The Nation runs an article from the great German philosopher Jurgen Habermas on the Euro crisis. (I didn’t see a credit for an original German publication; if it’s special to the Nation, congratulations on an intellectual coup. But reads as though it had appeared somewhere earlier.) Habermas, consistent with his long held positions, comes out in strong favor of political consolidation of the European project. He re-states what many economists have been saying since the crisis began (Martin Feldstein states it more plainly, as a matter of rational incentives in the public choice intersection between market and politics); Habermas sums up the problem of economic union without fiscal or political union in familiar terms:
The financial crisis, which has developed into a crisis of the states, calls to mind the birth defect of an incomplete political union marooned in midstream. A common market with a partially shared currency has developed in an economic zone of continental proportions with a huge population, but without the establishment of institutions at the European level with sufficient powers to coordinate the economic policies of the member states effectively.
No one can write off the call by the president of the IMF for “European economic governance” as unreasonable anymore. The models of a “rule compliant” economic policy and a “disciplined” budgetary policy that conform to the requirements of the stability pact do not meet the requirement of a flexible adaptation to rapidly shifting political constellations. Of course, the national budgets have to be balanced. Yet this is not only about Greek “cheating” and Spanish “delusions of affluence” but an alignment of levels of economic development within a currency area with diverse national economies. The stability pact, which France and Germany themselves suspended in 2005, has become a fetish. Imposing harsher sanctions will not be sufficient to counterbalance the undesirable consequences of a planned asymmetry between a complete economic and an incomplete political unification in Europe.
Habermas then calls for greater political integration to overcome the asymmetry, and in the process, locates it in the historical project of anchoring Germany, and Germans, in Europe. He blames Merkel, and he blames the Germans, for refusing to be good Europeans first:
The historically justified distrust of the Germans could not be weakened by their discernible interest in a peaceful European unification alone. West Germans seemed to have come to terms with the partition of the country, in any case. Mindful of their past nationalistic excesses, they could have no trouble in forgoing the recovery of sovereignty rights, in accepting their role as the largest net contributor to Europe and, if need be, in making concessions that paid off for the Federal Republic in any case. To be convincing, the German commitment had to be normatively anchored. Jean-Claude Juncker described the stress test well when, in view of Merkel’s cool interest calculation, he missed a willingness “to take domestic political risks for Europe.”
The new German intransigence has deeper roots. In the wake of reunification, Germany’s perspective had already changed in an enlarged country preoccupied with its own problems. But there was a more sweeping change in mentalities after Helmut Kohl. With the exception of a too quickly exhausted Joschka Fischer, since Gerhard Schröder took office a normatively unambitious generation has been in power that has become preoccupied with a short-winded approach to the day-to-day problems of an increasingly complex society. Conscious of the diminishing room for political maneuver, these people shy away from farsighted goals and constructive political projects, let alone an undertaking like European unification.
In the process of blaming the Germans, however, he also sends a collateral attack on the amoral, cool calculation of interest form of thinking that arises an attachment to economics-rational interest forms of thinking, on the one hand, and an atavistic attachment to sovereignty, on the other. So, a narrow utilitaritarianism in the form of rational choice economics in the service of an outmoded sovereignty. Habermas’ response is to call down for doubling down on the bet on European union in every sense – economic, fiscal, political, and the construction of a shared European identity; one senses, however, that he would find the very terminology in which I have framed this (“bet” and “doubling down”) to be yet another objectionable example of the “Anglicizing metaphors prevalent in Germany,” precisely because of their rational choice implications. His call:
In times of crisis even individuals can write history. Our lame political elites, who prefer to read the headlines in the tabloids, must not use as an excuse that the populations are the obstacle to a deeper European unification. For they know best that popular opinion established by opinion polls is not the same thing as the outcome of a public deliberative process leading to the formation of a democratic will. To date there has not been a single European election or referendum in any country that wasn’t ultimately about national issues and tickets. We are still waiting for a single political party to undertake a constructive campaign to inform public opinion, to say nothing of the blinkered nationalistic vision of the left (by which I do not just mean the German party The Left).
With a little political backbone, the crisis of the single currency can bring about what some once hoped for from a common European foreign policy, namely promoting a cross-border awareness of a shared European destiny.
