly deals with the figure of the Übermensch and its plausibility in the contemporary world. The gist of his discussion is that in the hyperconnected world of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries it is not thinkable, nor meaningful, that a few exceptional individuals rise beyond resentment to a higher moral existence and live a life of “relative solitude”, largely disconnected from the state20 and the social fabric: “exactly what late-modern life renders inescapable is the intensive entanglement of everyone with everyone else. No one is left alone anymore” (Id: 188). This determines “the collapse of social space for the overman as an independent, solitary type” (Id: 189). The technological revolutions dramatically enhanced the connections among humans and the pervasiveness of the

19

The existence of specific normative boundaries in Connolly’s philosophy has prompted critics such as Luca Mavelli (2010) to argue that it unwittingly embraces a transcendental dimension. Cf. footnote 30 below. 20 Connolly recalls an eloquent excerpt from Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “only where the state ends, there begins the human being who is not superfluous [. . .] Where the state ends – look there my brother! Do you not see it, the rainbow and the bridges of the overman?” (Nietzsche 1978: 287).

226

8 Dogmatization and Pluralization: William Connolly’s Sovereign People

state in the regulation and control on citizens, as Connolly demonstrates by pointing out the increase of “the number of people today whose primary job is to control” (Id: 188). In such an interwoven context, there is neither room nor use for the Übermensch as an outstanding and solitary figure, lifted above established moral identities. In such an interrelated context, therefore, Nietzscheanism can and must relinquish its original anti-egalitarianism and aristocratism and be recast in the framework of a democratic theory. The starting point lies in the intimately Nietzschean reverence for life discussed thus far, which due to the hyper-connectedness characterizing late-modern societies requires a political complement. It is for this reason that in his critique of George Kateb’s ethic of individuality, Connolly points out that even the most sophisticated ethics cannot do without a political theory of individuality, and that the individual retreat from politics is far from honouring and preserving an ethical individuality; in a hyperconnected world, a minimalist understanding of politics “is an anachronism that misreads paradigmatic threats to individuality in late-modern society” (Id: 85). Connolly’s line of reasoning here seems somewhat analogous to Pettit’s posture on the relation between democracy and freedom as non-domination: democracy is not an end in itself, thus not being primary, but it is constitutive of the normative source of reference – non-domination for Pettit, nontheistic reverence for life for Connolly – in the sense that without it the normative principle can never materialize in our world and social-political frameworks. In stressing that every social order ends up naturalizing some of its own boundaries and presumptions, Connolly argues that an ethic of individuality as self-cultivation merely pursued by atomized, apolitical individuals is “too easily squeezed to death” (Ibid: 85) by the normalizing pressures that an increasingly pervasive web of political and economic powers does exert. Thus, the only way to actively honour and pursue ethics is to bring it into the political arena. Contestation thus becomes, in Morton Schoolman’s words, “the distinguishing feature of his [Connolly’s] thinking, his quality of mind” (Schoolman 2008: 20). Counterpressures to forms of normalization and calcified boundaries of inclusion are needed in order for an ethics of cultivation and responsiveness to thrive, and they are only possible in the context of an active democracy: “for existing settlements become politicized if a significant element of the populace credibly and insistently refuses to treat them as natural, thoroughly rational, reflective of a dialogic consensus. . .” (Connolly 2002: 91). Connolly identifies in democracy the most suitable political order for the purpose of unsettling repressive boundaries and disturbing dogmas. The simple democratic rights to vote, speak up publicly and protest make a potential dissident out of every single citizen. Democratic citizenship lives in the ambiguity, or “productive tension”, between the authorial/editorial moment of law-making and the moment of protest against and unsettlement of burdening sediments, whether in the guise of laws or of cultural biases. The pluralist ethic of nontheistic gratitude for life may only be pursued and fostered within a fervently, “radically” democratic environment: “more than other social forms, democracy accentuates exposure to contingency and increases the likelihood that the affirmation of difference in identity will find

8.4 Connolly’s Ethicopolitical Philosophy

227

expression in public life” (Id: 193).21 Given the interpenetration of Connolly’s ethic and democracy, the latter can take on the more political name of “democratic ethos”, which infuses a form of democracy that Connolly terms “agonistic” or “agonal”. The gist of an agonistic democracy thus lies in the social pervasiveness of such ethos, which (a) nourishes the ongoing practices of bottom-up contestation of and confrontation with the socially shared definitions of normality, the basic commitments and the foundations of moral and political obligation, and (b) simultaneously delimits those self-same contestatory practices within the borders of mutual, “agonistic” respect among citizens.22 As hinted above, Lloyd (2010) argues that such a tight bond between nontheistic reverence and democracy ends up obscuring other possible affective grounds of democratic action, one of which she identifies precisely in resentment. Lloyd thus aims to undermine Connolly’s polarization opposing the couple ‘resentment/fundamentalism’ to the couple ‘generosity/democracy’. The gist of Lloyd’s argument is that democracy should not be built on the monistic ground of generosity, as also resentment can be a democratic resource, and “subjects for whom such generosity is difficult” (Id: 115) (for not being “lucky” enough to develop it, in Connolly’s words) can still be democratic subjects. Following Rancière, Lloyd points out that “it is when the unintelligible, those who fail to figure in the political realm as fully human, declare a ‘wrong’ [. . .] that the people (qua democratic subject) are produced” (Id: 124). Democracy, thus, is vitalized precisely by the resentment of the oppressed. The line of defense to which Connolly would probably resort starts by admitting that resentment surely works practically as a crucial engine activating social movements, and that when oppression occurs, any trigger awakening dissidence is desirable. Nonetheless, if an ethos of generosity fails to infiltrate the value-system of the

It might be worth recalling that “active democracy” in Connolly’s thought is perfectly consistent with “representative democracy”. The tools provided within a representative democratic system are regarded as largely sufficient for the purposes of active citizens wishing to “question, interrogate, doubt, dissent, protest, organize, resist, disturb, prod, and disrupt fixed priorities” (1995: 100). 22 Not all readers are convinced of the potential of Connolly’s framework for social critique. On the one hand, Andrew J. Douglas (2007) argues that Connolly’s commitment to pluralism “shows little concern for how class structures or the hegemony of global capital might curtail the efficacy of this trickle-down diversification” (Id: 253). In general, from Douglas’s standpoint, the subversive hopes that Connolly places in affects and faiths are not enough to challenge “the liberal academic mainstream”. On the other hand, according to James Martin (2010) the “second problem of evil”, that is the ever-present possibility of conflict arising from the naturalization of identities, cannot be merely tackled by means of an ethos that inspires citizens to listen to each other and admit the contestability of their own projections. Connolly’s reliance on an ethos imbuing citizens is thus an “optimistic hope”, whereas Martin points to the direction of an “institutionalisation of adversarial procedures so as to normalise conflict” (Id: 139). Connolly’s ethos alone, in other words, is incapable of pushing citizens to actually confront each other, and is likely to result in a mere tolerance among constituencies. Among the authors who offer a “more robust approach”, one “less ‘generous’ to potential opponents of pluralism than is Connolly[‘s]” (Id: 141), Martin mentions Vattimo, Laclau and Mouffe. The democratic theories they developed variously call for “institutions and practices of mutual questioning and deliberation over contrasting points of view” (Id: 140), which “expose them [citizens] to alternative and competing points of view” (Id: 139). 21

228

8 Dogmatization and Pluralization: William Connolly’s Sovereign People

oppressed protestants and to curb its dogmatization to some extent, social movements may easily face the slippery slope of fundamentalism, with the prospects of conflict and inter-constituency violence looming large. In Pluralism (2005), with explicit reference to Carl Schmitt’s definition of the sovereign as “he who decides the state of exception”, Connolly develops an alternative conception of sovereignty: “sovereign is that which decides an exception exists and how to decide it, with the that composed of a plurality of forces circulating through and under the positional sovereignty of the official arbitrating body” (Id: 145). What this means is that there are always popular components, “irresistible forces of power” (Id: 141), influencing and interacting with the decisions made by “positional power”; even Supreme Court decisions (in the US case) are affected by the ethos circulating throughout civil society. Sovereignty is thus dislocated and pluralized in a “micropolitical” dimension “which can be located in a multitude of cultural and social sites” (Campbell 2008: 296), and which inserts a dimension of indeterminateness into the very heart of sovereignty. This position is somewhat ambiguous, as Connolly presents it in a manifestly realistic fashion (“it illuminates the complexity of sovereignty” (2005: 145)) while defending its desirability, e.g. when he argues that “it becomes important to fill the ambiguity and oscillation of sovereignty with a positive ethos of engagement” (2008b: 247), or when he complains that the US Supreme Court neglected the ethos animating the Country as it forbade the recount of Florida’s votes in the presidential elections of 2000. As to the realistic component, Connolly makes no distinction whatsoever between the role and functioning of the ethos, or “micropolitics”, in different kinds of regime, whereas it is hard to prove that an ethos would play the same role in a democratic and a totalitarian regime. It is certainly arguable that also totalitarianism requires an ethos, and that “the macropolitics of state fascism, for instance, drew much of its support from a series of resonating microfascisms” (1995: xxvi); yet, in a totalitarian regime the popular ethos and “micropolitics” are largely crafted and maintained by the state through the tools it possesses for surveillance, intimidation, repression, and brainwashing. Rather than a popular ethos penetrating the institutions and their decision-making mechanisms, we have that the institutional and bureaucratic spheres actively work to impose their own truth on the people, so as to prevent destabilizing counter-narratives from rising and spreading. This distinction is adumbrated, for instance, by Laclau and Mouffe, who point out that totalitarianism precludes the logic of equivalence by which the popular will is autonomously shaped through discursive processes – and thus precludes the penetration of an authentically popular ethos in political decision-making.23 As to the normative dimension Connolly attaches to his reading of sovereignty, the argument appears partly unclear. It is certainly desirable that a decentralized popular ethos, or will, detains sovereign power in the sense of permeating legislative and judicial decisions. This view has a deliberative-democratic flavour, and would hardly be rejected by the thinkers sympathetic with that school. Regarding the

23

Cf. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau and Mouffe 2001), pp. 186–188.

8.4 Connolly’s Ethicopolitical Philosophy

229

juridical field, also thinkers such as Rawls and Ackerman would accept that a widespread popular ethos penetrates and intertwines with the juridical cogitations of the Justices, in a creative and democratically legitimate interaction; nonetheless, the popular sentiment is one out of several ingredients of juridical hermeneutics, and it is arguably not the only ethos a democracy should preserve. The constitution itself is infused with the ethos developed by a ‘people’ throughout the centuries in a long, diachronic process of self-constitution and self-reflection. Such ethos too needs to be defended and integrated with the ethos animating the people at given historical moments.24 Connolly does not do justice to this dimension, at least not explicitly, although he defends the centrality of “positional sovereignty”, which “is both indispensable to the rule of law and constitutively insufficient to itself” (2005: 147). The “indispensability” of courts advocated by Connolly might refer precisely to their role in protecting and enhancing central constitutional values, including those which honour Connolly’s pluralistic ethics, if you will. Yet, Connolly does not clarify this aspect, and his notion of ethos itself becomes incomplete: the popular ethos appears as the ethos of the people as they live and breathe at a given moment, whereas the ethos intended as the long-lasting culture developed throughout generations, and to some extent constitutionalized in the form of essential rights, is overlooked. All the uncertainties notwithstanding, Connolly’s position can be given a clear enunciation: sovereignty is a complex assemblage of positional authority and “other cultural forces that insert themselves irresistibly into the outcome” (Id: 140). Such forces represent the “zone of instability that sovereignty inhabits” (Id: 141). It is therefore important that the ethos be as close as possible to Connolly’s ethics of nontheistic gratitude, so that power and law are influenced by the virtuous ethos of agonistic democracy, in which different constituencies contest each other while sharing a feeling of mutual respect. As we saw, precisely this “agonistic” democracy is the necessary political counterpart to the ethics of nontheistic reverence for life, given its proclivity to “disturb the naturalization of settled conventions” (2002: 192). Nevertheless, democracy is also the source of a problem that Connolly addresses at many places, i.e. that of the territorialization of identity, or the “civi-territorial complex”. As we shall see, Connolly’s discussion of and solution to this difficulty are crucial to the definition of the people in his radical democratic political philosophy. The issue arises when Connolly acknowledges that the political imaginary of our time invariably links democracy to a territory dividing the members of the community from the others. Such link, Connolly goes on to argue, cannot be completely dismissed: “it is probably impossible even to imagine a form of democratic politics today that breaks entirely with this model” (1995: 136). The problem is of a Schmittian sort, if you will: democracy has to create its own exclusive (territorial) boundaries. On the

Cf. Ferrara’s (2020) discussion of the broad “legal conversation”, involving a plurality of actors, that constitutively permeates the practice of judicial review and leads a Court to interpret or transform the Constitution in given ways. 24

230

8 Dogmatization and Pluralization: William Connolly’s Sovereign People

one hand, Connolly justifies the territorialization of politics and democracy by pointing out that “institutions of electoral accountability do form a key condition of democracy, and the territorial state is the modern site upon which this institutionalization is built” (Id: 153). Democratic orders thus have to be delimited in order for essential democratic practices and institutions to operate properly. Nonetheless, on the other hand, Connolly also highlights that the territorial nation-state bears seeds of exclusion that domestic democracy alone is insufficient to tame. The growth of a “people” on a contiguous territory is possible by virtue of “mores” and cultural habits that hold it together; hence, intrinsic to the creation of a people is the exclusion of internal and external forms of otherness, dissonant with the culture and ensemble of social conventions and institutions aggregating the socio-political-territorial complex.25 This connection between a collective identity and a territorial form of power is what Connolly names the “civi-territorial complex”, and it exacerbates the problem of identity as analyzed so far because it ties identity to the monopolistic form of power exercised within the territory. Not only identity is always inclined to dogmatize its own elements, but such dogmatization is defended and imposed by all possible means by a state which “sets itself up to be the sovereign protector of its people, the highest site of their allegiance, and the organizational basis of their nationhood” (Id: 135). The territorial state claims a full legitimacy, obedience and allegiance, and pretends to reduce to a single established identity the “abundant diversity of being”, reflected in the multi-faceted physiognomy of every social community. This tension between a territorial state as the highest site of collective allegiance and the infinite diversity of being is intrinsic to democracy, insofar as the latter requires the territorial state in some form. It is from this perspective that Connolly criticizes authors as diverse as Rousseau, Schumpeter and Walzer: Rousseau’s general will (which “requires the concealment of impurities” (Id: 138)), Schumpeter’s “rational mode of governance”, and Walzer’s spheres of justice regulated by “shared understandings” are nothing but ways to obscure the paradox of territorial democracy, facades behind which internal diversity is hidden. From Connolly’s perspective, there is no such thing as an objective rationality of governance or a “rich, warm world of we, community” (Id: 147) within which collectively shared understandings can operate rightfully; diversity penetrates every dimension of the social, and the territorial state’s pretence to unity and homologation is repressive and anti-pluralist. Certainly the representation of the territorial state as such a tightly uniform entity upholding a given identity strikes the reader, as it clashes with the internal division of powers, and with the variety of institutions, sub-institutions and political actors composing a modern state. Nonetheless, Connolly’s point is of interest: in order 25

Connolly has chiefly in mind the exploitation, repression and exclusion of the Native Americans on the grounds of Christian monotheism, which worked as “the cultural glue binding the civiterritorial complex together” (1995: 169). Cf. Chapter 6 of The Ethos of Pluralization for Connolly’s analysis of Tocqueville’s discussion on the rise of the North-American state and democracy.

8.4 Connolly’s Ethicopolitical Philosophy

231

for the democratic ethos to work properly against the settlement of naturalized identities, the monopoly of the territorial state on power and loyalty has to be undermined, and democracy has to become “multi-dimensional”. In order to fully unfold, that is, Connolly’s ethics of generosity and critical responsiveness (and the democratic ethos as its political translation) has to honour its universalistic scope and cross geopolitical boundaries, so as to inspire cross-national constituencies and social movements to lay siege to given forms of oppression. The democratic ethos as a disturbing force has to dispossess the territorial state of its status as the unique guarantor of justice, rights, protection, and create alternative territorialities that contest the dominant identities and the role of the state as the highest source of allegiance. In the democratic imaginary proposed by Connolly, the state has to be thought of “as one site of identification, allegiance, and action among others” (Id: 137). Thus, the ethos of responsiveness bears in itself a “nomadic element”, by which a cross-national political bond can be created “that is not inherently anti-state but rather one activated by the reduction of the political to the state” (Campbell 2008: 301). In order not to contradict its unsettling commandments, the democratic ethos has to be developed horizontally and globally, rather than remaining ensnared within boundaries that at times suppress its scope: “the politics of disturbance within a state, for instance, might grow into the formation of cross-national, nonstatist social movements that speak to particular issues within states, between states, and in the global setting as a system” (1995: 180). This is even truer in a global context in which the “old link between territory and security” (Id: 150) is loose, and nationstates can hardly claim to guarantee security, full authority and independent sovereignty. Thus, Connolly advocates what he terms a “disaggregation of democracy”, the consequent “pluralization of democratic spaces”, and a “dis-nationalist, late-modern pluralism”. This last element of Connolly’s political philosophy enables us to pinpoint the definition of ‘the people’ emerging from his works: the people is a territorial entity consolidated around a constellation of “mores” and cultural habits, an entity which exercises its sovereignty by infusing the spheres of “positional power” with its ethos, and which yet tends to dogmatize its own identity in repressive ways that need to be contrasted. Precisely like the individual “biocultural” identity and the collective identity entrenched by the territorial state, from Connolly’s normative viewpoint the people is both necessary and problematically incomplete: it is configured as a territorial, institutional and cultural unit whose calcified and oppressive conventions must be called into question under the light of a universal faith towards life and diversity, inspiring domestic activisms and cross-national constituencies to rise and “invigorate democratic energies within states, exert external pressures upon the secret practices of states, and challenge the state’s monopoly over the symbols of danger and security in the late-modern times” (Id: 156). Thus, that “plurality of ruptural points” which corresponds to “the people” in the Laclauian agonistic theory of democracy, in Connolly’s framework is hardly more than an ever-changing ensemble of social movements correcting and destabilizing the dogmas and oppressive tendencies of the established “people”.

232

8 Dogmatization and Pluralization: William Connolly’s Sovereign People

The fact that the settled territorial people results as a more ‘conservative’ entity, whereas social movements are often depicted by Connolly as liberating forces, should not lead to conclude that Connolly regards the former as oppressive and the latter as virtuous once and for all. On the one hand, it is true that Connolly tends to neglect the liberating power which lies within the cultural resources of a community, and is inclined to see established cultures as “institutionally embedded presumptions of a fundamental Law or Design of being” (1995: 34), requiring genealogical and deconstructionist analyses. As we shall see at the end of this section, this has partly to do with the lack of a dualistic perspective capable of distinguishing the resources of the political democratic culture from those of the tradition, ethnicity, religion. On the other hand, however, Connolly constantly stresses the need for identity at the individual and the collective level, as well as “the necessity of limitations and exclusions” (Id: 89). Moreover, and more interestingly, also the pluralizing forces embodied by social movements have normative operational limits that Connolly calls the “borders of pluralization”. The ethics of cultivation and responsiveness, as the ultimate normative core of Connolly’s ethical-political thought, sets constraints which neither political activism nor institutional politics should trespass. First of all, “economic inequality cannot become too extreme” (Id: 193); in a way which reminds C. B. Macpherson’s argument mentioned in Chapt 4, Connolly defends at many places the interdependence of democracy and economic equality: “economic equalization is a prerequisite to effective democracy, but effective democracy is also a prerequisite to equalization” (Id: 82), because economic egalitarianism fosters mutual care and reciprocity, whereas an active democracy lays the ground for economic equalization.26 A further limit to pluralization is the tolerance towards fundamentalist constituencies, which yet commands to “resist the drive of such constituency to impose its exclusionary norms upon the entire culture” (Id: 193–194).27 Other borders of pluralization Connolly identifies are “general civilizational values, including the protection of life, respect for privacy, the appreciation of diversity, and protection from undeserved suffering” (Id: 194). Finally, when in Identity/Difference Connolly defends the liberal nature of his political philosophy, (“an alternative, militant liberalism” (2002: 94)), he lists a number of liberal principles and commitments that may be arguably included among the borders of pluralization, such as the protection of rights, the appreciation of individuality, the “refusal to choose between revolutionary overthrow and the idealization of traditional culture” (Ibid). According to Schoolman, this normative commitment to democracy – and liberalism – leads Connolly not to radically dismiss, but rather to preserve and problematize the liberal “responsible” subject which he regards as the hotbed of resentment in late-modernity. Schoolman notes that although Connolly’s goal is the

26 Cf. also Aspirational Fascism (2017), pp. 105–109, where Connolly puts forwards a set of egalitarian socio-economic policies that a “democratic, pluralist Left” should pursue. 27 Cf. also Aspirational Fascism (2017), p. 74.

8.4 Connolly’s Ethicopolitical Philosophy

233

redemption of liberalism from its problematic postulation of the subject as a “responsible agent”, “he [Connolly] still retains agency, responsibility, and subjectivity on the grounds that they are our modern “achievements” and the preconditions for a far greater modern achievement, democratic life itself” (Schoolman 2008: 38). In spite of the centrality of deconstruction, genealogy and contestation in disturbing the collective representations of the subject as a responsible agent, the latter is ultimately too essential to democracy to be discarded: “if responsibility were rejected, modern, liberal agency would become impossible, and without liberal agency modern democratic society is not possible either” (Id: 53). Thus, Schoolman concludes, Connolly’s solution to the paradox of identity and responsibility is to maintain them while problematizing them, as in their absence democracy and its ethos of responsiveness would be impossible.28 In a more critical vein, Valentine objects that Connolly subordinates his political theory to his own ontology, in a way that makes democracy desirable and fundamentalism deplorable on the grounds that the former “is closer to the way things really are (as distinct from fundamentalism’s ideological distortions) which is that things are becoming, and they are becoming different from what they were” (Valentine 2010: 215). Connolly’s political thought would thus be strongly connoted ontologically, and hence circular. As we saw above, Connolly openly admits the necessity of ontological projections grounding thought, thus defusing the import of this critique. Nonetheless, Valentine goes farther to argue that Connolly’s ontological framework “is dependent on epochality” (Id: 216): it is ultimately a reflex of his modern appreciation for globalization, which leads him to develop an ontology of becoming in order to achieve a “naturalization of globalisation through ontology as an ethical imperative” (Ibid). To wrap up, Connolly’s ethics has clear normative boundaries and evaluative footholds, in spite of its resistances to epistemology, its marked emotional/affective character and its role of counterpoint to established morality rather than of fullfledged moral doctrine. Notwithstanding the “material” character of Connolly’s democracy correctly identified, among others, by Finlayson,29 the ethics developed by Connolly enshrines guidelines to establish what is just and what is not, what claims are more valid and what are less.30 As we saw in footnote 8, according to Mihic the dimension of the “self” is problematically central to Connolly’s whole philosophical approach and methodology. Although he theorized the “essential contestability of concepts”, and thus the idea that normative evaluation and descriptive reconstruction are co-original, Connolly’s evaluating self contradictorily assumes priority over the descriptive-explanatory efforts; “if, however, fact and value are mutually constitutive, neither facticity nor normativity can have the hegemony of either simple fact or compulsory yes-saying” (Mihic 2010: 108). 29 “Connolly’s democratic theory is not sentimental but materialist. It is an attempt to articulate, and facilitate that immersion in this wild, flowing tide of social experience [. . .] Instead of a general theory of the abstraction of democracy Connolly proposes a way to live a democratic life in a particular place, at a particular time” (Finlayson 2010: 16). 30 According to Luca Mavelli, the borders of pluralization ultimately reinsert a dimension of transcendence into Connolly’s immanent ethics. His attempt to shift normativity from the transcendence of divine law or moral commandment to the immanence of human sensibility towards life 28

234

8 Dogmatization and Pluralization: William Connolly’s Sovereign People

In the light of these conclusions, Connolly’s enduring diffidence towards “shared cultures” solicits a final reflection. At several places Connolly takes pains to demonstrate that the ethical-political approach he develops “does not require the degree of cultural homogeneity that nationalists, collectivists, and communitarians invoke” (1995: 96). And rightly so; yet, there is a degree of cultural homogeneity that seems desirable from Connolly’s very perspective, and there is a textual passage in which this is partly acknowledged. When wondering about the possibility that his democratic ethos and its limits become “the consensual background of late-modern life” (Id: 103), Connolly himself reluctantly admits that this is an implausible limitcondition which yet is desirable. A sort of consensus on nonconsensuality would mean “to consent together to a world in which criticism of the politics of nonconsensuality is enabled while the deceptive comforts of stable consensuality are attenuated” (Ibid). It would be valuable, in other words, that the borders of pluralization were internalized in that biocultural complex constituting human beings and their identities. Nonetheless, Connolly tends to dismiss shared cultures, thus downplaying their relevance in his own theoretical framework. In The Ethos of Pluralization he goes so far as to claim that his own ethics is supported by a “politics of assemblages”, where by “majority assemblage” he means “a mobile constellation in which some support the programs in question out of dire economic need, some out of particular self-interest, some because they are implicated with others who need these programs . . .” (Id: 95). It is unclear, in a similar scenario, what the role of Connolly’s “ethos of generalized respect for multifarious ways of being” (Id: 96) would be. What is the virtuous social role of ethics (or the social role of ethics at all), if the flourishing of ethics, or of specific ‘ethical’ policies, occurs out of incidental factors which have little in common with people’s inclination to ethicality? If achievements that Connolly would welcome as ethical progresses materialize out of several scattered factors rather than from the ethos he advocates, does not the ethos become a normative-evaluative standpoint with no hopes of undergirding an agonistic-democratic community and of impacting on real-world politics? What is left of the material character of Connolly’s ethos and democratic theory, which

drifts into the reinstatement of “non-negotiable principles of justice such as freedom from torture, punishment for murder, the right to an education [. . .]” (Mavelli 2010: 159). Thus, Mavelli concludes, a connection “between modes of social agency, connective justice and the idea of a transcendent just order beyond the subject appear very much reflected in Connolly’s philosophy” (Id: 160). This role of the “transcendent(al)” is praised by Mavelli, who points out that Connolly’s depreciation of such category overlooks its potential role of “essential source of political imagination”, a role it plays in Connolly’s very philosophy itself. Perhaps one may argue, against this argument, that the direct connection tying Connolly’s “faith” towards life with the set of “nonnegotiable principles” limiting pluralization should not be underestimated. The principles mentioned by Connolly do not seem to flow from a “transcendental” source “beyond the subject”, but from the very ethos which would be forsworn if those limits were trespassed. The nontheistic reverence for life is their steady, “groundless” foundation, and their formulation as “abstract principles” stems from Connolly’s attempt to capture and fix such ethical sensibility into a formal, normative enunciation.

References

235

should portray “a way to live a democratic life in a particular place, at a particular time” (Finlayson 2010: 16)? Certainly, majority assemblages are a way to achieve ethical progresses, and they explain how ethical progress often works in fact. But they are largely unrelated to an ethos which seems to require a form of culturalization to be actually operative to a meaningful extent. Connolly’s diffidence towards culture-based shared consensus can perhaps be explained by his Nietzschean and Foucauldian background. As hinted above, he is diffident towards the immanent resources of culture because he does not distinguish between the often oppressive “practices of rationality, subjectivity, normality, madness, criminology, sexuality, medicalization, and gender” (1995: 34) bequeathed within a cultural, social and political context – as Nietzsche and Foucault saw – and the emancipatory potential that a long-lasting democratic tradition can enfold, and that can be subscribed by the varied constellation of co-existing cultures which Connolly values. In a sentence, he lacks the Ackermanian/Rawlsian dualistic perspective discussed above in Chap. 3, and this trickles down to his consideration of the people. Like identity, Connolly’s territorial people is a necessary entity,31 which yet can be redeemed from its dangerous exclusivist drives only by a universal feeling of gratitude for the abundance of being. Connolly’s Nietzschean/Foucauldian conception of shared cultures and institutions as normalizing ensembles of dogmas prevents him from envisioning a ‘people’ that, in spite of its many and manifest repressive dogmatisms, can self-reflexively draw from a long-lasting political culture of reciprocity which does have an important affective dimension, and which resonates with Connolly’s ethos of agonistic respect and its “borders”. Therefore, Connolly cannot properly praise the culturalization (or “bioculturalization”) of the democratic ethos which such ethos seems to call for.

References Campbell, David. 2008. Identity, Difference and the Global: William Connolly’s International Theory. In The New Pluralism: William Connolly and the Contemporary Global Condition, ed. David Campbell and Morton Schoolman, 289–304. Durham: Duke University Press. Chambers, Samuel A. 2003. Untimely Politics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Connolly, William E. 1995. The Ethos of Pluralization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2002. Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (1991), expanded ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2005. Pluralism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Mainly because, to recall, “you need identity to act and to be ethical” (2002: xv), and “institutions of electoral accountability do form a key condition of democracy” (1995: 153).

31

236

8 Dogmatization and Pluralization: William Connolly’s Sovereign People

———. 2008a. Essentially Contested Concepts (1974). In William E. Connolly: Democracy, Pluralism and Political Theory, ed. Samuel A. Chambers and Terrell Carver, 257–279. London: Routledge. ———. 2008b. The Power of Assemblages and the Fragility of Things. British Journal of Politics and International Relations 10: 241–150. ———. 2013. The Fragility of Things: Self-organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2017. Aspirational Fascism. The Struggle for Multifaceted Democracy under Trumpism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Douglas, Andrew J. 2007. Review: Pluralism by William Connolly. The Journal of Politics 69 (1): 252–253. Ferrara, Alessandro. 2009. Authenticity Without a True Self. In Authenticity in Culture, Self and Society, ed. Philip Vannini and J. Patrick Williams, 21–35. London: Routledge. ———. 2020. Os tribunais também representam. “Legitimidade pela Constituição”, Representação e os Tribunais. In Representação: Variações de um Conceito, ed. Marta Nunes da Costa, 85–100. São Paulo: LiberArs. Finlayson, Alan. 2010. Introduction: Becoming Plural. In Democracy and Pluralism: The Political Thought of William E. Connolly, ed. Alan Finlayson, 1–19. London: Routledge. Howarth, David R. 2010. Pluralizing Methods: Contingency, Ethics, and Critical Explanation. In Democracy and Pluralism: The Political Thought of William E. Connolly, ed. Alan Finlayson, 20–45. London: Routledge. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. 2001. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985). London: Verso. Lloyd, Moya. 2010. Hate, Loathing and Political Theory: Thinking with and against William Connolly. In Democracy and Pluralism: The Political Thought of William E. Connolly, ed. Alan Finlayson, 114–128. London: Routledge. Martin, James. 2010. A Post-secular Faith: Connolly on Pluralism and Evil. In Democracy and Pluralism: The Political Thought of William E. Connolly, ed. Alan Finlayson, 129–143. London: Routledge. Mavelli, Luca. 2010. Beyond Secularism: Immanence and Transcendence in the Political Thought of William E. Connolly. In Democracy and Pluralism: The Political Thought of William E. Connolly, ed. Alan Finlayson, 144–164. London: Routledge. Mihic, Sophia J. 2010. Interpretation, Political Theory, and the Hegemony of Normative Theorizing. In Democracy and Pluralism: The Political Thought of William E. Connolly, ed. Alan Finlayson, 96–113. London: Routledge. Nietzsche, Friedrich W. 1978. Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1891). Harmondsworth: Penguin, transl. by Walter Kaufmann. Schoolman, Morton. 2008. A Pluralist Mind: Agonistic Respect and the Problem of Violence towards Difference. In The New Pluralism: William Connolly and the Contemporary Global Condition, ed. David Campbell and Morton Schoolman, 17–61. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Valentine, Jeremy. 2010. Time, Politics and Contingency. In Democracy and Pluralism: The Political Thought of William E. Connolly, ed. Alan Finlayson, 203–221. London: Routledge. Wenman, Mark. 2015. William Connolly: Resuming the Pluralist Tradition in American Political Science. Political Theory 43 (1): 54–79. White, Stephen K. 2010. Ethos and the Late-modern Democracy. In Democracy and Pluralism: The Political Thought of William E. Connolly, ed. Alan Finlayson, 46–67. London: Routledge.

