| This is the introduction chapter of the book : "Civil Society
and Political Theory", published in 1992 at MIT Press. We are providing
it with the permission of the authors. For the Table of Content . |
By Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato
We are on the threshold of yet another great transformation of the self-understanding of modern societies. There have been many attempts from various points of view to label this process: the ambiguous terms "postindustrial" and "postmodern" society reflect the vantage points of economic and cultural concerns. Our interest is in politics. But from this standpoint, the changes occurring in political culture and social conflicts are poorly characterized by terms whose prefix implies "after" or "beyond." To be sure, for a variety of empirical and theoretical reasons the old hegemonic paradigms have disintegrated, as have the certainties and guarantees that went with them. Indeed we are in the midst of a remarkable revival of political and social thought that has been going on for the last two decades.
One response to the collapse of the two dominant paradigms of the previous period -pluralism and neo-Marxism - has been the attempt to revive political theory by "bringing the state back in." While this approach has led to interesting theoretical and empirical analyses, its state-centered perspective has obscured an important dimension of what is new in the political debates and in the stakes of social contestation.1 The focus on the state is a useful antidote to the reductionist functionalism of many neo-Marxian and pluralist paradigms that would make the political system an extension, reflex, or functional organ of economic (class) or social (group) structures of selectivity and domination. In this respect the theoretical move served the cause of a more differentiated analysis. But with respect to all that is nonstate, the new paradigm continues the reductionist tendency of Marxism and neo-Marxism by identifying class relations and interests as the key to contemporary forms of collective action. Moreover, the legal, associational, cultural, and public spheres of society have no theoretical place in this analysis. It thereby loses sight of a great deal of interesting and normatively instructive forms of social conflict today.
The current "discourse of civil society," on the other hand, focuses precisely on new, generally non-class-based forms of collective action oriented and linked to the legal, associational, and public institutions of society. These are differentiated not only from the state but also from the capitalist market economy. Although we cannot leave the state and the economy out of consideration if we are to understand the dramatic charges occurring in Latin America and Eastern Europe in particular, the concept of civil society is indispensable if we are to understand the stakes of these "transitions to democracy" as well as the self-understanding of the relevant actors. It is also indispensable to any analysis that seeks to grasp the import of such changes for the West, as well as indigenous contemporary forms and stakes of conflict. In order to discover, after the demise of Marxism, if not a common normative project between the "transitions" and radical social initiatives under Established liberal democracies, then at least the conditions of possibility of fruitful dialogue between them, we must inquire into the meaning and possible shapes of the concept of civil society.
Admittedly, our inclination is to posit a common normative project, and in this sense we are post-Marxist. In other words, we locate the pluralist core of our project within the universalistic horizon of critical theory rather than within the relativistic one of deconstruction. At issue is not only an arbitrary theoretical choice. We are truly impressed by the importance in East Europe and Latin America, as well as in the advanced capitalist democracies, of the struggle for rights and their expansion, of the establishment of grass roots associations and initiatives and the ever renewed construction of institutions and forums of critical publics. No interpretation can do these aspirations justice without recognizing both common orientations that transcend geography and even social political systems and a common normative fabric linking rights, associations, and publics together. We believe that civil society, in fact the major category of many of the relevant actors and their advocates from Russia to Chile, and from France to Poland, is the best hermeneutic key to these two complexes of commonality.
Thus we are convinced that the recent reemergence of the "discourse of civil society" is at the heart of a sea change in contemporary political culture.2 Despite the proliferation of this "discourse" and of the concept itself, however, no one has developed a systematic theory of civil society. This book is an effort to begin doing just that. Nevertheless, systematic theory cannot be built directly out of the self-understanding of actors, who may very much need the results of a more distanced and critical examination of the possibilities and constraints of action. Such theory must be internally related to the development of relevant theoretical debates. At first sight the building of a theory of civil society seems to be hampered by the fact that the stakes of contemporary debates in political theory seem to be located around different axes than the nineteenth century couplet of society and state. It is our belief, however, that the problem of civil society and its democratization is latently present in these discussions and that it constitutes the theoretical terrain on which their internal antinomies might be resolved.
Three debates of the last 15-20 years seem to tower above all the rest. The first continues an older controversy within the field of democratic theory between defenders of elite vs. participatory models of democracy.3 The second, for the most part restricted to the Anglo-American world, is between what has come to be called "rights-oriented liberalism" and "communitarianism." While it covers some of the same ground as the first controversy, the terms of the second discussion are quite distinct for, unlike the first, it occurs within the field of normative political philosophy rather than between empiricists and normativists.4 The third debate, pitting neoconservative advocates of the free market against defenders of the welfare state, has animated discussion on both sides of the Atlantic.5 Its context is, of course, the notorious crisis of the welfare state that intruded on political consciousness in the mid-1970s. These debates are interrelated, and, as already indicated, there are overlaps. Nevertheless, each of them has culminated in a distinct set of antinomies leading to a kind of standoff and increasing sterility. What no one seems to have realized, however, is that the relatively unsystematic and heterogeneous discourse of the revival of civil society can be brought to bear on these debates and indeed can provide a way out of the antinomies that plague them. Accordingly, we shall briefly summarize these debates in this introduction and show how our book provides a new paradigm for thinking about the issues they raise.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the debate between elite and participatory models of democracy has been going around in circles ever since Schumpeter threw down the gauntlet to the normativists in 1942.6 Schumpeter's claim that "the democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide via a competitive struggle for the people's vote"7 has formed the core of the elite model of democracy ever since. Democracy is defined not as a kind of society or as a set of moral ends or even as a principle of legitimacy but rather as a method for choosing political leaders and organizing governments. The elite model of democracy claims to be realistic, descriptive, empirically accurate, and the only model that is appropriate to modern social conditions.
Far from indulging in utopian illusions about the possibility of either conjuring away the phenomenon of power or the gap between rulers and ruled, this approach assumes that no society, and certainly no modern one, could function without both. A "realistic" appraisal of democratic societies must grant that the motor of the political system is power just as the motor of the economy is profit. The struggle to acquire and use power is at the heart of the political. What distinguishes democratic from nondemocratic societies is thus the way in which power is acquired and decisions are arrived at: So long as some core set of civil rights is respected and regularly contested elections are held on the basis of a universal franchise, so long as alternation in power is accepted by elites and occurs smoothly without violence or institutional discontinuity, so long as decision making involves compromises among elites and (passive) acceptance by the population, a polity can be considered democratic. The main concern here is obviously with the ability of a government to produce decisions, to have them accepted, and to ensure orderly transitions, i.e., stability.
The elite model of democracy prides itself on providing an operationalizable and empirically descriptive account of the practices of polities considered to be democratic. There is no pretense here that voters either set the political agenda or make political decisions; they neither generate issues nor choose policies. Rather, leaders (political parties) aggregate interests and decide which are to become politically salient 8Moreover, they select issues and structure public opinion. The true function of the vote is simply to choose among the bids for power by political elites and to accept leadership. The voters are consumers, the parties are entrepreneurs offering alternative packages or personnel; it is they who create demand, bowing to consumer sovereignty only with regard to the yes/no decision by the voters about who among the preselected candidates will be their "representatives" (using the latter term very loosely indeed) .9 In short, the empirical theories of democracy (elite, pluralist, corporatist, and rational choice models) tend quite openly to reduce the normative meaning of the term to a set of minimums modeled on a conception of bargaining, competition, access, and accountability derived more from the market than from earlier models of citizenship.
