Abstract
Jean-Jacques Rousseau throws down a gauntlet for theories of popular sovereignty. After announcing his distress at the modern condition and confessing that he has no idea how things got that way, Rousseau strikes a more confident tone, saying that he does know what could be done to render such a condition legitimate. The project, he says, is to,
Find a form of association which defends and protects with all common forces the person and goods of each associate, and by means of which each one, while uniting with all, nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before.1
This formulation, like so much of Rousseau’s writing, is delicious precisely because of its daring juxtaposition of conflicting ideas. The normative standard set down here is “obeying only oneself and remaining as free as before.” Rather than situating it in a romanticized state of nature, however, Rousseau frames this criterion as a basis for finding a “form of association” — that is, a politically organized society. This is not just any politically organized society, of course, but the type characterized as putting men everywhere in chains. The chains are uniquely modern ones — not those of despotism, but simply of modernization itself. The complex social, bureaucratically organized character of modern life is precisely Rousseau’s target. Against this background, it is especially striking that he describes his inquiry as seeking a form of association in which each associate can obey only himself and remain as free as before.
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Notes
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, trans. Donald Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett Books, 1987), book I, chap. 6, p. 24.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard/Pléiade, 1964), 360.
Malcolm Ashmore, The Reflexive Thesis: Wrighting the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989);
Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology (Cambridge: Polity, 1990);
Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992);
Michael Lynch, “Against Reflexivity as an Academic Virtue and Source of Privileged Knowledge,” Theory, Culture and Society, 17, 3 (2000): 26–54;
Steve Woolgar, Knowledge and Reflexivity: New Frontiers in the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Sage, 1988).
Jean Cohen, Regulating Intimacy: A New Legal Paradigm (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), chap. 4;
William Scheuerman, “Reflexive Law and the Challenges of Globalization,” Journal of Political Philosophy, 9, 1 (2001): 81–102;
Gunther Teubner, “Substantive and Reflexive Elements in Modern Law,” Law and Society Review, 17, 2 (1983): 239–85.
Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990);
Giddens, “Living in a Post-Traditional Society,” in Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash (eds), Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition, and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 56–109.
Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter (Newbury Park CA: Sage Publications, 1992), pp. 151–236;
The Reinvention of Politics: Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social Order, trans. Mark Ritter (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997); and
“The Reinvention of Politics: Towards a Theory of Reflexive Modernization,” in Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash (eds), Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition, and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 1–55.
Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 115.
Sidney Verba, Kay Schlozman, and Henry Brady, Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1996), p. 123.
Jürgen Habermas, “What Is Universal Pragmatics?,” in Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979);
Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1978), pp. 272–91;
Kevin Olson, “Do Rights have a Formal Basis? Habermas’s Legal Theory and the Normative Foundations of the Law,” Journal of Political Philosophy, 11, 3 (2003): 273–94.
Jürgen Habermas, “Constitutional Democracy: A Paradoxical Union of Contradictory Principles?,” Political Theory, 29, 6 (2001): 775; Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 421.
Andrew Arato, “Procedural Law and Civil Society: Interpreting the Radical Democratic Paradigm,” in Michael Rosenfeld and Andrew Arato (eds), Habermas on Law and Democracy: Critical Exchanges, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 26–36. To some extent the equivocation that Arato notes can be attributed to the close similarity of the German Reflexion and reflexiv, which give reflexivity a mental or cognitive connotation. The separation between them is stronger in English, where reflection and reflexivity are more orthographically distinct. I’m grateful to Joel Anderson for this insight.
Leonard Feldman, Citizens without Shelter: Homelessness, Democracy, and Political Exclusion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004);
Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U. S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
Kevin Olson, “Paradoxes of Constitutional Democracy,” American Journal of Political Science, 51, 2 (2007): 330–43;
Bonnie Honig, “Between Decision and Deliberation: Political Paradox in Democratic Theory,” American Political Science Review, 101, 1 (2007): 1–17.
Barbara Cruikshank, The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).
Kevin Olson, Reflexive Democracy: Political Equalityand the Welfare State (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2006), chap. 5.
Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).
Jürgen Habermas, Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973);
Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979). In this context, it is worth noting that the latter was originally titled Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus.
Kevin Olson, “Constructing Citizens,” Journal of Politics, 70, 1 (2008): 40–53.
Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, vol. 2 (New York: Vintage, 1990);
Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, vol. 3 (New York: Vintage, 1988);
Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (New York: Routledge, 1990).
Sheldon Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” Constellations, 1, 1 (1994): 11–25;
Wolin, “Norm and Form: The Constitutionalizing of Democracy,” in J. Peter Euben, John Wallach, and Josiah Ober (eds), Athenian Political Thought and the Reconstruction of American Democracy, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 29–58.
Alan Keenan, Democracy in Question: Democratic Openness in a Time of Political Closure (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).
James Bohman, Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, and Democracy (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1996), chap. 3;
“Deliberative Democracy and Effective Social Freedom: Capabilities, Resources, and Opportunities,” in James Bohman and William Rehg (eds), Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 321–48.
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).
John McCormick, “Contain the Wealthy and Patrol the Magistrates: Restoring Elite Accountability to Popular Government,” American Political Science Review, 100, 2 (2006): 147–63.
Iris Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, revised ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 197–201, esp. p. 200. My sense of materialism fits under the rubric of Williams’ definition (ii), “explanations and judgments of mental, moral and social activities” (p. 197). See also
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780–1950 (New York: Penguin Books, 1961); and
Judith Butler, “Merely Cultural,” Social Text, 15, 3–4 (1997): 265–77.
In a way that Habermas’s theory, for instance, does not. Kevin Olson, “Democratic Inequalities: The Problem of Equal Citizenship in Habermas’s Democratic Theory,” Constellations, 5, 2 (1998): 215–33.
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), passim, for example, pp. 12–13, 163.
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Olson, K. (2009). Reflexive Democracy as Popular Sovereignty. In: de Bruin, B., Zurn, C.F. (eds) New Waves in Political Philosophy. New Waves in Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234994_7
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