From Public to Social Reasoning in a Liberal Democracy

   

From Public to Social Reasoning in a Liberal Democracy*

“Democracy [in Athens] started with Solon [638-558 BCE] stating that persuasion should be the way to win, not money or force or family relations. ‘Citizens come into the forum with nothing but their arguments.’ In today’s consolidated democracy, ‘we may take for granted that a democratic regime presupposes freedom of speech and assembly, and liberty of thought and conscience.’ Taking them for granted may obfuscate their strength and fragility.’” — Nadia Urbinati (quoting Michael Walzer and John Rawls respectively), Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (Harvard University Press, 2014).

The bracketed reference to Athens above is meant to suggest the origins of “democracy” may not be exclusively of Grecian provenance, for

“… the little word democracy [dēmokratia] is much older than classical Greek commentators make out. Its roots are in fact traceable to the Linear B script of the Mycenaean period, seven to ten centuries earlier, to the late Bronze Age civilization (c. 1500-1200 BCE) that was centered on Mycenae and other urban settlements of the Peloponnese. It is unclear exactly how and when the Mycenaeans learned to use the two-syllable word dāmos, to refer to a group of powerless people who once held land in common, or three-syllable world like damokoi, meaning an official who acts on behalf of the dāmos. What is also unclear is whether these words, and the family of terms we use today when speaking about democracy, have origins further east, for instance in the ancient Sumerian references to the dummu, the ‘inhabitants’ or ‘sons’ or ‘children’ of a geographic place. But these uncertainties are tempered by another remarkable discover by contemporary archaeologists: it turns out that the democratic practice of self-governing assemblies is also not a Greek innovation. The lamp of assembly-based democracy was first lit in the ‘East,’ in lands that geographically correspond to contemporary Sryia, Iraq and Iran. The custom of popular self-government was later transported eastwards, towards the Indian subcontinent, where sometime after 1500 BCE, in the early Vedic period, republics governed by assemblies became common. The custom also traveled westwards, first to Phoenician cities like Byblos and Sidon, then to Athens, where during the fifth century BCE it was claimed as something unique to the West, as a sign of superiority over the ‘barbarism’ of the East.” — John Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy (W.W. Norton & Co., 2009).

Amartya Sen made a similar point several years earlier, urging us not to view democracy as “just a gift of the Western world.” As Sen explains,

“democracy is intimately connected to with public discussion and interactive reasoning. Traditions of public discussion exist across the world, not just in the West. And to the extent that such a tradition can be drawn on, democracy becomes easier to institute and also to preserve. Even though it is very often repeated that democracy is a quintessentially Western idea and practice, that view is extremely limited because of its neglect of the intimate connections between public reasoning and the development of democracy—a connection that has been profoundly explored by contemporary philosophers, most notably John Rawls. Public reasoning includes the opportunity for citizens to participate in political institutions and to influence public choice. Balloting can be seen as only one of the ways—albeit a very important way—to make public discussions effective, when the opportunity to vote is combined with the opportunity to speak and listen, without fear. The reach—and effectiveness—of voting depend critically on the opportunity for open public discussion. [….]

Long traditions of public discussion can be found across the world, in many different cultures. But here India does have some claim to distinction…. The Greek and Roman heritage on public discussion is, of course, rightly celebrated, but the importance attached to public deliberation also has a remarkable history in India. [….] [After citing an encounter between Alexander and Jain philosophers, Sen points out that] in the history of public reasoning in India, considerable credit must be given to the early Indian Buddhists, who had a great commitment to discussion as a means of social progress. The so-called ‘Buddhist councils,’ which aimed at settling disputes between different points of view, drew delegates from different places and from different schools of thought. The first of the four principal councils was held in Rājagriha shortly after Gautama Buddha’s death; the second about a century late in Vaiśālī; and the last occurred in Kashmir in the second century CE. But the third—the largest and best known of these councils—occurred under the patronage of Emperor Ashoka in the third century BCE, in the then capital of India, Pātaliputra (now called Patna). These councils were primarily concerned with resolving difference in religious principles and practices, but they evidently also addressed the demands of social and civic duties, and furthermore helped, in a general way, to consolidate and promote the tradition of open discussion on contentious issues.

[…. ] [Ashoka] was strongly committed to making sure the public discussion could take place without animosity or violence. Ashoka tried to codify and propagate what must have been among the earliest formulations of rules for public discussion—a kind of ancient version of the nineteenth-century ‘Robert’s Rules of Order.’ He demanded, for example, ‘restraint in regard to speech, so that there should be no extolment of one’s own sect or disparagement of other sects on inappropriate occasions, and it should be moderated even on appropriate occasions’ [the history of Tibetan Buddhism testifies to how difficult this was, for a time at least, to put into practice!]. Even when engaged in arguing, ‘other sects should be duly honoured in every way on all occasions.’