Competitiveness in acquiring political power and in making policy decisions is, of course, the core of this model of democracy. The competitive element is deemed to be the source of creativity, productivity, responsibility, and responsiveness. The ultimate sanction of the vote, together with the necessity on the part of elites to compete for it, will supposedly keep things fair, encourage authorities to be responsive to a multiplicity of demands and accountable to the citizenry, and foster their willingness to compromise with one another. To be sure, this model of democracy rests on certain preconditions that it supposedly should be able to reproduce: high-quality leadership with a tolerance for differences of opinion, a restricted range of political decision,10 and an elite political culture based on democratic self-control.11 These pre-conditions are predicated in turn on the fact of social pluralism cleavage, which the democratic method institutionalizes into non-violent competition for office and influence. A final precondition, deemed indispensable for a stable political system to be able to make decisions, is that it must be shielded from too much participation by the population: Citizens must, as it were, accept the division of labor between themselves and the politicians they elect.12 Accordingly, this model of democracy argues that the secret ballot, civil rights, alternation, regular elections, and party competition are central to every modern conception of democracy if democracy is to have any place at all in complex modern societies.
We find this last statement to be quite convincing, so far as it goes. But the normativist critique of the elite model of democracy is also convincing. It is especially compelling against the elite model's tendency to extol apathy, civil privatism, and the necessity to shield the political system from "excess" demands of the population as democratic principles, the meaning of this excess to be determined by the elites alone.13 The normativists correctly point out that what makes for stability and continuity in a polity is not identical with what makes it democratic. From the standpoint of participation theory, the elite model of democracy is both too broad and too narrow. To define a polity as democratic if it periodically holds contested elections and guarantees civil rights, regardless of what sorts of public institutions or private arrangements exist, is to extend democratic legitimacy to an enormously wide range of societies while simultaneously shielding them from critical scrutiny.14 At the same time the concept of democracy at play here is too narrow, for it is defined by procedures that have left few to do with the procedures and presuppositions of free agreement and discursive will formation.15 Indeed the participation theorists argue that the "realistic" model has denuded the concept of democracy of so many of its elements that it has lost any connection with its past meaning.16 What is left if one drops the ideas of self determination, participation, political equality, discursive processes of political will formation among peers, and the influence of autonomous public opinion on decision making? In short, the price of the elite model's realism is the loss of what has always been taken to be the core of the concept of democracy, namely, the citizenship principle.
Moreover, by restricting the concept of democracy to a method of leader selection and to procedures regulating the competition and policy making of elites, this model sacrifices the very principles of democratic legitimacy on which it is nevertheless parasitic. It loses all criteria for distinguishing between formalistic ritual, systematic distortion, choreographed consent, manipulated public opinion, and the real thing.17
The participatory model of democracy maintains that what makes for good leaders also makes for good citizens-active participation in ruling and being ruled (i.e., in the exercise of power) and also in public will and opinion formation. Democracy in this sense would allow all citizens, and not only elites, to acquire a democratic political culture. For it is through political experience that one develops a conception of civic virtue, learns to tolerate diversity, to temper fundamentalism and egoism, and to become able and willing to compromise.18 Hence the insistence that without public spaces for the active participation of the citizenry in ruling and being ruled, without a decisive narrowing of the gap between rulers and ruled, to the point of its abolition, polities are democratic in name only.19
For the most part, however, when it comes to conceptualizing alternatives, participation theorists offer institutional models that are meant to substitute for rather than complement the allegedly undemocratic (and/or bourgeois) forms of representative government that exist today.20 Whether the theorist harkens back to an idealized model of the Greek polis, to the republican tradition of the late medieval city-state, or to the new forms of democracy generated within the milieus of the workers' movement (council communism, revolutionary syndicalism), in each case the alternative is presented as the single organizational principle for society as a whole. Accordingly, the underlying thrust of these models is the dedifferentiation of society, the state, and the economy. Small wonder that participationists in turn are accused by their opponents of utopianism and/or antimodernisin.21
To sum up, this debate leaves us with the following antinomy: Contemporary democratic theory involves either some rather undemocratic adjustments to the "exigencies of complex industrial societies" coupled with an abandonment of the normative core of the very concept of democracy, or it proffers somewhat hollow normative visions that cannot be reconciled with the institutional requirements of modern society.22
The debate between political liberals and communitarians reproduces some of the arguments described above but on a different terrain. In one respect, both sides in this debate challenge the elite/pluralist model of democracy.23 Both reject antinormative, empiricist, utilitarian strain in this model and both seek to develop a convincing normative theory of democratic legitimacy or justice. The dispute is over how to formulate such a theory. Despite this shift in emphasis, however, this debate also culminates in a set of antinomic positions from which it seems unable to extricate itself. At the center of the controversy are two interrelated issues, one epistemological, the other political. The first revolves around the question of whether it is possible to articulate a formal, universalistic (deontological) conception of justice without presupposing a substantive (historically and culturally specific) concept of the good.24 The second revolves around the question of how freedom can be realized in the modern world. At issue here is whether the idea of freedom should be explicated primarily from the standpoint of individual rights or of the community's shared norms.25 Each side comes up with a different, indeed opposed, set of responses as to what constitutes the legitimating principles of a constitutional democracy. In the process, however, the very conception of liberal democracy disintegrates into its component parts.
Liberal theorists see the respect for individual rights and the principle of political neutrality as the standard for legitimacy in constitutional democracies. The core premise of rights-oriented liberalism is that individuals qua individuals have moral rights that serve as constraints on government and on others - constraints that are under the control of the rights holder. They have these rights not on the grounds of some social convention, aggregate common utility, tradition, or dispensation from God, but by virtue of their having some "property" (moral autonomy, human dignity) that constitutes them as bearers of rights.26 The liberal sees individual autonomy, moral egalitarianism, and universalism as inherent in the idea of moral rights.27 As such, rights constitute the heart of a conception of justice that makes plausible the claim to legitimacy of any modern polity. Law and political decisions are binding to the degree to which they respect individual rights.28
The communitarian critique of the rights thesis focuses on its individualist presuppositions and universalist claims. With respect to the first, communitarians argue that the liberal ideals of moral autonomy and individual self-development are based on an atomistic, abstract, and ultimately incoherent concept of the self as the subject of rights.29 This allegedly leads to a focus on nonpolitical forms of freedom (negative liberty) and an impoverished conception of political identity, agency, and ethical life. Accordingly, the communitarians invoke a set of empirical and normative arguments against these assumptions. First, they argue that individuals are situated within an historical and social context; they are socialized into communities through which they derive their individual and collective identity, language, world concepts, moral categories, etc. Hence the empirical primacy of the social over the individual is asserted against the alleged priority of the asocial individual to society. Second, on the normative level, communitarians charge that liberals fail to see that communities are independent sources of value and that there are communal duties and virtues (loyalty, civic virtue) distinct from duties to others qua their abstract humanity. Indeed, duties of loyalty and membership are and must be primary.
As far as universalism goes, communitarians claim that what the liberal sees as universal norms grounded in the universal character of humanity (dignity or moral autonomy) are in fact particular norms embedded in shared understandings of specific communities. The individual cannot have a firm basis for moral judgment without getting it from a community to which one is committed. The strongest claim is that there are no duties pertaining to abstract man but only to members: The proper basis of moral theory is the community and its good, not the individual and her rights. Indeed, individuals have rights to the degree to which these flow from the common good. Accordingly, the idea of moral rights is an empty universalism that mistakenly abstracts from the only real basis of moral claims, the community. Only on the basis of a shared conception of the good life, only within the framework of a substantive ethical political community (with a specific political culture) can we lead meaningful moral lives and enjoy true freedom.
