Democracy and difference: contesting the boundaries of the political

DEMOCRACY AND DIFFERENCE

CONTESTING THE BOUNDARIES OF THE POLITICAL

Edited by Seyla Benhabib

P R I N C E T O N

U N IVE R S I TY

PR E S S

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright ©

1996

by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Democracy and difference : Contesting the boundaries of the political/ edited by Seyla Benhabib. p.

em.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-691-04479-1 (cl: alk. paper).­ ISBN 0-691-04478-3 (ph: alk. paper)

1. Democracy.

2. Ethnicity.

4. Social movements. JC423.D43979 321.8-dc20

3. Nationalism.

I. Benhabib, Seyla.

1996 96-2189

This book has been composed in Berkeley Book Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on library Resources Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

____________________________________

Introduction The Democratic Moment and the Problem of Difference

Seyla Benhabib PART ONE. DE M O CRAT IC THEORY: FOUNDATIONS AND PERSPECTIVES

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One Three Normative Models of Democracy

jurgen Habermas

21

Two Fu gitive Democracy

Sheldon S. Wolin

31

Three Using Power/Fighting Power: The Polity

jane Mansbridge

46

Four Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy

Seyla Benhabib

67

Five Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy

joshua Cohen

95

Six Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy

Iris Marion Young

120

PART TWO. EQUALITY, DIFFERENCE, AND PUBLIC REPRESENTATION

13 7

Seven Dealing with Difference : A Politics of Ideas, or a Politics of Presence?

Anne Phillips

139

Eight Three Forms of Group-Differentiated Citizenship in Canada

Will Kymlicka

153

vi

CONTENTS

Nine Diversity and Democracy: Representing Differences

Carol C. Gould

171

Ten Democracy, Difference , and the Right of Privacy

jean

L.

Cohen

187

Eleven Gender Equity and the Welfare State : A Postindustrial Thought Experiment

Nancy Fraser PART THREE. CULTURE, IDENTITY, AND DEMOCRACY

218 243

Twelve Democracy, Power, and the "Political"

Chantal Mouffe

245

Thirteen Difference , Dilemmas, and the Politics of Home

Bonnie Honig

257

Fourteen Democracy and Multiculturalism

Fred Dallmayr

278

Fifteen The Performance of Citizenship: Democracy, Gender, and Difference in the French Revolution

joan B. Landes

295

Sixteen Peripheral Peoples and Narrative Identities: Arendtian Reflections on Late Modernity

Carlos A Forment PART FOUR. DOES DEMOCRACY NEED FOUNDATIONS?

314 331

Seventeen Idealizations, Foundations, and Social Practices

Richard Rorty

333

Eighteen Democratic Theory and Democratic Experience

Robert A Dahl

336

CONTENTS

vii

Nineteen Democracy, Philosophy, and Justification

Amy Gutmann

340

Twenty Foundationalism and Democracy

Benjamin R. Barber

348

List of Contributors

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Index

365

DEMOCRACY AND DIFFERENCE

Introduction

__________

The Democratic Moment and the Problem of Difference SEYLA BENHABIB

Two

HUNDRED YEARS

after the French Revolution, in 1989, a different set of

walls came crumbling down . With the end of authoritarian communism in East Central Europe, the Baltic countries, and the former Soviet Union, and with the earlier transitions from dictatorship to democracy in the Philippines, Argentina, and Brazil, the worldwide movement toward democracy has been celebrated. Uke Alexis de Tocqueville, who in 1 833 prophesied the "irresisti­ ble revolution advancing century by century," contemporary thinkers have greeted the "democratic moment."1 Francis Fukuyama, in

The End of History,

proclaimed that we have reached "the end point of mankind's ideological evo­ lution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. " 2

History, however, always proves wrong those who claim to have solved its riddle. The ink had hardly dried on Fukuyamas triumphalist words when political realitl.es and experiences different from the ones prophesied by his theory erupted: the civil war and ethnic genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina; the Russian destruction of Chechnya; the �r.Ln.& nationality conflicts in Azer­ baijan, Armenia, Macedonia, and Greece; the devolution of democracy and the rise of Moslem fundamentalism in Algeria and elsewhere among the coun­ tries of North Africa and the Middle East. These trends indicate that "the universalization of liberal democracy" is far from complete . Yet in the heart of the West as well, in France and Italy, and perhaps even in the United States neofascist movements have emerged on a scale unprecedented since the end of World War I I . 3 The global trend toward democratization is real , but so also are the oppositions and antagonisms asserting themselves against this trend in the name of various forms of "difference"-ethnic, national , linguistic, reli­ gious, and cultural.4 Throughout the globe a new politics for the recognition of collective identity forms is reSU"rging. Since every search for identity includes differentiating oneself from what one is not, identity politics is always and necessarily a politics of the creation ofdiffe�e:nce . One is a Bosnian Serb to the degree to whicnone-rs-n:on Bosnfiln Moslem or a Croat; one is a Gush Emmunim �ter in the West Bank to the