Part IV

Populism and Radical Democratic Theories: How Thin Is the Red Line?

The widespread consolidation of what Cas Mudde has called a “populist Zeitgeist” in Western societies has determined a noticeable proliferation of studies on the phenomenon and concept of populism in the last twenty years. This vast academic and journalistic production can be roughly divided into two broad branches: (a) one engaged in the analysis of the cultural, economic, social, political processes which led to the perceived rise of populism as an empirical phenomenon, and which will be briefly discussed in these introductory remarks; (b) one concerned with the theoretical clarification of populism as an increasingly central concept in political philosophy. This will be the object of Chap. 9. (a) The historical factors contributing to the populist wave are manifold, and hardly one can be pointed as explanatorily self-standing; as stressed especially by Yascha Mounk, “mono-causal” reconstructions seem inappropriate to account for the rise of the populist phenomenon. The economic scenario is certainly a key ingredient, but its role is not uncontroversial. Whereas scholars often relate populist proclivities and the tendency to rely on populist leaders with the individuals’ material conditions and personal experience of economic breakdown, Mounk questions this direct correlation; rather, on his reading, populist tendencies are most common among “those that are still living in material comfort but are deeply afraid that the future will be unkind to them” (Mounk 2018: 159). After decades of rampant and unprecedented economic growth, during which every generation was richer than previous ones, the recent crisis and stagnation of the economy have elicited the perception of a gloomy horizon ahead, in spite of the fact that “never in the history of mankind have societies been able to afford so many of their members such plenty” (Ibid). In a slightly different vein, Marco Revelli emphasizes the socio-economic cleavages dramatically growing from the ‘80s, and reaching their peak in the years of the “social earthquake” following 2008. The historical defeat of employed and bluecollar labour, favoured by technological progress, industrial restructuring, and by decades of neo-liberal policies which dematerialized, delocalized, “liquefied” labour, contributed significantly to the current phenomena of protest voting, or “revenge” voting. Revelli highlights that the votes for populist leaders such as Trump or the Brexit representatives, besides coming from the old conservative

238

IV

Populism and Radical Democratic Theories: How Thin Is the Red Line?

bases radicalized by the gradual loss of social and economic status, are to be seen as the expression of the “ressentiment” of those social strata which saw the gap with the upper echelons of society stretching dramatically at their own disadvantage. As reported by a study mentioned by Revelli, carried out before the 2008 breakdown and referred to the twenty years between early ‘80s and early 2000s, the 8–10% of the GDP of the most industrialized countries shifted from salaries to profits.1 In the ten years following the subprime crisis, only in Italy the number of people living below the “absolute poverty threshold” almost doubled.2 The economic hardships and the widespread perception of fraud following 2008, however, are not the sole causes of the increasing popular distrust towards powerholders. Scholars such as Jan-Werner Müller, Margaret Canovan, Yascha Mounk, Alain de Benoist, and Marco Revelli, just to mention some, highlight how the institutional party-system dominant in the twentieth century has always born in itself the seeds of oligarchy and popular exclusion from decision-making, both in Europe and the US: “the Founding Fathers themselves were obviously wary of unconstrained popular sovereignty. They precisely tried to avoid a situation where an imagined collective whole could be played off against the new political institutions” (Müller 2016: 86); likewise, “the postwar European order really is based on the idea of keeping “the people” at distance” (Id: 96).3 As stressed by Revelli, the problem of the party’s “inevitable oligarchic twist – as a genetic pathology of that organizational form”4 has been at the centre of the theoretical discussions on political parties since their very beginnings with Robert Michels, more than a century ago. The causes and symptoms of the erosion of the party-system are manifold. In the first place, as observed by Mounk, “the legislature, once the most important political organ, has lost much of its power to courts, to bureaucrats, to central banks, and to international treaties and organizations” (2018: 59). The need for such institutions is undeniable, and cannot certainly be reduced to “elite conspiracy”; yet, the growing complexity, decentralization, and multiplication of decision-making processes, stretching far beyond the nation-state,5 invariably undermine transparency and popular involvement, thus enhancing the citizens’ perception of being ruled by unresponsive and unaccountable elites. Moreover, it is often highlighted that even when enabled to do their jobs, representatives are deeply detached from the represented, in socio-economic, cultural, and anthropological terms (Revelli 2019). The de-territorialization of elites, exemplified for instance by the disappearance of the notables, has fostered a mutual

1

Cf. Revelli (2019), p. 33. Id, pp. 182–183. 3 See also Canovan (2002, 2005), and Mounk (2018), pp. 54–57. 4 My translation of the original: “[...] l’inevitabile torsione oligarchica – come patologia genetica di quella forma di organizzazione [...]” (Revelli 2019: 92). 5 Just to give a sense of the scope of the phenomenon, Mounk mentions the 568 pages-long “List of Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States”. 2

IV

Populism and Radical Democratic Theories: How Thin Is the Red Line?

239

diffidence and lack of acquaintance which undermined the ability of the elite to capture the needs and moods of the grassroots. Political elites appear to perform better at finding understanding with the wealthiest social groups. As observed by Mounk, both in the US and in Europe politicians tend to belong always more to the same socio-cultural milieu as rich lobbyists, financers and donors, with the result of sharing with them ideas, worldviews, perspectives on social justice and the desirable future of the country: “well before they reach office, most lawmakers have already been socialized into a cultural, educational, and financial elite that sets them apart from average Americans” (2018: 88). In this sense, the difference with past generations is glaring. When politicians were mostly “notables with a strict sense of place” (Id: 89), “there would have been many party leaders who felt more at ease having dinner with their constituents than with their main political rivals. Today, that is no longer the case” (Id: 91).6 Mounk also notes that intense contact and understanding with the economically powerful is also somewhat necessary to lawmakers, whose activities require donors. The lobbying power acquired by the latter has increased throughout the last decades, and ends up influencing the legislature in uncountable and untraceable ways.7 This is true especially for the US, but also for Europe. Notwithstanding the necessity and lawfulness of those interactions, the result is that narrow interest groups are generally more influential on public policy than mass interest groups and ordinary citizens.8 This cannot but enhance a sense of elite unresponsiveness which is deemed essential for populism to rise in contemporary democracies (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017). A further interesting dimension of the crisis of traditional parties is identified by Revelli, for whom the phenomenon is inscribed within a broader process: the collapse of the epoch-making organizational paradigm which Max Weber identified

6

This detachment from the common people involved the whole party-spectrum; yet, Leftist parties were especially blamed for the momentous failure of having abandoned the worse-off, which they were historically set out to represent. The main and most evident fault was the Left’s marriage with global financial capitalism and the ‘third way’, which resulted in a dramatic degradation of labour (Revelli 2019), and in the long run prompted prominent intellectuals to welcome populism and grassroots protest movements (in the French case, for instance, scholars such as Thomas Piketty (2017) and Étienne Balibar (2018) saw populist movements favourably as “merely a somewhat confused but legitimate response to the feeling of abandonment experienced by the working classes in the advanced countries in the face of globalisation and the rise of inequalities” (Piketty 2017). The debate on the failures of the Left became so stark as to urge its sharpest critics to call into question the centrality that the Left conferred upon the protection and expansion of key liberaldemocratic rights. The front of the democrats is thus fractured: on the one hand, the advocates of the clash against “systemic domination, [which] concerns the subordination of all members of society to the operational logic of capitalism – the competitive production of profit” (Azmanova 2019: 1199). This should be the Left’s primary goal, rather than a somewhat sterile defense of liberal-democratic rights; on the other hand stand those who insist that the Left should undertake “an unambiguous commitment to the basic institutions of liberal democracy rather than an attack upon them” (Isaac 2019: 1168). For an exemplification of the positions at stake, see Albena Azmanova (2019) and Jeffrey C. Isaac (2019). 7 Cf. Mounk (2018), pp. 78–87. 8 Id, pp. 77–78.

240

IV

Populism and Radical Democratic Theories: How Thin Is the Red Line?

as undergirding both the Fordist model of capitalist production and the complex bureaucratic apparatuses of post-war welfare states – an equation to which Gramsci added the twentieth century “partito-fabbrica” (factory party), shaped upon the same rationale (Revelli 2019). The processes leading to the end of this paradigm involved the overcoming of Fordism, largely due to the unbearable costs of maintenance required by its massive production plants, and the consequent adoption of more volatile forms of production and distribution – and thus of labour itself – which included the uncontrolled increase of delocalization. As to the states’ administrative apparatuses, a parallel simplification of the bureaucratic model occurred, especially in the US, which gave up the quest for the full rationalization of society through standardized procedures, and embraced more fluid and ‘open’ forms of interaction between state bureaucracy and citizens.9 In this increasingly “liquid” context, the heavy organizational structures of traditional parties, rooted in territories and accustomed to interacting with predictable and familiar constituencies, were often unable to “interpret expectations and unprecedented, unpredictable demands, and to float on a «liquid mass», made up with individual behaviours always less standardized, or relatable with the great social aggregations (workers, rural classes, middle classes, etc.), and always more personalized”.10 This account somewhat locates on the same line of continuity the erosion of the classic party-system and the rise of that simplified party structure which is typical of populism. As Jean Cohen elucidates, the populist wave was enabled by and has contributed to a deeper historical process of “hollowing out of parties” (Cohen 2019: 1090). Historically, this tendency started with the increasing interaction between social movements and established parties. The organizational structure of the former prevailed, partly due to their higher adaptability to changing electorates, thus displacing the cumbersome territorial and hierarchical organizations of traditional parties. Hence, Cohen traces a trajectory leading from the nineteenth century mass party to the catch-all party, thence to the cartel-party, which in turn was supplanted by the movement party (Id). The latter’s peculiarity lies in the mix of an organizational model inspired from social movements, and the raison d’être of a political party: “they [movement parties] tend not to develop an internal hierarchical structure with designated organs and officers [...] Nevertheless they are electoral actors competing in democratic elections and seeking political power” (Id: 1092). Populism, according to Cohen, “fosters the worst version of movement party relationships” (Id: 1095). A further factor often included in the analysis of the populist phenomenon is the deep change that the introduction and spread of the social media impressed on national and transnational public spheres worldwide. According to Mounk, who

9

Cf. Revelli (2019), pp. 123–128. My translation of the original: “[...] interpretare aspettative e domande inedite e non predicibili, restando a galla su una «massa liquida», composta da individui dai comportamenti sempre meno standardizzati, o riconducibili ai grandi aggregati sociali (operai, ceti rurali, classi medie, ecc.), e sempre più personalizzati” (Revelli 2019: 130). 10

IV

Populism and Radical Democratic Theories: How Thin Is the Red Line?

241

provides a detailed account of the debate on the matter, the main effect of the social media revolution was the end of the elite’s monopoly on “the standards of acceptable political discourse” (2018: 146), and a related rampant increase in the circulation of ideas. On Mounk’s reading, the “many-to-many” communication allowed by the social media has certainly the effect of empowering the outsiders and providing unprecedented channels for social coordination and expression of discontent; yet, it also enables the conscious creation and spread of fake news, which reach their addressees also by virtue of the so-called “echo chambers”, i.e. communicative spaces “in which users would effectively surround themselves with others who are politically like-minded” (Id: 144). What appears as a tool for fostering an unprecedented cross-constituency and cross-territorial interaction often promotes the personalization of informational sources, and thus the insulation of social and political subgroups, believing in their own truth and avoiding confrontation. As stressed by Revelli, this resonates with the rising interpretive paradigm of the ‘post-truth’: “indeed, the practice of post-truth does not say «everything is false», like traditional nihilism, but rather «everything is true» (what I like is true)”.11 Finally, cultural cleavages are identified as triggering factors for populism. Whereas several scholars (Betz 2002; Mounk 2018; Weale 2018) highlight in different ways the destabilizing role of migration issues and the uncertainties related with changes in the ethno-cultural constitutions of communities, for the main theorists of the “cultural backlash” the most decisive cultural cleavage is intergenerational. According to Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, the contemporary upsurge of conservative authoritarian populism comes as the consequence of a perception, by older generations, to be “strangers in their own land” (2019: 34). As in the Newtonian third law of motion, according to which every action corresponds to an equal and opposite reaction (Id), the radicalization of older constituencies comes as a response to a world in which the old material values and commitments are supplanted by post-material values, which were counter-cultural a few decades ago and are now dominant (e.g. “environmental protection, peace movements, sexual liberalization, democracy and human rights, gender equality, cosmopolitanism” (Id: 33)). Norris and Inglehart’s thesis, therefore, is that “birth cohort is one of the strongest predictors of support for post-materialist values and socially liberal policy attitudes” (Id: 88). The rise of authoritarian values, and the increasing success of authoritarian populists, occurred when the “tipping point” was reached in the intergenerational clash between younger and older generations, with the latter perceiving “a growing gap between the norms of the world in which they had been born, and the world in which they lived” (Id: 34). On Norris and Inglehart’s reading, the impression that this “silent revolution” be majoritarian, as well as the political effectiveness of authoritarian populists, can be mainly explained by the fact that younger generations tend to resort less to conventional democratic practices

My translation of the original: “La pratica della post-verità, per l’appunto, non dice «tutto è falso», come il nichilismo tradizionale, ma piuttosto «tutto è vero» (è vero quel che mi piace)” (Revelli 2019: 156).

11

242

IV

Populism and Radical Democratic Theories: How Thin Is the Red Line?

such as elections.12 Moreover, the inhabitants of less urbanized and developed areas, who tend to be less educated, less exposed to the cultural, political and artistic fervency of metropolitan centres, and thus more traditionalist, generally join the ranks of the older generations.13 (b) Let us move to briefly introduce the second above-mentioned strand of literature on populism, namely the one concerned with its conceptual elaboration. This will be the focus of the analysis offered in Chap. 9. As we shall see, the scholarly debate is extremely lively as to what I will call the ‘meta-definition’ of populism, by which I mean the identification of its philosophical classification, as opposed to the definition of its specific contents, internal logic and core claims. I find the distinction useful in that it allows unveiling a tendency in the recent literature on populism which often goes unnoticed: whereas the ‘meta-definition’ is the object of ongoing discussions as to whether populism overlaps with a specific political position and policy-program, a discursive style of political construction, an ideology, a strategy, or a forma mentis, the definition of populism’s contents and core claims is far less disputed. As we shall see, the basic intuition that populism involves a pars pro toto logic and a Manichean polarization dividing ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ – both constructed as homogeneous groups – is almost ecumenically embraced, albeit to different degrees of elaboration. The main aspects and implications of populism’s pars pro toto logic will be analyzed in Sects. 9.2 and 9.3, while the issue of the metadefinition will be addressed in Sect. 9.1. In Sect. 9.3, the debate on the relationship between populism and democracy will be reconstructed, while in Sect. 9.4 a brief discussion will be devoted to the relationship between populism and constitutionalism and to the behaviour of populist parties in power. This will lay the ground for the attempt to cast light on the ‘thin red line’ distinguishing populism from radical democratic theories, which will be the object of Chap. 10. As we shall see, the dividing line identified entirely excludes populism from the scope of democracy: on the one hand, democracy assumes an irredeemable social and individual heterogeneity, and is fundamentally engaged in the quest for the conditions which simultaneously (a) enable and (b) limit the collective exercise of sovereignty, and (c) account for its desirability (in case of normative theories); on the other hand, populism embraces an organicistic and moralistic understanding of the people, which cuts ties with democratic institutions and practices, and with the very task of providing with content the indeterminate wording ‘popular sovereignty’. At the end of the chapter, however, some nuances are introduced. It will be observed that empirically speaking populism comes in degrees, and its exclusionary

Norris and Inglehart stress frequently that “by 2012, the Interwar and Baby Boom generations had become a minority of the adult population in Europe – yet they remain a bare majority of voters, since they are far more likely to cast a ballot than the young. In the US as well, today Millennials surpass Baby Boomers as the largest sector of the adult population, though there are lagged effects in the electorate” (2019: 89). For a different reading of the phenomenon of the new generations’ abstentionist tendencies, stressing the young’s general detachment from and “apathy” (or even “antipathy”) towards democracy, cf. Mounk (2018), and Foa and Mounk (2019). 13 See Norris and Inglehart (2019), pp. 108–114. 12

IV

Populism and Radical Democratic Theories: How Thin Is the Red Line?

243

and undemocratic potential tends to vanish as long as the populist rhetoric is recessive and subordinated to other democratic claims advocated by the movement at stake.

References Azmanova, Albena. 2019. The Paradox of Emancipation: Populism, Democracy and the Soul of the Left. Philosophy and Social Criticism 45 (9–10): 1186–1207. Balibar, Étienne. 2018. Gilets jaunes: le sens du face à face. Mediapart, December 18th. https:// blogs.mediapart.fr/etienne-balibar/blog/131218/gilets-jaunes-le-sens-du-face-face. Betz, Hans-Georg. 2002. Conditions Favouring the Success and Failure of Radical Right-Wing Populist Parties in Contemporary Democracies. In Democracies and the Populist Challenge, ed. Yves Mény and Yves Surel, 197–213. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Canovan, Margaret. 2002. Taking Politics to the People: Populism as the Ideology of Democracy. In Democracies and the Populist Challenge, ed. Yves Mény and Yves Surel, 25–44. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2005. The People. Cambridge: Polity Press. Cohen, Jean L. 2019. Hollow Parties and Their Movementization: The Populist Conundrum. Philosophy and Social Criticism 45 (9–10): 1084–1105. Foa, Roberto Stefan and Mounk, Yascha, 2019. “Youth and the Populist Wave”, in Philosophy and Social Criticism, 45(9-10): 1013-1024. Isaac, Jeffrey C. 2019. Beyond Trump? A Critique of Nancy Fraser’s Call for a New Left Hegemony. Philosophy and Social Criticism 45 (9–10): 1157–1169. Mounk, Yascha. 2018. The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom is in Danger & How to Save It. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mudde, Cas, and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2017. Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Müller, Jan-Werner. 2016. What is Populism? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Norris, Pippa, and Ronald Inglehart. 2019. Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Piketty, Thomas. 2017. Long Live Populism!. Le Monde, January 17th. https://www.lemonde.fr/ blog/piketty/2017/01/17/long-live-populism/. Revelli, Marco. 2019. La Politica Senza Politica. Torino: Einaudi. Weale, Albert. 2018. The Will of the People: A Modern Myth. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Chapter 9

Populism in Contemporary Political Philosophy

Abstract In this chapter, the vast contemporary literature on populism is split into two distinct debates: one focused on what I call the ‘meta-definition’ of populism, namely the identification of its philosophical classification; another concerned with the core contents and claims of the populist rhetoric. This partition is relevant not only because it highlights the different objects of analysis addressed in the debates, but also because it allows capturing the significant variation in the current scholarly consensus on the two distinct issues. Whereas the ‘meta-definition’ is heatedly debated, observers tend to converge on the contents and claims typical of populism, although differences in emphasis exist, as well as discordant implications drawn from similar definitions. Therefore, the aim of the critical discussion offered in this chapter is to achieve a compact and consistent definition of the concept by starting from its most settled and conspicuous features, such as the Manichean attitude, the apodictic attribution of moral, political, cultural authoritativeness to an intrinsically virtuous ‘people’, ineffably homogeneous, opposed to an analogously homogeneous elite and endowed with a right to legitimate political authority. The reconstruction attempts to gain in cogency and consistency by critically dispelling the definitions of populism most incompatible with the settled core identified. Keywords Populism · Populist logic · Populism as strategy · Populism as ideology · Populism as forma mentis · Pars pro toto logic · Populist people · Populist constitutionalism · People vs. elite

9.1 9.1.1

The ‘Meta-definition’ of Populism Populism as a Substantive Political-Ideological Position

In spite of the lingering perception that the vast contemporary academic literature on populism generally inclines to conflate it with substantive political positions, it is

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Fiorespino, Radical Democracy and Populism, Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations 18, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84969-6_9

245

246

9 Populism in Contemporary Political Philosophy

extremely rare to find examples of such stance. With few exceptions,1 the large majority of leading political theorists tends to introduce the analysis of populism by pointing to the risk that the category becomes too loose to remain cogent, due to precisely the burgeoning variety and political-ideological incompatibility of parties, movements and leaders which populism is commonly made to subsume. In PierreAndré Taguieff’s words, ‘populism’ risks undergoing a process of “desemantization by semantic satiation”.2 On closer inspection, the idea that populism is characterized by definition by a specific ideological orientation has always been rare among prominent scholars analyzing the concept. Starting from the 1950s, when the term ‘populism’ began to be used in a derogatory manner in the US with reference to McCarthyism (Houwen 2011), the main observers were already aware of the lack of a shared political orientation connecting the disparate political movements defined as populist. Edward Shils, for instance, pointed out that populism, in spite of displaying a recognizable authoritarian tendency, has different and often contrastive ideological referents. Its ubi consistam, in Shils’s view, lies in “the belief that the people are not just the equal of their rulers; they are actually better than their rulers and better than the classes – the urban middle classes – associated with the ruling powers” (Shils 1956: 101). During the ‘60s, marked by the rise of the New Left in the US, populism was divested of its pejorative connotation, and connected with healthy forms of bottomup participation (Houwen 2011). An eminent example here – albeit not directly connected with the New Left – is Isaiah Berlin, whose distinction of “populism proper” from “false populism” attempts to rescue the good, egalitarian face of populism as “bound by a sense of fraternity and by a desire of a certain kind of social equality and perhaps liberty – but of the two equality is probably nearer to its heart than liberty – and which is opposed to a competitive, atomized society” (Berlin et al. 1968: 173). And yet, in spite of the reversal in the perception of the phenomenon occurred from ‘50s to ‘60s, in the famous volume edited by Ionescu and Gellner (1969) at the end of the decade the idea that populism draws on any substantive political orientation is nowhere to be found. One of the most explicit rejections of such connection can be traced in Peter Worsley’s contribution, who argued that populism is “much wider than its particular manifestation in the form or 1

Nicolao Merker, for instance, in his Filosofie del Populismo seems to relate populism with ethnonationalism intended as the defence of an ancestral cultural, bio-racial, and at times religious unity, and thus with a generally right-wing orientation. This conflation appears evident throughout the whole work, but it is explicitly formulated when, in mentioning Taggart’s Populism, Merker writes that “as in much of the current literature on the topic, practically nothing is said about the major themes of populism, such as ancestry, race and religious identity, and thus ethnicism, racism, religious-based identity politics”. (My translation of the original: “[. . .] come in molta letteratura corrente sull’argomento, praticamente nulla si dice di temi di grande peso nel populismo, quali stirpe, razza e identità religiosa, e dunque etnicismo, razzismo, identitarismo religioso.” (Merker 2009: 14)). 2 My translation of the original: “desemantizzazione per sovrasaturazione semantica” (Taguieff 2003: 36).

9.1 The ‘Meta-definition’ of Populism

247

context of any particular policy, or of any particular class of polity: democracy, totalitarianism, etc. This suggests that populism is better regarded as an emphasis, a dimension of political culture in general” (Worsley 1969: 245). Tellingly, the equation of populism with a specific political ideology or policy program failed to permeate even one out of the famous (or notorious, some would say) twenty-four facets of populism proposed by Peter Wiles (1969) in his contribution to the same volume. The collective perception and use of the term ‘populism’ changed again throughout the decades (Houwen 2011). Undoubtedly, the concept was associated by and large with the right-wing – and often with the neo-liberal credo – during the ‘80s and ‘90s, especially in Europe, with the rise of the ‘hegemonic bloc’ mainly represented by Thatcher and Reagan, but also by Haider in Austria, Le Pen in France, Blocher in Switzerland, and later Fortuyn in the Netherlands, Perot in the US and Berlusconi (and the Northern League before him) in Italy.3 Nonetheless, the conflation of the term ‘populism’ with the right-wing, albeit common during those years (Taggart 2002; Houwen 2011), scarcely touched the academic debate. When a flourishing literature on populism began to proliferate between the late 1990s and the early 2000s,4 the awareness that a shared political orientation could not be made part of a definition of populism was almost unanimous among scholars. Examples are numerous. Paul Taggart, for instance, famously defined populism as “chameleonic”, adding that “all populisms develop additional ideas, but these are not the ideas that make them populists” (Taggart 2000: 15). Similarly, Yves Mény and Yves Surel observed that “it is precisely by identifying populism with specific programmes or ideologies that we miss out on its crucial specificity” (Mény and Surel 2002: 17); on the same note, Taguieff: “populism cannot be embodied either by a specific kind of political regime [. . .] or by determined ideological contents”.5 Not to mention Margaret Canovan’s broad definition of populism as “redemptive politics” (1999), disentangled from specific political positions, and Ernesto Laclau’s articulated theorization of populism and its rhetoric dimension as the very logic of construction of all sorts of political and ideological contents: “far from being a parasite of ideology, rhetoric would actually be the anatomy of the ideological world” (Laclau 2007: 12–13). Thus, in the following decade Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser remarked that European populism and radical right are bound by a

3

In this regard, Urbinati argues that whereas populism in American history has also played a democratizing role and “has become a democratic expression of political action” (1998: 111), European populism has always born an exclusivist and anti-democratic tendency, which began to unfold precisely between the 1980s and ‘90s. 4 As reported by Marco D’Eramo, drawing from the database of the University of California Library (which includes journal articles), “from 1920 onwards, the UC catalogues contain more than 6200 entries on ‘populism’, but over half of these pertain to the last thirteen years” (D’Eramo 2013: 15). More specifically, he reports 557 publications in the 1980s, 1336 publications in the 1990s, 2801 publications in the 2000s, and 1046 publications between 2010 and 2013. 5 My translation of the original: “il populismo non si incarna né in un tipo definito di regime politico [. . .] né in contenuti ideologici determinati” (Taguieff 2003: 80).

248

9 Populism in Contemporary Political Philosophy

mere “marriage of convenience” (2013: 155), and Jan-Werner Müller specified that “it’s a mistake to think that populism will always turn out to be a form of nationalism or ethnic chauvinism. There are a variety of ways for a populist to distinguish moral and immoral” (2016: 24–25). Analogously, scholars as different as Marco Tarchi (2015), Mark Tushnet (2019), and Alain de Benoist (2017), just to mention some, concluded that, in Tarchi’s words, “as to the cross-cutting nature of populism across the dividing line right/left, few observers persist in contesting it nowadays”.6 We shall see later the way in which populism interacts with the categories of left and right, and more in general with different political ideologies. So much for the first hypothesis of ‘populism as a substantive political content’, which has arguably reverberated much less in the scholarly debate than it has done in commonsense talk, journalistic narrations and political polemics. What is populism, then? The options remaining on the table, which we shall now analyze in turn, are the following: a discursive style of political construction, a political strategy, an ideology, a forma mentis.

9.1.2

Populism as Discursive Style of Political Construction

The idea of populism as a discursive style of political construction has its most articulated version in Laclau’s ambitious theory of hegemony and radical democracy, which we examined in Chap. 7. As we saw, Laclau theorizes a process of discursive articulation of the political which is grounded in the logic of the equivalential chains, defined as broad connections of different unfulfilled social demands which condense and unify around an empty signifier by means of affectively loaded rhetoric associations. Through such discursive process, a political formation constitutes itself and its ‘other’ at once. Such logic, in Laclau’s framework, is simultaneously the structuring logic of a people, of a hegemonic formation, and of those antagonistic fronts which constitute ‘the political’ as such – as opposed to ‘politics’, i.e. the practices and institutions organizing and regulating social co-existence.7 In other words, populism as the discursive construction of a people aspiring to hegemonize the entirety of the society coincides with the only eminently political moment, which occurs when an established order is represented as the antagonist of the people for having failed at fulfilling their demands to a significant extent. In those cases, Laclau writes, there is an accumulation of unfulfilled demands and an increasing inability of the institutional system to absorb them in a differential way [. . .] The result could easily be, if it is not circumvented by external factors, a widening chasm separating the institutional system from

My translation of the original: “quanto alla trasversalità del populismo rispetto alla linea divisoria destra/sinistra, sono ormai pochi quelli che insistono nel contestarla” (Tarchi 2015: 71). 7 Cf. Mouffe’s discussion on ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ in The Democratic Paradox (2000), pp. 100–101. 6

9.1 The ‘Meta-definition’ of Populism

249

the people. So we have here the formation of an internal frontier, a dichotomization of the local political spectrum through the emergence of an equivalential chain of unsatisfied demands (Laclau 2007: 73–74).

