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The Spirit of Democracy
Jeffrey Stout
Columbia Legal Theory Workshop
November, 2004
The following paper is the transcript of a talk that I have delivered this fall to general audiences at the University of Tennessee and the University of Notre Dame. It summarizes a position on one aspect of the ethics of citizenship—a position explicated and defended in more strictly philosophical terms in my book, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). I would encourage anyone interested in the details of my critique of Rawls and Rorty to read chapter 3. My critiques of John Milbank, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Stanley Hauerwas are presented in chapters 4-7.
Things would be different if you and I and others like us behaved differently. This is the thought that the Levelers had in mind when they claimed that all English citizens have a share in responsibility for decisions about who rules England and how. Sojourner Truth gave the same thought another twist hundreds of years later when she said: “If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, [today’s] women together ought to be able to turn it back and get it right-side up again.”[1]
The thought is not that things would be different if we were gods or supermen. It need not involve an aspiration to take God’s place. The thought is that things would be different if we did what we could do, given our ordinary human capacities to think, converse, and interact with one another. And what we could do, in this sense, is what we can reasonably be held responsible for failing to do—by God, according to believers, on the day of judgment, by the victims of injustice in our midst today, if we give them a voice, and by our descendants, who will someday have to live with the long-term consequences of our actions.
By refusing to defer to unjust rulers or any other human being who claims to be our superior, it is in our power to deny them effective authority. This implies that the decision about who rules and what the basic roles and regulations are going to be in fact rests with us. The responsibility for our institutional arrangements belongs to us. What, then, do I mean by the spirit of democracy? The notion that we, the people, are responsible for the condition of our society and that it is therefore up to us to take responsibility for our common life.
The self-conscious affirmation of this responsibility first achieves expression in early-modern Christian talk about popular sovereignty. This talk was not meant to deny God’s ultimate sovereignty over the political order as part of creation. To the contrary, it took for granted that all human beings are responsible ultimately to God for the human arrangements in which they are complicit. But the notion of popular sovereignty did involve a historic expansion in the range of things for which human beings are to be held responsible. The basic social framework had long been viewed as given by God, as something already settled as part of God’s creation, with the basic roles having already been defined and distributed. Both sides of the original debate over popular sovereignty made their cases in theological terms. Both sides acknowledged God’s ultimate sovereignty over all creation.
Modern democracy is the tradition in which the implications of human responsibility for human arrangements are gradually made explicit—not only in cities and states, but also in civil society, in corporations, and in families. It consists in the attempt on the part of human beings to exercise collective responsibility over the arrangements governing them. Exercising this responsibility in the public sphere is a matter of holding rulers responsible for the arrangements they make on one’s behalf and holding one’s fellow citizens responsible for the role they play in determining who rules and what the arrangements are going to be. In the ancient world democracy meant direct rule by the commons. In the modern world it refers in the first instance to formal procedures that allow citizens to turn them out of office in favor of someone else. As Oliver O’Donovan points out, the modern legislature or parliament is supposed to conduct its deliberations against the background of, and in response to, a public discussion in which all members of the society are entitled to participate. In this respect, it differs from medieval councils, which served at the pleasure of monarchs and gave their advice to them privately.[2]
But the meaning of democracy in the modern world is hardly exhausted by the procedural structures of government. Indeed, the structures of government, being largely administrative, tend to be largely bureaucratic in nature. They tend also to be large, hierarchical, and to some extent corrupt. As such, they are also resistant, for a variety of reasons, to being held responsible by the societies they are supposed to serve. It therefore makes sense to say that modern governmental structures are democratic only to the extent that they are actually responsive to a public discussion and an electoral process in which members of the society in question actually participate. Hence Dewey’s claim, in his early essay “The Ethics of Democracy,” that “Democracy is a form of government only because it is a form of moral and spiritual association.”[3]
In other words, a form of government ceases to be democratic insofar as the public life surrounding it ceases to be animated—ethically inspirited—by a concerted attempt on the part of citizens to hold one another responsible for the condition of the government and to hold governmental officials responsible to the governed. The activity of holding rulers and one’s fellow citizens responsible by offering reasons to them and demanding reasons from them places citizens in a moral association with one another—an association the spirit of which is mutual recognition and accountability. By allowing all citizens to express their own most deeply felt commitments and aspirations, as well as their interests, in the public discussion, a genuinely democratic community also implicitly affirms its members as spiritual beings. The spirit of democracy resides in a citizenry that practices accountability and mutual recognition. Where the spirit of democracy is lacking, the rhetoric of democracy becomes mere ideology, a decoration draped over institutions to enhance their authority by disguising their nondemocratic reality.
Democratic discussion cannot proceed from perfect agreement in spiritual outlook, because the most deeply felt commitments expressed in it are various, conflicting, and constantly in flux. Still, many are the citizens who aspire, in expressing their concerns, to bring about a more perfect union by their own lights. The United States of America is full of perfectionists bent on perfecting both themselves and the life that citizens share together. But democracy in this time and place has had to come to terms with a plurality of perfectionisms. American citizens are conscious to the extent to which their ideals of perfection conflict. While modern democracy has deep religious roots, and retains a perfectionist impulse, it should not be viewed as a species of religion. It has become an attempt on the part of human beings to take responsibility for shared arrangements, despite (and in light of) the differences in religious outlook that divide one person from another. Its wise defenders value it without proposing it as an object of worship in its own right. To bow down before democracy, or any other product of human effort, is idolatry.
