What Is Democracy?

Alain Touraine, David Macey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429982743
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

In this sequel to A Critique of Modernity, Alain Touraine questions the social and cultural content of democracy today. At a time when state power is being increasingly eroded by the economic might of transnational capital, what possible value can we ascribe to a democratic idea that is defined merely as a set of guarantees against the totalitarian state?If democracy is to survive in the postcommunist world, Touraine argues, it must accomplish two urgent goals: It must somehow protect the power of the nation-state at the same time as it limits that power (for only the state has sufficient means to counterbalance the global corporate wielders of money and information); and it must reconcile social diversity with social unity and individual liberty with integration.This is not merely a philosophical problem but a dilemma whose resolution will dramatically affect the immediate future of people everywhere. If we want a resolution in democracy's favor, then it is time, in Touraine's view, for us to redefine democracy in terms of active intervention rather than mere passive institution. To preserve the power and effectiveness of our states and societies, we must make visible strides?and soon?away from a politics of particularity and toward the integration and balancing of women and minorities, of immigrants, of rich and poor. If our states become too weakened, too debased by the politics of competing identities and interest groups, we will one day find ourselves without the means to protect the very values we believe we are fighting to uphold.

Part 1
The Three Dimensions of Democracy

1
A New Idea

Democracy is a new idea. Now that authoritarian regimes have collapsed in the East and the South and the United States has won the cold war against the Soviet Union—which, after having lost its empire, its all-powerful party, and its technological lead, has finally ceased to exist-many people believe that democracy has won. Many now believe that democracy is of necessity the normal form of political organization, the political face of modernity, whose economic form is the market economy and whose cultural expression is secularization. Reassuring as this belief may be for those living in the West, it is so flimsy that we should find it worrisome. An open and competitive political market is no more identifiable with democracy than a market economy is in itself constitutive of an industrial society. In both cases, we can say that an open system—whether political or economic—is a necessary but not a sufficient precondition for democracy or economic development. There is indeed no democracy unless the ruled are free to choose their rulers, or without political pluralism, but we cannot speak of democracy if the voters’ only choice is between two fractions of the oligarchy, the army, or the state apparatus. In the same way, the market economy ensures that the economy is independent of state, church, or caste; but if we are to be able to speak of an industrial society or self-sustaining growth, there must also be a legal system, a public administration, an inviolate territory, entrepreneurs, and agents who redistribute the national product.

There are now many indications that the regimes we describe as democratic are, like authoritarian regimes, being weakened, and that they are dominated by the demands of a world market that is protected and regulated by the might of the United States and by agreements between three primary centers of economic power. This world market tolerates the participation of countries with strong authoritarian governments, countries with decaying authoritarian regimes, or even oligarchic regimes. It also tolerates the participation of what might be called democratic regimes, or in other words regimes in which the ruled are free to choose the rulers who represent them.

As states, democratic or otherwise, decline in importance, involvement in politics also declines, and we have what has rightly been called a crisis of political representation. Voters no longer feel that they are represented. They voice that feeling by denouncing a political class that appears to be interested only in its own power or in the accumulation of personal wealth by its members. The awareness of citizenship fades, either because many individuals feel that they are consumers rather than citizens, and cosmopolitans rather than nationals, or because a certain number of individuals feel that they have been marginalized by or excluded from society for economic, political, ethnic, or cultural reasons.

Once democracy has been weakened in this way, it can be destroyed either from above, by an authoritarian power, or from below, by chaos, violence, and civil war. Alternatively, it may be destroyed from within as power comes under the control of oligarchies or parties that accumulate economic or political resources so as to impose their choices on citizens, who have been reduced to the role of voters. The twentieth century has been so strongly marked by authoritarian regimes that their destruction seemed to many to be adequate proof of the triumph of democracy. Yet if we content ourselves with purely indirect or negative definitions of democracy, we restrict the analysis to an unacceptable extent. Giovanni Sartori was right in both his first (Sartori 1957) and his most recent book (Sartori 1993) to reject absolutely the distinction some have made between two forms of democracy, described respectively as political and social, formal and real, or bourgeois and socialist, depending on which vocabulary these ideologues preferred. Sartori correctly reminded us that there is only one form of democracy—firstly, because we could not use the same word to designate two different realities if they did not have a great deal in common, and secondly, because a discourse that culminates in the claim that an authoritarian or even totalitarian regime is democratic cancels itself.

