Democratic Community

Nomos XXXV

John W. Chapman, Ian Shapiro

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1995
• ISBN:
  9780814772140
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Essays in Politics & International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A state-of-the-art meditation on relations, theoretical and practical, among a familiar triad of themes: comunitarianism, liberalism, and democracy.
-- American Political Science Review

A collection of distinguished contributors, from a wide range of disciplines, examine the implications of the resurgence of interest in community. The chapters in Democratic Community consider the fundamental issues that divide liberals and communitarians, as well as the structure of communities, the roles of freedom and democratic institutions in sustaining one another, the place of a democratic civil society in a democratic polity, and the contributions of feminist thinking.

This thirty-fifth volume in the American Society of Political and Legal Philosophy series is devoted, as is each volume in the series, to a single topic-- in this case, the implications for human nature and democratic theory of the resurgence of interest in community. Democratic Community deals not only with fundamental issues that divide liberals and communitarians, but is also concerned with the structure of communities, the roles of freedom and democratic institutions in sustaining one another, the place of a democratic civil society in a democratic polity, and the contributions of feminist thinking to the great debate. The collection of distinguished contributors, from a wide range of disciplines, includes: Richard J. Arneson (University of California, San Diego), Jean Baechler (University of Paris, Sorbonne), Christopher J. Berry (University of Glasgow), Robert A. Dahl (Yale University), Martin P. Golding (Duke University), Carol C. Gould (Stevens Institute of Technology), Amy Gutmann (Princeton University), Jane Mansbridge (Northwestern University), Kenneth Minogue (London School of Economics), Robert C. Post (University of California, Berkeley), David A. J. Richards (New York University), Gerald N. Rosenberg (University of Chicago), Bruce K. Rutherford (Yale University), Alan Ryan (Princeton University), and Carmen Sirianni (Brandeis University).

PART I
LIBERALISM AND COMMUNITARIANISM

1
INDIVIDUAL, GROUP, AND DEMOCRACY

JEAN BAECHLER

TRANSLATED BY SUZANNE STEWART

The three terms in the title may be considered the very essence of modernity and of the problems that face modern man. Since at least the 17th century, the question of “good political regime” has been raised in Europe. To the extent that experiences have accumulated, that reflections have deepened, and that institutions have become more clearly defined, this question has received an increasingly democratic answer. A first set of problems is given by the difficulty one encounters when trying to lend an unambiguous definition to democracy. A second set of problems arises in connection with the actor and the beneficiary of a good regime. The solution appears straightforward: the individual. But what is an individual? Furthermore, it is obvious that human societies are not simply made up of individuals, but also of groups, a fact that generates a third set of problems: What are groups? And to complicate matters even further, each of the terms evokes the other two and is related to them in problematic ways. If one views the problem from the point of view of the “individual,” one will inevitably raise the question, on the one hand, of the individual’s relations to groups and, on the other hand, of his or her position toward democracy. To a great extent, the starting point for Auguste Comte’s reflections was precisely the danger that democratic individualism poses for groups, as well as the consequent risks of dissolution and anomie. If one focuses on groups, one cannot escape questions about the place that individuals occupy in these groups, nor questions about the role that democracy plays in a group. The entire “socialist” current may be considered a multiform development of these speculations. If, finally, one views the question from the standpoint of democracy, one inevitably comes up against its relations to the groups that make up society, and to the individuals that make up groups. The “anarchist” positions, which have not ceased to flourish since at least the 19th century, seem to start off from this point. The debates about “self-management” in Europe during the fifties and sixties are an expression of this trend, as also, it seems, are the current arguments about “democratic community” in the United States.

The problems are real. It would be pretentious to want to solve them in a trice. It is rather possible to delineate them more precisely, in a such way as to allow for a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate solutions. One possible entry into such an endeavor is a definition of the very terms of the problems and of the relations between them, a definition that should be as rigorous as possible. It is only after this intellectually ascetic inquiry that one may draw conclusions regarding the place of groups in democracy and of democracy within groups.

I. THE INDIVIDUAL, THE GROUP, DEMOCRACY: DEFINITIONS

Nothing is more indispensable than a definition of the concepts one employs, and few endeavors are as dangerous, because a definition does not hold except as a particular element within the general body of a theory. One thus runs the risk of proposing definitions to one’s interlocutors who adhere to different theories. One must, nevertheless, take this risk, by progressing from what is more certain to what is less.