Hmm … Habermas, and the European elite for which he is the celebrated chief public intellectual, are not exactly enamored of that homely American sentiment, “Here, the people rule.” It is impossible within Habermas’ account – faithfully reflecting German and European history – to disentangle patriotism from nationalism, a fundamental difference of political experience that is one of the chief reasons why American intellectual elite attempts to ape their presumed European betters are so far-fetched, ill-suited, and ultimately ugly. (The historian John Lukacs has written deeply on this distinction; it is one that, I sorrow to say, eludes most international law professors of my acquaintance.) The inability to formulate such a distinction is a principal reason for the European elite attachment to both the EU and the ideals of global constitutionalism.
It’s a peculiarly German problem, for obvious reasons – France has no such inherent difficulty, much less Britain – but the received view is that populism can have no honorable outlet save for nationalism, and from there it is a straight line to fascism and Nazism. (It used to be regarded as a straight line to the Holocaust, but that connection somehow seems fuzzier to a Europe sensibility than it used to be.) American elites found the refusal to countenance such a distinction in American political experience and history to be a good thing for, I suggest, two reasons. The first is that it is so … so thrillingly Continental. The second is that it is so empowering for elites.
Hence the appeal, as ever to “deliberative democracy.” I have criticized the program of deliberative democracy, in the hands particularly of Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson in Democracy and Disagreement, here on this blog for – well, in shorthand – metaethicizing its prior normative commitments. In ordinary speak, it not only insists on a particular method by which democracy is to proceed, it then insists that this meta” method of doing ethical democratic politics must inevitably result in … whereupon follows a wish list of progressivism’s cherished domestic views of the last couple of decades, from abortion to affirmative action.
If you reach any different conclusion, you haven’t engaged in a legitimate political process of “deliberative democracy” – return to the seminar room and start over. The beatings will continue until morale improves, so to speak. The whole method is a central political part of what I have sometimes described in the 1990s as “therapeutic liberal authoritarianism,” which is back with a vengeance, and it all reminds of those conversations with my mother which were not actually over until I agreed with her. I don’t think I would call them ”conversations,” at least not in politics.
The criticism of “deliberative democracy” here, in Habermas’ use of it above, is related but slightly different. It is not only a complaint about the elite assumption that the “deliberation” is not over until you agree with me, but that the popular will does not express the universal will, and the universal will is given by the elites, whose problem is to shape the electoral will to reflect it.
Let me reflect my humble American intellectual roots and say that I don’t buy it. Not for my political culture, anyway. I quite accept that a political system rooted in nothing more than calculations of cool self-interest and in which its elites are inculcated with a view that they are merely elite managers a bunch of people whom they govern from the jet stream, as it were, will not last. I have many profound objections to the shallowness of some versions of both reductionist political and economic theory precisely because it inculcates a view that there are no true relations of fiduciary duty built on trust, on shared sacrifice and shared blessings, and that to be a politician is simply to be a person who has obtained a gate-keeping position on the line between the public and the private, from which one can extract economic rents, either now or as deferred payoffs in the future. There is a role for leadership in politics which requires both elitism and a connection to those whom one would “lead,” rather than merely manage.
So I have some sympathy with Habermas’ rejection of narrow utilitarian thinking in politics and something of his ethical distaste for it. That does not, however, draw me any closer to the profound illiberalism of his – or his American counterparts and acolytes’ – love of the empowerment of elites through “deliberative democracy.”
(Update: I suppose I feel the same way about my professors in philosophy, whether Philippa Foot or Rogers Albritton, as some of the commenters feel here about Habermas. Which is fine, even if it might mean reflexively rising up to defend the Great Philosopher from any criticism, no matter how mild, almost always on the basis that the critic Had No Idea What He Was Talking About and hadn’t read the works in question. Okay, I’ve done it myself. Still, it does at least slightly raise the eyebrows when someone – Henry Farrell in this case, over at Crooked Timber – suggests I might not have read (enough) Habermas.
Well, I don’t agree that Habermas has managed to disentangle patriotism from nationalism, at least in a way that can make sense outside of a very particular European frame and perhaps not there either. To those of us who are not already convinced Habermasians, it doesn’t help to be told that H. has been elaborating a theory of patriotism; it looks like round 35 of trying to square a circle, to put it non-reverentially. To which the response is, you haven’t read enough of it, or read it correctly, and forgive me if it all starts to feel slightly religious.