As we saw, therefore, Laclau argues that the vagueness of the populist language, as well as the trivializing attitude of its rhetoric, are intrinsic to politics as the attempt to construct a hegemonic people from the ashes of and in opposition to an exhausted political order, one which is (discursively constructed as) no longer capable of “suturing” the constitutive irrepresentability of the social, its “anomie”. Laclau’s theorization had a vast echo, to the extent that many scholars conflated his framework with populism as such. The most obvious example is Chantal Mouffe, who famously claims for the rise of a left populism capable of opposing a counternarrative to the neoliberal hegemony and to the authoritarian right-wing populist wave (Mouffe 2018). The merits of this proposal will be addressed in the next sections, when the relation between democracy and populism will be analyzed in depth. Besides Mouffe, Villacañas Berlanga, for instance, claims that populism is not as simplistic and theoretically naive as it looks, in that it relies upon a complex theory of society and language – namely Laclau’s theory, drawing from Althusser, Saussure, Freud, and Lacan. According to Villacañas, populists are aware that “at the roots of every society there is always an empty ground – that lack of foundation which Heidegger’s philosophy taught us”8; thus, populism is “a theory of the social being and of the human being”,9 assuming that “society is language and that the populist construction is a rhetoric one”.10 In a similar vein, Andrew Arato has asserted, with some irony, that “populism is what populist theory says it is” (2019: 1107), before expressing his concerns about the potential dangers of its core features. Now, there is truth to these claims, but a clarification is necessary. This has to do with a problem in Laclau’s theory which critics have not failed to notice. Simply put, quite ironically, Laclau’s renowned theory of populism has the effect of annihilating the usefulness and meaningfulness of the concept. The problem here is not with Laclau’s theory of populism per se, but more specifically with the equation of populism, “the political” and hegemony he operates. If one labels as populist every bottom-up movement contesting and developing alternatives to given cultural-symbolic structures of power, then populism loses all specificity, and we can do without the concept. As Yannis Stavrakakis put it, “if populism becomes synonymous with politics, and if any signifier can potentially become the nodal point of a populist discourse, how can we conceptually account for the difference between an equivalential discourse articulated around ‘the people’ [. . .] and any other equivalential discourse?” (Stavrakakis 2004: 263). Broad social movements of any My translation of the original: “[. . .] alla base di ogni società c’è sempre un terreno mancante – quella mancanza di fondamento che ci ha insegnato la filosofia di Heidegger” (Villacañas Berlanga 2017: 16). 9 My translation of the original: “[il populismo] è una teoria dell’essere sociale e dell’essere umano” (Id: 18). 10 My translation of the original: “i teorici del populismo concludono che la società è linguaggio e che quella populista è una costruzione retorica” (Id: 20). 8

250

9 Populism in Contemporary Political Philosophy

kind (which Laclau takes as central to his analysis, especially in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy), as well as momentous cultural and constitutional revolutions such as the New Deal in the US, become indistinguishable from movements which appear to hinge on a specific narrative, core features and symbolic referents. In Worsley’s words, “since the word [populism] has been used, the existence of the verbal smoke might well indicate a fire somewhere” (Worsley 1969: 219). If, however, populism as a counter-hegemonic antagonism appealing to the figure of ‘the people’ is equated with mass movements tout court, whether conceptually articulated or not, whether appealing to the people or not, then the ‘smoke’ ends up revealing nothing more than a fire we already knew, with no specificity.11 We could get rid of the concept once and for all. Thus, in order to move on with our inquiry, it may be useful to present two critiques of Laclau’s equation of populism with the logic of discursive production of political objectivity as such. The first one comes from Villacañas, who accepts Laclau’s definition of populism, as we saw, and yet denies that it be the sole logic of constitution of collective objectivity; the second critique is elaborated by Urbinati, who discusses Laclau’s appropriation of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. Villacañas’s analysis takes off from Laclau’s reconstruction of the Freudian concepts of identification and love, which we introduced very briefly in Chap. 7. As we saw, drawing on Freud, Laclau structures social psychology on the following formula: “identification between brothers, love for the father” (2007: 56). The brothers become such because they all replace their ego ideal with the same father (whom they all love), hence identifying with one another. To this model, which may appear to follow the logic of the horde, Laclau adds a further specification, drawing again on Freud: the closer the ego of the brothers to their ego ideal, the more egalitarian their relationship to the father will be – and thus, the less prone to manipulation the group will be. In other words, if the leader can be a primus inter pares, then the social psychology of group formation is no longer doomed to utter irrationality, to the ‘logic of the horde’; rather, it embraces a full spectrum of variations ranging between the two (impossible) extremes of “the fully organized group and the purely narcissistic leader” (Id: 58). To this framework, Villacañas opposes an objection that hinges upon the psychic constitution of subjectivity as outlined by Freud. He starts from observing that the subject idealizing other individuals, i.e. adopting them as ego ideals, aspires to identify with them. The subject gradually tries to embody the features she idealizes from the empirical subjects she has around, and this psychic dynamic is already unequivocally narcissistic. Thus, Villacañas argues, even those who succeed in lifting their ego close to their ego ideal are ultimately narcissistic subjects “who do not have a critical potential in the formation of their ego”.12 This is because the

In this regard, Jan-Werner Müller aptly highlights that populism all too often “serves as a very imprecise placeholder for “civic participation” or “social mobilization”” (2016: 61). 12 My translation of the original: “[. . .] i soggetti che non hanno un potenziale critico nella formazione del proprio Io [. . .]” (Villacañas Berlanga 2017: 68). 11

9.1 The ‘Meta-definition’ of Populism

251

subject can attain a critical self-awareness only when the construction of her ego ideal acquires a degree of complexity and abstractness: when the subject, rather than the immediate idealization of the empirical subjects at hand, “loves her self-project”,13 an abstraction, thus shaping a distant ego ideal which “humiliates” the ego and tames its narcissism. Therefore, the Laclauian primus inter pares is the leader of narcissistic subjects incapable of producing a complex ego ideal, and thus incapable of self-criticism and scarcely self-conscious: the more elementary and narcissistic the construction of subjectivity, the easier the leader is accepted with full identification [. . .] What populism concludes from this [from Laclau’s social psychology] is that the psychic apparatus displays the necessity of a leadership for structural reasons inherent to the very psychic apparatus. But things are different. Only in this narcissistic psychic formation is the leader actually likely to rise.14

In a nutshell, Villacañas attempts to undercut Laclau’s equation of populism with every form of active politics, group formation and construction of socio-political objectivity. He does that by undermining Laclau’s reconstruction of the Freudian group psychology, which undergirds not merely Laclau’s theory of populism, but more deeply his idea that the populist logic overlaps with political construction as such. In the final pages of his Populismo, Villacañas praises “the republican option”, which attributes a central role to reasoning and complex differentiation, as opposed to the populist homogenizing simplification: “it is necessary to understand that conceptual language needs components which are unequivocally metaphoric, but also that those components can be conceptually fine-tuned so as to handle a complexity and heterogeneity that republicanism does not fear”.15 A similar endeavour is undertaken by Urbinati, although from a different angle: she calls into question Laclau’s rendition of Gramsci and the theory of hegemony, with the analogous aim of impairing the bond of populism and ‘construction of political objectivity’ as such. As we began to see, Laclau’s theory of populism involves the role of a leader, a centralizing figure, and thus a (more or less) vertical structure: “the relationship with the leader depends on the degree of distance between the ego and the ego ideal. The shorter the distance, the more the leader becomes a primus inter pares [. . .] But some distance between the two will always necessarily exist” (2007: 161), because “the represented depends on the representative for the constitution of his or her own identity” (Id: 158). According to Urbinati, this contributes to signalling the intrusion of Caesarism in Laclau’s theory of

My translation of the original: “Ama il progetto di sé, potremmo dire” (Id: 67). My translation of the original: “quanto più elementare e narcisistica è la costruzione della soggettività, tanto più è facile che il leader sia accettato con un’identificazione piena [. . .] Ciò che il populismo ne deduce [dalla psicologia sociale di Laclau] è che l’apparato psichico dimostra la necessità di leadership per ragioni strutturali dello stesso apparato psichico. Ma non è così. Il leader è probabile solo in questa formazione psichica narcisistica” (Id: 68, my italics). 15 My translation of the original: “[. . .] necessario comprendere che il linguaggio concettuale ha bisogno di componenti inequivocabilmente metaforiche, ma anche che queste possono essere disciplinate concettualmente per poter maneggiare una complessità e una eterogeneità che il repubblicanesimo non teme” (Id: 79). 13 14

252

9 Populism in Contemporary Political Philosophy

populism and hegemony. From her perspective, precisely this vertical dimension detectable in populism is what Gramsci’s definition of hegemony rejects explicitly. According to Urbinati, Gramsci’s theory sets both normative and definitional constraints which unequivocally distinguish the politics of hegemony from Caesarism intended as the direct relationship between a strong leader and the people following him. As to the normative aspect, Urbinati stresses that Gramsci was explicit in bringing to the floor the risks that the politics of hegemony contains. He thought, for instance, that unless it was anchored in a party organization with a collective leadership and entrenched in a conception of history and social progress that did not leave any interpreter the liberty of making it into a rhetorical tool of persuasion, hegemonic politics would be dangerously prone to becoming a vehicle for reactionary Caesarism (2014: 154).

This insight pairs with the critique proposed in Chap. 7 above, targeting Laclau’s obstinate rejection of any form of normativity: on the grounds of the Nietzschean/ Lacanian philosophical anthropology he adopts, Laclau cannot but refute any normative differentiation between a hegemonic formation organized “with a collective leadership and entrenched in a conception of history”, and one which becomes “a vehicle for reactionary Caesarism” (e.g. a populist one). If all objectivity is structured largely by a leader through overdeterminations and affective/rhetoric processes that cannot be comprehended from without, then every hegemonic formation is a vertical and self-referential system, appraisable only according to its own standards of objectivity. This is perhaps what happens with populism, but from a Gramscian perspective it is not what happens with the politics of hegemony properly conceived. With regards to the definitional limits of hegemony, Urbinati points out that Gramsci’s framework is conceptually at odds with the Caesaristic tendency traceable in Laclau’s populist theory. In fact, hegemony is described by Gramsci as a “war of position”: a slow process of cultural, social and political change, designed and promoted by a structured elite capable of undertaking a transformative operation which permeates society at its roots throughout a significant time-span. On the contrary, the Caesarist leader exploits a “social situation [which] is already ripe for change” (Id: 155), without creating the conditions of such change through the slow and broad positional process that characterizes Gramsci’s hegemony. Hence, Urbinati concludes that, conceptually speaking, “where the politics of hegemony is in place, Caesarism is out of place and vice versa” (Ibid). This point somehow resonates with Arditi’s objection, mentioned in Chap. 7 above: if populism stems from the collapse of an order, then the primary creative role is played by such collapse and its causal factors; conversely, the populist moment is turned into a mere reaction, the by-product of a fecund crumbling. This contradicts the primacy of politics advocated by Laclau: “if the political has a primary structuring role, then it must also be able to trigger a de-institutionalization of the given system” (Arditi 2010: 494, my italics). Therefore, Urbinati and Villacañas converge on the same conclusion through two different paths: populism is not the logic of construction of the social; rather, it appears as one such form in competition with others, among which Villacañas’s

9.1 The ‘Meta-definition’ of Populism

253

republicanism and Gramsci’s theory of hegemony figure. As such, from Urbinati’s perspective populism is better defined as a specific strategy in the social and political struggle for power. This introduces us to the next meta-definition.

9.1.3

Populism as Strategy

The most famous account of populism as a strategy was formulated by Kurt Weyland in the early 2000s. On his account, “populism is best defined as a political strategy through which a personalistic leader seeks or exercises government power based on direct, unmediated, uninstitutionalized support from large numbers of mostly unorganized followers” (2001: 14). The leader attempts to attract mass support by appealing “to the people for help in his heroic effort to regenerate the nation, combat the privileged groups [. . .]” (Ibid). Similarly, Hans-Georg Betz suggests that “populism is primarily a political strategy [. . .] designed to tap feelings of ressentiment and exploit them politically” (2002: 198), while Urbinati points out that the essential condition for populism to occur is the appearance on the political arena of “a leader that wants to transform popular distress and protest in a strategy for mobilizing the masses towards the conquest of democratic government” (2014: 130). Thus, the advocates of this stance agree on the idea that centralizing leaderships constitute an intrinsic feature of the phenomenon, insofar as the phenomenon itself is crafted by them as their work tool, their political strategy. Interestingly, in arguing that populism revolves around charismatic leaders, both Urbinati and Weyland refer to a special degree of intensity in the bond between leader and followers. Urbinati relates the populist quest for “a more intense majority” (Id: 141) with the very conditions of emergence of populism (and demagoguery, as we shall see) outlined above: when “the social situation is already ripe for change” (Id: 155), a royal road to power is open for those who realize that a new unification of the people can be pursued; hence, populists seek a “more intense majority” than a mere numerical one, because the construction (through polarization) of a whole new people in the midst of the socio-political collapse of old collective bonds and certainties is ultimately their strategy to “claim and acquire more power in order to achieve some results that an open, pluralist and long deliberation would not allow” (Id: 143). In a slightly different vein, Weyland connects the greater ‘intensity’ of populist representation with its tendency to mass mobilization: “the relationship between populist leaders and their mass constituency is uninstitutionalized and fluid [. . .] To compensate for the fragility of their mass support, populist leaders seek to create a particularly intense connection to their followers” (2001: 13). This can hardly be denied; it is uncontroversial, and largely accepted by scholars, that populist parties tend to display a weak organizational structure, largely hinging on the charisma of the leader and on direct contact with the masses of voters. As hinted in the introductory remarks to Part IV, authors such as Jean Cohen and Marco Revelli have focused on the relationship between the populist wave and the deeper historical tendency towards the “hollowing out of parties” (Cohen 2019: 1090). Such

254

9 Populism in Contemporary Political Philosophy

transition, as we saw, can be read as inscribed in the process of the momentous collapse of the Weberian organizational paradigm, underlying simultaneously Fordism, post-war welfare state’s bureaucracy, and the heavy, territorially rooted “partito-fabbrica” dominating the twentieth century (Revelli 2019), supplanted by ‘lighter’ organizational frameworks which populism often exemplifies. Nonetheless, if on the one hand virtually no one denies the structural volatility of the populist party and its frequent reliance on charismatic figures, on the other hand not all scholars accept the reduction of populism to the political strategy of a charismatic leader, and accordingly to the distinctive structural disintermediation of the party. Mudde and Kaltwasser, for instance, wrote that “while we do not deny that particular expressions of populism might have an elective affinity with certain organizational aspects – for example, charismatic leadership and a style of communication characterized by the absence of intermediaries – we argue that these kinds of organizational aspects are not defining properties of populism” (2013: 154).16 Mudde and Kaltwasser observe that also religious movements, for instance, often embrace charismatic leadership to a significant extent, and on the other hand not all populist movements are led by strong leaders. More importantly, they argue, while the model of populism as a strategy accounts for the “populist supply”, i.e. the rise of leaders with a populist strategy to conquest power, it cannot explain the “populist demand”, i.e. “the support for populist ideas at the mass level” (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017: 20). The definition of populism, therefore, must be searched at a further depth, which the focus on the strategic-organizational dimension is unable to grasp. At a closer glance, this deeper layer can already be traced in one of Urbinati’s formulations of populism: “without the presence of a leader or a centralized leadership that seeks control of the majority, a popular movement that has a populist rhetoric (i.e., polarization and antirepresentative discourse) is not yet populism” (Urbinati 2014: 129, my italics). The circle is evident, and Urbinati is perfectly aware of it: if a “populist rhetoric” exists which can be employed by a non-populist movement, it must take root in a definition of ‘populism’ which precedes populism as a strategy for power. Populism, in other words, cannot be solely made to coincide with a strategy, in that something of a pre-existing “populist rhetoric” can be employed in the absence of a populist strategy. This deeper layer of analysis was conceptualized in terms of ideology and of forma mentis.

9.1.4

Populism as Ideology

The idea that populism be a distinctive ideology has its ancestor in the definition that Donald MacRae provided in the seminal volume edited by Ionescu and Gellner in

16

For a response to this argument, cf. Urbinati (2019a), pp. 122–124.

9.1 The ‘Meta-definition’ of Populism

255

1969. Yet, it is important to clarify that the formulations offered by contemporary theorists defending such position have little in common with that framework. MacRae argued that populism is grounded in an ideology of the individual as a “complete man”, who lost such completeness since “every individual is dependent on a web-work of specializations equivalent to his own. People are therefore unrealized, fragmentary and one-sided personalities” (1969: 160). The motif of the complete man as informing populism loomed large at the time; traces of it can be found also in Isaiah Berlin’s conclusive remarks to the famous 1967 LSE conference on populism.17 Nonetheless, it was abandoned by the current theorists of populism, who employ a notion of ideology indebted to Michael Freeden’s work, and construe populism in a way which shares little with the ideology of the complete man. Freeden construes ideologies as “conceptual maps of the political world” (Canovan 2002: 30), having their central feature in their being significantly less articulated and theoretically focused than the comprehensive philosophies underlying them. Yet, for Freeden such simplicity has a crucial function, coinciding with one of the essential social and political roles of ideologies: the creation of a connection between citizens and politics, between the base and the elite: “ideology operates on the middle ground between philosophy and political action” (Id: 33), in that it “bridges the gap between politics and people by converting opaque complexities into a picture that voters can grasp” (Id: 30). Thus, ideology as theorized by Freeden “motivates its followers by offering a redemptive vision, promising salvation through politics by pointing the way to a better world” (Id: 31, my italics). It is at this juncture that Freeden’s notion of ideology intersects Margaret Canovan’s definition of populism. As we shall see more in depth later, populism for Canovan constitutes precisely the redemptive face of democracy, the promise of salvation represented by the mythical image of a united people rising up against oppression. Populism is thus a somewhat simplified version of democracy, the salvific character of which is attractive for citizens, especially in certain historical circumstances. In this sense, it can be defined as “the ideology of democracy”: like an ideology, it relies on a clear ensemble of basic claims and ideas capable of laying a connective ground between represented and representatives, by offering a broadly intelligible “promise of salvation”.18 The other leading advocates of populism’s ideological nature are Mudde and Kaltwasser, who describe it as “a thin-centred ideology” (2017: 6). Whereas Canovan is attracted by the social and political function of Freeden’s notion of ideology, Mudde and Kaltwasser are focused on its structural aspects: ideology is

Cf. “To Define Populism”, pp. 174–175 (Berlin et al. 1968). Canovan’s thesis was endorsed by Urbinati. As we saw, Urbinati’s argument establishes that one can properly speak of populism only when a movement aspires to governmental power by means of a populist, dichotomizing rhetoric: “the distinction between movement form and government form is thus essential” (Urbinati 2014: 130). Yet, as hinted at the end of 9.1.3, a rhetoric defined as ‘populist’ pre-exists its employment in the struggle for power. Urbinati defines such populist rhetoric precisely by appeal to Canovan’s framework: “like Canovan, I take populism to be ingrained in the ideology of the people in a way that, although it is in communication with the democratic language, is in sharp contrast with “practical democracy”” (Id: 134). 17 18

256

9 Populism in Contemporary Political Philosophy

defined as a “structure of tightly interrelated concepts” (Canovan 2002: 33), organically connected and thus mutually constitutive. While ‘thick’ or ‘full’ ideologies are largely self-standing constructs of multiple elements consistently assembled, ‘thincentred ideologies’ such as populism “have a restricted morphology, which necessarily appears attached to [. . .] other ideologies. In fact, populism almost always appears attached to other ideological elements” (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017: 6), which Mudde and Kaltwasser helpfully call “host ideologies”. We shall get back to this notion. The formulation of populism as a ‘thin-centred’ ideology revolving around a narrow content enables Mudde and Kaltwasser to account for several intuitions often associated with populism: (a) its “malleable” nature, which allows its combination with the most diverse ideological currents and policy-proposals; (b) its compatibility with different kinds of mobilization and party structures; (c) its multi-faceted relation with democracy (this will become clearer in the next sections); (d) unlike the notion of populism as a strategy, the ‘thin’ ideological nature encompasses both the supplyand the demand-side of populism19: it keeps together in the same interpretive framework the strategic top-down use of the populist ideology, the existence of populism as a “mental map”, and the analysis of the socio-political processes laying the “perfect breeding ground” (Mudde 2007: 202) for the rise of mass, bottom-up support to the populist ideology. Now, especially at this last juncture lies a possible threat to Mudde and Kaltwasser’s definition. Ideology is helpful for them because it responds to the following question: how is it possible that the movements supplying a populist political offer encounter a corresponding demand? What are the conditions of such convergence? And, more fundamentally, how can the populist framework, given such conditions, become attractive to so many people across time and space, if its core elements are not already somehow ingrained in their mindset and culture? For Mudde and Kaltwasser, here comes ideology: there exists, in modern political cultures, “a kind of mental map through which individuals analyze and comprehend political reality” (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017: 6), a map having its “core concepts” in “the people, the elite, and the general will” (Id: 9); that is a populist ideology. Given certain socio-political conditions,20 therefore, such (pre-existing) mental map can stand out as a particularly effective interpretive paradigm to which citizens tend to resort and which political leaders strategically exploit. Nonetheless, it is tempting to indulge the doubt that ideology, though in its ‘thin’ form, is still too substantive, too rationally and consciously structured, to capture the gist of what 50 years ago Worsley vaguely adumbrated as “an emphasis, a dimension of political culture in general” (1969: 245), a sort of mental scheme which seems to circulate in our societies, whether manifestly or latently. Hints to populism as a more fluid, ungraspable and somewhat archetypical imaginary can perhaps be found even

19

For full discussion of the supply- and demand-sides of populism, cf. Mudde (2007), Part III. Mudde and Kaltwasser mainly identify such conditions with “major corruption scandals and particularly systemic corruption” (2017: 110) on the one hand, and “elite unresponsiveness” (Id: 111) on the other. 20

9.1 The ‘Meta-definition’ of Populism

257

in the writings of Mudde and Kaltwasser themselves, when they suggest that “populism is a moral and Manichean discourse that exists in society regardless of the presence of populist actors. Whether one likes it or not, many citizens interpret political reality through the lens of populism” (2017: 97, my italics). This widespread adoption of a seemingly unconscious, non-codified, and yet pervasive interpretive paradigm encourages to at least explore alternatives to the definition of populism as ideology. Moreover, as argued by Tarchi, populists are generally resistant to abstruse constructions and intellectualisms, which contributes to making populism incompatible with the fair degree of abstraction inherent to ideology (2015). Tarchi also notes that “an ideology is supposed to condensate into a system of interrelated beliefs, ideas and values concerning the political order, and such an ensemble should find an appropriate and relatively consistent expressive form. Yet, populist movements have left no trace of sources from which the Divine Word can be drawn”.21 Despite discarding this last objection as “logocentric”,22 Michael Freeden himself shares some of Tarchi’s concerns, and refutes the definition of populism as a thin-centred ideology on grounds of substantive and morphological reasons. On his reading, populism can at best be a “phantom ideology”, mixing together an ensemble of elements “combined in a unique but ideationally insubstantial fingerprint” (2017: 10). First of all, Freeden argues, populism lacks the complex historical articulation and reflective elaboration that thin-ideologies exhibit, in spite of their relatively narrow scope; secondly, whereas thin-centred constructs can aspire to become ‘full’ when absorbing external ideological tools, “the truncated nature of populism seldom evinces such aspirations or potential” (Id: 3). Finally, like Tarchi, Freeden notes that populists tend to dispel anything resembling intellectualism, and thus to distinguish their credo from those ideological intricacies which they deem characteristic of their competitors, pejoratively portrayed as “reality-defying systemisers” (Id: 9).23

21 My translation of the original: “Per dirsi tale, un’ideologia deve coagularsi in un sistema [. . .] di credenze correlate, di idee e di valori riguardanti l’ordine politico [. . .] e tale insieme deve trovare un’adeguata e almeno relativamente coerente forma espressiva. Orbene: di fonti a cui attingere il Verbo, i movimenti populisti non hanno mai lasciato traccia” (Tarchi 2015: 40). 22 Cf. Freeden (2017), p. 9. 23 A further line of criticism targeting Mudde and his view of populism as ideology comes from Norris and Inglehart, but it arguably misses the bull’s-eye: “populism has been depicted as a ‘thin’ ideology. But it would be more accurate to depict it as a political ideology of governance, which is about legitimate authority not substantive policy programs” (Norris and Inglehart 2019: 68). The comment is puzzling, because Mudde is explicit and adamant on the idea that populism’s “malleability” allows it to ally with the most diverse ideologies and policy-programs while displaying no inherent elective affinity with any of them. Furthermore, Mudde’s notion of populism can certainly be seen as a “political ideology of governance” concerned with legitimate authority. An excerpt from Canovan, which could have been written by Mudde alike, suits well as a response to Norris and Inglehart: “the key concept that lies at the heart of the populist ideology is undoubtedly ‘the people’, followed by ‘democracy’, ‘sovereignty’ [. . .] Thus, democracy is understood as government by the sovereign people, not as government by politicians, bureaucrats or judges” (2002: 33, my italics).

258

9.1.5

9 Populism in Contemporary Political Philosophy

Populism as Forma Mentis

The definition of populism as a forma mentis is formulated by Tarchi with the precise intent of accounting for the impression that populism “appears rather as a feeling, a moral attitude, or even better as the reflection of a structure which is psychological, emotional and cognitive at once, which pre-exists and produces it”.24 This vagueness, indeterminacy and seemingly psychic pervasiveness of populism – which perhaps also Müller aimed to seize, when he referred to a “moralistic imagination of politics” (2016: 19) – is thus explained by Tarchi by appeal to Juan José Linz’s notion of distinctive mentality, which the Spanish political scientist famously applied to authoritarianism. Conceived as a forma mentis, populism is most fundamentally a “psychic predisposition”, somewhat amorphous, unrefined, “more emotional than rational”, and yet ubiquitously extended across historical, social and cultural contexts. As Tarchi duly admits, his definition is a work in progress requiring further elaboration; for instance, in order for the definition to be plausible, it seems to me essential to build a more solid bridge between the psychic and the cultural dimensions of the populist forma mentis: the cultural import of the notion of ‘the people’ can hardly be neglected, as we shall see in 8.2.3,25 and an account must be provided of its interplay with the psycho-cognitive sphere. Moreover, as claimed by Freeden, the appeal to the forma mentis risks obscuring the distinctively political nature of populism.26 What I find interesting to Tarchi’s formulation, however, is that it succeeds in pulling together, without dismissing as interpretively irrelevant, a vast array of expressive forms typical of populism, including those captured by the definitions examined above. Concordantly with Taguieff’s observation that populism can consistently apply to at least six “fields of meaning”,27 the interpretive framework of the forma mentis allows to pinpoint a fundamental source, a psychic (psycho-cultural?) frame, from which those apparently disparate fields of meaning tap: “this mentality can assume a multiplicity of expressions; it can ground an ideological interpretive scheme of the social dynamics, a style of political behaviour of individual or collective actors, an ensemble of convictions and principles underlying a political culture, a rhetoric register, a form of legitimation for a given regime [. . .]”.28 My translation of the original: “[il populismo] appare semmai come un sentimento, un atteggiamento morale, o, meglio, come il riflesso di una struttura psicologica, emotiva e cognitiva a un tempo, che gli preesiste e lo produce” (Tarchi 2015: 49). 25 For a brilliant history of the evolutions of the concept, cf. Canovan’s The People (2005). A brief discussion of the historical rise of the notion and myth of ‘the people’ and its sovereignty will be presented in the next sections. 26 Cf. Freeden (2017), p. 9. 27 Namely, populism can manifest as a movement, a regime, an ideology, an attitude, a rhetoric and a form of legitimation (cf. Taguieff 2003, pp. 101–108). 28 My translation of the original: “Questa mentalità può assumere una molteplicità di espressioni e può essere alla base di uno schema ideologico di interpretazione della dinamica sociale, dello stile i 24

9.2 The Antagonistic Gist of Populism and the Populist People

259

With this overview in mind, let us now turn to the core contents and claims of populism and populist actors.

9.2 9.2.1

The Antagonistic Gist of Populism and the Populist Representation of the People A Pars Pro Toto Logic

As we saw, the scholarly debate on the definition of what populism is at the ‘meta’ level, as we defined it, is extremely varied and vivid. Rather differently, the current discussion on the contents typically attached to populism – i.e. the set of central features, claims, interpretive and normative patterns – is characterized by a largely homogeneous consensus, albeit not always fully acknowledged. This means that a specific content and logic are quite regularly attached to populism, whether it is defined as an ideology or a strategy, a distinctive mentality or a discursive style. We already began to introduce such core elements in the discussion of Laclau’s framework, which is the hardest to split sharply into separate analytic chunks. In addressing Laclau’s meta-definition, we also bumped into his rendition of the “populist logic”, the conditions of which arise when a symbolic-institutional order is unable to accommodate a range of social demands. The accumulation and spread of unsatisfied demands trigger an equivalential process through which a (selfproclaimed) people is discursively constructed as an entity condensing around an empty signifier. The latter homogenizes at the symbolic/affective level the different demands, thus producing “a stable system of signification” (2007: 74) out of their irreducible heterogeneity. The people is thus constructed antagonistically, in opposition to an analogously constructed elite, discursively represented as responsible for the hardships that the people had to suffer. In Laclau’s words, we thus have “a plebs who claims to be the only legitimate populus” (Id: 81), despite amounting to “something less than the totality of the members of the community: it is a partial component which nevertheless aspires to be conceived as the only legitimate totality” (Ibid). As we saw, the operation of symbolic constitution of the people is performed discursively by a leader, or a leading group, drawing together the varied demands into a homogeneous representation centred upon “a certain identity [which] is picked up from the whole field of differences, and made to embody its totalizing function” (Ibid). Now, almost the totality of the theorists who attempted to define populism in the last two decades converged on the idea that this pars pro toto logic seems to be shared by all populisms, thus defining the concept analytically. The pars pro toto comportamento politico di soggetti individuali o collettivi, di un insieme di convinzioni e principi posti alla base di una cultura politica, di un registro retorico, di una formula di legittimazione che può fare da base a un regime [. . .]” (Tarchi 2015: 52).

260

9 Populism in Contemporary Political Philosophy

logic unfolds as a dichotomic polarization of the social field into two camps, the people and the elite, both represented as homogeneous and organic, symmetrical but normatively at odds: the people is “the only legitimate totality”, the morally virtuous entity deserving sovereignty, whereas the elite is invariably depicted as a morally corrupt, illegitimate holder of governmental (and often economic) power. As most scholars highlight, this coincides with Schmitt’s “us/them” antagonistic opposition, that “friend and foe” logic which Schmittians (like Laclau and Mouffe) take as constitutive of ‘the political’ as such. Definitions of populism along the line of the pars pro toto logic are countless: for Mudde, populism is defined as “an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be the expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people” (2004: 543). Thus, populism is for Mudde inherently antielitist and antipluralist (Id). This double opposition is endorsed by Müller, who suggests that populism “is a particular moralistic imagination of politics, a way of perceiving the political world that sets a morally pure and fully unified [. . .] people against elites who are deemed corrupt or in some other way morally inferior [. . .] In addition to being antielitist, populists are always antipluralist: populists claim that they, and only they, represent the people” (2016: 19–20). Similarly, Taggart characterizes populism as “a reaction of the ruled against the rulers” (2000: 111), a form of mobilization which draws from the pervasive cultural motif of the “celebration of the virtues of ordinary people” (Id: 5), “especially in so far as their values contrast with those of the elites” (Id: 91). Accordingly, Mény and Surel condense populism into three core elements: (a) the centrality of the people, celebrated as “good, wise, and simple”, although “the definition of the people tends to integrate only those who are considered to be the ‘true’ people. This exclusion is more or less symbolic” (2002: 12); (b) the claim that the people has been betrayed by the ruling elite, defined as “corrupt, incompetent and interlocking” (Ibid); (c) the mission of restoring the primacy and sovereignty of the people. On the same note, one can mention Norris and Inglehart’s “minimal” definition of populism “as a rhetorical style of communications claiming that (i) the only legitimate democratic authority flows directly from the people, and (ii) established power-holders are deeply corrupt” (2019: 66). In their view, however, the Schmittian us/them polarizing logic is not intrinsic only to populism, but to authoritarianism; by sharing such logic, therefore, populism entertains “logical connections” (Id: 68) with authoritarianism without fully overlapping with – or becoming a subset of – it. This pars pro toto, antagonistic logic is thus identified by most contemporary scholars as the gist of populism, invariably animating every populist movement in spite of the deep ideological differences that may set them apart.29 Let us now go 29

The definition can be variously found, just to mention some further authors, in Mouffe (2018), Villacañas (2017), Anselmi (2017), Taguieff (2003), Weale (2018), Mounk (2018), Caramani (2017), Doyle (2019), de Benoist (2017), Tarchi (2015), Revelli (2019), Mueller (2019), Arato (2019), Weyland (2001), Jean Cohen (2019), Rasmussen (2019), Pinelli (2019), Panizza (2005), Freeden (2017). In the most recent writings, the pars pro toto logic is at times straightforwardly

9.2 The Antagonistic Gist of Populism and the Populist People

261

deeper into the analysis of such logic, by observing its three central facets: its conception of the people; its forebears, origins and historical conditions; the vexata quaestio of its relationship with democracy. The second of these themes touches upon and introduces the third, namely the relationship between democracy and populism, which will be fully addressed in a specific Sect. 10.3.

9.2.2

The People of the Populists

‘The people’ as depicted by the populists has two central features, which will result crucial to mark the thin red line distinguishing it from radical democratic theories: the people is a homogeneous, organic entity which constitutes the ultimate normative, moral, political, epistemic source of authority. In Müller’s words, the populist people is a “fictional entity outside existing democratic procedures, a homogeneous and morally unified body” (2016: 27); in spite of its fictional nature, or perhaps because of it, such entity is said to constitute the “real people”, as opposed to the inauthentic one, which is thus excluded from peoplehood. Populists thus claim to represent not the majority of the people, but rather a symbolic whole “which cannot be disproven” (Id: 39). From Freeden’s perspective, such populist “undifferentiated understanding of society, the indivisibility of the people, is an ontological view of the social world” (2017: 4). This symbolic whole was conceptualized by Taggart by means of the famous notion of the “heartland”, a mythical original land inhabited by virtuous working people and imbued with pure values, genuine solidarity, “romanticized visions of the lifestyles and landscapes” (2000: 5), which in the populist narrative are threatened by the external actors constructed as enemies: “the singularity of the heartland implies a singularity in its population. The heartland as a single territory of the imagination demands a single populace. The unity and the homogeneity of the imaginary residents of the heartland explains why populist rhetoric is usually so geared towards seeing ‘the people’ as homogeneous” (Id: 96). On the same note, Tarchi (2015) and Revelli (2019) highlight the “organicism” intrinsic to populism: the populist forma mentis described by Tarchi, for instance, “identifies the people as an organic totality assumed as an obvious premise to the analysis of some specific aspects or implications of populism: “the general approach towards populism argues that it displays a friend-foe logic in its political mobilization of ordinary citizens, engages in the construction of a unified people, and criticizes the liberal-democratic status quo in the people’s name” (Blokker 2019: 333, my italics). A notable exception is Rogers Brubaker (2019), who points out that the populist exclusion is both vertical and horizontal: “definitionally restricting populism to vertical appeals in the name of ‘the people’ against ‘the elite’ misses the mutually constitutive relation of vertical and horizontal oppositions” (2019: 14). Brubaker does not reject the pars pro toto logic per se, but rather the idea that populism’s vertical antagonistic structure (people v. elite) is enough to define it. On his reading, the unity of the populist ‘people’ necessarily results in the performance of exclusions which echo the nationalist ones: both the excluded from the nation and the excluded from the people are ultimately horizontally located outside the community.