For those communitarians who see themselves as democrats,30 the concept of freedom thus has to do not with the idea of moral rights but with the specific way in which agents come to decide what they want and ought to do. Taken together, the empirical and normative criticisms of the rights thesis imply that freedom must have its original locus not in the isolated individual but in the society that is the medium of individuation: in the structures, institutions, practices of the larger social whole. Civic virtue rather than negative liberty, the public good as distinct from the right, democratic participation unlike individual rights (and the concomitant adversarial political culture), involve a communal practice of citizenship that should pervade the institutions of society on all levels and become habitualized in the character, customs, moral sentiments of each citizen. By implication, and on the strongest version of these claims, a society in which claims individual rights proliferate cannot be a solidary community but must be alienated, anomic, privatized, competitive and lacking in moral substance.
This debate also leads to an apparently unresolvable antinomy. On the one side, the liberal tradition itself, with its focus on individual rights and its illusions about the possibility of political neutrality, appears as the source of egoistic, disintegrative tendencies in modern society and hence as the main impediment to achieving a democratic society predicated on civic virtue. The other side counters with the contention that modern societies are precisely not communities integrated around a single conception of the good life. Modern civil societies are characterized by a plurality of forms of life; they are structurally differentiated and socially heterogeneous. Thus, to be able to lead a moral life, individual autonomy and individual rights must be secured. On this view, it is democracy, with its emphasis on consensus, or at least on majority rule, that is dangerous to liberty, unless suitably restricted by constitutionally guaranteed basic rights that alone can render them legitimate in the eyes of minorities.
The debate between defenders of the welfare state and its neo-laissez-faire critics has also been going around in circles, albeit for a shorter time than the controversy plaguing democratic theory.31 Arguments for the welfare state have been made on both economic and political grounds.32 According to Keynesian economic doctrine, welfare state policies serve to stimulate the forces of economic growth and to prevent deep recessions by encouraging investment and stabilizing demand. Fiscal and monetary incentives for investors coupled with social insurance, transfer payments and public services for workers compensate for the dysfunctions, uncertainties, and risks of the market mechanism and contribute to overall stability. High growth rates, full employment, and low inflation should be the result of this policy.
The political aspects of the welfare state would also increase stability and productivity. On the one side, legal entitlements to state services and transfer payments simultaneously aid those who feel the negative effects of the market system while removing potentially explosive needs or issues from the arena of industrial conflict. On the other side, the recognition of the formal role of labor unions in collective bargaining and in the formation of public policy "balances" the asymmetrical power relation between labor and capital and mitigates class conflict.33 The overall increase in social justice would lead to fewer strikes, greater productivity, and an overall consensus of capital and labor that they have a mutual interest in the success of the political economic system: Growth and productivity serve everyone. The welfare state would finally deliver on the claim of liberal capitalist societies to be egalitarian and just, by supporting the worst off and by creating the preconditions for a true equality of opportunity which in the eyes of defenders of the welfare state is the only context in which civil and political rights can function in a universalistic manner. Instead of being concerned by the anomalous status of the so-called social rights, for a theorist such as T. H. Marshall these represent the highest and most fundamental type of citizen rights.34
Certainly the remarkable growth rates, relative stability, and increase in the standard of living in postwar Western capitalist economies have, until recently, made the arguments for state intervention convincing to all but a very few. In a new context of more limited possibilities for growth, neoconservative defenders of a return to "laissez-faire" criticize both the economic and political claims of the welfare state model. Unfortunately for the latter, their arguments also carry weight. Indeed, it was not difficult for these critics to point to the high rates of unemployment and inflation and low growth rates that have plagued Western capitalist economies since the 1970s as proof that state-bureaucratic regulation of the economy is counterproductive. They can also point to successes in these domains where their own policies have been applied.
On the economic front, three claims are made against the policies of welfare states: that they lead to a disincentive to invest and a disincentive to work, and that they constitute a serious threat to the viability of the independent middle class.35 The burden imposed by the regulatory and fiscal policies on capital together with the power of unions to extract high wages allegedly contribute to declining growth rates and, in a context of severe competition, lead to the perception that investment in home markets will be unprofitable.36 The disincentive to work is attributed to extensive social security and unemployment provisions that allow workers to avoid undesirable jobs and to escape the normal pressure of market forces. The quantity of available workers shrinks as whole sectors of the working class are turned into welfare state clients, while the work ethic declines as workers become simultaneously more demanding and less willing to spend effort on their work. Finally, the independent middle class finds itself squeezed by high rates of taxation and inflation. The emergence of the "new middle class" of civil service professionals and higher-level bureaucrats only exacerbates these problems because these strata have an interest in reproducing and expanding the client population on which their jobs depend. Welfare state economic policies are thus antinomic in more than one respect: Policies meant to stimulate demand undermine investment, policies meant to provide economic security for workers undermine the willingness to work, the policy of tempering the undesirable side effects deriving from unregulated market forces creates even greater economic problems in the form of a vastly expanded, expensive, unproductive state sector.
On the political front, neoconservatives argue that the very mechanisms introduced by welfare states to resolve conflicts and create greater equality of opportunity, namely legal entitlements and the expanded state sector, have led to new conflicts and have violated the rights and liberty of some for the sake of others. By impinging upon the score right of liberal market systems, namely, private property, state intervention and regulation undermine both the liberty of entrepreneurs and the incentive to achieve on the part of the working population. Far from increasing social justice or equality of opportunity, welfare undermines the preconditions for both of these. In short, it rewards failure rather than success. In the name of equality, moreover, state intervention in the everyday lives of its clients poses a severe threat to liberty, privacy, and autonomy.
In addition, these mechanisms have allegedly generated a set of rising expectations and increasing demands that lead to an overall situation of ungovernability.37 Indeed, the very institutions of welfare state mass democracy that promised to channel political conflict into acceptable and harmless forms (the end of ideology) and to integrate workers especially into the political and economic system of late capitalism (deradicalization) - i.e. the competitive (catchall) party system based on universal suffrage, interest group politics, collective bargaining, and extensive social rights - lead to a dangerous overload of the political system and a crisis of authority.38 In short, the rights explosion that so irritates democratic communitarians is even more alarming to neoconservative critics of "statism." By placing obligations upon itself that it cannot possibly fulfill,39 the state creates rising yet unsatisfiable expectations, becomes overexpanded and weak at the same time, and suffers from a dangerous loss of authority. Indeed, on this view, there is a central political contradiction inherent in the welfare state: In order for the performance capacity of the state to be enhanced vis-à-vis the number of demands, the very freedoms, modes of participation, and sets of rights associated with it would have to be curtailed.40
The neo-laissez-faire economic and political alternatives, however, do not escape the fate of becoming merely one of the untenable sides of an antinomic structure. "Supply-side" economists seek to dismantle the welfare state in order to eliminate the "disincentive" to invest, but to do so would be to abolish precisely those "buffers" that stabilize demand.41 If the socioeconomic supports for workers and the poor are terminated in the name of refurbishing the work ethic, the compulsion of the market will certainly return, but so will the gross injustices, dissatisfaction, instability, and class confrontations that characterized the capitalist economies prior to welfare state policies.
