Why Should We Expect From More Democracy

What Should We Expect from More Democracy?
: Radically Democratic Responses to Politics

Author(s): Mark E. Warren
Source: Political Theory, Vol. 24, No. 2 (May, 1996), pp. 241-270
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.
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WHAT SHOULD WE EXPECT
FROM MORE DEMOCRACY?
Radically Democratic Responses to Politics
MARKE. WARREN
Georgetown University
THEORIES OF RADICAL DEMOCRACY hold that if individuals were

more broadly empowered, especially in the institutions that most directly
affect their everyday lives, their experiences would have transformative
effects. Individuals would become more public spirited, more tolerant, more
knowledgeable, more attentive to the interests of others, and more probing
of their own interests. Transformations such as these would improve the
workings of higher-level representative institutions, as well as mitigate
threats that democracy is often held to pose to rights, pluralism, and gov-
ernability.1 And institutions that make collective decisions in radically demo-
cratic ways will tend to generate new forms of solidarity, cooperation, and
civic attachment.
One version of radical democracy that has been gaining currency-
increasingly referred to as "deliberative democracy"-holds that, of the
variety of possible democratic experiences, deliberation is most central to
these generative and transformative effects.2 Unlike many democratic theo-
rists, proponents of deliberative democracy do not view formal procedures
such as voting and political rights as definitive of democracy. Rather, on the
deliberative view, we should regard democratic rules and procedures as
mechanisms that empower and protect democratic deliberations. Formal
AUTHOR'S NOTE: This article, a long time in the making, has benefitedfrom the comments,
suggestions, skepticism, and criticisms of a good many people, including Seyla Benhabib, Jack
Crittenden, Jean Elshtain, Jon Goldberg-Hiller, Sandra Hinchman, Robert Holsworth, Wesley
Joe, George Kateb, George Klosko, Gerald Mara, Debra Morris, Diana Owen, Phil Paolino,
Tracy Strong, Elizabeth Wingrove, and the members of the Princeton Colloquium on Political
Philosophy. Writing was supported by a summer grant made possible by the Mellon Foundation.
POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 24 No. 2, May 1996 241-270