Have we no choice but to follow the pendulum as it swings back to constitutional liberties after having attempted, throughout the long century that began in 1848 in France, to extend political liberty to economic and social life? Adopting that stance does not help us to answer the question of how to reconcile or combine government by law with the representation of interests. It merely underlines the incompatibility of the two goals and, therefore, the impossibility of constructing or even defining democracy. We thus come back to our starting point.

We therefore have to agree with Norberto Bobbio, who defined democracy in terms of three institutional principles. According to Bobbio, democracy is primarily “a set of rules (primary or basic) which establish who is authorized to take collective decisions and which procedures are to be used” (Bobbio 1988: 24). To this one might add that the greater the number of people who participate either directly or indirectly in decisionmaking, the more democratic the regime; and, finally, that the choices to be made must be real choices. One might also agree with Bobbio that democracy is based on the replacement of an organic conception of society by an individualistic vision, the main elements of which are the idea of a contract, the replacement of Aristotle’s political animal by homo œconomicus, by utilitarianism and its pursuit of the greatest happiness for the greatest number. But having established these “liberal” principles, Bobbio showed us that political reality is very different from the model he outlined. Large organizations such as parties and labor unions exert an increasing influence on political life. The supposed sovereignty of the people therefore often has no basis in reality. Individual interests do not disappear in the face of the general will, and oligarchies perpetuate themselves. Finally, the democratic process has not penetrated most domains of social life, and secrecy, which is antithetical to democracy, continues to play an important role; thus behind democratic structures, a government by technocrats and apparatuses frequently forms. In addition to these worries, there is a more basic cause for concern: If democracy is no more than a set of rules and procedures, why should citizens actively defend it? A few parliamentarians may be willing to die for an electoral law, but no one else is.

In sum, we must go beyond procedural rules, although these are indispensable if democracy is to exist. We must investigate how the will that represents the majority’s interests is formed, expressed, and applied at the same time as is the awareness that all are citizens, responsible for the social order. Procedural rules are nothing more than a means toward ends that, while never achieved, nonetheless lend their meaning to political activities—preventing arbitrary rule and secrecy, responding to the demands of the majority, and ensuring the participation of as many as possible in public life. Now that authoritarian regimes are in retreat and “people’s democracies,” which were merely one-party dictatorships over peoples, are a thing of the past, we can no longer content ourselves with constitutional and juridical guarantees, abandoning economic and social life to the domination of increasingly remote oligarchies.

That is why I wrote this book. Distrusting participatory democracy, disquieted by all forms of the central powers’ ascendancy over individuals and public opinion, and hostile to appeals to the people, the nation, or history-which invariably attribute to the state a legitimacy that it no longer obtains from free elections—I embarked on this study of the social and cultural content of democracy today.

As the nineteenth century came to an end, limited democracies were out-flanked in the West by industrial democracies and newly emergent social-democratic governments supported by labor unions, and in the East by Leninist-inspired revolutionary parties and others who prioritized the overthrow of the old regime rather than the establishment of democracy. That era of debates about “social” democracy is over, and in the absence of any new content, democracy is degenerating into the freedom to consume, into a political supermarket. Public opinion was satisfied with that impoverished definition at the time when the Soviet regime and empire were collapsing, but we cannot in the long term surrender to the facile attractions of a purely negative definition of democracy. In “liberal” countries and around the globe, this impoverishment of the democratic idea can only result in the extraparliamentary, or even extrapolitical, expression of social demands, protests, and hopes—here, in the privatization of social problems, and there, in a “fundamentalist” mobilization. Is it not obvious that democratic institutions are becoming quite ineffective, being seen as either a more or less rigged game or an agency for the penetration of foreign interests?

Faced with this loss of meaning, one can only turn to a conception of democratic action as the liberation of individuals and groups who are dominated by the logic of a power, or, in other words, subject to control by the masters and managers of systems, who view them as mere resources.

In the struggle against absolute monarchies, some called on the people to seize power; but that revolutionary call led either to new oligarchies or to populist dictatorships. In a period dominated by every form of political, cultural, and economic mass mobilization, we must move in the opposite direction. That is why we are witnessing the return of the idea of human rights. That idea is stronger than ever because it has been sustained by resistance fighters, dissidents, and critical thinkers who fought totalitarian powers in the darkest hours of our century. From the workers and intellectuals of Gdansk to those of Tiananmen Square, from U.S. civil rights activists to the European students of May 1968, from those who fought South African apartheid to those who are still fighting dictatorship in Burma, from Chile’s Vicaría de la Solidaridad to the Serbian opposition, from Salman Rushdie to embattled Algerian intellectuals, the democratic spirit has been brought to life by all who have opposed increasingly absolute powers in the name of their right to live in freedom.

