Abstract
According to all versions of democratic theory, however they may differ on the extent to which fully democratic institutions are thought to be practicable, “democracy” is about the authorship of collective decisions. People who are subject to laws are to be treated as if they willingly subjected themselves to such laws—to endorse their own personhood and to firmly ground a sense of collective agency. This ideal notion of authorship is of course not reducible to the actual making of decisions, particularly not in a system of representative government. Still, even democratic minimalists have suggested that at the very least this notion of expressive agency has to include some sense on the part of citizens that they can in different ways initiate political activity and influence public opinion. Thus it is basic to democratic theory that the idea and practices of democracy include some continual mediation between collective self-determination and the individual self-determination of particular citizens. It follows that some kind of equality of participation and discourse is needed for this mediation, so that citizens can feel that their own agency in political matters can potentially have an effect in the larger society.
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Notes
Among the most important of these are Iris Young’s Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990)
Lani Guinier’s The Tyranny of the Majority (New York: The Free Press, 1994)
Wil Kymlicka’s Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
See Ronald Dworkin’s Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2000), Chapter 10.
See, e.g., James Bohman, “The Democratic Minimum and Global Justice,” Ethics and International Affairs, vol. 19 no. 1 (2005), pp. 102–116.
See Dan Clawson et al., Dollars and Votes: How Business Campaign Contributions Subvert Democracy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), p. 69. Given the various other similar provisions that were slipped into that bill, it might well have wound up costing taxpayers, even workers, more than the rise in the minimum wage benefitted the latter. The chapter in which this anecdote is embedded, “What a Typical Bill Is Like,” tells more about the political process of representative oligarchy than almost any imaginable textbook on American government. It is also important to note that the worst instance of corruption Clawson et al. give comes courtesy of Democratic senator, John Breaux, demonstrating the reality of the one-party system at work.
Peter Bachrach’s The Theory of Democratic Elitism (Washington DC: University Press of America, 1967, 1980) is the classic critique of this neo-realism.
On the difference between legitimate protection and “racketeering,” see Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Reuschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 170–171.
The developing nationalist consensus in France, for example, is stifling rather than empowering, and race-inflected rather than democratic. See Judith Ezekiel, “Magritte meets Mahgreb: This is not a veil,” Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 20, no. 47, 2005.
Robert Dahl, Who Governs? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), Chapter 24.
See Rawls’s The Law of Peoples with the Idea of Public Reason Revisited (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). On “overlapping consensus,” see Political Liberalism (Columbia University Press, 1993).
There is no evidence so far that cyberspace in any way promises to be a satisfactory substitute for the real spaces in which speaking and publishing take place. On television and the monopolization of opinion, see Philip Green, Primetime Politics: The Truth about Conservative Lies, Corporate Control, and Television Culture (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005).
On the necessity of debate within the context of American idealism, see the “Introduction” to Rogers M. Smith’s Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
See Drucilla Cornell, The Imaginary Domain: Abortion, Pornography, and Sexual Harassment (New York: Routledge, 1995).
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© 2014 Philip Green
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Green, P. (2014). Rethinking Democratic Theory: The American Case. In: American Democracy. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137381552_6
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