Blackwood Project 2001. Geoff Boucher
Geoff Boucher, Tuesday, July 03, 2001
This document consists of my report on the Third Way concept of democracy for the working group session on ethical politics, plus some opening speculations on the meaning of the expression “ethical politics”. My survey of Giddens’ position on the “democratisation of democracy” consists of the following sections of my “Theory of Structuration and the Politics of the Third Way” document:
I have omitted these sections to save space for posting. They should be inserted between “Giddens and Ethical Politics” and “Global Governance and Cosmopolitan Democracy”. This final section examines David Held’s book on global democracy, which fleshes out the sketch by Giddens for global and world politics. (David Held, Democracy and the Global Order (1995).) Once again, I have not (yet) made a criticism of Giddens’ and Held’s lame politics. I wanted to submit my report first (apologies for lateness - my car! My books!).
According to that font of philosophical wisdom, the Oxford English Dictionary, the terms relating to conduct in civil and political society enjoy the following definitions.
In relation to civil society (most broadly, the economy and the institutional framework lying between the economy and the state, including both public institutions - the media, education, cultural arenas, special forums of public debate, churches, trades unions, political parties, etc. — and the domain of private life - the family, friendship relations, personal property).
In relation to political society (the institutional framework of government and the political administration of the state, including political parties, government bureaucracy, the judiciary and court system).
These terms form two relatively distinct systems of interlocking categories. Within the respective systems (called, by me, “civil society” and “political society”) the individual terms rely upon all the other terms for their definition. (No surprises here - that’s what a dictionary does.) Let’s look at how the OED usefully summarises the everyday meaning of these terms.
Congruent with the everyday sense of these terms, morals refers to personal conduct, morality to a domain of personal conduct with supra-personal rules (for instance, professional morality of the medical field), ethics to the totality of domains of personal conduct (to the field of morals as a whole). Morals is something individual, morality something that regulates individual actions and belief within a specific conventional domain, and ethics is the field of all moralities and all morals. Ethics is only something “collective” in an attenuated sense. Ethics deals with something “general” rather than something “collective” - it is closer to a meta-morality (a discourse about discourses of morality, a set of rules for the construction of moralities and morals) than to a morals of collective agents. In bourgeois society, the individual is not supposed to derive their morals from a collective conception of the good, modify this in the light of the specific domains of application and then finally derive rules of personal conduct from this general field. In the self-understanding of social agents in bourgeois society (in ideology, that is) things happen the other way around (from individual to generality). Likewise, in harmony with the everyday understanding of politics, government and justice, these terms are defined in relation to the administration of states. They deal primarily (if not exclusively) with the legislative arm of the state - with civil government, in the Lockean sense of the term. The terms relating to political society make no explicit reference to the terms relating to civil society.
The categories of civil and political society are bourgeois categories that I have used to group these terms in a manner absent from the OED, in order to bring out the underlying presupposition, namely, the separation of politics and economics characteristic of bourgeois society, and the consequent relative separation of ethics and politics. You will note that “justice” is the only articulating term, and then barely. Justice as just conduct and maintenance of right refers to the coincidence of “just” with “right” - where right means both lawful (of rights) and morally good. This again conforms to the everyday understanding of the political process, where what is good should be legislated and then upheld as good because it is law.
From this (schoolboy dissertation) I infer that “ethical politics” in the everyday sense means:
“Ethical politics” in this sense is implicitly opposed to realpolitik, the science of the manipulation of the political process for the ends of government (to enhance the power to govern). Realpolitik supposes the constrained nature of political office and therefore consists mainly of negotiations, manoeuvres and compromises occasioned not by lack of a mandate (this is presupposed) but by lack of the power to govern due to some other influence effectively constraining the political agenda. Realpolitik is the practical consequence of the institutional separation of politics and civil society, combined with the preponderant power of economics within both civil and political society. We can therefore suppose that “ethical politics” in say, newspaper discourse, names a bourgeois utopia - the return of the “rule of the people,” considered as a multitude of moral individuals, in the epoch of the (amoral) multinational corporation.
This suspicion is strengthened by a glance at the influential works of Anthony Giddens. The importance of Giddens is that he articulates the agenda of the mainstream of international social democracy and social liberalism (including the labour parties in this designation) at a moment when the “global Third Way” is gathering momentum.