Ashoka’s championing of public discussion has had echoes in the later history of India, but none perhaps as strong as the Moghal Emperor Akbar’s sponsorship and support for dialogues between adherents of different faiths, nearly two thousand years later, Akbar’s overarching thesis that ‘the pursuit of reason’ rather than ‘reliance on tradition’ is the way to address difficult problems of social harmony included a robust celebration of reasoned dialogues. A royal sponsorship is not essential for the practice of public reasoning, but it adds another dimension to the reach of the argumentative history of India. In the deliberative conception of democracy, the role of open discussion, with or without sponsorship by the state, has a clear relevance. While democracy must also demand much else, public reasoning, which is central to participatory governance, is an important part of a bigger picture.” — Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005).

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The seemingly motley list of “further reading” below is intended to capture some of the (historical and geographical) breadth and depth of public reasoning insofar as such reasoning is capable of revealing, implying or exemplifying ancient, incipient, or Liberal democratic values, principles, and practices that can be and thus should be, or in fact are essential ingredients of a morally robust democracy in the contemporary world. I should note that I understand salons (and perhaps coffeehouses and the ‘republic of letters’ as well) of the European Enlightenment to be one of the fora of social reasoning that blur the boundaries between everyday conversation and more obviously public or democratically oriented deliberations, discussions, and reasoning. Indeed, properly conceived, and with Anthony Simon Laden, we should view reasoning as “a species of conversation,” a form of “relating to others,” not merely making (often agonistic) claims and assertions involving “specific paths to judgment such as deduction, induction, and abduction.” While democratic procedures and the corresponding reasoning that takes place often entail, eventually, coming to some sort of conclusion and is primarily directed to making (individual and collective) decisions and legislating, that fails to do justice to the overarching character and quality of “social reasoning,” which is no less, even if indirectly (say, as a by-product or spillover effect) relevant to democratic procedures and deliberations or the spirit of a democratic society.

Social reasoning does in fact speak more directly to the nature of democratic societies in which citizens hold different worldviews, religious or not, which are often said to be, loosely and at times misleadingly, “multicultural,” societies in which different sorts of pluralism does not make for easy consensus or agreement on any number of topics. Social reasoning takes place among unique individuals or persons: as individuals, and as members of families (or simply in the intimate realm of daily life which extends beyond families), and finally as members of various kinds of groups and community in the society. Laden asks us to consider this reasoning outside the prevailing views, models and practices of same found in professional philosophy and among their academic colleagues in cognitive psychology (which does not render these irrelevant!) insofar as it entails “inviting or proposing” (Laden notes that these can ‘come in all sorts of guises’), thus allowing for the creation of new “relationships,” whereby we construct or modify existing “shared spaces of reasoning” (such spaces allow us to speak to another person or group of persons in the first instance, to speak in a mutually intelligible manner). And although casual conversation, for example, is often aimless and open-ended, it is not “formless.” Laden further speaks to the norms that simultaneously govern conversation and social reasoning more generally, therefore “form[ing], shap[ing], and maintain[ing] our relationships to one another” as well as fashioning “the spaces of reasons we inhabit.”

The anarchist philosopher William Godwin (1756 –1836) drew inspiration for his model of the plausibility of anarchist society and it conspicuous reliance on sophisticated individual judgment as a vehicle of rationality and benevolence from “the context of the social circles in which he lived, worked and debated.” I think Godwin provides us with a powerful picture of just that sort of “social reasoning” we find in Laden’s argument. These radical social circles, in turn, “were part of a larger middle class community which drew on a range of philosophical and literary traditions in developing critical perspectives on contemporary social and political institutions” (Mark Philp). To be sure, Godwin’s An Enquiry Composing Political Justice (first edition, 1793, later editions to 1798) evidences learning from the philosophes and British radicals, as well as others on the periphery of the early Liberal tradition (e.g., Paine), but especially the “writings, sermons, and traditions of Rational Dissent.” But his strong conviction in the veracity of his critique and vision was grounded in the daily life and round of conversations in the social circles of metropolitan radicalism in which he worked and shared his convivial and leisure activities. While this social and intellectual milieu soon succumbed to government repression, it provides what we might call the intimate empirical evidence Godwin needed to fortify his belief (shared with Condorcet) in “perfectibility” (which is distinct from perfectionism) of man and the necessity of an anarchist society as the fertile soil for same.