Almost every finite good becomes somebody’s ultimate concern sooner or later, and democracy is no exception. That is why my book chastises Whitman, one of my heroes, for occasionally allowing his love of democracy to degenerate into “chauvinistic idolatry.” All human societies are prone to self-idolatry. A society that takes pride in democratic self-reliance is no less prone to self-idolatry than a society that considers itself God’s chosen people. The warning is always in order.
Our society is so far from being worthy of worship in my view that it barely sustains the hope required to continue the struggle for just arrangements. Sheldon Wolin rightly laments “the evisceration of democracy” in our day.[4] The problem has a cultural and an institutional dimension. Culturally, individuals had until recently largely lost their habits of political participation. In most recent elections they voted in low numbers. What they said in public often lacked the spirit of mutual accountability and respect essential to the “moral and spiritual association” Dewey was trying to describe in 1885. As Wolin makes clear, many members of our society do not think of themselves as citizens, as having a share in the responsibility for its condition (590-594). Given that they work mainly in corporate and governmental bureaucracies, they are in the habit of deferring to superiors and then expressing their resentment privately. They have learned the habits of the culture they inhabit.
The state of political culture reflects the nature of our institutions. We now live in a world dominated militarily by the American Superpower and economically by corporate conglomerates. Our inherited procedures of accountability—the election of political representatives, legislative bodies that are responsive to public discourse, and an independent judiciary —might now be incapable of constraining the mutually reinforcing powers of empire and capital. Organizationally speaking, Wolin concludes, we have entered a postdemocratic era.
Democracy survives, in effect, only by splitting in half. On the institutional level, as the semblance of an accountable form of government, it is a structure of electoral and other procedures in fact controlled by empire and capital; it is the means of disguise by which empire and capital legitimate their control of government. On the cultural level, as a social practice dedicated to demanding real accountability, democracy becomes “fugitive.” It becomes a perpetual but necessarily ephemeral struggle to hold organizations of all kinds accountable for their behavior. Fugitive democracy depends, as Wolin puts it, on “the ingenuity of ordinary people in inventing temporary forms to meet their needs” (603). It does not aspire to govern, he says, because that would involve accommodating itself to hierarchical institutions. It aspires instead to “nurture the civic conscience of society” (606).
I share Wolin’s concerns about the evisceration of democracy. And as Democracy and Tradition makes clear, I am more than happy to join him in an attempt to nurture the civic conscience of society. Better fugitive democracy than no democracy at all. Yet I also worry that Wolin’s vision is self-defeating. His picture of our situation is too bleak to sustain hope, but also too bleak to be entirely accurate. Fugitive democracy—like its close cousin, fugitive Christianity—threatens to become a mere “ought” that has lost both its roots in the soil of social life and any hope of effecting change in the institutions it criticizes. It is the spirit of spiritless conditions, the sigh of creatures who take themselves to be powerless against the major agents of their oppressed condition.
Wolin sees grounds for hope only at the local level. It is true that local arrangements are inherently easier for citizens to hold accountable than national and global arrangements are. Capital now holds by far the greatest concentration of power, operates freely at the national and global levels, and transforms most political officials at both of these levels into its tools. But the arrangements required to keep power concentrated in this way—deregulation of corporations, imperial control of oil-rich countries, and a shift of societal burdens from rich to poor—depend for their survival on the deference and torpor of ordinary people. If we, and many others like us, behaved differently, things would be different.
To abandon the hope that we might, by changing our own behavior, be able to use governmental structures to exercise a greater degree of control on the economy than we now do is also to resign ourselves to ever-increasing domination by corporate elites. While it is foolish to think that the election of democrats to political office would transform government into something other than a sprawling hierarchical bureaucracy, it is too early or too despairing simply to concede essentially unconstrained global power to capital. It is also premature to cede control of the legislative and electoral processes to big money or control of the judiciary to people who believe that the Bill of Rights became obsolete on the day our government declared a permanent state of war against terrorism.
Even from the vantage point of a strictly fugitive democracy, the question of who holds office in the three branches of government in the United States remains an issue of great consequence for people everywhere. The major institutional buttress of fugitive democracy as a cultural force in the United States is judicial respect for the First Amendment. If we lose freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right of assembly, democracy will not be fugitive; it will be subterranean. If the legal system is to survive as a significant institutional repository of practical wisdom, it needs judges who are prepared to nourish the spirit of democracy and protect the Bill of Rights. Who will appoint those judges, if democrats abandon the mechanisms of government to the interests of empire and capital? I conclude that a strictly fugitive democracy—as a politics that has lost all hope in the representative function of government as a means for holding rulers accountable—is self-defeating in practice.
If fugitive democracy is self-defeating, is that because Wolin’s picture is too bleak or because it is not bleak enough? The completely bleak conclusion would be that democracy can survive in the decades ahead, if at all, only by going underground, by abandoning its hopes of holding any institution accountable and becoming instead a subterranean affair of clandestine meetings and occasional imprisonment and martyrdom. If it comes to that, then underground I will go. But it is not obvious to me that ordinary people are incapable of taking collective responsibility for their institutional arrangements. Wolin underestimates the potential vitality of democratic culture because he doesn’t look in the right places to find it. His localism proceeds largely without the benefit of local knowledge.