Democratic Culture

Akeel Bilgrami, Akeel Bilgrami

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136197772
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

A collection of essays by distinguished scholars, this book delineates a substantial conception of democracy, the great promise as well as the pitfalls of a democratic mentality and culture. These essays go beyond the institutional and formal descriptions of democracy to its underlying cultural context — expressed both historically and analytically, descriptively and normatively.

1
Liberal Democracy and its Critics

Some Voices from East and West^*

FRED DALLMAYR

Heraclitus notwithstanding, history is not just random flux. Apart from its great or memorable events, every historical period also pays tribute to certain guideposts or guiding ideas — what sceptics call its idola fori or idols of the marketplace. Looking at our contemporary age, it is not difficult to pinpoint a guiding, and probably the guiding idea endorsed almost universally by people around the world: that of ‘liberal democracy’. Although originating in Western societies, the idea today is circulating as an orienting loadstar among people in Africa, the Middle East as well as South and East Asia. As can readily be seen, the guidepost is actually a composite phrase combining the two terms ‘liberal’ and ‘democracy’. Yet, despite the possibility of differentiation, the two terms in recent times have been basically conflated or amalgamated — with the result that, in the view of both ordinary people and leading intellectuals, the ‘democratic’ component has become redundant or been absorbed without a rest in the dominant ‘liberal’ idea. This conflation is particularly evident in, and traceable to, modern economics (with its own idols of the ‘market’). In large measure, the ongoing process of globalization is fuelled by the idea of ‘neoliberalism’ — a version of the liberal tradition which insists on ‘downsizing’ political (including democratic) oversight for the sake of promoting individual or corporate ‘free enterprise’.

This preponderance of liberal or neoliberal agendas is by no means fortuitous. Taking a broad view, the entire trajectory of modern Western history can be seen as a movement of progressive human liberation, above all, liberation from clerical and autocratic modes of control. This trajectory was present already in the work of Thomas Hobbes, in his rupture with classical and medieval conceptions of community. The movement was carried forward by John Locke with his accent on the persistence of ‘natural rights’ — especially the right to equal liberty — in the confines of an established commonwealth. The latter emphasis was deepened and fleshed out by later liberal thinkers like John Stuart Mill and Benjamin Constant — whose arguments in favour of minimal government (laissez-faire) were by then powerfully buttressed by the rise of capitalism and modern market economics. Small wonder that, in view of this long-standing trajectory, individual freedom became at last a catchword or shibboleth. As we know, the Western world calls itself, somewhat boastfully, the ‘Free World’, while America celebrates itself as the ‘land of the free’. As a corollary of this development, democracy as a political regime has come to be equated with an arena of free individual choice — that is, with liberal or libertarian democracy. But how plausible is this outcome? Has freedom in the modern world completely replaced such traditional categories as ‘virtue’ and the ‘good life’ — with the result that Aristotle’s distinction between just and unjust regimes would be levelled into that between free and unfree forms of life?

In what follows I want to pursue this line of thought. In a first step, I shall outline the meaning of liberal democracy, as it is defined by some contemporary theorists or philosophers. Subsequently I want to examine efforts to correct this liberal conception, turning first to the South Asian and next to the East Asian context. By way of conclusion I shall review again the relation between liberalism and democracy.

