The Road Not Taken

7 October 2009

I agree with Tom Bentley when he says, ‘A single, centred source of authority cannot direct or replace the intelligence and aspirations of millions of people and the organisations they create. The left is still coming to terms with this shift….’ I have recently crossed swords on openDemocracy.net with some on the left who see ‘selfish individualism’ as the great elephant trap in liberal democracies, just waiting to destroy politics altogether. I am convinced that the left must seek a different notion of individualism from the Machiavellian/ Hobbesian/ Mandevillian model that underpins much liberal thinking, and that we must pursue a politics that fully recognises and respects the role of individual choice in any modern, pluralist democracy. What would this politics look like?

Many arguments have been advanced to explain why people’s participation in collective self-government should be discouraged. Numbers are too large, competence is questionable, and the tyranny of the majority the result. Yet, since the eighteenth century, in the name of political equality, the previously excluded have gradually been admitted to the public realm. But the form that participation has taken in liberal democracies has for the most part been narrowed down to voting for representatives, minimising active contributions to decision-making. This is part of an older and more profound hijacking in which Machiavellian notions of statecraft and a Hobbesian conception of the state – as protector of private interests – displaced the polis of the classic republics as a shared space for the exercise of civic virtues and the finding of common ground.

It is time to care again about this route not taken because political representation is today in crisis. Ironically, one of the last remaining arguments against people’s widespread participation in politics was demolished by the expenses scandal. The argument that ordinary people may have little competence, information or interest in determining the common goods; that representatives were more knowledgeable, more civic-spirited, more insulated from particular interests. That contrast has bitten the dust. As the proxy war of another first past the post election looms, many are simply disillusioned. But many more yearn for a renaissance of civic virtues and a renegotiation of the common goods.

The crisis in representation is also bound up with the sheer diversity of the societies in which we live. Despite efforts by the state to remain, in Tom Bentley’s words, the ‘single, centred source of authority’, social life has become politicised as various faiths and single issue campaigns – on abortion, gay marriage, offence against religion or hate speech, to name a few – jockey for precedence to have their views prevail as the standard in state law. Such attempts to influence government can only overstretch and undermine its capacity to govern as if we were one big ‘National Us’. One mechanism for this individualisation and diversity has been consumer choice. But another has been the extraordinary acceleration of the kind of pluralist encounters that have always been associated with cities.

In cities, the outlook is broadened by the encounter with the other so that one is forced to see things from other points of view. To think from other perspectives counters the narrowness of mind that has concerned thinkers about citizenship from the outset of political thought. This argument is well recognised in liberalism. For John Stuart Mill, ‘mental enlargement’ was at the centre of his thought when he insisted that humanity is progressive. And it is from the fractures between social groups and tendencies that diverse politicised individuals with ‘enlarged mind’ emerge, laying the basis for a non-statist politics. The diversity of our societies is not a problem, but an historic opportunity.

As Iseult Honahan recounts in her invaluable book, Civic Republicanism (Routledge, 2002), there has been a revival of civic republican thinking since the middle of the twentieth century led by thinkers such as Hannah Arendt and more recently, Charles Taylor. They recognised that while values and identities were once confirmed through social hierarchies and homogenous communities, now those societies are marked by increasing diversity. They concluded that in these circumstances, political community must be based on communication rather than an assumption of commonality. This notion of citizenship produced through pluralist encounter is entirely consistent with the best aspects both of the liberal and the civic republican traditions, and has waited for its full fruition, I would argue, for the unprecedented period of communications in which we now live.

Here, however, I part company from the authors of the Liberal Republic, who also draw on republican vocabulary and on Honohan’s account to argue their case for active political participation. Pointing to Honohan’s ‘useful distinction’ between ‘strong’ republicans who ‘emphasise the inherent value of participating in self-government’ and ‘instrumental’ republicans who ‘see citizenship as a means of preserving individual freedom, rather than as an activity or relationship which has an intrinsic value’, Reeves and Collins place themselves in the instrumental category, on the – to my mind – strange grounds that while ‘political or civic engagement provides the opportunity to determine the environment within which people can lead good lives; it does not make them good people.’

My commitment is to ‘strong’ republicanism in Honohan’s terms, both because I believe there is an important link between good lives and good people – and because while it is clear that the function of the public is to protect private interests and freedoms, it is also urgent that we recognise the obligation of the private to enhance the public sphere. Whether it is environmental degradation, anti-social behaviour or the duty of public service that concerns us – all require the fostering of civic virtues, private or public, and clarifying the effect that private actions have on the common goods. ‘Strong’ republicanism, in emphasising the way that political deliberation shapes the citizen, provides the missing link between the ‘self-determination’ and ‘empowerment’ that many of Open Left’s contributors seek, as well as their other calls for a ‘strong public realm’, ‘collective action’, and ‘shared projects’. When Amartya Sen proposes ‘a democratic conversation’ about the range of ‘basic capabilities’ any society requires and how to achieve them, he is surely acknowledging the need for this two-way construction.

Many of the most passionate contributions to the Open Left discussion are concerned with people’s education in an ever-increasingly unequal society. But, shouldn’t we also spend time on the essential educative role of politics? We have a wider need for an adult education in how to live side by side, and a public sphere in which citizens ‘express and realise themselves, gain a sense of political efficacy or empowerment, and may achieve social recognition of their values.’ (Honohan, p.217)

Rosemary Bechler is a freelance commissioning editor and writer and is on openDemocracy’s rotating editorial team

2 Comments

2 Responses to “The Road Not Taken”

  1. michael_green
    October 7th, 2009 @ 6:21 pm

    How does this translate into policy?

    In what ways could self-government and deliberative democracy be applied to public services like education and the NHS, so as to create individual autonomy?

  2. michael_green
    October 7th, 2009 @ 6:24 pm

    Surely economic prosperity has to be reconciled with the 'mode of production' to create individual autonomy.

    In other words, consumer choice in public services may be most effective at reconciling individual autonomy with economic prosperity and public service prosperity. Radical democratization also has it's place, but mass assemblies and direct democracy are so time constraining that they often come into conflict with economic prosperity and public service productivity in a capitalist economy going through rapid globalization.

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