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Democracy Disfigured : Opinion, Truth, and the People

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Democracy Disfigured : Opinion, Truth, and the People Democracy Disfigured Democracy Disfigured OPINION, TRUTH, AND THE PEOPLE Nadia Urbinati Cambridge, Massachusetts London, En gland 2014 Copyright © 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Urbinati, Nadia, 1955– Democracy disfi gured : opinion, truth, and the people / Nadia Urbinati. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 0- 674- 72513- 3 (alk. paper) 1. Democracy. 2. Democracy— Public opinion. 3. Pop u lism. I. Title. JC423.U774 2014 321.8—dc23 2013014795 To my students CONTENTS Introduction 1 1 Democracy’s Diarchy 16 2 Unpo liti cal Democracy 81 3 The Populist Power 128 4 The Plebiscite of the Audience and the Politics of Passivity 171 Conclusion 228 Notes 243 Ac know ledg ments 299 Index 301 Democracy Disfigured Introduction he fi gure is a shape that is externally identifi able, a composite of ob- Tservable characteristics and the confi guration of a person’s distinctive features that enable recognition. Each of us has his or her phenotype thanks to which others recognize us. Our fi gure is thus precious to us be- cause the traits composing it are meant to make our appearance unique, different from others. In this book I use the analogy with body fi gure to explore some disfi gurements of democracy. The analogy of the “body” in po liti cal thought is as old as refl ection on politics. Theories of po liti cal legitimacy have been developed as theories on the substance of the body politic, what makes it po liti cal. Thus, for instance, Jean- Jacques Rousseau famously argued that if citizens obey laws they do not make directly, the system in which they live is not politi cal, although they may call it so, be- cause the autonomy of their sovereign will is the substance that makes for a body politic. This is not the model I follow. I will not inquire into the substance of po liti cal sovereignty. Rather, I take “fi gure” or an observable confi guration as indicative of a po liti cal order, a phenotype thanks to which we recognize it as distinct and different from other systems. A re- gime that is tyrannical is characterized by some traits or has a fi gure that makes an observer pretty much sure of its identity, like no regular elec- tions, no division of powers, and no bill of rights. By the same token, a demo cratic society has certain traits that belong only to it and make it recognizable from outside. In relation to the fi gure that democracy ex- poses to the world I detect some disfi gurations. This is the sense of the analogy I use in this book. In the fi rst chapter I shall portray the main 1 DEMOCRACY DISFIGURED basic traits composing the demo cratic fi gure—the procedures and institu- tions and the public forum of opinions. In the subsequent chapters I will detect and analyze some disfi gurations that, although they do not change the form of government, may be perceived as remarkable changes in what is externally observable of democracy. The word “disfi guration” implies a negative evaluation, not merely a description. The three disfi gurations I will illustrate in this book are alarming mutations. In detecting and ana- lyzing them I intend to alert readers to these forms of distress in view of amending them, and in the conclusion I advance some suggestions for legal innovations. The analysis I propose pivots on the idea of democracy as a government by means of opinion. It partic u lar, as I shall explain in Chapter 1, it relies on the premise that representative democracy is a diarchic system in which “will” (by which I mean the right to vote and the procedures and institu- tions that regulate the making of authoritative decisions) and “opinion” (by which I mean the extrainstitutional domain of po liti cal opinions) infl uence each other and cooperate without merging.1 The societies in which we live are demo cratic not only because they have free elections and more than one po liti cal party competing but also because they prom- ise to allow for effective po liti cal competition and debate among diverse and competing views; they promise that elections and the forum of opin- ions make institutions the site of legitimate power and an object of control and scrutiny. The conceptualization of representative democracy as diar- chy makes two claims: that “will” and “opinion” are the two powers of the sovereign citizens, and that they are different and should remain distinct, although in need of constant communication. Based on this premise, I offer a theoretical and critical examination of three observable traits that have been recently put forth by actual demo cratic countries and theo- rized by scholars of politics in order to cope with the dissatisfying per for- mance of demo cratic procedures: epistemic and unpo liti cal twists of de- liberation; and the