Democratic critique of liberalism

As I noted above, the universalist model of political legitimation of conventional liberal politics has been criticized from many directions; communitarian, radical democratic and feminist criticism being just some of them. In this section I focus on some of the viewpoints of the radical democratic critics that I briefly introduced above. The major critical arguments discussed here are the claims that the liberal contract is inherently undemocratic, because it assumes the consent of the citizens without actually consulting them; and because it reduces political citizenship to the passive role of a voter for representatives while attempting to eliminate serious disagreement and certain sections of the citizenry from the political sphere. It is also claimed that the Rawlsian rationalist thought experiment cannot represent in reality all sections of the society and therefore the principles that it generates, or constitutional institutions stemming from these principles, should not be protected from public scrutiny. In the radical democratic view the liberal politics of rights cannot be treated as absolute, beyond the reach of democratic revision and change, because the procedures used to generate it fail to be sufficiently justified and the historical conditions that constitute its background have favored some social groups at the expense of others. Critics suspect that the universal politics of rights is likely to stabilize and perpetuate that initial injustice rather than cure it. (See e.g. Pateman 1988, 1-18; MacKinnon 1998, 215-234; Young 1990, 96-121; Brown 1995, 135-165.)

I will briefly return to the arguments about political liberalism’s tendency to eliminate disagreement from the political sphere, presented by Mouffe and Isaac, Filner and Bivins; and then introduce the critical argument developed by Young that the alleged exclusion of difference is inherent in the justificatory model of liberal thought rather than contingently connected to it. In Young’s view political liberalism fails to promote universal justice, because it is ideological in its bias toward the privileged groups of society while pretending to be neutral and equally representative of all reasonable social perspectives (Young 1990, 96-121).

As I noted above and discuss in more detail below, Mouffe criticizes the liberal ideal of politics for attempting to eliminate conflict through rationalist exclusions and for its allegedly moralist politics of rights. Her primary concern with conventional liberalism is that it suppresses substantial disagreement and discourages open political disputes. She regards the conventional liberal conception of politics as

hostile to pluralist democracy, because in its quest for consensus it allegedly excludes genuine disagreement from the political sphere and thus encourages apathy and alienation among the public, who can become frustrated and even violent because of the lack of the possibility to publicly articulate their grievances (Mouffe 2000, 104). Similarly Isaac et al, as also noted above, criticize the tendency of

“political liberalism” to privatize and bracket from political debates “the matters of identity and moral concern”; arguing that the Rawlsian ideal of “civic reason”

illegitimately excludes certain arguments or “modes of discourse” from the public sphere. Admitting that political liberalism does not attempt to proscribe political speech, they note that it nonetheless dismisses speech that is not in accord with the requirements of public reason, as unconstitutional: “[…] while there exists a perfect civil freedom of expression, the role of the ideal of ‘public reason’ is, it would seem, to underprivilege, an indeed politically invalidate, certain modes of discourse” (Isaac et al 1999, 231-232). They claim that the constitutional “gag rules”⁹ by which political liberals “seek to insulate public debate and to privatize discourses on the good life”

while relying on an implausibly “thin” conception of political identity and of public discourse; are “both philosophically and practically deficient” and “in disturbing tension with democratic values of associational freedom, political pluralism, and collective self-government” (Ibid. 224, my emphasis).

Although Isaac et al, like Mouffe, criticize the conventional liberal restrictions on democracy for their violation of some deep democratic values; they do not see these restrictions as expressions of a utopian quest for harmony and consensus the way Mouffe does. On the contrary, they interpret Rawls’s theory, particularly its later version in Political Liberalism, as a “liberalism of hard times”, a vision whose goal is to deal with the existence of irreconcilable differences and conflicts of value in a period of disillusion, after the social democratic vision of universal welfare and happiness of the 1960-ies and 1970-ies has given way to an atmosphere of civil strife and emerging fundamentalisms, exacerbated by the decline of economic growth and increasing scarcity. More specifically, they read Rawls’s “political liberalism” as an explicit attempt to keep religious fundamentalism out of liberal politics, in continuity with early 16^th century liberalism, especially its ideal of tolerance and plurality emerging from the European religious wars; and with Mill’s defense of liberties, in

9 See Holmes 1995, 202-235.

particular the freedom of expression that was originally presented with special emphasis on individual citizens’ right to be free from religious compulsion:

“Indeed, the most important respect in which political liberalism recommends itself […] is that it guards against the coerced imposition of religious belief that remains likely whenever

‘comprehensive moral doctrines’ and contentious conceptions of the good enter the public sphere and make claims upon the organization of political authority” (Isaac et al 1999, 228-229; see also Rawls 1993, 37 and Mill 1991, 20-61).