It is slightly surprising, though, for a former long-term Telos editor to be informed he hasn’t read enough Habermas. Possible, I suppose, but frankly it feels a little more like, you haven’t read enough Habermas, closely enough to … agree with me. The beatings will continue, etc., as I remarked above. But it’s like saying a Telos editor hasn’t read enough Schmitt, no? However, on a completely different note, though I’m only partway through Professor Farrell’s The Political Economy of Trust, if you have an interest in the intersection of law of agency and fiduciary, finance, rational choice, and the moral psychology of trust, as I do, this is an fine book.)
Matt says:
This is, to say the least, a pretty contentious account of deliberative democracy (a view that doesn’t start or end with Habermas, or with Gutmann and Thompson, for that matter) but what I’m more interested in is this remark:
It is impossible within Habermas’ account — … to disentangle patriotism from nationalism,
I’m not sure what your getting at here. Habermas has, of course, a view that he’s well known for called “constitutional patriotism” that tries to do just this. (See also the very nice, quite short, book by Jan Werner-Muller on the subject and of the same name.) So, I’d be interested to hear more clearly the point you’re trying to make here.
June 12, 2010, 11:56 pmtamerlane says:
Sounds to me like the Habermas article was originally written for the Onion. Rousseaun democracy is beloved by the elites because they see themselves as the enlightened determiners of the popular will. In the past this has given us communism, fascism, and naziism. It’s interesting to speculate what new ism Habermas and his elitist European colleagues are planning to spring on the world.
June 13, 2010, 12:10 amMark Field says:
Wow, I’m not sure it’s possible to be wrong in more ways than you managed here. It’s late so I’m going to be relatively brief.
First, no American Founder was in favor of anything other than deliberative democracy. That’s why we have multiple protections against the wayward public sentiments that an opinion poll might capture. The whole Constitution is structered as it is in an effort to obtain deliberative democracy.
That was also the goal of individuals. Here’s George Washington, just for example:
“It is on great occasions only and after time has been given for cool and deliberate reflection that the real voice of the people can be known.”
In fact, Madison’s entire goal in Federalist 10 was to establish a system in which ONLY the “permanent and aggregate” interests of the country would be enacted.
Second, anyone with even the slightest familiarity with the Populist movement in this country would be far more modest about it than you are here. It was expressly racist and anti-market, two things you, I hope, would repudiate rather than celebrate.
Third, I suspect your mother would have a very different view of your “conversations”. You give off the attitude of a snotty kid unwilling to listen to adults, which you’re now attempting to hide behind a facade of phony humility. Democracy is nothing more than a continuing conversation. It’s your desire to halt the conversation which is authoritarian, anti-democratic and illiberal.
June 13, 2010, 12:27 amJ.T. Wenting says:
More and more Europeans are starting to believe that the crisis Europe is in now was deliberately created by the EU to enable them to pull ever more power to themselves and away from member states and citizens, using the crisis as an excuse.
This piece fits exactly in that pattern, now an “academic” claim that such a Brussels powergrab is needed and actually a good thing.
Never mind that the Brussels cleptocrats are the ones responsible for the mess in the first place, are not elected, and are not responsible to anyone but themselves.
June 13, 2010, 12:39 amWe’d be trading what little democracy we’ve got left for a complete dictatorship by the European Comission.
jakecollins says:
Are the only alternatives nationalism or elite-driven supra-nationalism? Without adopting Habermas’s notion of “deliberative democracy,” the idea that people might reason together to form democratic institutions minus deleterious nationalist commitments seems appealing.
June 13, 2010, 1:17 amThe fact that Americans have been so quick to discard the “Continental” tradition of anti-nationalism is not entirely a good thing. If we reasoned a bit more like Habermas and bit less like Cheney, maybe the Iraq war would have been prevented.
SC says:
Mark Field is correct, not only does our Constitution embody deliberative democracy, it also insists on certain broad outcomes. Practically, every argument in American politics is whether policies suit those outcomes. The winner of those arguments (for the time being) is just the winner (for the time being). Don’t be a sore loser, Prof. Anderson, if your own political prescriptions are current losers – and don’t whine to us about your mother (for christ sake).
June 13, 2010, 1:33 amjakecollins says:
What’s up with the “Learn how to invest in Gold” ad banner? Is this an conservative/libertarian intellectual law blog, or Glen Beck? Hopefully, there’s still a difference.