Of course, the attack on the welfare state is predicated on the idea that there is an unlimited growth potential for marketable goods and services that would be unleashed once the state is pushed back into its proper, minimal terrain. Privatization and deregulation would allegedly restore competition and end the inflation of political demands. However, the political presuppositions for such a policy conflict with its goals of social peace and social justice. Necessarily repressive policies regarding the right to associate and efforts to abolish social rights ranging from social security to unemployment compensation, not to mention welfare, are scarcely conducive to consensus. While the "freedom-threatening" dimensions of state intervention, namely the regulation of proprietors, the supervision and control of clients, and the spiraling cycle of dependency, would end, so would all of the gains in social justice, equality, and rights. Moreover, efforts to restore state authority by limiting its scope and by shielding it from popular demands would not reduce state activism but would simply shift it from the political to the administrative terrain. For, if one reduces the ability of democratic institutions such as the party system, elections, and parliaments to provide for the articulation of political conflict, alternative channels, such as the neocorporatist arrangements proliferating in Western Europe, will develop. While these arrangements successfully shield the state from excess demands, they hardly indicate a shift from state to market regulation. Thus the neo-laissez-faire alternative to the 'crisis' of the welfare state is as internally contradictory as the illness it purports to cure.
We are accordingly left with the following antinomy: Either we choose more social engineering, more paternalism and leveling, in short, more statism, in the name of egalitarianism and social rights, or we opt for the free market and/or the refurbishing of authoritarian social and political forms of organization and relinquish the democratic, egalitarian components of our political culture in order to block further bureaucratization of everyday life. It seems that liberal democratic market societies cannot coexist with, nor can they exist without, the welfare state.
The early modern concept of civil society was revived first and foremost in the struggles of the democratic oppositions in Eastern Europe against authoritarian socialist party-states. Despite different economic and geopolitical contexts, it does not seem terribly problematic to apply the concept also to the "transitions from authoritarian rule" in Southern Europe and Latin America, above all because of the common task shared with the oppositions of the East to constitute new and stable democracies. But why should such a concept be particularly relevant to the West? Is not the revival of the discourse of civil society in the East and the South simply part of a project to attain what the advanced capitalist democracies already have: civil society guaranteed by the rule of law, civil rights, parliamentary democracy, and a market economy? Could one not argue that struggles in the name of creating civil and political society especially in the East are a kind of repeat of the great democratic movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that created a type of duality between state and civil society which remains the basis for Western democratic and liberal institutions? And isn't this an admission that the elite theorists, the neoconservatives, or at best the liberals are right after all? Put this way, the revival of the discourse of civil society appears to be just that, a revival, with little political or theoretical import for Western liberal democracies. And if this is so, why would a civil-society-oriented perspective provide a way out of the antinomies plaguing Western political and social thought?
Several interrelated issues that have emerged in the current revival go beyond the model of the historical origins of civil society in the West and therefore have important lessons to offer established liberal democracies. These include the conception of self-limitation, the idea of civil society as comprised of social movements as was a set of institutions, the orientation to civil society as a new terrain of democratization,42 the influence of civil on political and economic society, and finally an understanding that the liberation of civil society is not necessarily identical with the creation of bourgeois society but rather involves a choice between a plurality of types of civil society. All these notions point beyond a restriction of the theory of civil society merely to the constituent phase of new democracies.
The idea of self-limitation, all too often confused with the strategic constraints on emancipatory movements, is actually based on learning in the service of democratic principle. The postrevolutionary or self-limiting "revolutions" of the East are no longer motivated by fundamentalist projects of suppressing bureaucracy, economic rationality, or social division. Movements rooted in civil society have learned from the revolutionary tradition that these fundamentalist projects lead to the breakdown of societal steering and productivity and the suppression of social plurality, all of which are then reconstituted by the forces of order only by dramatically authoritarian means. Such an outcome leads to the collapse of the forms of self-organization that in many cases were the major carriers of the revolutionary process: revolutionary societies, councils, movements. Paradoxically, the self-limitation of just such actors allows the continuation of their social role and influence beyond the constituent and into the constituted phase.
This continuation of a role of civil society beyond the phase of transition can be coupled with domestication, demobilization, and relative atomization. That would mean convergence with society as the Western elite pluralists see it. But in the postauthoritarian settings actors who have rejected fundamentalism and raised civil society to a normative principle show that we do have a choice. While the total democratization of state and economy cannot be their goal, civil society itself, as Tocqueville was first to realize, is an important terrain of democratization, of democratic institution building. And if East European oppositionals were driven to this alternative at first only by blockages in the sphere of state organization, there is certainly a good chance that the idea of the further democratization of civil society will gain emphasis in the face of the inevitable disappointments, visible above all in Hungary, (East) Germany, and Czechoslovakia, with the emergence of the typical practices of Western democracies. Thus, the actors of the new political societies would do well, if they value their long-term legitimacy, to promote democratic institution building in civil society, even if this seems to increase the number of social demands on them.
The idea of the democratization of civil society, unlike that of its mere revival, is extremely pertinent to existing Western societies. Indeed, the tendency to see extrainstitutional movements and initiatives in addition to settled institutions as integral parts of civil society is found earlier in Western than in Eastern experience, to which it is rapidly being extended primarily by new and old movements and initiatives. It is quite possible that some of the emerging Eastern constitutions will embody new sensitivity to an active civil society, a sensitivity that should in turn influence Western constitutional developments. These potential normative gains will confirm, in the East as well as the West, the idea that there can be very different types of civil society: more or less institutionalized, more or less democratic, more or less active. Discussions in the milieu of Solidarity in Poland raised these choices explicitly as early as 1980, along with the choice of political vs. antipolitical models of civil society. In the current wave of economic liberalism in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, another question inevitably arises concerning the connection between economy and civil society and the choice between an economic, individualistic society and a civil society based on solidarity, protected not only against the bureaucratic state but also against the self-regulating market economy. This debate, too, will be directly relevant in Western contexts, as it already has been in Latin America, and conversely Western controversies around the welfare state and the "new social movements" should have much intellectual material to offer Eastern radical democrats hoping to protect the resource of solidarity without paternalism.
The aim of our book is to further develop and systematically justify the idea of civil society, reconceived in part around a notion of self-limiting democratizing movements seeking to expand and protect spaces for both negative liberty and positive freedom and to recreate egalitarian forms of solidarity without impairing economic self-regulation. Before turning to this task, we would like to conclude this introduction by illustrating the important, and perhaps decisive, contribution of our theory of civil society to the three theoretical antinomies mentioned above.43
It might seem that our position is already anticipated by one of the six theoretical traditions involved in the debates depicted above, namely the pluralist version of the elite democratic tradition of political theory. Indeed, the pluralists' addition to the elite model of democracy is precisely a conception of a "third realm" differentiated from the economy and the state (what we call "civil society").45 On the pluralist analysis, a highly articulated civil society with cross-cutting cleavages, overlapping memberships of groups, and social mobility is the presupposition for a stable democratic polity, a guarantee against permanent domination by any one group and against the emergence of fundamentalist mass movements and antidemocratic ideologies.46 Moreover, a civil society so constituted is considered to be capable of acquiring influence over the political system through the articulation of interests that are "aggregated" by political parties and legislatures and brought to bear on political decision making, itself understood along the lines of the elite model of democracy.
Although we use many of the terms of this analysis in our work on civil society, our approach differs in several key respects from that of the pluralists. First, we do not accept the view that the "civic culture" most appropriate to a modern civil society is one based on civil privatism and political apathy. As is well known, the pluralists value involvement in one's family, private clubs, voluntary associations, and the like as activities that deflect from political participation or activism on the part of citizens.47 It is this which allegedly makes for a stable democratic polity. Moreover, it makes no difference to this model what the internal structure of the institutions and organizations of civil society is.48 Indeed, in their haste to replace "utopian (participatory democratic) principles" with realism, the pluralists tend to consider attempts to apply the egalitarian norms of civil society to social institutions as naive.49
We do not share this view. Instead, we build upon the thesis of one of the most important predecessors of the pluralist approach, Alexis de Tocqueville, who argued that without active participation on the part of citizens in egalitarian institutions and civil associations, as well as in politically relevant organizations, there will be no way to maintain the democratic character of the political culture or of social and political institutions. Precisely because modern civil society is based on egalitarian principles and universal inclusion, experience in articulating the political will and in collective decision making is crucial to the reproduction of democracy.
