eSharp Issue 25:1 Rise and Fall Deliberative Democracy: A Post-modern Utopia? Laura Fearnley (University of Glasgow) Classical utopianism has suffered a battery of charges from political liberals who view the utopian methodology as necessarily oppressive and violent. By conflating utopia with dystopia, political liberals have induced the downfall of classical utopian engineering. Some scholars have responded to the fall of classical utopianism by developing a new, reconstructed form of idealization – the post- modern utopia. The post-modern model attempts to avoid the putative liberal critiques by inculcating liberal values, whilst rejecting violence and despotism. Alongside the rise of the post-modern utopia was the revival of deliberative democracy. In the last thirty years, democracy has enjoyed an energetic deliberative turn, creating a paradigm shift in political theory and policy practice. Since then, there has been a flurry of interest in deliberative democracy with many scholars offering detailed accounts about what the theory entails. In this paper, I examine the fall of classical utopianism, followed by the rise of post-modern utopianism. I conclude by claiming that deliberative democracy fully realizes the post-modern utopia. Keywords: utopia, utopianism, political liberalism, deliberative democracy. The Fall of the Classical Utopia To fully investigate the fall of classical utopianism we need to get to grips with what it means to be labelled a ‘utopian’ or what the concept of utopianism entails. A good place to begin is J.C. Davis’s Utopia & the Ideal Society (1983). Davis characterizes the utopia as a particular mode, not as a tradition of thought. That is, utopians do not necessarily or self-consciously set out to write a utopia: ‘[r]ather, it is a mode or type of ideal society, and what utopian writers have in common is not common membership of a tradition but their subjection to a common mode’ (1983, p.4). Davis begins his exposition of these modes by firstly arguing all societies must face the collective problem: the supply of particular social and material goods and how scarcities of these goods are to be overcome. Davis writes: The material scarcity of satisfactions consists, for example, in there being only a given number of beautiful women or men, and only one specific example of each. Sociological scarcity arises out of the hierarchical distribution of these satisfactions (some men have more than others) and the existence of specific socially derived satisfactions (there are only so many places on the committee, only a limited number of holders of a certain title of honour, only one king or only one seat of power) (1983, p.19). It is the utopian’s task, then, to offer a solution to the collective problem in the guise of an alternative society. Here, however, Davis recognizes a definitional problem. Utopias offer a solution to the collective problem but so do other ideal societies; hence, the utopia is but one mode of social idealization. Davis crucially identifies a further four: the Land of Cockaygne, arcadia, the Perfect Moral Commonwealth and the millennium. These four alternatives, however, tinker with the premises of the collective problem rather than providing a forthright solution. Cockaygne, for example, magically satisfies our material desires through nearly unlimited access to food, drink, wealth, sex and everlasting youth, thus also fulfilling any 59 eSharp Issue 25:1 Rise and Fall sociological dissatisfactions. Arcadia envisages a return to our natural selves; stripped of artificial appetites, humans are once again moderate in their desires, and nature is magnificently abundant. Survival is easy in this world of unstructured harmony. The Perfect Moral Commonwealth, on the other hand, strategizes that nothing need change except the qualities and virtues of the members of society. Agents are morally reformed thereby eradicating sociological tensions and overcoming material satisfactions. The fourth mode, the millennium, is reminiscent of the Judaeo-Christian tradition whereby Christ would defeat all forces of evil in a cataclysmic battle, and peace and justice would reign for a thousand years before the earth passes away. Typically, the millenarian’s solution does not describe the ideal society post- revolution; rather, the emphasis is on the process by which the new social order would arrive. By contrast to these modes, the utopia does not ‘tamper with the equation’ (Davis 1983, p.37). It seeks to solve the collective problem through thorough reorganization of laws, institutions, sanctions, education and conventions. Accordingly, utopias begin by ‘taking men as they are, and laws as they can be’ (Rousseau 1997, p.41). Individuals are citizens not saints, nature is finitely ambivalent, not