Boris DeWiel, Democracy: A History of Ideas (Vancouver and Seattle: UBC Press and University of Washington Press, 2000)

Cloth:   ISBN 0-7748-0801-2
Paper: ISBN 0-7748-0802-0 (Canada); 0-295-98106-7 (USA)

ã UBC Press 2000. All rights reserved. This material may not be copied or reproduced in any way without the written permission of the Publisher:

[p. 3]

Why do people disagree about politics? One reason is that interests collide, but this explanation is too easy. Why do honest, unselfish people differ in their conceptions of the good society? Why is there no consensus among theorists who specialize in these questions? Why, for example, is it so easy to identify right-wing and left-wing positions across political issues? Why are these differences recognizable in the politics of every modern democracy? Why do they reach across historical eras? A pattern of dissensus seems entrenched in democracy. As issues change, left-right conflicts may retrench, but reports of their demise, whether hopeful or despairing, are exaggerations. Why is democracy so fractious?

    The purpose of this book is to challenge the notion that ideological conflict is a contest between good ideas and bad ones -- one’s own and those of others, as it always turns out; instead, this book attempts to discover the political implications of value pluralism, the thesis that that our ultimate values, or ideas about the good, conflict with each other. By identifying the common but conflicting values underlying the left-right political spectrum, we can begin to outline the inherently conflictual nature of democracy. As members of modern democracies, we share values, but, because they conflict, we prioritize them differently. We are divided by our commonalities. Democracy is an irresolvable contest of priorities among common values. Were we able to remove all the sources of venality, stupidity, and nastiness in politics, democracy would still cleave in familiar ways.

    On one level, the claim that values conflict is a truism. We are happy to admit the conflict among the values we hold dearest, but we are quick to draw the line of legitimacy according to our own priorities. Value pluralism is quickly forgotten when our priorities run hard up against another’s. The fact of deep disagreement is unpleasant, and so we tend to associate with those who see things more or less as we do. Most political arguments are intramural because that is the level at which discussion occurs. Because we [p. 4] argue mostly with those who have views close to our own, it is easy to pull the circle of legitimacy too closely. Respectful dialogue rarely crosses ideological borders. The truly deep differences among us are across camps, and this dissensus is rarely recognized as legitimate.

    If we accept value pluralism at a deeper level, it could change the way we think about ethics and politics. Such a revolution would be analogous in Western theology to the overthrow of monotheism. What if there were more than one God, and what if Their commands were to conflict? Or, putting the metaphor slightly less heretically, what if God gave irreconcilable commands? Value pluralism is the uncomfortable theory that the good is not unitary, that our common goods conflict, and that there is no right answer when goods ultimately collide.

    Is value pluralism a form of moral relativism? The suggestion here is that it is not, although mono-ethicists may disagree. Relativism is the doctrine that every person or group is the source of unique subjective values. In the theological analogy, relativism means that we each have our own unitary God. Pluralism is the doctrine that human beings share common values but that these conflict with each other. To say it in a culturally sensitive way, value pluralism is the theory that the expanding culture of modernity provides each of us with shared conceptions of the good but that these conceptions are irreconcilable. For relativists, each person (or group) is mono-ethical, and their divergent values never meet. For pluralists, the monoculture of modernity is multi-ethical, and our common values collide within each of us.

    Relativism is an unsophisticated variant of one of the great concepts of liberty, which holds that to be free is to be the source of one’s own defining ends. Relativists hold that we create our own good -- that we are our own God. They believe, more literally than others, that, as each person is the source of value, whatever one values is good. Because it trivializes the good as a mere subjective preference, relativism is inadequate as an ethical theory. Yet it arises from a deeply important ethical belief -- that each person is the source of value. The history of this idea, and its ongoing importance in democracy, is one of the stories that will be told here.

    In contrast to relativists, value pluralists do not believe that we each create our own good ex nihilo. Rather than trivializing the idea of goodness as subjective, pluralism recognizes both the legitimacy and the commonality of values. Every normal person can understand the ultimate importance of values like liberty, equality, justice, and so on. To be normal in this sense is to have common norms. We do not just tolerate these values in others, we share them. However, because we have no ultimate criteria to rank competing goods, our priorities inevitably differ.

    In politics there are not may pluralists. Politics is about what we should do together, a question that demands that a choice be made. Politicians do [p.5] not merely suggest options, they are proponents of a certain set of priorities. Political theorists, to the extent that they come to practicable evaluative conclusions, are politicians of the best sort. They work to sort out evaluative ideas as best they can, and they attempt to convince others that their own priorities are best. To the extent that the priorities of social scientists and humanists in general are reflected in their work, they are politicians too. From politicians we will not find a pluralist theory. The proponents of a normative order must reduce the breadth of pluralism by narrowing the range of legitimate disagreement. To do politics is to reject competing options, whether the practitioner is a theorist or an electoral candidate. The true meaning of pluralism has been missed by political theorists and social scientists, whose calling is to resist the political complexity of ordinary people. Philosophers who seek to change the world in certain ways are driven to misunderstand it.

    And yet we cannot do without political philosophies and ideologies. As defined in this book, ideologies are honest attempts to make the best possible sense of an insoluble evaluative problem, the ultimate conflict of our shared values. More than other people, ideological thinkers seek consistency and rational justifications for their priorities. This leads them to dismiss or diminish some values, while defining others in ways that can be synthesized into a single normative story. A value like equality, for example, begins as something we share but comes to be defined to fit within a story about what we should do together. For socialists, the just society is one in which positive liberty should be shared, while negative liberty is of diminished importance. For economic libertarians, on the other hand, equality is not about shared power but about common rules of competition, while negative liberty is given a high priority. Other ideological thinkers find their own ways to prioritize values in consistent ways.

    Ideological thinkers are necessary to political practice because they present us with rational options. They show us how to put political values into action. We cannot do without them because they alone show us how to do some good. When we move towards one good, we move away from another, but the alternative is to do no good at all. Ideological politics is politics at its very best, a contest of ideas about the good. Without ideology, politics becomes the pursuit for power as its own reward. In pre-modern eras, politics was about power alone. Today, it is a competition of goods. The political mode of modernity is democratic, and democratic politics is a permanent ideological contest.

    Does the contest of democracy have an underlying structure? Democracy may be essentially contestable, but does it involve a regular pattern of disagreement? This book traces the history of a few political values about which people disagree today, and it searches for deep continuities and patterns. If [p.6] persistent differences can be discovered in the values of modernity as they developed, then the underlying contest of modern politics will become clearer. We will be able to specify the values embedded in the familiar, but ill-defined, model of the left-centre-right political continuum. The political centre, we will see, is not a zone of confusion or wishy-washy trade-offs; rather, it is defined by the dominant, though contested, ideology of modernity.

    The historical approach to the study of political ideas is justified by the epistemological theory that the only immediate source of our ideas is other ideas. Direct knowledge of truth is not available to us, and so we all begin with the competing ideas of our time. Our perceptions are important but not sufficient; only through ideas can we make sense of our sensations. Ideas are theories about what our perceptions mean. They are attempts to fit the sense data of our lives into some kind of meaningful whole so that we can know what to do. In this sense, our ideas are always normative. They are neither innate nor perceived but are communicated to us by others. We try to reconcile our own life-data -- our private perceptions, reflections, emotions, and desires -- using the various theories taken from our culture. Occasionally, ideas may be put together in interesting ways, and new variants of old ideas will be passed on to new thinkers. A culture changes over generations, but its geniuses must begin with the ideas of their time. The changes in our theories about how to live are incremental, modest, and never entirely original. The source of our ideas is cultural, and the culture of modernity is deeply rooted. Our ideas are very old, and their sources and substance can be traced to other ideas.

