Abstract
This chapter provides an overview of contemporary approaches in social and political theory that in a way or another anticipate mine. I critically examine theories of democracy stemming from a plurality of European and Anglo-American traditions, with the aim of showing what is still missing there, and why a pragmatist wide view of democracy accomplishes something that no other theory has achieved so far. The different theories I examine are organized in three main categories: (1) theories of democracy which have accomplished a significant advancement in expanding the scope of democracy to one or another limited sphere of social reality (the family, the workplace, the public sphere, etc.); (2) theories conceiving democracy as an event external to the functioning of political regimes, and (3) theories which conceive democracy as a global, or holistic category of social thought. I contend that my approach is inscribed within this third category, and show differences and similarities with other main approaches.
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Notes
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For a rich and articulated account of the democratic function of the public sphere and of the legacy of Dewey’s ideas in the tradition of critical theory from Habermas onwards, see Honneth (2014, Sect. III.3.a).
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Not surprisingly, Habermas’ laudatory praise of Dewey’s philosophy is strictly confined to the procedural dimension of Dewey’s theory of publics and is never extended to the whole of Dewey’s social theory of democracy. Bohman (2007) confirms on different grounds that the reception of Dewey’s theory of democracy within the tradition of critical theory has largely been dependent upon Habermas’ first move and has mainly revolved around the theory of the public sphere and of the civil society. I have explored at a greater length the implications of the reception of pragmatist themes in the Frankfurt School in Frega (2017c).
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The affinity between Urbinati’s “wide view of representation” and pragmatist approaches to democracy has been remarked by David Bray, who draws on her approach to develop his own pragmatist account of cosmopolitan democracy. See Bray (2011).
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The idea of ‘paradigmatic ’ normativity is explained in the next chapter.
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Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, Andreas Kalyvas, Sheldon Wolin are the first names that come to mind. For an overview of approaches in this tradition, see Marchart (2007).
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See, in particular, the first part of Rancière (1998).
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This theme spans most of Lefort’s writings since the late 1970s. For a general overview, see Flynn (2005). In Frega (2017d) I have compared Dewey and Lefort’s theories of democracy and claim that they overlap to a large extent, so that we can interpret Dewey’s theory of democracy as a way of life in the terms of Lefort’s theory of democracy as a form of society. The expression form of society is also used by Dewey. See Dewey (1888, ew1.232) and Dewey (1936, lw11.378). The approach I develop is derived from a re-interpretation of Dewey’s theory of democracy in light of Lefort’s.
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Whilst for Lefort democracy as a form of society and democracy as a political regime are inseparable because, historically, they stem from the same organizing principle, the relation between social and political ideas of democracy has been more complex. As historians of post-revolutionary France have shown, conservative thinkers attempted to separate social from political democracy with the aim of reconciling the revolutionary idea of a society of equals with a still anti-democratic and authoritarian political regime. Their assumption was indeed that the achievement of democracy as a form of society did not require the realization of democracy as a political regime (Rosanvallon , 1993). Tocqueville opposed this project under the assumption that combining social democracy and political aristocracy would have produced social instability and political unrest (Oskian , 2015, Ch. 2). For Lefort too such a project was misguided since the start.
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On hierarchy and equality as principles of social organization see Dumont (1976). Louis Dumont has been a colleague of Lefort for decades at the EHESS.
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Frega, R. (2019). Enlarging Democracy. In: Pragmatism and the Wide View of Democracy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18561-9_2
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