reaction of pop u lism and of the plebiscite of the audience against representative democracy. Different as they are, epis- temic views, pop u lism, and plebiscite of the audience entail a view of the forum of opinion that is one- sided and disdainful of the diarchic confi gu- ration of democracy. To be sure, dissatisfaction with democracy is part of the history of de- mocracy and recurrent in demo cratic societies, and the right to free speech and freedom of association that citizens enjoy makes it public and 2 Introduction frank. Thus, Demosthenes depicted Athens as a city permitting its citi- zens to praise the Spartan constitution over the Athenian one, Niccolò Machiavelli wrote against its critics that pop u lar government allows every- body “to freely speak ill” of the people, and Alexander Meiklejohn argued during the Cold War that the Unites States must allow its communist critics to speak freely because “to be afraid of ideas, any idea, is to be unfi t for self- government.”2 Tolerance and free speech made possible that Athe- nian democracy developed alongside with its “enemies,” the oligarchs, and this proved the liberal character of its society, which denied neither its opponents nor foreigners freedom of expression, so as to make Euripides’s Phaedra desire that her children lived there as “free men, free- spoken, honourable.”3 As for modern democracies, whose freedoms are protected by bills of rights and written constitutions, their stabilizing process in the last two and a half centuries has been dramatically interfered with, and in some cases stopped by its opponents. But with the end of the Cold War, this form of government was able to win global recognition. Today, de- mocracy has no legitimate competitor; it would be hard to disclaim it in the name of a government that is more respectful of civil and po liti cal liberty. Yet its planetary solitude does not make it invulnerable. Po litical theo- rists have recently pointed to the appearance of two concurrent phenom- ena that provide reasons for concern: on the one hand, the privatization and power concentration in the sphere of po liti cal opinion formation, and on the other, the growth of demagogical and polarized forms of consen- sus that split the politi cal arena in factional and inimical groups. These are not extemporaneous characteristics but the signs of a transformation of the public sphere in mass democracies provoked by phenomena as di- verse as the erosion of legitimacy of politi cal parties in the managing of repre sen tation and the escalation of economic in e quality. Both phenom- ena have a direct impact on the distribution of the opportunity of “voice” and infl uence in politics. In the mid- nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill surmised that newspa- pers would be able to re- create in large societies that kind of immediacy and proximity in national conversation that ancient republics enjoyed by having their citizens gathered together in one assembly to directly interact in the agora or the forum. Modern means of communication, Mill thought, would rouse an immaterial forum of opinions by including issues of pop u- lar concern in the public arena and keeping politicians and the institutions 3 DEMOCRACY DISFIGURED under the judgment of the public of writers and readers.4 Pluralism of the means of information would mirror the pluralism of ideas and interests, and both of them would be valuable obstacles to the growth of a new ty- rannical form of power, coming precisely from public opinion. A century after Mill, Jürgen Habermas thus claimed the public forum essential to democracy on the condition it remains public, pluralistic, and autono- mous from private interests of all sorts. With prescient words, already in 1962 Habermas depicted the acclamation style that can disfi gure the public sphere in mass democracy.5 My primary concern here is opinion, not “will;” I am interested in the problems that arise from within the domain of opinion, although no lon- ger or not simply in forms that raise the basic question of “how to protect freedom of expression from the power of the state.” The issue is instead how the public forum of ideas can succeed in remaining a public good and play its cognitive, dissenting, and monitoring role if the information industry that affects politics so radically “in many different parts of the world belongs to a relative small number of private individuals.”6 In a po liti- cal arena in which video power is so prominent an actor and an “acclamation- prone mood” tends to predominate, dispersal of mass media own ership, some scholars have suggested, should be able to prevent the “Berlusconi effect,”7 the plebiscitarian disfi guration that has inspired me in writing this book.8 Yet other scholars have expressed concern that dispersal of in- formation is not in and of itself a suffi cient condition for limiting homoge- neity.
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