Critical Theory and Democracy

Enrique Peruzzotti, Martin Plot, Enrique Peruzzotti, Martin Plot

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136183706
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

This book focuses on Andrew Arato's democratic theory and its relevance to contemporary issues such as processes of democratization, civil society, constitution-making, and the modern Executive.

Andrew Arato is -both globally and disciplinarily- a prominent thinker in the fields of democratic theory, constitutional law, and comparative politics, influencing several generations of scholars. This is the first volume to systematically address his democratic theory. Including contributions from leading scholars such as Dick Howard, Ulrich Preuss, Hubertus Buchstein, Janos Kis, Uri Ram, Leonardo Avritzer, Carlos de la Torre, and Nicolás Lynch, this book is organized around three major areas of Arato´s influence on contemporary political and social thought. The first section offers a comprehensive view of Arato's scholarship from his early work on critical theory and Western Marxism to his current research on constitution-making and its application. The second section shifts its focus from the previous, comprehensive approach, to a much more specific one: Arato´s widespread influence on the study of civil society in democratization processes in Latin America. The third section includes a previously unpublished work, 'A conceptual history of dictatorship (and its rivals, )' one of the few systematic interrogations on the meaning of a political form of fundamental relevance in the contemporary world.

Critical Theory and Democracy will be of interest to critical and social theorists, and all Arato scholars.

Part I

From critical theory to constitution making

The contemporary relevance of Arato's democratic theory

1 Politics and anti-politics

Dick Howard

Recalling my first meeting with Andrew Arato more than forty years ago, I am struck by a continuity in our concerns in spite of the different subjects we have studied. We met in 1970, at a time when the New Left knew that it had to be more than a counter-cultural movement, and that it could not simply mobilize the resentment of those who might be drafted into the vain and vainglorious anti-communist crusade in Vietnam. “From Resistance to Revolution” was the vague slogan of those who began to call themselves “comrades” as they abandoned what they called their bourgeois liberalism for one or another variant of Marxism (a few Stalinists, more Trotskyists, still more Maoists and of course the Castrist-Guevarist). For all their differences, these groups shared an orthodoxy built around the legacy of Lenin. It was in this context that Karl Klare and I decided to co-edit a volume called The Unknown Dimension: European Marxism Since Lenin.¹ Our goal was to show that critical political thought had not ceased after 1917; a radical tradition that was critical, curious and above all anti-dogmatic had continued. We thought that this hidden tradition could help the New Left to understand what was truly “new” about it, how its goals related to those of the classical “left” and how it belonged in fact to a deeper tradition of critical thought. Karl and I asked Andrew Arato to write the chapter on Lukács, who stood at the origins of what Merleau-Ponty, looking for the roots of critical political thought, had called “Western Marxism.”²

Our collaboration continued in the journal Telos, whose editorial board Andrew joined with issue nine, in the fall of 1971. That journal was a kind of privileged place in which a few young multi-lingual American leftists had the luxury of, so to speak, getting our education in public thanks to the extraordinary dedication of the journal's editor, Paul Piccone. Looking back through its early issues, Telos and its young editors passed from leftist versions of Husserlian phenomenology mixed with a dose of Gramsci to Lukács and Korsch, and then onward, beyond the then-popular Herbert Marcuse to the various co-stars of the Frankfurt School. No orthodoxy could hold back the editors’ curiosity or prevent their forward movement. There was a brief pause – but only for a moment – when editors hesitated to publish the openly anti-Marxist work of Claude Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis.³ Could we be leftists while criticizing Marxism?

By 1975, after the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam and the accompanying decline of the anti-war movement, the goal of remaining on the left became unfortunately a rather academic matter. A kind of intellectual orthodoxy crept into the pages of Telos – or so it appeared to me at the time. The journal became a kind of academic project with a good conscience. What other options existed? No one really knew, until the emergence of Solidarnosc in 1980, whose importance was made clear by the brilliant editorial work of Andrew Arato, and by his own interpretative essays. The heady days of the old political adventure returned; Telos did not join the liberal chorus of anti-communism but sought to give voice to the new movement that was emerging. The twin themes of democracy and civil society became leitmotifs of the journal's quest for something like an “unknown dimension” of left-wing political thought and action. In spite of the well-earned label of “European intellectuals,” some of us began to see that these themes could be found also in American history, a theme that we had neglected in the early years. But others in the circle around Paul Piccone had other ideas; Telos was increasingly drawn toward Carl Schmitt and turned, so to speak, from red to brown. Andrew could not hold back the tide; he left, as did others and I.

