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PART 1
Democracy and Critique
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CHAPTER 1
An Awareness of Politics
As a tradition, Anglo-American analytical political philosophy, informed by liberalism, is deeply embarrassed by power and tends to ignore it. As a tradition, continental political thought and discourse, to the contrary, sees power as pervading and distorting the networks of human interaction, but offers no clear ways of eliminating the unfortunate by-product of oppressive and invasive human relationships. Both cannot deal with power as a normal, indeed pivotal, political phenomenon and as a potential resource to be harnessed to the attainment of human and social ends.
—Michael Freeden
Democracy seems to have a simple enough meaning. It means “rule by the people.” Or it means “rule by the many,” to distinguish it from monarchy (rule by a single person), aristocracy (rule by the best), or anarchy (the absence of rule). It is common enough to note that the word “democracy” derives from the Greek words “demos” (the people) and “kratos” (power). But, as Philip Pettit observes, “Each of these words is ambiguous in an interesting way.”1 Are the people a unified community or a more pluralistic and divided populace? Should power be understood as equivalent to rule, as control, or as a synonym for domination? Is the sense of power implied by kratos distinct from that implied by the archē referred to in monarchy and anarchy? The latter word refers us to questions about the sources of authority and legitimacy that underlay systems of rule. Is the idea of rule anathema to democracy, or is democracy a distinctive way of sharing in rule? Or perhaps the power of democracy is better understood as the capacity to act?2 If so, democracy seems to speak more to the capacity of a public to act collectively and to bring about change. So perhaps it would be better to define democracy as “the power of the people.”3
The idea of democracy as the power of the people is the source of the deep suspicion this concept has often engendered. As C. B. Macpherson has observed, for much of the history of Western political thought, from Plato and Aristotle through to the early nineteenth century, democracy was not well thought of at all. The original meaning of democracy was “rule by the common people, the plebeians. It was very much a class affair: it meant the sway of the lowest and largest class. That is why it was feared and rejected by men of learning, men of substance, men who valued civilized ways of life.”4 Jacques Rancière has sought to redeem the traditionally negative associations whereby democracy was used as a term of abuse: “Democracy meant the power of the people with nothing, the speech of those who should not be speaking, those who were not really speaking beings.” The reference to the original Greek meaning of the word “demos” allows Rancière to assert, “Properly it designates those who are outside the count, those who can assert no particular title over common affairs.”5 Rancière revives and reaffirms the rebellious spirit apparently enshrined in the original meaning of “democracy.”
Rancière’s reference to the original meaning of the word “demos” is just one example of the etymological gesture that characterizes a great deal of theorizing about democracy. It reveals a tendency to think of modern democracy as a variant of a political form invented by the ancient Greeks and, more specifically, a form that has its origins in Athens of the fifth century B.C.. The appeal to the Athenian origins of democracy can be made to legitimate contemporary regimes or just as often to anchor a critical perspective on the inauthentic, fallen qualities of modern democracy. Discussions of democracy are therefore framed by Hellenocentrism, as Enrique Dussel calls it, referring to the habit of rooting all discussions of apparently universal philosophical concepts back to authoritative readings of Greek philosophy and tragedy and of Roman political thought. Following this habit of mind, the particularities of modern Western experience are taken to constitute universality itself, and in the process are sundered from their constitutive relationships with non-European cultures and contexts.6
The prevalence of the etymological gesture in radical political thought is often influenced by a form of analysis derived from the philosophical writings of Martin Heidegger. Such analysis tracks the historical variations of the meanings of words and ideas in order to recall to our attention aspects of these meanings that have been covered over or forgotten. The concept of the political is quite central to this tradition of analysis. For Heidegger himself, a recovery of the meaning of the concept of the political allows us to see how the history of translation is a succession of betrayals. “We think the ‘political’ as Romans, i.e., imperially,” he asserts. And this way of thinking has lost touch, so Heidegger argues, with the distinctive experience of Truth upon which a more authentically original Greek meaning depends. As a consequence of our forgetting this experience, we are condemned to mistake the essence of the Greek meaning of the political: “our usual basic ideas, i.e., Roman, Christian, modern ones, miserably fail to grasp the primordial essence of ancient Greece.”7
