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Polity Volume 45, Number 3 July 2013 © 2013 Northeastern Political Science Association 0032-3497/13 www.palgrave-journals.com/polity/
EDITOR’S NOTE Democracy: A Perilous Project? During Athens’ golden age, the participation of non-noble citizens in deliberations about the interests and policies of the city–state generated considerable consternation among members of the previously reigning aristocratic families. They alleged that the demos introduced new emotions, desires, and expectations into political discussions: the democratic style of politics seemed greedier, more spiteful, and less generous to enemies than the politics of the nobles. Whatever the shortcomings of rule by skilled warriors (and the shortcomings were well known, partly through Homer’s stories of aristocratic rage and vengeance), the demagoguery, materialism, and irresoluteness of the democracy seemed worse. Today, political scientists also have a love–hate relationship with democracy. Fears of “democratic distempers” and impatient, boundless appetites coexist with hopes of making the entire world more democratic. The tension is particularly apparent in certain subfields, such as comparative politics, and on certain topics, such as studies of the causes and unanticipated consequences of referenda and party caucuses. That tension is also evident in this issue of Polity. On the whole, the authors of the articles in this issue see democracy as a source of blessings and dignity. Yet there also is a sense that democracy is a form of politics with troubling features and potential hazards. Each essay either analyzes a risk in democratic politics that is not commonly recognized and discussed, or notes how a frequently identified risk is less dangerous than is commonly assumed. *** For contemporary political scientists, the writings of Thucydides and Kant remain sources of observations and dreams about democracy.1 Gerald Mara uses Thucydides’ critical analysis of democratic politics in Athens to reflect on challenges to Kant’s proposal for creating a worldwide federation of democratic states. Mara recognizes that Kant is more hard edged than present-day admirers of his moral philosophy might realize. After all, he defends war because, despite bloodshed, military threats cultivate patriotism, love of liberty, and other noble sentiments. Mara, therefore, chooses not to contrast the unworldly “idealist” Kant 1. See, for example, Jeffrey Church’s “The Political Cultivation of Moral Character: Kant on Public Moral Feeling as a Precondition for Right,” Polity 45 (January 2013): 56–81.
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with the power-sensitive “realist” Thucydides (a common juxtaposition among students of international relations). Mara explores another type of difference. In his opinion, Kant fails to recognize the challenges that the complex passions and the ongoing contestation of democratic politics pose to morally motivated reform. Kant’s followers (says Mara) could learn a lot from Thucydides about the ways visions of history, of providence, and of rationality are constantly manipulated and debated in democratic orders, making politics profoundly contingent. True, Thucydides arguably underestimates the possibilities for enhancing politics. For him, fierce political contestation seems to be an inherent feature of democratic politics, which makes systematic efforts to improve the world seem silly. Kant, however, ignores the political forces within a democracy, especially the disputations of cultural traditions and the sudden sea changes in citizens’ emotions, that make the consequences of ambitious reforms unpredictable. Like Mara, Nora Hanagan argues that today’s reformers, wishing to bring greater justice to human affairs, do not appreciate the challenges that democracy poses to effective change. Whereas Mara turns to Thucydides to remind readers of the popular passions and public debates that are absent from a Kantian vision of global democracy, Hanagan turns to the experiences of Jane Addams to correct what Hanagan considers to be the blind spots of Iris Marion Young and Jean Bethke Elshtain. In Hanagan’s opinion, both writers, who are prolific moral philosophers and ardent advocates of social justice, misunderstand how social segmentation and class isolation impede democratically oriented reformers’ understandings of the circumstances, needs, desires, and abilities of most poor and working-class citizens. This is because Young and Elshtain do not fully appreciate the need for concrete, local-level cooperative actions across class lines. Instead, they emphasize the importance of patterns of moral reasoning that arise from one’s family and community. This is not adequate, Hanagan insists. Because the United States is a profoundly class-structured society, people from different class backgrounds reside and labor in different parts of every city. Hermetically sealed from the experiences and viewpoints of others, U.S. citizens often find the choices of people from other class backgrounds odd, irrational, and perverse. As a result, an unwarranted sense of moral superiority poisons well-intentioned efforts by the materially fortunate to improve the conditions of fellow citizens who are down on their luck. Addams’ memoirs about cross-class contact at Hull House teach readers about the need for inclusivity in policymaking. Inclusivity, says Hanagan, entails not just giving many people access to decision-making processes, but also meeting face to face and regularly with people from different backgrounds to discuss how to solve immediate, tangible problems. Such exchanges, according to Addams, will help promote respect for the profound diversity of perspectives within a class stratified society and, according to Hanagan, will offset the current drift toward rule by state-funded experts, which Young and Elshtain wisely fear.