This, of course, is the point that is always made by participation theorists. Our approach differs from theirs in arguing for more, not less, structural differentiation. We take seriously the normative principles defended by radical democrats, but we locate the genesis of democratic legitimacy and the chances for direct participation not in some idealized, dedifferentiated polity but within a highly differentiated model of civil society itself. This shifts the core problematic of democratic theory away from descriptive and/or speculative models to the issue of the relation and channels of influence between civil and political society and between both and the state, on the one side, and to the institutional makeup and internal articulation of civil society itself, on the other. Moreover, we believe that the democratization of civil society - the family, associational life, and the public sphere - necessarily helps open up the framework of political parties and representative institutions.50
Indeed, these concerns open the way to a dynamic conception of civil society, one that avoids the apologetic thrust of most pluralist analyses. Far from viewing social movements as antithetical to either the democratic political system or to a properly organized social sphere (the pluralists' view), we consider them to be a key feature of a vital, modern, civil society and an important form of citizen participation in public life. Yet we do not see social movements as prefiguring a form of citizen participation that will or even ought to substitute for the institutional arrangements of representative democracy (the radical democratic position). In our view, social movements for the expansion of rights, for the defense of the autonomy of civil society, and for its further democratization are what keep a democratic political culture alive. Among other things, movements bring new issues and values into the public sphere and contribute to reproducing the consensus that the elite/ pluralist model of democracy presupposes but never bothers to account for.51 Movements can and should supplement and should not aim to replace competitive party systems. Our conception of civil society thus retains the normative core of democratic theory while remaining compatible with the structural presuppositions of modernity. Finally, while we also differentiate the economy from civil society, we differ from the pluralists in that we do not seal off the borders between them on the basis of an allegedly sacrosanct freedom of contract or property right. Nor do we seek to "reembed" the economy in society. Instead, on our analysis, the principles of civil society can be brought to bear on economic institutions within what we call economic society. The question here, as in the case of the polity, is what channels and receptors of influence do, can, and ought to exist.52 Indeed, we are able to pose such questions on the basis of our model without risking the charges of utopianism or antimodernism so frequently and deservedly leveled against worker-based versions of radical democracy.
It is also our thesis that the tensions between rights-oriented liberalism and, at least, democratically oriented communitarianism can be considerably diminished if not entirely overcome on the basis of a new theory of civil society. While the idea of rights and of a democratic political community derive from distinct traditions in political philosophy, today they belong to the same political culture. They need not be construed as antithetical, although on an empirical level the rights of an individual may conflict with majority rule and "the public interest," necessitating a balancing between the two sides.53 Nor is it necessary to view these as based on two conflicting sets of principles or presuppositions, such that one could accommodate the first set only insofar as it is instrumental to the achievement or preservation of the other. On the contrary, we contend that what is best in rights-oriented liberalism and democratically oriented communitarianism constitutes two mutually reinforcing and partly overlapping sets of principles. Two steps are necessary to argue this thesis and to transcend the relevant antinomies. First, one must show that there is a philosophical framework that can provide a political ethic able to redeem the normative claims of both right-oriented liberalism and radical democracy. Second, one must revise the conception of civil society as the private sphere, shared by both theoretical paradigms, in order to grasp the institutional implications of such an ethic.
We also defend the principles of universality and autonomy to which the rights thesis is wed, but we deny that this commits us either to the liberal notion of neutrality or to an individualist ontology. The communitarians are right: Much of liberal theory, especially the contract tradition from Hobbes to Rawls, has relied on either one or both of these principles.54 However, the Habermasian theory of discourse ethics, on which we rely, provides a way to develop conceptions of universality and autonomy that are free of such presuppositions. On this theory, universality does not mean neutrality with respect to a plurality of values or forms of life but rather refers, in the first instance, to the metanorms of symmetric reciprocity 55 that are to act as regulative principles guiding discursive processes of conflict resolution and, in the second instance, to those norms or principles to which all those who are potentially affected can agree. The procedure of universalization defended here involves an actual rather than a hypothetical dialogue. It does not require that one abstract from one's concrete situation, need interpretations, or interests in order to engage in an unbiased moral testing of principles. Instead, it requires that these be freely articulated. It also requires that all those potentially affected by institutionalized norms (laws or policies) be open to a multiplicity of perspectives. Accordingly, universality is a regulative principle of a discursive process in and through which participants reason together about which values, principles, need interpretations merit being institutionalized as common norms.56 Thus, the atomistic disembodied individual allegedly presupposed by procedural (deontological) ethics is most emphatically not the basis of this approach. Assuming that individual and collective identities are acquired through complex processes of socialization that involve both internalizing social norms or traditions, and developing reflective and critical capacities vis-à-vis norms, principles, and traditions, this theory has at its core an intersubjective, interactive conception of both individuality and autonomy. It is thus able to accommodate the communitarian insights into the social core of human nature without abandoning the ideas of either universality or moral rights. Indeed, discourse ethics provides a philosophical basis for democratic legitimacy that presupposes valid rights, even if not all of these rights are derivable from it.57
While it is of course individuals who have rights, the concept of rights does not have to rest on philosophical or methodological individualism, nor, for that matter, on the idea of negative liberty alone. Although most liberal and communitarian theorists have assumed that such a conception of freedom and of individualism is presupposed by the very concept of rights, we believe that only some rights involve primarily negative liberty while none requires a philosophically atomistic conception of individuality. It is here that a revised conception of civil society, together with a new theory of rights, must enter into the analysis. For every theory of rights, every theory of democracy, implies a model of society. Unfortunately, communitarians and liberals also agree that the societal analogue of the rights thesis is a civil society construed as the private sphere, composed of an agglomeration of autonomous but egoistic, exclusively self-regarding, competitive, possessive individuals whose negative liberty it is the polity's task to protect. It is their assessments and not their analysis of this form of society that diverge.
But this is only one possible version of civil society and certainly not the only one that can be "derived" from the rights thesis. Only if one construes property to be not simply a key right but the core of the conception of rights - only, that is, if one places the philosophy of possessive individualism at the heart of one's conception of civil society and then reduces civil to bourgeois society - does the rights thesis come to be defined in this way.58 If, however, one develops a more complex model of civil society, recognizing that it has public and associational components as well as individual, private ones, and if, in addition, one sees that the idea of moral autonomy does not presuppose possessive individualism,59 then the rights thesis begins to look a bit different. In short, rights do not only secure negative liberty, the autonomy of private, disconnected individuals. They also secure the autonomous (freed from state control) communicative interaction of individuals with one another in the public and private spheres of civil society, as well as a new relation of individuals to the public and the political spheres of society and state (including, of course, citizenship rights). Moral rights are thus not by definition apolitical or antipolitical, nor do they constitute an exclusively private domain with respect to which the state must limit itself. On the contrary, the rights to communication, assembly, and association, among others, constitute the public and associational spheres of civil society as spheres of positive freedom within which agents can collectively debate issues of common concern, act in concert, assert new rights, and exercise influence on political (and potentially economic) society. Democratic as well as liberal principles have their locus here. Accordingly, some form of differentiation of civil society, the state, and the economy is the basis for both modern democratic and liberal institutions. The latter presuppose neither atomistic nor communal but rather associated selves. Moreover, on this conception the radical opposition between the philosophical foundations and societal presuppositions of right-oriented liberalism and democratically oriented communitarianism dissolves. This conception of civil society does not, of course, solve the question of the relation between negative and positive liberty, but it does place this issue within a common societal and philosophical terrain. It is on this terrain that we learn how to compromise, take reflective distance from our own perspective so as to entertain others, learn to value difference, recognize or create anew what we have in common, and come to see which dimensions of our traditions are worth preserving and which ought to be abandoned or changed.