The Heideggerian maneuver of recalling the lost meanings of foundational concepts is caught up in a politically loaded assertion of an essential affinity between the Greek origins of philosophy and a particular claim of German exceptionalism.8 We would do well to recall that this is not the only way of seeking to historically refine the meaning of concepts. Hannah Arendt’s political theory, developed in conversation with the work of Heidegger, among others, also depends on an account of the Greek and Roman genealogy of modern political concepts such as freedom, justice, power, responsibility, and virtue. Arendt did not think that politics could be reduced to a single model of truth, to a proper grasp of ontology, or to the authority of philosophical reasoning. Her ambition was “to discover the real origins of traditional concepts in order to distil from them anew their original spirit.”9 On the face of it, this sounds much the same as Heidegger’s attitude. But Arendt uses concepts to attend to the variations in the “underlying phenomenal reality” of political life. Rather than thinking of Greek origins having been betrayed in translation by Romans and others, Arendt sees the movements of translation as bearing the traces of specific forms of political experience.10 Rather than bemoaning the eclipse of an authentically Greek sense of political life as a realm of unhindered free association between equals, Arendt reminds us that the wider conditions of systematic exploitation, inequality, and slavery on which such a vision depended no longer frame the “elementary experiences” of modern political life: “It is precisely the absence of rule in the public realm that characterizes the specific cruelty of Greek history.”11
Heidegger and Arendt can stand for different ways of appreciating the historicity of political concepts.12 In one approach, translation is always seen as a process of diminution, forgetting, or neglect. This view bestows a certain degree of authority on those able to lay claim to the privileged interpretation of proper meanings. In the other approach, translation is a movement across distinct, particular, but still recognizably political fields of experience. It is the latter approach that informs my own argument in this book.
One reason to be wary of the etymological gesture in political theorizing is that, on closer examination, Athenian democracy turns out to have been not quite so originally Greek as is often supposed. Athenian democracy was a grafting together of traveling practices and translated values rather than an original creation.13 What is more, the idea that modern democracy is the realization or degradation of something invented by the ancient Greeks is itself a decidedly modern invention.14 An Athenian lineage for modern forms of liberal democracy is largely a fabrication of nineteenth-century political thought.15 As the history of this construct shows, the significance of the concept of democracy is always an effect of translations.16 It might be best to think of democracy as an inherently divided concept with no proper meaning. Which is not quite the same thing as saying that democracy can have any old meaning one might like it to have, as we will see in chapter 2.
The reference to classical traditions also characterizes a great deal of the twentieth-century French thought that has done so much to shape theoretical innovations in the humanities and social sciences.17 Jean-Pierre Vernant, the most authoritative reference point in this intellectual lineage, rejected the idea that Greek thought should serve as an originating reference point for modern thought. He focused instead on locating Greek thought in the context of the societies from which it arose.18 Vernant argues that the meaning of democracy for the Greeks pivoted around the problem of neutralizing arbitrary exercises of force through kratos.19 For Vernant, there are two elements of kratos, referring both to legitimate authority and to violence or confrontation. Neither is more authentic than the other. Rather, according to Vernant, the recurring theme of Greek thought is the problem of how these different aspects of power are related.
In a similar spirit, the historian Paul Veyne has argued that there are two schemas in both Greek and Roman political thought, one more idealistic than the other.20 One of these turns on the issue of rule and on relations between governors and the governed. The other examines the activist virtues that are required to constitute the polity. Veyne suggests that this latter “militant ideal” did not necessarily have much to do with the real politics of the ancient Greeks, except insofar as critics and reformers invoked it as an “exacting ideal.” The distinction Veyne draws rather exactly captures the pattern of interpretation through which contemporary invocations of the Greek and Roman origins of democratic thought often work: appeal is made to exacting ideals in times of trouble in order to call into question existing configurations of rule and authority. It is here, perhaps, that we should locate the significance of any putatively classical inheritance for democratic theory. The significance lies not so much as a source of original, proper meanings to be recalled but in providing one model among others for the persistent problem of thinking relationally about the powers mobilized by democratic politics.
We can see, then, that different understandings of meaning are at the very heart of arguments about the meaning of democracy. I will return to these issues of meaning more directly in chapter 2. My more immediate concern in this chapter is with how key concepts are used in discussions of a critical theory of democracy. This includes a consideration of how to understand the relationship between democracy and power that I just alluded to: whether power is to be understood as something to be resisted from below, as a medium of agonistic collective self-assertion, or as a medium for the exercise of rule. The question of how to think about the relationship between democracy and power is central to the problem of political evil discussed in the introduction. In this chapter I address this question by considering the ways in which intuitions of human vulnerability are presented in anarchist and liberal political thought. I use this discussion to present a preliminary account of democracy as a mode of exercising power within frameworks of authorization and accountability, rather than as an alternative to rule. The chapter closes by considering the implications of this account of democracy for our picture of the tasks of critical theory.
