The Next Democracy ?: The Possibility of Popular Control - Softcover

Milligan, Tony

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783480653 ISBN 13: 9781783480654

Verlag: Rli, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Responding to widespread disenchantment with electoral politics, this book gives a practical examination of the possibilities offered by a generalized system of direct democracy.

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Tony Milligan is Teaching Fellow in Ethics and Philosophy of Religion with the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at King's College London.

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The Next Democracy?

The Possibility of Popular Control

By Tony Milligan

Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.

Copyright © 2016 Tony Milligan
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78348-065-4

Contents

Introduction, ix, 
1 At the Crossroads, 1, 
2 General Direct Democracy, 11, 
3 Occupy and Consensus, 31, 
4 Weber and the Difficulties of Scaling Up, 51, 
5 Arendt and Council Democracy, 71, 
6 The Tyranny of the Majority, 89, 
7 The Rule of the Unwise, 105, 
8 Gandhi's Local Democracy, 119, 
Conclusion: Democracy without Utopia, 137, 
Bibliography, 145, 
Index, 149, 

CHAPTER 1

At the Crossroads

THE CENTRAL CLAIM

This is a book about the possibilities for political change in the West, in the liberal democracies of Europe and North America. The central idea is that a transition to some form of direct democracy is becoming a viable possibility and that there are both popular and systemic pressures towards such a transition. Here, I have in mind a version of direct democracy which would be more or less 'general' rather than a fragmentary component of a system based upon representation. (Although the 'more or less' is worth bearing in mind. I do not suggest that political representation is some sort of inherent evil which should or could be entirely replaced.) Additionally, and to avoid confusion, I suggest that a general direct democracy system would not be a utopia and would be unlikely to carry any guarantee of making humans happy or fully rounded beings. Politics, on its own, simply does not have the potential to do that. One reason why a general direct democracy would not be a utopia is that it would, almost certainly, require a modified version of the party system with all of the shortcomings that we associate with the latter (factionalism, the misrepresentation of opposing views, the prioritisation of a political tradition and organisational machine over principles and truth). But neither would such a version of direct democracy automatically succumb to familiar criticisms that it would involve the covert rule of an elite; or else a tyranny of the majority; or else the rule of the unwise (charges examined successively in chapters 4, 5 and 6). I have no qualms about accepting that Athenian democracy in antiquity, or at least the direct components of the latter, succumbed to all three. But fortunately that is not where we are now.

Nor am I suggesting a future in which all political decisions will be instances of e-democracy made from the couch and at the press of a button. Political systems need to have mechanisms for generating and maintaining a sense of social solidarity, even in the face of factionalism, but they do not necessarily need such solidarity to be maintained by a modern equivalent of a citizens' assembly on a hillside. The latter is a parody of what a modern direct democracy would have to involve, but a parody with a point. Certain conceptions of direct democracy instituted from below, conceptions associated with traditions of social protest, present direct democracy as a more or less comprehensive escape from our familiar, flawed systems of politics, and especially those of party politics and electoral competition. While sympathising with the need for change, and change of a radical sort, I will also accept that with regard to such flawed practices there is currently no viable way out. A world of our sort, turned upside down and remade as a perfect order of political freedom, would be a world unfit for humans because we are neither perfectly free nor perfectly orderly. But we do not need a way out of all institutional flaws in order to have a good, if still somewhat imperfect, society or to have a form of democracy which is far better, far more direct and significantly less prone to uphold social injustice in the interests of economic and political elites. However, there are imperfections that we live with and imperfections which are so destabilising that they make ordinary life impossible. Chapters 4, 7 and 8 go some way towards drawing out the imperfections and, more particularly, the impractical instabilities of familiar kinds of direct democracy, particularly those which occupy a special place within the Marxist tradition (such as the workers' council movement), instabilities which would have to be avoided.

My thought here is that any workable system would require a capacity to stabilise as a political order with certain kinds of routine which are absent from the high peaks of social protest where only a limited number of tasks present themselves as immediate necessities. As a result, a workable system would have to be a hybrid in at least two respects (and possibly more). First, it would have to involve a combination of direct decision making and representation (for reasons that will become clear); second, to avoid elite control it would need to include components which echo revolutionary attempts to establish direct democracy from below, but also components which more closely resemble contemporary systems of recall, voter initiative and referenda. It might also have to include some elements which were not democratic at all, given that democracy is one good among many and that the purity of political processes is not as important as human well-being (but to say this is not to point to a new requirement, which is avoided by existing forms of liberal democracy which are also geared to be democratic only up to a point).

One upshot of this is that the familiar conception of a modern direct democracy as a system based upon a constant referendum about everything, with citizens choosing options in the way that we currently change TV channels, or the way in which viewers vote for one singer in a televised contest rather than another, is just as misleading as attempts to imagine what the Athenian model would look like today and in a modern urban setting (and for some of the same reasons). Contemporary political systems are complex systems. They are not just one thing or another but a mixture of many things, with different components complementing one another but also, in some cases, operating in tension with one another. This is unlikely to change, although in chapter 8 I do consider one attempt, by Gandhi, to depict a system based instead upon simplicity (a misleading simplicity, as it turns out. Yet one which is very much in keeping with his own life given that the exemplary simplicity of the latter required a great many arrangements on the part of others). While certain kinds of streamlining may be both possible and desirable, complexity in political systems is here to stay and this will apply to whatever political systems we have in the future. A corollary of this is that the future presupposed here is a political future and not some post-political condition of society of the sort envisaged by Marx in which all agents draw freely according to their needs and give freely in line with their abilities without any co-ordinated and disputed allocation system with associated, varying, principles of distribution over which ongoing debate might be required.

Such a post-political world no longer seems possible, if it ever was. What is envisaged is also a political system and up to a point this presupposes the continuation of some form of state rather than the stateless condition aspired to by Bakunin, Tolstoy, Gandhi and at times by Marx and Lenin. A small community can be stateless, but countries with millions of inhabitants cannot (a point which both Lenin and Gandhi had to come to terms with when faced with the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Rli
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1783480653
• ISBN 13: 9781783480654
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 162
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland