Abstract
Domingues discusses in this last chapter the concept of democracy. The classics come back. The diverse formulations of democracy, especially liberal democracy, with Dahl, Bobbio and Urbinati, as well as Huntington and other, but also the Marx-Lenin alternative, are laid out. Radical democracy and the politics of the extraordinary, featuring Laclau and Mouffe as well as Kalyvas, are mobilized in order to lend the book a firm emancipatory edge. This is carried out within an immanent critical perspective. Political plebeianism comes to the fore. The notion of the will as well the concepts of sovereign and constituent power close the book. The chapter resumes also the concept of the imaginary and how emancipatory openings can be discerned in it.
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Notes
- 1.
The notorious democratic exception—to which extent consisting in a debated topic—is found, despite his pessimism regarding the sway of reason upon individuals, in Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise (1670), chaps. 16–17, and the unfinished Political Treatise (1677) as well as Ethics (1677), especially Part IV, all in Complete Works (Indiana, IN: Hackett, 2002). Note that the translation of vulgus as ‘mob’ and of plebs as ‘common people’ (PT, chap. 7.27, pp. 719–20) totally obscures the proper meaning of a key passage. See also Étienne Balibar, Spinoza et la politique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985); Marilena ChauÃ, PolÃtica em Espinosa (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003). Rousseau saw democracy as practically problematic (due to size, executive power, human fallibility) and suited for angels rather than men. He was sympathetic to elective aristocracies and thought mixed governments were inevitable. Besides, the ‘general will’ leaves little room for disagreement and argument. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du Contrat social, ou principes du droit politique (1762), in Ouevres complètes, vol. II (Paris: Seuil, 1971), chaps. 3.4–5. Control of assemblies by magistrates characterizes his views in Idem, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755), in Ouevres complètes, vol. II (Paris: Seuil, 1971), ‘Dedicace’. Conflict between patricians and plebeians lies at the core of Niccolò Machiavelli, Discorsi sopra la prima deca de Tito Livio (1531), in Edizione nacionale delle opera di Niccolò Machiavelli (Roma: Salerno, 1997). Machiavelli and the late Spinoza held a positive view of the ‘multitude’, though the latter was keen on several exclusions.
- 2.
Hauke Brunkhorst, Critical Theory of Legal Revolutions: Evolutionary Perspectives (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 16, 173, 209–10, 324.
- 3.
Maurice Duverger, Les Parties politiques (Paris: Armand Colin, [1951] 1954), Part I, chap. 2. See, for the mismatch between parties, oligarchies and the societal-political dynamic, Wanderley G. dos Santos, ‘O século de Michels: competição oligopólica, lógica autoritária e transição na América Latina’ (1985), in Paradoxos do liberalismo. Teoria e história (Rio de Janeiro: IUPERJ and São Paulo: Vértice, 1988).
- 4.
Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington and Joji Watamuki, The Crisis of Democracy (New York: New York University Press, 1975); S. P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Oklahoma, OK: Oklahoma University Press, 1991), pp. 5–7ff.
- 5.
Moses I. Finley, Democracy Ancient and Modern (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1985, revised edition), p. ix.
- 6.
Robert Dahl, Democracy and its Critics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 218–19.
- 7.
Aristotle, Politics and The Constitution of Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), especially pp. 72ff. See also Andreas Kalyvas, ‘Democracy and the poor: prolegomena to a radical theory of democracy’, unpublished paper, New School for Social Research (2018).
- 8.
My argument therefore resembles that of Martin Breaugh, La expérience plébéienne. Une histoire discontinue de la liberté politique (Paris: Payot, 2007).
- 9.
Max Weber, ‘Die nichtlegitime Herrschaft (Typologie der Städte)’, in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriβ der verstehende Soziologie (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], [1921–22] 1976). See also José MaurÃcio Domingues, ‘The City. Rationalization and freedom in Max Weber’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 26 (2000).
- 10.
J. M. Domingues, ‘The imaginary and politics in modernity. The trajectory of Peronism’ (2016), in Emancipation and History: The Return of Social Theory (Leiden: Brill, 2017 and Chicago: Haymarket, 2018).
- 11.
Leon Trotsky, ‘Bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie and proletariat’ (1932), in Fascism: What it is and How to Fight it (Chipendale: Resistance Books, 2007), pp. 19–20.
- 12.
Jeffrey Edward Green, The Shadow of Unfairness: A Plebeian Theory of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 25ff, especially 39. He sets off from a radical sort of liberal political individualism.
- 13.
See Carlos Forment, ‘Ordinary ethics and the emergence of plebeian democracy across the global south: Buenos Aires’ La Salada market’, Current Anthropology, vol. 56 (2015).