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I N T R O D U C T I ON

extent that one is not a secular Zionist; one belongs to the "European anthro­ pological-cultural community" to the degree that one is not from the Maghreb, the Middle East, or Asia. What is shocking about these developments is not the inevitable dialectic of identity/difference that they display but rather the atavistic belief that identities can be maintained and secured only by eliminat­ ing difference and otherness. The negotiation of identity/difference, to use William Connollys felicitous phrase,5 is the political problem facing democra­ cies on a global scale.

I

Under the title Democracy and Diff erence: Contesting the Boundaries of the Politi­ cal, the essays collected in this volume seek to articulate and come to grips with forms of identity/difference politics that were particularly salient in West­ ern liberal democracies throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Referred to at times as "new social movement politics," these developments were seen as express­ ing "postmaterialist values" (Ronald Inglehart)6 and were interpreted as signal­ ing_a...sh_ift from "issues of distribution" to a concern with "the grammar of forms of life" Ourgen Habermas).7 Through the experiences of new social movements, maj or transformations occurred in the nature of issues defined as being political concerns. The struggles over wealth, political position, and access that characterized bourgeois and working-class politics throughout the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century were replaced by strug­ gles over abortion and gay rights, over ecology and the consequences of new medical technologies, and the politics of racial, linguistic, and ethnic pride (colloquially referred to in the U.S. context as the "politics of the Rainbow coalition"). These new issues have been represented by novel groups of politi­ cal actors: instead of political parties, there was a shift to movement politics and to loosely coalesced groups of activist women, people of color, gay indi­ viduals, and concerned citizens. 8 Viewed in a global context, the emergence of this new politics in Western democracies partially �verlapped with the worldwide movement toward de­ mocratization. But the politics of "identity/difference," emerging out of the experience of new social movements in liberal capitalist· democracies, and the politics of racial, ethnic, linguistic, and religious difference developing in for­ mer communist countries, North Africa, and the Middle East are radically different. Whereas the former kind of identity/difference politics focuses on the neg9�i�tion, contestation, and representation of difference within the pub­ lic sphere of liberal democracies, the politics of ethnonationalisms seek to redefine the constituents of the body politic, and aim at creating new politi­ cally sovereign bodies. In fact, the expression of cultural, religious, national, and ethnic homogeneity through a sovereign state-form is the desideratum of -----

I N T RO D U C T I O N

5

these latter movements. The essays in this volume, in discussing the demo­ cratic politics of difference, share the assumption that the institutions and culture of liberal democracies are sufficiently complex, supple, ·and decen­ tered so as to allow the expression of difference without fracturing the identity of the body politic or subverting existing forms of political sovereignty.9 The phrase "democracy and difference" was an invitation to the contribu­ tors to reflect upon the theory and practice of democracy after the experiences of identity politics in their "new social movement" form. D..oes d�1llocracy rest on J:!:omogen�i�g mo�els of identity? What does the "body" of the body politic look like? Can. the ideal of universal citizenship accommodate differenc�? What theories of rationality and motivation govern our conceptions of the democratic citizen and the legal person? Does democracy need philosophy? If so, which kind: rationalist, contextualist, postmodernist, critical, or neo-Kant­ ian? W hat institutional, cultural, representational channels are there for the expression of difference? How much difference is compatible with the ideal of t�e rule of law under fair and equal conditions? Within this context, the term "difference," and its more metaphysical per­ mutations, "differance" in the work of Jacques Derrida, and "le differend" in the work of Jean-Franc;ois Lyotard, have become rallying points for two issues: a ph.ilos9phical critique of Enlightenment-type rationalism, essentialism. and universalism, and a cultural battle cry for those who insist on. the .experience of alterity, otherness, heterogeneity, dissonance, and resistance.1° Contempo­ rary Western liberal democracies are being challenged by groups who insist upon their unassimilatable difference and who want to use their experience. of alterity to demystify the rationalist and identitary illusions of these liberal democracies. As is often the case in periods of momentous transformations such as the ones we have been living through since 1989. old and new definitions, pre­ suppositions, currents of thought, assumptions, and values mix, mingle, and clash in inchoate ways. The purpose of this volume is to contribute to a self­ clarification of our times by analyzing the conceptual, cultural, and institu­ tional quandaries and puzzles of the present "democratic moment" in the face of the questions of identity/difference.

