Queen Mary, University of London Multiculturalism and the Democratic Turn: A Classical Liberal Critique Paul Michael David Gunn A thesis submitted to the Department of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2010 1 Abstract The increasing prominence of multiculturalism and moral diversity over the past few decades has coincided with a theoretical expansion of the democratic project. In particular, so-called „deliberative‟ and „strong‟ theories of democracy have been offered and expanded as solutions to the various moral and political problems that have arisen. However, while democrats disagree in the literature about what form a strongly participative democracy should take, there has been little circumspection about the wisdom of expanding democratic mechanisms. This thesis attempts to fill this lacuna by examining the merits of the various democratic theories on offer. By analysing the dilemmas posed by diversity and multiculturalism, it shows that the efficacy of deliberative democracy rests upon its epistemic virtues. If a stronger democracy is to overcome the problems of pluralism, it needs to greatly improve the flow of information around society. The principal argument offered is that, in practice, strong theories of democracy would not be able to deliver the epistemic outcomes necessary to provide a desirable alternative to modern liberal democracy. Multiculturalists and strong democrats do offer compelling reasons to reject modern liberalism, but the various democratic positions they advance rest upon prima facie controversial assumptions about the good society. By presuming both the means and the end of social life, deliberative democracy would likely close down rather than increase the flow of information between social actors, to the detriment of those already marginalised by the liberal democratic system. As such, it is contended on pragmatic grounds that we would do better to return to a classical, „Austrian‟ form of liberalism to find a theory of multicultural accommodation. Since we cannot know in advance how we should live our lives, our best response to pluralism would be to renounce the political management of society in order to strengthen those social mechanisms which help us learn about and adapt to one another. 2 Acknowledgements My deepest thanks go to my supervisor, Dr Mark Pennington, who introduced me to the liberal philosophy which I here try to make use of. Dr Pennington was instrumental in my learning of the opportunities and rewards of pursuing a PhD, and his limitless patience and support have presented an example the likes of which I could only hope to emulate in future. I am particularly grateful for his thoughtful advice and suggestions, which inspired me to realise the full potential of my ideas. It has been my pleasure to discuss and play with these ideas with a variety of other people, too. I should give my greatest thanks to my close friends and family, who, as my thesis came to a finish, must have dreaded the sight of me. In a connected role, I am grateful also to the generosity and support of the Department of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, who were kind enough to offer me a PhD studentship to fund my studies. And I am also obliged to the administrators and discussants of the various Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) and Liberty Fund events which I have had the pleasure of attending. I am especially thankful to the IHS for offering me a Summer Fellowship in 2008, because this allowed me to deepen my understanding of many of the political and economic ideas of which I make use herein. 3 Contents Title 1 Abstract 2 Acknowledgements 3 Contents 4 List of Figures 7 Chapter 1 Introduction: Politics as a Problem 8 The nature of the problem 15 Individualism and multicultural order 20 Conclusion 24 Chapter 2 Critical Literature Review 26 Overview 26 Procedural individualism 30 John Stuart Mill 31 John Rawls 34 Beyond liberalism 39 Substantive individualism 39 Seyla Benhabib 40 John Dryzek 44 Towards an alternative deliberative democracy 48 Procedural communitarianism 48 Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson 49 Iris Young 53 Substantive communitarianism 57 Michael Sandel 57 Sheldon Wolin 61 4 The limits of democracy 64 Democrats and reasonable pluralism: a fatal conceit 64 Chapter 3 Classical Liberalism 66 What‟s so „classical‟ about classical liberalism? 66 Market failures and the „credit crunch‟ 69 Austrian economics and spontaneous order 76 Positive liberty and the case for fairness 81 Inter-temporal knowledge and spontaneous order 84 The ghost of knowledge past 87 The ghost of knowledge present 90 The ghost of knowledge yet to come 94 Conclusion 97 Chapter 4 Procedural Individualism: The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing 99 The status quo: liberalism as impartiality 99 Impartiality‟s egalitarian edge 102 The cultural critique 107 The fatal attraction of acceptability 112 The forgotten benefits of foregone freedoms 118 Conclusion 123 Chapter 5 Substantive Individualism and the Social Capital Zeitgeist 124 The need for social capital 124 Deliberation, social capital and civil society 127 Associational democracy 132 The epistemic problems with decentralised deliberation 140 The continuing relevance of civil society 145 Conclusion 147 5 Chapter 6 Procedural Communitarianism and the Philosopher’s Stone 149 A realistic deliberative democracy 149 Legitimacy as truth 152 The battle against scale 157 Public choice and the problem of implementation 163 The epistemic appeal of classical liberalism 168 Conclusion 172 Chapter 7 Substantive Communitarianism and the Movement to Markets 173 The agonistic anti-solution 173 Politics as an open system 176 Agonism and direct democracy 182 The weakness of strong democracy 187 Agonistic capitalism 194 Conclusion 197 Chapter 8 Conclusion: Liberalism and Pragmatism 199 The argument so far 199 Pragmatism 203 John Dewey and deliberative democracy 208 Richard Rorty‟s liberal democracy 214 Liberalism as pragmatism 219 Why democrats should be liberals too 233 References and bibliography 238 6 List of Figures Figure 2.1: The four unique democratic solutions to the dilemmas of equality and ontology 7 1. Introduction: Politics as a Problem „Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedy.‟ - Sir Ernest Benn1 Students of politics have a unique if largely unremarked responsibility. By engaging variously with the institutions, activities and ideas which it takes to be its subject matter, political science effects an irrevocable change upon the world which is unparalleled within the academy. This is because the language of politics reconstitutes even the most self-evidently stable and harmless private phenomena as manifestations of the universal problems of justice, legitimacy and power. Under this political „observer effect‟, ever-more features of human behaviour are brought by the sometimes obscure theories and studies which fill the politics literature into the eternal court of public opinion, forced to justify their own existence on terms imposed from without. As the guardians of this process, political scientists are significant and powerful political actors themselves, and yet very few questions are asked of them. Following the academy‟s own example, it therefore seems apt to ask whether this creeping and seemingly irreversible politicisation of the social world is itself legitimate. It is of course true that any academic activity might have political ramifications. The physical sciences in particular continually erode at settled ideas of what we want to achieve as a species. Similarly, there is undoubtedly much political science which has a negligible impact on real-world politics, this very dissertation providing perhaps the most immediate example. Yet academic politics is notable because all political studies hold the potential – and many of them the explicit intent – to initiate political debates and influence their outcomes. In Friedrich Hayek‟s (1949: 424) 1 This quote is commonly attributed to Benn, but it is not possible to identify the original source. Personal correspondence with the chairman of the Society for Individual Freedom suggests that the quote originated in a meeting of the then-named „Society for Individualists‟ in 1948. 8 terms, political scientists, philosophers and economists are significant because they are responsible for creating and disseminating many of the „fashions and catchwords‟ which shape the „climate of [public] opinion‟. Thus, while the physical sciences hold the distinction of creating genuinely new knowledge, it is only after this knowledge has passed the intellectual and ethical gauntlets created and shaped within politics departments that it can effect real world change. Accordingly, it is important to bear in mind the caveat that any problem that might be identified and bewailed in real-world politics might also plague the pursuit of political scholarship. As Ernest Benn‟s somewhat flippant criticism suggests, we should expect politicians to do more harm than good when operating under both the competitive pressures and epistemological challenges of modern, complex democratic politics. His observation counsels us to be sceptical of any politician who claims to have surmounted these limitations and to have discovered a „truth‟, to which we must all become subject. Now, since western universities face increasing national and international competition