1. The Individual

Nothing seems less problematic than the individual: The individual is you and I, everyone knows that. Without doubt, you and I are individuals, and yet the term is as devoid of meaning as if we referred to ourselves as “man” or “living being.” A butterfly, too, is an individual, as is an ant, a mountain, a galaxy, or all that exists. All beings are individuals, and vice versa: The nominalist position is correct and seems unassailable. But let us look at it more closely. Let us take a clearly identifiable individual, one whom we will name Pierre. This singular Pierre who exists incontestably in his irreducible singularity, is in fact the focal point of an infinity of determinations, whose singular status is at least problematic. Pierre is a man, in the sense that he is neither a lion nor a dolphin, and in the sense that he is not a woman. He may further be defined as a mammal, a vertebrate, an animal, a living being. In other words, according to the Naturalist, Pierre is the representative of a specific species among the kingdom of the living. By virtue of this fact, his individuality is destabilized and is almost dissolved in its specificity. Pierre may also become ill. Insofar as he is ill, and from the point of view of the doctor, his individuality tends to dissolve itself in the symptomology of his illness: He will be seen as tuberculous or cancerous. Pierre may also love and be loved, and may form a couple together with another individual. His individuality increases and becomes more defined because it is he personally who is loved. Yet this individuality is not as broad as within a Christian or a Buddhist perspective where the individual as person is in charge of his or her salvation or deliverance, and it does not matter what the conception of the person may be, a reflection of his or her creator or a precarious and insignificant agregate.

One need not add further examples because a first conclusion can already be drawn. The human individual is the geometric locus of an indefinite number of determinations, which each in turn may be defined along a scale that moves from the greatest generality to the greatest particularity. Let us clarify such a conclusion by the introduction of a more technical vocabulary. By “order of activities” or more simply put, by “order,” I designate a domain of human activities that is delineated by appropriate goals and the appropriate means for attaining these goals. One may distinguish between orders that are political, religious, economic, pedagogical, of leisure, technical, ethical, psychological, and so forth. Viewed from within each order, the individual is at first the final actor of the activity of which he or she takes charge. Within the political order, the individual is a citizen; within the economic, an economic agent; a child to be educated in the pedagogic order, and so forth. This is, of course, a very simplified description. Economic agents may be workers of varying degrees of skill—they may be peasants, capitalists, or entrepreneurs. Such details are not, however, crucial to our argument.

The concept of the individual as geometric locus of determinations by different orders must itself be qualified by two important points. The first concerns the determinations themselves. Each determination is so arranged as to include a complete scale that ranges from the singular to the general. Let us assume Pierre to be religious. His religiosity—which we will assume to be both authentic and genuine—will necessarily involve metaphysical concerns, concerns that lend the religious order its specificity; it will involve a particular interpretation of this concern, be it Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, or Muslim; it will involve a religious practice that is influenced by historical time, by the group to which one belongs, by the country, by intellectual background; it will involve a personal experience of such a practice. We have not mentioned but a few elements of this range, and one could easily come up with more. The points between the two poles of the singular and the general have an objective reality that has access to consciousness, be it to that of the actors themselves, to exterior observers, or to both.

The second qualification concerns the ways in which actors deal with the determinations that affect them. A further range or scale may be sketched between two extremes. At one extreme one would find the individual who has deliberately become conscious of the determinations and their singular, particular, and general manifestations, and who cultivates them all with the most scrupulous respect for their multiple definition. In relation to such an ideal—impossible as are all ideals—individuals would be fully and simultaneously citizens/economic agents/believers/ethical subjects as representative of a civilization/members of a collectivity/themselves. At the other extreme, one would find individuals who are engulfed by one exclusive determination, captives of their singularity and lived by an idiosyncratic psychological formation. An anomalous cohort of drug-addicts, marginals, religious fanatics, virtual or real tyrants, misers and coveters, and so forth pass by. Between these two extremes, one would encounter all those human types that make up average and middling humanity.

To make the argument complete, one must introduce one last source of differentiation. Individuals tend to be formed closer to the pole of the ideal person or alternatively to that of unidimensionality, depending on an infinite number of factors, such as those of culture, historical time, political regime, social position, representation, or educational background. One should approach the problem of modern individualism from within such a perspective, both as a problem in its own right and in comparison to other cultures, that is, cultures that have defended positions often very different from our own.

2. Groups

An initial definition of groups may begin as that of the union of at least two individuals. This definition is insufficient because two individuals who meet in the street and exchange a few words do not make up a group, and even less does a gathering of individuals who attend a neighborhood or village market. One must specify that the union of at least two individuals is motivated and justified by the intention of attaining together one or more agreed-upon objectives. A group is defined as an organized and instituted set of individuals who are united in order to attain a common goal.