II

In his contribution to this volume, Sheldon Wolin writes: "Thus democracy is too simple for complex societies and too complex for simple ones." The ques­ tion of social complexity and democracy is also in the forefront of Habermass lead essay, "Three Normative Models of Democracy." Habermas distinguishes among the liberal, republican, and proceduraUst-deliberative views of demo­ cratic politics. According to the liberal model, the democratic process has

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I N T RO D U C T I ON

the function of transmitting to the political apparatus the interests of an au­ tonomous civil society; the task of politics is the coordination of divergent interests among private persons. According to the republican model, politics is viewed as the articulation of a "common good," of a substantive vision of the ethical life of a community. The good of politics is not the administra­ tion of the interests of civil society as much as it is the creation of solidarity among citizens. Habermas objects that both the liberal and the republican models "pre­ suppose a view of society as centered in the state-be it as guardian of a market-society or the state as the self-conscious institutionalization of an ethi­ cal community." The discourse theory of democracy (used by Habermas inter­ changeably in this context with a "deliberative model of politics") proceeds from the image of a decentered society. . The political system is considered neither the peak , nor the center, nor even the formative model of society in �neral, but as one mo.re "action system," to borrow a phrase from Niklas Luhmann, among others: Habermas seeks to recast concepts like iegitimati?n and popular sovereignty. in the terms of this proceduralist model: "Discourse theory works instead with the higher-level intersubjectivity of communication processes that flow through both the parliamentary bodies and the informal networks of the public sphere. Within and outside the parliamentary com­ p1g. these subjectless forms of communication constitute arenas in which a more or less rational opinion- and will-formation can take place." Habermas shares with the civic republican tradition of J.-J. Rousseau, Thomas jefferson, Hannah Arendt, and among the contributors to this volume, Benjamin Barber, an insistence "on.the original meaning of democracy in terms of the institu­ ti:Qilalization of a public use of reason jointly exercised by autonomous citi­ zens." The challenge is not only how to reconceptualize the ideal of such a public sphere under conditions of societies "too complex for democracy," but it is to give it a philosophically more adequate formulation which does not run together questions of justice with those of the good life, the way in which civic republicans do. Habermas maintains, on the basis of arguments he has devel­ oped much more explicitly elsewhere,11 that the republican tradition "over­ burdens" the democratic process by assimilating "politics to a hermeneutical process of self-explication of a shared form of life or collective identity." He distinguishes such ethical discourses on collective forms of life from political discourses proper that �ould involve both moral questions of justice and instru.:

mental questions of power and coerdon.

·

Although a large number of contributors to this volume defend a version of "deliberative democracy" as providing the most adequate conceptual and in­ stitutional model for theorizing the democratic experience of complex socie­ ties (Benhabib, joshua Cohen, Iris Young, jean Cohen, Amy Gutmann), none would subscribe to all aspects of Habermas's sociological and philosophical arguments on behalf of this model. joshua Cohen believes that the substantive