Minimal Liberal Democracy

As previously indicated, liberalism has a long history in the course of which it has assumed many different shapes and shadings. During the early period, the time of Hobbes and Locke, liberalism — in the sense of the defence of ‘natural’ individual rights — served precariously as an adjunct or supplement to monarchical and even absolutist regimes. In the post-revolutionary era, liberalism became affiliated with various republican or democratic regimes — but in such a manner that the latter would progressively be trumped by the former (a development in which, as stated, the rise of capitalism played a major role). In the opinion of 19th-century liberals, the role of government — including democratic government — was meant to be minimal: seen chiefly as protectors of private property, political regimes were said to govern best when governing least. The dismal experiences of the 20th century with populist and totalitarian governments have reinforced the liberal preference for political or public minimalism — despite occasional concessions to ‘welfare’ programmes during times of economic hardship. As a result of these experiences and developments, the notion of individual freedom has come to be equated preponderantly with ‘negative liberty’ (to use Isaiah Berlin’s phrase) or the freedom to be left alone — with only limited allowance made for active or ‘positive freedom’ (mainly on the level of voting rights and lobbying). In his study of John Dewey (who opposed this entire trend), Raymond Boisvert has sketched the stereotype of the minimalist liberal: ‘an individual with no roots and little connectedness to community . . . a highly competitive individual fixated on narrow purposes whose practice is marked by expedience rather than conventional ethics’.¹

On a sophisticated level, aspects of democratic minimalism can be found even in the writings of theorists or intellectuals otherwise strongly committed to democratic politics. An example is Robert A. Dahl’s celebrated text A Preface to Democratic Theory (first published in 1956).² In the very Introduction to his study, Dahl delineates two basic approaches in this field: a ‘maximizing’ theory (relying either on ethical principles or formal axioms) and a purely ‘descriptive–empirical’ and to that extent minimalizing approach. Traditional political theory, he notes, has tended to be ‘maximizing’ by emphasizing ‘internal checks’ — such as conscience and ethical dispositions — to restrain possible excesses of governmental power. Pre-revolutionary writers in particular, he says, insisted upon ‘moral virtue among citizens as a necessary condition for republican government’, a condition which needed to be cultivated through ‘hortatory religion, sound education, and honest government’. This approach, however, has gone out of fashion since the revolutionary period and, in America, since the writings of James Madison. In Dahl’s presentation, Madison proceeded to sideline the earlier ‘maximizing’ approach which must have been still ‘a common assumption of his time’. From Madison’s perspective, the traditional ethical approach was simply no longer viable given the increasingly competitive and interest-based character of modern politics. Moreover, even if occasionally operative, ethical constraints were no longer reliable given the strength of individual ambitions. Hence, for both Madison and Dahl, modern governments require not traditional but ‘external [or procedural] checks’ to restrain oppressive tendencies. As can readily be seen, however, procedural checks are themselves the result of contractual arrangements and hence dependent on changing individual preferences.³

Another example of a democratic theorist leaning in the minimalist direction is Giovanni Sartori, well known for his text The Theory of Democracy Revisited (1987) (which is a sequel to his earlier Democratic Theory of 1962).⁴ Like Dahl’s study, Sartori’s text distinguishes at the outset between a ‘prescriptive’ or normative conception and a ‘descriptive’ or empirical conception — with the latter version involving greatly reduced demands on democratic politics. In his view, to introduce normative expectations is likely to overburden the democratic regime such as to render it unviable: ‘To bring morality into politics is akin to playing with fire — as we have only too well rediscovered since Hegel theorized a ‘political ethos’ or Sittlichkeit’. In view of the alleged danger associated with public ethics, Sartori prefers to employ ‘minimalist’ language and to leave phrases like ‘pol-itical morality, social morality, professional ethics’ aside. What he finds particularly unhelpful or obnoxious is any association of democracy with public affection or Aristotelian-type friendship — something he derisively calls ‘demophily’. As he insists: ‘Since real-world democracy consists (this is what renders it real) of a democratic machinery, democracy can do well without demophily’. Democratic machinery coincides for him — and many other empirical theorists — with voting behaviour, pursuit of individual interests through pressure groups and political parties, and public policy-making on the basis of these interests. Comprising this battery of elements, the democratic machinery basically yields what he calls ‘demo-power’, that is, the power of the people, or predominant segments of the people, to implement and make effective prevailing interests: ‘Democracy begins with demo-power’.⁵

