Mark Warren: Between Realism and Aspiration—Democracy for the Twenty-First Century

THE EARLY YEARS

Mark Warren grew up in a family that taught him a lot of lessons. In my third interview with Warren, as I probed for details of his life, he told me that his mother had been paralyzed from the time that he was four. She had contracted a disease from the live polio vaccine in a sugar cube. The producers of the vaccine did not realize that the serum carrying the vaccine, derived from monkeys, was infected with a myelitis similar to polio. Warren saw his dad work to raise three kids and take care of his mother. He saw his mom, a teacher, go on to acquire an MA in education with a specialization in special education, so that she was able to teach children with high needs at home. He saw his dad, a fisheries ecologist, write a book on Biology and Water Pollution Control, with a logo for the book designed by an indigenous woman and a Haida epigraph warning that greed would ruin the resources upon which we all depend. He learned from his family some lessons in everyday heroism. When problems arise, try harder. Learn to combine realism and hope.

What about agency—the theme that most deeply characterizes Warren’s work? I don’t think this theme came primarily from his family, remarkable as it was. I think it came from simply observing others and himself, and thinking hard about what he observed. Warren was lucky enough to grow up in a public school, in the town where his father taught at Oregon State University, that had not only its share of professors’ kids but also its good share of kids whose parents were farmers and loggers. The logging business was dying. So were the mills, where some of the kids’ parents worked. So Warren saw what it meant to work hard and succeed, but also what it meant to work hard and fail. He saw the inequalities around him. His father had pictures in his office of Native Americans fishing—in places where hydro-electric dams later destroyed their fishing grounds. His family talked about civil rights. His sixth-grade teacher hated little boys, telling them over and over how many faults they had, and particularly picking on Warren. He spent “half of sixth grade” in the principal’s office, in a small way experiencing firsthand what later he learned the fancy words for: disrespect, misrecognition, injustice. And agency? Warren’s focus on agency grew slowly as he began, as an adult, to understand the world.

Pictured above: Mark Warren

First came Nietzsche. I don’t mean literally first. Actually first, Warren went to college at Lewis and Clark, in Portland, Oregon, initially majoring in mathematics before switching to political science, with a good dose of philosophy. He was attracted to the University of Toronto for a PhD by the work on democracy of C. B. Macpherson and Christian Bay, but soon became enamored with Frankfurt School critical theory, along with French and German phenomenology, both introduced into North America by the Telos group. Through critical theory, he became interested in Marx, Hegel, Freud, Weber, and Nietzsche, who became the topic of his dissertation. Warren was attracted to Nietzsche’s fierce anti-metaphysics, which commands us to stop looking outside of the world we have and start looking at our own world, phenomenologically and existentially. For Warren, Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity blazed out from his conviction that people ought to be the agents of their lives. Don’t farm that out to religion. We need to build our agency from the resources in front of us—what Hannah Arendt called “worldliness.” The positive philosophy animating Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity was a deep analysis of how humans might become agents responsible for their futures. Ultimately, this is the profoundly democratic philosophy in an otherwise undemocratic thinker.

THE TURN

After the excellent book on Nietzsche, Nietzsche and Political Thought (1988a) derived from his dissertation, plus seven articles on Nietzsche (including one in Political Theory in 1985 and one in the APSR in 1988) and one on Marx and Habermas (in Political Theory in 1989), articles that were reprinted seven times, Warren turned toward political theory and democracy more broadly. He immersed himself in Habermas, whose work connected Warren’s long-standing interest in participatory and progressive democracy with what would later be called “deliberative democracy,” linking the philosophy of language with the basic political point that talking is better than fighting.

At that point in Warren’s life, many things coincided. He had taken a two-year Mellon post-doc in Rice University’s philosophy department and another year teaching at the University of Texas, San Antonio while his wife had a post-doc at the University of Texas, Austin. Then in 1985, Warren moved to Northwestern to become, for three years, a visiting assistant professor in political science while his wife took a second post-doc at that university. Those few years, he told me, were deeply formative. A generation of thinkers—not just Habermas but Michael Walzer, Carole Pateman, Benjamin Barber, and Bernard Manin among others, including myself and Nancy Fraser at Northwestern—were building what Warren saw as a progressive democratic theory in conversation with evolving social structures, movements, and political openings. Warren valued those theorists’ strong normative commitments to self-government as well as their return to common-sense democratic norms and values that were too often buried in jargon in empirical political science. Moreover, the political world was rapidly changing once again. The democratic ideals in the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s were settling into a wide array of formal associations and social networks. The Berlin wall came down, promising a post-Cold War world in which democratic aspirations might flourish. Contemporary democratic theory seemed excitingly fresh. Warren retained Nietzsche’s pragmatics, suspicion of metaphysics, and orientation to the worlds we have, but began the process of creating what he would later describe as problem-based democratic theory.