Godwin was not a political activist (although he knew and was friends with members of radical groups and organizations) but a philosopher. And while the radical social circles in which he lived temper the utopian tendencies of his great work, at the very least they demonstrate radical principles incarnate in praxis, even if Godwin had insufficient appreciation of the greater socio-economic and political conditions that gave rise to (in the sense that they were the necessary preconditions of) radical sentiment. “Given the assumptions and conventions of his background and his social circles” writes Philp, “his position could be rationally defensible.” Godwin’s seemingly naïve faith in the power of private rational judgment was confirmed in his conversational experience within these social and intellectual circles. In Philp’s words,

“… [Godwin’s] membership [in] a literate and intellectual culture … cannot be identified politically, socially or intellectually with either aristocratic privilege or with the potentially violent and disruptive London poor. It is in this group that we find the politically unattached intellectuals and writers who had greeted the French Revolution and who had called for reform at home on intellectual and humanitarian grounds.  [While this group is] is diffuse and made up of heterogeneous social and intellectual currents … there seems to be no doubt that in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, there existed in both London and the provinces significant number of critical, literate, professional men and women who held often very radical views on social, political and religious issues who regularly met together for the purposes of discussion in a number of overlapping social and professional circles. [….]

Godwin move[d] in the company of artists, portrait painters, engravers, grammarians, industrialists, writers, editors, publishers, antiquarians, librarians, actors, theater managers, playwrights, musicians, novelists, poets, classical scholars, scientists, dons, lawyers, mathematicians, doctors, surgeons, and divines—and this list is not exhaustive. We should also recognize that members of these groups sustained a commitment to radical thinking throughout most of the last decade of the century. As both [Roy] Porter and [Marilyn] Butler stress, [the middling class radicalism of these men and women was not simply the product of a Dissenting background, the French Revolution, and the influence of the philosophes, for it required the warp and woof of a cultural experience of that type of sociability that formed the basic fabric of late-eighteenth century intellectual life:

Once he had concluded his morning’s work Godwin’s day was free and he generally spent it in company—talking and debating while eating, drinking and socialising. His peers’ behavior was essentially similar; they lived in a round of debate and discussion in clubs, associations, debating societies, salons, taverns, coffee houses, bookshops, publishing houses, and in the street. And conversation ranged through philosophy, morality, religion, literature and poetry, to the political events of the day. Members of these circles were tied together in the ongoing practice of debate. These men and women were not the isolated heroes and heroines of Romanticism pursuing a lonely course of discovery; they were people who worked out their ideas in company and who articulated the aspirations and fears of their social group. Their consciousness of their group identity was of signal importance….”

Godwin’s anarchist ideal of a natural society is fundamentally “discursive,” or perhaps better, conversational, in other words, a society defined by “intellectually active and communicative agents, a society where advances are made through a dialectic of individual reflection and group discussion.” Reason and argument in conversation were the lifeblood of the radicalism that flourished in the soil of this kind of sociability:

“The rules [which function as social norms] of debate for this group were simple: no one has a right to go against reason, no one has a right to coerce another’s judgment, and every individual has a right—indeed, a duty—to call to another’s attention his faults and failings. This is a highly democratic discourse, and it is essentially non-individualist: truth progresses through debate and discussion and from each submitting his beliefs and reasoning to the scrutiny of others.” The values of openness, rationality, and discussion or conversation that distinguished this sociability were likewise suffused with the norms and values that animated the literature of “sensibility.”

* Such a society need not be capitalist. As readers may know, I happen to believe eco-socialism is perfectly compatible with Liberal democracy, indeed, that it is preferable, in fact, obligatory, on any number of democratic, social justice and moral grounds, including for urgent environmental and ecological reasons.