    Our values come from our culture, and the culture of democracy has antecedents that reach across millennia. At the core of democracy, this book will argue, is a definable pattern of disagreement. The conflicts among our values are as deeply rooted as our ideas themselves. Apart from the epistemological postulate that ideas come from ideas, there is no overriding theory of cultural progress, no end of history, to be found in these pages. The only universal lesson is that people have always argued about the good.

    The process by which we separate truth from falsehood remains controversial and will not be discovered here. In particular, we have no uncontested way to decide the contest of values. Moral and political philosophers just disagree. Rather than entering into philosophical arguments about whether certain values are better than others, the approach will be to understand our values sympathetically by tracing their emergence. The goal is to present, in the end, an overview of the structure of competing values and ideologies without becoming lost in the rivalry among them. These values will be described with the hope that a fair-minded reader will see them as truly valuable, but a full philosophical defence is not available.

    [p. 7] Our political values are not mere subjective preferences but belong to an old common culture. They are objective in the sense that they are things in themselves, objects of exchange among persons. They may change very gradually in the process, but they belong to no one alone. Our values are highly condensed abstractions, each of which summarizes a long braid of normative ideas. Political values, such as liberty, equality, or justice, encapsulate theories about what it means to live a good life. Each of our political values -- and every contending version of each value -- represents a long normative background story that belongs to our culture. These stories tell us who we are, the first step to knowing what we ought to do. Why do we value freedom? Because we understand ourselves as the sorts of beings who cannot live a good life, individually and together, unless we are free.

    The contending versions of these background stories, we will see, conflict with each other. Our culture is composite, complex, and convoluted. Distilled into a single word like ‘liberty’ is a set of competing theories about the good. Because we lack an overriding normative story in which these conflicts are resolved -- because value pluralism is true -- politics is endlessly contentious. The conflicts of values, like the contending meanings of liberty, are what drives democratic politics. Democracy is not a single theory or ideal; it is a quarrel driven by the clash of ideals. It is not the quest for united self-determination, equality, and the common good. Democracy is not an egalitarian super-story but a multi-sided shouting match in which egalitarians are not the only legitimate voice. If value pluralism is true, then democracy is an argument that can never be won. It is about a terrible clash of goods, analogous to a civil war in heaven. Democracy is not the triumph of the common good but an unwinnable war of good against good against good.

    Egalitarians have their own version of pluralism, according to which human differences should be recognized so that the powerless can be made equal. Everyone should be equally self-determining, say egalitarians; equality of power is the prerequisite to true democracy. Unfortunately, this story of the good society is one that most people do not accept as the best; and a conception of democracy that leaves out most of the people is, by definition, wrong. The priorities of the people tend to be different than those of egalitarians not because the people are the dupes of social forces or confused in some other way, but because equality is not the highest value of our culture. The culture of democracy has no single highest value.

    Pluralism has a larger meaning, in which the priority of equality is contested. No one can deny that equality is among our ultimate values, but it conflicts with some of them. To take a quick example, equality necessarily conflicts with excellence. We cannot deny the reality of this conflict without abandoning the meaning of the concepts involved. If we pretend that [p. 8] everyone can be equally excellent, then the idea of excellence is flattened into meaninglessness. If we feign that equality requires only that everyone should have the same chance to excel, then we have misunderstood what equality means. To excel is to become unequal, and to be equal is not to excel.

    People normally believe in the value of both equality and excellence, and yet these two concepts conflict in their very meaning. As ultimate values, they belong to different stories about what it means to live a good life together. The themes of these stories make sense to all of us -- they are stories that belong to the common culture of democracy -- and yet they are not reconcilable. Forced to decide among goods, we differ inevitably over our priorities. In what respects should excellence be relevant to social life? To what extent and in what forms should it be rewarded with wealth and social power? Should we be allowed to empower our own children more than others so that they have a better chance to excel? What is the minimum owed to those who are left behind while others excel? Depending on one’s priorities, the answers to questions like these will vary.

