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Democracy and the Problem of Statesmanship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Richard S. Ruderman
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Is statesmanship still compatible with democracy? Democratic theorists once viewed democracy as a partnership between citizens and statesmen, to which each brought complementary virtues. Statesmanship has come to be condemned by many contemporary democratic theorists, however, as inimical to democracy. By turning statesmen into “facilitators,” they seek to displace statesmanship with an expanded concept of citizenship. In response, and stung by charges of elitism, embattled liberal defenders of statesmanship have begun to recast it in light of this line of attack. Most notably, the liberal Bruce Ackerman has sought to advance a new concept of nonelitist, “neutral” liberal statesmanship that is compatible with democracy. This study examines both the criticisms that led to this rethinking of statesmanship—especially in the thought of Benjamin R. Barber, liberal statesmanship's leading critic—and Ackerman's success in meeting them. Our study tries to demonstrate that Ackerman actually reconstructs liberal statesmanship on the basis of Barber's arguments and thereby further undermines the statesmanship he purports to defend. I conclude with an effort to rehabilitatean older understanding of liberal statesmanship.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 59 , Issue 4 , Fall 1997 , pp. 759 - 788
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1997

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References

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3 Montesquieu, notes that “as execution has the limits of its own nature, it is useless to restrict it” (The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Cohler, Anne M., Miller, Basia Carolyn, and Stone, Harold Samuel [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989], p. 162)Google Scholar. If statesmanship is always needed in politics, it is better to give it a legitimate, constitutional place than to require that its exercise be illegal or extraconstitutional.

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52 Barber, himself notes this in The Conquest of Politics, p. 209Google Scholar. And so even Woodrow Wilson, accused by Barber of being a “strong leader” who set the tone for a “stewardship of daring” (“Neither Leaders Nor Followers,” p. 118), insists that, in a democracy, “public opinion must be truckled to” (Wilson, , Leaders of Men, ed. Motter, T. H. Vail [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952], p. 40Google Scholar).

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54 See Stephen Holmes, “The Permanent Structure of Antiliberal Thought,” in Rosenblum, Liberalism and the Moral Life.

55 Ackerman, , Social Justice, pp. 236,249–50, 255.Google Scholar

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57 Ackerman, , Social Justice, p. 289Google Scholar, emphasis added; see too 319.

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59 Ackerman even comes to suggest that statesmanship may sometimes have to transcend legal limitations in order to secure the common good (see his account of the Founding, We the People, pp. 173–79, 195; see also Locke, , Two Treatises, 2. 160Google Scholar on “prerogative”).

60 Ackerman, , We the People, p. 314.Google Scholar

61 Ibid., pp. 297–305.

62 Ibid., p. 44.

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64 Ibid., pp. 250, 312.

65 Ackerman, , We the People, p. 10, 51–52.Google Scholar

66 Ibid., pp. 14, 16–32; Ackerman, , Social Justice, p. 368Google Scholar. Ackerman rejects the notion of any meaningful “progress” in history (We the People, p. 220).

67 Ackerman, , We the People, p. 15.Google Scholar

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71 Ibid., p. 159.

72 Where Ackerman earlier relied on “neutral conversation” to establish a policy's legitimacy (Social Justice, p. 319), he now puts his faith in the “larger synthesis” in which two contradictory theses are combined without any admitted loss or dilution of principle (We the People, pp. 25, 29, 98). Rational political judgment, that is, remains unwelcome.

73 Ackerman, , We the People, p. 146.Google Scholar

74 Ibid., pp. 60–61. As it will be the courts (or the “legal community”) that will engineer the “interpretive synthesis” that will guide political decisions (p. 162), it is hard to avoid the conclusion that executive statesmanship will in the end be reduced to executing, not the will of the Legislative branch, or of the people, but of the courts.

75 Ackerman asserts that it is fruitless to concern oneself with neutral dialogue in the midst of even a liberal revolution and asks only that statesmen “try to make the liberal principle of dialogue a living political reality as soon as possible” (Social Justice, p. 304). Moreover, he routinely situates his character “Statesman” in (private) dialogues, not in the rough and rumble of public life (see 238–39, 251–52). This nicely captures the overdrawn separation of power politics from deliberation in Ackerman's thought. For talk, in fact, need not be “fruitless” amid struggle: Jefferson penned the tolerably effective Declaration of Independence in the midst of a liberal revolution. Conversely, “talk” that utilizes promises, threats, etc. (i.e., power) in support of its argument proper may well be required even after the revolution is complete.

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93 All it requires is the assistance of a “facilitating leader,” who quickly teaches the citizens “critical self-sufficiency and the ability to think independently”—and then disappears (Barber, , “Neither Leaders Nor Followers,” p. 125Google Scholar). Presumably colleges, relieved of this once arduous responsibility, could focus wholly on football.

94 Barber, , An Aristocracy of Everyone, p. 13Google Scholar. Similarly, Walzer, in his otherwise critical review of Barber, claims that it is easier to understand justice than “pollution” (Walzer, , “Flight From Philosophy [Review of Barber's The Conquest of Politics],” The New York Review of Books, 2 02 1989, p. 44Google Scholar). Contrast this outlook with that expressed by Dahl's spokesman for the older view, Aristos: “I think it's probably easier to become an excellent mathematician than an excellent ruler” (Dahl, , Democracy and Its Critics, p. 63Google Scholar). Nietzsche, for one, deplored this trend: “one now knows in Europe what Socrates thought he did not know and what that famous old serpent once promised to teach—today one ‘knows’ what is good and evil” (Beyond Good and Evil, aph. 202).

95 Political thinking can be “vigorous and inspire decisive action” (Barber, , Strong Democracy, p. 170Google Scholar).

96 Douglass, Frederick, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1983 [1881]), p. 498.Google Scholar

97 Ackerman, , Social Justice, p. 21Google Scholar, emphasis in original.

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99 Barber, Benjamin, “The Compromised Republic: Public Purposelessness in America,” in The Moral Foundations of the American Republic, ed. Horwitz, Robert H., 3rd ed. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986), p. 61Google Scholar. Cf. Barber's own excellent appreciation of Truman's statesmanship that was neither authoritarian nor anxiety-laden in The Conquest of Politics, chap. 5.

100 As Barber claims (Strong Democracy, p. 167).

101 Locke, , Two Treatises, secs. 2.160, 2. 57.Google Scholar

102 For all his defense of statesmanship, then, it comes as no surprise that Ackerman finally agrees with Arendt on “the most important point”: modern men and women must learn to take “citizenship” seriously (We the People, p. 220, emphasis added).