June 13, 2010, 1:42 amCornellian says:
that is one of the chief reasons why American intellectual elite attempts to ape their presumed European betters are so far-fetched, ill-suited, and ultimately ugly.
Such gratuitous cheap shots aren’t all that attractive either.
June 13, 2010, 1:46 amAnonymous says:
The original German version appears to have been posted on Zeit Online in May (www.zeit.de/2010/21/Europa-Habermas).
June 13, 2010, 5:36 amMartinned says:
…except for the national parliaments that ratified the treaties that contain the offending rules, the people who voted for these treaties in Ireland, Luxembourg and Spain, the national ministers who carry out the rules when the meet in Brussels to form the Council of Ministers, and the members of the European Parliament who act as co-legislators. The only people here who are not elected are the members of the European Commission, who do, however, need the approval of the Council and the EP, and the executives of the European Central Bank. Are you saying we should have held a special ECB election?
Whatever mess there is, it isn’t the Commission that caused it. The rules are in the Treaties, unchangeable except by unanimously ratified Treaty change.
June 13, 2010, 6:57 amMartinned says:
You made me curious. Please, do tell. I’ve had this conversation in the past, and I’ve never met anyone who’s been able to explain to me the difference between patriotism and nationalism. (Probably because I’m an IL guy, or just generally one of prof. Anderson’s “European betters”.) Whatever patriotism is, if it involves playing the national anthem before strictly domestic sports events, you can keep it.
June 13, 2010, 7:01 amEngineer says:
The characterization of deliberative democracy as “metaethicizing its prior normative commitments” is presumably not accepted by those who are more sympathetic to it than Prof. Anderson.
What then is a better characterization of the process?
June 13, 2010, 7:45 amPersonFromPorlock says:
Why assume that beneficial Big Government is even possible, whether done by We the People or an Elite? California and the old Soviet Union are striking examples of failure ‘achieved’ either way. May it not be that the whole process of complex government is beyond human capacity, leaving ‘minarchy, markets and private arrangements’ as the least imperfect solution?
June 13, 2010, 9:16 amPersonFromPorlock says:
My patriotism imposes on me; my nationalism imposes on you.
June 13, 2010, 9:19 amMartinned says:
How do you figure?
June 13, 2010, 9:51 amMartinned says:
And, if you will, in which category do you put the “appropriate patriotic exercises” = pledge of allegiance? On who does that impose?
June 13, 2010, 9:54 amgeokstr says:
Really, Mark, that was their only concern? I thought there were at least some passing worries in those DWEMS minds about preventing the centralization of power in the federal government. Didn’t they insert “multiple protections” against that too in the penumbras of that worthless, unheeded scrap of paper they wrote?
How’s that goal working out for us?
June 13, 2010, 11:43 amJoseph Slater says:
Geokstr: The founders were also concerned with creating a federal government with too little power, having experienced problems with that in the Articles of Confederation.
More generally, it’s interesting to contrast the surprisingly proudly anti-democratic comments on threads about voter ignorance and the 17th Amendment with the “omg, European elites are so anti-democratic” thread here.
June 13, 2010, 12:57 pmBDF: Luftverkehrsabgabe ist Gift für Wirtschaft und Tourismus | World Politics says:
[...] The Volokh Conspiracy » Habermas on the Euro Crisis and the Necessity of Doubling Down on the … [...]
June 13, 2010, 1:26 pmMark Field says:
Not at all, but it was their only concern relevant to the point about deliberative democracy.
As Joseph Slater noted, they were at least as concerned with the abuse of power by the states and the lack of central authority. It was a balance.
But one of the ways they did try to prevent the federal government from being overbearing was to implement safeguards (bicameral legislature, presidential veto, judicial review, etc.) which would assure that the decisions it reached were deliberative.
June 13, 2010, 1:29 pmDavid M. Nieporent says:
It’s hard to see how you can be so badly misreading the OP. It’s not the process of deliberation that Prof. Anderson is criticizing. It’s using the rhetoric of deliberation as code for substantive outcomes — to such an extent that any substantive outcomes one disagrees with (that is, ones not far enough left) are deemed to not to be the product of sufficient deliberation.
June 13, 2010, 3:01 pmMartinned says:
I don’t think that makes deliberative democracy problematic. There are some ideas that I merely disagree with, and then there are ideas that I disagree with to the point that I don’t see how a reasonable person, after actual consideration/deliberation, can reach such a conclusion.