I N T RO D U C T I O N

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presuppositions of procedural democracies need to be taken much more seri­ ously. Citizens' autonomy needs to be protected and expanded through the guarantee of certain social and economic rights that would enable participa­ tion in democratic deliberative processes. Even under conditions of a reason­ able value pl�ralism among competing conceptions of the good and of value in general, joshua Cohen believes that a more substantive conception of de­ mocracy can be defended. In my contribution, "Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legiti­ macy," I also defend the model of a decentered public sphere, but refuse to follow Habermas's sharp distinctions among ethical, political, and moral dis­ courses. In fact, as Iris Young argues in her article entitled "Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy," the version of deliberative democ�acy proposed by Habermas cuts political processes too cleanly away from cultural forms of communication. Even if we consider some distinction between the right and the good at the philosophical and institutional levels as being essential to preserving democratic freedoms in societies in which multi­ ple visions of the good compete, this distinction does not commit one to building a cordon sanitaire around political discocrse such as to block off the articulation of issues of collective identity and visions of the good life. Young focuses on three sociocultural practices which, in her view, "a broader concep­ tion of communicative democracy requires in addition to critical argument: greeting, rhetoric, and storytelling." Very broadly stated, there is a tension in this volume among defenders of the proceduralist-deliberative model of democracy and a fourth type, not named by Habermas. I will call this the "agonistic model of democratic politics." Shel­ don Wolin provides a succinct and compelling account of this vision. Strains of this view, in different ways, also animate the contributions by jenny Mansbridge, Chantal Mouffe, Bonnie Honig, and Benjamin Barber. "I shall take the. political," writes Wolin, "to be an expression of the idea that a free society �omposed of diversities can nonetheless enjoy moments of commonal­ ity when, through public deliberations, collective power is used to promote or protect the well-being of a collectivity. Politics refers to the legitimized and public contestation, primarily by organized and unequal social powers, over access to the resources available to the public authorities of the collectivity. Politics is continuous, ceaseless, �.9. endless. In contrast, the political is epi­ sodic, rare." The development of the modern state in Western industrial societies cre­ ated a specific kind of politics; a politics of domestication, containment, and boundary drawing. Advanced industrial democracies are heirs to this tremen­ dous controlling power of the state, which defends and exploits "the labor, wealth, and psyches of the citizens." Any conception of democracy grounded in the citizen-as-actor and politics-as-episodic models, argues Wolin, is in-

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I N T RO D U C T I O N

compatible with the "modem choice of the State as the fixed center o f political life . " Instead of exploring the alternative of a non-state-centered vision of the political , however, Sheldon Wolin concludes that "democracy needs to be reconceived as something ot�er than aJ orm of government: as a mode of being that is conditioned by bitter experience, doomed to succeed only temporarily, but is a recurrent possibility as long as the memory of the political survives . " This conceptualization of the democratic project a s a certain "mode of being," not just a form of government, is shared by Chantal Mouffe , Bonnie Honig, Joan Landes, and Benj amin Barber. Both Mouffe and Landes appeal to Claude Leforts concept of "tQ.e dissolution of the markers of certainty" 12 to characterize the specific form of social-symbolic power that is the core of de­ mocracy. "Liberal democracy, " writes Mouffe , "is not the application of the democratic model to a wider context. . . . Understood as a regime, it concerns the symbolic ordering of social relations . " This symbolic ordering i� character­ ized not j ust by a pluralism of values and worldviews, as John Rawls would maintain; rather, this is a pluralism "at the axiological level," which recognizes the impossibility of ever adjudicating without contest and without residue a m�ng competing visions of the good, of justice , and of the political. Bonnie Honig sums up a similar perspective of agonistic politics: 'To take difference-and not just identity-seriously in democratic theory is to affirm the inescapability of conflict and the ineradicability of resistance to the politi­ cal and moral projects of ordering subjects , institutions, and values . . . . It is to give up on the dream of a place called home , a place free of power, conflict , and struggle , a place-an identity, a form of life, a group vision-unmarked or unriven by difference and untouched by the power brought to bear upon it by the identities that strive to ground themselves in its place . " Agonistic visions o f democratic politics inevitably invite the question, How can we be so sure that the agon of episodic politics, or the contest of plural­ isms that cannot be adjudicated at the higher levels, will all be instances of good and just democratic politics as opposed to being instances of fascism, xenophobic nationalism, right-wing populism? Are the people always wise? Are their decisions always just? Is the will that guides them always worthy of respect? Radical visions of agonistic politics are subj ect to the kinds of objec­ tions which liberal-constitutional theory articulates so well: the democratic demos may be unjust, racist, fickle, and capricious. Ho.w can_ theorists of ag­ onistic democracy safeguard freedom and justice, respect for the rights of citizens as equal and free beings, if they are unwilling to place some con­ straints that bind, trump , limit, and otherwise confine the will of the sovereign people? In his contribution to this volume , Benjamin Barber articulates the stand­ point of the strong democrats: "What is required is not foundational mandates or individual mental i£11..DUal in rigidly applying fixed standards to a changing world but su ch political skills as are necessary to discovering or forging com·