abundantly benevolent; utopias are always tantalizingly attainable. Now, since utopias do not assume miraculous transformations in humans or nature, they must call upon a range of political, social and educational arrangements available to them. This, according to Davis, makes the utopia a ‘holding operation, a set of strategies to maintain social order and perfection in the face of the deficiencies, not to say hostility, of nature and the wilfulness of man’ (1983, p.37). In their quest for speculative perfection, the utopian is perhaps not especially concerned with human happiness or individual freedom of choice, instead, they seek ‘triumph over fortuna’ (Davis 1983, p.378), to end the moral chaos and political debate through the absolute rebuilding of the social order. In this sense, the utopian vision is totalistic, closed-natured and ordered; it allows citizens freedom to do what they ought to do rather than what they want to do. Thus, for Davis, utopia is a repressive and bureaucratic mode of idealization. One prime manifestation of utopia’s supposed oppressive nature is, Davis contends, its deep urge to eradicate politics (1983, p.372). Political debate threatens to destabilize the utopian’s perfect, harmonious society by means of irreconcilable argument; it fosters sectional interest as well as value clashes between groups and individuals. In these moments, citizens often expose their most selfish and foolish nature, failing to identify themselves as part of the political community. In order to end the social debate, utopias steadfastly prescribe onto society their own conception of political values, usually concerning justice, freedom and equality or, as Karl Popper refers to it, the ‘ultimate good’ (1966, p.158). Many anti-utopians share this conclusion. Dahrendorf for instance, writes: A […] structural characteristic of utopias seems to be [their] uniformity […] Universal consensus means, by implication, absence of structurally generated conflict. In fact, many builders of utopias go to considerable lengths to convince their audience that in their societies conflict about values or institutional arrangements is either impossible or simply unnecessary. Utopias are perfect - be it perfectly agreeable or perfectly disagreeable - and consequently there is nothing to quarrel about (1958, p.116). 60 eSharp Issue 25:1 Rise and Fall If utopias do indeed seek to end politics, then they deny a fundamental belief that lies at the heart of political liberalism: plurality of values. The pluralist thesis espouses that we cannot come to know a priori of a single common good that will benefit all of society. Rather, the most just way of organization is to let each pursue their own conception of the good under the qualification of, say, the Millian Harm Principle (Mill 2008, p.17). Isaiah Berlin makes exactly this point in Two Concepts of Liberty (2007): ‘the belief that some single formula can in principle be found whereby all the diverse ends of men can be harmoniously realized is demonstrably false’ (p.214). The pluralist thesis may hold a thin conception of the good, in that it values tolerance and freedom, but the utopia proposes a thick conception of good which cannot be deviated from. It therefore stands in marked contrast to the liberal tradition. The critique that utopias end the political debate is part of a larger objection against utopian engineering. As we have seen, Davis maintains the utopia is primarily concerned with creating stability in the face of chaos and moral discord; consequently, utopias are totalistic, perfect and ordered. Thus, the utopian goal, the final end, must rely on totalitarian methods: ‘[a]lmost by definition then, the perfection of utopias must be total and ordered; the totality, ordered and perfect. In order to achieve this, without denying the nature of man or society, there must be discipline of the totalitarian kind’ (Davis 1983, p.39). J.L. Talmon makes a similar claim in The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1952). He explicates that utopias are an integrated whole: they obliterate the liberal distinction of public and private to such an extent they ‘recognize ultimately only one plane of existence, the political’ and therefore endow every action with some moral significance (pp.2-3). Now, Davis certainly provides a helpful taxonomy with regards to other ideal societies. Ultimately, however, his account has a serious theoretical shortcoming. In suggesting the perfect solution is always repressive and bureaucratic, he expresses a major point of contention between the utopist and the liberal. For liberals, there is no absolute solution to the collective problem and any attempt to prove otherwise would necessarily resort to force, coercion or falsity. Therefore, the