? 1996 Sage Publications, Inc.
241
242 POLITICAL THEORY / May 1996
rules and procedures can work no better than the deliberative processes they
enable, and democracy works poorly when individuals hold preferences and
make judgments in isolation from one another, as they too often do in today's
liberal democracies. When individuals lack the opportunities, incentives, and
necessities to test, articulate, defend, and ultimately act on their judgments,
they will also be lacking in empathy for others, poor in information, and
unlikely to have the critical skills necessary to articulate, defend, and revise
their views. For this reason, deliberative experiences should be extensively
empowered and protected by democratic mechanisms and widely dispersed
throughout the institutions of state, economy, and civil society.
Although the transformative ideals of radical democracy are attractive for
many reasons, they too often seem beset by a fuzzy utopianism that fails to
confront limitations of complexity, size, and scale of advanced industrial
societies. Moreover, contemporary political cultures-propelled by the mass
media and permeated by rhetorics of fear and hate-hardly seem conducive
to deliberative ideals. Nor is it clear that deliberative mechanisms could
amass the powers necessary to deal with the globalization of markets, trade
blocs, migrations, environmental destruction, and so-called collective secu-
rity arrangements. So we should ask once again: Do the transformative ideals
of radical democracy, especially in its deliberative form, have a place in
today's societies?
What I intend here is more modest than an answer to this overly general
question. Although theories of radical democracy are uniquely attuned to the
generative and transformative powers of democracy, their expectations are
not articulated in ways that make it clear what an answer would look like.
For the most part, radical democrats have not conceptualized how contem-
porary societies have altered both the opportunities for and the nature
of transformative ideals. Nor have they conceived the social and psychologi-
cal difficulties inherent in political engagement, difficulties that make a
difference for how we might expect individuals to respond to democratic
opportunities.
These lacunas are obscured by at least three common kinds of assumptions
in theories of radical democracy-assumptions, I shall argue, that should be
identified and dispensed. First, radical democrats should give up once and
for all the Rousseauian ideal of the state as the political expression of a
democratic community, as well as the communitarian/republican notion that
democracy can or should, as a matter of necessity, reveal or result in
community.3 Such constructions articulate poorly-even as ideals-with the
differentiated, pluralized, and extensively politicized nature of contemporary
Warren / DEMOCRATIC RESPONSES TO POLITICS 243
societies. And too often they are based on assumptions that political activity,
especially of the deliberative kind, works because it reveals preexisting
solidarities of necessary social bonds.4
Second, radical democrats almost without exception hold that democratic
participation is attractive activity, one that people would naturally choose if
only they had the opportunity. They should dispense with this romantic
dogma. Democracy places exceptional demands on the self (for maturity,
autonomy, and discursive engagement) at precisely those moments when
other kinds of responses (avoidance, acquiescence, wishful thinking, funda-
mentalist assertion, or militant struggle) will seem to offer more satisfaction
because of what I shall refer to as the social groundlessness ofpolitical space
with its attendant anxieties. Radical democrats, I shall argue, must distinguish
between the unattractiveness of many, even most, political engagements
(whether or not mitigated by partisan solidarity) and the relative desirability
of dealing with social groundlessness by democratic means-relatively de-
sirable, since social groundlessness always admits of worse ways of coordi-
nating collective actions across social abysses. Individuals may indeed be
drawn to democratic participation, not necessarily because it is attractive, but
because it is the least unattractive way of organizing power in the face of
contest.
Third, while radical democrats are right to focus on the transformational
and generative qualities of democracy, they are often conflicted about what
democracy generates and transforms, often focusing only on the goods of
consensus and solidarity and assuming that individuals likewise become
more attuned to social goods, more tolerant, and more virtuous citizens.5
Democracy may indeed generate new social grounds and bridge differences,
and it may in fact lead individuals to develop new virtues. But even if
successes are limited here, democracy may underwrite less appreciated and
apparent goods. Even if democracy fails to develop new social ground, it may
induce individuals to become more autonomous, develop voice, and under-
stand that certain of one's interests and identities are indeed distinct from
those of others. In addition, democracy may generate institutional authority.
This good, typically a topic for conservatives, is almost always overlooked
by radical democrats.
I conclude by returning to the issue of the "groundlessness" of politics and
suggest why democratic theories should avoid concepts that seem to guard
against such groundlessness-specifically, by avoiding (logically) necessary
relationships between democracy and moral identity, or between democracy
and the discovery of true interests.
DEMOCRATIC RESPONSES TO POLITICS
Whatever potentials democracy has, it has because democracy is a good

way of responding to and organizing politics. So we must wonder what it is
about politics that makes democracy relatively attractive. Let us explore
the intuition that politics, even in its best, most civil forms-political
discussion-may not be especially attractive, whatever its necessities. Most
of us would be hard-pressed to deny the observations that Russell Jacoby
included in a recent op-ed piece about political talk: "Virtual strangers will
passionately argue about last night's game," he writes,
but try starting a discussion about the antagonism between Korean-American grocers
and their customers, or the effects of affirmative action, or the desirability of immigra-
tion. That is, bring up urgent subjects about which almost everyone has opinions and
ideas. You'll get funny looks. No one will say anything. People will inch away.
Groups of friends are no better. The talk stays light and gossipy. Even discussion
about politics is less a discussion than a general nodding of heads over that tragedy or
this scandal. Everyone agrees, more or less; at least no one wants to spoil the good
atmosphere. After all that's what friends are for: to concur and give support, not to
challenge and argue.6
To be sure, we can account for discomforts with political talk (as do most
radical democrats) as reflecting a lack of democratic experiences, the absence
of structured public spaces within which individuals might learn to be
comfortable with political dialogue, a political system that makes it very
unlikely that dialogue could have any significance, and a co-option of public
dialogue by the mass media. But while such diagnoses certainly capture much
of the problem, they fail to come to grips with the fact that even under the
best of circumstances, political relationships are among the most difficult of
social relationships. We will need to think this through, if only to underscore
the extent to which democracy must respond to these difficulties, in part by
reducing and containing the risks of political engagement.
Politics as Social Groundlessness
Politics, I am suggesting, is difficult because it emerges within arenas of

social groundlessness-spaces within which the rules, norms, institutions,
identities that regulate most social interactions become contestable. Most
social interactions we can take for granted-not because they do not involve
risks, but rather because the risks are contained; they are covered by a myriad
of intricate forms of shared social knowledge, such as the rules governing
reciprocity when one gives and receives gifts.7 Politics emerges when these
forms of shared knowledgeability fray and become contestable, so that the

risks of social interactions are no longer predictable; it develops at those
moments in which the "automatic" regulations of social interaction become
problematic and must somehow be restored, adjusted, or established under
pressure of needs for collective decision and action.8 Identifying politics in
this way implies that most of what we do is not immediately political: we
regulate most of our social interactions without thinking about them, as when
we engage in routine exchanges of money for food, make way for others on
the subway, or take turns cooking dinner. Even collective actions are mostly
routine-the garbage is collected, food appears in the supermarkets, social
security checks are distributed, and the universities admit new classes every
fall and hand out diplomas every spring.
To say that most social relations are not immediately political is not to say
they do not involve power. The social rules, norms, and allocations that
constitute routines will involve, to greater or lesser degrees, discomforts,
injustices, hidden injuries, and conflicts between goods, all of which are
created, aggravated, or suppressed by power. Only insofar as we can distin-
guish politics (which is distinct from most social relations) from power
(which is involved in most social relations) will we also be able to see that
most social relations contain within them potentials for contestability-
potentials that individuals may experience only as inarticulate discomforts,
or as tensions or hardships they take for granted. Political contests emerge
when individuals judge that discomforts and hardships are important enough
to risk (and the risks can be substantial) moving into an arena of social
groundlessness.
Jean-Fran9ois Lyotard speaks instructively about politics as emerging in
the differences between regimes of phrases, the sets of rules (what he calls
"genres") through which individuals negotiate and coordinate their daily
lives.9 Social life is regulated by the ways individuals "link onto" genres. No
genre is complete, however; no way of thinking or speaking or relating is
exhaustive. So the cognitive understandings of the self that individuals
acquire as they link onto sets of rules will, of necessity, exclude other
possibilities, leaving a residue of inarticulate discomfort or, sometimes,
articulate incommensurability.
These exclusions and differences Lyotard terms "differends." Differends
are produced simply as a matter of course, owing to the fact that social life
must reproduce itself through genres, which in turn leave a residue of
differends. This residue, we might say, indicates the potentially contestable
nature of social relations, and it is this potential contestability out of which
politics emerges. As Lyotard puts it, "Everything is political if politics is the
possibility of the differend on the occasion of the slightest linkage."10 But this
does not mean that all social relations are regulated in a political way. Indeed,
politics indicates a breakdown of social regulations and an absence spurred
by incommensurabilities. So politics "is not everything," says Lyotard, "if by
that one believes it to be the genre that contains all genres. It is not a genre." 11
Politics is "the threat of the differend.... It is the multiplicity of genres, the
diversity of ends, and par excellence the question of linkage. It plunges into
the emptiness where 'it happens that . . .'" whereas social relations are
"immediate," established by any mode of linking or participation in a genre.12
As Lyotard is using the term, politics is a pervasive potential of social
relations. But to say that politics is "potential," even pervasively so, is also
to say that most social relationships are not manifestly political, but regulated
in ways that, although they inevitably suppress differends, have an uncon-
tested immediacy about them, and for this reason alone hold at bay the
uncertainties of politics. It is in this sense that we might understand politics
as pervasive (possible in any social relationship) and yet not "everything"
(since it emerges when the immediacy of social relations is torn, as it were,
by the differends they engender).
A virtue of Lyotard's formulation is that it suggests how political relations
can be pervasive at the same time that they are exceptional and difficult,
socially and psychologically speaking. Because social space is regulated by
genres of rules, cognitive space is also constrained, meaning that social
interaction involves a continuous pressure to remain on the terrain of what
can be expressed. So one of the key difficulties of politics involves inarticu-
lateness. In Lyotard's terms, we would miss the emergent terrain of politics
if we conceived it as a clash of vocal interests that are litigated according to
accepted rules (as in American pluralist theory). Politics involves struggles
to find ways of expressing injustices, over and against the pressure, built into
social life, to routinize conflict resolution. We should not, therefore, under-
stand all forms of contest as equally political: contest may be institutionalized
in ways that produce relatively ordered and routine responses, as with
functioning legislatures. Much of what we consider to be within the realm of
the state may be virtually uncontested (collecting garbage, mailing social
security checks, providing veterans' benefits) and so may be much less
political than institutions outside of the state engaging in contested practices
(such as banks that red-line inner-city neighborhoods). Or, contest may be so
ritualized and rule-bound, as in a tennis match between friends, that politics
virtually disappears. (This is why the metaphor of a "game" with its predict-
able rules and ritualized contests obscures as much as it reveals about
politics.)
The anxieties evoked by politics, however, are not merely the result of
social groundlessness alone, but social groundlessness in combination with
pressures for collectively binding resolutions, whether the collective is the