Although they emphasize that they share the liberals’ “commitment to defending the achieved equality and civil liberties from the claims of religious fundamentalists”, Isaac et al do not agree with the measure of bracketing “comprehensive doctrines” or illiberal, unreasonable claims, from the political sphere; not only because they regard such approach to be in conflict with democratic values, but also because they fear it may cause resentments and frustrations that may make it harder to defend both liberal and democratic values. They blame proponents of “political liberalism” for the juridification of problems that should be dealt with politically; arguing that the Rawlsian model renders matters of disagreement, that is issues where

“comprehensive doctrines” have intruded the public sphere, from democratic fora to the courts, to be decided by judicial review. In opposition to the Rawlsian view, they argue that the “background assumptions” and moral commitments cannot be separated from the political and are indeed an important constituent of political consensus (that, as many agree, in turn is essential for the stability as well as legitimacy of a constitutional order). Stating the history of modern feminism as an exemplary case, they claim that indeed the history of modern liberalism is a history of democratization, which includes contesting the given boundaries between the public and private, political and non-political spheres. (Isaac et al 1999, 233-235.)

This argument raises some important questions about the possibility of treating all political positions – liberal as well as illiberal - as equal within a liberal democratic framework. Feminist and other emancipatory civil rights movements challenged the early liberal restrictions of the public sphere on the premises of liberalism itself – its proclaimed commitment to the individual dignity and equality of all human beings was in apparent conflict with the de facto exclusion of women, the poor and the non-white peoples from the spheres of politics and justice. Can similar arguments against the current protections of liberal political values be made to allow the entrance of religious identities and along with them anti-liberal and

anti-egalitarian positions into the liberal political sphere? Courtney Jung, in her response to Isaac et al, argues that there is a substantial difference in whether the identity-based claims are made under the assumption of a liberal value system or in opposition to it (Jung 1999, 269).

These questions, particularly the question whether democracy, in order to be inclusive, should be able to accommodate also undemocratic and illiberal political positions or whether it must be able to qualify publicly acceptable positions according to some universally applicable criteria, will resurface in this debate in connection with feminism, multiculturalism and transnational democracy and will be discussed in more detail in the following chapters. It is also interesting to discuss whether the liberal constraints on democracy are motivated by a too optimistic view regarding the possibility of achieving political consensus (as Mouffe claims); or, on the contrary, a too pessimistic one (as Isaac et al assume).

While Mouffe and Isaac et al criticize mainly the alleged tendency of conventional liberal theory and politics to narrow down the political sphere to an unjustifiable extent and place too strict demands of “reasonableness” on valid political arguments so that a serious democratic discussion on substantial disagreements becomes impossible; Young criticizes the Rawlsian universalist-objectivist justification model and the ideals of political neutrality and impartiality for having a hidden ideological agenda whose de facto effect is the exclusion of the perspectives of those who fail to comply with the universal norm, from the public sphere. Young’s criticism of liberal rationalism reflects Mouffe's position in the observation that under the conditions of inequality the supposedly neutral and universal principles of the liberal state in fact represent the interests of the strongest; that those with real power are able to dictate the contents and meaning of "common good" and that the apparent neutrality just works as an ideological cover, making the particularity of the dominant perspective invisible, presenting it as universal and thus silencing different opinions as

“particular” and “deviant”.

