Chapter 8 - Reframing Democracy with Positive Freedom

Summary

Contemporary democracies are facing ever increasing threats of authoritarian rule on the part of their own leaders, along with the emergence of powerful white nationalist social movements. In this difficult political context, those committed to reform have called for a recommitment to democracy, including restoring and expanding voting rights, and limiting the power of money. Yet, several theorists (myself among them), have argued that we need to go beyond this, not only by deepening democracy but also by expanding its domain, extending it to corporations and firms and to social institutions, as has also been proposed by feminist ethics, e.g., as caring democracy.In this paper, I want to argue that a key element is missing in the standard analyses of democracy’s difficulties, one that is at least partly theoretical and normative in nature.I argue that the deeper meaning of freedom has been obscured within the dominant liberal democratic tradition, taking this to include both liberal and libertarian approaches. And although authoritarianism falls outside both of these more mainstream approaches, it benefits from the fecklessness of the traditional understanding of liberty, which also, I believe, enables it to propagate itself in perniciously inegalitarian as well as antidemocratic ways.