June 13, 2010, 3:23 pmEH says:
Is this to say that sufficiency of deliberation is defined as the amount of time it takes to achieve an outcome one agrees with?
June 13, 2010, 4:34 pmMark Field says:
Nice try at a rescue. If that’s what Prof. Anderson meant, he might try, you know, saying that.
June 13, 2010, 4:49 pmMartinned says:
No offence, but I think he did.
June 13, 2010, 5:06 pmDavid M. Nieporent says:
Nice try at snark, but he, you know, did.
June 13, 2010, 5:13 pmnoahp says:
Didn’t the deliberations of the Weimar Republic perhaps simplistically lead to the holocaust and WW2.
I have great suspicion of the necessity of elites including Habermas and Anderson. Elites have strangled this nation with regulations which for example apparently deterred Obama from accepted oil skimmers from the Dutch.
June 13, 2010, 6:24 pmnoahp says:
Apparently the Lisbon Treaty guarantees EUropeans utopia without the structure to realize the unobtaniumable. So, if Habermas were to advocate a practical ‘utopia’ modelled on, say, the US constitution, then I would say go for it.
June 13, 2010, 6:47 pmMark Field says:
Actually, even that one passage, taken out of context, doesn’t make the more limited argument DMN suggested.
First, it claims that proponents “insist on a particlar method of democracy [i.e., deliberation]“, implying some fault there. As I pointed out, deliberation isn’t a fault, it’s the particular intent and virtue of the US system which he celebrates as somehow different.
Second, he criticizes the fact that the conversation continues. Again, duh — of course it does. One of the greatest virtues of democracy is that the side which loses today gets to keep trying to change peoples’ minds. For example, the womens’ suffrage movement here began in 1848 and suffered repeated defeats along the way. In Prof. Anderson’s world, the continued struggle in the face of those defeats was “elitist” or somehow effete and “European”. In the real world, it’s an example of true democracy: the conversation continues as long as someone thinks it important.
June 13, 2010, 7:04 pmChrisTS says:
Mark Field:
That.
I am not a Habermasian, but the OP is just an awful distortion of Habermas’ own views.
June 13, 2010, 7:22 pmDavid M. Nieporent says:
I don’t know that this actually is “one of the greatest virtues of democracy,” or that “conversation” is a good metaphor for democracy in the first place.
But Prof. Anderson is talking about something entirely different: something which definitely isn’t a “conversation” at all. Rather, he’s talking about an approach in which the elites decide the “right answer,” and then the public keeps getting told to do their deliberation over again until they get that answer — at which point the deliberation stops.
For example, in Europe you don’t get to debate, say, the death penalty. It’s not a “conversation” — or if it is, it’s a “conversation” only among elites.
Well, it “implies” that if you cut the sentence in half, as you did.
June 13, 2010, 8:52 pmMartinned says:
That’s not a very good example. The death penalty is institutionalised murder. You can’t have a conversation about that any more than about legalising any other kind of murder.
A better example would have been referendums. There, too, I don’t think the example would have been entirely fair, but one can reasonably ask whether it was fair to have a second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty in Ireland.
June 13, 2010, 9:01 pmtamerlane says:
And you’ve just illustrated David M. Nieporent’s point. How would you feel about the assertion, “The income tax is institutionalized robbery. You can’t have a conversation about that…..”?
June 13, 2010, 9:33 pmDavid M. Nieporent says:
The prosecution rests.
June 13, 2010, 9:35 pmcurle says:
Or institutionalized justice. Regardless, you’ve done a good job of illustrating the good professor’s central point; debate will be constrained by the predetermined assumptions, confusions, preferences and prejudices of the elite and such debate will only mimick, in terms of social value, debate unfettered by such pretenses.
June 13, 2010, 9:47 pmMartinned says:
Actually, I illustrated my own earlier point:
There are in fact opinions that are out of bounds, in the sense that a reasonable person could not hold them if they’d given the issue even a minimum of actual reasonable thought. Such opinions cannot be the product of anything resembling deliberation. As it happens, I don’t personally consider the death penalty to be an example of such, so I must admit I was trolling a bit, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other examples abound. (There’s one very obvious one, but I don’t want to violate Godwin’s Law…)
June 13, 2010, 9:59 pmPerseus says:
Since you have since withdrawn the death penalty as an example, you might want to provide an example other than the Nazis.