The Critique of Power
Before proceeding further, I want to consider in more detail the difference between two distinct understandings of power that we have already seen to be present in disputed appeals to the authority of Western philosophical tradition. Interpretations of the meaning of democracy often divide between those that place an emphasis on accountability, legitimacy, and representation in systems of rule on the one hand and those that emphasize autonomous action and the self-institution of the people on the other. The difference between these two emphases is related to different ways of appealing to the authority of Greek or Roman sources. The appeal to ancient origins to authorize an understanding of democracy as a form of popular government is strongly associated with the Roman translation of Athenian politics.21 Conflict, in this strand of thought, is a matter of disputes between equals, and the key issue is the consent of free persons to collective rule and government. But it is sometimes claimed that this understanding obscures a more original, more authentic meaning of democracy as “the forceful entry into the realm of politics of those who are deprived of political status.”22 In this latter understanding, kratos is about the exercise of power against an antagonist, and it informs a view of democracy as always involving claims to power. The idea of democracy as a mode of making insurrectionary claims against domination is revived, for example, in Rancière’s account of democracy as an essentially anarchic form best expressed in the punctual suspension of existing orders.23
Democratic theory often revolves around categorical formulations that contrast imperatives of rule and order with those of dissent and struggle. Some thinkers present democracy as the power of a unified community of citizens, while others see democracy as the claim or even conquest of power by lower orders. Some thinkers view democracy as involving the consent of free persons to collective rule, while others see rule as a form of subjugation that negates any meaningful sense of autonomy. And a number of political thinkers seek to reconcile both sides of these contrasts, presenting democracy as a form in which the experience of inhabiting the abysses and aporias, impasses and paradoxes of these competing imperatives is actively embraced and cultivated. Sometimes, just to add another layer of paradox, democracy is further defined in terms of the (im)possible institutionalization of this sort of unsettling experience. What all these different views share is the idea that democracy is more than a set of procedures for selecting rulers, making decisions, or holding government to account. It is also, and perhaps most fundamentally, a particular configuration of cultural dispositions, sometimes modeled on complex theories of subjectivity, sometimes on sophisticated philosophies of aesthetics, sometimes on refined moralities of virtue.
I want to emphasize how appeals to ancient derivations of the meaning of democracy are one way in which different visions of power are elaborated. Debates in political theory often revolve around a contrast between deliberative theories and agonistic theories of democracy and on various efforts to reconcile differences between them. In important respects, the two types of theory are associated with two broad ways of thinking about power identified by Martin Saar: “On the one hand, there is a concept of power as domination, whereas, on the other hand, there is a concept of power as constitution. The former is concerned with realisation and subjugation of wills, whereas the latter with the unleashing and channelling of multifarious forces.”24 These two ways of thinking are variations on the distinctions unearthed by Vernant and Veyne. In one view, power is understood as something wielded by some people over others, following from an idea of power as the capacity to exercise one’s will. It is associated with an action-theoretic line of thinking, going as far back as Thomas Hobbes, on to Max Weber, and then to the Frankfurt School. In the other view, often traced back to Baruch Spinoza, power is understood as a constitutive feature of all social life. In this view, power is understood as a potential, a force that is not held or possessed or wielded at all. It is, rather, an attribute of relations and collectives.
The two views of power that Saar identifies capture a fundamental division in how to imagine the task of critique in social theory.25 In the first view, power is thought of as repressive and restrictive or as subjugating, and therefore opposed to freedom. The task of critique, in turn, is to expose domination by identifying restrictions of agency and autonomy, seen as illegitimate impositions of the will of some over the will of others. The second view, which sees power as a constitutive dimension of social relations, involves what Saar calls a “flattening of the concept of power,” one that effectively “changes the conceptual criteria available to us for the purposes of social critique.”26 In a strong Spinozan interpretation, critical assessment affirms the maximization of whatever increases and assists the body’s power of acting and the mind’s power of thinking and the minimization of whatever diminishes or hinders those same powers.27 Radical interpretations of Spinoza’s thought often suppose that this type of assessment must necessarily eschew first-person registers of agency. They thereby inadvertently elevate the rationalism central to Spinoza’s own philosophy into a depersonalized, third-person register that presents evaluations of good or bad combinations as available only to those able to occupy a position outside of the situations where such evaluations might actually matter to participants.
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