An even more resolutely minimalist approach is propagated by a perspective which, in recent times, has increasingly gained prominence in the social sciences: rational choice theory. This outlook basically transfers neo-classical economic assumptions to social and political life; under the aegis of ‘neoliberalism’, the perspective is fast emerging as something like a dominant global ideology. As can readily be seen, what is jeopardized or called into question by this model is not only public ethics, but politics, particularly democratic politics, as such. For, even when seen as a minimally shared regime, democracy is bound to be a burden or hindrance for the ambitions of an unrestrained economic agenda. No one has articulated this burden more forcefully than William Riker, a founder of this model, in his book Liberalism Against Populism (of 1982).⁶ In this text, the term ‘populism’ stands for an interventionist or perhaps ‘Jacobin’ type of democracy — in a manner which immediately renders democracy suspect (if compared with liberalism). As Riker states at the outset: ‘The theory of social [or rational] choice is a theory about the way the tastes, preferences, or values of individual persons are amalgamated and summarized into the choice of a collective group or society’. Since these preferences are not ethically ranked, the primary focus is on something measurable or quantifiable: in economics monetary profit, in politics ‘the theory of voting’ which is the core of liberal (or libertarian) democracy barring any interference with voting preferences. Like Dahl, Riker distinguishes between a normative–ethical and an empirical or ‘analytical’ conception of politics — placing rational choice clearly in the second category: the model is ‘an analytical theory about the way the natural world can [and does] work and what kind of outputs that world can yield’.⁷

Again like Dahl, though with modified accents, Riker delineates two different genealogies of modern democracy: a ‘liberal or Madisonian’ type and a ‘populist or Rousseauistic’ type. In the liberal (or libertarian) version, he notes, ‘the function of voting is to control officials, and nothing else’ — meaning by ‘nothing else’ the absence of positive political programmes promoting something like the common good. As he adds, this Madisonian definition ‘is logically complete, and there is nothing to add. Madison said nothing about the quality of popular decision, whether good or bad’. By contrast, ‘populists’ — presumably following Rousseau — desire a more active, participatory role of the people and a politics that creates ‘a moral and collective body’ endowed with ‘life and will’, especially the (in)famous ‘general will’. At this point, Riker endorses wholeheartedly Isaiah Berlin’s notion of ‘negative liberty’ and his indictment that ‘positive liberty, which appears initially innocuous, is the root of tyranny’ or oppression. Tellingly, Riker also alludes to some ideological background, not unaffected by the geopolitics of the Cold War. ‘No government’, he asserts, ‘that has eliminated economic freedom has been able to attain or keep democracy’. On the other hand, ‘economic liberty is also an end in itself because capitalism is the driving force for the increased efficiency and technological innovation that has produced in two centuries both a vast increase in the wealth of capitalist nations and a doubling of the average life span of their citizens’. Although acknowledging that it may be viewed as ‘minimalist’ by some, Riker concludes that liberal or Madisonian democracy is ‘the only kind of democracy actually attainable’ or feasible in our world.⁸

Beyond Minimalism: Voices from South Asia

In large measure, liberal democracy — in the sense of a minimalist, libertarian regime (or non-regime) — tends to occupy center stage in recent Western social and political thought. As it is important to note, this has not always been the case. During important phases of Western political development, minimalist liberal democracy has been criticized or contested by able thinkers and public intellectuals. One such phase was the American colonial period when the Puritan John Winthrop proposed the formation of an ethical–communitarian republic in Massachusetts Bay. Another, post-revolutionary phase was the era of ‘Jacksonian democracy’ when the ideal of an egalitarian republic was pitted against the laissez-faire ambitions of the emerging manufacturing elite (epitomized by the Bank of America). On a theoretical or philosophical plane, however, the most important development was the rise of ‘pragmatism’ in the late-19th century, and especially John Dewey’s eloquent defence of ‘radical’ democracy as an antidote to laissez-faire liberalism. In Boisvert’s words, for Dewey ‘democracy as an ideal for community life ...