- 14.
Green, op. cit., pp. 13–14.
- 15.
For a recent statement in this tradition, according to which Greek democracy prevented the powerful from socially subordinating the poor, contrary to extra-political domination in liberal democracies, see Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (London and New York: Verso [1995] 2016), pp. 202–03. This should be qualified, at any rate, at least in what concerns social and labour rights, let alone slavery.
- 16.
Nadia Urbinati, Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
- 17.
Noberto Bobbio, Quale socialismo? (Torino: Einaudi, 1976).
- 18.
For a selection of texts and broad introduction, in which the certainty of a communist future is reaffirmed, see Ernest Mandel (ed.), Controle ouvrier, conseils ouvriers, autogestion (Paris: Maspero, 1970). In a Rousseaunian-Kantian vein, Cornelius Castoriadis, Le Contenu du socialisme (Paris: Unión Generale d’Éditions, 1979). Democracy is the ‘autonomous society’ ‘giving itself its own law’, he says. See, for a comparison with other democratic theories, Craig Browne, ‘Between creative democracy and democratic creativity’, in Vrasidas Karalis (ed.), Cornelius Castoriadis and Radical Democracy (Leiden: Brill, 2014).
- 19.
See, for a historically memorable polemic, N. Bobbio et al., Il marxismo e lo stato (Roma: Mondoperario, 1976).
- 20.
Green, op. cit., pp. 3–7, passim.
- 21.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Politics: The Central Texts (London and New York: Verso, [1987] 1997), pp. 3ff.
- 22.
J. M. Domingues, ‘Creativity and master-trends in contemporary sociological theory’, European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 3 (2000); Fredrik Jameson, Post-Modernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991); Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). He speaks now, less sanguinely and not really for democratic reasons, of ‘political decay’ in liberal democracies. Idem, Political Order and Political Decay (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).
- 23.
C. Castoriadis, L’Institution imaginaire de la société (Paris: Seuil, 1975), pp. 7–9, 138ff, 394ff; Idem, ‘Les intellectuels et l’histoire’ (1987), p. 130; Idem, ‘Pouvoir, politique, autonomie’ (1988), pp. 160–61, 171, in Le Monde morcelé. Carrefours du labyrinthe III (Paris: Seuil, 1990). In the first pages of his magnum opus, Castoriadis even adopts a Lacanian definition of the imaginary and links the unconscious to alienation (the discourse of the ‘big Other’), however much he disavowed Lacan in the ‘Preface’ to the book. Subsequently, in it, his breach of the causal chain through displacement and condensation tacitly invokes how Kant and Sartre defined freedom: as unconditioned, let alone self-transparency and undisturbed rationality. We could also raise the perhaps unanswerable point of what the ‘real’ would mean for political modernity. See Jacques Lacan, ‘Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage en psychoanalyse’ (1953), in Ecrits (Paris, Seuil, 1966); Idem, Le Seminaire, Book XI. Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris, Seuil [1964] 1973); J. M. Domingues, Social Creativity, Collective Subjectivity and Contemporary Modernity (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press and New York: Saint Martin’s Press [Palgrave], 2000), chap. 2.
- 24.
Karl Marx, Misère de la philosophie (1847), in Oeuvres, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), p. 135; K. Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifest der kommunistischen Partei (1848), in Werke, vol. 4 (Berlin: Dietz, 1978), pp. 463–65.
- 25.
K. Marx, Zur Juden Frage (1843), in K. Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, vol. 1 (Berlin: Dietz, 1981); Idem, ‘Kritik des Gothaer Programs’ (1875), in K. Marx and F. Engels, Werke, vol. 19 (Berlin: Dietz, 1987).
- 26.
I have proposed a three-partite definition of ‘reflexivity’—non-identitary, practical and rationalized—partly to deal with this issue in Domingues, Social Creativity, Collective Subjectivity and Contemporary Modernity, chap. 2. The discussion of the ‘ego’ and the ‘reality principle’ is perhaps best formulated in Sigmund Freud, Das Ich und das Es (1923), in Studienausgabe, vol. 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Fisher, 1975).
- 27.