    Politics is more complex than this example suggests, but it illustrates the nature of our common dilemma. Nor does our future hold an evaluative consensus to be found through new moral understandings. A new morality, or a new set of values, would only increase the complexity of our cultural story by adding another layer of competing ideas. Pluralism cannot be eliminated by addition.

    The long run of moral philosophy in our culture is disputational, and the hope for final agreement is unreal. People will always differ in how they prioritize competing values, and democracy will always be a contest of priorities. Those who believe we cannot have democracy until we have more equality, or until any other value triumphs finally, are not for the people but against them. The people are neither a monolith nor clay to be reshaped in better ways; rather, they are complex evaluators, dealing with the deep dilemma of democracy as best they can. The simplicities of political theory do not belong to them.

    Between ultimate values there is no best trade-off because there is no super-value by which we can measure and judge. Ultimate values are not just different like apples and oranges, but like apples and opals, opals and idols, idols and ideals. They differ not in their quantity of goodness but in their defining quality. Goodness is not a single thing. If compromises are necessary, there is no way to find the best balancing point because there is no common scale of measurement. The best we can do is to argue forever. We find our way by following a path for a while, while disagreeing endlessly about the true way to go. We backtrack in confusion, we go in circles, we head off in all directions, and we come apart. True democracy will always be an ethical mess.

    [p.9] It is a mess, however, with a recognizable shape. Democracy is more than a conflict between equality and excellence, but its complexity is not infinite. By identifying a few ultimate values, we can begin to sketch the outlines of democratic disagreement. The ubiquitous left-right political metaphor, we will see, is useful and enduring because it captures a core of central value conflicts. Wherever democracy arises, this theory suggests, broadly similar ideological differences will arise. Local differences are also important, but these add to, rather than diminish, the divisiveness of democratic politics.

    In summary, this book makes two general points. First, democracy is not a political philosophy but a battle of philosophies. We have no super-philosophy to settle this contest; we never had one and we never will. Second, there is a permanent pattern to the disagreement of democracy, which we can outline minimally by recognizing the conflict between two great traditions of liberty, for individuals and for communities. The resulting ideological model of democracy is parsimonious and could be expanded by adding additional values. Democracy may be more disputational but not less so.

    The culture of democracy, sometimes called Western civilization or simply the West, began about three millennia ago. The theories about the good taught by Plato and Aristotle led, in time, to competing ideas among the medieval Scholastics, which emerged into contending traditions in early modernity before coming to us in ways familiar today. On one side is the belief that there is a deep teleology to human affairs, which may be understood as a causal flow or a natural order. On this side are those who see human purposes in terms of the pursuit of economic happiness and those who see society as structured by an invisible hand of moral order. On the other side are those who believe that the truest liberty is in the power to create our defining ends, that the human will is not just the locus but the source of value. Whether this freedom is vested in individuals or in society as a progressive whole, goodness is in the human will, a power exercised most fully as moral self-determination.

    From this clash of ancient philosophies, each of which was modernized over millennia, arose the familiar pattern of ideological disagreement that characterizes democratic politics. Both stories are deeply embedded in the culture of modernity, and most people, unless ideologically committed to a comprehensive philosophy, know the value of both. For most people, democracy is an ongoing dilemma. We tend to lean in certain ways, with varying degrees of consistency, but valuable foregone alternatives always retain their appeal.

    The people rule, but we have no single voice. It is not just that we differ about solutions to our problems, it is that we differ about what our problems are. The obstacles to our attainment of the good, and the threats to the [p.9] good we have attained, inevitably vary with our conflicted understanding of what constitutes the good. To be democratic is to be divided by common ideas -- understandings we share but that are not reconcilable with each other. To understand politics, therefore, we must understand the conflict among our values. The meaning of democracy can be found in the history of its competing ideas.
 
 

ã UBC Press 2000. All rights reserved. This material may not be copied or reproduced in any way without the written permission of the Publisher: