Abstract
In chapters 2–4, I have outlined the nature, history, and current condition of democratic theory in its normative, constitutive, and causal aspects. I have been focusing throughout on what I have called the cognitive dimension of democracy, which has emerged gradually into prominence in democratic thought, having initially been an index of antidemocratic thought in the writings of Plato, with echoes in Rousseau. Since Tocqueville, though there in an ambiguous sense, and more plainly and unambiguously in Mill, a view of the harmonious and mutually supportive relationship between progress in knowledge (in science, in education, and in the availability of information) and the progress of democracy has become the mainstream view. Doubts raised by Tocqueville have been put to one side. Instead, constitutive and normative arguments about the scope for improvement of democracy, exemplified by the work of Dahl and Sartori, have endorsed the Millian view that these would come about in tandem with improvements in the cognitive environment.
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Notes
see Stefan Collini, Donald Winch, and John Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), esp. p. 4.
Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1968).
Quoted in Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment: An Evaluation of Its Assumptions, Attitudes and Values (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 34; Hampsoh’s interpolation.
Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Anne Cohler, Basia Miller, and Harold Stone (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), Part 3, Bk. 14, Chap. 13 (242).
See, for instance, the entries “Abraham,” “Heaven in Antiquity,” “Christianity,” “Hell,” “Moses,” and “Peter” in Voltaire, A Pocket Philosophical Dictionary (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Lucian W. Pye, “Political Science and the Crisis of Authoritarianism,” American Political Science Review 84 (1990).
On nationalism, see, for example, Tom Nairn, “The Modern Janus,” New Left Review, no. 94 (1975);
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983).
Andrew C. Janos, “The Politics of Backwardness in Continental Europe, 1780–1945,” World Politics 49 (1989).
On fascism, see, for example, Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism: Action Française, Italian Fascism, National Socialism, trans. Leila Vennewitz (New York: New American Library, 1969).
Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
On fundamentalism, see, for example, Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, updated ed. (Berkeley, CA, and London: University of California Press, 2000).
Bruce B. Lawrence, Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt against the Modern Age (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 1990).
Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992).
See also Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994).
Ulrich Beck, The Reinvention of Politics: Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social Order (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997).
Karl R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London and New York: Routledge, 2002).
Robert K. Merton, “Science and Democratic Social Structure,” in Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1942), 607.
Robert K. Merton, “Science and the Social Order,” Philosophy of Science 5 (1938): 334; references omitted.
Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).
See in particular, Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1970).
Thomas S. Kuhn, “Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?,” in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. Imre Lakatos and Alan Mus grave (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
Steve Fuller, Kuhn vs. Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science (Cambridge: Icon, 2003).
See, for example, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).
Andrew Pickering, Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984).
See Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1998).
Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
For the reactive aspect of radical democratic theory, see Peter Bachrach, The Theory of Democratic Elitism:A Critique (Lanham, MD, and London: University Press of America, 1980).
Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
See Reginald J. Harrison, Pluralism and Corporatism: The Political Evolution of Modern Democracies (London: Allen and Unwin, 1980).
Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 29.
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© 2013 Stephen Welch
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Welch, S. (2013). Cognitive Mobilization and Reflexive Modernization: Deriving the Theory of Hyperdemocracy. In: Hyperdemocracy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137099174_5
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