Session 4b: Justifying Democracy

1st Global Conference

Friday 30th April – Sunday 2nd May 2010
Prague, Czech Republic

Equality: Empowerment or Regressive Egalitarianism?
Nicolas Bechter
Reasearch Project: “Jewish members of the Austrian parliament” at the Department of Political Science, University of Vienna, Austria

Equality was – and indeed is – often considered as the major goal and principle of democracy. The equality of the citizens, the equality of citizens and their political leaders, the equality of different ethnic groups or the equality of different genders.

The paper shall start with an overview on the different forms of equality in the discourse on democracy theory. Starting with ancient and enlightened philosophers current or more recent trends (i.e. Habermas, Macpherson, Crouch or anti-democratic scholars, such as the anarcho-capitalist Hans-Hermann Hoppe) shall be examined.

Nevertheless the main focus of the paper is the question whether equality is really the most important principle of democracy or just an ideological phrase.

Isn‘t the enlightenment ideal of equality dialectically combined to the methods of egalitarianism in modern societies such as often critcised by (not exclusively) Frankfurt School scholars? The call for equality is not only the call for all people to have the same possibilities to participate in democratic processes, but also the threat to all the marginalised groups of a society (migrants, women, etc.), that they can only participate, if they surrender their uniqueness to the standard of the majority.
In this understanding democracy theory shouldn‘t focus on equality as the goal of democracy, but on a „situation in which individuals can be different without fear“ (Adorno).

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

Radical Democracy and Associative Ethics
Jason Edwards
Department of Politics, Birkbeck, University of London, United Kingdom

‘Radical democracy’ may stand for a particular approach towards thinking and speaking about democracy. Involved in it are a rejection of both classical liberal and republican theories of democracy. Liberalism as process, republicanism as life – democracy is neither prudential nor immanent. The justification for democracy is to be found within already existing forms of democratic practice. The ethics of democracy is a practical ethics inherent in democratic practices. ‘Ethics’ does not stand for a set of law-governed restrictions or prohibitions, not for a general set of principles of action or conduct. A democratic ethics can be understood as a set of action-orientations that are embedded within the institutions and practices that are taken by the participants as democratic. To understand what democracy is requires a reflection on these institutions and practices and the democratic concepts that are held by actors participating in these institutions and practices.

Today two theories of radical democracy dominate contemporary democratic literature: deliberative democracy and agonistic democracy. In this paper I will argue that these theories offer powerful challenges to liberal and republican models of democracy by focusing on the character of an ethics of discussion and an ethics of difference in democratic practices. However, they fail to offer a convincing reconciliation of the demands of discussion and difference. I will argue that such a reconciliation can only be made when we recognise how democratic practices are informed by an ethics of association – a form of democratic practice that encompasses both the achievement of agreement through various forms of discussion and argumentation while starting from a recognition of the ineliminable differences inherent to democratic life.

Democracy World-wide? A Reflection on the Questions, ‘What is Democracy?’ and ‘What is it Good For?’
Evert van der Zweerde
Centre for Ethics, Faculty of Philosophy, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands

In this paper it is argued that, although democracy is not a vision of the good life, but one of the conditions for it, it must, in order to “do what it is good for”, be treated as if it were not a mere means. The value of “democracy” is relative, but not nil, because it does three good things. i. lending legitimacy to political power and to those that embody it; ii. serving to transform societal antagonism into political agonism, thus turning opposed societal power into contestable political power; iii. generating commitment, on the part of a dèmos, to their government and political system. The argument will arrive at a definition of democracy as primarily a quality of a “regime”, i.e. of a set of institutions, repertoires and practices. A “regime” marked by this quality is, under conditions of relative societal homogeneity and equality, the best possible form of government, provided it is matched by a set of democratic civic virtues. The core element of this “quality” is the presence of a substantial degree of participation of people in the decisions (not only the deliberations that precede those decisions) which concern them. The often-suggested “identity of rulers and ruled” is an oversimplification, because “ruler” and “ruled” are not single identities. This already points to the second argument, namely that although democracy is “good”, there is no such thing as a single conception of democracy that is best for all possible situations. The type of democracy that people are familiar with in most Western countries during the more recent part of history, i.e. liberal democracy, is not an obvious model for the whole world, nor an obvious model for the West, for that matter.