Giddens divides the contemporary political field into two partitions. The dominant part is “emancipatory politics” - the politics of liberation from exploitation and oppression, guided by the ethical principle of autonomy. Emancipatory struggles are informed by material values - values relating to material concerns, beginning with food and shelter and working up to wages, conditions and rights. The supplementary part is “life politics” - the politics of self-development and identity formation. This is also guided by the ethics of autonomy, since Giddens’ concept of the “auto-telic self” (the self-directing person capable of external agency and internal reformation) is only a restatement of the Kantian principle of the autonomy of the representations that determine the will. Yet the struggles of life politics, conducted by the new social movements, are informed by “post-materialist values”. These relate not to material conditions and political rights, but to the cultural factors that influence the quality of life and the identity of the social agent. These cultural factors are by no means negligible: they include the politics of environmentalism, many of the demands of feminism and the general raft of single issue groups who effectively aim at the democratisation of civil society (in the restricted sense, where this term excludes the economy).
The concept of a Third Way, beyond the socialist Left and the neo-liberal Right is relevant to the determination of the space of “ethical politics” in Giddens. While the ethics of autonomy acts as a foundation for all political conduct - and therefore all politics is ethical politics — there is a clear sense in Giddens in which this ‘says too much’. For a start, the ethics of autonomy necessarily leads to a politics of separation (of the separation of powers and the relative autonomy of politics and economics), but this is a far cry from calls to radically democratise the state apparatus. While the programme of the “democratisation of democracy” - the policy of transparent administration, community consultation and the public accountability of the state administration - is an effort to ‘clean up politics,’ this is not the same as the direct or indirect representation of the people within the state administration. The bureaucracy will continue to be a specialised professional class fraction, but the actions of the bureaucrats will be held open to increased public scrutiny. The government will continue to be based on representative democracy and constitutional principles, but it will make its processes clearer and accept greater sectional and general representations of interests. But this is only a modification of standard bourgeois democratic politics, a programme for the reconstitution of the welfare state that includes privatisation, consultation and a (probably farcical) set of guidelines for generating trust in the government. “Ethical politics” names something different from the pragmatism of normal government. Clearly, what are “beyond Left and Right” in Giddens’ Third Way are the concepts of risk society, life politics and “positive welfare”. Risk management, cultural enhancement and the redistribution of opportunities supposedly represent the leading edge of the shift beyond emancipatory politics (class politics), towards a politics where the main antagonisms are determined along the axes of autonomy and community, not the welfare state and the free market. Hence “ethical politics” in Giddens appears as a supplement to mainstream policy formation, linked to the role of the new social movements.
While the watchword of traditional social democracy is “balance,” the key support for Third Way politics is the “supplement”. Life politics supplements emancipatory politics; the opposition between autonomy and community supplements the antagonism between Left and Right; post-materialist values supplement material equality. When reading expressions like “the democratisation of democracy” and “the democratisation of the emotions,” I frequently get the feeling that Giddens is (deliberately?) blurring the line between politics and ethics. It is important to state that advocating democracy does not constitute an ethical stance. Democracy is a political system of popular rule through direct or representative institutions. Autonomy is generally taken (in classical liberal theory) to be the ethical principle that supports democratic politics. By contrast, the term “democracy” is popularly used to mean “equality” - which is an ethical principle, but does not solely support democratic politics. Giddens trades on the ambiguity between democracy (politics) and “democracy” (equality). For instance, the “democratisation of the emotions” really means the equalisation of the distribution of emotional roles between men and women, replacing the nineteenth century order of male sense and female sensibility. This has nothing to do with political procedures for implementing majority decisions - although it is the result of a political process, namely, the struggles of the second wave of the women’s liberation movement. I think that Giddens uses an expression like “the democratisation of the emotions” precisely to slide from the history of political struggles linked to the radical 1970s, to a sociology of civil society connected to an apolitical theory of globalisation (remember, this expression is from the work The Transformation of Intimacy, describing the consequences for personal identity and gender roles of reflexive modernity). This is the only way that the reduction in Third Way theory of the new social movements to “sub-politics” can happen. This is an historical reduction - “sub-political” accurately describes the activities of the coteries of lawyers, doctors, politicians and pop stars at the helm of the mainstream environmental or women’s movement today, at the historical nadir of radical politics - not a structural consequence of globalisation. “Misrecognising” the current state of the new social movements for their necessary (structurally assigned) condition is vital when one wants to claim them as an appendage of government policy. The notion of the demands of feminism as “post-material” and “sub-political” is an insult to the intelligence.