June 13, 2010, 10:20 pmMartinned says:
Burning people for witchcraft?
June 13, 2010, 10:47 pmChrisTS says:
I think this is a difficult conversation, but perhaps we could note that there are some moral and legal data that are accepted as nonnegotiable by each/every political perspective. So, libertarians think certain rights are fundamental. Contrary views as to these rights are simply beyond the pale. To say this is no more than to say that intelligent political views are grounded.
However, let’s imagine that, theoretically – or ‘metaethically’ as the OP suggests – none of us has any foundational values. Difficult to imagine, but let’s go with it.
To what fundamental claims might we cling? One could be that views antithetical to the basic political perspective [apparently value-less] are suspect, if not automatically to be rejected. This might satisfy purists. The problem is it leaves the basic political perspective open to question: why this arrangement?
No political perspective is free of moral commitment. The suggestion in the OP that the existence of ‘metaethical’ commitments by Habermas is illegitimate is a red herring. One might object to the content of the commitments – on alternative grounds – but no intellectually honest person should object to the fact that others have moral grounds for their positions. Anyone who does not have such grounds for her/his position is either a fool or a tyrant-in-the-making.
By the way: I am a professional philosopher of (cough)many years. I have never encountered any use of the term ‘metaethical’ to mean ‘hidden substantive’ [commitments]. Typically, ‘metaethical’ refers to nonsubstantive, nonnormative considerations.
June 13, 2010, 11:01 pmMark Field says:
No, that’s the implication of the sentence. It goes on to then cast aspersions on the motives of other people, but that adds nothing substantive to his argument.
No, he’s making exactly the opposite point. He wants the elites to shut up just because they lost the first time around. That’s a phony commitment to democracy on his part because, as I said, the whole point of democracy is that the debate never ends. His argument is, at its root, utterly illiberal.
June 13, 2010, 11:53 pmEngineer says:
He wants the elites to shut up just because they lost the first time around. That’s a phony commitment to democracy on his part because, as I said, the whole point of democracy is that the debate never ends.
Whereas you are arguing that the common folk winning the first round shouldn’t prevent the elites from trying again?
Sincerely just trying to understand here ….
June 14, 2010, 2:08 amEngineer says:
There are in fact opinions that are out of bounds, in the sense that a reasonable person could not hold them if they’d given the issue even a minimum of actual reasonable thought.
Aren’t we all enlightened enough to know that the body of reasonable/unreasonable opinions is itself hugely dependent on cultural context? We can agree that witch-burning is out-of-bounds only because it’s not relevant anymore.
June 14, 2010, 2:14 amSC says:
Burning people.
June 14, 2010, 9:16 amPersonFromPorlock says:
Serves me right for being aphoristic. What I meant was just that the patriot says “Me being x, there are things I should do,” where the nationalist says “We being x, there are things you should do.” It’s the difference between standing in the shadow of the flag, and threatening others – although ‘threatening’ may be a little strong – with the flagpole.
If I decide I should only buy American cars, that would be ‘patriotism’. If the government/union/Chamber of Commerce tells me I should buy American, that’s ‘nationalism’.
As for patriotic exercises, they are mostly in fact nationalistic since they’re required of their performers: The Pledge of Allegiance, specifically, is a nationalistic rather than a patriotic exercise.
June 14, 2010, 9:23 amCarlsson says:
Patriotism: “I love my country with all its faults in all its glory. I may even do what I can to improve on its faults.”
Nationalism: “My country is better than yours, and if you get in my way, you’d better move or get beaten down. And not just on the football field.”
Can a libertarian be a patriot? I’d think so. But never a nationalist!
Could a libertarian patriot cheer for his nation’s team or is s/he morally compelled to support the best team only? I’d think the latter. Only a Nazi nationalist would ever only cheer for his country’s team.
So, with that, I say — Vamos os brasileiros! And I’m an American patriot, and no Brazilian.
