Abstract
“The civic dissensions of our generation have, by a curious paradox, generated an increasing emphasis upon the necessity of agreement upon fundamentals as an essential condition of a working democracy.”
I am indebted to the National Science Foundation and the City University Research Foundation for financial support, and to Sharon Zukin and Binnaz Sayari for research assistance. All errors of fact and lapses of judgment are mine alone.
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References
“Democracy and Dissent,” Political Studies, vol. 10, no. 4 (October-December 1939), pp. 571–582. Cf. The New Belief in the Common Man, Brattleboro: Vermont Publishing Co., 1942, chapter V: “The Need for Dissent.” pp. 151–186. The book was reprinted in 1943 and 1945 and republished, with a new prologue and epilogue as The New Image of the Common Man, Boston: Beacon, 1950.
Cf. Carl Joachim Friedrich, Man and His Government: An Empirical Theory of Politics, New York: McGraw, 1968.
“Democracy and Dissent,” pp. 571f., 573; cf. New Belief, p. 156f.
New Belief, p. 186; cf. “Democracy and Dissent,” p. 582.
The most thoughtful wartime statement is by Ernest Barker, Reflections on Government, Oxford: Clarendon, 1942: “Before government by discussion can exist at all, there must be the preliminary basis of a common national tradition and a common social structure; but when it has once come into existence upon this basis it still needs for its working a mental habit of agreement upon a number of axioms which have to be generally accepted” (p. 63). Barker lists three such axioms: The “Agreement to Differ,” the “Majority Principle,” and the “Principle of Compromise” (pp. 63, 65, 67).
“Charles the Emperor… together with the bishops, abbots, counts, dukes, and all the faithful subjects of the Christian Church, and with their consent and counsel, has decreed the following… in order that each loyal subject, who has himself confirmed these decrees with his own hand, may do justice and in order that all his loyal subjects may desire to uphold the law.” Quoted by George H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory, rev. edn., New York: Holt, 1950, p. 204.
Harold Laski, Parliamentary Government in England, New York: Viking, 1938, second printing, 1947, p. 4; for similar discussions see the same author’s Democracy in Crisis (1933) and The Labour Party and the Constitution (1900). Cf. Reginald Bassett, The Essentials of Parliamentary Democracy, London: Macmillan, 1935, chapter V.
Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution, 1867; World’s Classics edn., with an introduction by the First Earl of Balfour, London: Oxford University Press, 1928, chapter VII: “The Prerequisites of Cabinet Government…,” pp. 225, 227, 228.
Balfour, ibid., p. xxiv. As Friedrich observes (“Democracy and Dissent,” p. 571), Laski cites or refers to this brief passage repeatedly, namely Parliamentary Government, pp. 8, 13, 65, 72, 165, 366f., as well as in other works. Three decades before Balfour’s preface, the doctrine of “general agreement” on “fundamentals” had been stated by G. Lowes Dickinson, Development of Parliamentary Government in England During the Nineteenth Century (1895), p. 161f., in a passage quoted in turn by A. Lawrence Lowell, Public Opinion and Popular Government, 1913, new edn., New York: Longmans, Green, 1914, p. 42f. “Government by the majority,” says Dickinson, “is a convenient means of conducting national affairs, where and in so far as there is a basis of general agreement deeper and more persistent than the variations of surface opinion; but as soon as a really fundamental point is touched, as soon as a primary instinct, whether of self-preservation or of justice, begins to be seriously and continuously outraged, the democratic convention gives way.” Specifically Dickinson predicted that the propertied class would set aside the democratic rules as soon as the “extremer Socialists” should use them “to effect a social revolution.” There is a squeeze play on: both the conservatives and Laski, the Marxist, assert that, democracy brooks no basic dissent — the ones to reject dissent, the other to doom bourgeois democracy. The partial but real social revolutions effected since their day by means of the progressive income tax and the welfare state make the diagnosis less plausible today.
My phrase inverts the usage of Arnold Brecht, Political Theory, Princeton: 1959, p. 126, who characterizes arguments such as Jefferson’s on equality as a “shift from Is to Ought” (p. 200). Brecht’s is a searching study in the history of ideas, and his term accurately describes the overt content of the Declaration of Independence, which argues from the fact of equal divine creation to the imperative of unalienable rights. My focus is on the recent discussion, which is willy-nilly imbued with the Scientific Value Relativism which Brecht so eloquently advocates. But I also mean to convey that Jefferson’s premise (“all men are created equal”) in its theological and pseudo-factual language smuggles in the moral judgment that the conclusion (“certain unalienable rights”) extracts. Brecht’s term “fusion between Is and Ought” (p. 199) covers both interpretations. The complaint about the fusion and resulting confusion was first registered in Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739); see Brecht, p. 540.