The throughline is that Warren has always been a critical theorist, pulling the ideal out of the real, finding the normative in what exists. The ideals we should have are ideals we already know something about, often latent and unrecognized in everyday social interactions. We cannot build a future from what we do not know in the present, even germinally or unconsciously. We find this insight in Hegel, Marx, Habermas, Weber. We find it in Dewey’s pragmatism and Hannah Arendt’s democratic phenomenology. The mandate is to look for what is implicit in our thought about justice, implicit in our understanding of respect for others, implicit in our ache for self-governance. Analytically, Warren’s respect for the ideals we already have is a kind of realism. If we add to that intellectual realism an empirical realism born of farming, fisheries, and bodily paralysis—all of which can get better or worse depending not only on nature but on human decision and action—we get a problem-based political theory, a political theory that recognizes the complexity, difference, and promise in the worlds we have, and to which we need to respond.

“…a political theory that recognizes the complexity, difference, and promise in the worlds we have, and to which we need to respond.”

PROGRESSIVE DEMOCRATIC THEORY FOR COMPLEX, PLURAL SOCIETIES

Warren’s overall message to theorists—and to anyone struggling with what I have called the need to create sufficient legitimate coercion to sustain our human interdependence—is: don’t give up. The “methodological” values are: realism + hope + sticktoitiveness. Today’s societies are complex and highly differentiated, with layer upon layer of practices, forms of knowledge, institutions, and systems. Part of realism is to understand this complexity, but likewise to find myriad openings for democratic reforms, innovations, and practices these complexities afford. It is not just enough to recognize these complexities and their promises. We need to theorize them, so we can identify their possibilities and limitations. We need theory that matches complexity: hence, a signature feature of Warren’s democratic theory is his use of conceptual tables. Warren uses tables more than any other theorist I’ve ever read (43 tables in Democracy and Association [2001] alone), because tables convey graphically and most directly the often complex facets of an ideal or set of democratic institutions and the possible responses to those differences. So: Analyze the differences. Theorize the complexities. Find the gaps in the existing human responses to human needs. Build the capacities to respond. Make agency central. These themes animate the contributions Warren has made in many fields, running over time from the psychological demands of democracy to authority, trust, corruption, associations, deliberative democracy, representation, democratic innovations, supplementary democracy, democratic systems and comparative political theory. The goal is, in each case, to expand both restrictive boundaries and human powers. As Melissa Williams summarizes this key strand in Warren’s thought, “To give up on the agency we can have would be to give up on our own humanity, but we must be clear-eyed about what is possible and what is not in the world as it really is.”

THE CENTRAL ROLE OF AGENCY

Warren’s analysis of Nietzsche, Weber, and others had often revolved around agency. As he moved from analyses of others’ work to his own contributions, his first major articles explored the role of autonomy. In the first of these works, his 1990 “Ideology and the Self,” he noted that the problem in critical theories of ideology has been “to show how ideologies penetrate the self while…retaining…a conception of the self with capacities for reasoned political discourse and autonomous choice” (599). His solution was to see “rational autonomy,” defined as “the ability to reflect on and direct one’s desires in such a way that one can develop a life-plan,” as a “social achievement” (601). He specified the several different ways that ideologies work to subvert this achievement and undercut cognitive judgments. A key innovation in this analysis was to show how it could be perfectly rational to adopt an ideology contrary to one’s interests if the perspective that induced those cognitions derived from one’s situation. As in so much of his later work, this early analysis entered sympathetically into the worlds in which people actually lived, showing, for example, how valid and important interests in self-esteem and “non-precariousness” could, in particular contexts, bias one’s cognitions against one’s interests. One’s structural situation may give one both “perspectival limits” and also “choices that do not permit interests in self-esteem and self-determination to be served at the same time” (608). Moreover, he wrote, “we are never fully transparent to ourselves. We assign meaning to our lives partly by borrowing stories that are already a part of our culture. …Only during…times of disorientation, even crisis, do we see the extent to which our identities depend on the narratives others impose on us” (622). It is also “easier - from the point of view of cognitive effort - to judge by means of categories that are available” (623). He then stressed the processes that lead to rational autonomy, and concluded, “If in the course of these processes individuals revise their notions about what the world looks like and come to know more about themselves, we do not say that they have moved from ‘false consciousness’ to ‘true consciousness,’ but rather that they are following through on their capacities for rational autonomy” (626).

The perspective that informs this early work, and all of the work to come, is one of warm sympathy for the beings who live in this world, critically informed anger at the forms of power that trap those beings and prevent them from living a fuller life, and a nuanced, contextually and temporally contingent, differentiated understanding of the norms we should develop to guide us as we try to move, better prepared intellectually and normatively, into the future.

In an aside that presaged his own future work, Warren argued here that a “personality that is open to the kind of value the world has to offer will also be open to temporality and contingency” (617). Warren’s own work is just that—open to the kind of value that the world has to offer, and open to temporality and contingency.

Two years later, in “Democratic Theory and Self-Transformation,” the lead article in that issue of the American Political Science Review (1992), Warren made this open approach to autonomy central to his critique and expansion of the then article of faith in writings on participatory democracy that participation in democratic decision produces selves more oriented to the common good. That faith, he argued, should be made more contingent, particularly on a situation’s potential for commonality or conflict. He noted again that “autonomy is an inherently social capacity that individuals develop through their interactions with others,” adding that autonomy is ideally developed in “public spaces …[that] permit claims and arguments to be publicly tested, altered and justified.” Such discourse is “necessary to distinguish and identify plural, common and emergent interests” (12). Selves are not wholly constituted by discourse; nor can all conflicting interests be transformed into common interests. Goods can be individual or social, excludable or non-excludable (free to all), material or symbolic, and scarce or non-scarce. With tables that elaborate these distinctions and their contingent relations, he shows that each of these characteristics affects the likelihood of conflict or commonality as well as the chances that political interaction over them will produce transformations of self that advance autonomy.

Pictured above: Mark Warren in front of European Parliament.

AUTHORITY

In 1996, Warren published two telling articles. In “What Should We Expect from More Democracy? Radically Democratic Responses to Politics” for Political Theory, his analysis of the limitations of our current liberal democratic institutions is, in Graham Smith’s words, “withering—but, as ever, measured.” The liberal state failed to give its citizens “opportunities, incentives, and necessities to test, articulate, defend, and ultimately act on their judgements,” leaving them often “lacking in empathy for others, poor in information, and unlikely to have the critical skills necessary to articulate, defend, and revise their views” (242). Radical responses, however, failed to “confront limitations of complexity, size, and scale of advanced industrial societies” (242) and assumed that “democratic participation is an attractive activity, one that people would naturally choose if only they had the opportunity” (243). After a psychologically acute analysis of the potential for aversive conflict and “social groundlessness” in political interaction, he urged radical democrats to take the problems of political interaction seriously and consider, in both deliberative and adversarial formats, “how institutional designs could lessen and contain the risks of politics while still offering the means to articulate and negotiate its discomforts” (266).

In “Deliberative Democracy and Authority” (1996) for the American Political Science Review, Warren identified a major problem in progressive democratic theory. Yes, we should self-govern, individually and collectively. But because we are embedded in complex societies, we can’t each do everything all of the time. We need a division of labor. We thus need a hefty helping of trust in others who act and decide in the areas we delegate to them, when, implicitly or explicitly, we give them authority in those areas. Any complex modern polity needs a vast amount of authoritative decision-making, but democratic theory did not have a convincing account of how authority could be reconciled with democracy. Many theorists had previously concluded that democracy and authority must trade off against one another. Warren argued that democracy could constitute and sustain authority. He did so by framing democratic authority as created and sustained by the capacity for discursive justification. One could trust authorities to the degree that they were subject to challenge and demands for communicative accountability from their peers and attentive publics. The mere possibility of such challenges, he argued, could change the orientation of the individual to the authority from a surrender of judgment to a more or less watchful suspension of judgment. The possibility of challenge would also condition the behavior of authorities, making them more likely to behave in ways that could stand up to demands for justification by those affected. “Democratic authority, then, is generated neither by the authoritative status of expertise or beliefs as such nor by the authoritative status of rules and procedures; instead, it comes from a set of institutionalized protections and securities within which the generative force of discursive challenge is possible” (57).¹

“Yes, we should self-govern, individually and collectively. But because we are embedded in complex societies, we can’t each do everything all of the time. We need a division of labor.”

TRUST

Having identified the encompassing necessity of trust in democratic polities, Warren’s next step was to investigate trust itself. While at Georgetown University (1988-2004), he convened a conference on the subject. “Democratic Theory and Trust” (1999) was the central article in the ensuing edited volume on Democracy and Trust (a volume that Rainer Forst calls “essential” and Warren’s work in it “ground-breaking”). In it, Warren notes that democracies need both high levels of generalized trust in political institutions and a focused distrust on those nodes in a democratic system where the interests of those with most power in the system are most likely to diverge from the interests of other citizens. He distinguishes three important forms of trust: social trust among people, which democracies should protect and encourage by providing secure and fair public order and public institutions; first-order trust in public institutions, which democracies should insure by insulating administrative agencies from political pressures and structuring them to provide services efficiently and fairly; and second-order trust in the institutions that channel conflict into equitable forms of talking, campaigning, and voting. In all three realms, trust is maintained by empowering citizen monitoring and both formal and informal oversight bodies. Warren’s highly productive idea is that the trust democracy needs develops where conflicts are institutionalized and mediated in transparent ways. Distrust, channeled into monitoring and politics, and trust, both in other citizens and in the political and administrative framework, thus depend on each other. In this article and later works (2012a, 2017c, 2017d), Warren develops a normative notion of justified democratic trust—a trust that can stand a “test of publicity,” that is, of public justification to those affected.²

CORRUPTION

Corruption directly undermines the trust that makes the necessary division of labor in democracy work. Warren accordingly moved next to analyzing corruption, including the less studied problem of legal “institutional” corruption, such as the unequal power of money in politics.

When Dennis Thompson introduced the theory of institutional corruption in the Annual Review of Political Science, he identifiedWarren as one of the major contributors to that theory. As Thompson put it then,

Warren provides the most sustained theoretical analysis from [the egalitarian] perspective. In a series of important articles, he develops an institutional conception of corruption as “duplicitous exclusion” (Warren 2004a; 2006a,b; 2015a). More explicitly than most institutionalists, Warren links his conception to democratic theory. Corruption violates the norm of equal inclusion: “every individual potentially affected by a collective decision should have an opportunity to affect the decision proportional to his or her stake in the outcome” (Warren 2006b, p. 804; see also 2004a, p. 333; 2015a, pp. 47–48). Not all unjustified exclusion is corrupt, only that in which the agents of corruption claim to accept the norm of inclusion but at the same time violate it. That is what makes it duplicitous.

The link between citizens and their representatives is broken when the “representatives’ decisions are … the result of the whispered voices of those who have bought access through their campaign contributions” [2004a, p. 337]. (Thompson 2018, 499).

Warren showed that by dissolving the vital thread of trust, corruption, including legal “institutional corruption,” was even more deeply anti-democratic than previous commentators had realized.

ASSOCIATION

As he was writing about trust and corruption, Warren also completed his path-breaking work, Democracy and Association (2001), winner of the Spitz Book Prize and the ARNOVA Outstanding Book Award. Warren was interested in the effects of associations—“developmental effects on individuals; effects in constituting public spheres of political judgment; and effects that underwrite democratic institutions such as representation” (11). The underlying message of this book, as in much of his work, is that democratic capacities and possibilities emerge from complex ecologies of systems, institutions, associations, and practices. The book investigates the democratic capacities (and sometimes dangers) that emerge from association, that form of social organization in which people come together to pursue shared interests, in contrast to the kinds of organization that characterize states and markets. Yet, like so much in today’s societies, the domains of association are wildly complex.

On this work, Nancy Rosenblum commented,

In the wide and wide-ranging domain of civil society and associations, Warren has created order. His typologies have provided markers for me in making sense of the wild pluralism of groups and their significance for liberal democracy – and for people personally and individually. The order he creates is not rigid, but a foothold and guide. This is far from Warren’s only contribution to political theory, but it will have staying power as civil society becomes less civil and recognized as more and more vital to political well-being.

This sustained piece of political theory enables democrats to make fine grained judgments as to the kinds of associations that are better, worse, or simply benign from the standpoint of democracy.

Later work on participatory democracy (2002) and the major article for the American Political Science Review, “Voting with Your Feet: Exit-Based Empowerment for Democratic Theory” (2011) would plumb further both the growing need for a complex and differentiated network of associations in the ecology of self-government broadly understood and the capacity of participant exit, in the right conditions, to produce accountability, responsiveness, and the conditions for democratic voice.

DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY AND THE INNOVATION OF CITIZENS’ ASSEMBLIES

In 2004, Warren moved from Georgetown University to the University of British Columbia. In that year, fortuitously, the first full-scale Citizens Assembly in human history also took place in British Columbia, with 160 citizens, randomly chosen, undergoing an almost year-long, multi-stage deliberative process to develop recommendations for the province’s electoral system. This was “a natural experiment not to be missed” (Warren and Pearse 2008, xii). At UBC, Warren had founded a new Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, which in 2005 hosted two interdisciplinary workshops on the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly. Those workshops generated an edited volume, Designing Deliberative Democracy (2008a), which became a touchstone in research on deliberative institutions. Two important new ideas emerged from this experience.

First, following his work on trust, Warren slightly later (2012a, 2015b) showed how deliberative minipublics like the British Columbia Citizen Assembly can bolster important forms of public trust in policymaking. Those that report their findings to the public can serve as “trusted information proxies,” which citizens can use to help guide their own judgments on proposed legislation, referenda or ballot initiatives. Those that report their findings to administrative agencies can serve as “anticipatory publics” to both guide the decisions of those agencies and their executives and strengthen the public’s trust in those decisions.³

Second, Warren’s chapter, “Citizen Representatives,” in the 2008 volume was the first to conceptualize the randomly chosen citizens as representatives and to explore the implications of this new form of representation for understanding political representation more broadly. Here Warren noted that over the preceding few decades, democratic governments had responded to a decline in public support by establishing citizen advisory bodies, stakeholder meetings, and now the new mechanism of minipublics—randomly chosen deliberative forums. Although political scientists had previously seen such forums as contributions to “participatory democracy,” Warren argued that this approach obscures their most significant feature. These forums enlist a small number of citizens to act as non-elected, non-professional “citizen representatives.” Warren looked differentially at the specific nature and quality of democratic representation they provide. Focusing on three features of political representation—authorization, inclusiveness, and accountability—Warren examined the strengths and weaknesses of citizen representation as compared to electoral representation by legislatures. Citizen representation should not be expected to replace electoral representation, Warren argued, but it provides an important supplement within an “ecology of democratic institutions and practices” (2008b, 69). Political representation had been (and often still is) widely seen as inherently elitist, but Warren showed how it can be egalitarian, emancipatory, and radically democratic.⁴

“Political representation had been (and often still is) widely seen as inherently elitist, but Warren showed how it can be egalitarian, emancipatory, and radically democratic.”

REPRESENTATION

Beginning in 2004 with a prescient article on “Informal Representation: Who Speaks for Whom” and continuing with this important conceptualization of citizen representatives, Warren has been a leading proponent of and participant in the representative turn in democratic theory (see, e.g., Castiglione and Warren 2019a, originally written in 2007).

Most centrally, Warren’s Annual Review article, “The Concept of Representation in Contemporary Democratic Theory” (2008c), written with Nadia Urbinati, reviews and propels a “new wave of democratic theory” that understands representation as “intrinsic” to democracy rather than opposed (395). The authors detailed the limits of the standard electoral model of representation and its territorially-based constituencies and emphasized the increasingly consequential political force of non-electoral forms of representation performed by non-governmental organizations, transnational movements, associations, and social networks. They recognized democratic theorists’ new interest in representation as a welcome motivator for political theorists to wrestle with practical questions such as ballot design and alternative voting methods. More than reviewing an emergent body of literature, their essay memorably changed our way of thinking about representation, “not as a pragmatic alternative to something we modern citizens can no longer have, namely, direct democracy, but as an intrinsically modern way of intertwining participation, political judgment, and the constitution of demoi capable of self-rule” (402).

Warren’s subsequent essay, “How Representation Enables Democratic Citizenship” (2019b) presses the representative turn still further by making an ingenious shift from the activities of representatives to the activities of citizens. Going well beyond the boundaries of the standard electoral model of representation, Warren argues that robust democratic representation requires constituencies able to judge how well they are being represented and hold their representatives accountable. Supporting and fostering citizen judgment, not merely substituting the judgment of the representative for that of the represented, becomes a key criterion in evaluating democratic representation. A complementary criterion pertains to what Warren identifies as the agent-constituting effects of representative claims. Elections, campaign promises, messaging, and party platforms should at once galvanize voters and “constitute collective agents,” such as a caucus within a legislative body, which can deliver on those promises and provide a “locus of accountability” for citizens to ascertain whether their expectations have been met and their participation was worthwhile.⁵

A PROBLEM-BASED APPROACH

In 2017, Warren wrote “A Problem-Based Approach to Democratic Theory” for the American Political Science Review (2017a). Simone Chambers considers this article:

one of the most important contributions to democratic theory in the last 20 years. It is a game changer, offering a full paradigm shift from a models-of-democracy-based approach in which, for example, deliberative democracy squares off against agonistic democracy, direct democracy or participatory democracy, to an alternative paradigm that begins from democracy as a complex system. The core of this new paradigm involves identifying a certain number of functions that must be performed for a political system to be called democratic. The brilliance of this approach is that it lends itself to many different ways of developing the basic insight.

In this analysis, Warren identifies three primary functions that need to be performed by a heathy democratic system: empowered inclusion, communication and collective will formation, and collective decision-making. To this he adds seven generic practices that serve these functions in different ways, such as recognizing, resisting, voting, and deliberation. Each has democratic strengths and weaknesses. So, for example, deliberation is good at communication and collective will formation but weak on collective decision making, while voting is good for empowering inclusions and decision-making, but a weak medium of collective will-formation. A strongly democratic system would be comprised of institutions that build on the democratic strengths of these practices, while limiting their weaknesses.

Warren’s contribution here both articulates a new paradigm and reflects a core shift in democratic theory in the twenty-first century. In the face of democratic erosion and backsliding, contemporary democrat theory is now focusing on diagnosing what ails democracy and what measures are needed to breathe new life into democratic institutions. A problem-based approach to democratic theory is exactly the sort of paradigm that can do justice to the complexity of a democratic system while at the same time identifying concrete problems that new institutions and practices must address.⁶

André Bächtiger points out that Warren´s problem-based approach also “turns a new leaf in the research on deliberation.” First, it makes clear that different democratic and deliberative goals (e.g., epistemic or ethical) and different contexts may require different forms of deliberation (e.g., contestatory vs cooperative). This is in stark contrast with the traditional approach, in which one conception of deliberation with fixed standards (such as justification rationality and consensus-orientation) is expected to prevail for different goals and in different contexts. Second, no democratic practice (including deliberation) can fulfill all democratic functions or goals at once. So deliberation must provide an “added” or at least “equal” value for democratic systems. When other practices (e.g., information provision or mobilization) realize certain democratic or deliberative goals (e.g., enlightened understanding, awareness or policy transformation towards specific goals) more efficiently, then we need not take the trouble to deliberate. The insights together generate a new focus on blending different practices and institutions depending on the context.⁷

COMPARATIVE POLITICAL THEORY

Warren embraces the “all-affected principle,” meaning that “individuals have a normative claim to influence collective decisions just to the extent that they are affected by collective decisions” (Warren 2011a). This principle reflects, among other things, the need to address problems generated by non-state actors and the cross-border effects of state actions, problems amplified by an era of global complexity and interdependence. Yet cultural and linguistic differences pose a challenge for the emergence of transnational or global publics that can address these problems.

In a 2014 article for Political Theory, “A Democratic Case for Comparative Political Theory,” Melissa Williams and Warren crafted the first conceptualization of a “problem-driven democratic theory” (28) as they articulated the democratic reasons for developing conceptual dialogue across global cultures and intellectual traditions. Pointing out that all political theory is dialogical (35), they stressed transnationally “building political capacities within communities of fate, by facilitating the mutual intelligibility of ideas across contexts and traditions, and increasing the pool of ideational resources available to those who share fates. As with all problem-attentive political theory, ideas filter up from political practices and situated debates to the level of theory, and filter down again from theory into practice when they have resonance” to those affected (37). Political theory, in this problem-centered view, is an intensely practical enterprise.

Warren also played a key leadership role in a multi-year, transnational project on East Asian Perspectives on Politics, including co-organizing with Baogang He a conference on “The Cultural Sources of Deliberative Politics in East Asia” at Fudan University in 2010.⁸ Warren subsequently coauthored with He three articles on deliberative practices and their democratic promise in China, for which they coined the term “authoritarian deliberation" (2011b, 2017b, 2020). Because this work was attentive to Chinese experiments in deliberative politics as well as to the western theoretical literature, it has helped to generate a surprising amount of intercultural discourse and research on openings within China for deliberative politics. Baogong He commented:

Warren is a truly democratic political theorist in practice, in the sense that he has made great efforts to democratize Western theory itself through his deep engagement with and thoughtful reflection of Asian democratic practice. He has achieved a conceptual advancement in this area by creating the concept and theoretical study of “authoritarian deliberation.” Additionally, he has provided a potent theoretical critique of meritocracy. His theoretical works have been well received in Asia and, as a thinker and person, he is also well respected and admired by many young scholars in Asia and China.

CONCLUSION: EXPANDING BOUNDARIES AND POWERS

It is hard to act without having some idea of why you are acting. Political theory is the discipline of helping us think better about those “why” questions in the domain of politics. In this task, Mark Warren is a consummate thinker and writer.

He begins with the simple observation that modern societies are complex, differentiated, and pluralistic. It follows that political divisions of labor are both practically needed and normatively justified. If we have divisions of labor, we need trust as well as many kinds of representation. Associations fulfill some of the needs for representation missing from electoral democracy. If democracies need trust and representation, then corruption—including legal, “institutional” corruption—is deeply threatening to democracy. And so are gaps in representation. Deliberative institutions like citizens’ assemblies fill some gaps and build some capacities, but they must be designed to serve as trustworthy proxies for other citizens. They should supplement, not replace, the other democratic institutions that we have successfully evolved. They can play a significant role in democratic systems, which also have different parts, with different purposes and gaps. Finally, cultural contexts are different. We must respect what the human mind has done in different contexts, so that we can build ideals and implement institutions to respond to both the ideals and material needs. Here too we should compare differences and use the comparison to show us where different systems have normative gaps.

As Warren has followed this intellectual path, he has always been willing to go against the grain, breaking from orthodoxies in participatory (1996a, 2002) and deliberative theory, as when he argued against the universally accepted norm of sincerity in deliberation that some things should not be said even if they were true (2006c). Yet his goal was never to shock, but only to try to make things better. His insights came from what he saw around him, inside him, in the empirical literature in political science, and in the work of the practitioners, the builders of democratic experiments, with whom he worked and talked. Because he let democratic problems drive his theory, he saw early on that democratic theory must take in both the administrative state (e.g., 2009) and civil society with its “associational ecology” (2001, 12).

Warren is also an institution-builder. He founded the Center for Democracy and Civil Society (originally Democracy and the Third Sector) at Georgetown University, which organized several productive conferences not only on trust but also on representation. He founded the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions at the University of British Columbia, which organized two symposia on the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly and a host of other important conferences. He co-founded the Participedia (www.participedia.net), an open-source, participatory knowledge platform that documents and allows the comparison and analysis of new forms of participatory and deliberative engagement across the world (Fung and Warren 2011b). He co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy (2018), with fifty-eight chapters on deliberative democracy globally. He has collaborated actively in deliberative co-authorships on deliberative systems (2012b) and deliberative negotiation (2015b). Co-authors, such as Dario Castiglione, praise his “intellectual and personal generosity.”

Throughout, Warren’s has focused not only on understanding what legitimates decisions so that individuals can cooperate together, but also, and more intensely, on the agent, the individual who must live a life within that decision structure, and whose life that structure can suppress or allow to unfold in its best development, unpredictably and evolvingly, but in the direction of coming to understand others and know more about themselves in relation to others. Warren’s theory has always aimed at expanding boundaries and powers for that agent. As it turns out, his practice has expanded boundaries and powers for the profession. ◼