state, a firm, a church, or a family. These pressures may be owing to the
capacities of the parties to disrupt established but essential routines or
responses to problems, or they may stem from failures of essential routines,
or from events that press themselves upon a collective and demand a re-
sponse. In all cases, time combines with other pressures to produce an inertia
toward binding resolutions. Short of consensus, however, the means of
resolution will involve power: the powers of coercive compulsion in the case
of the state, the powers over livelihood in the case of workplaces, or the
powers of membership, place, and identity in the case of the church. Given
these characteristics of politics, individuals confront social groundlessness
knowing that they could be forced to live, as it were, on alien territory-
territory they do not know, or know and do not like.
From this perspective, we can see that the development of the modem state
has come to exemplify such anxieties. It is, perhaps, a success of the modern
state that it manages to monopolize many direct sources of coercion, since
this is probably a necessary means of collective control of coercion. But it
also means that any political contestation, even if institutionalized as demo-
cratic deliberation, and even if the goal is consensus, cannot help but to evoke
the possibility that a contest might, ultimately, be resolved through collective
coercion. This is, of course, what any principle of majority rule ultimately
requires, as Tocqueville and J. S. Mill made quite clear. But it also means that
even in an ideal deliberative democracy, the possibility of collective coercion
casts a shadow over every political discussion.
These unattractive possibilities are endemic, as it were, to the nature of
politics. But there is everything to choose between different kinds of re-
sponses. Theocratic, authoritarian, totalitarian, and technocratic systems
deny politics, promising ordered certainty, usually by means of an enforced
narrative. These are fundamentalist responses to politics by virtue of their
reference to a fundamental ground that would ensure against politics. In
contrast, a democratic response is the only truly political response. It admits
that politics is intrinsically uncertain, without denying, in Lyotard's terms,
the "abysses that threaten 'the social bond.' " Democracy "presupposes and
registers a profound dislocation of the narrated world.""3 More particularly,
deliberative forms of radical democracy testify, in Lyotard's terms, to the
space of uncertainty, and in fact seek regularized ways of keeping the space
of uncertainty open long enough for it to resolve in new kinds of social
relations."4 Claude Lefort expresses this point when he argues that democracy
is, and must be, the representation of "an empty place"-although he would
have done better to write of "empty places"-as suggested by Adam
Przeworski, when he refers to democracy as "a system of ruled open-
endedness, or organized uncertainty."" Democracy is not, in other words, an

expression of a social totality. It is not the expression of a community, a "we,"
the will of the people. Metaphors of popular sovereignty are misleading at
best. Rather, it is one, relatively desirable, way of responding to politics, with
its intrinsic uncertainties and anxieties. Surely this is why the legal and
institutional protections that attach to democracy are especially attractive
when other kinds of social bonds are suspect, challenged, or fail to function.
Politics as Extensive Contestability
Ours is a world that opens out to democracy. This is not a necessity, but
rather a possibility given by the ever greater number of relationships that are
politicized and thus require political resolutions-that is, resolutions that are
negotiated, compromised, agreed, or imposed, rather than a result of tradi-
tions, habits, or automatic structures or mechanisms such as markets. This is
what I mean by referring to politics as extensive contestability.
Politicization in this sense is driven by the increasing differentiation of
complex societies. Differentiation might be understood, as does Luhmann,
as a depoliticizing force, owing to the increasingly specialized roles that
political systems play in increasingly complex societies."6 But Luhmann
misses the full impact of differentiation, because he fails to note the parallel
processes of cultural differentiation that often conflict with institutional and
structural integration."7 Nor does he pay serious attention to the variety of
individual responses, given that individual identities are less likely than ever
to be exhausted by their functional locations.'8
To see why differentiation politicizes, we shall need to notice that differ-
entiation of means of organizing institutions is not the same kind of thing as
differentiation of goods and principles of institutional authority, in spite of
the fact that every institution requires a justification in terms of goods and
principles. Put simply, politicization is fueled by conflicts between increas-
ingly differentiated goods and their institutional locations.
With respect to differentiation of means of organization I shall follow
Habermas in distinguishing administrative power, money, and solidarity."9
These are generic means of organizing collective actions: they can be (coer-
cively) administered; they can be unintended outcomes of individuals' agree-
ments mediated by a universal medium of exchange (money); or they can be
agreed by means of customs, norms, or language (solidarity). Of course, most
institutions involve all three media to a greater or lesser extent. But as
societies differentiate, institutions tend to be organized by one of these
possibilities.
Differentiation of the goods and principles of institutional authority occurs