Further Reading

• Azadpur, Mohammad. Reason Unbound: On Spiritual Practice in Islamic Peripatetic Philosophy (State University of New York Press, 2011).
• Bohman, James and William Rehg, eds. Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics (MIT Press, 1997).
• Blom, Philipp. A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment (Basic Books, 2010).
• Craveri, Benedetta (Teresa Waugh, trans.) The Age of Conversation (New York Review Books, 2005).
• Diagen, Souleymane Bachir. Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with the Western Tradition (Columbia University Press, 2018).
• Elster, Jon, ed. Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
• Fontana, Benedetto, Cary J. Nederman, and Gary Remer, eds. Talking Democracy: Rhetorical Perspectives on Rhetoric and Democracy (Pennsylvania State Press, 2004).
• Fumaroli, Marc (Laura Vergnaud, trans.) The Republic of Letters (Yale University Press, 2018)
• Ganeri, Jonardon. Philosophy in Classical India (Routledge, 2001).
• Garsten, Bryan. Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Harvard University Press, 2006).
• Garver, Eugene. Rhetoric: An Art of Character (University of Chicago Press, 1994).
• Gaus, Gerald. The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
• Gilbert, Alan. Democratic Individuality (Cambridge University Press, 1990).
• Goodin, Robert E. Reflective Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2003).
• Goodin, Robert E. Innovating Democracy: Democratic Theory and Practice after the Deliberative Turn (Oxford University Press, 2008).
• Goodman, Dena. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Cornell University Press, 1994).
• Goodman, Lenn E. Islamic Humanism (Oxford University Press, 2003).
• Gordon, Daniel. Citizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670-1789 (Princeton University Press, 1994).
• Groff, Peter S. Islamic Philosophy A-Z (Edinburgh University Press, 2007).
• Habermas, Jürgen (Thomas Burger, trans. with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (MIT Press, 1989; in German, 1962).
• Habib, Irfan, ed. Akbar and His India (Oxford University Press, 1997).
• Harvey, Peter. An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics: Foundations, Values, and Issues (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
• Hirakawa, Akira (Paul Groner, trans.) A History of Indian Buddhism: From Śākyamuni to Early Mahāyāna (University of Hawaii Press, 1990).
• Hourani, George F. Reason and Tradition in Islamic Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 1985).
• Israel, Jonathan I. Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, Human Rights, 1750-1790 (Oxford University Press, 2012).
• Israel, Jonathan I. The Enlightenment that Failed: Ideas, Revolution, and Democratic Defeat, 1748-1840 (Oxford University Press, 2019).
• Kale, Steven. French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1948 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).
• Kock, Christian. Deliberative Rhetoric: Arguing about Doing (University of Windsor, 2017).
• Laden, Anthony Simon. Reasoning: A Social Picture (Oxford University Press, 2012).
• Krausz, Michael, ed. Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation (University of Notre Dame Press, 1989).
• Leaman, Oliver. An Introduction to Classical Islamic Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2^nd, 2002).
• Leaman, Oliver. The Qur’an: A Philosophical Guide (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).
• Leaman, Oliver. Islam and Morality: A Philosophical Introduction (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).
• Long, Jeffery D. Jainism: An Introduction (I.B. Tauris, 2009).
• Lynch, Michael P. Truth in Context: An Essay on Pluralism and Objectivity (MIT Press, 1998).
• Lynch, Michael P. Truth as One and Many (Oxford University Press, 2009).
• Matilal, Bimal Krishna. The Central Philosophy of Jainism: Anekāntavāda (L.D. Institute of Indology, 1981).
• McEvilley, Thomas. The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies of Greek and Indian Philosophies (Allworth Press, 2002).
• Melton, James Van Horn. The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment in Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
• Miller, Stephen. Conversation: A History of a Declining Art (Yale University Press, 2006).
• Moosvi, Shireen. Episodes in the Life of Akbar: Contemporary Records and Reminiscences (National Book Trust, 1994).
• Nikam, N.A. and Richard P. McKeon, ed. and trans. The Edicts of Aśoka (University of Chicago Press, 1959).
• Nusseibeh, Sari. The Story of Reason in Islam (Stanford University Press, 2017).
• Perdue, Daniel E. Debate in Tibetan Buddhism (Snow Lion Publications, 1992).
• Perdue, Daniel. The Course in Buddhist Reasoning and Debate (Snow Lion, 2014).
• Philp, Mark. Godwin’s Political Justice (Cornell University Press, 1986).
• Rawls, John. Political Liberalism (Columbia University Press, 1993).
• Rescher, Nicholas. Pluralism: Against the Demand for Consensus (Oxford University Press, 1993).
• Robinson, Francis. The Mughal Emperors and the Islamic Dynasties of India, Iran, and Central Asia (Thames & Hudson, 2007).
• Strong, John S. The Legend of King Aśoka: A Study and Translation of the Aśokāvadāna (Princeton University Press, 1983).
• Thapar, Romila. Aśoka and the Decline of the Mauryas (Oxford University Press, revised ed., 1998).
• Turkle, Sherry. Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Penguin Press, 2015).
• Urbinati, Nadia. Mill on Democracy: From the Athenian Polis to Representative Government (University of Chicago Press, 2002).
• Urbinati, Nadia. Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy (University of Chicago Press, 2006).
• Walton, Douglas N. Plausible Argument in Everyday Conversation (State University of New York Press, 1992).
• Walton, Douglas N. The New Dialectic: Conversational Contexts of Argument (University of Toronto Press, 1998).
• Warder, A.K. Indian Buddhism (Motilal Barnarsidass, 3rd ed., 2000).