262

9 Populism in Contemporary Political Philosophy

artificially divided by hostile forces, attaches to it natural ethical qualities, opposes its realism, industriousness and integrity to the hypocrisy, inefficiency and corruption of the political oligarchies [. . .]”.30 From this excerpt it should emerge how this organicism goes hand in hand with the intrinsic righteousness of the people, whose homogeneity bears a likewise single truth. In this regard, Mudde and Kaltwasser have controversially appealed to the Rousseauvian category of the general will: “populism’s monist and moral distinction between the pure people and the corrupt elite reinforces the idea that a general will exists” (2017: 16). Despite the dubious rendition of the general will, Mudde and Kaltwasser mean to highlight the “transparent” and “absolute” will postulated by populists, which only the corrupt may oppose.31 Following this scheme, Müller specifies that, unlike in Rousseau, the populist “can divine the proper will of the people” (2016: 29), which thus does not result from popular participation: “a singularly correct policy that can be collectively willed” (Id: 26) exists as a hypostasis, which makes the populist formation intrinsically right and the others essentially wrong: “there cannot be such a thing as legitimate competition when the populists run for office” (Ibid). This sort of populist epistemology was already captured in the ‘50s by Shils, who argued that for populists “the will of the people as such is supreme over every other standard, over the standards of traditional institutions, over the autonomy of institutions and over the will of other strata. Populism identifies the will of the people with justice and morality” (1956: 98). The people thus becomes the ultimate normative, moral, political, epistemic source of authority: “the authority of the voice of the people is valued even when at odds with professional specialists (‘Britain has had enough of experts’), legal authorities (‘so-called judges’), mainstream media commentators (‘fake news’), scientists (‘climate change is a hoax’), and elected politicians (‘just out for themselves’)” (Norris and Inglehart 2019: 66). In a nutshell, a shift is operated from “science for the people” to “science coming from the people”.32 Whether populism is conceived of as an ideology, a distinctive mentality or a mere political strategy, the idea is that “virtue resides in the simple people” (Taggart 2000: 94), whose consciousness,

My translation of the original: “[definiamo perciò il populismo come la mentalità che] individua il popolo come una totalità organica artificiosamente divisa da forze ostili, gli attribuisce naturali qualità etiche, ne contrappone il realismo, la laboriosità e l’integrità all’ipocrisia, all’inefficienza e alla corruzione delle oligarchie politiche [. . .]” (Tarchi 2015: 76–77). 31 Cf. Albert Weale’s The Will of the People: A Modern Myth (2018) for a discussion of the Rousseauvian general will as animating distorted democratic myths which “are a barrier to coherent thinking about modern democracy” (Id: 28). For an analysis of this monistic understanding of a ‘true’ common interest as informing both populism and technocracy, cf. Daniele Caramani’s “Will vs. Reason: The Populist and Technocratic Forms of Political Representation and Their Critique to Party Government” (2017). 32 Cf. Taguieff (2003), pp. 33–34. 30

9.2 The Antagonistic Gist of Populism and the Populist People

263

“generally referred to as common sense, is the basis of all good” (Mudde 2004: 547) “beyond and above any form of representation and mediation”.33 On the grounds of this representation of the people, Pierre Rosanvallon defined populism as a “perverse”, extreme form of counter-democracy: whereas the latter, intended as popular invigilation solicited by a healthy distrust towards power, is an essential democratic practice, populism appears “as an absolute distillation of the three types of counter-democracy” (Rosanvallon 2008: 273): in populism, “oversight and vigilance”, “preventive sovereignty”, and “people as judge” are taken to the extremes, and institutions are frantically scrutinized and criticized at their roots, on the grounds that the homogeneous and virtuous body of the people is placed above them. This resonates with Shils’s observation that populism “is tinged by the belief that the people are not just the equal of their rulers; they are actually better than their rulers” (1956: 101). This self-referential character of the people, disregarding every external form of authoritativeness and conceiving of politics as “a monologue” (Zaccaria 2018: 42), is perfectly consistent also with the Laclauian framework of populism discussed above, especially in Chap. 7: the political formations aspiring to hegemony are rhetorically constructed as independent and incompatible forms of objectivity, equipped with different moral/epistemic views based on the “lack” they experienced, and the “desire” they have born; thus, they claim full legitimacy and sovereignty, and proclaim themselves as the only real people, “a plebs who claims to be the only legitimate populus” (Laclau 2007: 81). The difference with most of the other scholars of populism is that, as we saw, for Laclau every mass movement opposing an established order is characterized by such logic and legitimacy claims. With regards to the adoption of the people as the ultimate normative lodestar, Kenneth A. Taylor carries out an interesting comparison between the “vanguardist” and the populist: whereas the former is ambiguously and dramatically suspended between two ‘sacred’ entities which he has to reconcile, namely ‘the people’ and ‘the ideal’, where the former is supposed to be transformed by the latter, the populist resolves this tension by conflating the people and the ideal: “the populist fully embraces and identifies with the people in what he celebrates as its folkish purity. True enough, he may claim to channel, focus and crystallize that voice. But he does not thereby intend to distance himself from the people” (Taylor 2019: 1228). This leads us to a final core element of the populist people, especially highlighted by the Laclauian scholarship: its being constructed. Although the people is “fully embraced” by populists, who tend to depict it as a pre-given, self-evident, natural entity, it is actually constructed through discourses condensing and bringing together a set of unsatisfied social demands. In Villacañas’s words, “the popular community is not the root, but the end towards which populism is directed”34: “the crucial factor,

My translation of the original: “[. . .] al di sopra di ogni forma di rappresentanza e di mediazione” (Tarchi 2015: 77). 34 My translation of the original: “la comunità popolare non è la radice, ma il termine verso cui si dirige il populismo” (Villacañas Berlanga 2017: 32). 33

264

9 Populism in Contemporary Political Philosophy

the actually populist one, lies in the fact that this community does not exist. It has to be created”.35 In this sense, it was often argued that such creative endeavour is largely performed by the populist leadership, and thus that populism is much more of a ‘top-down’ type of movement than it claims to be. This aspect is especially stressed by those thinkers, such as Weyland and Urbinati, who define populism as a strategy: according to Urbinati, “populism is not a call for participatory as self-governing democracy” (2014: 131), in that its “simplification and polarization produce a verticalization of political consent, which inaugurates a deeper unification of the masses under an organic narrative and a charismatic or Caesarist leader personating it” (Ibid). Similarly, Müller stressed that the popular will is the product of the interpretation and construction of the leader, and that “populism without participation is an entirely coherent proposition” (2016: 29). In Taggart’s succinct formulation, populism appears as “a movement of ordinary people [which] relies on the most extraordinary of individuals for leadership” (2000: 103); this charismatic dimension may result “at odds with the celebration of ‘the people’ as its driving force” (Ibid).36 As we shall see better at the end of the present chapter, the two fundamental features of the populist people – organicism and intrinsic virtuousness – justify not only its right to exert governmental powers in ordinary matters, but also an absolute constituent power; to say the opposite, after all, would result in the admission that something external to the popular will – a constitution, in this case – may somehow constrain it, by imposing its own content and set of principles on the people’s inherently just truth. In their sanctification of ‘the people’, the populists do not distinguish between constituent and constituted power, ‘higher’ and ‘ordinary’ politics; “the idea of constitutional guarantees, as limits to political power and its excesses, is completely extraneous to populist logic” (Zaccaria 2018: 43).

9.2.3

A Forerunner of Populism? Demagoguery, the Roman Populus and the Modern Nature of Populism

In her articulated analysis of populism, Urbinati brings under the spotlight the relation between populism and demagoguery.37 As to the latter, she draws the definition from Aristotle’s discussion on the rise of demagogues in the ancient Greek direct democratic systems. According to Aristotle (and Urbinati), demagoguery consists in “the use citizens and leaders make of their speaking abilities and political liberties in order not merely to win a majority vote but to over-win and reduce the opposition to a meaningless entity with no role in the political game”

My translation of the original: “il fattore decisivo, quello veramente populista, consiste nel fatto che questa comunità non esiste. Bisogna crearla” (Id: 34). 36 For a similar point, also cf. Mény and Surel (2002), p. 13, and Freeden (2017), pp. 4–5. 37 See also Urbinati (2019a), Ch. 2. 35

9.2 The Antagonistic Gist of Populism and the Populist People

265

(Urbinati 2014: 138–139, my italics).38 The gist of demagoguery, in other words, lies in the same polarizing, antagonistic logic characterizing populism; demagoguery is thus a sort of ancestor of populism, operating in direct democratic systems, and in contexts in which a ‘myth’ of the people, its ‘will’ and sovereignty did not exist as it does today. Demagoguery is thus not merely the art of mass manipulation through discourse, but, like populism, it is a manipulation meant to attain a large portion of power in the context of social crises which engender major transformations in the whole social and institutional balances. Thus, like a populist, the demagogue builds a manipulative representation of “the people’s collectivity as a homogeneous whole” (Id: 143) and attempts to fracture the social field so that “the city becomes a city of two peoples” (Ibid) confronting each other. Like populists, demagogues aspire to earn a “more intense majority” through “the cunning usage of words” (Ibid), so as to rise to power and transform the society and its institutions for their own advantage.39 Now, on this reading populism becomes a sort of successor of demagoguery, one which operates along the same logic.40 Yet, Urbinati identifies three main differences between the two, which make populism peculiar and distinctively modern. (a) First of all, drawing from Aristotle, she points to a “class factor at the origin of demagoguery” (Id: 141): the phenomenon springs from significant decreases in economic well-being, due to which the middle class is narrowed down, inequality increases, and the wealthy fear that the poorer sections may vote laws against them, e.g. increasing taxation. Thus, the rich “band together” “in order to better resist the popular claims” (Ibid). (b) More importantly for our purposes, however, demagoguery and populism differ as to the latter’s specific narrative and claims, with which the ancient Greeks were not acquainted. In depicting this narrative, or rhetoric, Urbinati largely draws on Canovan’s idea of the “ideology of the people”. As hinted above, Canovan defines modern democracy as hinging upon two inseparable pillars, “a pair of squabbling Siamese twins, inescapably linked” (Canovan 1999: 10): the pragmatic and the redemptive faces of democracy. On the one hand stand its practices, rules and complexities, the workings of which are beyond the reach of

38

Also cf. (Urbinati 2019a). A similar view was offered by Kim Scheppele, who observed that populists are ultimately autocrats: “what we may find beneath the surface is the drive for power, plain and simple” (2019: 330); “populists see election victories and popular approval only as a means to a different and far less democratic end. Populists, in short, are opportunists who, in practice, put themselves and their eternal hold on power above any democratic appeal” (Id: 331). Likewise, according to Michael Freeden populism is a sort of variant of autocracy, in that it “replaces autocracy with populocracy” (2017: 4). 40 A similar relation of demagoguery and populism was proposed also by Taguieff, albeit in less articulated a manner. Cf. Taguieff (2003), p. 30. On the other hand, Paul K. Jones, albeit sympathetic with Urbinati’s attempt to investigate the “systemic” relationship between demagoguery and populism, argued that “Urbinati’s effective equation of demagogy with her delimited conception of populism risks neglecting the contingent prospect of populist parties and movements that avoid demagogic leadership” (Jones 2019: 465). 39

266

9 Populism in Contemporary Political Philosophy

most citizens; on the other hand lies its mythical imaginary of a united people, which inspires a “faith in secular redemption: the promise of a better world trough action by the sovereign people” (Id: 11). Such faces of democracy are fated to clash with each other, in that the abstruse practicalities invariably frustrate the redemptive image of a united people acting in concert as a sovereign. According to Canovan, that mythical image is precisely the one to which populists resort in times of social and institutional crisis, when a cleavage is broadly and acutely perceived between the institutions and the grassroots. In this sense, as we saw, populism is an ideology, and more specifically it is “the ideology of democracy” (Canovan 2002: 32): by appealing to the mythical redemptive substrate from which democracy cannot be dissociated, it simplifies the complexities of democracy’s pragmatic face, in order to make them intelligible, to “promise salvation through politics” (Canovan 1999: 10), thus establishing a connection between the representative and the represented. What is most interesting is the historical background that Urbinati and Canovan sketch out for such idea of the people as homogeneous, undivided and sovereign, which lies at the basis of democracy’s redemptive myth. Both Canovan and Urbinati trace this understanding of the people back to the Roman term populus: “since its origins, the term “the people” had a collective connotation as the opposite of an aggregation of individuals” (Urbinati 2014: 161). Such term infiltrated most European languages, which thus employ words for ‘people’ that “designate an organic, collective entity, a single body with a collective name and meaning that has one will” (Ibid). According to Urbinati, this is the inception of the myth of popular homogeneity that characterizes populism today. This picture is importantly fleshed out by Canovan, from whose reconstruction it becomes possible to grasp the intimately modern nature of the populist appeal. In her The People (2005), a historical-philosophical reconstruction of such landmark concept, Canovan unveils the polysemy already embedded in the Roman idea of populus and its conceptual and historical iterations. ‘Populus’, in Rome, stood simultaneously for plebs, i.e. the “common people”, and “the whole political community” (Canovan 2005: 12), a collective entity, which became a populus Romanus universus when Rome enormously expanded its territorial domain. In the political system of the Roman Republic, the mixed constitution allowed for a fair degree of rule by the people, here intended as plebs: “the populus in the sense of a large body of plebeian citizens held and exercised a substantial political power” (Ibid). When the transition occurred in Rome from Republic to Empire, this form of plebeian power went largely lost; yet, not completely: the key point here is that the end of the Roman Republic was not clear cut; the institutional forms of a self-governing city-state lingered on long [. . .] Though master of Rome, Augustus exercised powers legally conferred upon him by the Roman popular assembly and the Senate [. . .] This legal formality was incorporated into the body of Roman law as the lex regia, according to which the sovereign power exercised by the emperor was derived by delegation from the Roman people (Id: 13).

9.2 The Antagonistic Gist of Populism and the Populist People

267

The lex regia thus maintained, at least as a “legal formality”, the populus as the fundamental legitimating actor in reserve, even during the imperial age, when the verticalization of power was at its peak. The Roman term populus, therefore, delivered a complex semantic richness to the subsequent ideas of ‘people’ and ‘popular sovereignty’: the people as homogeneous and collective sovereign actor, but also as plebs; popular sovereignty as collective government, which includes a degree of effective plebeian government, and survives throughout centuries as the idea that every form of political power, even imperial, has in the people its unitary source of legitimation. Now, those ideas remained disjointed for centuries, and there is no room here for following Canovan throughout the whole suggestive story she traces. What is relevant for our purposes is the moment at which those conceptual paths converged, which Canovan identifies in the American Revolution: during and after its burst, “the Roman Imperial legacy of the sovereign people in reserve was reunited with the Roman Republican legacy of popular government, including a political role for the common people [. . .] Last but not least, the Revolution established a resonant and enduring myth of the sovereign people in action” (Id: 27). Here glimmers the dawn of Canovan’s democratic myth, the redemptive promise inherent to democracy: a homogeneous people intended as a constituent, legitimating and legitimate entity, exercising sovereignty by self-rule. The populist appeal taps into precisely this cluster of ideas, originally Roman but distinctively modern insofar as welded together for the first time at one of the essential junctures of modernity’s origins. We shall see shortly, however, that Canovan’s reduction of the whole import of the ‘democratic myth’ to this dimension of popular unity and concerted action is a questionable operation. (c) From the populist idea of a homogeneous popular body, Urbinati derives one last difference between populism and demagoguery, which contributes to making the former peculiarly modern; namely, populism is intrinsically against representative democracy: “populism competes with representative democracy on the meaning of representation” (2014: 134). Although it invariably operates within representative democratic contexts, populism’s understanding of the homogeneous people (and its leadership) as the exclusive holder of legitimacy, intrinsically virtuous, challenges the practice of elections: when a populist leader declares himself as the true representative of people’s will beyond and outside the electoral mandate, he puts in motion the destructive power of judgment and calls into question not simply a bad or corrupt performance of representation and state institutions but the electoral procedure itself, its advocacy, and its authorizing and mediating character (Id: 153).41

Yet, as we shall see, for both Urbinati and Canovan populism is not intrinsically undemocratic: despite being potentially “deeply inimical to political liberty”

41

Also cf. Urbinati (2019a) on this point.

268

9 Populism in Contemporary Political Philosophy

(Urbinati 2014: 152) and “likely to be self-defeating” (Canovan 1999: 16), it ultimately remains an “interpretation of democracy” (Urbinati 2014: 152).42 Thus, in its intrinsic opposition to representative democracy (Urbinati), and in its appealing to the myth of the sovereign people in motion (Canovan), populism and its ideology – or mental scheme – appear as markedly modern and clearly distinct from Aristotle’s demagoguery, in spite of sharing its fundamental polarizing logic.

9.3

Three Ideas on Populism’s Democratic Credentials

After having identified a core ensemble of elements on which virtually every contemporary analysis of populism agrees, let us reintroduce some theoretical discord. Disagreements among scholars take off again in the form of a quite neat division splitting in three fronts the advocates of the pars pro toto logic as definitional of populism: (a) those who, drawing mainly on Laclau, argue that democracy essentially coincides with such logic; (b) those who see populism’s proneness to authoritarianism and anti-pluralism, but yet are convinced that it is still a form of democracy, or at least that it can work as a “corrective for democracy”; (c) those who regard populism as intrinsically undemocratic and inclined towards authoritarianism, rather than merely illiberal. We shall analyze those positions in turn, and conclude that the most consistent stance is the third one. Nonetheless, there is an interesting element to the second one which may open a path towards its partial reconciliation with the third one. Such path will be pursued at the end of Chap. 10. In opening this section, it is important to specify – as it will hopefully emerge – that the authors of the second block mentioned, namely those who argue that populism somewhat intersects with democracy, do not fail to see its more dangerous aspects, such as its exclusivist and anti-pluralist tendencies, or its authoritarian overtones. Urbinati calls populism a form of “democracy disfigured”; and yet, for those authors, populists target less democracy itself than liberalism. Thus, worrisome as they are, the nature of their rhetoric is ultimately not extra-democratic.

9.3.1

The Equation of Populism and Democracy

The first interpretation of populism as overlapping with democracy appears doomed by the very concept of antagonism upon which it rests, and to which it may be worth devoting a few more words. As we saw in Chap. 7, Laclau and Mouffe’s theory starts from the radical heterogeneity and openness of the social, which in their view has characterized modern societies to a different extent since they have overcome the

42 For an earlier discussion of populism as an “interpretation of democracy” potentially inimical to political liberties, see Urbinati (1998).

9.3 Three Ideas on Populism’s Democratic Credentials

269

fixed, theologically-based forms of social and political hierarchy. In this context of utter heterogeneity, where nothing, not even language, can aspire to a fair degree of comprehensiveness, durability and historical depth, the only possibility for collective identities to rise lies in the equivalential process, which is distinctively antagonistic: identities can be formed only affectively, rhetorically, by appeal to an unprecedented use of language, and in open antagonism with a ‘constitutive other’. It is important to recall what antagonism means here: in Mouffe’s words, “antagonism is a we/they relation in which the two sides are enemies who do not share any common ground” (2005a, b: 20). That kind of relationship is said to be inescapable in the age of heterogeneity: if all possible unification requires a form of otherness which compacts a social front, then conflict is ineradicable, antagonistic, for the simple reason that the clashing identities are exclusively constituted as mutual opponents. They are not conceived of as two different fronts which oppose each other within a pre-existing historical horizon, a cultural and political context, a deep, rich and largely shared language, which ultimately exceed their constitution; they are two monads, whose only cultural and linguistic resources, whose only available standards of objectivity, are those specifically framed in opposition to the antagonist. Thus, any utterance they can ever express, by their very constitution, reflects such enmity, and mediation or reconciliation are perfectly impossible. This amounts to accepting, for instance, that a fascist and an anti-fascist can only confront each other on the terrain of their stark mutual revulsion, without being able to appeal to anything exterior to their political disagreement, because all they are informed by, all the standards of objectivity their identities are grounded upon, all the linguistic resources to which they can resort, stem from such disagreement. In the modern context of radical social heterogeneity, Laclau and Mouffe thus alert us, the only possible identity-construction is antagonistic. We saw that Laclau provides a deeper ontological and anthropological layer to this framework by introducing the Lacanian ‘deficient being’, who shapes all objectivity on the grounds of the ‘lack’ he experiences. Once accepted that, it is clear that antagonism becomes for Laclau and Mouffe the one and only path towards democratic emancipation from any sort of oppressive power: the construction of a counter-hegemony is either antagonistic or it cannot be, to paraphrase Mouffe. The democratic moment of mobilization against a power which fossilizes the openness of the social – at least to some extent – by imposing its own symbolic framework on it exclusively depends on the construction of an oppositional collective identity. Photographed in its “status nascendi” (Urbinati 2014: 167), such antagonistic, counter-hegemonic attempt to topple the hegemonic establishment is democratic; and yet, only in its status nascendi it can be; only in its being an unsettling force. But in its intimately antagonistic nature, the counterhegemonic formation bears the seeds of exclusion from its very inception, and exclusion must occur as soon as it succeeds in rising to power. In this sense, it is hard to reject the conclusion that, strictly speaking, ‘antagonistic democracy’ is an oxymoronic formula. Even if one accepts Laclau’s social ontology with all its

270

9 Populism in Contemporary Political Philosophy

evident difficulties,43 and thus embraces the idea that a popular subversion of oppression can only be antagonistic, it seems inevitable to conclude that any political order built on such premises is doomed to slip into the slope of unrestrained domination of one part on the other, of a ‘we’ on a ‘them’. In this scenario, ‘popular’ sovereignty dissolves. If the only cognitive, linguistic, cultural, symbolic resources to which a group can resort are those which demonize ‘the other’ – i.e., resources specifically crafted along such demonization – then ‘the other’ is wholly excluded once it is defeated in the hegemonic struggle. It is frankly difficult to figure out how this can resonate with any definition of democracy, even one oriented to the most basic majority rule.44 Not by chance, Laclau and Mouffe identify democracy with the “openness of the social” distinctive to the modern age, more than with the features of the hegemonic formations they envision. Moreover, it hardly comes as a coincidence that, as we saw in Chap. 7, Mouffe has battened down the hatches by arguing that agonism should be preferred to antagonism. Unfortunately, such strategy has led her to collide with two icebergs at once: (a) she recanted the Lacanian philosophical anthropology (and social ontology) that Laclau painstakingly built to undergird the populist/hegemonic logic of equivalential construction; (b) she lightheartedly embraced liberal-democratic constitutionalism, thus forsaking all the originality and distinctiveness of her own school of thought.

9.3.2

The Intersections of Populism and Democracy

Thus, the idea that the pars pro toto, antagonistic logic which most scholars attach to populism overlaps with democracy as such45 appears rife with problems. This 43

We saw above, for instance, how Villacañas and Urbinati, by drawing respectively on Freud and Gramsci, envisage forms of social-political construction alternative to antagonism. Moreover, and accordingly, it is hard to defend Laclau’s rejection of the existence of a linguistic, cultural, political, historical substrate which exceeds political identities as shaped in the struggle for power – without thereby being fixed and immutable. Such substrate provides, at least in principle, shared evaluating footholds, forms of objectivity which elude the hegemonic constructs, and resources for mutual understanding by which antagonism is deflated. 44 Cf. Kaul (2020) for further critique. As hinted in Chap. 7, on Kaul’s reading the left populism advocated by Laclau and Mouffe cannot do without an underlying myth, which enables the unification of heterogeneous demands, and which must have a somewhat nationalist-ethnic base; “it is not by chance that left-wing populists are nationalists whose demands are not exactly of a ‘global’ or ‘universal’ dimension, as Laclau would have liked” (Id: 35). 45 Further examples of such stance can be mentioned. In a Laclauian vein, Thomas Claviez formulates the rhetorical question: “Are not both the experts of Political Theory and the populists working on the same premiss, which is that to establish either order requires a Manichean outlook as to an ‘other’ that needs to be excluded – if for different purposes? For Political Theory, it is the part that has no part; for populism it is those who have no part in the demos” (2019: 1142). Moving away from Laclau’s area of influence, Mark Tushnet argues that there exists “something like a populism at the very foundations of democratic constitutionalism [. . .] Political movements that observers call populist in Ecuador and Bolivia sought and achieved what classical theorists of liberalism – such as

9.3 Three Ideas on Populism’s Democratic Credentials

271

insight allows us to step into the analysis of the second group of ideas on the relationship between populism and democracy, namely those who think that the former is still somewhat internal to the latter, and that it can bring about democratic improvements. As hinted above, Urbinati effectively disentangles populism from participatory democracy, representative democracy and liberal democracy: “populism is not a call for participatory as self-governing democracy” (2014: 131); “populism competes with representative democracy on the meaning of representation” (Id: 134); “populism may actually be described as a recurrent attempt within democratic societies to disassociate democracy from liberalism” (Id: 150). She describes the polarizing, pars pro toto logic characteristic of populism as dangerous for democracy and exclusivist, and she recognizes, crucially, that populism aspires to something more, and different, than the mere numerical majority. Nonetheless, she goes on to argue that it can still somewhat be inscribed within democracy, and states diffusely that “populism is more than a historically contingent phenomenon and pertains to the interpretation of democracy” (Id: 151–152, my italics), in that “unlike fascism, however, populism does not suspend free and competitive elections, nor does it deny them a legitimate role” (2019b: 1071).46 The populist interpretation of democracy, however, “depicts and theorizes democracy as hegemonic conflict in the view of and for the domination of one largely majoritarian opinion over its components and over minority opinions” (2014: 131–132, my italics). Such a disquieting “interpretation of democracy” is reinforced by the insight that “popular government, rather than democracy, is its [populism’s] reference point” (Id: 146) – where “popular government” is defined by reference to Schmitt’s idea that the best expression of the popular will is acclamation (of a leader by a part of the people), as preferred to the “statistical apparatus” of elections. In sum, Urbinati acknowledges that populists aspire to dominate their foes once in power, that they vociferously operate a “twist of majority rule into the rule of the majority” (Id: 139), that they disregard basic democratic practices, and that their rhetoric “denies autonomy to political institutions, but in particular to the legislative branch” (Id: 160), in order to fully empower the executive; and nonetheless, she concludes that populism represents an “interpretation of democracy”, as it “does not change the de facto institutional order to such an extent that it inaugurates a dictatorial, ‘mono-party-ist’ regimes” (2019b: 1075). Yet, is this enough to remain within the scope of democracy? The political formations Urbinati describes follow precisely the logic of Laclau’s hegemonic identities, which clash antagonistically for domination on each other, with no shared ground: what precisely is there left for democracy in such a scenario? What is most disrespectful of popular sovereignty than a part which overtly aims to dominate the other, and which seems to embrace Hannah Arendt,
called the transformation of subjects into citizens” (Tushnet 2019: 383). Tushnet also refers to exclusivist types of populism, but he seems to regard this transformative dimension as a central feature of the concept. Quite similarly, de Benoist claims that populism aims to restore a shared world, an Arendtian “space in-between people” as the locus of common freedoms (cf. de Benoist (2017), p. 115). 46 See also Urbinati (2019a).

272

9 Populism in Contemporary Political Philosophy

the “totalitarian image of a pre-procedural people, as represented by a party or a single leader seeking to occupy democracy’s empty space of power” (Pinelli 2019: 39, my italics)? Democracy and elections here figure only as the pre-existing institutional-social background within which such antagonistic formations rise, and which in themselves cannot attest for their democratic credentials. As it was largely observed, populism “arrives after the revolution is over and democratic sovereignty of the people has been established” (Rasmussen 2019: 1061); that is, populism “presupposes a formally democratic context” (Brubaker 2019: 7, my italics), which does not suffice to define it as democratic. The populist vocation towards domination described by Urbinati betrays the aspiration to subvert the democratic social-institutional background within which populist movements brew, independently of their exterior support of elections, contradicted by a “pre-procedural” understanding of politics, as stressed by Pinelli. As we shall see, the populist rendition of the people and popular sovereignty is incompatible with the electoral practice; moreover, from a historical point of view, currently a handful of Countries worldwide exists which excludes elections outright from the institutional system; in a similar global context, the exterior acceptance of elections is insufficient to qualify a political actor as democratic, as aptly observed by Ferrara.47 It is unclear how one can consistently refer to a hegemonic, in the sense of antagonistic, interpretation of democracy without drifting into an oxymoron. For as highly contested and protean as the concept of democracy may be, the loosest definitional and normative borders we can imagine seem to be trespassed by the idea of a pars aspiring to exert forms of domination on its opponents, even though it maintains an electoral facade. As William Scheuerman has observed, the Schmittian understanding of democracy as “homogeneous identity” “made a mockery of its core elements” (2019: 1174). The democratic substance inherent to populism, however, was defended by means of three further strategies, the first two of which can be analyzed in pair. Their main advocates are Mounk and Canovan. On the one hand, Mounk provides a straightforward formulation of a lingering intuition on the relation between democracy and populism: the latter is defined as democracy without liberalism, i.e. illiberal democracy: whereas democracy is defined minimally as “a set of binding electoral institutions that effectively translates popular views into public policy”, liberalism’s core business is to “effectively protect the rule of law and guarantee individual rights” (Mounk 2018: 27). According to Mounk, populism amounts to embracing the former while forsaking the latter: “to understand the nature of populism, we must recognize that it is both democratic and illiberal” (Id: 35). On the other hand, almost 20 years before Canovan had already provided an effective objection to the “democracy without rights” thesis, by succinctly observing that it “seems to imply that however weak populists may be as liberals, they do get full marks on the democracy section of the paper” (1999: 8).48

47

Cf. Ferrara (2020), pp. 23–24. On this point, see also Müller’s (2016) detailed discussion, pp. 49–60, and Pinelli (2019), for whom “the ‘illiberal democracy’ formula is a misnomer” (Id: 41). 48

9.3 Three Ideas on Populism’s Democratic Credentials

273

Thus, as we saw above, Canovan goes on to suggest that populism shares with democracy a myth, a redemptive idea of a wholesome, homogeneous sovereign people in motion. The difference is that populism wallows in that ‘messianic faith’, whereas democracy constructs a system of practices meant to translate the myth into a political and institutional order. Therefore, Canovan acknowledges the limits of populism and its potential clash with democracy. For instance, she notes that “the preference for direct personal representation over elaborate mediating institutions itself gives the leader of a populist movement a degree of personal power that is hard to reconcile with democratic aspirations” (Id: 14). Nonetheless, on the other hand, Canovan binds rather tightly populism with democracy. She ultimately confers on the former some democratic credentials, by arguing that it draws on and is enlivened by the essentially democratic mythical substrate, the emergence of which can at times be desirable: “in cases where radical populist mobilization against a partitocrazi leads to the formation of new parties or to a reform of the institutional structure, democracy may indeed be regarded as a self-correcting system in which both aspects play their part” (Ibid). This last idea of populism as “correcting” democracy’s shortfalls anticipates the final strategy to identify the intersection between populism and democracy. We shall get to it shortly, after having delved a little more into Canovan’s depiction of the democratic myth. Whereas Mounk traces a borderline between liberal and populist/ democratic politics, Canovan marks a boundary internal to democracy: she distinguishes its redemptive from its pragmatic face, and defines the former as a messianic faith in a mythical homogeneous people, which populism shares. What is questionable in Canovan’s framework is that this understanding of the people, whose modern origins we discussed above, is made to play the absolute protagonist in democracy’s redemptive dimension. There appears to be no other ‘archetypical’ image of democracy capable of putting in motion the modern sensibility of citizens socialized in a democratic context. Nonetheless, this flies in the face of at least another deeply ingrained cultural trope, which can hardly be excluded from a ‘democratic myth’: the idea, largely inspired from the Athenian agora and canonized most effectively by Rousseau in the modern age, of a body of citizens qua equal individuals, deliberating in a shared space in order to make political decisions and collectively shape their world. Now, on the one hand, in a way such imaginary was already perfectly warped in a populist-organicistic sense. In Albert Weale’s analysis of the democratic myth, the Greek and Rousseauvian legacies are central to the modern idea of ‘the will of the people’ as well as to the populist narrative. Weale helpfully highlights how their vulgarization ended up reinforcing the populist idea (i.e. democratic, in Canovan’s vocabulary) of a homogeneous people with an unequivocal will: “the phrase ‘the will of the people’ is part of a larger populist myth that assumes that government policy can be decided directly by the people as they exercise their power collectively” (Weale 2018: 3). In this sense, thus, the imaginaries of the Athenian polis and the Rousseauvian city-state have flowed into and contributed to the myth of popular homogeneity as identified by Canovan. As we shall see, this aspect is relevant for the identification of the red line lying between populism and democracy.