This simple and little contestable definition requires additional refinement. The first concerns goals. We return to our “orders” and may now lend them greater substance. An order is a domain of human activities defined by the ends pursued. The economic order has as its goal the satisfaction of human needs and desires, while bearing in mind the scarcity of resources. The religious order has as its end the bliss that would fulfill the deficit of being that affects all beings to the degree that they are not at one with the Being. The political order has as its end peace and justice, peace through justice. I am aware of the audacity and the incongruity of making such large statements without accompanying them with decisive supportive arguments. Perhaps my excuse is that not everything can be said, whereas what has been said must suffice for present purposes. In effect, one will easily agree with my conclusion, namely that groups are defined by the ends they pursue. More specifically, a group is the means to achieving determined ends, which implies that one finds economic groups (e.g., enterprises, workshops, stores), religious groups, (e.g., churches, sects, monasteries, fraternities), scientific groups (e.g., laboratories, universities, seminaries, journals), and so forth. Let us look more closely at political groups, because we will later return to our present comments about them.

The political group par excellence may be called a polity. The polity is a group where together its members try not to suppress the conflicts that arise inevitably among them, but to prevent these conflicts from degenerating into violence. This is accomplished by mechanisms that permit the allocation to each member of what is owed to him or her, that permit the definition of rules of the game, the punishment of those who break the rules, the regulation of litigations. In a word, the polity is a group of attempted peace-making through the imposition of justice in its various meanings. Until now, individuals, who at any moment represent the species, have never been united into one single polity, and therefore there are always at least two polities. By definition, therefore, they do not make up one single group of peace-making through justice, so two or X number of polities define a system of action where conflicts may always degenerate into violence and into war. To sum up, a polity is internally a group of attempted peace-making and externally a group of potential war.

The plurality of polities already exhibit a second characteristic that may be applied to groups in general. They are in the plural. This plural structure flows from all our preceding remarks, along two radically different axes. On the one hand, each order has its group or groups. Biology and pedagogy have the family, of which there are a number of possible types, as the proper group through which to pursue their goals. The economic order has its own, as do the religious, the political, the one of leisure, and all other orders. The plurality of ends and the diversity of means required to meet these ends ensure that, even in minuscule societies like the bands of the Pygmies or those of the Eskimoes, the association can never be reduced to one single group. The second axis along which groups multiply is that of the orders taken one by one. Even in societies of reduced size, it is rare that the number of groups within one order is reduced to uniqueness. Even the polity, whose uniquity would seem to result from its very definition, becomes more or less differentiated depending on whether its structure is more or less centralized or federal. Even within a centralized polity such as the ancient Greek city, political sub-groups do form, such as demes, tribes, or phratries. The irreducible plurality of groups raises the problem of their competition and their coexistence. A third and last specification concerns the relations between groups and individuals. Groups are not amorphous collections of an arbitrary set of individuals, they are units of collective action. Groups are formed by individuals to attain together specific ends. They must assign to themselves these ends because they are human beings defined by their belonging to a particular species, and they must unite because these ends cannot be attained unless they join together. This common-sense proposition leads to conclusions that are not indifferent, even if they are banal. Individuals should only enter into groups to contribute to the pursuit of ends that justify the existence of these groups. From this point of view, the individual should lend himself to the group, but not dissolve there. But, on the other hand, adherence to a group is affected in its intensity by the personality of the individual. My point is that if, in principle, a group should never be anything for the individual but a society with limited responsibilities, it may always become a community where the individual dissolves her- or himself to the point of losing individuality. In the opposite direction, an individual may live in a group and forget the ends that justify its existence, and pursue there personal goals that bear no relation to the collective goals.

It is easy to establish a connection with the definition of the individual proposed in the preceding section. The accomplished person, the one who perfectly embodies the concept of the individual conformed to the nature of things, participates in all the groups necessary for the pursuit of ends that he or she has assigned to him- or herself. The individual participates in these groups and respects the proper finality of each group, but participates in them without dissolving into them. At the other extreme, one encounters those atrophied images of individuals who have either dissolved themselves to the point of indistinction within one exclusive group, or of individuals who avail themselves of groups for their own personal ends, or of individuals incapable of entering into a group at all and confined within their individuality, without being able to pursue any end whatsoever.

3. Democracy

It is not easy to arrive at a plausible and acceptable definition of democracy in a few words. Let us, nevertheless, give it a try. The best point of departure is probably the political order. We have defined it as an order of activity centred on the goals of peace and justice. To lend such a definition greater specificity, one must successively introduce human freedom, in the sense of a non-programmed species who must invent its humanity; the plurality of possible realizations of this freedom, and the conflicts that necessarily follow; and human sociality that entails that individuals and groups, who will not fail to oppose conflicts, are condemned to live together. In a word, a free, conflictual, and social human species must confront the concrete problem of making individuals and groups live together without killing each other. The general solution may be found in the definition of polities, where there exist different procedures that allow for the peaceful resolution of conflicts through the application of justice. One may agree to call “political regime” the ensemble of institutions that define and organize these procedures.

At least two regimes are possible, one that is able to put into place and make function those procedures that lead to peace and justice, and another that fails. Furthermore, there ...