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01/12/2022

Democracy & Liberty, Part 3

The previous parts of our series: 1(a), 1(b), 2(a), and 2(b). The first two focus on democracy, the next two concern liberty.

This is our fifth and final installment on “democracy and liberty” from Raghavan Iyer’s book, Parapolitics: Toward the City of Man (Oxford University Press, 1979), specifically, from the beginning of the chapter on “Democracy and Liberty in Emerging Polities.” Iyer’s aim was to “show the complexity of the concepts of democracy and liberty, the variety of concrete conditions, and the specificity of theoretical assumptions upon which they are usually based.” This is a necessary but not sufficient condition for an appreciation of “some of the telling features and immediate problems of the emerging polities [often called ‘developing countries’ and usually and not helpfully grouped together as the ‘third world’], many of which have colonial histories and most of which are “victims of imperialistic domination,” although Iyer notes that these are “not all new countries or new democracies or even newly independent entities,” the salient point remaining that “the world-wide demand for national self-determination and sovereignty has now become essentially irresistible.” Geographically, most of these new States belong to the continents of Asia and Africa, which have given to humanity its chief religions, and now comprise the great majority of the world’s people ….” (Bracketed comments here and below are from yours truly.)

This last snippet from the aforementioned chapter treats “the assumptions underlying the traditional models and modern systems of democracy and liberty [emphasis added]:”

“Both these concepts were conditioned by the intellectual climate of early scientific metaphysics, the ethical flavor of secularized religious values, and the social and economic context of expanding industrial capitalism, as well as the noble but somewhat naïve optimism and enthusiasm of the [European Enlightenment] philosophes and revolutionaries. We cannot trace the details here of the lineage and background of these concepts, but merely indicate a few of the more fundamental assumptions. Political power is assumed to be a finite quantity of storable and distributable force which resides in individuals or in the social system. When it is evenly divided among the crucial agencies of decision-making or when its concentration at a single point is prevented by a complicated machinery of checks and balances, the stable equilibrium of the system is achieved [this ‘equilibrium’ later becomes, for John Rawls, transformed into a more explicitly Liberal and democratic concern for the ‘stability of a well-ordered society of justice as fairness’]. Individuals are motivated by the attractions and repulsions of self-interest [this term has a complicated and a fairly wide range of meanings within the history of political and economic thought in the West; see, for example, the discussion in Stephen Holmes’ Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 1995)]. Given an atomistic view of actions, interests, and individuals, the pulls and pressures in different directions throughout the system can be seen as reconcilable only in terms of a central harmony carried over from the ancient world into a mechanistic picture of nature and the finite universe. The stress in politics as in science is on regularity, predictability, and manufacturability. This simple model was modified and generalized into a doctrine of political pluralism and the interplay of autonomous centers in our own century.

The pace of change should be slow, measured, and self-regulating, except for inevitable explosions in the system at infrequent intervals [these ‘explosions’ would soon include the ‘manias, crashes, and panics’ endemic to capitalism]. The needs of social life and of State action are generally not so compelling or immediate as to require rapid legislation or even a very strong and expanding government and administration [an essential premise of conservatism and libertarianism]. There should be opportunities for revision and readjustment at all levels of activity, so that the number of irrevocable changes in the system is reduced to a minimum [this is what I have elsewhere described, after Jon Elster and Robert E. Goodin, as the obdurate ideological doctrine of ‘piecemeal (trial-and-error) social engineering and incrementalism,’ which has strong family resemblance to the inordinate fondness for and fealty to tradition, custom or convention and, in common law, a rather strict rendering of stare decisis (precedent)]. A purely utilitarian but cautious conception of government may be combined with a contractual and relatively static picture of society. There is presumed to be a majestic movement in history toward better democracy and greater freedom, toward spontaneous [if not inevitable] social progress. The struggles of the past—between Church and State, Society and State, Government and State, the King and his Barons, Kind and Parliament and the Courts, Government and the Courts, the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat—have all been regarded as essential and ordered phases in a grand sequence, aspects of the folklore of the political odyssey of liberal democracy. The notion of sovereignty, theories of the State, and many other preoccupations of the political theorists of democracy and liberty were doubtless stimulated by such factors as the bitter struggle between Church and State, which has no parallel in the history of many of the emerging polities of today. The acceptance of the System by all classes and groups through a series of struggles resulted in considerable cultural [and especially in the U.S., racist] homogeneity and a common political consciousness. The dissolution of traditional loyalties and local bonds led to a general concern for common rights and wider loyalties. The growth of a civic spirit and of social solidarity thus came to be taken for granted.

A crucial assumption is the unique efficiency of a competitive mechanism of politics, open to all and regulated by its own code [hence ‘self-regulating’], marked by considerable mobility between rival groups and the equalization of risks if not rewards, destined to maximize general satisfaction. [….] The method of arriving at decisions is assumed to be more important than whether the right decision is taken in any situation [‘proceduralism’]. It could be contended that the subordination of democratic theory to rationalist ends and utilitarian procedures is not so much the corruption as the culmination of democratic ideas. However, many critics of democracy complain that there is no real competition, that there are non-competing groups and a collusion between different sections of the ruling class, that the élite in power becomes the Establishment by absorbing potential rivals and by alienating the incurably discontented until they are regarded as the common enemies of the entire System. At the worst the System is a social or economic monopoly, and at its best it is a form of monopolistic competition in which there are clandestine coteries pulling strings behind the scenes and reaching compromises in the hope of deferred if not immediate profits. Apologists and critics of democratic competition share many common assumptions and play into each other’s hand by their respective exaggerations. Mill and Montesquieu as well as Mosca and Marx spoke some truth[s] about democracy and liberty.

An even less pleasant assumption is the uniqueness of particular democratic systems [as in, say, the U.S. or Great Britain, perhaps even in France], which fosters a mystical faith in the inevitability and invulnerability of democracy and liberty in a given country and an obstinate belief in the dubiousness of democracy and liberty elsewhere. The greater the prevailing cynicism, the more the assumption has been cherished. The tragedy of democracy and liberty in the older States, like that of religion and culture, has been their prostitution and desecration in the service of individual and national egotism. A less harmful assumption is the magical potency of political ritual, with its ideal as well as symbolic elements, its capacity to bolster up failing morale and to allay persisting anxieties. Like all ritual, it is impersonal, dramatized, and solemn, an equalizer and a tranquilizer, a medium of expression as well of communication, a substitute for the sense of mystery of the supernatural. When ritual is outmoded and decaying we have democracy at a low temperature. There is, finally, the admirable assumption that political freedom and responsibility could be developed through exercise; that all social problems are soluble by the good sense of every citizen; that every individual is endowed with integrity, conscience, and reason; that the potentialities of individuals are more important than their present capacities; that it is better to reform society than to accept or reject it; that people have the power of grading loyalties as well as being moved by them; that the citizen knows when to resist and how to compromise; that the leader knows how to listen and when to lead; that, in short, it is better to trust than to fear others and ourselves” [emphasis added].  

Relevant bibliographies for this series of posts:

Posted at 04:48 AM in Patrick S. O'Donnell |

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