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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
The focus here will be on democracy as a social good. Today people want to live in a democratic society. But why do they see this as a good? Exploring this question will lead us to a justification of democracy. I shall not be concerned primarily with justifying full or ideal democracy; for it is important to show the positive effects of even modest democratic gains. I do not think one can justify democracy in the more demanding sense of showing it has consequences that any rational being would desire. So I shall be content to give what might seem merely a social, or group-based, rather than a purely rational justification of democracy.
1 Petras, James ‘Towards 2000: Pinochet’s “New Order,”’ Against the Current 14 (1988) 23-7Google Scholar
2 Cunningham, Frank Democratic Theory and Socialism (New York: Cambridge University Press 1987), 55-7Google Scholar
3 Rawls, John A Theory of Justice (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press 1971), 60-1Google Scholar
4 Rawls, John ‘A Kantian Conception of Equality,’ The Cambridge Review (Feb 1975) 94-9Google Scholar
5 Walzer, Michael Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books 1983) 78-91Google Scholar
6 This definition is modeled on that of ‘domination’ given by Thomas E. Wartenberg in The Forms of Power: From Domination to Transformation (Philadelphia PA: Temple University Press 1990), 117.
7 Gendron, Bernard Technology and the Human Condition (New York: St. Martin’s Press 1977), ch. 6Google Scholar
8 Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers base their concept of democracy on control without explicit reference to participation. But they build the concept of participation into their requirement that in a democracy free and equal persons control their social relations. Equal persons are ones who have equal weight in public deliberation. In contrast, I have avoided appeals to such an ideal concept of persons in favor of the comparative concept of greater shared control through participation. See Cohen and Rogers’s book On Democracy: Toward a Transformation of American Society (New York: Penguin 1983), 149-50.
9 Nelson, William On Justifying Democracy (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1980) ch.6.Google Scholar
10 The Writings of Thomas Jefferson Washington, H. A. ed. (New York: Riker, Thorne, and Co. 1855), vol. 6, 540-4Google Scholar: Letter to Joseph C. Cabell, February 2, 1816; vol. 7,9–17: Letter to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816
11 Rawls, John ‘The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus,’ Oxford journal of Legal Studies 7 1987 1-25CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Rawls wants to avoid linking democratic procedures with any substantive norms so as to allow for disagreements within a democracy over such norms. The success of democracy will, he thinks, lead in time to a consilience of those initially incompatible norms. It is doubtful, however, that democratic procedures alone could survive without immediate compromises that guarantee, or seem to guarantee, to groups with conflicting interests that they need not sacrifice to the majority their vital interests. The content of such a compromise would constitute a substantive norm. Democracy then depends on agreement on substantive norms.
12 Compare, e.g. Habermas, Jurgen Theory of Communicative Action vol.1, McCarthy, T. trans. Boston: Beacon Press 1984)Google Scholar (in which there is an underlying suggestion that since there are common conditions for effective discourse there must be universal moral norms sufficient in complexity to thwart relativism.
13 The nature of the compromise worked out by labor and social democratic parties with capitalist forces is studied by Przeworski, Adam Capitalism and Social Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press 1985) ch. 1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
14 Mill, John Stuart Considerations on Representative Government (1861; Buffalo NY: Prometheus Books 1991)Google Scholar, ch. 6
15 Diminishing the vote of a group in a direct democracy, where widespread discussion would be emphasized more than voting, might not dampen its participation as much as in a representative democracy. The case for a serious dampening of participation in a representative democracy is quite clear (Macpherson, C.G. The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy [New York: Oxford University Press 1977] 56–60Google Scholar). Where representative democracy works within a class society, those in the lower classes will understand that diminishing the weight of their vote denies them a crucial means for offsetting the educational and monetary advantages enjoyed by the upper-class minority. Even where the principle ‘One person, one vote’ is adhered to, the advantages of the upper classes affect the political process so decisively that voter and civic participation of the lower classes is diminished. In a representative democracy where such advantages would play a smaller role the conflict of class interests itself would have subsided. The threat of lower-class class legislation would in turn subside, and there would cease to be a need to diminish the vote of the lower classes. However, so long as there is the conflict of class interests, diminishing the weight of the vote of the lower classes will decrease their incentive to participate.
16 This idea is developed in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe: ‘For the defense of the interests of the workers not to be made at the expense of the rights of women, immigrants or consumers, it is necessary to establish an equivalence between these different struggles. It is only on this condition that struggles against power become truly democratic, and that the demanding of rights is… carried out… in the context of respect for the rights to equality of other subordinated groups…. This total equivalence never exists…. [T]he precariousness of every equivalence demands that it be complemented/limited by the logic of autonomy. It is for this reason that the demand for equality is not sufficient, but needs to be balanced by the demand for liberty, which leads us to speak of a radical and plural democracy’ Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics [London: Verso 1985] (184).
17 A brief account of the new movements in the United States is given by Zinn, Howard A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper 1980), ch. 17–19.Google Scholar
18 Tismaneanu, Vladimir ‘Eastern Europe: The Story the Media Missed,’ Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist 46 (1990) 17–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar
19 The idea of a democratic coordination comes from Cohen and Rogers, 175–6.
20 The role of the social background in limiting the right to autonomy is not a determinist one since the background does not play the role of a stimulus cause but that of a structure. This distinction is developed in Fisk, Milton The State and Justice (New York: Cambridge University Press 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ch. 2.