274

9 Populism in Contemporary Political Philosophy

Nonetheless, on the other hand, it may hardly be denied that “the vision of selfgovernment by a community of equals” (Barber 2003: 232) – the seed of which in the European culture dates back to the ‘Equals’ in the polis – pervades democracy to the same degree as the idea of the people in uniform motion. Not by chance, such imaginary of substantively equal individuals undertaking a collective endeavour has been the polemical target of all the most distinguished anti-democrats in the history of thought, before and after modernity, from Plato to Nietzsche49 and d’Annunzio,50 from Burke to de Maistre, up to monarchists such as Robert Filmer. They built very different philosophical foundations to undergird the same revulsion towards the idea of individual human beings as politically (and ontologically) free and equal, and thus equally entitled to express their views and needs in a public forum, a common space where no single truth stands as the exclusive reign of superior spirits. The egalitarian imaginary, which has a strong mythical referent in the Greek agora, was rediscovered and given high value in modernity; quite ironically, the long-lasting and deeply ingrained centrality of this idea in modern culture was emphasized precisely by Laclau and Mouffe, despite their depiction of the equivalential process as brushing off any form of cultural and symbolic depth, and their Nietzschean reduction of all thought to the self-referential objectivity of identities aiming to impose themselves on others. In Laclau and Mouffe’s own words, “in order to be mobilized in this way, the democratic principle of liberty and equality first had to impose itself as the new matrix of the social imaginary; or, in our terminology, to constitute a fundamental nodal point in the construction of the political. This decisive mutation in the political imaginary of Western societies took place two hundred years ago” (2001: 154–155). It is important to emphasize that my aim here is not to reconcile democracy and liberalism so as to insinuate a Habermasian co-originality in democracy’s mythical substance, although perhaps that would not be such an implausible endeavour. After 49

In Maurizio Ferraris’s rendition, in spite of the famous polemical stance of Nietzsche towards Plato, they share an aristocratic understanding of truth. Such affinity is condensed by Nietzsche in the formula: “I, Plato, am the truth”, presented in Twilight of the Idols: “This is why Nietzsche opens his apologue, which is largely a story of decay, of plebeization, of a mistake indeed, with the praise of a personal and aristocratic notion of truth: «I, Plato, am the truth». At the other end of the apologue, as an antidote to decay, we find a figure that is not very different from the philosopher king: Zarathustra”. (My translation of the original: “Ecco perché Nietzsche fa iniziare il suo apologo, che è in buona parte la storia di una decadenza, di una plebeizzazione, di un errore appunto, con l’elogio della nozione personale e aristocratica della verità: «Io, Platone, sono la verità». All’altro capo dell’apologo, come antidoto alla decadenza, troveremo una figura non molto diversa dal filosofo-re: Zarathustra” (Ferraris 2014: 118)). 50 From d’Annunzio’s Le Vergini delle Rocce: “Meanwhile the poets asked, disheartened and lost [. . .] They asked, some with irony, yet some without: «What may our duty be nowadays? Shall we glorify, by double senarii, universal suffrage? Shall we hasten, by frantic decasyllables, the fall of the Kings, the advent of the Republics, the access of the plebs to power?»”. (My translation of the original: “Chiedevano intanto i poeti, scoraggiati e smarriti [. . .] Chiedevano, alcuni con ironia, altri pur senza: «Qual può essere oggi il nostro officio? Dobbiamo noi esaltare in senarii doppii il suffragio universale? Dobbiamo noi affrettar con l’ansia dei decasillabi la caduta dei Re, l’avvento delle Repubbliche, l’accesso delle plebi al potere?»” (2010, Libro I)).

9.3 Three Ideas on Populism’s Democratic Credentials

275

all, Canovan herself has cast light on how modern democracy and liberalism have intertwined in their political and historical development: “for much of its history liberalism was explicitly the cause of the people, mobilizing the excluded in the name not only of popular sovereignty but of freedom and the rights of man [. . .] The liberal side of modern democracy is deeply indebted to that multifaceted radicalism, which regularly mobilized the excluded people behind liberal and progressive causes” (Canovan 2005: 86, my italics). Thus, one may even dare to claim that the democratic myth is actually infused with liberal elements, and the opposite. Yet, this is not the argument I am putting forward. Rather, the point here is that the ‘democratic myth’ is more multi-faceted than Canovan represents it, and that populists unilaterally select a part of it while neglecting the other: their narrative systematically obscures the plural component while embracing the organicistic one. Thus, populist actors appeal to a specifically populist, not democratic, redemptive myth, in that they perform an incomplete, counterfeit refashioning of the democratic myth. This populist version appeals to the people as a uniform, self-legitimating whole while forgetting the individual-egalitarian dimension. Populism, therefore, does exploit the mythical substance inherent to democracy, as Canovan claims, but only after having dismembered it. Its narrative rests on a chunk of the democratic imaginary. If this is true, then the intersection between populism and democracy pinpointed by Canovan no longer holds: rather than sharing a redemptive vision with democracy, populism forges its own by tapping into the richer democratic one. Let us now briefly examine the last of the points of intersection between populism and democracy, which we have already anticipated with Canovan: in her view, populism and its redemptive force can at times correct the distortions of pragmatic democratic institutions. This idea was famously captured by Arditi’s image of the “awkward guest”, who arrives drunk at a party and infringes the most basic rules of civility and behaviour, thus embarrassing the hosts and the guests; analogously, populism disregards and exerts pressures on “the ‘table manners’ governing democratic politics”. Yet, “the populist ‘noise’, irritating as it may be, is in fact internal to democratic practice as such” (Arditi 2005: 91): populism is democracy’s “internal periphery”, and in putting “to the test the obviousness of what passes as a normal democratic order” (Id: 92), it may either disrupt the very limits it tests, or transform them in a genuinely inclusive direction. This stance was advocated especially by Mudde and Kaltwasser. Despite defining populism’s pars pro toto logic as both antipluralist and anti-elitist, they point out that it “can work as either a threat to or a corrective for democracy. This means that populism per se is neither good nor bad for the democratic system” (2017: 79). In fact, on the one hand, populism can attack minority rights, “erode the institutions specialized in the protection of fundamental rights” (Id: 83), create or exacerbate political cleavages, e.g. by moralizing the political and social arena. On the other hand, however, populism may give voice to the excluded, mobilize them and better integrate them; it can press the system towards a higher responsiveness and accountability, and re-politicize “issues that are not discussed by the elite” (Id: 84). Therefore, any type of populist movement can bring about democratic improvement.

276

9 Populism in Contemporary Political Philosophy

Furthermore, Mudde and Kaltwasser add another democratic, inclusive credential to populism: they introduce the idea that, in spite of having its central feature in an exclusionary logic that splits society into antagonistic camps, populism can be inclusionary. Not only, therefore, can a populist formation – independently of its ideological orientation – politicize crystallized assumptions oppressing given social strata; it can also be intrinsically inclusionary rather than exclusionary, in spite of the anti-pluralist and antagonistic character that Mudde and Kaltwasser themselves were among the first to identify. This is explained by the idea that “populism does not exist in isolation” (Id: 21), in that it always manifests in conjunction with a specific set of ideas and policy proposals, contextually tailored, which Mudde and Kaltwasser call “host ideologies”. It is precisely the variety of the ideologies that can be assembled with the minimal pars pro toto, ‘people v. elite’ logic, that accounts for the apparently inexhaustible spectrum of ideological referents adopted by populist movements: “it is the combination of populism and its host ideology that creates the specific interpretation of “the people” and “the elite”” (Id: 41). This explains why populism can ultimately be both leftist and rightist, inclusionary and exclusionary.51 Exclusion, especially, is traced not to the Manichean posture of populists, but to an external source: “it is nativism and not populism that is at the basis of the exclusion” (Id: 83, my italics). Nativism was defined by Mudde in his Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe as “an ideology, which holds that states should be inhabited exclusively by members of the native group (“the nation”) and that nonnative elements (persons and ideas) are fundamentally threatening to the homogeneous nation-state” (2007: 19). Therefore, a populist logic employed in the absence of nativism can perfectly be oriented towards the inclusion of given categories, rather than building upon antagonism and exclusion. For instance, Mudde and Kaltwasser have argued that Latin American populists such as Chavez and Morales tend to be more inclusionary, whereas European populists tend to rely more on nativism – and thus on exclusion (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2013). Nonetheless, they specify, the democratizing potential of a populist movement is not necessarily the function of its intrinsic inclusive or exclusive nature: “by arguing that European populism is predominantly exclusionary and Latin American populism is primarily inclusionary, we are not claiming that the former inevitably has a negative impact on democracy, while the latter exclusively embodies a positive force for democracy” (Id: 168). To wrap up, Mudde and Kaltwasser claim that populism is not inherently undemocratic, as its democratic character depends on its host

51

The possibility of an inclusionary, leftist populism was also stressed, to mention some, by Mouffe (2018), Blokker (2019), Norris (2019), Tushnet (2019). Moreover, if pushed to extremes, the focus on host ideologies can result in positions that sideline populism as a useless category to evaluate a political movement. According to María Pía Lara, populism is a mere combat concept, a pejorative label that should be relinquished, and critical attention should be diverted towards host ideologies: “it is not populism, but racism, authoritarianism and exclusion that we must fight against. The struggles of today present us with a conflictual panorama in which powerful actors have been manipulating their followers, encouraging them to embrace fascistic and other anti-democratic political parties” (Lara 2019: 1151).

9.3 Three Ideas on Populism’s Democratic Credentials

277

ideologies. Moreover, populism can be either democratizing or not, and either inclusionary or exclusionary, depending on empirical contingencies and on the nature of the host ideologies adopted by a given populist movement. We shall evaluate further the merits of such positions in Chap. 10, after having analyzed their main competitor in what follows.

9.3.3

The Incompatibility of Populism and Democracy

The last group of scholars advocates the lack of any intersection between populism and democracy. There are mainly two identifiable strategies to support such stance. One appears internally problematic, while the other is arguably the most consistent account of the relationship between populism and democracy. The first one is well exemplified by Axel Mueller, who identifies at the bottom of populism a “normative essence of ‘democracy’ as ‘non-dictatorship’” (2019: 1033), where ‘non-dictatorship’ merely derives from the populist respect for the electoral practice. On his reading, populism strips democracy to the bone by removing any and every of its ingredients except for an extreme idea of majority rule, which thus represents its ultimate normative bedrock: “it [populism] is committed to acquiesce in ‘minimal representative electoral democracy’, the view that the legitimate government is constituted by those elected by majorities in procedures of fair competitive elections” (Ibid). According to Mueller, the normative gist of populism lies in the full empowerment of the elected majority, which is legitimately entitled to vindicate for itself the attribute of ‘the people’ – and thus ‘the sovereign’ – thereby excluding the minority from government, denying them rights, and arrogating a “permanent mandate” for itself: “according to populist’s ideology core principles, those losing the elections, the opposition, have no legitimate entitlement to co-govern because normative majoritarianism entails that no one else can correctly claim to represent the people” (Id: 1041). In Mueller’s view, differently from a normal majority rule, populism denies the alternation of mandates, the idea that ‘the people’ always encompasses the whole community, and that therefore majorities and minorities should co-govern. Thus, Mueller concludes, populism is intrinsically – not accidentally – exclusionary and undemocratic, in that it construes majority rule as swiftly turning the ruling majority into ‘the people’ as such; this amounts to exclusionism, potential weakening of minority’s rights, potential tyranny of the majority (albeit “founded in an ideology” (Id: 1034) and not in mere cynicism). Now, this reading seems to suffer from both internal inconsistencies and a failure to account for some basic and broadly recognized features of populism. On the one hand, if populism rests fully upon “the people’s will as expressed in elections” (Id: 1035), to the extent that the elected majority acquires the status of ‘the people’, it is unclear why populists should arrogate a permanent mandate, thus dismissing those very elections which represent the core of their own “normative structure”. In other

278

9 Populism in Contemporary Political Philosophy

words, on Mueller’s account, the populist ideology normatively reinforces elections,52 up to the point that they appoint not a mere government, but ‘the people’. Why then would populists disavow their own normative lodestar, by usurping a temporally indefinite mandate and silencing the electoral expression of the people’s will, which they value? The doubt arises that the populist normativity has a different source. On the other hand, and more importantly, Mueller’s framework fails to include a set of elements which can hardly be ignored when defining populism: the dichotomic people/elite axis, the homogeneous nature of the populist people, and the selfreferential normativity characterizing populism. The idea, in other words, that the people be a uniform whole, epistemically, morally, and culturally authoritative, opposed to a corrupt elite, is plainly ruled out by Mueller’s reduction of populism to a stark majoritarianism which conflates the majority with the people. An implausible and evident consequence of Mueller’s framework is that a populist movement would accept to be treated as a rightless minority once defeated in the electoral run. The firm belief in a majoritarian system appointing ‘the people’ (rather than a simple majority) would prompt the losing populists to surrender their weapons and rights to the winners – rather than thundering against the elite’s obscure plots, or at least persisting with their self-conferred license of ‘peoplehood’.53 Jan-Werner Müller is arguably the thinker who has most consistently extracted the consequences of the pars pro toto logic. As we saw, he defines populism as “a particular moralistic imagination of politics, a way of perceiving the political world that sets a morally pure and fully unified [. . .] people against elites who are deemed corrupt” (2016: 19). Such self-attributed moral superiority results in the “populist claim that they, and only they, represent the people” (Id: 20), and in the belief that “only some of the people are really the people” (Id: 21). Such people, as we saw, bear a “singular common good”. The reference to Schmitt’s idea of the people as a symbolic unity, which can be found also in other analyses of populism (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017; Urbinati 2014; Urbinati 2019a), is especially fruitful in Müller’s framework. In recalling Schmitt’s “conceptual split between the “substance” of the

52

Such distorted reinforcement of elections seems to contrast with Rosanvallon’s interpretation of populism: whereas for Rosanvallon populism is an undemocratic “pathology” in that it exacerbates the practices of counter-democracy, for Mueller populists take to extremes precisely the democratic institution par excellence, namely elections. 53 Examples of populist parties keeping vindicating the status of representatives of the ‘real people’ after electoral defeats are uncountable; it is probably easier to list the populist parties which relinquished that kind of claim after bad electoral outcomes, rather than those which maintained it. Just to pick an outstanding example, however, it may be worth mentioning the case of the Northern League between the 2013 and 2018 Italian national elections. After the 2013 unfortunate 4,08% accomplished by the party, Matteo Salvini took the leadership and revolutionized its narrative: from the emphasis on the regional autonomy of Northern Italian regions (cf. Tarchi 2002 and 2015), the main refrains became slogans such as “prima gli italiani”, “faccio quello che mi chiedono gli italiani”, “abbiamo gli italiani con noi” (“Italians first”, “I do what Italians ask me to”, “we have the Italians with us”). This is especially telling, as not only populist discourse was not discouraged by the disappointing electoral outcome; it was crafted from scratch in the years following such an electoral loss.

9.3 Three Ideas on Populism’s Democratic Credentials

279

people on the one hand and the empirical outcome of elections or opinion surveys on the other” (Müller 2016: 52), Müller casts light on the unbridgeable hiatus between the self-referential normativity of the populist moralistic whole and the proceduralized normativity inherent to democratic practices. This allows him to “explain why populists so frequently oppose the “morally correct” outcome of a vote to the actual empirical result of an election, when the latter was not in their favor” (Id: 32).54 As argued by Freeden, who is explicitly sympathetic with Müller’s perspective, “in the world of populism [. . .] a distaste for tolerance, and distrust of ‘others’, is a matter of principle, because compromise would be a betrayal of the ‘authentic’ people” (2017: 8). Thus, Müller convincingly contrasts the pervasive refrain “populism as illiberal democracy”. The definition of populists as democratic on the grounds of their acceptance of elections, which several scholars tend to endorse, fails to acknowledge that “political rights are not just about liberalism (or the rule of law); they are constitutive of democracy as such” (Müller 2016: 55).55 A government dismantling the liberal-democratic institutional framework by appeal to the legitimation of a wholesome people is not merely targeting liberal institutions, but also democratic ones. We shall shortly analyze the behaviour of populists in power in what follows. To conclude with Müller, in denying that populism may intersect with democracy, he concedes, like Mudde, Kaltwasser and Arditi, that populism “can be useful in making it clear that parts of the population really are unrepresented” (Id: 103). Although “populism is not a path to more participation in politics” (Id: 102), but rather “a real danger to democracy” (Id: 103),56 populists can work as a signalling device of social, political, institutional deficits in liberal democracies.

A similar insight was advanced by Urbinati, who notes that “the people’s collectivity as a homogeneous whole, rather than an ex post result of counting votes, seems to be, since Aristotle, one of the signs of a disfigured democracy, a democracy that is prone to host a demagogic leadership” (2014: 143). 55 For a sympathetic perspective, cf. Pinelli (2019). 56 Further supporters of populism’s intrinsic “affinity with authoritarianism” (Cohen 2019), or at least of its problematic co-existence with democracy, are Jean Cohen (2019), Scheppele (2019), Arato (2019), Rosanvallon (2008), Tarchi (2015), Norris and Inglehart (2019), Pinelli (2019). Moreover, the undemocratic character ingrained in the populist logic led Scheuerman to identify an affinity of populism with neo-liberal, “reactionary economics”: “populism goes hand-in-hand with reactionary economics because without the degradation of democracy generated by the former the latter would not be practically viable” (2019: 1177). Drawing on Franz L. Neumann’s analysis of the Nazi regime, Scheuerman observes that precisely the institutional chaos fostered by the Nazis, and similarly by the populists today, paves the way for an economic-financial oligarchy to act unconstrained. Clearly, Scheuerman specifies that not all populist parties embrace neo-liberalism, but that there exists “a possible ‘elective affinity’ between populism’s logic, on the one hand, and neoliberalism’s economic logic, on the other” (Id: 1178). For a different perspective, stressing the irrelevance of the neo-liberal credo to (rightist) populisms, cf. Chap. 6 of Mudde’s Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe (2007). 54

280

9.4 9.4.1

9 Populism in Contemporary Political Philosophy

Populists in Power, Populist Constitutionalism, and the Enemies of Populism Populists in Power

When discussing the features and demeanours of populists in power, several authors at the beginning of the twenty-first century emphasized the irredeemable vagueness of populist parties, which resulted in unstable governments, incapable of taking consistent action. Taggart, for instance, observes that populism’s frequent reliance on charismatic leadership, and more generally its de-institutionalizing tendencies, represent the main self-limitation of populism (2000, 2002): “the appeal of populists to their constituencies is usually on the basis of their non-political nature and, therefore, as they become institutionalised into politics, they inevitably lose a major part of their popular appeal” (Taggart 2002: 69). In a similar vein, Weyland stresses that “populist leadership therefore tends to be transitory. It either fails or, if successful, transcends itself” (2001: 14), and Mény and Surel argue that “populist parties are by nature neither durable nor sustainable party governments. Their fate is to be integrated into the mainstream, to disappear, or to remain permanently in opposition” (2002: 18). Such stance was gradually abandoned by scholars in the following years, when North American and European populists endured institutionalization, from Trump to Orbán, from Brexit’s leadership to Berlusconi, from Babiš to Erdoğan. Mudde, Kaltwasser and Betz, for instance, provided articulated analyses of the conditions under which ruling populists are stable in power (Betz 2002; Mudde 2007; Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017). Among the most important, they highlight aspects such as “internal coherence and effective leadership” (Betz 2002: 210), “performance in office” (Id: 211), “party ideology, leadership and organization” (Mudde 2007: 256–257), the contexts, “breeding ground”, and political cultures in which populists operate (Mudde 2007; Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017), their ability to create and nourish a sense of crisis (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017). Whether compatible or not with institutionalization, observers have frequently highlighted the tendency of populists to stoke the fire of antagonism even after seizing power (Urbinati 2019b; Villacañas Berlanga 2017). This can result in two opposite behaviours: on the one hand, “short-termism”, as Urbinati aptly named it, i.e. the readiness to “satisfy the immediate needs and claims they [populists] have gathered. Future-oriented strategies qualify parties and are the target of populist propaganda” (Urbinati 2019b: 1076); on the other hand, as stressed by Villacañas, “in order for the people to stay united the equivalential chain and the packages of demands have to remain unfulfilled”.57 As soon as the demands which constitute the equivalential chain are differentially answered, the hegemonic formation (or the people, in Laclau’s terms) is dissolved. Thus, populists in power may ultimately My translation of the original: “Perché il popolo resti unito la catena equivalenziale e i pacchetti di rivendicazioni devono restare inevasi” (Villacañas Berlanga 2017: 62).

57

9.4 Populists in Power, Populist Constitutionalism, and the Enemies of Populism

281

attempt to maintain the social needs which nourish the equivalential chains they crafted, as well as the sense of crisis they helped to foster (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017). In so doing, they may engage in a “permanent electoral campaign, which the leader and its majority wage in order to prove they are not – and never will be – a new establishment” (Urbinati 2019a: 191). Those two strategies may also co-exist in practice,58 and ultimately respond to the same pattern and needs: preserving the significance of the narrations which earned them power is a crucial legitimating tool for populists, insofar as they have no identity, scope, and aim, other than the enmities, protests, and policies that they blended into the miraculous concoction of ‘the will of the people’. The idea of a governmental inconsistency and instability of populists was most firmly refuted by those who most carefully stressed the undemocratic nature and authoritarian proclivities of populists and of their pars pro toto mentality. Clearly, the lack of governmental durability and vagueness were not completely ruled out of the picture; yet, the focus on the populist movements which successfully translated intolerant or monistic narratives into a consistent governmental action led several scholars to deny that populists be “by nature” incapable of institutionalization. According to the authors who more strongly connect populism with authoritarianism, when populists rise to power and become authoritarian, they do not “transcend themselves” and do not give up their inner nature – thus becoming ‘non-populists’; rather, with the authoritarian turn they ultimately fulfil the exclusionary core of their own mentality, or ideology, precisely after having institutionalized. In Jean Cohen’s

58

An interesting example of such co-existence is provided by the government coalition of the two Italian populist parties, 5S Movement and Northern League, which lasted from June 2018 to August 2019. On the one hand, the 5S Movement implemented a costly basic income policy (reddito di cittadinanza), ideally aimed at the professional employment of its addressees, without a realistic infrastructure and program for employment. The policy had been the flagship of the 5S Movement’s campaigns over a decade, and thus its immediate enactment was perceived as essential to the movement’s credibility, independently of its long-term economic sustainability and actual impact on employment. Almost 1 year after its launch, only the 3,6% of the employable beneficiaries of the measure were actually integrated in the job market (cf. Finizio 2020), most of whom with short-term contracts (cf. Pogliotti 2020). I must clarify that what is at stake here are not the specifics of the policy itself, but rather the short-term attitude which has hastened the degradation of a “revolutionary” measure (promoted as such by and large) into a form of economic support, important as it is for its addressees. The policy was enacted before the infrastructural and occupational conditions for its realization were created, or at least seriously planned. On the other hand, the Northern League succeeded in implementing its “decreto sicurezza” (security decree), which was largely acknowledged as a tool for weakening the Italian welcoming structures for migrants. This resulted in the inevitable increase of irregular migrants with no assistance, accommodation, job and integration perspectives. As a consequence, the number of migrants wandering streets, stations, and abandoned buildings in conditions of utter poverty rose (cf. Gagliardi 2019, who refers to Openpolis and ActionAid’s analyses). This obviously enhanced, rather than diminished, the general sense of insecurity essential to the Northern League’s nationalist and securitarian ‘equivalential chain’. The two examples show how the same ‘populist’ majority can simultaneously pursue forms of short-termism on the one hand, and of (disguised) preservation of the equivalential chain on the other.

282

9 Populism in Contemporary Political Philosophy

writing, such reversal in perspective is especially clear: “the authoritarian logic only implicit in populist movements and movement parties invariably asserts itself once populist leaders gain governmental power, if they retain their populist stance” (1097–1098, my italics). Hence Müller’s claim that populism is not incompatible with institutions, nor with constitution writing and amending: “populists are not generally “against institutions”, and they are not destined to self-destruct once in power. They only oppose those institutions that, in their view, fail to produce the morally (as opposed to empirically) correct outcomes” (2016: 62). Müller argues that once in power, populists tend to pursue three statecraft strategies: “colonization of the state”, “mass clientelism”, and “systematic repression of civil society”. He clarifies that all these practices appear also in the absence of populism, but what is distinctive of populists is that “they can engage in such practices openly and with public moral justifications, since for them only some people are really the people and hence deserving of the support by what is rightfully their state” (Id: 46). On such grounds, Müller argues, populists justify constitutional amendments which are ultimately “designed to limit the power of nonpopulists” (Id: 67), rather than to guarantee the rule of law. This introduces us to the short discussion of populist constitutionalism which follows.

9.4.2

Populist Constitutionalism: Not Just Constituent Politics

The distorted appeal to liberal-democratic justificatory resources identified by Müller – or, in Scheppele’s terms, the tendency to “hide in liberal language, the way that wolves hide in sheep’s clothing” (2019: 325) – is a central ingredient in the recent attempts at identifying a “populist constitutionalism”. Simone Chambers provides four examples (Poland, Hungary, Turkey and Venezuela) demonstrating how often the constitutional innovations of populists in charge are “far down the road of authoritarianism” (Id: 1118) in their contents and effects, albeit justified by an artificial appeal to the ideals of liberal democracy. Her conclusion is that “one of the identifying features of populist constitutionalism is the tension between the means of justification of constitutional reform, on the one hand, and the institutional ends sought through constitutional reform” (Id: 1119). The policies mentioned by Chambers, from Erdoğan’s referendum in 2017 to Orbán’s legislative action in the last 9 years, cannot be said to have a populist content; rather, they have a vaguely democratic justification meant to legitimate reforms which undermine the liberaldemocratic institutional framework, and move towards an authoritarian direction passing through intermediate phases, during which the regime can be defined, with Müller, as a “defective democracy” (2016: 58). Few observers may argue with certainty that the recent suspension of parliament and elections in Hungary, with

9.4 Populists in Power, Populist Constitutionalism, and the Enemies of Populism

283

Orbán indeterminately ruling by decree,59 does not mark a significant step from “defective democracy” to authoritarianism. The limit of Chambers’s interesting contribution is that it seems to construe the populist justification and the policies justified as if they were entirely independent of each other. On the one hand stands a truly democratic justificatory framework, on the other a set of authoritarian measures, undemocratically implemented (e.g. through controlled referendums), which need a disguise, an artificial facade. The populist sleight of hand would consist in providing such disguise by the instrumental appeal to fairly democratic motifs. A suspicion which can hardly be overlooked, however, is that those two strands be intertwined from the outset: the populist justifications and narratives, far from being plainly democratic, already contain and reflect undemocratic distortions of democratic constitutionalism. That would explain their striking consistence with the undemocratic policies they conceal. A hypothesis of this sort was explored by Luigi Corrias in an interesting discussion of populist constitutionalism. According to Corrias, populist constitutionalism has a threefold structure, which seems to have strong affinities with liberal-democratic constitutionalism: (a) constituent power is conferred on the people, and constituent power has priority over constitutional power; (b) the people is sovereign; (c) the people has a clear identity over time. Yet, Corrias’s argument runs, these three pillars are all interpreted in a very different way from their contemporary liberal-democratic formulations: (a) constituent power, or the moment of ‘politics’, is depicted as distinguished from and independent of constitutional power, or the ‘legal-juridical’ moment. Such rendering allows to subordinate either of them to the other, and the populists opt for subordinating the latter to the former. But contemporary legal theory has demonstrated their interdependence: whereas the constitutional moment requires a constituent founding, such founding calls for prospective legitimation: “only in retrospect, if and only if this act will be taken up and followed by other acts that recognise it as the foundation of a new legal order will it truly count as constituent” (Corrias 2016: 17); (b) by representing the people as a ‘present’, concrete and defined entity, populists forget that the people is always, to some extent, an ‘absence’ (as Lefort has observed, such absence is especially evident in elections as the moment of mass individual expression, in which the citizen “becomes a mere statistic” (Id: 21)). For Corrias, the absence of the people requires representation in order for popular sovereignty to be possible; in this sense representation is constitutive of democracy, whereas populists tend to reject it in the name of a sovereign people simplistically assumed as present;60 (c) the constitutional identity of the people is seen by populists in terms of “sameness” rather than “selfhood”: identity is imagined as a self-same, immutable object which has to be protected, rather than as an ever-changing, “collective selfhood” (Id: 24) which denies justification to fixed, unquestionable borders of exclusion and urges the protection of minorities. 59 60

Cf. Walker and Rankin (2020). For a similar perspective, cf. Zaccaria (2018).

284

9 Populism in Contemporary Political Philosophy

Now, one does not necessarily have to agree in full with Corrias’s well-argued framework. By appeal to a different understanding of constitutionalism it may be argued, for instance, that the primacy of constituent power is not a deformation, but rather a key tenet, of a truly democratic constitutionalism. Or it may be argued, like scholars as different as Jan-Werner Müller, Mudde and Laclau do, that representation does play a role in populism, rather than being its polemic target. However, the strength of Corrias’s approach is independent of the empathy that different readers may have with his rendition of populism, and with the specific constitutionalist perspective from which he evaluates populist constitutionalism. Corrias’s discussion is promising in that it attempts to pinpoint the specificity of the populist appeals to the people, constitutionalist intuitions, and basic claims. Rather than conceding that the superficial affinity of those claims with democracy corresponds to a substantive kinship, Corrias aims to account for the perception that there be something distinctive attached to them. To pull the three strings of his argument together, populist constitutionalism hinges upon the idea of a “present”, tangible people as sovereign, homogeneously defined by a fixed identity, which provides justification for exclusion and for the self-attribution of a full constituent power. This distinguishes his endeavour from more superficial readings of the constitutionalist import of the phenomenon – e.g., those which tend to construe populism as a simple “prioritization of constituent politics” (Blokker 2019: 333), inherently neutral and virtually in harmony with democratic constituent politics; or those which argue for a substantive affinity of the liberal-democratic and the populist appeals to the people: “constitutional rhetoric and mainstream constitutional theory therefore both lend support to the populist claim that a unitary and unchanging people has an immanent but continuing role as a constitutional actor superior to the constitution itself” (Doyle 2019: 162). Against such positions, Pinelli has argued that “the idea that the collectivity comes prior to the individual lies on the presumption that the former is a social construction, not a natural element. For contemporary populism it is instead an allegedly natural community, ‘the people’, that takes centre stage” (2019: 41). One thing is the constitutional fiction of a “unitary and unchanging people”, another is the naturalization of the latter as a tangible, living, desiring whole. In Chap. 10 we shall try to identify the point at which the populist claim and the democratic one part ways.