For my part, forty years later, the search for an “unknown dimension” that can fructify radical political reflection and prevent its dogmatic stagnation, remains a lodestar. Whether it can fulfill the old Marxist – and more specifically Lukácsian – goal of uniting theory and praxis is another question, and probably not the right one. The analysis which follows leaves behind the old vocabulary but does not abandon the goals that I have shared with Andrew and others over these four decades.

1 Defining the political

What is politics? What is the goal that defines it? The classical answer since Plato is justice; the modern definition borrowed from Machiavelli is power. Today, the fact that we use the word in a variety of disparate contexts reflects a flattening of the concept. We speak of office politics, family or gender politics, racial or class politics, domestic or foreign politics. We may express our disdain for someone by saying that he is just “playing politics.” At the university, professors are sometimes accused of trying to advance their careers through “academic politics.” The term politics seems to act like a sponge, soaking up adjectives that qualify it while having no substance of its own; what was the sun around which social life turned has become the moon that at best reflects it.

In its contemporary uses, politics cannot be separated from forms of power; but it cannot simply be reduced to these. Power is a means which cannot define the end for which it is used. Yet political power is not the same thing as material force, which is imposed on others without their consent. Although material force may be used, it will bring diminishing returns as those subjected to it resist (actively or passively). Successful political power must have legitimacy in the eyes of those subject to it. Such legitimate power generates authority to which members of a society implicitly or explicitly consent. They do not feel that they are obeying someone else's wishes but are carrying out their own freely chosen projects, exercising their own will to achieve ends that they have rationally chosen. The source of the legitimacy of power will differ in different societies: the kinds of authority on which it depends may be secular or sacred, rational or customary, institutional or charismatic. Its basis may be strength, knowledge or wealth, each of which will in turn be defined according to historical conditions. Each of these sources of legitimate power and authority is an example of what I am calling the political. The members of any society that is not governed by brute force share a basic, minimal, set of values that provide meaning to all the aspects of their lives, not only to those that concern government.⁴ This shared meaning is defined by the political, which concerns not only social institutions but also the character of the men and women in the given society.

This general definition of the political provides a framework for the analysis of concrete political choices. The journalists’ “first draft of history” describes the particular facts; but to evaluate them, it is necessary to fit them into a more general framework. That is why anyone who is interested in politics must be concerned with political theory. Without the help of some theory, the student of politics is lost, in the thicket of discrete events; the parts don't fit together into a whole. However, just as the word “politics” seems to function like a sponge that can absorb multiple, even contrary, meanings, the same is true of theory. Its claims are universal; they eliminate factors that are due to accident, subjective bias or contingent events. The social sciences offer many such theories, some at a macro-, others at a micro-level. But then, seemingly out of nowhere, history seems to take a new turn: Solidarnosc emerges, the Berlin Wall falls, the Arab Spring spreads rapidly. Theory's ability to put into perspective particular choices has clay feet. Social theory cannot explain the political. The universality of its claims blinds it.

Part of the problem is that social science looks at its object from outside of it, as if it were using a telescope or a microscope to study something that remains constant. It sees differences among individuals and groups, some natural, others cultural. Which ones count? The scientist describes differences of economic wealth, social status or political power; he then charts ethnicity, gender, religion or levels of education; finally, he looks for a correlation among them. But correlation is not causation. What is missing is the standpoint of the participants, for it is they who give meaning to the differences described. The participants determine which factors lead a person to complain about the injustice of her lot, and why she thinks that others will support her grievance. That is why some social differences are accepted even though they give advantages to one group or person over others. This meaning-giving aspect of social relations is an expression of the political. It defines legitimate power; and in so doing, it draws the line between the licit and the illicit, the just and the unjust, the known and the unknown. It establishes a shared background of values and meaning that leads the participants to treat certain differences as salient whereas others are considered normal.

This interpretation of the nature and role of the political owes more to continental thought than to the reigning Anglo-American approach. Rather than focus on the facts that are the case, that theoretical orientation is concerned to establish what ought to be the case. Since the publication of John Rawls’ Theory of Justice (1971), this kind of normative theory has become dominant. In its original version, normative theory attempted at once to legitimate liberal political values while criticizing those practices that were inconsistent with them, most particularly social arrangements that distorted the possibility of realizing the values of the liberal creed. In the intervening decades, the Rawlsian version of normative theory has been criticized in particular for its assumption that free, rational individuals exist before they come together rationally to form a community. That appears to put the part before the whole. It would seem politically more accurate to examine first the bonds that tie together the community, since there are no individuals who do not belong to some sort of community. Whether one agrees with this general criticism or not, both sides share the goal of explaining the rational reasons that lead men and women to consider their social relations as legitimate.⁵

