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...dominates struggle for political legitimacy, is not definite and coherent political form, nor has it been adopted so widely because it has some irresistible allure. (1) We are still some way short of fathoming the political meaning of the word's passage through space and time, or seeing just how its insistent rise relates to the concurrent ascent of capitalist economic institutions. (2)
This much is clear: while, in America, Tom Paine and James Madison both imagined that a commercial society could coexist happily with a representative republic, others elsewhere, from Filippo Buonarroti and the first Duke of Wellington in the 1830s to the Guild Socialist G. D. H. Cole in the 1920s, were just as certain that the inequalities generated by a market economy were incompatible with a truly democratic republic. (3) Whatever else may be said against it (and always can and probably always should be), capitalism has shown itself convincingly over the last two centuries a much less imprudent way of organizing some of the more fundamental aspects of economic life than any vaguely specifiable rival. (4) It frames all our lives, and it is to more or less adroit modulations of its dynamics that we must look for any hope of reversing its cumulatively disastrous impact on the setting in which we and all our foreseeable descendants will have to live. (5)
In the struggle to make these adjustments, the toxic and deeply confused character of our current understandings of democracy is a formidable impediment. Until we learn to distinguish better among the elements in our understanding of democracy that do and should attract us, those on which it is wise for us to rely, those that often do not or certainly should not attract us, and those on which it would be demented for us to rely, our political approach to the challenge of fostering our collective survival will remain the shambles that for the present it unmistakably is.
When Buonarroti, in 1828, looked back on the French Revolution, the aged and by then compulsive conspirator drew a shimmering contrast between two shapes, or orders, within which human beings could henceforth choose to live: the order of egoism (essentially capitalism as glossed by Adam Smith and his subsequent admirers) and the order of equality (the political goal of eliminating privilege from the texture of collective social life). Buonarroti had bet his life on championing the second and gave an eloquent account of his reasons for doing so.
The order of egoism was real enough at the time and has since come close to imposing its rule upon the entire world. The order of equality, in contrast, has turned out to be a very abstract normative idea, and every wholehearted subsequent attempt to render it concrete has proved violently contradictory. It survives in polite intellectual circles (6)--sometimes in wonderfully fluent and ingenious interpretations--as a regulative ideal. But any impulse to apply it is crimped everywhere by the exacting requirements of the order of egoism. In states where electoral choice in some measure modifies governmental policies, one of the mechanisms that confines that impulse can be seen, reasonably if selectively, as the democratic choice of the people concerned.
At the time when Buonarroti wrote, the partisans of the order of equality were in the habit of calling themselves Democrats. It was a good clear name for the way they saw their political, economic, and social goals. Outside North America, at that point, very few partisans of the order of egoism showed the least inclination to dispute their claim to the title. (7) But already in North America that simple clear contrast had blurred irremediably, (8) and today we have lost it irrevocably across the world. The time has come to face up to the consequences of that loss, and learn with some haste to talk and think more clearly about just what democracy implies.
The view that has held sway in America for well over two hundred years--through the distractions of slavery, civil war, and European socialist ideas--is that representative democracy (a phrase Alexander Hamilton appears to have coined impromptu in a private letter) (9) was a clear improvement on participatory democracy. It somehow winnowed out...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
have been removed from this article.
More articles from Daedalus
Democracy in corporate America., June 22, 2007
Economic democracy: meaningful, desirable, feasible?(Critical essay), June 22, 2007
Capitalism, economic growth & democracy.(Critical essay), June 22, 2007
Capitalism & democracy in 2040., June 22, 2007
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