with secularization and the development of posttraditional culture. Tradi-
tional cultures often included extensive distinctions between goods, but each
had a place within a relatively comprehensive cosmology, so that the possi-
bilities for contests between goods (and their genres) was limited by their
place within the cosmology. Posttraditional cultures increasingly distinguish
between different spheres of goods and tend to assign these goods to distinct
social relationships and spaces. But they also lack the overriding cosmologies
that could limit conflicts between goods, so that posttraditional societies are
relatively sensitive to the intrinsic relations within and between spheres of
goods and to their means of organization and realization.20
In contemporary, posttraditional societies, politics arises in disjunctions
between the differentiation of media of organization and the differentiation
of goods. I speak of "disjunctions" in order to emphasize the force of these
developments: in contemporary societies, patterns of goods and patterns of
institutions do not fit together neatly for the individuals who make their lives
within them. Although accidents of social location are more constraining for
some than others, in today's societies no one's life is given. Individuals must,
in one way or another, negotiate their lives and strive to impose a biographical
unity on a multiplicity of often conflicting goods and institutional contingencies.
One might, of course, experience these contemporary conditions as a
burdensome drift without strong authoritative direction, one in which uncer-
tainty and choice bring with them the threat of meaninglessness. Many do,
and they will be attracted to fundamentalist closures of possibility. But the
imperatives and conflicts associated with differentiation may also induce
reflexive responses that will tend to politicize in ways that have democratic
potentials. Reflexivity means that individuals come to regard themselves in
the first person, as agents or subjects of their lives. The self increasingly
becomes a "project," a process of self-making, self-governance, and self-
direction. Goods, moral orders, and relationships serve to locate the self and
are valued at least in part just because they locate the self, so that the self
is an expression, not just a reflection, of whatever meaning and order various
relationships offer. Individuals may become more adept at distinguishing
goods and relationships and at adjusting their lives to these various potentials
and at respecting and valuing others who have chosen differently. Robert
Jay Lifton has aptly termed such centered, but open individuals "protean
selves."21
Yet, as individuals become more reflexive, they will also become more
conscious that the goods they value do not fit into a singular pattern: love,
friendship, work, material well-being, community, membership, curiosity,
beauty, bodily health, lifestyle, and generational location may be difficult or
impossible to weave together within a life project. Politicization implies that,

for any individual, at least some of these goods are problematic. This is not
just because of differences in the genres they inhabit-that is, incommen-
surabilities between the intrinsic criteria of aesthetics and economics, science
and faith, and the like. A pluralized world will always require that these be
negotiated; in an ideal world, individuals would weave plural genres into rich,
biographical unities, as in Lifton's image of the protean self. Rather, politi-
cization is a result of disjunctions between institutions and goods that issue
in incommensurabilities. Incommensurabilities occur when institutions vio-
late goods that reflexive individuals can distinguish, as when one genre (such
as the language of economic utility) threatens to become so dominant through
its media of organization (such as markets) that other goods (say, love or
knowledge) tend to be translated into its currency (such as money). When
such dominance marginalizes goods that individuals have come to value,
spaces of contestation develop. And because all social relationships are
simultaneously situated within overlapping fields of goods and organizational
media, every institution is now potentially contestable.
From the perspective of democratic theory, extensive contestability opens
new spaces for democratic politics, broadly conceived.22 The domain of
"democracy" is now more likely to extend (and increasingly does extend) to
institutions and practices outside of institutionalized politics.23 Indeed, what-
ever increases there are in democracy today often have less to do with
democratic control over the state than with the changing and fragmenting
boundaries of the state, as well as other powerful institutions. When state
activities contribute to democracy, the contributions are now more likely to
be indirect. The politics of state supported and enforced rights and security
entitlements, for example, has everything to do with adjusting power relations
outside the state, potentially pushing nonstate institutions in democratic
directions.24
From the perspective of the self, such developments recapture something
of the past radical meanings of democracy as self-government. Democracy,
to borrow Michael Walzer's terms, may increasingly become a matter of
patrolling borders between goods-not with a border patrol, but by empow-
ering individuals with legal standing and other securities.25 When individuals
are empowered, nondemocratic means of dealing with conflicts-repressing
them or coercively imposing solutions-are no longer viable, so that contests
are more likely to be channeled into public spaces and resolved by democratic
means. In this way democracy becomes the last best option, as it were, for
developing or restoring the capacities of institutions to organize collective
actions.
POLITICAL SELF-IDENTITY
A model of democracy such as this one, attractive among many delibera-