Normative theory makes no moral assumptions about the nature of the good; rather, it sets out to determine what duties and rights a person ought to agree to in a society that all its members would agree is just, whatever their effect on their own particular lives. In this way, normative theory is a modern reformulation of the social contract theories that try to show how and why men leave their natural, pre-political conditions to form political society. It asks what natural rights can be legitimately surrendered to the political state, and what that state owes (or not) to the members who accept the bargain. What freedoms are given up to the state; and what obligations does it have toward its members? Citizens of a political society must be equal to one another (at least as concerns their political rights); but they must also retain at least some of their natural liberty (which can lead to differences among them). What makes the normative theory effective is that its account of the relation between equality and liberty is political in a limited but important sense insofar as it is concerned only with the public activity of the members of society – not with their private moral beliefs – while at the same time its normative force binds the individual with a subjective force similar to the way a moral imperative affects a private person. In this way, normative theory claims to explain the existence of a political unity that leaves room for moral diversity, permitting believers in different gods, followers of different cults, agnostics and unbelievers to live together in public harmony in spite of their private differences.

2 The political and the moral

The attractiveness of normative political theory lies in its attempt to take into account the perspective of the actors in society. This permits it to study the way in which political action becomes the basis of legitimate power rather than the exercise of brute force. Although it claims to be indifferent to the personal moral values of the members of society, normative theory is ultimately a moral rather than a political theory. In the most simple terms, the difference between moral and political claims is that moral relations concern only two participants whereas political action takes place among three (or more) actors, one of whom is affected only indirectly by the behavior of the other two who must, however, take into account his perspective in making their choices. This fundamental distinction needs to be carefully explained.

Relations between two persons are direct and immediate; they are governed by a code of morality. In a dyadic relation, the participants can look one another in the eye; they can directly challenge the claims of the other both as to their veracity and to the sincerity with which the speaker emits the claim. The moral actor is never alone; but he is never in mixed company. When he asks what ought to be done in a given situation, the question is directed to himself, to his self as if it were another, the representative of moral humanity. If I resolve to act in a moral manner, it is because I have to continue to live with myself, and I don't want to have to spend my time with an amoral opportunist or an immoral evildoer. I look at my actions through the eyes of an other who is, however, identical with me. This is the other with whom, in the normative theory, all individuals as identical participants agree to participate in a contract that defines the political nature of their society. This other is at once like me and yet – at least in principle – different from me. If he were me, there would be no reason to inquire about his judgment of my behavior. But if he were completely other, there would be no reason for me to worry about his opinion, which wouldn't matter to me. What this second party through whose eyes I look at my own actions represents is my better self, the one whom I should become in order to truly be myself, an other who is sufficiently similar to me that I want to act together with him. In principle, there is no reason why I cannot achieve this goal, becoming what I am by joining with him in order to become a fully human self. In this sense, morality has a political dimension because it affects individual character; but it cannot be identified with the political, which concerns participants whose difference from one another is more important than their shared morality.

Relations among three (or more) persons depend always on the mediation of a third party whose relation to the other two can never be made fixed or permanent because any of the participants can in principle take the role of the Third. The Third can be another person, a group of people, or even an institution. It stands outside of the relation that the other two establish to one another; their accord was based on moral considerations and is in principle the private, subjective relation of two individuals. The Third threatens the unity of purpose sought by the dyad because it sees the public, objective character of their relation denying its claim to moral justification. As a result, one of the members of the dyad, feeling the critical gaze of the Third, may try to draw it into complicity with their couple; but the danger is that the previous partner will resent the lost immediacy of the dyad, looking jealously at the attempts by its former partner to widen their entente. This jealous former partner may become a Third in whose eyes the new partners have acquired an intimacy that seems to exclude his/her participation. At this point, the emerging new dyad may react by attempting to eliminate the former partner, who has become a Third. But in taking this action, the newly formed dyad violates its own moral structure, which was based on the immediacy of mutual recognition; it treats the new Third as foreign, other and inassimilable. The new Third, in turn, denounces as a private conspiracy what the new dyad conceived of as a moral protest against the refusal of the Third to respect its rights. The dyad replies to the accusation by denouncing the Third for “politicizing” their relation for its own benefit. In short, full political unity as moral fusion can never be achieved; but the quest for moral unity constantly renews the dynamic of political relations. While the political is not distinct from morality, it cannot be identified with morality, which is based on dyadic relations.

The distinction between morality and politics can be made more concrete by showing how and why there is always a temptation to replace the political by theories of morality. Moral values are justified by claims to universal validity; what is good for you is good for me and for all others as individuals. There may be difficulties in determining how to apply moral principles in specific situations; but the principle of universalizability is unchanging. For its part, the political deals with ...