9.4.3

Concluding in Harmony: The (Nearly) Uncontroversial Enemies of Populism

In concluding the critical review, let us briefly mention an important area of concordance among observers, which has to do with the political-institutional conditions of existence of populism and its main polemical target. Here scholarly disagreement is narrow. Regarding the first issue, virtually all scholars agree that populism is a necessary product of modern liberal, representative democracies: it is “the (bad) conscience of liberal democracy” (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017: 116), and “it arises with the introduction of representative democracy; it is its shadow” (Müller

9.4 Populists in Power, Populist Constitutionalism, and the Enemies of Populism

285

2016: 20). More in general, populism is seen as the product of the “breakdown of social order and the loss of confidence in the political system’s ability to restore it” (Panizza 2005: 11), “the exhaustion of political traditions and the discrediting of political parties” (Id: 12), “changes at the level of the economy, culture and society, such as processes of urbanisation and economic modernisation” (Id: 12–13),61 “the emergence of forms of political representation outside traditional political institutions” (Id: 13). Debate is practically non-existing on this matter. As to the natural opponent of the populist logic, the debate boils down to few alternatives, which sometimes reveal little more than differences in emphasis. Some authors focus more on the opposition of populism and liberalism (Mounk 2018; Scheppele 2019; Mudde 2007; Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017), others on that between populism and representative/parliamentary democracy (Mény and Surel 2002; Taggart 2000; Weale 2018; Zaccaria 2018), and some highlight both of them (Canovan 1999, 2005; Urbinati 2014; Urbinati 2019a; De Benoist 2017; Tarchi 2015; Mueller 2019). Only few observers explicitly exclude that populism contrasts with one of the two. For instance, we saw that Müller, Mudde and Kaltwasser deny that populism be against representation as such: “given that populism is usually employed to attack the establishment, pundits and academics are prone to argue that it is against political representation [. . .] This does not mean, however, that populism is intrinsically at odds with political representation. What populists want is to have their representatives in power, i.e., representatives of “the people”” (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017: 51). A further enemy of populism, compatible with the previous ones, was identified in technocracy (Müller 2016; Caramani 2017). In an interesting article, Caramani highlighted the specular opposition dividing populism and technocracy: while sharing an idea of a homogeneous and uncontroversial collective interest, a non-pluralistic view of society and politics, and a consequent rejection of accountability and mediation, populism and technocracy diverge in the selection of the allegedly self-evident common good to be (undemocratically) implemented: ‘the people’ for populists, the scientific procedures and knowledge for technocrats (Caramani 2017).62 Only the authors who take the most radical positions on the relationship between democracy and populism, such as Mueller and Müller, argue for the incompatibility of populism and democracy as such. Axel Mueller, for instance, concludes that “given its normative core, populism is incompatible with the continued democratic legitimation of political authority even in the normatively most austere conception of ‘electoral democracy’” (2019: 1027).

In this regard, Kurt Weyland’s critique (2001) of “modernization and dependency theories” has become an obvious presupposition for the totality of contemporary theorists of populism. None of them advocates the dependence of politics, and thus of populist phenomena, on socio-economic structures. 62 As correctly stressed by Mudde, however, populism is “not necessarily opposed to technocratic measures, particularly if they can help to do away with (established) politicians” (2004: 547). 61

286

9 Populism in Contemporary Political Philosophy

As we shall see in the following search for the ‘thin red line’ between radical democratic theories and populism, the thesis advocating their incompatibility appears the most cogent.

References Anselmi, Manuel. 2017. Populismo. Teorie e Problemi. Milano: Mondadori Università. Arato, Andrew. 2019. How We Got Here? Transition Failures, Their Causes and the Populist Interest in the Constitution. Philosophy and Social Criticism 45 (9–10): 1106–1115. Arditi, Benjamin. 2005. Populism as an Internal Periphery of Democratic Politics. In Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, ed. Francisco Panizza, 72–98. London: Verso. ———. 2010. Populism is Hegemony Is Politics? On Ernesto Laclau’s on Populist Reason. Constellations 17 (3): 488–497. Barber, Benjamin R. 2003. Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age. 20th anniversary ed. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press. Berlin, Isaiah, Richard Hofstadter, Donald MacRae, et al. 1968. To Define Populism. Government and Opposition 3 (2): 137–179. Betz, Hans-Georg. 2002. Conditions Favouring the Success and Failure of Radical Right-Wing Populist Parties in Contemporary Democracies. In Democracies and the Populist Challenge, ed. Yves Mény and Yves Surel, 197–213. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Blokker, Paul. 2019. Varieties of Populist Constitutionalism: The Transnational Dimension. German Law Journal 20 (3): 332–350. Brubaker, Rogers. 2019. Populism and Nationalism. Nations and Nationalism 26 (1): 1–23. Canovan, Margaret. 1999. Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy. Political Studies 47 (1): 2–16. ———. 2002. Taking Politics to the People: Populism as the Ideology of Democracy. In Democracies and the Populist Challenge, ed. Yves Mény and Yves Surel, 25–44. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2005. The People. Cambridge: Polity Press. Caramani, Daniele. 2017. Will vs. Reason: The Populist and Technocratic Forms of Political Representation and Their Critique to Party Government. American Political Science Review 111 (1): 54–67. Cohen, Jean L. 2019. Hollow Parties and Their Movementization: The Populist Conundrum. Philosophy and Social Criticism 45 (9–10): 1084–1105. Corrias, Luigi. 2016. Populism in a Constitutional Key: Constituent Power, Popular Sovereignty and Constitutional Identity. European Constitutional Law Review 12 (1): 6–26. D’Annunzio, Gabriele. 2010. Le Vergini delle Rocce (1895). Segrate: BUR Rizzoli, ed. by Pietro Gibellini. De Benoist, Alain. 2017. Populismo. Bologna: Arianna Editrice, transl. by Giuseppe Giaccio. D’Eramo, Marco. 2013. Populism and the New Oligarchy. New Left Review 82: 5–28. Doyle, Oran. 2019. Populist Constitutionalism and Constituent Power. German Law Journal 20 (3): 161–180. Ferrara, Alessandro. 2020. Maggioranza degli elettori, minoranza del popolo. Parole-chiave 1: 19–33. Ferraris, Maurizio. 2014. Spettri di Nietzsche. Milano: Ugo Guanda Editore. Finizio, Michela. 2020. Poco lavoro con il reddito di cittadinanza, ancora fermi i progetti dei Comuni. Il Sole 24 Ore, February 13th. https://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/poco-lavoro-il-redditocittadinanza-ancora-fermi-progetti-comuni-ACjslzHB?fromSearch. Freeden, Michael. 2017. After the Brexit Referendum: Revisiting Populism as an Ideology. Journal of Political Ideologies 22 (1): 1–11.

References

287

Gagliardi, Andrea. 2019. Migranti, con il decreto sicurezza irregolari a quota 680mila. Il Sole 24 Ore, November 1st. https://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/migranti-il-decreto-sicurezzairregolari-quota-680mila-ACOtf9v. Houwen, Tim. 2011. The Non-European Roots of the Concept of Populism, Sussex European Institute: Working Paper no. 120. https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php? name¼sei-working-paper-no-120.pdf&site¼266. Ionescu, Ghita, and Ernest Gellner, eds. 1969. Populism: Its Meanings and National Characteristics. Letchworth: The Garden City Press. Jones, Paul K. 2019. Insights from the Infamous: Recovering the Social-Theoretical First Phase of Populism Studies. European Journal of Social Theory 22 (4): 458–476. Kaul, Volker. 2020. On How to Deal with Populism. In Minorities and Populism – Critical Perspectives from South Asia and Europe, ed. Volker Kaul and Ananya Vajpeyi, 29–37. Dordrecht: Springer. Laclau, Ernesto. 2007. On Populist Reason (2005). London: Verso. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. 2001. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985). London: Verso. Lara, María Pía. 2019. The Term ‘Populism’ as a Combat-Concept and a Catchword. Philosophy and Social Criticism 45 (9-10): 1144–1156. MacRae, Donald. 1969. Populism as an Ideology. In Populism: Its Meanings and National Characteristics, ed. Ghita Ionescu and Ernest Gellner, 153–165. Letchworth: The Garden City Press. Mény, Yves, and Yves Surel. 2002. The Constitutive Ambiguity of Populism. In Democracies and the Populist Challenge, ed. Yves Mény and Yves Surel, 1–21. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Merker, Nicolao. 2009. Filosofie del Populismo. Roma: Laterza. Mouffe, Chantal. 2000. The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso. ———. 2005a. On the Political. London: Routledge. ———. 2005b. The ‘End of Politics’ and the Challenge of Right-wing Populism. In Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, ed. Francisco Panizza, 50–71. London: Verso. ———. 2018. For a Left Populism. London: Verso. Mounk, Yascha. 2018. The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom is in Danger & How to Save It. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mudde, Cas. 2004. The Populist Zeitgeist. Government and Opposition 39 (4): 541–563. ———. 2007. Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mudde, Cas, and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2013. Exclusionary vs. Inclusionary Populism: Comparing Contemporary Europe and Latin America. Government and Opposition 48 (2): 147–174. ———. 2017. Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mueller, Axel. 2019. The Meaning of ‘Populism’. Philosophy and Social Criticism 45 (9-10): 1025–1057. Müller, Jan-Werner. 2016. What is Populism? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 2019. Democracy and Disrespect. Philosophy and Social Criticism 45 (9–10): 1208–1221. Norris, Pippa. 2019. Varieties of Populist Parties. Philosophy and Social Criticism 45 (9–10): 981–1012. Norris, Pippa, and Ronald Inglehart. 2019. Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Panizza, Francisco. 2005. Introduction: Populism and the Mirror of Democracy. In Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, ed. Francisco Panizza, 1–31. London: Verso. Pinelli, Cesare. 2019. The Rise of Populism and the Malaise of Democracy. In Critical Reflections on Constitutional Democracy in the European Union, ed. Sacha Garben, Inge Govaere, and Paul Nemitz, 27–45. Oxford: Hart Publishing.

288

9 Populism in Contemporary Political Philosophy

Pogliotti, Giorgio. 2020. Reddito di cittadinanza, ecco l’identikit di chi ha trovato lavoro. Il Sole 24 Ore, February 15th. https://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/reddito-cittadinanza-ecco-l-identikitchi-ha-trovato-lavoro-ACN64YJB. Rasmussen, David. 2019. Reflections on the Nature of Populism and the Problem of Stability. Philosophy and Social Criticism 45 (9–10): 1058–1068. Revelli, Marco. 2019. La Politica Senza Politica. Torino: Einaudi. Rosanvallon, Pierre. 2008. Counter-Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scheppele, Kim Lane. 2019. The Opportunism of Populists and the Defense of Constitutional Liberalism. German Law Journal 20 (3): 314–331. Scheuerman, William E. 2019. Donald Trump Meets Carl Schmitt. Philosophy and Social Criticism 45 (9-10): 1170–1185. Shils, Edward. 1956. The Torment of Secrecy: The Background and Consequences of American Security Policies. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Stavrakakis, Yannis. 2004. Antinomies of Formalism: Laclau’s Theory of Populism and the Lessons from Religious Populism in Greece. Journal of Political Ideologies 9 (3): 253–267. Taggart, Paul. 2000. Populism. Buckingham: Open University Press. ———. 2002. Populism and the Pathology of Representative Politics. In Democracies and the Populist Challenge, ed. Yves Mény and Yves Surel, 62–80. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Taguieff, Pierre-André. 2003. L’Illusione Populista (2002), Milano: Bruno Mondadori, transl. by Alberto Bramati. Tarchi, Marco. 2002. Populism Italian Style. In Democracies and the Populist Challenge, ed. Yves Mény and Yves Surel, 120–138. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2015. Italia Populista. Dal Qualunquismo a Beppe Grillo. Bologna: il Mulino. Taylor, Kenneth A. 2019. Neither a Populist nor a Vanguardist Be! Respecting the Wisdom and Will of the People. Philosophy and Social Criticism 45 (9-10): 1222–1238. Tushnet, Mark. 2019. Varieties of Populism. German Law Journal 20 (3): 382–389. Urbinati, Nadia. 1998. Democracy and Populism. Constellations 5 (1): 111–124. ———. 2014. Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2019a. Me the People: How Populism Transforms Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2019b. Liquid Parties, Dense Populism. Philosophy and Social Criticism 45 (9-10): 1069–1083. Villacañas Berlanga, José Luis. 2017. Populismo (2015). Milano-Udine: Mimesis, transl. by Guido M. Cappelli and Daniela Signorino. Walker, Shaun, and Jennifer Rankin. 2020. Hungary Passes Law That Will Let Orbán Rule by Decree. The Guardian, March 30th. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/30/ hungary-jail-for-coronavirus-misinformation-viktor-orban. Weale, Albert. 2018. The Will of the People: A Modern Myth. Cambridge: Polity Press. Weyland, Kurt. 2001. Clarifying a Contested Concept: Populism in the Study of Latin American Politics. Comparative Politics 34 (1): 1–22. Wiles, Peter. 1969. A Syndrome, Not a Doctrine: Some Elementary Theses on Populism. In Populism: Its Meanings and National Characteristics, ed. Ghita Ionescu and Ernest Gellner, 166–179. Letchworth, Hertfordshire: The Garden City Press. Worsley, Peter. 1969. The Concept of Populism. In Populism: Its Meanings and National Characteristics, ed. Ghita Ionescu and Ernest Gellner, 212–250. Letchworth, Hertfordshire: The Garden City Press. Zaccaria, Giuseppe. 2018. The People and Populism. Ratio Juris 31 (1): 33–48.

Chapter 10

Where the Line Lies, and How Thin It Is

Abstract In this chapter, the comparative endeavour is finally undertaken. Whereas populism is often said to intertwine with democracy in some way, the chapter contends that it significantly departs from democratic theory and practice, and belongs to a distinct conceptual space. It cannot be made to overlap with “illiberal democracy”, a “democratic myth”, a crude electoral majoritarianism, nor it amounts to hiding undemocratic policies into formally democratic justifications. The boundary dividing populism and democracy, the chapter claims, starts unfolding at the level of the conception of the people: whereas democratic theory invariably assumes a people intended as simultaneously plural and united, populism conceives of the people as a moral whole, internally undifferentiated, whose homogeneity and intrinsic righteousness preclude the task of specifying what popular sovereignty ultimately means. Populism cannot address the question: “What does it mean for a multitude of heterogeneous individuals to share sovereign power?”. This specification, on the other hand, seems inescapable for any democrat assuming the people as a composite unity. The chapter reconstructs the four steps of such specifying operation, which involve articulating conditions and limits of popular sovereignty, establishing the grounds of its desirability, defining the unity of the popular body. Keywords Illiberal democracy · Democratic myth · Populism · Populist people · Democratic people · Popular sovereignty · Democratic normativity · Host ideologies · Legitimacy of the people

10.1

The Sovereign People of Radical Democrats: A Heterogeneous Unity

To start with, let us briefly recall in turn the definitions of the people and its sovereignty which emerged from the analyses of the radical democratic theories in the first three Parts of this work. As to deliberative democracy, we saw that two different definitions of the people and popular sovereignty were provided by its two most articulated theoretical frameworks. On the one hand, Habermas denies that the people can be intended as © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Fiorespino, Radical Democracy and Populism, Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations 18, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84969-6_10

289

290

10

Where the Line Lies, and How Thin It Is

a collective ‘subject’ capable of concerted action; the unity of an ensemble of individuals, social groups, “monadic” functional subsystems, cultural minorities, particularized interests, may only be accomplished by the legal system, its interaction with the public sphere (and the lifeworld, less directly), and the procedures regulating such interaction. An anonymous ensemble of individuals becomes a ‘people’, thus exercising collective sovereignty, only by sharing a communicative space, “linguistically constituted” (Habermas 1996: 361), from which the institutional sphere (the second component of Habermas’s two-tracks system) is normatively bound to draw when legislating. The ‘anarchical’ dimension of the public sphere thus produces rough wills that the institutional dimension has to filter, again by discourse and deliberation. This jurisgenerative process is the cement keeping together ‘the people’ as a sovereign entity. Popular sovereignty is thus enabled by the private and civic rights which are granted to citizens by the legal system, and which allow their participation in the public sphere – rights that in turn are discursively specified and filled with contents within the public sphere itself, rather than being conceptualized by Habermas as universal and immutable. ‘Peoplehood’ and popular sovereignty thus become synonym with ‘citizenship’ and citizenship rights. On the other hand, Rawls embraces the idea of the people as an intergenerational project, thus undertaking the challenge of searching unification for an even broader entity: not only the scattered individuals of post-modern societies have to be held together, despite being indefinitely fragmented into social systems, ethnic, national, religious, folkloric cultures, pop subcultures, personal, educational, and professional backgrounds; this intra-generational diversity is multiplied when an intergenerational dimension comes into play. As we saw, Rawls’s solution lies in the idea of a constitutional identity. The people is the entity which collectively shapes and is shaped by a constitution throughout generations, and its most profound identity is crystallized into constitutional essentials which achieve consistent and durable legitimation by (rare) constituent and (frequent) constitutional acts throughout centuries. Those constitutional essentials are the object of an overlapping consensus, which means that justification for them can be provided from the perspective of multiple comprehensive doctrines. Popular sovereignty for Rawls, therefore, is the practice of self-government through the procedures and within the limits established by the constitution, and ratified by centuries of practice. As we saw, Rawls is far from arguing that the constitution cannot be modified; yet, constitutional amendment should honour the collective, constitutional identity of the sovereign people. It cannot be arbitrary. Moreover, constitutional essentials (such as the First Amendment, for instance) should not be abolished or distorted. Their disfigurement disables popular sovereignty for the simple fact that a “constitutional breakdown” would correspond to the breakdown of the diachronic ‘people’ that the constitution reflects, and hence of the sovereign power it possesses. Rather differently, as we saw, participatory democrats tend to equate popular sovereignty with the citizens’ equal decisional power, i.e. the equal participation in the making of decisions to be enacted by the institutional system of a political community – whereas the meaning of participation was twisted by the deliberative

10.1

The Sovereign People of Radical Democrats: A Heterogeneous Unity

291

democrats, in a way that is especially clear in Lafont’s theoretical framework. As we saw, Lafont conceptualizes the people as participating in a deliberative process by which the institutional structure to which they are subject is pressed towards responsiveness, so as to assure that they live by laws and policies the content and justifications of which they contributed to crafting, and which they can accept as “reasonable upon reflection”. With regards to the republicans, as we saw, Pettit is suspended between two definitions of popular sovereignty, in that he is ambiguous when it comes to defining what is freedom as non-domination’s precise meaning and scope of application. On the one hand, non-domination can come to overlap with the compliance of legislation with policy-making norms inspired from the idea of reciprocity embedded in the “norm of norms”. On this reading, as long as government action and legislating procedures are limited by norms of reciprocity and equality, and decisions are contestable on those grounds, non-domination is achieved. In this sense, Pettit’s people appears akin to Rawls’s one: an intergenerational entity which constructs over decades contextual, fair norms for controlling (i.e. influencing and directing) power, which in Pettit’s framework corresponds to exercising popular sovereignty. On the other hand, if non-domination is addressed to the democratic process, and “every law must be capable of being amended” (Pettit 1997: 180), then the specifications of the norm of norms become less relevant in the definition of non-domination. The people is still the entity which contextually frames those norms of fair policy-making, but ultimately non-domination means that the democratic decisions of the people do not have to be dominated by any external actor. Thus, the fair policy-making norms themselves, which guarantee individualized control, can be amended, and given social categories can be denied reciprocity and recognition, in the name of non-domination on the democratic process. Also in this case, the people can be seen as an intergenerational entity, but one which is sovereign and non-dominated only when the will of its electorate, as emerging in democratic procedures, is unconstrained. Either way, as we saw, in a republican fashion Pettit takes the role of a centralized state as crucial to non-domination and popular sovereignty: a system of political and social justice is only possible if a state with an agency exists to implement it. Thus, a protean ensemble of individuals is unified and enabled to be sovereign by a common belonging to the same state which is the object of their collective control and which, in turn, acts in compliance with norms of policy-making constructed upon an idea of reciprocity and equality, and drawing on contextual resources. Similarly, Bellamy justifies the nation-state on the grounds that it is the best way to guarantee non-domination and popular sovereignty. However, Bellamy avoids some of the ambiguities just mentioned: for him, domination occurs when the equality of citizens is denied by a top-down constraint on popular self-determination. A court striking down a law passed with the majority of an elected parliament, in compliance with legitimate institutional mechanisms, perpetrates a form of domination on citizens, whose equal right to express is overridden by an external imposition. Thus, Bellamy’s definition of the people is clearly stated: a people is made up by “individual citizens who together form a demos through being subject to the

292

10

Where the Line Lies, and How Thin It Is

power of a particular state” (2019: 17). They can be sovereign as long as they are part of an unconstrained democratic process, through which they produce outcomes which are always legitimate. As we saw, in Bellamy’s framework the nation-state is the ideal locus for such processes to work properly, as it is best equipped to guarantee an equal right to political participation for all. Regarding agonistic democrats, Laclau and Mouffe define the people as the hegemonic formation arising from a “plurality of ruptural points”, i.e. the various expressions of dissatisfaction towards the established order. Social heterogeneity being irreducible, unity is only possible by negation, and thus by the construction of an antagonist. The ‘people’ is therefore a self-referential entity, whose rhetoric and affective constitution cannot be comprehended from without, and which variously pursues the exclusion of its constitutive other, in spite of the latter still being a part of the community. As we saw, however, this picture needs to be completed by Laclau and Mouffe’s notion of democratic openness: their idea (which also resembles a hope, rooted in an ethical soil) seems to be that hegemonic formations can hardly achieve alarming degrees of social closure, and that the pervasiveness of discourse ultimately tends to bring about the rise of new hegemonies, in an ongoing cycle which avoids that the constructed ‘antagonist’ be irremediably marginalized: the “constant overflowing of every discourse by the infinitude of the field of discursivity” (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 113) should prevent authoritarianism and totalitarianism, i.e. the imposition of “immutable articulations in an authoritarian manner” (Id: 188), which Laclau and Mouffe regard as “impossible [. . .] and prohibited, something that is an ethical abominion” (Boucher 2008: 111). The hope, in other words, is that conditions of openness are always maintained which allow counter-hegemonic discourses to unfold, and thus to nourish the ongoing renovation of ‘the people’. Radical democracy in Laclau and Mouffe’s framework should thus be defined as overlapping with such discursive openness, in which unsatisfied social demands can emerge and provide the basis for a new hegemonic front. Laclau and Mouffe do not hold a straightforward normative position, as we saw; yet, they hold together a descriptive account of democracy (which defines, albeit quite loosely, what can count as a democratic order), and a militant hope that such openness is sufficiently preserved. As aptly observed by Geoff Boucher, such hope is grounded in ethics. For Connolly, democracy is the political counterpart of the ethos of generosity, without which the latter would be an anachronistic form of individual selfcultivation: “more than other social forms, democracy accentuates exposure to contingency and increases the likelihood that the affirmation of difference in identity will find expression in public life” (Connolly 2002: 193). The democratic ethos somewhat represents the political translation of the individual ethics of generosity. Their aim is the unsettling of the rigid identities which sediment in a given cultural and political community, and tend to become oppressive. Thus, popular sovereignty ultimately coincides with this ongoing exercise of mobilization and disturb of naturalized certainties, pursued not only by open protest and contestation, but also by the simple bottom-up discursive and cultural pressures that for Connolly constitute one of the two components of sovereignty. Thus, the other component, which is institutional power, is necessarily influenced by “a plurality of forces circulating

10.2

Grounds of Desirability, Enabling Conditions, Constitutive Limits

293

through and under the positional sovereignty of the official arbitrating body” (2005: 145). Moreover, Connolly argues that in the contemporary globalized world democracy can only be effective if extra-national pressures are made on national governments; this allows better unleashing the unsettling potential of the democratic ethos, so as to prevent the nation-state from enjoying a monopoly of culture and identity. The people as a territorially defined entity, therefore, is sovereign insofar as an ethos of generosity finds expressions at a national and cross-national level, in order to perpetually contest the sedimented borders of oppression of the political community itself, which would otherwise suffocate the “rich diversity of life”.

10.2

Democracy and the Grounds of Desirability, Enabling Conditions, and Constitutive Limits of Popular Sovereignty

The harbinger of the red line is precisely the evident dissonance between the condition of ineradicable pluralism and heterogeneity that radical democrats assume, on the one hand, and the homogeneity of the people as depicted by populism, on the other. As to populism, we saw that the most minimal definition on which scholars largely converge is centred on the dichotomy people/elite, and thus on a pars pro toto logic that polarizes the social field into two uniform camps, one of which claims to be the sovereign people – despite being a part – as opposed to the corrupt elite. Such people, as argued most cogently by Jan-Werner Müller, is depicted as a homogeneous whole which claims for itself a “moral monopoly of representation”, vindicated on the grounds of an uncontroversial truth, an intrinsic moral righteousness, and hence an intrinsic political legitimacy. An especially eloquent exemplification here is Orbán’s story of the “thirty robust lads” who find a fallen tree blocking the street, and solve the problem they face in the one and only way it can be reasonably and legitimately solved: removing the tree, rather than wallowing in fascinating speculations.1 That is what politics should do. Populism thus appears as a form of sedition, claiming for a moral legitimation that has nothing to do with the electoral one, as it is self-attributed before elections, survives electoral defeats, and locates the ultimate source of normativity in the popular will and identity (as constructed symbolically by a leadership), with no need of a legitimation granted by a normative substance external to the populist one. As hinted above, populists such as Le Pen, Trump, Orbán, Salvini, Soini, Farage, have certainly achieved important electoral successes to different extents, but they have never needed them to self-appoint as the spokesmen of the ‘true’ people, which they oppose to the ‘enemies of the people’. In Freeden’s apt words, “they invent themselves, they are Cf. “Plebeians, Citoyens and Aristocrats, or Where is the Bottom of the Bottom-up? The Case of Hungary” (Enyedi 2015).

1

294

10

Where the Line Lies, and How Thin It Is

their own origin” (2017: 4). Expressions such as Trump’s “I am your voice”, Le Pen’s “au nom du peuple”, Salvini’s “noi abbiamo gli italiani con noi”, Farage’s “victory for real people”, Chavez’s “Chavez es Pueblo!”, up to Timo Soini’s onomastic frankness, do not come on the wave of democratic validations; they are utterly self-referential, normatively self-standing, stemming from a seditious act of legitimacy self-bestowal. In this sense, the Italian Sardine, starting their activism in the fall of 2019 and mobilizing thousands of people, have performatively disproven the populist rhetoric: the people of the populists (of Salvini’s Northern League, in this case) is not the people, but a portion of it, whose claims for totality fly in the face of the unrepresented crowds of ‘the others’, which gathered together under the name of ‘Sardine’.2 This is the populist logic as reconstructed from a set of recurring intuitions and leitmotifs. We shall see in Sect. 10.5 that there can be more to populism as an empirical phenomenon, but this is what results from the attempt at conceptualizing the operational logic, mentality/ideology, and normative structure distinctive of populism, which accounts for the perception that strong similarities exist among considerably dissimilar movements. On the other hand, all radical democratic thinkers – pace the critics of Rawls, Habermas, and of the much-reviled notion of consensus – invariably assume a dimension of heterogeneity, disagreement and pluralism which no consensus can or wishes to stifle. Their quest for a united people moves within a horizon of ineradicable heterogeneity, which can never be overcome. The people is always constructed, or re-constructed, as a plural unity, a “collective entity that simultaneously remains a set of individuals” (Canovan 2005: 100). As Kenneth Taylor remarks, “no democracy could get off the ground, let alone sustain itself, if cacophony and disunity were the entire story about the people and their relations one to another” (2019: 1223). Cacophony and disunity are not the entire story, but they constitute the obvious terrain on which a vital unity is searched and found by democratic thinkers, whether one agrees with their specific renditions or not. This unveils that which is the linchpin of the incompatibility between populism and democracy. The respective constructions of ‘the people’ are qualitatively different. For the populists the people “is an existing entity present as a political unity” (Corrias 2016: 11); an elected electorate, we may call it, or the elects among the electorate: a symbolically unified portion of the community, constructed as morally authoritative and politically self-legitimating. For the radical democrats analyzed, the people is the whole multiplicity of actors revolving around a legal-political system, or the individuals partaking in a pluralistically justifiable constitutional identity, or the hegemonic formation which will (hopefully) be toppled by another one in an ongoing cycle, given the openness and heterogeneity of the social. The unity of the political community is never one which does away with its pluralism, its being made up by disparate individuals and groups. The elements of unity and singularity are always held together: “the individualistic aspect is crucial, and it is 2

See Floridi (2019) and Santarpia (2019).

10.2

Grounds of Desirability, Enabling Conditions, Constitutive Limits

295

the condition that makes the collective people a composite unity, rather than an organic whole” (Urbinati 2014: 162). This is why Canovan’s account of the democratic myth seems incomplete, as argued above in Sect. 9.3.2. The individualistic-egalitarian component is a basic intuition of democracy, an inherent and primordial part of its redemptive force, which cannot be made to coincide with the dull practicalities of democracy, “the cold light of pragmatism” (Canovan 1999: 11) with which Canovan’s democratic myth conflicts and co-exists. The exclusive focus on popular organicism appears rather as the populist mythology, drawn arbitrarily from the richer democratic one, and politically effective precisely because it echoes – with distortions – the democratic one. This difference in the construction of the people is rife with implications, and ultimately marks the boundary between populism and democracy. The endeavour which characterizes all democratic thinkers is defining how an absent people, whose unity is fragmented into an inevitable plurality, can actually be sovereign, and what it means for it to be sovereign. This involves illustrating (a) who or what is the collective entity that can be sovereign, and (b) what it means for it to be such, or how it can be such. In other words, the challenge is to identify a united ensemble of individuals, i.e. pinpointing its trait d’union, and to account for how it can be collectively sovereign. We shall get back to the issue of the democratic selection of the trait d’union in Sect. 10.4. For now, what matters is to draw the implications of the democratic operation of accounting for what it means for a heterogeneous people to be collectively sovereign. The contention I wish to introduce is that defining popular sovereignty requires the establishment of the enabling conditions3 for a plural people to govern itself, or the conditions of signification of popular sovereignty, which coincide with the identification of the limits of popular sovereignty, and of the grounds of its desirability – except for starkly descriptivist theories, such as Laclau and Mouffe’s. Those operations are co-implicated and performed through the same gesture: the philosopher, the politician or the ordinary citizen aspiring to define the conditions at which a protean ensemble of individuals is sovereign – thus defining popular sovereignty – simultaneously account for democracy’s desirability and trace limits, whether negotiable or not, beyond which popular sovereignty is dissolved. The question, in other words, is the following: how can political authority be held in the hands of multiple and different single individuals at once? This paves the

It is important to highlight that the expression ‘enabling conditions’ as used here does not contain any reference to the functional requirements needed for democracy to work – i.e., economic equality as functionally necessary for the factual stability of the democratic order. Rather, ‘enabling conditions’ point to the specification of the conditions at which a heterogeneous popular unity may be said to collectively exercise sovereignty. This is why an alternative formulation of ‘enabling conditions’ in the way I mean it may be ‘conditions of signification’ of the otherwise fuzzy wording ‘popular sovereignty’. In this sense, sticking to the example of economic equality, one might claim – as many authors do – that in order for the people to govern collectively there should be a certain degree of economic equality.