David Held is a major social theorist and political philosopher with close links to Anthony Giddens. His analysis of globalisation is inspired by Giddens’ concept of “reflexive modernity” (20) and his political positions are close to those of Third Way social democracy. Because Held is a philosopher situated within a powerful contemporary theoretical current, his analyses have the intellectual weight that Giddens’ impressionistic surveys lack.
Held begins by noting that the triumph of liberal democracy does not mean that there exists a unitary model of democracy globally. Democratic theory is traversed by an antagonism between democracy as popular rule and democracy as a legitimation process centred on elections. This has led to three models of democracy:
The critical problem is this: globalisation implies that “first, chains of political, economic and social activity are becoming worldwide in scope, and, secondly, it suggests that there has been an intensification of levels of interaction and interconnectedness within and between states and societies” (21). The worldwide turn to representative democracy happens:
“at just that moment when the very efficacy of democracy as a national form of political organisation appears open to question. As substantial areas of human activity are progressively organised on a global level, the fate of democracy, and of the democratic nation-state in particular, is fraught with difficulty. In this context, the meaning and place of democratic politics, and of the contending models of democracy, have to be rethought in relation to the overlapping local, national, regional and global structures and processes” (21).
Democratic theory has assumed the nation state as the unit of analysis, while the theory of international relations is predicated upon the existence of an “international civil society” composed of sovereign state entities who behave like the individuals of classical political theory. Both of these assumptions are negated by globalisation. “it was generally assumed that the representative democratic state had control over its own fate, subject only to compromises it must make and limits imposed upon it by groups and forces operating within its territorial boundaries, and by agencies and representatives of other nation states” (23). “Change was presumed to occur via mechanisms ‘built in’ to the very structure of a given society, and governing its development” (24).
To rethink the analytical framework of political theory, Held proposes what is essentially an ‘external constraints’ model. “At the international level, there are disjunctures between the idea of the state as in principle capable of determining its own future, and the world economy, international organisations, regional and global institutions, international law and military alliances which operate to shape and constrain the options of individual nation states”. This analysis of the ‘seven major constraints’ “is intended to indicate the different ways in which globalisation can be said to constitute constraints or limits on political agency in a number of key domains; and to what extent the possibility of a democratic polity has been transformed or altered” (99).
This reconstructed framework rests upon three main concepts: the principle of autonomy, the democratic legal state and the notion of cosmopolitan democracy. The principle of autonomy is the foundation of democratic politics (145) and can be defined as follows:
“Persons should enjoy equal rights and, accordingly, equal obligations in the specification of the political framework which generates and limits the opportunities available to them; that is, they should be free and equal in the determination of the conditions of the own lives, so long as they do not deploy this framework to negate the rights of others” (147).
The principle of autonomy therefore specifies the self-determination of individuals and the limitations upon government. It is therefore the opposite of the doctrine of the sovereignty of states, since it holds that the state is fundamentally conditioned by the rights of the citizenry - not the reverse. All liberalisms (irrespective of differences) defend (150):
The principle of autonomy links these rights and powers, and entails six consequences:
The concept of a democratic legal state - or Rechtstaat - involves a constitutional order that is not subject to amendment by the majority. This refers to the institutional framework for deliberative decisions - centrally, the constitution, parliament and the judiciary - which cannot be regarded as revokable if the state is to be considered a democratic legal state. The sovereignty of the democratic legal state - its rightful capacity to take political decisions - therefore rests not with government policy but with the formal mechanisms of democratic procedures. Where governments change, democratic procedures must remain invariant, according to this theory.