Patrick Willey, Will and Political Legitimacy: A Critical Exposition of Social Contract Theory in Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant and Hegel (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, [1982] 1999), especially pp. 3–10, 200–05; Chris Thornhill, German Political Philosophy: The Metaphysics of Law (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 81–83, 340–343. The somewhat arbitrary and dogmatic character of Hegel’s exposition partly stems from his necessity for affirming state will and substantiality above all else. Constitutions would be an issue internal to the state, utterly detached from constituent power and removed from a social contract, as his criticism of Rousseau makes clear. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, in Werke, vol. 7 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, [1820] 1986), §§ 257–320, pp. 398ff. While the tenets of liberalism are maintained, the pre-eminence of society is rejected. See Werner Maihofer, ‘Hegels Prinzip der modernen Staats’ (1967–68), in Manfred Riedel (ed.), Materialen zu Hegels Rechtsphilosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975).
- 28.
Rousseau , op. cit., chaps. 1–6, 2.1–4; Emmanuel Joseph Sieyés, Qu’est-ce que le Tiers état? (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, [1789] 2001), chap. 5; Vladimir I. Lenin, The State and Revolution: The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution, in Collected Works, vol. 25 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, [1918] 1974), chap. 3. As is well known, Lenin drew upon Marx’s view of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. See also Carl Schmitt, Verfassungslehre (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot [1928] 1993), pp. 61ff, 75ff, 91ff. He pretended to embrace full popular sovereignty just to collapse, in a very authoritarian perspective, its clever democratic veneer notwithstanding, the ‘people’ into its relation with leaders. Thereby Schmitt deflected and neutralized its potency, putting it to sleep after the latter were chosen.
- 29.
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, [1963] 1990), chaps. 4, 6; Andrew Arato, Post-Sovereignty Constitution Making: Learning and Legitimacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
- 30.
Sieyés , op. cit., chap. 6; Antonio Negri, Il Potere Constituente. Saggio sulle alternative del moderno (Roma: Manifestolibri, 2002); Jürgen Habermas, ‘Volkssouveränität als Verfahren’ (1988), in Faktizität und Geltung: Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaat (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992). Negri has tried to give up on the sovereign power of the multitude due to its apparently inherent homogeneity, distinguishing it from ‘autonomy’, in Michael Hart and A. Negri, Assembly (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), chap. 3.
- 31.
Arato (op. cit.) is highly critical of sovereignty and is keen on fragmenting constituent power, while a positive assessment of the link between them is forcefully asserted in A. Kalyvas, ‘Constituent power’, Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon, vol. 3 (2013). See also Christopher Thornhill, A Sociology of Constitutions: Constitutions and State Legitimacy in Historical-Sociological Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Idem, A Sociology of Transnational Constitutions: Social Formations of the Post-National Legal Structure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). The pluralist novelties of the Latin American ‘left turn’, especially in Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia, are presented, overoptimistically, in Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Refundación del Estado en América Latina. Perspectivas desde una epistemologÃa del Sur (Lima: Instituto Internacional de Derecho y Sociedad, 2010). He disregards the role of executives in shaping these constitutions and how participation is contradicted in their structure by strong presidentialism. Their links with previous processes in Brazil and Colombia are also symptomatically overlooked. See, more critically, Roberto Gargarella, La sala de máquinas de la constitución. Dos siglos de constitucionalismo en América latina (1810–2010) (Buenos Aires: Katz, 2014).
- 32.
Habermas, Faktizität und Geltung. I believe there is an opening in his ideas to operate the articulation between the abstract and the concrete , although this is limited, since he tends to emphasize the abstract universality of communicative action and its outcomes.
- 33.
A. Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 254, 295–300.
- 34.
J. M. Domingues, Modernity Reconstructed (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006), especially Part 4.
- 35.
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London and New York: Verso, 1985); Claude Lefort, ‘La question de la democratie’ (1983), in Essais sur le politique (Paris: Seuil, 1986).
- 36.
E. Laclau, On Populist Reason (London and New York: Verso, 2002).
- 37.
Agnes Heller, ‘The concept of the political revisited’, in David Held (ed.), Political Theory Today (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), pp. 340–43. Although I find her perspective congenial, normatively it overly narrows the concept of ‘the political’ (which, in any event, I do not employ here) as ‘the practical realization of [equal] freedom’ in the ‘public domain’. Unfortunately, it may be the opposite of that.
- 38.
Unger, op. cit., pp. 387–91; Franz Z. Neumann, The Rule of Law: Political Theory and the Legal System in Modern Society (Oxford: Berg, [1936] 1986), pp. 44ff.
- 39.
Brunkhorst, op. cit.
- 40.
Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Ernesto Ganuza, Popular Democracy: The Paradox of Participation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017).
- 41.
Habermas, Faktzität und Geltung.
- 42.
Domingues, Social Creativity, Collective Subjectivity and Contemporary Modernity, chap. 4.
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Domingues, J.M. (2019). Radical Democracy. In: Critical Theory and Political Modernity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02001-9_9
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