Does democracy reveal the voice of the people? Four takes on rousseau

Australasian Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 75, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 141-162

  Gaus, Gerald ^a  

^a QUEENSLAND UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY   (Australia)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0141508438     PISSN: 00048402     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00048409712347761     Document Type: Article

References (48)

1. See e.g., J. Roland Pennock, Democratic Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University)
2. See e.g., J. Roland Pennock, Democratic Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) p. 261.
3. 'The nation-state is the politics of the first person plural. Its government can speak for its people because it is part of the "we". It emerges out of the nation. There can be disputes about how the government does its emerging, by election or by some more obscure process . . . [But in the nation state all governments claim] their authority, truthfully or not, from the will of the people'. The Economist (Dec. 23, 1995-Jan. 5, 1996) pp. 17-18.
4. Saul K. Padover (ed.), Thomas Jefferson on Democracy (New York; Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1939) p. 15.
5. Sidney Verba, 'The Voice of the People', PS: Political Science & Politics 26 (1993) pp. 677-686, esp., p. 677.
6. Robert Dahl, A Preface to Economic Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) p. 28.
7. William Riker, Liberalism Against Populism (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1988) pp. 11-12.
8. See my Justificatory Liberalism: An Essay on Epistemology and Political Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) pp. 269 ff.
9. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract in The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G.D.H. Cole (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1973) p. 185 [bk. II, ch. iii].
10. Riker, Liberalism Against Populism, p. 11.
11. Jules Coleman and John Ferejohn, 'Democracy and Social Choice', Ethics 97 (1986) pp. 6-25, esp., p. 15.
12. Joshua Cohen calls this a 'purely procedural' conception of populism. See 'An Epistemic Conception of Democracy', Ethics. 97 (1986) pp. 26-38, esp., p. 29. I consider his alternative, 'reasonable populism', in sections IV and V below.
13. Even Idealist theories held that the general will was a function of individual wills, but the former was not simply calculated from the latter; rather, the general will was a systematized and coherent will that in some way encompassed the individual wills. See Bernard Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State (London: Macmillan, 1951) pp. 140 ff.
14. According to one psychiatrist, when talking to a schizophrenic it is 'as if one was talking to a series of complexes or mental processes, not to a single person; as if one was presented with all the parts of a body dissected from each other with no unity to bind them into a single body'. See Anthony Storr, The Integrity of the Personality (Harmondsworfh: Penguin, 1964) p. 68.
15. Michael Argyle, The Psychology of Interpersonal Behaviour, 3rd. edn. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978) p. 211.
16. The Social Contract, p. 182 [bk. II, ch. 1].
17. Bernard Grofman and Scott L. Feld, 'Rousseau's General Will: A Condorcetian Perspective'. The American Political Science Review 82 (1988) pp. 567-576.
18. For broadly epistemic accounts of democracy, see Rex Martin. A System of Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1993), chs. 6 and 7;
19. David Estlund, 'Making Truth Safe for Democracy' in David Copp, Jean Hampton and John E. Roemer (eds.). The Idea of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) pp. 71-100;
20. Susan Hurley, Natural Reasons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
21. See also Elaine Spitz, Majority Rule (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House, 1984), p. 206;
22. Brian Barry, 'The Public Interest' in Anthony Quinton (ed.), Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967) pp. 112-126;
23. For discussions of Grofman and Feld, see the responses by David Estlund and Jeremy Waldron, as well as Grofman and Feld's rejoinder in The American Political Science Review 83 (1989) pp. 1315-1335.
24. Arthur Kuflik, 'Majority Rule Procedure' in J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman (eds.) NOMOS XVIII: Due Process (New York: New York University Press, 1977) pp. 297-322, esp., p. 306.
25. Those who maintain that the common good arises out of majority voting typically conflate the interests of the majority with the common good, as in the following passage from The Economist, August 6, 1994, p. 20, col. 2: 'Taxes are imposed for what government believes to be the common good. Some people will condemn the ends the government decides on: pacifists may object to defence spending, or greens to spending on new roads. Most pay anyway. They have other ways of making their case: through the press, through the legislature and even, as a last resort, by sitting down in the streets. But at the end of the day government must govern, and tax, in the interests of the majority'.
26. John Dewey, Intelligence in the Modern World: John Dewey's Philosophy (ed.) Joseph Ratner (New York: Modern Library, 1939) p. 402.
27. See Arend Lijphart, 'The Political Consequences of Electoral Laws, 1945-85'. The American Political Science Review 85 (1990) pp. 481-496.
28. See S.I. Benn and G.F. Gaus, The Liberal Conception of the Public and Private' in S.I. Benn and G.F. Gaus (eds.), Public and Private in Social Life (New York: St. Martin's Press. 1983) pp. 31-65, esp. pp. 56-57.
29. See my 'Greerr, Bosanquet and the Philosophy of Coherence' in The Routledge History of Philosophy, vol. VII, The Nineteenth Century (ed.) C.L. Ten (London: Routledge, 1994) pp. 408-436.
30. Geoffrey Brennan and Loren E. Lomasky, Democracy and Decision: The Pure Theory of Electoral Preference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
31. See also L.B. Solum, 'Constructing an Ideal of Public Reason,' San Diego Law Review 30 (1993) pp. 729-762, esp. pp. 755-756.
32. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987) p. 160 [sec. 40].
33. See also Ronald Beiner, Political Judgment (London: Methuen, 1983) pp. 51 ff;
34. Onora O'Neill, Constructions of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) p. 46.
35. For example, the so-called 'political liberals'. See, e.g., John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993);
36. Charles Larmore, 'Political Liberalism', Political Theory 18 (1990) pp. 339-360.
37. See also Jeremy Waldron, 'Theoretical Foundations of Liberalism' in his Liberal Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) pp. 36-62;
38. Gerald Gaus, Value and Justification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) Part II.
39. On the distinction between the rational and the reasonable, see Gerald Gaus, 'The Rational, The Reasonable and Justification', The Journal of Political Philosophy 3 (1995) pp. 234-258.
40. On constructivism, see John Rawls, 'Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory', The Journal of Philosophy 77 (1980) pp. 515-572;
41. David O. Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) pp. 17 ff.
42. In addition to Rawls, see also Stephen Macedo, Liberal Virtues (Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1991);
43. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1971) p. 139.
44. Fred D'Agostino, 'Some Modes of Public Justification'. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 69 (1991) pp. 390-414.
45. See, e.g., Jiirgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicolsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987).
46. See A.K. Sen, Collective Choice and Social Welfare (San Francisco: Holden-Day 1970).
47. Fred D'Agostino, 'The Idea and Ideal of Public Justification', Social Theory and Practice 18 (1992) pp. 143-164.
48. Rousseau, The Social Contract, p. 246 [bk. IV, ch. i].