Democracy would be a poor word indeed if it were not defined by the battlefields where so many men and women have fought for it. And if we do need a strong definition of democracy, it is partly because we must wield it against those who, in the name of old democratic struggles, have become or are becoming the servants of absolutism and intolerance. We no longer want participatory democracy, and we cannot be content with deliberative democracy; we need a liberating democracy.

We must of course begin by making a distinction between individual conceptions of “the good society” and the definition of a democratic system. We can no longer conceive of a democracy that is not pluralist and, in the broadest sense of the term, secular. When a society sees its institutions as the incarnation of a conception of “the good,” it is liable to impose its beliefs and values on a highly diversified population. Just as public schools make a distinction between the educational realm and the family or personal realm, so a government cannot force everyone to accept the same conception of good and evil. It must ensure that all may assert their demands and opinions, freely and without risk, so that the decisions made by popular representatives might reflect as broadly and accurately as possible the people’s opinions and interests. The idea of a state religion is particularly incompatible with democracy, if it signifies the imposition of moral and intellectual dogmas. Freedom of opinion and freedom of assembly and organization are essential to democracy in part because they imply that the state may make no judgment about moral or religious beliefs.

This procedural conception of liberty alone, however, cannot serve as a basis for organizing social life. The law takes us further in what it permits or forbids, which imposes a conception of life, property, and education. Yet, a social right is hardly reducible to a legal code.

How, then, are we to respond to two apparently contradictory demands—on the one hand, for the greatest possible respect of personal liberties (that is, negative liberty), and on the other, for a social system that is regarded as fair by the majority (in other words, positive liberty)? That question will run through this book to its very end; but as a sociologist I cannot wait that long to offer a truly sociological answer, one that explains the behavior of social actors in terms of their social relations: The link between negative and positive liberty is the democratic will to enable those who are subordinate and dependent to act freely and to discuss rights and guarantees on equal terms with those who possess economic, political, and cultural resources. That is why the introduction of collective bargaining and, more generally, industrial democracy, was one of democracy’s great victories: The action of the labor unions allowed wage-earners to negotiate with their employers in the least unequal situation possible. Similarly, freedom of the press not only protects an individual liberty; it gives the weakest the opportunity to make themselves heard even though the powerful are moving behind the scenes to defend their interests, secretly mobilizing networks based on kinship, friendship, and mutual benefit. Procedural democracy lacks passion, and participatory democracy lacks wisdom. The alternative is democratic action aimed at freeing individuals and groups from the constraints that weigh on them.

The founding fathers of the republic wanted to create a citizen-man, and they admired above all else individuals who sacrificed themselves to the higher interest of the city-state. Republican virtues today arouse our suspicion rather than our admiration. We no longer appeal to the state to rescue us from tradition and privilege: We who live at the close of a century dominated even more by totalitarianisms and their instruments of repression than by the growth of production and consumption in one part of the world are afraid of the state and of all forms of power. The appeal to the masses and even to the people has so often been the language of despots that it cannot but inspire horror in us. We no longer accept even the impersonal disciplines that have been imposed on us in the name of technology, efficiency, and security. Perhaps we now understand that democracy is vigorous only when it is sustained by a desire for liberation that constantly looks to new frontiers both distant and close at hand, running counter to all forms of authority and repression that affect our most personal experiences.

In this way, the democratic spirit can respond to what seemed at first two contradictory exigencies—limiting power and meeting the demands of the majority. But under what conditions and to what extent can it do so? My task in writing this book was to answer these questions.

The Liberty of the Subject

All these themes converge in the central theme of the liberty of the subject. I use the term “subject” to describe the construction of the individual (or group) as actor through the simultaneous assertion of liberty and assumption and reinterpretation of life experience. The subject is an attempt to transform a lived situation into free action; it introduces liberty into what initially seem to be social determinants and a cultural heritage.