This brings us to the heart of our differences with the neo-conservative model of civil society. The neoconservative slogan, "society against the state," is often based on a model in which civil society is equivalent to market or bourgeois society. Another version of this approach does, however, recognize the importance of the cultural dimension of civil society. We have serious objections even to this second version, whose strategies for unburdening the state are aimed in part at the institutions involved in the formation and transmission of cultural values (art, religion, science) and in socialization (families, schools). An important component of the neoconservative thesis of "ungovernability" is the argument that the excessive material demands placed by citizens on the state are due not only to welfare institutions themselves but also to our modernist political, moral, and aesthetic culture. The latter allegedly weakens both traditional values and the agencies of social control (such as the family) that tempered hedonism in the past. 60 In this view, we need to resacralize our political culture, revive faltering traditional values such as self-restraint, discipline, and respect for authority and achievement, and shore up "nonpolitical" principles of order (family, property, religion, schools), so that a culture of self-reliance and self-restraint replaces the culture of dependency and critique. 61 The cultural politics of neoconservatism that accompanies the policies of deregulation and privatization are thus based on the defense or recreation of a traditionalist and authoritarian lifeworld.62
Our conception of civil society points to a different assessment. First, we try to show that the resources for meaning, authority, and social integration are undermined not by cultural or political modernity (based on the principles of critical reflection, discursive conflict resolution, equality, autonomy, participation, and justice) but, rather, by the expansion of an increasingly illiberal corporate economy as well as by the overextension of the administrative apparatus of the interventionist state into the social realm. The use of economic and political power to shore up (or worse, re-create) the "traditional" hierarchical, patriarchal, or exclusionary character of many of the institutions of civil society is, on our view, what fosters dependency. We agree that certain features of the welfare state63 fragment collectivities, destroy horizontal solidarities, isolate and render private individuals dependent on state apparatuses. Unrestrained capitalist expansion, however, has the same destructive consequences. But appeals to family, tradition, religion, or community could foster the destructive fundamentalism of false communities so easily manipulated from above, unless the achievements of liberalism (the principle of rights), democracy (the principles of participation and discourse), and justice (a precondition for solidarity) are first defended and then supplemented with new democratic and egalitarian forms of association within civil society.
Moreover, to opt for the preservation of traditions, if accompanied by a denial of the universalist tradition of cultural and political modernity, implies fundamentalism. Accordingly, the question that flows from our model becomes: Which traditions, which family form, which community, which solidarities are to be defended against disruptive intervention? Even if cultural modernity itself is just one tradition among many, its universal thrust is the reflexive, nonauthoritarian relation toward tradition - an orientation that can be applied to itself and that implies autonomy (allegedly cherished by the neoconservative) rather than heteronomy. Indeed, traditions that have become problematic can be preserved only on the terrain of cultural modernity, i.e., trough arguments that invoke principles. Such discussion does not mean the abolition of tradition, solidarity, or meaning; rather, it is the only acceptable procedure for adjudicating between competing traditions, needs, or interests that are in conflict. Accordingly, our model points toward the further modernization of the culture and institutions of civil society as the only way to arrive at autonomy, self-reliance, and solidarity among peers allegedly desired by the neoconservative critics of the welfare state.64
Our conception of civil society seeks to demystify the other strain within neoconservatism, namely, that the only alternative to the paternalism, social engineering, and the bureaucratization of our lives typical of welfare state systems is to shift steering back to the magic of the marketplace (and of course to renounce distributive justice and egalitarianism). This "solution" is not only politically untenable and normatively undesirable; it is also based on the fallacious assumption that no other options exist. Our framework, however, allows in principle for a third approach, one that does not seek to correct the economic or state penetration of society by shifting back and forth between these two steering mechanisms. Instead, the task is to guarantee the autonomy of the modern state and economy while simultaneously protecting civil society from destructive penetration and functionalization by the imperatives of these two spheres. For now, of course, we have only some of the elements of a theory that can thematize both the differentiation of civil society from state and economy and its reflexive influence over them through the institutions of political and economic society. But we believe that our conception has the best prospects for future theoretical progress and for integrating the diverse conceptual strategies that are currently available. The project it implies would avoid correcting the results of state paternalism by another form of colonization of society, this time by an unregulated market economy. It would seek to accomplish the work of social policy by more decentralized and autonomous civil-society-based programs than in traditional welfare states and the work of economic regulation by nonbureaucratic, less intrusive forms of legislation, "reflexive law," focusing on procedures and not results.65 In our view this synthetic project should be described not only by Habermas's term, "the reflexive continuation of the welfare state," but also by the complementary idea of the "reflexive continuation of the democratic revolution." The former arises in the context of Western welfare states, the latter in that of the democratization of authoritarian regimes. The two ideas can and should be combined. Thus far, the recent revival and development of the concept of civil society has involved learning from the experience of the "transitions to democracy." The idea of the reflexive continuation of the welfare state and of liberal democracy should, however, open the way for enriching the intellectual resources of democrats in the East by what has been learned in a double critique of already established welfare states and of their neoconservative discontents. A theory of civil society informed by such ideas should also inform the projects of all those in the West who seek the further democratization of liberal democracies. ___________________________________________________
Notes to Introduction
1. Of course, Karl Polànyi's Great Transformation [1944] (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), which has been a major touchstone for our work, brought the state "back in" in the mid-1940s. But see Peter Evans et al., eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985). The focus on the state has, however, occasioned an extremely interesting and important debate (and new research) around the relation of women and the welfare state. Here a new dimension has been captured that was ignored in the past. See such recent work as Gretchen Ritter and Theda Skocpol, "Gender and the Origins of Modern Social Policies in Britain and the United States," ms.; Linda Gordon,"What Does Welfare Regulate?," and Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, "Welfare Doesn't Shore up Traditional Family Roles: A Reply to Linda Gordon," both in Social Research 55, no.4 (Winter 1988): 609-648; Cynthia Epstein, Deceptive Distinctions: Sex, Gender and the Social Order (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); Mimi Abramovit::, Regulating the Lives of Women (Boston: South End Press, 1988); Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); and Helga Hernes, Wdfare State and Woman Power: Essays on State Feminism (Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1987). (to the text)
2. See chapter 1. (Return)
3. This debate began in the mid-i 950s and reemerged in the aftermath of the New Left. For a chronology, see John F. Manley, "Neo-Pluralism:A ClassAnalysis of Pluralism rand Pluralism II," American Political Science Review 77, no.2 june 1983): 368-383. The list ofparticipants in this debate is long. Let us mention just a few key figures and representative works on each side. Elite theorists include Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1942); S. M. Lipset, Political Man (New York: Doubleday, 1963); Robert Dahl, Polyarchy (New Raven: Yale University Press, 1971); William Kornhauser, ThePolitics of Mass Society (New York: Free Press, 1959); G. Almond and S. Verba, The Civic Culture (Boston: Little Brown, 1963). Participatory democrats include Peter Bachrach, The Theory of Democratic Elitism: A Critique (Boston: Little Brown, 1967); Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1970); Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (Boston: Little Brown, 1960). For an overview of the debate, see Quentin Skinner, "The Empirical Theorists of Democracy and Their Critics: A Plague on Both Their Houses," Political Theory 1(1973): 287-306. (Return)
4. The list of participants in this debate is also too long to cite fully. Two of the best presentations of "rights-oriented liberalism" are John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University' Press, 1971), and Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977). For the liberal concept of neutrality, see Bruce Ackerman, Social Justice in the Liberal State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), and Charles Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987). The best and most original "neocommunitarian" work, predating but nevertheless in-forming the debate, is Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1963); see also Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (Boston: Little Brown, 1960), and R. Unger, Knowledge and Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1975). Contemporary epistemological critics of liberalism include Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue - (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), and Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Communitarian democrats include Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1975) and Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic, 1983); and Carole Pateman, The Problem of Political Obligation: A Critique of Liberal Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). A volume that brings together both sides of the debate is Michael Sandel, ed., Liberalism and its Critics (New rork: New York University Press, 1984).
