Unpolitical democracy

Political Theory

Volumn 38, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 65-92

  Urbinati, Nadia ^a  

^a Och Spine at New York Presbyterian Hospitals   (United States)

Author keywords

Antidemocracy; Antipolitical; Deliberation; Impartial judgment; Political judgment; Unpolitical

Indexed keywords

EID: 73249135435     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: 15527476     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591709348188     Document Type: Article

References (120)

1. Thomas Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, trans. with an introduction by Walter D. Morris (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983), 16.
2. For a critical discussion of the several facets of relativism, see Steven Lukes, Moral Relativism (New York: Picador, 2008).
3. Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, 169-70.
4. Massimo Cacciari, The Unpolitical: On the Radical Critique of Political Reason, ed. and with an introduction by Alessandro Carrera, trans. by Massimo Verdicchio (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 94.
5. This echoes Joseph Ratzinger's criticism of democracy's presumption of making law substi- tute for the ethical good: The majority principle always leaves open the question of the ethical foundations of the law. This is the question of [...] whether there is something that is of its very nature inalienably law, something that is antecedent to every majority decision and must be respected by all such decisions. That which Holds the World Together: The Pre-political Moral Foundations of a Free State, in
6. Joseph Ratzinger and Jürgen Habermas, The Dialectic of Secularism: On Reason and Religion (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007), 60.
7. Bernard Yack, Democracy and the Love of Truth (manuscript paper to be pub- lished in a collective volume on Truth and Democratic Politics by the University of Pennsylvania Press).
8. For an overview of the counterrevolution ideology and its manifestation with different streams of antiliberal thoughts, cf. Stephen Holmes, The Anatomy and Anti-Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
9. Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France (1797), ed. Richard A. Lebrun (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994) chap. 7.
10. Edmund Burke, Reflections on Revolution in France (1790), in The Portable Burke, ed. Isaac Kramnick (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 438-44.
11. Pierre Rosanvallon, La contre-démocratie. La politique à l'âge de la défiance. Paris: Seuil, 2006.
12. Philip Pettit, Depoliticizing Democracy, Ratio Juris 17 (March 2004): 52-65.
13. Deliberative Democracy, the Discursive Dilemma, and Republican Theory, in Debating Deliberative Democracy, ed. James S. Fishkin and Peter Laslett (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2003), 138-62.
14. Pettit, Depoliticizing Democracy, 64.
15. Rosavallon, La contre-démocratie, 15.
16. Nancy Rosenblum, On the Side the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 25-26.
17. Iris Young was among the first to criticize the rationalist vocation of deliberation (Justice and the Politics of Difference [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990, chap. 4]).
18. but see also Bernard Yack, Rhetoric and Public Reasoning: An Aristotelian Understanding of Political Deliberation, Political Theory 34 (2006): 417-38.
19. Bryan Garsten, Saving Persuasion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
20. Linda L. Zerilli, Response To Jon Simons, Political Theory 28, no. 2 (April 1, 2000): 279-84.
21. Chantal Mouffe, Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism? Social Research 66 (1999): 745-58.
22. Pettit, Depoliticizing Democracy, 59.
23. Vigilance, dénounciation, and notation are the three forms of the pouvoirs de surveillance that negative power puts in action.
24. Rosanvallon, La contre-démocratie, 15-21.
25. Early on, Michel Gauchet suggested a parallel between the judge (in the court) and opinion (in civil society) because both of them put in action a permanent representation of the sovereign while none of them wants to substitute to the ordinary powers of the sovereign, but wants simply to recall them that they must remain within the constitutional limits.
26. La révolution des pouvoirs. La souver-aineté, le peuple et la représentation 1789-1799 (Paris: Gallimard, 1995, 43-36.
27. Une telle défiance démocratique s'exprime et s'organise de multiples façons. J'en distinguerait trois modalités principales: les pouvoirs de surveillance, les formes d'empêchement, les mises à l'épreuve d'un jugement. Rosanvallon, La contre-démocratie, 15.
28. Ibid., 224.
29. Pierre Rosanvallon, La Légitimité démocratique. Impartialité, réflexivité, prox-imité (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2008), 354.
30. Hannah Arendt captured the political implications deriving from being a spectator and being an actor: the former entails impartial judgment, but the later is unavoidably partial.
31. Only the spectator occupies a position that enables him to see the whole; the actor, because he is part of the play, must enact his part-he is partial by definition. Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, ed. with an interpretative essay by Ronald Beiner (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 55.
32. For a brilliant critical analysis of the myth of the independent citizen (not partisan).
33. see Rosenblum, On the Side of the Angels, in particular chapter 7.
34. Le populisme peut être appréhendé dans ce cas comme une forme d'expression politique dans laquelle le projet démocratique se laisse totalement aspirer et vampiriser par la contre-démocratie; il est la forme extrềme de l'anti-politique. Rosanvallon, La contre-démocratie, 276.
35. On populism's antithesis to democracy, see Nadia Urbinati, Democracy and Populism, Constellations 5, no. 1 (March 1998): 110-24.
36. for a more benign understanding of populism, see Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London and New York: Verso, 2005).
37. Rosanvallon, La contre-démocratie, 276.
38. According to Bernard Manin, video democracy represented a new stage in the evolution of representative government, one in which partisanship would be replaced by more objective information. Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 228-29.
39. I criticized Manin's interpretation in Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy (Chicago and London: the University of Chicago Press, 2006), 38-39.
40. Damian Tambini, Nationalism in Italian Politics: The Stories of the Northern League, 1980-2000 (London: Routledge 2001) chap. 3 and 4.
41. Tom Gallagher, Rome at Bay: The Challenge of the Northern League to the Italian State, Government and Opposition 27, no. 4 (2007): 470-85.
42. Rosanvallon, La contre-démocratie, 263-68.
43. Ibid., 308.
44. Philip Pettit, Republican Freedom and Contestatory Democracy, in Democracy's Value, ed. Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordón (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 163-90.
45. Gene Rowe and Lynn J. Frewer, Public Participation Methods: A Framework for Evaluation, Science, Technology and Human Values 25 (2000): 3-29.
46. For an excellent critical overview of citizens panels, see Mark B. Brown, Survey Article: Citizen Panels and the Concept of Representation, Journal of Politi- cal Philosophy 14 (2006): 203-25.
47. Archon Fung, Varieties of Participation in Complex Governance, Public Administration Review 66 (2006): 66-75.
48. James Fishkin, The Voice of the People: Public Opinion and Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995).
49. Nadia Urbinati and Mark E. Warren, The Concept of Representation in Contemporary Democratic Theory, Annual Review of Political Science 11 (2008): 387-412.
50. Bruce Ackerman, We the People: Foundations (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 181.
51. Jane J. Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy, with a revised preface (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), 248-51.
52. Russell Muirhead, Why Deliberative Democracy Needs Partisans, forthcoming in Critical Review (2009), pp. 24-25 of the manuscript.
53. Brown, Survey Article, 8.
54. Fishkin has written that deliberative polls are a modern version of the ancient Athenian selection by lot (The Voice of the People, p. 169).
55. for a counterargument, see Brown, Survey Article, 9-10.
56. Pettit, Depoliticizing Democracy, 56-57.
57. Ibid., 54.
58. An interesting comparison has been proposed by David Miller, who shows how the deliberative ideal fulfills the promises of liberal-democratic institutions because, while it starts from the premise that political preferences will conflict and that the democratic institutions must resolve them, it envisages this occurring through an open and uncoerced discussion of the issue at stake with the aim of arriving at an agreed judgment. Informal processes of discussion make pro- cedural and institutional factors less central. Deliberative Democracy and Social Choice, in Fishkin and Laslett, eds., Debating Deliberative Democracy, 183.
59. Pettit, Depoliticizing Democracy, 57.
60. Josiah Ober, The Original Meaning of 'Democracy': Capacity to Do Things, Not Majority Rule, Constellations 15, no. 1 (2008): 3.
61. Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999), 174.
62. Pettit, Republicanism, 167.
63. John Dunn, Democracy: A History (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005), 54.
64. Cf. Giuseppe Cambiano, Polis. Un modello per la cultura europea (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2000), in particular chapters 1 and 2.
65. J. G. A Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Traditionm (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 100-03.
66. Pettit, Republicanism, 166.
67. Ibid., 176.
68. Hence, liberal theorists of democracy, from Joseph Schumpeter to William Riker, have insisted in giving suffrage a mainly negative function that involves removal of leaders more than guiding politics.
69. Richard Bellamy, Political Constitutionalism: A Republican Defense of the Constitutionality of Democracy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 163-71.
70. Pettit adds an important caveat to his criticism: the enemy of liberty as nondomination and republican good government was born in the nineteenth century, with the theory of national sovereignty and the centrality of public opinion and parliamentary democracy. Republicanism, 182.
71. Pettit, Depoliticizing Democracy, 54-55.
72. Niccoló Machiavelli, The Discourses, ed. Bernard Crick, trans.
73. Leslie J. Walker (London: Penguin Books, 1970), 1:18 and 58.
74. James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana, in The Commonwealth of Oceana and a System of Politics, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 32-33, 24-25, 29, 143.
75. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract: Principles of Political Rights, in Basic Political Writings, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), book 4, chap. 2.
76. The enmity of republicanism to democracy became particularly strong after and as a consequence of the French revolution; an antidemocratic republican was certainly Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de Sismondi (1773-1842) as one can see from his Recherches sur les Constitutions des Peuples libres written between 1796 and 1800 and whose first complete edition was edited by Marco Minerbi (Genève: Droz, 1965).
77. Pettit, Deliberative Democracy, 145-46.
78. But also in the Leviathan the subjects have the legal right to sue the sovereign in a controversy over property, debt, or criminal law as if it were against a Subject. My goal is to simply disclose the intriguing suggestion coming from Pettit's revision of the deliberative theory of democracy: extending deliberation and republican contestability would allow modern democracies to be more regulated and less political (hence also less democratic), but for this very reason less exposed to partisan arbitrariness, and thus more secure against the sovereign. Pettit's repub- licanism is not very far from Hobbes' formalism. Indeed, although according to Hobbes the scope of what the law requireth, is under the control of the sovereign (and this gravely contradicts the neo-republican principle of making liberty secure, not simply legally defined), it is however certain that Hobbes argued that when the sovereign oversteps these bounds or can no longer fulfill its role, it is no longer legitimate; Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan, ed. Richard Tucker (Cam- bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), chap. 21.
79. Pettit, Republicanism, 196.
80. In La contre-démocratie, Rosanvallon reconstructs the history and institutional characteristics of the main controlling strategy, from the ancient tribunate to modern constitutional courts and central banks.
81. For a clarification on the role of the theory of liberty as nondomination in relation to democracy, see Pettit, Republicanism, 164-72.
82. On the antidemocratic implications of neo-Roman republicanism, see John McCormick, Machiavelli against Republicanism: On the Cambridge School's 'Guicciardinian Moments,' Politi- cal Theory 31 (October 2003): 615-43.
83. Pettit, Republicanism, 166.
84. For some recent critical appraisals of Pettit's theory of liberty, see Bellamy, Political Constitutionalism, 154-62.
85. Patchen Markell, The Insufficiency of Non-Domination, Political Theory 36, no. 1 (2008): 9-36.
86. Pettit Deliberative Democracy, 154.
87. Pettit, Republicanism, 179.
88. Thus the target of Pettit's neo-Roman model of good government is not merely democracy but post-eighteenth-century representative democracy, a hybrid embodiment of several components, all of which potentially hostile to liberty: popular sovereignty, suffrage, and the electoral appointment of representatives; the lawmaking power of the parliament; party competition; and the manipulation of public opinion (pp. 182 and 198). Pettit's concern reminds us of Friedrich Hayek's about the natural tendency of democracy to become unlim- ited and the conviction that the conditions of liberty can be met only by taking the powers of the decision out of the hands of democratic assemblies, whether representative or plebiscitarian.
89. Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 1: Rules and Order (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1973), 3.
90. Pettit, Republicanism, 174.
91. Pettit, Deliberative Democracy, 156.
92. Pettit, Republicanism, 185.
93. Samuel Freeman, Deliberative Democracy: A Sympathetic Comment, Philosophy and Public Affairs 29, no. 4 (2000): 375. (Freeman argues, convincingly, that the contrast between aggregative or interest-based voting and deliberative judgment is wrongly posed because, as Rousseau and Rawls have convincingly shown, assessing one's interests is not necessarily opposite to making judgments in the general interest, pp. 376-77).
94. For a version of deliberation less unfavorable to party advocacy, see Amy Gutmann and Dennis F Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement: Why Moral Conflict Cannot Be Avoided in Politics and What Should Be Done About It (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1996), 135.
95. I discussed this issue at length in Representative Democracy, chapter 3.
96. This is the scheme followed by Rawls in depicting the mind of the individuals behind the veil of ignorance. Manin, The Principles of Representative Government, 349.
97. The judge cannot be representative of (the opinion of) the sovereign because he does not have himself the power to make the law and thus to resist the law-wherein it is evident that opinion is directly related to sovereignty or the sphere of political deliberation. This was in Tocqueville's correct opinion the main source of the difference between American and European systems and the fact that the former gave to judges an immense political power as the latter did not.
98. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans.
99. J. P. Mayer (New York: Harper Perennial, 1969), 100-01.
100. On the negative impact of political judgment (thus election) on judicial integrity of trial judges, see Gregory A. Huber and Gordon C. Sanford, Accountability and Coercion: Is Justice Blind when It Runs for Office? American Political Science Review 28, no. 2 (2004): 247-63.
101. for an empirical analysis of the different methods of judgment by judges and political representatives, see Andrew Gelman, Why Do Supreme Justice Drift Toward the Center? http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2005/11/why-do-s upreme.html.
102. Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans.
103. Anne M. Choler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), book 11, chap. 4 and 6.
104. A regime of lawmaking needs not, in order to be right, result in perfect just laws; rather, it needs only use procedures capable of producing laws that are valid.
105. Frank Michelman, How Can the People Ever Make the Laws? A Cri- tique of Deliberative Democracy, in Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Rea- son and Politics, ed. James Bohman, and William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997), 148.
106. Rawls himself acknowledged this difference when he specified that it is essential to liberty that citizens and their representatives, unlike public officers, have only a moral not a legal duty to reason impartially: I emphasize that it is not a legal duty, for in that case it would be incompatible with freedom of speech.
107. John Rawls, The Idea of Public Reason Revisited, in Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999 [1997]), 577.
108. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 212.
109. Frank R. Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy beyond Fact and Value (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 47.
110. Different as they were, both Jean-Jacques Rousseau and James Madison agreed that lawmaking is a work that consists in finding minimum common denominator among partial views or interests to dilute the extremes, rather than erasing or ignoring them. Rousseau, On The Social Contract, 155-56.
111. Federalist 10, in James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1987), 57.
112. Jon Elster, Deliberation and Constitution Making, in Deliberative Democracy, ed. Jon Elster (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 104.
113. For an extremely useful analysis of the forms of judgment and rhetorical reasoning, see Chaim Perelman, Justice, Law, and Argument: Essays on Morals and Legal Reasoning (Boston: Reidel Publishing Company, 1980), 59-66.
114. The grammar of egalitarian societies seems to accentuate predicates, evaluations by the subject, whereas the language of hierarchic societies would be evocative, its grammar and syntax would have a magic quality... In an equalitarian society language belongs to everybody and evolves quite freely; in a hierarchic society it congeals. Its expressions and formulas become ritual and are listened to in a spirit of communion and total submission.
115. Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, trans.
116. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1971), 164.
117. On the perspectival nature of political judgment, see Norberto Bobbio, Left and Right: The Significance of A Political Distinction, trans. with an introduction by Allan Cameron (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1996), 1-17.
118. Manin, The Principles of Representative Government, 183-92.
119. Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, trans.
120. John Henry Freese, The Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 33-47.