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I N TRO D UCTION

mon ground. What is right, or even what a right is , cannot in itself determine political judgment. Rights themselves . . . are both constantly being redefined and reinterpreted and dependent for their normative force on the engagement and commitment of an active citizen body. " Barber speaks of the self-correct­ ing mechanisms of democracy. Surely though among such self-correcting mechanisms are not just the will of the people but the institutions of the Bill of Rights, constitutionalism, the interplay of the highest court of the land with the elected representatives of the people, processes of constitutional review, and the like . Where deliberative-democratic politics, in its strong procedural­ ist form defended by Habermas, immunizes politics against the forces of cul­ tural and ethical life , theorists of agonistic politics view democracy as the incessant contestation over such ethical and cultural questions. At the theoret­ ical level the desirable alternative is clear: a deliberative vision of democratic p_qliti.cs which ca� also do justice to the agonistic spirit of democracy so well articulated by its .defenders. The contributions by jenny Mansbridge , Anne Phillips, Will Kymlicka, and Jean C en approach the old conflict between liberalism and democracy in novel ways. In fact, it would be fair to state that even for the defenders of �onistic democracy represented in this volume , there is little question that the historical legacy of liberalism-respect for the rule of law, for individual rights, for value pluralism, for constitutional guarantees-must be upheld in one way or another. The issue is rather the right mixture , theoretically and practically, between the legacy of liberalism and the conflictual and contesta­ tory nature of all democnii1c politics . It is the virtue of Jane Mansbrid e's essay, "Using Power/Fighting Power: The Polity," that it focuses precisely on this mix. Arguing that no democratic polity can wholly eliminate the need for the use of coercive power, or attain full legitimation, Mansbridge maintains that along with the institutional safeguard of institutional rights, free speech and association, the rule of law, political parties, and interest groups, "demo­ cracies also need to foster and value informal deliberatiye enclaves of resis­ tance in which those who lose in each coercive move can rework their ideas and strategies, gathering their forces and deciding in a more protected space in what way or whether to continue the battle . " According t o Mansbridge none o f the criteria for legitimating coercion, "whether based on assessments of hypothetical consent, the substantive jus­ tice of outcomes, the fr� edom from coercion or closeness to agreement of the deliberative process that resulted in a decision to coerce , or the equal power that participants exercised in the decision process--can produce in cases of ongoing disagreement an incontestably legitimate result . " Theoreti­ cally, this observation leads Mansbridge to express sympathy for those agonis­ tic theorists of democracy, who maintain that there is no full-proof rational justification without a remainder. Actual democracies can only produce "good enough" legitimacy.

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I N T RODUC T ION

At the level of institutional proposals, Mansbridge joins a number o f other -sontributors to this volume, who, following a decentered public sphere and pluralistic civil society model, would like to combine the virtues of delibera­ tive politics with a sociological realism adequate to the complexity of modern societies Qoshua Cohen , Benhabib , jean Cohen, and Nancy Fraser). Mans­ bridge utilizes the term "enclave politics," and also drawing from an essay by Nancy Fraser, 1 3 she writes of �paltern counterpublics." For groups and so­

cial movements seeking to express diversity, the goals of such counterpublics would include "understanding themselves better, forging bonds of solidarity, preserving the memories of past injustices, interpreting and reinterpreting the meaning of those inj ustices, working out alternative conceptions of self, of community, of justice and of universality . . . deciding what alliances to make both emotio11ally and strategically, deliberating on ends and means, and de­ ciding how to act, individually and collectively." A sympathy for hybrid institutional solutions for representing differences within democracies also governs the essays by Anne Phillips and Will Kym­ licka. After a brief examination of thoughts about "representation" within the ·lil;>eral tradition , Phillips observes that liberalism has focused on diversity and conflict of ideas within pluralist polities . "But when the politics of ideas is taken in isolation from what I will call the polltlcs of presence, it does not deal adequately with the experiences of those social groups wlto by virtue of their race or ethnicity or religion or gender have felt themselves excluded from the democratic process. Political exclusion is increasingly-! believe rightly­ viewed in terms that can be met only by political presence." However, if what are to be represented are groups rather than ideas, views , and belief systems, this model of representation raises another set of quandaries: can groups be treated as homogeneous entities? If principles of represenfation are distributed .along group lines, which aspects of group identity _should be given the most :prefer�nce in public modes o f representation? Say you have a group of Franco­ phone women of African descent within the Province of Quebec: what aspect of their group identity is the one that should be represented in the political process? Since all identities, individual and collective , are riven by multiple , complex, and heterogeneous allegiances, does not the "politics of presence" run the risk of reinforcing a form of identity-essentialism , a defunct meta­ physics of group presences, as it were? Phillips concludes that the road leading in coi_!temporary__liberal democracies from a politics of ideas to a politics of presence is irreversible, and that "mechanisms should be-and can be-de­ vised that address the problems of group exclusion without fixing the bound­ aries 9r_ �h!r_acter Q.(��