How is this liberating action exercised—in disengagement or in withdrawal into self-consciousness or existential meditation? On the contrary, in modern society the assertion of liberty is characteristically expressed by active resistance to social power’s increasing hold over the personality and over culture. Industrial power imposed normalization, the so-called scientific organization of labor, requiring that workers submit to a regular schedule and tempo. Subsequently, the consumer society demanded that they consume as many signs of participation as possible. The mobilizing political power likewise exacted displays of belonging and loyalty. The subject resists all such powers, which, as Tocqueville was already aware, place even greater constraints on minds than on bodies, imposing a self-image and worldview rather than respect for law and order. The subject asserts itself through both its particularity and its desire for liberty, or in other words, by its self-creation as an actor capable of transforming its environment.

Democracy is not simply a set of institutional guarantees or a negative liberty. Democracy is the battle waged by subjects, in the context of their culture and their liberty, against the domineering logic of systems. Democracy is, to use the expression coined by Robert Fraisse, the politics of the subject. At the beginning of the modern era, when most human beings were confined to restricted collectivities and crushed by the weight of systems of reproduction rather than the ascendant forces of production, the subject asserted itself by identifying itself with reason and labor. However, in societies that have been invaded by technologies of mass production, consumption, and communication, a great change occurs: Liberty is so alienated from instrumental reason that it may completely reject it in order to defend or recreate a space tgat accommodates both memory and invention, thus facilitating the emergence of a subject that is, at one and the same time, existence and metamorphosis, immanence and imminence, body and mind. Democracy’s great task is to produce and defend diversity within a mass culture.

French political culture has taken the republican idea to extremes, identifying personal liberty with the work of the law, human beings with citizens, and the nation with the social contract. It has succeeded in seeing itself as the agent of universal values and has almost completely erased its particularities, its very memory, in legislating a society based on principles of rational thought and action. One can best understand how the democratic idea, thus defined, has been transformed by examining the difference between French-style republican culture and democratic culture. Republican culture seeks unity, whereas democratic culture protects diversity. Republican culture identifies liberty with citizenship; democratic culture contrasts human rights with the duties of the citizen or the demands of the consumer. For democrats, as Claude Lefort put it, people’s power does not mean that the people sit on the prince’s throne; it means that there is no longer a throne (Lefort 1986). People’s power means the ability of the greatest number to live freely, or in other words, to construct their individual lives by relating what they are to what they want to be, and by resisting power, in the name of liberty and of loyalty to a cultural heritage. The democratic regime is the form of political life that gives the greatest liberty to the greatest number, that protects and recognizes the greatest possible diversity.

As I write, the most violent attack on democracy is that being waged by the Serbian army and regime in the name of ethnic purity and the cultural homogenization of the nation. Bosnia, where people with different national or religious allegiances have been living together for centuries, is being dismembered. Hundreds of thousands of individuals have been driven out of their territory by force of arms and by rape, looting, and famine, so that ethnically homogeneous states can be constructed. Because democracy in any given period is best defined by the attacks that are being made on it, in Europe today, democrats can be recognized by their opposition to ethnic cleansing. The adoption of such a policy by Serbs required an antidemocratic dictatorship; the fact that MiloZeviâ and even more extreme nationalists speak for the vast majority of Serbs is of little relevance in defining the nature of this regime. What has happened in Bosnia proves that a democracy is not defined by participation or consensus but by respect for liberties and diversity. For the same reason, we greeted the end of apartheid in South Africa as a victory for democracy. If, at some future date, direct elections and universal suffrage allowed the black majority to eliminate the white minority, we could not invoke democracy to justify this policy of intolerance. In contrast, the de Klerk-Mandela agreements and the recognition of the diversity of a country that is inhabited by black Africans, Afrikaners, people of British descent, Indians, and others seem to mark a great step forward.

Our European nation-states, which were for the most part monarchies, became democracies because in most cases they recognized—willingly or under duress—social and cultural diversity, rejecting the religious territorialism (cujus regio, ejus religio)that was so widespread in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. States in which the central power was penetrating ever deeper into the daily lives of both individuals and collectivities learned to reconcile centralization with the recognition of diversities. The United States, and especially Canada, built societies that recognized a pluralism of cultures and reconciled it with respect for the law, the independence of the state, and reliance on science and technology. Democracy cannot exist without a recognition of the diversity of beliefs, origins, opinions, and agendas.

The de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1 The Three Dimensions of Democracy
• Part 2 A History of the Modern Democratic Spirit
• Part 3 Democratic Culture
• Part 4 Democracy and Development
• Conclusion
• References
• About the Book and Author
• Index