3

296

10

Where the Line Lies, and How Thin It Is

ground for the introduction of a set of values and requirements that are often described as external to popular sovereignty, but that are actually constitutive of the attempt to outline its very conditions of existence. In the selection of the enabling conditions, democratic thinkers diverge. Thus, are the people sovereign if non-domination occurs? Or if they enjoy equal political rights? Or if they partake in a hegemonic identity, a symbolic unity which yet leaves the field of discursivity open for new articulations? Are the people sovereign if a pervasive ethos of generosity incessantly foils the oppressive borders of identity, by bottom-up mobilization and constant influence on “positional” power? Or if legislation and adjudication move within the porous binaries of a constitution which reflects the unity of an intergenerational project connecting heterogeneous individuals? In short, the landmark intuition of popular sovereignty as the government of an ensemble of individuals requires a specification providing the conditions of possibility for power and authority to be shared by a “composite unity”. Such conditions, however, are simultaneously limits: once they are trespassed, the order they occasion vanishes – or, to introduce some shades, the more they are trespassed and the more the resulting order is undermined. Such limits are normative in the case of normative democratic theories, like most of those examined in this book, and plainly definitional in the context of purely descriptive reconstructions, such as Laclau and Mouffe’s.4 Their rendition of democracy sets the social-political conditions within which democracy exists, and thus the limits beyond which it dissolves, without justifying such limits as regulatory devices for the political order. Differently, in the normativist case, the conditions habilitating the popular exercise of sovereignty correspond to normative constraints on sovereignty. Thus, the normative structure that constrains the popular will is the same that enables its expression. Normativists and descriptivists, nonetheless, are equally engaged in establishing what it means for a heterogeneous people to hold sovereignty, and where such collective endeavour ends. Their disjunction lies in the further act that normativist democrats perform when attempting to grasp the meaning of popular sovereignty: they construe the requirements which enable and constrain the collective exercise of power as the grounds of desirability of popular sovereignty. For instance, if one connects democracy with an equal share of political rights for all, as Bellamy does, then the underlying notion of equality constitutes at once a condition of existence, a limit, and a reason for democracy’s attractiveness. Popular sovereignty is valued precisely because its advocates specify its meaning by appeal to given central commitments.5 This

4

Pure descriptivism is certainly a philosophically controversial notion, in that the concepts we use are hardly devoid of an evaluative content, and thus hardly employable for unbiased descriptions. Cf. Connolly (2008). Yet, thinkers such as Laclau and Mouffe refuse to accept any form of political objectivity exceeding the hegemonic formations, and thus they do not provide a justified version of democracy that works as a regulatory framework for the political order. 5 As we saw in Chap. 4, even an author like Pateman, for whom “the goal was democracy, seen as an end in itself” (Mansbridge 1995: 6; cf. also Elster 1983, 2003), ultimately provides reasons for why democracy is an end in itself, namely the pursuit of equality as “(equal) participation in the making

10.2

Grounds of Desirability, Enabling Conditions, Constitutive Limits

297

in-built conception of the people as made up by individuals sharing power also explains why democracy is embraced by thinkers originally committed to other theoretical endeavours, such as Pettit and Connolly, whose priorities are, respectively, the development of freedom as non-domination and the post-Nietzschean project of an ethos of pluralization. As we saw, for Pettit and Connolly democracy as popular sovereignty is constitutive of their normative point of reference: non-domination and the ethos of generosity constitutively require collective popular sovereignty, and simultaneously they substantiate the idea of popular sovereignty by providing its enabling conditions and limits: no collectively shared power can actually exist if domination occurs (Pettit), or if generosity fails to animate the community (Connolly). The claim of this book is that at this juncture lies the bifurcation of populism and democratic theory. This juncture being constitutive of the latter, the conclusion will be that there is nothing that it shares with populism. Let us further spell out the operation of democratic thought, so as to highlight populism’s externality to it. Firstly, by appealing to a homogeneous people bearing a glaring truth, populism forfeits precisely the task of explaining what the much-proclaimed popular sovereignty consists of. The enabling conditions for an ensemble of individuals to rule together go unspecified, because they are self-evident for the populist: sovereignty is apodictically attributed to a homogeneous and virtuous entity, which dissolves particularity. At the time of the democratic horizon, in which democracy seems “a regime without antagonists, an unquestioned horizon shared by all the advanced societies of the Western world” (Ferrara 2014: 1), such entity is called ‘the people’; yet, it could have been called God, or by the name of whatever ineffable, unquestionable entity. The divine nature of the people as depicted by populists was noted by scholars by and large. When discussing the problematic relation between populism and religion, for instance, Arato argues that “populism as understood here has a strong political theology, with a deus absconditus, namely ‘the people’ at its pinnacle. Yet, at least for the ‘Abrahamic’ religions there must be only one God. ‘The people’ of populism is clearly an idol or a god both false and non-existent” (2019: 1110). In a similar vein, Canovan compares the populist to “the charismatic preacher” who “hears the voices of God directly, by-passing the hierarchy and rituals of the church [. . .] The place of populism in democracy is in some ways similar. Populists appeal past the ossified institutions to the living people, the vox populi unmediated” (1999: 14). Populist popular sovereignty, therefore, remains nebulous and unspecified, in that it amounts to the application of an uncontroversial and just will which the populist leader “can divine”, in Müller’s words. Populism thus eludes the inherently democratic necessity of establishing specific enabling conditions for an exercise of collective power which takes diversity and plurality into account. This tendency is

of decisions” (Pateman 1970: 43), and the moral, psychological, and cultural development of citizens that participatory democracy intrinsically provides – with positive consequences for the stability of the participatory citizenry.

298

10

Where the Line Lies, and How Thin It Is

particularly evident in the populist narrative, and was largely recognized by observers. Mény and Surel, for instance, argue that “their [the populists’] weakness lies in the dream of an alternative form of democratic regime that they have been unable to articulate clearly, let alone establish” (2002: 18). In an interesting description of Alexander Herzen’s mentality, Taggart effectively captures this populist trait: Herzen “saw the need for a revolutionary liberation of the people, but he did not accept that the way to realize this vision was through the structures of liberal representative democracy” (2000: 50). He was convinced that “political action was far more important than political institutions” (Ibid), and never even adumbrated a sketch of popular sovereignty and its meaning. Similarly, for Canovan populism “sweeps under the ideological carpet awkward questions about the criteria to be used in determining where democratic boundaries fall” (2002: 35).6 Canovan’s emphasis on “democratic boundaries” allows connecting the first strand of our argument with the second: the lack of specification of popular sovereignty, its conditions and requirements has, as its flipside, the lack of popular sovereignty’s limits. Insofar as the unity of the people is fully present, rather than dispersed in multiplicity, and its will unequivocal and infallible, popular sovereignty is not subjected to conditions of possibility that establish the limits beyond which the people disavows its sovereignty. Hence, Perón’s claims that “true democracy is when the government does only what the people want and defends only one interest: that of the people”, and that “in this land the best thing that we have is the people”,7 or Erdoğan’s statement: “the republic belongs to the public, the people. These people (the opposition) don’t have respect for the people or popular sovereignty. Remember the slogan: one people, one flag, one homeland, one state”.8 The populist narrative is devoid of any idea of limits, of structures for extracting the will of the people in a way that all individuals share power, because the people is taken as “one”, “the best thing that we have”, and its rule can unfold unmediated and unconstrained. This accounts for the idea that populists do not need the legitimation of a procedure, in that a procedure is the practical outgrowth of a set of normative intuitions, and a democratic procedure is the product of intuitions about the enabling conditions and limits necessary for a dissonant unity to be sovereign. Thus, it has a normative substrate that is external to that of the populist formation, which arrogates a self-standing “monopoly of public ethics”.9 We shall get back to this in greater

6

Likewise, in outlining the features of the Latin American populisms, Taguieff highlights the same vagueness: “hence the ambiguity, the indeterminacy and even the confusion of ideological discourses crafted in order to spread the myth of that organic unity of the nation which justified solidarity among classes”. (My translation of the original: “di qui l’ambiguità, l’indeterminatezza e perfino la confusione di discorsi ideologici fabbricati per diffondere il mito di quell’unità organica della nazione che giustificava la solidarietà fra le classi” (Taguieff 2003: 51)). 7 Cf. “The Twenty Truths of the Justicialist Movement”, which Perón listed in a speech in Plaza de Mayo, on October 17th 1950. 8 Quoted in Chambers (2019), p. 1120. 9 My translation of the original: “[il popolo] È il titolare del monopolio dell’etica pubblica [. . .]” (Tarchi 2015: 339).

10.2

Grounds of Desirability, Enabling Conditions, Constitutive Limits

299

detail in Sect. 10.3, when the peculiar relationship between the electoral practice and populism will be addressed. Yet, one may still object that in spite of the different understandings of the people adopted, and of the populist vagueness on the meaning and limits of popular sovereignty, democracy and populism share the normative intuition that ‘the people’ is the ultimate source of constituent authority, just and virtuous in itself. On this reading, populists do distort the idea of constituent power by conflating the people as constituent authority in reserve with a portion of the electorate, but yet they truly share with democrats the central intuition of the intrinsic authoritativeness of the people, which makes democracy desirable.10 To put it in Canovan’s terms, one might say that the redemptive myth of a homogeneous popular whole is both populist and democratic, even once recognized that the democratic mythical content is made richer by its commitment to singularity. This objection, however, neglects the interplay of the individual and the collective, the heterogeneous and the homogeneous, which constitutes democracy at its roots. As we saw, unity in a democratic framework is doomed to co-exist with the “cacophonic” utterances of a multiple entity, and that multiplicity needs specific channels of expression which confer a share of power on everyone. The democratic idea that the people be sovereign, whether in reserve or not, is not simply valuable in itself, but rather it acquires value once its meaning is specified, that is, once established the principles accounting for how a fragmented power-holder can exercise such power. From a democratic perspective, in other words, popular sovereignty does not come alone because it cannot; ‘power to the people’ is a formula which invariably requires specification in order to acquire meaning, and providing such specification corresponds with setting its basic conditions, its limits, and an account of why it is valuable that the people exerts constituent and ‘ordinary’ sovereignty; on the other hand, ‘popular sovereignty’ as brandished by the populist remains unspecified, in that the people is apodictically depicted as one, true, and virtuous. There are neither further values – say, equality – to justify the attribution of constituent and constitutional power to a fragmented power-holder, nor procedures legitimating political action, nor limits to what ‘the people’ can do, given its righteous nature. Such operation of specification does not necessarily require high degrees of theoretical complexity. It can also be very intuitive, tacitly embedded in an untheorized praxis: popular sovereignty can mean, for instance, that every individual can cast an equally valid vote. Such principle of equality infuses content in the idea of popular sovereignty, accounts for why it is desirable (political equality of all individuals), and establishes individual equality as a limit: without it, democracy fades away. In other words, democracy does not and cannot take the people and its will as unmediated, unspecified and intrinsically just, as in the populist epistemology, which assumes a “science coming from the people”, or the view that “the will of

10

A-normative radical democrats are obviously untouched by this possible similarity of populism and democracy: they allegedly describe the workings of democracy, and do not advocate the desirability of popular sovereignty, or of the people as the ultimate constituent authority.

300

10

Where the Line Lies, and How Thin It Is

the people as such is supreme over every other standard, over the standards of traditional institutions, over the autonomy of institutions and over the will of other strata. Populism identifies the will of the people with justice and morality” (Shils 1956: 98). Popular sovereignty is not a self-standing value for democrats, in that it cannot be such if it has to mean something; rather, for populists it is a self-standing, unspecified and vague commitment to the will of a homogeneous whole. This is true for all the democratic thinkers analyzed above. Popular sovereignty is always specified and filled with content, which may correspond to the discursive specification of citizens’ rights according to the discourse principle, the exercise of constituent and constitutional power within the limits of the constitutional essentials, the establishment of the institutional conditions for non-domination, the equality of political rights, the discursive openness of the social, the circulation of an ethos of generosity which unsettles oppressive identities. In the case of normativist democrats, such content also accounts for the desirability of popular sovereignty, an endeavour which descriptivists do not undertake. Even if one goes back to classics and considers, for instance, Locke’s understanding of the people as unitary and pre-political11 – “there remains still in the people a supreme power to remove or alter the legislative [. . .]” (Locke 2003: 166) – one finds that the people intended as a composite unity always retains centrality: natural laws for every individual require protection, and that commitment is so primary for Locke as to trigger the transition from the state of Nature to the state and civil society. As observed by Canovan, Locke “seems determined to maintain two apparently contradictory views of the people [. . .] Locke insists on the freedom of the people as individuals while at the same time continuing to use the notion of the people as a body” (2005: 102–103). Locke’s is obviously a ‘metaphysical’ defense of liberalism and democracy, but it exemplifies the inescapable interplay of the collective and the individual lying at the basis of democracy. A similar point is advanced by Freeden, who – just to stick to classics – casts light on the difference between the populist discourse and Rousseau’s general will, and stresses precisely the peculiarly democratic dialectics of individuality and singularity: Rousseau’s general will is distilled “out of a reflective exercise by which each person is individually asked not what is good exclusively for him- or herself (the volonté de tous) but what would be good for everyone else as well as the reflective individual (the volonté générale), who thus participates in the endeavour to identify a commonality amidst plural differences” (2017: 8). The debate among democrats is focused on how best to define democracy as the sovereignty of a somewhat united plurality. Populists never join that conversation, and it is precisely at this juncture that the red – and not so ‘thin’ – line between populism and democracy lies. On the one hand, democracy assumes the heterogeneity of social and political actors, and thus specifies (even at the intuitive level of the practice) the meaning of popular sovereignty, which involves the articulation of a set of requirements and conditions for its materialization. Those cannot be ignored if democracy

11

Cf. Canovan’s discussion of Locke in The People (2005), pp. 102–104.

10.2

Grounds of Desirability, Enabling Conditions, Constitutive Limits

301

has to hold. They overlap with the establishment of limits to popular sovereignty, and account for why it is that the latter is desirable; on the other hand, populism cuts off this whole operation by postulating ‘the people’, “the best thing that we have”: an organic entity, apodictically sovereign and just, which claims to enact its one and only will. In light of this analysis, it seems useful to stress that the word ‘undemocratic’ here can be taken to mean ‘conceptually external to democracy’, rather than simply pointing to a deficit in normative democratic standards and a drift towards, say, authoritarianism. The authoritarian and absolutist tinges of populism, connected with its moral-epistemic monism, the exclusivist proclivities, and the attribution of limitless constituted and constituent power to ‘the people’, can be precisely illuminated by the idea that populism, albeit displaying some apparent family resemblance to democracy, is conceptually distinct from it. The cleavage becomes evident when one fully appreciates the implications of a conception of the sovereign people as virtuous and homogeneous, which compels the populist to remain silent on the meaning of popular sovereignty as the idea of shared power among a plural people, thus falling beyond the scope of democracy. This certainly does not mean to establish once and for all that populism is devoid of any conception of sovereignty and political power, although that may be argued;12 yet, it is incapable of specifying on what grounds the people should be sovereign, what does it mean for power to be collectively shared, and what are its limits, for it does not presuppose a ‘united multitude’ as the sovereign. The populist people is said to enjoy full constituent power on the grounds of its indisputable moralepistemic superiority, from which any other kind of normativity (reasonableness, equality of political rights, non-domination, discourse ethics, generosity, authenticity) is cast out; and on those same grounds it arrogates governmental power, thus needing no form of external legitimation from more or less articulated practices and their underlying normativity. A populist submitting himself to overarching regulatory practices such as elections would resemble the Olympian Apollo, god of the sun and the light, caught worshipping an icon of Thomas Edison. Some fellow divinity would probably remind Apollo that when you carry the sun in your chariot you do not need to venture into the complexity of science, and instil a modest light into a glass bulb, in order to enjoy some illumination.

12

In the Concluding remarks I briefly address the prospects of a positive understanding of populist sovereignty.

302

10.3

10

Where the Line Lies, and How Thin It Is

Populism and the Normative Substance of Democratic-Electoral Practices

Addressing two possible objections can lead to a further fine-tuning of the argument on the red line. In the first place, one may observe that there are democratic theorists (especially Laclau, Mouffe and Bellamy among those examined) who are overtly sceptical towards the idea of political normativity, albeit to different extents, whereas our argument may be taken as one which establishes the red line between populism and normative theories of democracy. In order to prevent such reading, we shall further delve into the divide between populists and descriptivist democrats, i.e. Laclau and Mouffe, and further spell out the argument on Bellamy’s normative logic, introduced at the end of Chap. 6. In the second place, it may be objected that elections do play a role in the populist rhetoric, and thus that kind of legitimation must be integrated in the picture. Also this issue will be addressed in this section. As to the first objection, we saw above and in Chap. 7 that Laclau and Mouffe do establish conditions and limits defining democracy: the openness of the social and of the discursive field, which is jeopardized by “the danger of totalitarianism, which imposes immutable articulations in an authoritarian manner” (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 188). In order for democracy to exist, the social and its discursive field should be kept open, and “articulation should be constantly re-created and renegotiated, and there is no final point at which a balance will be definitively achieved” (Ibid). This is presented as a somewhat descriptive/realistic observation, which as we saw is conflated with a partisan ethical hope that such openness is maintained, consistently with the modern egalitarian imaginary. Yet, Laclau and Mouffe never defend social openness explicitly, as that would amount to taking a normative stance on what is most desirable, thus contradicting the idea that every political articulation is equally valid in its constituting an independent form of objectivity, which cannot be assessed from without. Yet, what Laclau and Mouffe do, contrary to the populist indeterminateness, is precisely to identify the conditions of signification and the limits beyond which democracy as the collective sovereignty of a heterogeneous entity exists. Thus, they provide a definition of popular sovereignty while refusing to also articulate a normative argument for its desirability. Such ingredient is absent due to the utter descriptive scope of the theory of hegemony, which defines political construction as a starkly antagonistic practice. Bellamy’s framework is more articulated in terms of institutional design and the specification of the basic democratic requirements. Thus, it is more interesting for the present analysis, and will also allow us to introduce the response to the second objection mentioned above. As we saw in Chap. 6, Bellamy’s republicanism rests on the “circumstances of politics”, i.e. the idea that no position can stand out as objectively more valid within the context of radical disagreement characterizing modern societies. Citizens hold different positions on any issue, and we lack any epistemic source allowing to legitimately arbitrate among validity-claims. Thus, Bellamy rejects constitutions, entrenched constitutional rights, and constitutional

10.3

Populism and the Normative Substance of Democratic-Electoral Practices

303

courts, on the ground that they represent an anti-egalitarian, epistocratic imposition of one opinion over others, politically and epistemologically unjustifiable: “without an epistemological theory which explains why their [the judges’] deliberations are likely to be more accurate or track the moral truth, their ontological claims provide no basis for their assertions of judicial expertise” (Bellamy 2007: 183). The only way for non-domination to be achieved, therefore, is that every individual citizen has an equal say in the democratic process. Yet, Bellamy clarifies that no rights related with this principle can be entrenched and constitutionally protected, as that would re-introduce constraints on the democratic voice as coming from processes in which individuals equally express their position. The only way to guarantee “citizens equal concern and respect as autonomous reasoners” (Id: 191), therefore, is to provide them with democratic procedures based on nothing more than equal votes and majority rule. In this regard, Bellamy draws from Waldron’s well-known justification of majority rule, resting upon the core idea that “majority rule offers a method that accords respect to millions of individuals by giving equal weight to each person’s views” (Id: 226). What is striking of Bellamy’s framework is that despite the obstinate rejection of any epistemic-moral constraint on the disagreeing and equally authoritative individual claims, he does bridle the popular expression with a set of procedures which do enshrine an epistemic-normative substance. Majority rule and equality of votes are the most important among them, and they perfectly perform the task of establishing inescapable conditions and limits for popular sovereignty to materialize: they prescribe how the popular will is to be extracted, thus directing its expression and channelling it within given borders, and do so by appeal to a principle of equality which thus provides the notion of popular sovereignty with a rationale and a justification. As hinted above, Bellamy borrows from Waldron’s quest for “an adequate understanding of what is to be said in favour of the majority principle” (Waldron 1999: 129). Waldron’s conclusions are that majority rule (a) “respects and takes seriously the reality of their [individuals’] differences of opinion about justice and the common good. Majority-decision does not require anyone’s view to be played down or hushed up because of the fancied importance of consensus” (Id: 158–159); (b) “respects individuals [. . .] by treating them as equals in the authorization of political action” (Id: 160). Waldron’s is a normative reconstruction of majority rule, identifying at its bottom a principle of equal respect for individuals. In a similar vein, Weale highlights that “we cannot intelligibly say that, where once stood the will of the king, there now stands the will of the people” (2018: 71); the latter needs “to be distilled from the voices of the people” (Id: 73), and there cannot exist a system which delivers ‘the will of the people’ as such. Weale observes that even if one restricts the analysis to majority rule, several variants exist, undergirded by different core commitments and employed in different contexts. The use of one over another depends largely on convention, and on the degree to which the normative intuitions lying on the background of a convention are ingrained in the given context. A key feature of a convention, Weale notes, “is that it could be other than it is” (Id: 105). The gist of Weale’s discussion is that popular sovereignty always emerges as guided by conventional, somewhat

304

10

Where the Line Lies, and How Thin It Is

constructed practices, infused with normative commitments, none of which can convey the ‘absolute’, ‘true’, ‘unconstrained’ popular will. The will of the people could always come out as “other than it is”. What this tells us, again, is that even the most basic democratic practices are ways to simultaneously enable and constrain the expression of popular will, under the light of specific commitments which contribute to making popular sovereignty desirable. Bellamy’s procedures have precisely that function, and this is strikingly evident when he addresses the possibility that the output of a democratic process substantively undermines the rights to political participation of given individuals and social groups. Bellamy cannot say that a judge should intervene by interpreting the constitution, in that a judicial intervention would amount to an arbitrary act of domination; yet, he builds an ensemble of arguments attempting to demonstrate that, empirically speaking, such outcomes are extremely unlikely, insofar as a fair legislative institutional system would succeed in preventing them: as we saw, he appeals to the politicians’ general interest in the creation of common rules of the game, the average public-spiritedness of voters, the rarity of manipulations and voting cycles, the historical role of bottom-up processes in demanding rights rather than denying them, the idea that powerful majorities are coalitions of weaker minorities, and more. In other words, Bellamy suggests that the institutional system achieves that protection of his central normative principles (majority rule and equality of votes) which would be dominating if performed by judges and courts. The institutional system, by its mechanisms and procedures, can lift basic rights beyond the popular reach and somewhat de-politicize them, but a constitution cannot, because that would result in an epistocratic domination on individuals. The safeguards of Bellamy’s fundamental enabling (and limiting) principles of popular sovereignty are hidden in the meanders of procedures and institutional mechanisms, rather than in the constitution and its hermeneutic practices; yet they are not, and cannot be, dismissed. Therefore, in spite of the apparent lack of unity of the rule of law in the polity imagined by Bellamy, a continuity seems to be represented by institutional mechanisms which constrain the popular expression and hinder it from subverting the basic values informing them. Yet, this comes at the cost of admitting that something of a moral-epistemic content infused in the institutional system not only enables, but limits the popular expression. Therefore, Bellamy is certainly a democratic thinker, neatly distinguished from the populists in that he has a specific understanding of democracy, which attempts to lay down the conditions at which a protean people can exercise sovereignty. Yet, Bellamy also seems to display a tendency to pretend that by adhering to the normativity of majority rule and equality of votes he is not imposing any moralepistemic content on popular expression. This is evident from the claim that political constitutionalism is preferable to competing democratic theories in that it treats citizens equally as autonomous reasoners; this is achieved, Bellamy’s argument runs, when citizens’ self-expression and will are not frustrated by a pre-political, ready-made set of overarching principles – whether substantive or procedural. As we saw, nonetheless, Bellamy himself can hardly do without the latter: his understanding of democracy, and the ensuing political order he designs, are precisely guided by

10.3

Populism and the Normative Substance of Democratic-Electoral Practices

305

a non-negotiable principle of equality of vote and a related set of rights, which are neither morally nor epistemically neutral. Not by chance, Bellamy takes pains to prove that such basic principles are well secured by the institutional functioning of modern legislative systems. This tendency to depict elections as the natural way for the people to express unconstrained, unburdened by moral or epistemic commitments, rather than as a specific criterion to enable, guide, and limit the popular will, partly resonates with a typical populist approach to the practice of voting. This reconnects us with the second possible objection mentioned above, which compels us to investigate more on the relationship between populism and elections. We saw that populists do not need the electoral legitimation in order to selfappoint as the spokesmen of the ‘real people’, in that they locate the source of justice and legitimacy straightaway in the popular formation they construct and represent. Yet, it can hardly be denied that populists quite often tend to appeal to elections and referendums, at times stressing their supreme legitimating authority. The key to the conundrum, from the perspective developed in this book, is that populists appeal to a distorted understanding of elections in an instrumental manner, with the aim of exploiting the legitimating force that the electoral practice invariably exerts at the times of the “democratic horizon”. The populist distortion lies in the depiction of voting as the natural way in which the true popular will can emanate, in the absence of constraints. That is a sort of naturalization of elections (and referendums), which ignores their epistemic gist and their “conventional” nature, in Weale’s terms. Rather than taking the practice of casting a ballot as a way, normatively informed, to discern among the competing claims coming from a heterogeneous people, thus enabling and channelling in a peculiar and contingent way the expression of the collective will, populists take elections to be the practice through which the people express a true and unmediated will, emanating naturally as the one and only voice of the people unbridled. The meaning of elections is thus warped. The practice is not construed as a contingent structure for guiding the emergence of a composite people’s will according to a set of commitments – whether intuitive or theoretically fine-grained; rather, it is represented as the natural, ‘ontological’ tool from which the unequivocally true voice of the people emanates. Again, this is purely instrumental for populists, who invariably perform the seditious self-attribution of ‘peoplehood’ on grounds of a moral superiority, independently of the electoral validation. Elections are a central rhetoric tool in that they are, intuitively, the essential source of legitimation for any citizen of a contemporary democratic country; yet, they are not regarded by populists as an inherently valid legitimating tool, organically embedded in their approach to politics. If populists only launched their pars pro toto narratives in the wake of, or after, electoral triumphs, we would have hardly witnessed the proliferation occurred in the last twenty years. Rather, populists rhetorically employ elections when the latter can be taken to confirm the populist narrative about the people as authoritative and holistically united around a set of wills. In a way, the populist disfigurement of elections is systematic, but not primary; it is preceded by the populist seditious attribution of legitimacy, which does without

306

10

Where the Line Lies, and How Thin It Is

elections, but which prompts populists to appeal to their legitimating force when they can, that is, when they perform well. Only in those moments elections are instrumentally deformed as the tool by which the people can express unconstrained, and its true will comes to light. The legitimating authoritativeness of elections is subordinated to the pre-existing seditious act of the populist. This resonates with the impression, often voiced by observers, that “the referendum serves to ratify what the populist leader has already discerned to be the genuine popular interest as a matter of identity, not as a matter of aggregating empirically verifiable interests” (Müller 2016: 29). The idea, as argued above in discussing populist constitutionalism, is that populists do not merely resort to properly democratic motifs to justify undemocratic and illiberal claims and policies; rather, they appeal to already deformed democratic tools, which thus can be defined as distinctively populist. Examples are manifold. Back in August 2019, for instance, the Italian Government attempting to build a new majority after Matteo Salvini’s abrupt resignation was accused by Salvini himself to be “stealing sovereignty” from the people. Rather than valuing those very procedures of majority-formation which had enabled him to build a government coalition with the 5S Movement only one year before, Salvini claimed that the electoral practice would deliver the real will of the Italians in the moment of institutional crisis – a crisis that he himself had opened, for reasons that were never consistently explained to the public. Salvini’s calls for elections did not stem, for instance, from a full-fledged understanding of popular sovereignty which contrasted with and proposed to reform the Italian institutional system by constitutional amendment. He merely voiced the need of elections in order to extract an uncontroversial popular will, which the Italian Prime Minister in charge Giuseppe Conte was allegedly neglecting. Similarly, one can mention Erdoğan’s claim that “any attempt to form an institutional control over the people’s will is against democracy”,13 as if elections did not involve an institutional and constitutional framework, and popular will could be extracted in the absence of rules and procedures; or Chavez’s frequent appeals to referendums and constitutional assemblies “in the name of the people”, combined with the silencing of oppositions14 – as if elections delivered an unquestionable truth, a pure distillation of the popular essence, justifying the exclusion of minorities. Populists, therefore, distort the meaning of elections in order to use them as a rhetoric weapon. The distortion lies not in the fact itself of calling for elections, but in misrepresenting the whole practice of voting as the ‘ontological’ way for extracting the unbridled, singular will of the people as it really is – rather than construing them as a tool, informed by a specific substrate of commitments, meant to arbitrate fairly among the competing claims voiced by a people of individuals. Again, elections as intended by populists are a mere rhetoric device, occasionally useful for politicians operating within the “democratic horizon”. They are not a part 13 14

Quoted in Chambers (2019), p. 1120. Cf. Corrales (2010).

10.4

The Legitimacy of the People

307

of the populist “normative structure”: if they were normatively central, populists would be compelled to forsake their own narrative once defeated.