Held recognises that this model incurs the classical problems of formalism, namely, the description above is not incompatible with “slavery, apartheid and virulent forms of racism” (167). To close down the possibility of a formally democratic regime masking extreme injustice, Held invokes the Habermasian concept of an ideal deliberative situation (one free from all forms of coercion, where subjects would rationally accept the place of the other in the dialogue were it not for a difference of opinion). For instance, “irrespective of what Athenian citizens themselves would have considered fair and appropriate under altered circumstances, it is clear that the inequalities of slavery were sustained largely by the application of coercive power” (168). Hence no rational Athenian citizen would trade places in a hypothetical free dialogue with a slave - their difference is substantive, not intellectual. Therefore no situation of free deliberation exists. While this appears to close off the possibility of widely recognised injustice being screened behind formal democracy, it actually ‘says too much,’ since its principles are too sweeping for this variety of liberalism, and would lead, as they stand, to the rejection of the claims of the industrialised nations to be real democracies if the existence of class based structural inequality could be demonstrated. Held is not so naïve as to suppose that class no longer exists - unlike the average postmodern swashbuckler, Held considers his contribution something that might contribute to actual governance, not a bid for ephemeral academic sales.
This leads Held to ask the crucial question: “if one engaged in a democratic thought experiment about the proper form of public power, is it likely that one would accept as legitimate a political order in which the capacity for self-determination was shaped by asymmetries of power, unequal life-chances and radically unequal political opportunities patterned on one’s country of origin, race, sex and class? ... Is a system of power which generates systematic asymmetries of life-chances and political opportunities compatible with the principle of autonomy?” (169).
Held replies that “where relations of power systematically generate asymmetries of life-chances they may create a situation which can be called ‘nautonomic’. Nautonomy refers to the asymmetrical production and distribution of life chances which limit and erode the possibilities of political participation. By life chances I mean the chances a person has of sharing in the socially generated economic, cultural or political rewards and opportunities typically found in his or her community “ (171). Hence nautonomy limits the common structure of political action necessary for legitimate democratic governance. Held then applies the principle of autonomy and its entailments to demonstrate the illegitimacy of ‘nautonomy,’ but couples this to the assertion that a “democratic public law” can transform the structural asymmetries that generate nautonomy. Held’s position, like Giddens’, is a social liberalism.
There are seven (somewhat overlapping) sites of power where structural asymmetries generative of nautonomy arise (180-184):
To rectify the existence of nautonomy in contemporary society, Held calls for “seven clusters of rights ... health, social, cultural, civic, economic, pacific and political rights” (191). These supplement the primary political rights that are entailments of the democratic legal state. These additional rights are usefully tabulated on pp192-194.
Once the concept of supplementary rights designed to create the context for autonomy - as opposed to nautonomy - are defined, Held advances to the discussion of “cosmopolitan democracy”. The principle of autonomy is advanced as the (Kantian) regulative ideal for a cosmopolitan democratic world order (221). A regulative ideal works as an indispensable hypothesis or goal of thinking, which, however, is nowhere to be found in the empirically existing phenomenal world. Held’s description of cosmopolitan democracy as the asymptotic endpoint of the implementation of democratic legal reforms therefore needs to be supplemented by a plausible mechanism linking legal reforms to individual autonomy.
For Held, this is the framework of a cosmopolitan international law, which “transcends the particular claims of nations and states and extends to all in the ‘universal community'” (228). From this there follows the “obligation to build a transnational, common structure of political action” (232), within which “the nation state would, in due course, ‘wither away'” (233). This cosmopolitan polity is envisaged as an ensemble of regional, national and local self-regulating associations “from city-states to corporations” (234), all subordinated to an international democratic legal framework (that is, a global Rechtstaat). To prevent the formation of an imperial “world government” that arrogates all authority to itself, Held proposes that the decision-making powers of the various levels of cosmopolitan governance be carefully designed so that there exists a balanced division of power between the different government entities.
“The establishment of a cosmopolitan model of democracy is a way of seeking to strengthen democracy ‘within’ communities and civil associations by elaborating and reinforcing democracy from ‘outside’ through a network of regional and international agencies and assemblies that cut across spatially delimited locales. The impetus to the pursuit of this network can be found in a number of processes and forces, including: the development of transnational grass-roots movements with clear regional or global objectives ... the elaboration of new legal rights and duties affecting states and individuals in connection with the ‘common heritage of humankind,’ the protection of the ‘global commons,’ the defence of human rights and the deployment of force, and the emergence and proliferation in the twentieth century of international institutions to coordinate transnational forces and problems, from the UN and its agencies to regional political networks and organisations. Accordingly, it can be argued, a political basis exists upon which to build a more systematic democratic future. This future has to be conceived in cosmopolitan terms - a new institutional complex with global scope, given shape and form by reference to basic democratic law, which takes on the character of government to the extent, and only to the extent, that it promulgates, implements and enforces this law” (237).