June 14, 2010, 9:51 amCarl The EconGuy says:
This discussion could be well informed by a study of Kenneth Arrow’s famous Impossibility Theorem, for which he got half a Nobel Prize (the other half was for his work on general equilibrium). The point of Arrow’s work on social choice was his generalized proof of Condorcet’s early insight that democratic decision making leads to cycles. Arrow showed that when there is significant diversity of preferences in a society, democratic voting, under reasonable conditions, will *inevitably* lead to decision cycles. Every time someone loses, they’ll work to keep the game open, and to reverse the decision. Later work has proved that the larger a society is, the more likely such problems will be, because diversity of opinions increases with size. And all democratic societies are likely to have to address this problem.
One solution, very attractive to intellectual elites, is to restrict the domain of allowable preferences (as Arrow explicitly refused to do, on the theory that democracy requires that all opinions be equally tolerated and represented). That is, we can obviously avoid decision cycles by shutting down the debate. Is that democratic? No, but it may be necessary.
The real point about Arrow’s work is that we can only avoid decision cycles by violating some of our basic values regarding democracy. Restrict allowable preferences, let special interests rule, allow deliberate agenda control, find ways of supporting weighted voting (not all votes are equal, as in e.g. elected representatives picking their voters, think gerrymandering) — those are some of the ways by which we can avoid the downsides of democracy. Only they all tug at our democratic ideals.
The import of the work is that stable democracy is only possible if we deliberately work to violate some of our basic democratic ideals, in one way or another. Total virtue is impossible, and you have to choose which sins to commit to get you somewhere on the path towards virtue — that’s the point, really.
From that perspective, is it worse to disallow certain opinions or values to be represented in democratic debate than to rig the process of decision making to gain stable outcomes? That is the debate we should have in democratic societies. It depends on whether you value the outcome more than the process itself. But democracy *is* a process, not a guaranteed outcome. You can’t tinker with it too much and still call it a democracy. The price you pay is that you can’t control the results, and so you must accept constant debate and decision reversals.
June 14, 2010, 10:13 amMark Field says:
That’s right, but I’m also arguing that it works both ways: if the elites win the first round, that shouldn’t prevent the common folk from trying again. In a democracy, there are no permanent victories or defeats; a later majority can change its mind.
June 14, 2010, 10:15 amKen Arromdee says:
The death penalty example falls under Poe’s Law. You may not have really meant it, but there are people who really do think that it’s beyond the pale to argue for the death penalty, and make exactly the same argument you made (and ignore the question “does that mean that jail is institutionalized kidnapping?”).
Who exactly do we trust to set the parameters of discussion and decide what’s beyond the pale? I can’t think of anyone I’d trust, and certainly not those who are actually trying to do it (and sometimes succeeding). If they had their way, it really wouldn’t be acceptable to argue for the death penalty, Israeli settlements, and a whole bunch of other things that don’t fit left-wing ideology.
June 14, 2010, 10:22 amKen Arromdee says:
The answer is to the same as about half of all questions about whether a libertarian could do something: libertarianism isn’t about, and doesn’t claim to be about, all aspects of life and some questions just aren’t relevant to it. Unless he’s complaining about his nation’s team being government-sponsored, libertarianism has nothing to say whatsoever on the subject, any more than it dictates whether you should have chocolate or vanilla ice cream.
June 14, 2010, 10:26 amMark Field says:
Henry at Crooked Timber comments on Prof. Anderson’s post here.
June 14, 2010, 3:27 pmEngineer says:
You seem to have missed my sarcasm.
Your remark really does amaze me, because back in the 20th century, liberals saw themselves as working with the “common folk” against the establishment.
Whereas today the “progressives” take it for granted (eg. your comment) that they are part of the “elite” and that their opponents are the common folk (who are too stupid to appreciate their largesse).
June 15, 2010, 5:04 amEivind says:
You’re free to debate the death-penalty. But that isn’t to say that everyone is required to debate it with you. “unfettered” debate does not mean that I’m required to seriously entertain, and provide point-by-point endless rebuttals to an argument that I consider to be so unrealistic as to be a waste of time. If you insist that Australia does not exist, you’ll probably have a hard time getting anyone, unfettered or not, to debate the point with you at much length. (if you happen to bump into a philosopher, you may offcourse get a debate as to what, exactly existence is in the first place)
June 15, 2010, 7:02 amMark Field says:
Apparently so.
I think you’re bringing your own baggage here. My view of things was expressly equal — nobody gets to shut off debate. The fact that in this particular case it’s a member of the elite doesn’t matter. And as it happens, I’m as anti-elite (except for true merit) as you could find.
June 15, 2010, 10:57 am