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Dylan Weller’s article is an ardent response to Robert Bellah’s famous call for an American “civil religion.” As Weller notes, Bellah’s proposal resembles Rousseau’s insistence that a free and healthy society be infused with a common religious outlook. Believing that this helps citizens curb narrow self-interest and pursue their common good, Rousseau advised political leaders to ban heresies and heretics. While Bellah did not believe that American citizens needed to be legally pressured to hold a particular view of God, he nonetheless believed that for the modern nation to survive as a democracy, in which people from different ethnic backgrounds and class standings live and work alongside each other, all citizens must believe in some sort of God and in an afterlife, in which virtue and vice will be rewarded and punished. Like Rousseau, Bellah contends that a civil religion helps citizens overcome divisions of short-term interest and thus promotes republican virtue. Moreover, a civil religion helps citizens hold their state officials to a “higher judgment” and not passively accept the state’s dictates and pronouncements. “But what about the growing numbers of citizens in the United States who are agnostic or atheistic?” asks Weller. Should political rituals, from the pledge of allegiance to the mottos used on coins, continue if they inadvertently foment a sense of shame and resentment among non-believing citizens and, meanwhile, plant seeds of suspicions among believers about the potential disloyalty of non-believing citizens? Weller, fearing the emergence one day of hostility between believers in God and non-believers, argues that the rights of non-theists should be more stridently defended in the United States. This requires, among other things, a reexamination of the many myths Americans hold about the alleged immoral impulses of non-theists, including their proclivity to crass materialism and licentious life styles. Weller, conversely, urges non-theists in America to dampen public denouncements of God-fearing citizens and, instead, to reflect on Santayana’s and Dewey’s vision of religious life, in which one both expresses respect for ideals of a better world and views life’s ultimate purpose as a mystery. Kelly Bay-Meyer’s article on Nicaragua looks at efforts to create a democratic political order where a ruthless plutocracy once existed. Bay-Meyer first recounts the conditions and events leading to the Sandinista Revolution. The article then reports the results of fieldwork on the novel community councils that the new regime had established, purportedly to empower the poor. Bay-Meyer finds that the democratic experiments fell far short of expectations. Weak state capacity and partisan rivalries have meant that community organizations function as patronage outlets, which reward loyal followers of the regime, rather than as forums in which everyday people can, through free and open discussion, help define public goods and determine local policies. Cronyism, and not public spiritedness, has been the cultural consequence of this democratic experiment. Using field interviews to see through regime rhetoric, Bay-Meyer concludes that
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a genuine participatory democracy is extremely difficult to establish where economic inequality is extreme, where the state is weak, where partisan distrust is rampant, and where corruption is already widespread. An implication that a reader can easily derive is that hopes for encouraging democracies need to be rooted in an appreciation of social history and economic vulnerability, and in realistic expectations of what everyday people want, need, and wish to do—a point that resembles Hanagan’s argument in her essay on Addams.2 Nomi Claire Lazar, in a highly original discussion of the sources of durable democracy, turns the conversation back to classical Western history. Lazar asks if bursts of short-term dictatorship (or prerogative power) are necessary for the preservation of people’s rule. After all, the use of prerogative power was an accepted practice in ancient Rome when the citizenry needed to manage crises. Why would its use no longer be wise? Lazar, noting the many constitutional checks and restrictions on the Roman use of dictatorship, challenges a common dichotomy: dictatorship versus non-dictatorship. The practical issue, Lazar emphasizes, is determining the specified purpose of and restraints on prerogative power. When used for focused reasons that are understood by the citizenry, prerogative power can enhance a democratic system during periods of crisis. In the case of the Roman republic, prerogative power provided an element of flexibility that allowed the regime to adjust to changing conditions. Lazar closes by surmising that the origins of general hostility in the United States to prerogative power may be the outcome of a nostalgic view of the origins of the constitution. The myth of the constitution’s original purity leads to demands for vigilant protection and to deep suspicions of any procedural change. Given the governing problems that inevitably occur as evolving social and international conditions clash with older constitutional arrangements, it may be wise to become more candid about the limitations of any constitutional plan and, therefore, to the legitimacy of prerogative power. Regular readers of Polity may have noticed the recent appearance of essays on methodology and the philosophy of social science.3 This issue closes with an essay that addresses a central question in interpretive analysis: are value-neutral description and the social-scientific practice of interpretation compatible? Jason Blakely tackles this question by recalling Alasdair MacIntyre disagreements with Peter Winch. MacIntyre, who agreed with Winch’s insistence that “social science” 2. Readers interested in participatory governance may wish to contrast Bay-Meyer’s conclusions with those advanced by Brian Wampler in “Participation, Representation, and Social Justice: Using Participatory Governance to Transform Representative Democracy,” Polity 44 (October 2012): 666–82. 3. For example, Carlo Bonura, “Theorizing Elsewhere: Comparison and Topological Reasoning in Political Theory,” Polity 45 (January 2013): 34–55; Edward Schatz and Elena Maltseva, “Assumed to be Universal: The Leap from Data to Knowledge in the American Political Science Review,” Polity 44 (July 2012): 446–72; Ian S. Lustick, “Taking Evolution Seriously: Historical Institutionalism and Evolutionary Theory,” Polity 43 (April 2011): 179–209.
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departs from “natural science” in that the former studies human agents with goals, expectations, and understandings about social circumstances, went a step beyond Winch and argued that interpretation can never be value neutral. According to MacIntyre, when describing the action, the analyst inevitably must make assumptions about the reasonableness and rationality of the practitioner’s views. These assumptions are always rooted in the researcher’s own norms, expectations about how society works, and presumptions about rationality and reasonableness. An implication of MacIntyre’s position, Blakely argues, is that a social scientist’s interpretation of a political situation not be superior to the interpretation offered by a non-scientist. The non-scientist may have a better handle on the norms, expectations and so on that constitute the action. Rather than being necessarily better or worse, the scientist’s and non-scientist’s accounts are simply different. They reflect different backgrounds, experiences, and points of view about rationality and reasonableness. Blakely closes by noting that MacIntyre’s methodological position promotes a democratic politics in which different truth claims, by elites and non-elites alike, are treated as equally valid. This seems an appropriate closing for an issue devoted to the topic of the true and false hazards of democratic politics. *** The painting on this issue’s cover was selected during the journal’s lively, quarterly editors’ meeting. At the meeting, the managing editor, the associate editors, and I agree on a tagline, choose a piece of cover art, and decide on the sequence of the articles for the issue. By far, the most fun is the selection of cover art. The four of us, being different in our ages, social backgrounds, and political commitments, see different lessons in every piece of art. Currently, we have a set of about a dozen cartoons, photographs, paintings, prints, and sculptures in reserve for moments when we are stuck about what might fit the tagline and set of articles. But we are always looking for additional possibilities. If, by chance, you have a piece of art in mind that you think might make a good cover for an issue of Polity, please send the information to: cyrus.
[email protected]. Let us know about the political lessons that you found in the artwork. We will take a look and see if we can use it.
Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh Polity (2013) 45, 313–317. doi:10.1057/pol.2013.16
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