Foundations of American Democracy

3 Key excerpts on "Foundations of American Democracy"

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  eBook - ePub

  Democracy and Difference

  Contesting the Boundaries of the Political

  • Seyla Benhabib(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  HE LEADING political philosophical question of the eighties—Does democracy have foundations?—may not be the leading political philosophical question of the nineties. But it remains critical in that it compels an ongoing debate about the meaning of democracy itself. Whatever the merit of foundationalist approaches, they tend to mandate a construction of democracy that favors natural liberty and absolute rights. I wish here to ask not only whether democracy has foundations but what sort of democracy it is that can do without foundations or, indeed, repudiates foundations precisely because of what it requires politically.

  The very question, “Does democracy have foundations?” is dangerous for democrats of my tendencies, because it mandates a discussion on the turf of epistemology that leans toward an answer in the affirmative, and yields an understanding of democracy hostile to what I believe are its necessary participatory attributes. But if democracy is concerned with a form of knowledge (say, knowledge of political things such as power, or political values such as rights, or political ends such as justice) or constituted by institutions and procedures that rest on knowledge (say, constitutions or the principle of majoritarianism), then unless we wish to invite an abject politics of relativism or arbitrariness, to the question of whether democracy has foundations we are perforce obliged to reply, “Well, yes, democracy must have foundations in truths antecedent to and not dependent upon it.” How, after all, can any cognitive moral or political system function without roots in a prior understanding of what constitutes true knowledge?

  By my lights, however, it is the character of politics in general, and of democratic politics in particular, that it is precisely not a cognitive system concerned with what we know and how we know it but a system of conduct concerned with what we will together and do together and how we agree on what we will to do. It is practical not speculative, about action rather than about truth. It yields but is not premised on an epistemology and in this sense is necessarily pragmatic. Where there is truth or certain knowledge there need be no politics, even though (as Plato warns) politicians and citizens may wantonly ignore truth and certain knowledge in pursuit of base interests or raw power. But democratic politics begins where certainty ends. As I suggested in Strong Democracy , the political question always takes a form something like: “What shall we do when something has to be done that affects us all, we wish to be reasonable, yet we disagree on means and ends and are without independent grounds for making the choice.”1

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  Democracy and the Global Order

  From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance

  • David Held, David Held(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  Part III

  Reconstruction:Foundations of Democracy

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  7

  RETHINKING DEMOCRACY

  The transformation of politics which has followed in the wake of the growing interconnectedness of states and societies and the increasing intensity of international networks requires a re-examination of political theory as fundamental in form and scope as the shift which brought about the conceptual and institutional innovations of the modern state itself. It has always been open to dispute how far the claims of the modern state to be ‘independent’ and ‘impartial’ were redeemed in practice. To the extent that the state has been locked into the maintenance and reproduction of systematic inequalities of power and resource, distorting decision outcomes in favour of particular interests, the basis of its claim to legitimacy and distinct allegiance has been open to question. Nonetheless, the idea of the modern state was a guiding political orientation with far-reaching consequences. How far this idea remains applicable to the contemporary era, faced with distinctive and novel forms of power and authority, is, however, another matter. Likewise, how far the concepts of political order, authority and the democratic good can be elaborated at the level of state institutions and practices alone is a pressing and contentious problem.

  The chapters which comprise the following parts (III and IV ) are focused on the reconstruction of political ideas. Reconstruction in this context connotes reflection upon the basic concepts and circumstances of modern politics with the aim of elucidating the conditions and possibility of democratic political community in the contemporary world. The chapters take as their background the empirical context outlined in part II , but, unlike part II

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  Legitimacy and Force: State Papers and Current Perspectives

  Volume 1: Political and Moral Dimensions

  • Jeane J. Kirkpatrick(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Although democracy emphasizes procedures—elections, terms of office, due process—its underpinnings, what Ernest Barker called the “agreement to disagree,” are substantive. The substantive agreement that underlies democratic political institutions is rich and complex in assumption, approaches, beliefs, values. It includes a necessary minimum of trust. This necessary bond of trust—emphasized by writers as diverse as Jean Jacques Rousseau, Walter Bagehot, Gabriel Almond and Henry Fairlie—defines a community and guarantees the existence of shared purposes: to promote the general welfare, to provide the common defense, to preserve the Constitution—that sort of thing. Where people are not agreed on fundamentals, they may decide to seize power rather than campaign for it, to shoot their opponent instead of debating him, to organize a violent demonstration instead of a peaceful march, to lie rather than discuss truthfully, to enslave their defeated opponents rather than continue discussion with them.

  The “agreements” which democracy requires are rooted, of course, in a common culture and in habits, both of which are resistant but not impervious to change. In our day, mass media renders culture more accessible to manipulation than at any past time. Moreover our traditional culture itself embraces change. However, serious students of politics from Plato through the Founding Fathers until today have been convinced that the basic moral, religious, and epistemological conceptions that constitute the “glue” of a society and the foundation of its institutions should be protected, nurtured, and passed on to succeeding generations. Aware of democracy’s special propensity to faction, believing like Tocqueville that “men of democracies appear always excited, uncertain, eager …,” the Founding Fathers sought to remove basic questions most likely to spur the passions from the political arena—in part by removing them from government’s reach altogether. Thus, the many Constitutional prohibitions: Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, restricting the freedom of opinion or press, and so forth. Only when it has broken down, as in the Civil War, or at its edges, with fringe parties, has the nature and foundations of our Union become the object of serious questioning.

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