Just so, early nationalists celebrate the age-old existence of a nation they are hoping to help call to life. See Rustow, A World of Nations, Washington: Brookings, 1967, pp. 26, 40–47.
“Dissent and Democracy,” pp. 571, 577f.; New Belief pp. I53f., 175–177. Friedrich’s estimate of Bagehot appears to rely on Laski. His critique of Laski and G. D. H. Cole, in turn, relies in part on Bassett, op. cit.
V. O. Key, Jr., Public Opinion and American Democracy, New York: Knopf, 1967, p. 41.
The relevant definition in the Oxford English Dictionary is “Agreement in opinion; the collective unanimous opinion of a number of persons… Also consensus of opinion, authority, testimony, etc.” Among the examples given are: “Supported by a great consensus of very weighty evidence.” (1858) “Sustained by a great consensus of opinion.” (1874) “A consensus had actually been arrived at on the main features involved.” (1880) The word had recently become established in English usage when Lowell in 1896 took it up as a technical term.
Key, p. 41.
Key, p. 27. Either out of charity, or because of the difficulty of finding an authentic statement of the consensus theory (see above), Key refers only to anonymous “political theorists.” Shils’ essay, written some years later, is an authoritative reflection of the American social scientists’ consensus on “consensus” that Key had in mind.
Edward Shils, “Consensus,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, New York: Macmillan, 1968, III, p. 260f.
Edward Shils, “Consensus,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, New York: Macmillan, 1968, III, p. 266.
Key, p. 50.
John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (1861), chapter IV, cf. chapter I, Everyman’s Library edn., pp. 208, 175–184.
Lowell, Public Opinion and Popular Government, op. cit., p. 9. A half-century earlier, the concept of “consensus” had figured prominently in the sociology of Auguste Comte.
Lowell, Government and Parties in Continental Europe, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896, I, p. 102.
Lowell, Government and Parties in Continental Europe, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896, I, p101.
Lowell, Government and Parties in Continental Europe, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896, I, p. 102.
Lowell, Government and Parties in Continental Europe, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896, I, p. 103.
Lowell, Government and Parties in Continental Europe, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896, II, p. 121.
LowellGovernment and Parties in Continental Europe, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896, I, p. 103f.
See Rousseau’s famous footnote on free emigration as an implicit condition of the social contract (Social Contract, Book IV, chapter 2) — a qualification that opens up the entire subject of foreign relations. This subject Rousseau avoided in the Social Contract; he was struggling with it vainly in his commentaries on the Abbé de Saint-Pierre.
Richard Jensen, “History and the Political Scientist,” in Seymour Martin Lipset, ed., Politics and the Social Sciences, New York: Oxford, 1969, p. 5. On the difficulties of deriving significant political generalizations from attitude surveys cf. D. A. Rustow “Relevance in Social Science, or The Proper Study of Mankind,” The American Scholar, Summer 1971, p. 491.
Notably Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957.
“…a concept too vague, too personal, or too divine ever to do the job of politics for it,” in the striking phrase of Bernard Crick, In Defense of Politics, rev. edn., Penguin Books, 1964, p. 24.
New York: Harper, 1937, 2nd edn. 1941; rev. edn. under the title Constitutional Government and Democracy, Boston: Ginn, 1950.
D. A. Rustow, “Transitions to Democracy: Toward A Dynamic Model,” Comparative Politics, vol. 2, no. 3, April 1970, pp. 337–363, esp. 339–347; cf.
D. A. Rustow, “Communism and Change,” in Chalmers Johnson, ed., Change in Communist Systems, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970, pp. 343–358, esp. 357.
Bagehot, pp. 231, 232.
Horace M. Kallen, “Consensus,” Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, New York: Macmillan, 1931, III, p. 225f.
One possible research program along those lines is described in Rustow, “Transitions to Democracy,” pp. 350–361.
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© 1971 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Rustow, D.A. (1971). Agreement, Dissent, and Democratic Fundamentals. In: von Beyme, K. (eds) Theory and Politics / Theorie und Politik. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-1063-9_17
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