This debate has also given structure to some of the most important controversies within feminist political and legal theory. while there has always been a debate between radical, liberal, and Marxist/socialist feminists, today the battle is drawn along lines similar to those depicted above. Equal-rights-oriented liberal feminists who emphasize gender neutrality are pitted against communitarian feminists on one side and deconstructionist feminists on the other, both of whom emphasize difference, contextuality, and the limits of rights analyses, denying the very possibility of neutrality and universality in either law or politics. For two exemplary statements of the liberal-feminist position, see Wendy Williams, "Equality's Riddle: Pregnancy and the Equal Treatment/ Special Treatment Debate," 13 N.Y.U. Rev. Law and Social Change 325 (1984-85), and Susan Okin, Justice; Gender and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989). Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), is the classic statement of the communitarian feminist position. For the deconstructionist approach, see Joan Scott, "Deconstructing Equality-versusk:Difference: Of the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism," Feminist Studies 14, no.1 (Spring 1988): 33-50. For a neo-Marxist approach to the problem, see Catherine MacKinnon, Toward A Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). (Return)
5. See Michel Crozier et al., eds., The Crisis of Democracy (New York: New York University Press, 1975), and Claus Offe, Contradictions of the Welfare State (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984). (Return)
6. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper & 1942), 232-302. (Return)
7. Ibid., 269. (Return)
8. The model of the political party is the catch-all party. For the concept, see Otto Kirchheimer, "The Transformation of the Western European Party System," in Frederic S. Hurin and Kurt L. Shell, eds., Politics, Law, and Social Change: Selected Essays of Otto Kirchheimer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 346-371. Some elite theorists who are also pluralists include interest groups as actors in the political system (see DahI, Polyarchy). However, the idea that interests emerge spontaneously and autonomously in civil society and are then aggregated by political parties has been criticized not only by Marxists but also by theorists of neocorporatism. For an excellent overview of these criticisms, see Suzanne Berger, Organizing Interests in Western Europe (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 1-23. (Return)
9. On this model, societal interests cannot be represented. Neither public opinion nor raw individual interests find representation in the political system; instead, interests are aggregated and given their political salience by elites. (Return)
10. According to Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 292-293, not everything in a democracy is subject to the democratic method. For example, judges, federal agencies, and bureaucracies are beyond the reach of this method but are not thereby antidemocratic. We agree with this argument but would insist that just how far or in which domains democratic principles ought to extend is not something that experts can decide; it is, rather, a normative and empirical question that must be decided upon democratically, as it were. (We should note that Schumpeter's point was aimed against "totalitarian regimes, which so overextend the reach of the political - although hardly that of democracy - that they undermine the integrity and efficiency of political decision making.) (Back)
12. Just what counts as too much participation is a matter of debate. While the elite-democracy school partially buys into this idea and extols a mixture of activism and apathy (see Almond and Verba, The Civic Culture, and Lipset, Political Man), along with civil privatism, Schumpeter went the furthest in this direction. In arguing against the imperative mandate, Schumpeter insists that people should accept the division of labor between leaders and followers, give up on the idea of instructing delegates, and even cease from bombarding their representatives with letters and telegrams! (Return)
13. See Bachrach, Theory of Democratic Elitism. (Return)
14. As theorists of neocorporatism have shown, such polities often have powerful semipublic organizations that are hierarchically organized, engage in behind-the-scenes deals with one another and with the state, are not internally democratic, and do not interact according to principles of democratic procedure. See the essays in P. Schmitter and C. Lehmbruch, eds., Trends toward Coporatist Intermediation (London: Sage Publications, 1979). (Return)
15. Jurgen Habermas, "Legitimation Problems in the Modern State," in Communication and the Evolution of Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), 186-187. (Return)
16. Bachrach, Theory of Democratic Elitism. (Return)
17. That is, it loses a standard with which to judge whether consent, procedures, and so on are what they claim to be. See Phillippe C. Schmitter, "Democratic theory and Neocorporatist Practice," Social Research 50, no.4 (Winter 1988): 885-891. (Return)
18. See Arendt, On Revolution, and Wolin, Politics and Vision. See also Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). (Return)
19. Barber, Strong Democracy. (Return)
20. This is not true of Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory. (Return)
21. It should not be forgotten that classical democratic theory rested on an undifferentiated conception of Sittlichkeit that is, on an ethically superior consensus regarding the good to which all must adhere if they choose not to leave in a modern world characterized by value pluralism and the war of gods, such a conception is anachronistic. (Return)
22. Both the elite and the participatory model make the mistake of collapsing the principle of democratic legitimacy into organizational principles. The first dissolves normative proceduralism into procedures for winning power, while the second tries to deduce organizational models from the democratic principle of legitimacy. See chapter 8 for a discussion of this problem. See also Habermas, "Legitimation Problems," 186-l87. (Return)
23. In away, this debate is a response to the utilitarian dimensions of the elite and pluralist models of democracy. Rawls and Dworkin both challenge utilitarianism arguing that, without a principled conception of justice or a theory of rights, utilitarian elite pluralist model of democracy cannot claim legitimacy. The communitarians, of course, challenge the model in toto, but the focus of their efforts is less the utilitarianism of the democratic elitists than the rights focus of contemporary liberalism. (Return)
24. See note 4. (return)
25. ibid (Return)
26. What is new here vis-à-vis the early tradition of liberalism (or elite pluralism, for that matter) is that property is no longer placed at the heart of the conception of rights; it is one right among many, but open to "balancing." Rawls and Dworkin are, of course, strong defenders of the welfare state. (Return)
27. The rights thesis is predicated on the following assumptions: (1) there is no authority other than human reason for judging moral claims; (2) all individuals must be seen as equal partners in the moral dialogue when it comes to asserting and defending rights claims - moral reasons have to be given; (3) any tradition, prerogative, or claim is open to critique; (4) the values that individuals defend, including rights, are valid because they can be argued for vis-à-vis other moral systems. All values are values for individuals. If something is valuable for a community, it must be shown to be a value for the individual as well. See Janos Kis, L'Égale dignité. Essai sur les fondements des droits de l'homme (Paris: Seuil, 1989). (Return)
28. Hence the priority of the right justice over the good. (Return)
29. That is, the alleged anthropological premise of the rights thesis is one of isolated, self-sufficient, atomized individuals outside society, fully endowed with instrumental reason and autonomy. These selves are independent of their ends and social context. Such "unencumbered" selves are deemed to be the originary locus of freedom of choice regarding one's ends, forms of life, projects, etc. Sandel, Taylor, and Walzer all criticize these epistemological assumptions allegedly underlying rights-oriented liberalism. Amy Gutman, "Communitarian Critics of Liberalism," Philosophy and Public Affairs 14, no.4 (1985): 308-322, rejects the thesis as fallacious. (Return)
30. That is, Charles Taylor, Michael Walzer, and Benjamin Barber. (return)
31. Since the 1970s. For the left critique of the welfare state, see Offe, Contradictions, chapters 1 and 6. (Return)
32. For a discussion of various defenses and criticisms of the welfare state, see Offe, Contradictions, 35-206, 252-302. He gives a definition on page 194. (Return)
33. Ibid., 147. (Return)
34. T. H. Marshall, Class, Citizenship and Social Development (New York: Doubleday, 1964). (Return)
35. Offe, Contradictions, 149-154. (Return)
36. Investors will postpone investment in the expectation of special tax incentives, or in the hope that the burdens of certain regulations will be lifted. As Claus Offe has convincingly argued, whether or not there are other reasons for the failure to invest, such as the inherent crisis tendencies of the capitalist economy, including overaccumulation, the business cycle, or uncontrolled technological change (none of which has anything to do with the welfare state), the point is that private investors have the power to define reality, and hence their perceptions create that reality. Whatever they perceive as an intolerable burden is an intolerable burden that will in fact lead to a declining propensity to invest. See Offe, Contradictions, 151. (Return)
37. See especially Crozier et al., eds., The Crisis of Democracy. (Return)
38. Huntington, "The United States,"in Crozier et al., eds., The Crisis of Democracy, 73. (Return)
39. See James O'Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (NewYork: St. Martin's Press, 1973); Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, Part II; and Offe, Contradictions, 35-64. (Return)