10.4

The Legitimacy of the People

As argued above, the specification of an understanding of democracy is fourfold: it involves the identification of the enabling conditions, limits, and grounds of desirability of popular sovereignty, which we discussed in the previous sections; finally, it requires the drawing of the trait d’union which holds together an ensemble of individuals capable of sharing power. For obvious reasons, this operation tends to be affected by the empirical geopolitical order and the existing forms of political power, which is why the historically prevailing dimension of the nation-state often appears as the privileged horizon within which to develop a theory of popular sovereignty. Yet, whether the borders of the people are made to overlap with those of the nation-state or not, the very endeavour of specifying the boundaries of the sovereign people conceals a danger, which may land democrats close to populists – or to Schmittians, in a way: every trait d’union can be configured also as a trait d’exclusion. In other words, are not all democrats somewhat ‘antagonistic’, in their setting up boundaries dividing the insiders from the outsiders, the ‘us’ from the ‘them’? This problem was given a particularly nuanced formulation by Sofia Näsström, in her article “The Legitimacy of the People” (2007). According to Näsström, democratic theorists such as Rawls, Habermas and Benhabib do not take seriously the issue of how a people can be legitimate. Insofar as the notions of “consent” and “voluntariness” are central to their ideas of political legitimacy, they feel compelled to give up the task of accounting for the legitimacy of a given political community, which in fact cannot be established by consent: drawing on Rousseau’s well-known paradox of foundation, Näsström observes that “the vote on the proper constitution of the people is caught in a vicious circle. The vote does not concede legitimacy to the people. It presupposes it. It indirectly takes for granted what it sets out to decide, namely, who properly belongs to the people” (2007: 630). Thus, Näsström continues, democratic thinkers tend to draw a “Maginot line” between legitimacy and historical contingency. In her view, they take the legitimacy of the people’s borders as beyond democratic discussion, in that borders are the blind product of history, of “brute force”, and one cannot but accept them as history delivers them. Thus, Näsström concludes, “by drawing a Maginot line between history and legitimacy, these theorists paradoxically join the conservative critique of consent theory. In the absence of what they see as a legitimate resolution to the constitution of the people, they too dismiss voluntariness as a fiction” (Id: 632). Democratic thinkers focused on consensus, in other words, tend to accept the idea that the exclusion of outsiders be arbitrary, rather than principled, as they cannot apply the legitimating principle of consensus to the foundational act. The foundation of the people upon historical contingency partly differs from the populist logic,

308

10

Where the Line Lies, and How Thin It Is

which constitutes the people along the lines of a moral superiority; yet, those logics share the idea that the boundaries dividing ‘people’ from ‘non-people’ can be arbitrary, imposed by coercion, situated beyond the reach of political contestation over their legitimacy, and thus virtually immutable. How do democratic theorists distinguish themselves from populists in this regard? Is Näsström right in saying that they “submit the constitution of the people to the arbitrary forces of history”, and that they do so “not despite, but because, they keep to the normative underpinnings of consent” (Id: 646)? My aim here is to sketch out some responses which may be useful to lay the ground for future research, rather than to provide an extensive discussion. The problem can be broken down into two components. One acknowledges Näsström’s argument to some extent, whereas the other stresses that overlooking the foundation of the people, problematic as it may be, does not yet result in a wholesale uncritical acceptance of the political borders that define it. On the one hand, the foundation of the people and its democratic import. This is especially problematic to deal with, in that democratic theorists do not often address the issue. In her article, Näsström quotes Habermas and Rawls’s statements on the historical contingency and lack of consensuality of the foundational moments,15 and we saw in Chap. 2 that Habermas was criticized for the problem of the “infinite regress”. Pettit and Bellamy only tangentially touch on the issue. They variously argue that the people must always be free to “replace the old constitution with a new one, thereby establishing a novel state and a novel constituted people. [. . .] In John Locke’s phrase, they continue ‘to be always the supreme power’” (Pettit 2012: 292). In their republican praise to the state as the entity guaranteeing non-domination, however, Pettit and Bellamy devote less space to the democratic legitimacy of the constituent moment itself.16 As to agonistic democrats, Näsström sees them in a bright light. As observed above, for Laclau and Mouffe a political formation is merely legitimated through its success in the antagonistic struggle, by which it hegemonizes the community, independently of its political claims and contents. Therefore, Laclau and Mouffe do argue for the arbitrariness of the borders of exclusion more than anyone else, in two ways: first of all, they never address the issue of accounting for the borders of the background political communities which given constructed ‘peoples’ hegemonize: ‘the people’ is always a partiality, as we saw, which symbolically hegemonizes ineffable pre-existing “communities”, whose unity is never discussed by Laclau and Mouffe;17 secondly, the exclusion performed by a hegemonic ‘people’ is merely justified on the ground of its political victory as a form of objectivity. Nonetheless, Näsström claims that they (together with other

15

Cf. Näsström (2007), pp. 628, 630 and 632. The best places from which to start a reconstruction of their positions on the matter are perhaps Bellamy’s Citizenship (2008), where the historical rise of the nation-state is outlined, and Pettit’s On the People’s Terms (2012), where he discusses the processes of collective contestation leading to the specification of fair policy-making norms legitimating the state and, possibly, its borders. 17 See footnote 48 of Chap. 7 above. 16

10.4

The Legitimacy of the People

309

authors) “call for a politics of contestation, stressing that the search for consent undermines the contingent, productive, and above all political nature of the people” (Näsström 2007: 627). Their value lies in the refusal to merely accept non-contestable borders meant to preserve internal consensus. Similarly, Connolly satisfies Näsström’s requirements, in that, as we saw, he claims for the politicization of the territorial state and its boundaries. He explicitly tackles the violence of the foundational act, by suggesting “the possibility of disaggregating elements in the democratic imaginary so that democratic energies already exceeding the boundaries of the state might be mobilized and legitimized more actively” (Connolly 1995: 149). Whereas Näsström is right in pointing that the so-called “philosophers of consensus” underestimated the problem of the legitimacy of the foundational act, the antagonism of authors such as Laclau and Mouffe does not seem to offer a more promising resolution to the problem of the democratic foundation. On the other hand stands the element of ex post contestation and normative legitimation, which none of the democratic authors analyzed by Näsström denies. This partly weakens Näsström’s critique. She interestingly ties together the (deliberative) democrats’ (a) focus on consensus as the supreme criterion of legitimacy, (b) weak theorization of the legitimacy of the foundation, and (c) acceptance of the foundation’s historical contingency. Although suggestive and well-grounded, however, this argument does not suffice to prove that theorists such as Habermas and Rawls accept territorial boundaries as a mere historical product lifted beyond contestation. Rather, they provide normative reasons for those boundaries to exist, and do not contemplate the idea that the exclusion may be antagonistic, in the sense of inimical, and fixed once and for all. The limits they embrace are not merely functional to the achievement of a “consensus”, as Näsström argues, but to the very exercise of popular sovereignty, and thus to the fulfilment of democracy’s enabling conditions and of the commitments by which it is defined and given meaning. Both Rawls and Habermas, in spite of their differences, identify democracy with the deliberative process, in which the public and the institutional spheres interact, and inalienable rights are specified through discourses among (reasonably) disagreeing citizens. That is what makes the borders of the nation-state desirable; despite the perceived impossibility to normatively evaluate the foundation, which Näsström properly captures, Habermas and Rawls do not take ‘the people’ to be merely legitimized by history; rather, its legitimation derives from its being an entity within which democratic sovereignty as they define it can be exerted; in this sense, the empirical borders of the people can be, and at times should be, an object of democratic contestation, and they are not simply accepted once and for all due to their historical rootedness. The expression “democratic sovereignty can be exerted” obviously acquires different meanings according to the democratic authors; Habermas and Rawls provide different definitions of deliberative democracy, but they can normatively defend the borders between different peoples, and thus they accept the contestability of such borders once the

310

10

Where the Line Lies, and How Thin It Is

latter historically fail to live up to democratic standards. This holds in spite of Rawls and Habermas’s silence on the legitimacy of the people’s foundational act.18 We saw in Chap. 2 that Habermas’s appeal to the all-affected principle troubles his framework, as it undermines the limitation of citizenship rights to the members of the nation-state: if the affected by a policy-proposal have to express themselves on its merits, it follows that, in a globalized context, the right to partake in the deliberative process should not be limited to nation-state citizens. Despite this difficulty, Habermas’s endorsement of the nation-state corresponds precisely to the attempt to reconstruct its normative substance from the sociology and the sociology of law operating at the level of the nation-state, which has been the political entity of reference until recent times. As we saw, when the process of European integration experienced a boost, starting with the fall of the Eastern Bloc and the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, Habermas had no trouble with re-discussing his own political philosophy, the problem of national boundaries and the meaning of citizenship. And, crucially, he took that path precisely because the borders of the nation-state began falling short of the requirements he identified as central to democracy. Their legitimacy had to be called into question. This is evident from the very questions he asks himself: “How does globalization affect (a) the security of the rule of law and the effectiveness of the administrative state, (b) the sovereignty of the territorial state, (c) collective identity, and (d) the democratic legitimacy of the nation-state?” (Habermas 2001: 68, my italics). Näsström argues that once we drop the acceptance of a ‘people’ as the blind outgrowth of history, “we start asking different questions. Rather than enquiring into how the nation-state can mitigate the forces of globalization, we begin to wonder what makes the nation-state into a legitimate people in the first place” (Näsström 2007: 647). That is what Habermas can do, and does, precisely because he provided a theoretical justification of the people’s borders, based on a conception of democracy. Once the empirical nation-state turns incapable of living up to such democratic requirements, he poses the problem of “finding the appropriate forms for the democratic process to take beyond the nation-state” (Habermas 2001: 61). The legitimacy of the people stands out as an object of contestation and inquiry precisely because it was not passively accepted as a historical inheritance, within which a principle of consensus had to operate. Habermas’s Europeanism, as hinted in Chap. 2, was criticized for being too top-down. Nonetheless, Habermas himself has always underscored that “the first addressees of this “project” are not governments. They are social movements and non-governmental organizations; the active members of a civil society that stretches beyond the national borders” (Id: 57). Moreover, it seems useful to recall that the

18

Näsström is right, however, to stress that the nexus between theory of democracy (what is democracy and how it is justified) and criteria of democratic inclusion/exclusion is not always developed by normative democratic theorists. For instance, as we saw in Chap. 4, Lafont has criticized epistemic conceptions of deliberative democracy precisely on the grounds that their orienting normative principle fails to establish reasonable criteria of inclusion: in a nutshell, if democracy is justified on epistemic grounds, then there is no principled reason for including incompetent citizens, or excluding competent foreigners. Cf. Lafont (2020), Ch. 3.

10.5

Host Ideologies and the Endless Empirical Shades of Populism

311

European project in its basic commitments was certainly not the abstract dream of a detached elite, but the effort to create an international cohesion which effectively prevented the horror through which Europe and the whole world had gone. That is much more ‘popular’ a mission than the subsequent history of European integration may suggest, and it is still necessary, even though current generations may not perceive its urgency as their ancestors did. That process has mixed bottom-up and top-down elements; independently of the worst failures it incurred, especially in accountability, popular empowerment, and mutual solidarity, it has also been, and it is, a process of re-negotiation of the nation-state and its legitimacy. Neither Habermas, nor Rawls, nor Pettit would oppose similar contestatory practices, precisely due to their normative, not arbitrary, acceptance of the nation-state as an entity compatible with the core intuitions of their understandings of democracy. As we saw, Bellamy has recently provided a framework for European integration which simultaneously maintains the centrality of the nation-state and advocates the importance of the European Union as “a republican union of states” – a demoi-cracy, as he called it. One may agree or not with his proposal, but Bellamy’s framework, like the other democratic theories explored, hinges upon a justification of the nation-state and its legitimacy, rather than on the mere acceptance of its arbitrary historical facticity: “citizens are already constituted as peoples within a sovereign polity, which are capable of offering them valuable ways of living that possess moral worth” (Bellamy 2019: 86).

10.5

Host Ideologies and the Endless Empirical Shades of Populism

The present inquiry was conceptual. It aimed to identify the borderline dividing radical democratic theories from populism conceptualized in its distinctive traits – namely those traits which the disparate movements attracting the label of ‘populists’ share to some degree, so as to provoke, in Worsley’s words, a “verbal smoke [which] might well indicate a fire somewhere”. As long as the conceptual distinction is concerned, the analysis is concluded. However, for the sake of completeness, let us introduce a further intrinsic element of populism, that largely accounts for the substantive empirical differentiation of populist movements. The feature, widely recognized among scholars and best captured by Mudde and Kaltwasser, is that “populism does not exist in isolation” (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017: 21), and that “it is the combination of populism and its host ideology that creates the specific interpretation of “the people” and “the elite”” (Id: 41). As we saw above, this has encouraged Mudde, Kaltwasser and several further observers (Blokker 2019; Tushnet 2019; Mouffe 2018) to welcome the prospects of a leftist, inclusionary populism capable of bringing about democratization, transforming “subjects into citizens” and “moving from exclusion to some degree of inclusion” (Tushnet 2019: 383).

312

10

Where the Line Lies, and How Thin It Is

There is, I think, an element of contradiction in Mudde and Kaltwasser’s framework. On the one hand, they aptly identify the Manichean, exclusionary logic inherent to populism; on the other, they argue, as we saw, that the exclusionary import of the latter is due to the introduction of “nativism” in the narrative of a populist political movement, rather than in populist discourse as such. In this sense, they perhaps do not fully appreciate the undemocratic import affecting populism as such, independently of the ideologies it “hosts”. Nonetheless, the role of host ideologies is not irrelevant. By stressing their necessary co-existence with populism, Mudde and Kaltwasser capture the intrinsic ‘multipolarity’ of populist movements, which tend to rise in opposition to something the contestation of which shapes peculiar commitments. In fact, they appear as compounds assembling together different, contextual, and at times contradictory ideologies, sentiments, policyproposals. It is difficult to imagine a movement whose only claim is to represent the real people as opposed to the elite. It is true that the populist narrative tends to shape host ideologies along Manichean lines; yet, it is not automatic that a political formation deploying a populist rhetoric – and thus publicly felt as populist – locates such rhetoric at the centre of its multipolar system. There may be, as there are, cases in which parties perceived as populist resort less to populist motifs than to proposals and host ideologies which enjoy higher relevance in their political program, and which partly contradict the very populist mentality they display. In those cases, it is possible to speak consistently about populist movements that are not exclusionary and potentially undemocratic, as in their political offer and rhetoric the populist element is accessory. That is, the appeal to populist leitmotifs earns them the fame – sometimes welcomed – of populists, while their core claims and ideological referents clash with, and thus somewhat deactivate, the undemocratic nature of the narrative they employ. Among contemporary examples, one may certainly list the Spanish Podemos and the Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM25), which Paul Blokker mentions as a virtuous example of populism. Blokker highlights the DiEM25’s populist rhetoric and simultaneously praises its project of a constitutional text for the European Union, which “would serve as a fundament that defines a new sovereign political entity, a new legitimate community of equals, a framework from which law and rights stem”.19 Whatever degree of empathy the reader may have towards European constitutionalism, what appears evident is the hiatus between the populist pars pro toto, Manichean logic and the constitutional project of a union of equals, guaranteed for all by means of constitutional rights of justice and equality which political formations cannot dismiss at pleasure. The same may be said, for instance, about Pablo Iglesias’s recent and much-commended speech on European and Spanish constitutional values, referring to the “cross-cutting agreements uniting the people independently of the party they vote for”.20 The argument offered by Alexandros Kioupkiolis in his study of Podemos (2016) seems to strengthen the idea that the

19

DiEM25, quoted in Blokker (2019), p. 349. My translation of Pablo Iglesias’s (2020) speech, delivered at the Spanish Parliament on April 29th 2020.

20

10.5

Host Ideologies and the Endless Empirical Shades of Populism

313

populist narrative, albeit exclusivist and undemocratic at its core, can coexist with inclusive and genuinely democratic commitments that ultimately deactivate it. Kioupkiolis points out that Podemos merges two styles of leadership and organizational structures which reflect deeply different political narratives: on the one hand the horizontal, bottom-up logic, open to the participation of the grassroots in the creation of a political project welcoming inclusive ‘host ideologies’, and thus devoted to “a politically integrated and solidary Europe”, the cause of “immigrants and socially marginalized sectors”, “a strong social rights agenda”, “social justice and democratization” (Id: 2). On the other hand, Podemos also displays verticalistic proclivities “which are so typical of the populist tradition and signal its authoritarian trends” (Id: 3). An evidence of such trends is the implicit understanding of the people, which becomes less of an “open and participative multitude of active citizenry” (Id: 13), as the horizontal model of leadership has it, and more of an amorphous mass, rhetorically constructed by the leader according to his own aims and priorities.21 Kioupkiolis argues in favour of the co-existence of such dimensions, and yet he stresses that the typically populist, verticalist and exclusivist tendencies need to be subordinated to the horizontalistic, grassroots-oriented and inclusive core of Podemos: “a final prevalence of vertical hegemony over horizontal plurality [. . .] will resolve the constitutive ambiguity which defines populist politics more generally, i.e. the conflict between authoritarian and egalitarian, democratizing tendencies, in favour of the former” (Id: 15). As it should be clear, I do not share with Kioupkiolis the idea that populism is intrinsically inhabited by the tension between egalitarianism and authoritarianism. That idea clashes with my whole argument on the incompatibility of populism and democracy. Yet, we converge on the following: that the typically undemocratic core of populism is not enough to aprioristically label empirical populisms as undemocratic. From my perspective, this is due to the essential role that the ‘host ideologies’ of allegedly populist parties can play in internally contrasting their populist narratives, thus performatively redeeming them from a potential breakaway from democracy; for Kioupkiolis, this seems to be connected with the democratizing potential inherent in populism, which constitutively co-exists with undemocratic drives.22 Realizing that populism always ferments in combination with a set of contextdependent policy-proposals and ideological schemes helps accounting for different shades of populism. The latter’s role can range from ‘dominant’ to ‘recessive’ – to use a genetic metaphor – in the overall posture of a political movement. This prevents the automatic condemnation of empirical populist parties as undemocratic, and explains why movements which tend to bring forward democratizing battles are still regarded as populists. An example is the People’s Party, the leaders of which are said to have invented the name ‘populism’ (Howuen 2011), and which is generally well-known for marking the entrance of populism in history. Jan Werner-Müller is not wrong when he claims that “the Populists advocated democratic reforms such as 21 22

For further discussion on Podemos, see Tremlett’s (2015) in-depth journalistic analysis Cf. Kioupkiolis (2016), pp. 15–17.

314

10

Where the Line Lies, and How Thin It Is

the direct elections of senators as well as the secret ballot [. . .] Implementing their ideal of “cooperative commonwealth” may well have resulted in something that elsewhere in the world would have been called “Social Democracy”” (2016: 90). The same may be said of the narodnichestvo, known as the second populist movement in history.23 In spite of their failures, the narodniki of the ‘Going to the People’ movement were driven by genuine commitments towards the enfranchisement of the peasants and the “construction of a wholly new form of action that involved living, teaching and agitating” (Taggart 2000: 56); not by chance, they were firmly repressed by the Russian regime (Id). Yet, both those movements undeniably embraced typical elements of populism, especially the glaring tendency to confer on the people (strongly connoted as ‘plebs’) an unfathomable moral and epistemic authoritativeness. This is clear in the American Populists, who overtly entertained the dream of restoring “the government of the Republic to the hands of ‘the plain people’”;24 as well as in the narodniki, whose “reverence for the simple peasant life is so clear to see because that reference did not spring from the peasantry themselves and so cannot be confused with self-interest” (Id: 58). That is why it seems appropriate to refer to shades of populism on a continuous spectrum, and to identify in the peculiar interplay of host ideologies and populist narrative an essential indicator of the degree to which a political movement may be defined as undemocratic. Populism displays its exclusionary potential when it acquires centrality in the rhetoric and mentality of a movement, thus considerably affecting the way its other host ideologies are construed and the degree of antagonism conveyed by their discourse. However, at the opposite end of the spectrum one may find movements in which the populist element is recessive, subordinated to and obscured by incompatible democratic commitments.25

References Arato, Andrew. 2019. How We Got Here? Transition Failures, Their Causes and the Populist Interest in the Constitution. Philosophy and Social Criticism 45 (9–10): 1106–1115. Bellamy, Richard. 2007. Political Constitutionalism: A Republican Defense of the Constitutionality of Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2008. Citizenship: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

23

Cf. Taguieff (2003) and Howuen (2011). Cf. Taggart (2000), p. 28. 25 That is partly why it seems short-sighted from non-populist or ‘traditional’ parties to oppose and demonize populists on grounds of their seditious and often simplistic narrative tools, rather than entertaining debate and envisioning potential alliances focused on the democratizing proposals that populists at times advocate. For articulated discussions on how non-populists should deal with populists, cf. Müller (2016, 2019), and Mudde and Kaltwasser (2017). Cf. Kaul (2020) for an interesting analysis of three different approaches to populism and how to deal with it, namely the “liberal”, the “social democratic” and the “radical leftist”. 24

References

315

———. 2019. A Republican Europe of States: Cosmopolitanism, Intergovernmentalism and Democracy in the EU. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blokker, Paul. 2019. Varieties of Populist Constitutionalism: The Transnational Dimension. German Law Journal 20 (3): 332–350. Boucher, Geoff. 2008. The Charmed Circle of Ideology: A Critique of Laclau and Mouffe, Butler and Žižek. Melbourne: re.press. Canovan, Margaret. 1999. Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy. Political Studies 47 (1): 2–16. ———. 2002. Taking Politics to the People: Populism as the Ideology of Democracy. In Democracies and the Populist Challenge, ed. Yves Mény and Yves Surel, 25–44. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2005. The People. Cambridge: Polity Press. Chambers, Simone. 2019. Democracy and Constitutional Reform: Deliberative versus Populist Constitutionalism. Philosophy and Social Criticism 45 (9–10): 1116–1131. Connolly, William E. 1995. The Ethos of Pluralization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2002. Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (1991), expanded ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2005. Pluralism. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2008. Essentially Contested Concepts (1974). In William E. Connolly: Democracy, Pluralism and Political Theory, ed. Samuel A. Chambers and Terrell Carver, 257–279. London: Routledge. Corrales, Javier. 2010. The Repeating Revolution: Chavez’s New Politics and Old Economics. In Leftist Governments in Latin America: Successes and Shortcomings, ed. Kurt Weyland, Raúl L. Madrid, and Wendy Hunter, 28–56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Corrias, Luigi. 2016. Populism in a Constitutional Key: Constituent Power, Popular Sovereignty and Constitutional Identity. European Constitutional Law Review 12 (1): 6–26. Elster, Jon. 1983. Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2003. The Market and the Forum: Three Varieties of Political Theory (1986). In Debates in Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology, ed. Derek Matravers and Jon Pike, 325–341. London: Routledge. Enyedi, Zsolt. 2015. Plebeians, Citoyens and Aristocrats, or Where Is the Bottom of the Bottom-up? The Case of Hungary. In European Populism in the Shadow of the Great Recession, ed. Hanspeter Kriesi and Takis S. Pappas, 235–250. Colchester: ECPR Press. Ferrara, Alessandro. 2014. The Democratic Horizon: Hyperpluralism and the Renewal of Political Liberalism. New York: Cambridge University Press. Floridi, Luciano. 2019. Le Sardine, anticorpi tra la rete e la piazza in difesa della Costituzione. L’Espresso, December 16th. https://espresso.repubblica.it/plus/articoli/2019/12/16/news/lesardine-anticorpi-rete-piazza-1.341781. Freeden, Michael. 2017. After the Brexit Referendum: Revisiting Populism as an Ideology. Journal of Political Ideologies 22 (1): 1–11. Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. Between Facts and Norms (1992). Cambridge: Polity Press, transl. by William Rehg. ———. 2001. The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays (1998). Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, ed. and transl. by Max Pensky. Houwen, Tim. 2011. The Non-European Roots of the Concept of Populism, Sussex European Institute: Working Paper no. 120. https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php? name¼sei-working-paper-no-120.pdf&site¼266. Iglesias, Pablo. 2020. Spagna, il discorso di Iglesias (Podemos) in Parlamento su sanità pubblica, patriottismo e costituzionalismo europeo. Il Fatto Quotidiano.it, May 2nd. https://www. ilfattoquotidiano.it/2020/05/02/spagna-il-discorso-di-iglesias-podemos-in-parlamento-susanita-pubblica-patriottismo-e-costituzionalismo-europeo-e-laula-applaude/5789102/.

316

10

Where the Line Lies, and How Thin It Is

Kaul, Volker. 2020. On How to Deal with Populism. In Minorities and Populism – Critical Perspectives from South Asia and Europe, ed. Volker Kaul and Ananya Vajpeyi, 29–37. Dordrecht: Springer. Kioupkiolis, Alexandros. 2016. Podemos: The Ambiguous Promises of Left-wing Populism in Contemporary Spain. Journal of Political Ideologies 21 (2): 1–22. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. 2001. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985). London: Verso. Lafont, Cristina. 2020. Democracy Without Shortcuts: A Participatory Conception of Deliberative Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Locke, John. 2003. Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689). New Haven: Yale University Press, ed. by Ian Shapiro. Mansbridge, Jane. 1995. Does Participation Make Better Citizens? The Good Society 5 (2): 1. 4–7. Mény, Yves, and Yves Surel. 2002. The Constitutive Ambiguity of Populism. In Democracies and the Populist Challenge, ed. Yves Mény and Yves Surel, 1–21. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Mouffe, Chantal. 2018. For a Left Populism. London: Verso. Mudde, Cas, and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2017. Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Müller, Jan-Werner. 2016. What is Populism? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 2019. Democracy and Disrespect. Philosophy and Social Criticism 45 (9–10): 1208–1221. Näsström, Sofia. 2007. The Legitimacy of the People. Political Theory 35 (5): 624–658. Pateman, Carole. 1970. Participation and Democratic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pettit, Philip. 1997. Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2012. On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Santarpia, Valentina. 2019. Che cos’è il movimento delle Sardine e chi è l’ideatore, Mattia Santori. Il Corriere della Sera, December 14th. https://www.corriere.it/politica/19_dicembre_14/checos-movimento-sardine-chi-loro-ideatore-mattia-santori-35bee59c-1e9d-11ea-9389-bd53852 6c9e7.shtml. Shils, Edward. 1956. The Torment of Secrecy: The Background and Consequences of American Security Policies. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Taggart, Paul. 2000. Populism. Buckingham: Open University Press. Taguieff, Pierre-André. 2003. L’Illusione Populista (2002), Milano: Bruno Mondadori, transl. by Alberto Bramati. Tarchi, Marco. 2015. Italia Populista. Dal Qualunquismo a Beppe Grillo. Bologna: il Mulino. Taylor, Kenneth A. 2019. Neither a Populist nor a Vanguardist Be! Respecting the Wisdom and Will of the People. Philosophy and Social Criticism 45 (9-10): 1222–1238. Tremlett, Giles. 2015. The Podemos Revolution: How a Small Group of Radical Academics Changed European Politics. The Guardian, March 31st. https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2015/mar/31/podemos-revolution-radical-academics-changed-european-politics. Tushnet, Mark. 2019. Varieties of Populism. German Law Journal 20 (3): 382–389. Urbinati, Nadia. 2014. Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Waldron, Jeremy. 1999. The Dignity of Legislation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weale, Albert. 2018. The Will of the People: A Modern Myth. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Concluding Remarks

As suggested in the Introduction, radical democratic theories and populism were analyzed in the light of two essential questions, aiming to thwart the danger of incommensurability: who are the power-holders, and what kind of sovereignty do they exercise – or what is the people and how does it exercise sovereignty. As we saw in Part IV, the red line turns out to be rather thick, and its origin can be traced in the discussion of the first question: the conceptions of ‘the people’ reconstructed from the radical democratic and the populist claims and commitments appear so incompatible with each other as to determine the subsequent analysis of the ‘how’ of popular sovereignty. The line dividing the populist and the democratic people thus unravels across the domain of the second issue, i.e. the one concerned with the forma regiminis: given the organicistic and intrinsically virtuous nature that populists attach upon the people, populism appears irreconcilable with, and thus external to, the basic democratic task of specifying what it means for a multitude of individuals to share sovereign power. This conclusion fulfils the ambition of my research, in that it uncovers the dividing line separating populism and ‘radical’ democracy; yet, it seems to leave one issue somewhat hanging in mid-air: if it is not democratic, what is the way in which populists suggest that power should be exercised? Are we authorized to infer an authoritarian-absolutist nature of populism from the appraisal of its undemocratic character? All in all, the populist insistence on the evidence and singularity of truth bears an authoritarian overtone, and the portrait of the people as the ultimate source of unconstrained authority points to an absolutist proclivity. Nonetheless, perhaps populists do not say enough for us to achieve a methodologically sound reconstruction of their understanding of sovereignty. The vagueness, ambiguity, and the empirical implausibility of the populist sovereign – i.e., a compact aggregate with a singular and indisputable will – may be too sterile a soil to plant a full-fledged conception of how sovereign power ought to be exercised from a populist viewpoint. Therefore, although I do not aspire to foreclose such debate once and for all, I sense that there is not enough of meat to reconstruct populism’s positive understanding of sovereignty, and that the issue is bound to hang

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Fiorespino, Radical Democracy and Populism, Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations 18, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84969-6

317

318

Concluding Remarks

in mid-air due to the very shallowness of its political discourse. What can be said is what populism is not, as I attempt to do in this book: as long as it is constitutively disabled from providing any specification of what it means for a plural people to exercise sovereignty, it does not belong in the scope of democratic theory and praxis. The red line is thus drawn as a boundary separating democracy and populism as different concepts. The first identifiable feature discussed is the pars pro toto logic of populism, which attracts a large consensus among scholars. The polarization of the political and social field into two homogeneous, constructed, and morally antithetical fronts, namely ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’, is the essential gesture that most – if not all – authors underscore when facing the challenge of grasping the gist of the populist phenomenon. Hence, the populist ‘people’ was described as displaying two central and intertwined features: homogeneity on the one hand, and on the other an in-built moral, cultural, epistemic authority, which involves a self-attribution of political legitimacy. The people thus construed is an organic entity endowed with a singular and just will. Its legitimacy to exercise constituted and constituent power is unquestionable, stems from its inherent moral integrity, and therefore precedes any procedure. The normative constellation enfolded in any institutional practice, including basic democratic elections, cannot be made to externally regulate and constrain such self-referential righteous whole. Populism in its current guise appears eminently modern. The myth of the people as sovereign, united, made up by an empowered plebs, and bound to subvert oppression, is the product of the momentous revolutions of the modern age – especially the American Revolution, according to Margaret Canovan. From these conclusions on the populist logic and conception of peoplehood, a number of theoretical inaccuracies can be dispelled: (a) the equation of populism and democracy, to start with, appears problematic under many respects. The idea that stark, dichotomic antagonism be the sole logic of (democratic) construction of the social and of political collectivities is highly questionable descriptively, besides the obvious concerns regarding the compatibility of antagonism and democracy; (b) a further intuition inconsistent with the reconstruction provided is that populism and democracy intersect at some point. This idea was formulated in different ways: populism was defined as a form of “illiberal democracy”, as overlapping with democracy’s mythical-affective core, as an “interpretation of democracy” which challenges representative democracy and establishes a “rule of the majority”, and as a “corrective” of liberal-democratic shortfalls at given historical junctures. Whereas there is one way in which the last version may be consistently defended, the others were variously questioned throughout Chap. 9. Their common flaw may be summarized as the failure to see the specificity of the populist commitment to “power to the people”; (c) if populism is a moral claim, then it cannot be conflated with crude, oppressive majoritarianism. In the latter, arbitrary leadership and power (constituent and constituted) are vindicated not on the grounds of the seditious selfattribution of a superior moral status, but by virtue of an electoral victory. Hence, the electoral procedure assumes normative pre-eminence over ‘the will of the people’, whereas for the populist the latter is intrinsically just and legitimate. It does not

Concluding Remarks

319

require electoral validation; (d) populism is not a deceptive mix of authoritarianoriented policies and democratic justifications, categories, motifs; rather, it puts forward a set of distinctive claims which are themselves inherently undemocratic, such as the homogeneous nature and the apodictic moral supremacy of an ‘elected’ section of the electorate, arbitrarily misrepresented as ‘the people’. The reason why such populist intuitions are undemocratic, in the sense of external to democracy, lies in their forfeiting the task of specifying the content and meaning of popular sovereignty. What I argue in Chap. 10 is that popular sovereignty is nowhere to be found in the populist rhetoric. The ‘radical’ democratic authors analyzed in the book share a fundamental feature, running below the considerable differences that set them apart: they depict the people as irreducibly plural and singular, heterogeneous and homogeneous, and hence they take the practice of democratic theorizing as one which must account for how a multitude of disparate and yet united individuals may exercise shared sovereign power. In other words, the idea of popular sovereignty requires specification, ‘the people’ being a largely heterogeneous formation and not a monolith. Such specification was reconstructed in Chap. 10 as requiring a fourfold operation: (a) the articulation of the conditions enabling, or filling with meaning, the practice of popular sovereignty – for instance, is a popular multitude collectively sovereign when all enjoy an equal right to vote and majority rule is in force, or when non-domination is pursued by a political system allowing citizens to exert individualized control over power and oppressive majorities? When conditions of discursive fairness are structurally secured by the procedures of a socio-institutional system, or when “social openness” is maintained so that a hegemonic logic may be reproduced? These conditions filling with signification popular sovereignty – that is, illustrating how a plural whole may exercise sovereignty – are simultaneously (b) limits (both normative and descriptive) beyond which popular sovereignty is infringed or trespassed. Moreover, in the case of normative democratic theory, such conditions of signification provide (c) grounds of desirability of democracy, i.e., rationales accounting for why it is desirable that sovereign power be held by the people. Finally, democratic theories tend to provide (d) a conception of the sovereign people, its unity, and thus of the borders of political inclusion/exclusion, which are justified on the grounds of a democratic theory. Although the empirical geopolitical structure decisively affects theorizing, and the nation-state is often the political entity of reference, the borders and criteria of inclusion of political communities are neither taken by democratic theorists as fully arbitrary, nor as established once and for all, nor as posited beyond political contestation and re-negotiation. Although Näsström correctly notes that the foundation of ‘the people’ is often undertheorized in political philosophy, perhaps she goes too far when she claims that democratic theorists surrender the criteria of inclusion to the arbitrary forces of history shaping political communities, in a Burkean or Schmittian fashion. Those criteria are normatively justified, albeit retrospectively, and democratically contestable. The most evident example is Habermas’s partial rethinking of his own theory in the early 2000s: prompted by the lack of democratic legitimacy that he saw increasingly affecting nation-states, Habermas attempted to deploy his own theoretical categories in order to design possible paths towards

320

Concluding Remarks

European integration, and stressed the bottom-up role that social movements and civil society should play in the overcoming of twentieth-century nation-states.1 The performance of this complex gesture is as fundamental in democratic theory (and practice) as evidently unapproachable for populism. As long as the people is an internally homogeneous formation with a superior morality and a clear-cut will, there is neither way nor need to specify how can a plural people exercise collective sovereignty, what are the limits of political power, in the light of what values, principles, and interests democracy is desirable, and what are the grounds justifying the people’s borders, thereby providing grounds for contestation. In the populist depiction of the holder of popular sovereignty, the departure from the democratic dimension is already underway. The democratic task is snubbed from the outset by a seditious act which marks a rather thick red line.

Reference Habermas, Jürgen. 2001. The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays (1998). Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, ed. and transl. by Max Pensky.

1

Cf. Habermas 2001, p. 57.