Young argues that in spite of liberalism’s proclaimed egalitarianism, the liberal ideal of impartiality fails to neutralize such oppressive power relations that cannot be defined as direct legal discrimination and eliminated through the equality of formal rights. She criticizes the ideal of impartiality as an “idealist fiction”, because in her view it is impossible in practice to adopt a fully unsituated moral point of view, and thus the hypothetical universality of the Rawlsian and Scanlonian rationality is

bound to remain just hypothetical. Young emphasizes that human perspectives are inevitably situated in particular social positions; and a situated point of view can never be totally universal, standing apart from and understanding all other points of view. She argues that the liberal ideal of impartiality exposes “a logic of identity” that represses difference, because assuming that all rational trains of thought lead to the same conclusions, it must also assume that everyone who thinks rationally thinks identically. But as different particular viewpoints do exist in reality, their eventual deviance from the “universal” rational perspective gives the norm of impartiality an ideological character: if the particularity of the dominant perspectives is hidden behind the idea of their supposed universality, the universalist justificatory model implicitly justifies the existent hierarchical decision making structures in which the supposedly impartial class of rulers claims to represent anyone as a similar

“universal person”. By presenting difference as deviant from the impartial rational norm, the ideal of universal reason perpetuates the exclusion from publicity of the perspectives of “the oppressed and marginalized” that were never consulted in formulating that norm. Thus, according to Young, the ideal of impartiality means in practice that the hegemonic perspective of a dominant group is presented as universal and impartial, while alternative perspectives are positioned as “particular”

and deviant. The supposed neutrality thus legitimizes existing hierarchies, marginalizing those who challenge them as representatives of particularist “special”

interests. (Young 1990, 104-105; 111-116.)

Young does not reject the liberal concept of universal individual rights altogether, although she does not regard universal politics of rights as sufficient in granting equality, justice and democratic legitimacy to the liberal democratic order.

As I will indicate below, Young defends to some extent the slip of rights universalism to an alternative, group-specific politics of rights, in order to reinforce group-specific emancipatory policies and group representation in public policy-making and to fight group related social disadvantage. Those group-specific democratic rights include, as indicated in part I, rights to proportional participation in political decision making as well as a degree of group autonomy and self-determination. As I will argue below, both notions include problematic aspects regarding the conceptions of identity and equality. The particularist conception of group autonomy is particularly problematic in cases where granting a “group” a right to self-determination would mean accepting that some members of the groups are denied equality within the group as well as in the society at large.

Young’s attitude toward universalist politics is ambivalent: if the idea of universal reason is unable to deal with real-life injustices as the less privileged groups remain underrepresented in the processes of formulating general principles and in actual decision making, the question remains if the problem is the universalist ideal itself or the exclusive practices legitimized by an illusion of universality. If an apparently universalist politics is criticized for excluding in practice some groups or political positions, then it might be criticized not for universalism per se, but for the failure of being universal enough. At some level the ideal of democratic inclusiveness is itself an universalist norm; thus its relation to the universalist politics of rights is bound to remain complicated: on the one hand, radical democrats criticize the attempts to establish normative universality in the political sphere as attempts to homogenize the public sphere, depoliticize political discourse and silence differences; on the other hand, as I will argue later in more detail, any account of radical, pluralist and inclusive democracy turns out self-defeating if it rejects the norms of moral and political universalism altogether.

The above is in no way an exhaustive review of the radical democratic criticism of conventional political liberalism, but it contains some of the crucial arguments that proponents of liberal universalism and a politics of rights that restricts the range and scope of democratic decision making have had to respond to. I discuss the relevance of some of the radical democratic arguments, along with their problematic aspects, in part III. To summarize the currently presented critical arguments relevant for this discussion: the conventional liberal view on the relationship between democracy and rights – the view that democracy should be constitutionally constrained by some conception of universal individual rights in order not to be able to intervene, by collective decisions, too much in the life and choices of individual persons and in order to preserve democracy itself from potentially destructive political forces – has been criticized by radical democrats for being insufficiently democratic; not only because of the restricted scope and quality of its political sphere, but also because its justificatory foundations allegedly implicitly favor the privileged at the expense of more vulnerable and marginal social groups. The assumption behind this criticism is that a concept of democracy that is more inclusive in terms of participants and also more permissive about the style and content of political arguments as well as the reach of collective decisions, would bring along a more just social order. That

assumption will be explained in more detail below in this chapter; and some of its implications will be criticized later in part III.