40. For the reasons for this claim, see Offe, Contradictions, 67-76. (Return)
41. Claus Offe, Disorganized Capitalism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 84. (Return)
42. This includes the family within civil society. See our discussion of Hegel in chapter 2. (Return)
43. These discussions have, in turn, been highly instructive for the development of our conception. (Return)
44. See note 8.
45. Although they do not use the term, pluralists include voluntary associations, interest groups, a free press, and basic rights within the societal realm that is distinct from the economy. The most sophisticated three-part model to be found in pluralist theory is that of Talcott Parsons (see chapter 3). (Return)
46. See Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society. (Return)
47. This is very much contrary to the spirit of Alexis de Tocqueville, whom the pluralists frequently cite as one of their most important forerunners. (Return)
48. It is not a matter of concern whether the nuclear family is patriarchal or whether interest groups are in fact highly bureaucratized or hierarchically organized.
49. For an analysis of these norms, see chapter 8. (Return)
50. In this sense, we do not agree with Norberto Bobbio, who seeks to add the democratization of civil society. to elite democratic structures that he takes to be given and unchangeable. We shall try to show that an inevitably defensive strategy of democratizing only civil society must fail and that complementary strategies of democratizing state, economy, and civil society, albeit to different extents, are possible. Indeed, the democratization of civil society would in itself up the political terrain. Elite democracy, conversely, must either suppress the democratizing tendencies of civil society or become creatively responsive to them and hence change itself. See Norberto Bobbio, The Futur of Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), and our treatment of Bobbio in chapter 3. (Return)
5l. Despite the differences between elite theorists like Schumpeter and pluralists like Dahl (who do not see the exercise of influence by interest groups on political parties or congressional representatives as a threat to the division of labor between citizens and politicians), they all recognize the importance to smooth functioning of a consensus regarding the basic procedures of the political system. See also Dahl, Democracy and its Critics, 221. (Return)
52. See chapter 9. (Return)
53. We discuss this problem in chapter 8 with respect to the relation between moral autonomy and political norms, and in chapter 11 with respect to the question of civil disobedience in a "nearly just, nearly democratic" polity. (Return)
54. Neither Hobbes nor Locke presupposed the idea of neutrality, but they certainly based their theories on a methodological and ontological individualism). Theorists such as Rawls and Ackerman, on the other hand, embrace the principle of neutrality, as well as aversion of methodological individualism, but do not presuppose an individualist ontology. (Return)
55. See chapter 8. (Return)
56. See chapter 8 . It excludes only those need interpretations and forms of life that are incompatible with the metanorms of symmetric reciprocity - that is, forms of life that deny equal concern and respect to others, that silence, dominate, denigrate, or otherwise treat people as mere means. (return)
57. We discuss this point in detail in chapter 8, but we are not alone in arguing that one can defend the rights thesis without presupposing the theory of possessive individualism or a private, individual process of universalization. Two defenses of a liberal theory of neutrality, predicated on a dialogical foundation for rights and a nonconsequentialist conception of neutrality, have recently been proposed. While we do not accept the kinds of prior constraints these theories seek to impose on dialogue in order to secure neutrality, what is of interest is that both rest on the idea of communicative interaction as the heart of a theory of political justice or rights. See Ackerman, Social Justice in the Liberal State, and Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity. (return)
58. This is really an extreme libertarian rather than a liberal view. See Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974). (Return)
59. See chapter 8 for a different conception of autonomy. (Return)
60. See Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976). Bell is not, strictly speaking, a neoconservative, since he defends liberal democracy as well as socialism in the realm of the economy. For an overview of neoconservative cultural assumptions, see Peter Steinfels, The Neo Conservatives (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979). (Return)
61. For an argument in favor of resacralizing the political, see Edward Shils, Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). For arguments bewailing our hedonist culture and advocating a revived family life, see Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Norton, 1979) and Haven in a Heartless World (New York: Basic Books, 1977). For criticisms of the modernist culture of critique, see Bell, Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, and Alvin Gouldner, The Future of intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (New York: Seabury, 1979). (Return)
62. A series of books on "mediating structures" sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute offers a case in point. See John Neuhaus and Peter Berger, To Empower People - The Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy (Washington: American Enterprise Institute, 1978), Michael Novak, ed., Democracy and Mediating Structures (Washington: American Enterprise Institute, 1990), and Nathan Glazer, The Limits of Social Policy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). For an excellent discussion of the neoconservative position expressed in these works, see Robert Devigne, "Recasting Conservatism," unpublished doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, 1990. (Return)
63. Surely not all of them. We fail to see how social security, health insurance,job training programs for the unemployed, unemployment insurance, and family supports such as day care or parental leave create dependency rather than autonomy, even if the particular administrative requirements for such programs as AFDC (such as the man-in-the-house rule) do create dependency and are humiliating. But these are empirical questions. The theoretical issue behind such questions is the extent to which social services and social supports are symbolically constituted as welfare for "failures" or as supports for all members of the community. (Return)
64. This point can also be made against recent attempts to fashion a politics out of theories of postmodernism. "Postmodernism" refers to the work of French thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. For an excellent overview, see Peter Dewes, Logics of Disintegration (London: Verso, 1987). For one attempt to develop a politics out of this general approach, see Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).
Postmodernism rests on a fully modern lifeworld and is anything but traditionalist. Moreover, the critical investigations of modernist "identitary" logic and the dualisms of the philosophy of the subject underlying it are extremely insightful (although critical theorists made similar investigations many years before postmodernism became chic). However, the political applications of this orientation are not very satisfying, primarily because they tend to favor one side of the dualisms against the other. Hence, the defense of difference against equality, particularity against universality, responsibility against rights, relatedness against autonomy, and concrete thinking against abstract reflection. In our view, this tends to throw out the baby with the bath water. The task, rather, is to formulate the second set of principles in ways that do not eliminate or establish hierarchies tor difference, plurality, or particularity. For example, we ought to try to conceive of equality without insisting on sameness, universality without annihilating multiplicity, autonomy and rights on the basis of a philosophy of commuicative interaction rather than atomistic individualism. Moreover, the cultural principles of modernity are not in themselves responsible for their one-sided application or interpretation. All of these principles are open to new interpretations. But to take the side of difference, particularity, and situatedness per se yould leave one without the theoretical tools necessary to explain why one ought to tolerate, recognize, or communicate with difference or the other. (Return)
65. For a development of this conception, see chapter 9. (Return)