tive democrats today, requires a confidence that democratic responses to
contests will generate new social grounds where old ones have crumbled or
been torn away. It requires a confidence that the generative aspects of
democracy are sufficient to allay or contain the anxieties and fears of politics.
Can we assume that democracy possesses this capacity, even in its ideal
deliberative form? After all, democracy is a response the most difficult of
social relationships-political relationships involving fractured or missing
social grounds. It is not possible that a society could function, or anyone could
live their lives, or anyone could be connected to anyone else, were our
self-identities solidified primarily in a political mode, that of contestation-
which is, after all, what extensive democratization would bring to the surface
and enable. A workplace, a community, a family in which people understand
themselves in primarily terms of boundary maintenance, in terms of the
oppositions of contestation, would be anomic, incapable of solidarity and
cooperation. Trust would be unlikely, and respect for differences would be
fragile. So, the problem with a politicized society is not that it is totalitarian
(as liberals and conservatives alike often argue), but that it may contain too
many contests and too few securities to function-unless, of course, demo-
cratic responses have the capacity to generate new social grounds within
contested terrains.
So we need to ask what the transformational and generative qualities of
democracy are, and whether they might, theoretically, be sufficient to the
challenge. Let us approach an answer indirectly by asking what politicized
identities are, such that they could be or would need to be transformed. What
does it mean to take up a political relationship to the self? What kind of
reflexive identity do we acquire when we think, express, or do political
things; when we engage in or identify with political contests?
I have suggested that as a form of social interaction, politics is exceptional
and difficult: a political stance toward another often indicates a failure of
other kinds of social understandings. Thus a woman worker who questions
common forms of address or objects to habitual patterns of speaking and
listening among her colleagues is often considered disruptive, hard-edged,
dysfunctional, or perhaps even someone with a pathological need for atten-
tion. Conversely, a woman with a reputation for being "nice"-friendly,
social, and helpful above all-is often apolitical and does not challenge
conventions, although she may resent them; she is a "team player," and fits in.
If we consider such situations from the perspective of self-identity, we can
detect the breaks in social life that indicate the spaces of politics. Most people
like to get along, identify with others, be recognized and belong. Most of our
day-to-day interactions reflect this: we don't (usually) go around with an
"attitude." Say, however, we decide that an issue, offense, or unsolved
problem is serious enough that we are willing to risk some amount of social
groundlessness, even if we intend a surer grounding by raising the issue. We
become "political" and introduce a contest. Notice that our mode of self-
identification changes. We now become conscious of separation and distinc-
tion. We declare that our judgment is different than what had been assumed
to be a common judgment. We take a stand and introduce a distinction
between "I" and "we." We identify an interest at stake, one worth disruption.
We individuate ourselves: we are no longer part of a larger community, but
part of (say) a smaller, self-conscious alliance. We become a political agent,
and the cost is a disruption of at least some everyday routines, some amount
of previously assumed solidarity and commonality. This is why taking a
political stand is often considered "courageous" and why a virtue of some
formal procedures (such as the secret ballot or institutionalized opposition)
is that they insulate solidarity from conflict, providing easy ways to be
political.
When we move into political space, we enter an arena of social ground-
lessness-not just any groundlessness, but one in which there is a heightened
consciousness of the stakes against a background of possibly coercive reso-
lutions. As I have suggested, these features of politics are sufficient to elicit
fears and anxieties. And this will, more often than not, cause us to identify
our political location and identity through opposition, objectifying the Other
as an adversary, even while we feel increasing solidarity with our allies. This
is in part why politics is beset by misunderstanding, mudslinging, name-call-
ing, and petty searches for insidious motivations: once we experience broken
or missing ground and define our opposition, it is difficult not to stereotype
the Other, perhaps viciously, in ways that allow us to grasp and confirm our
place and identity within the broken relationships. Such responses may
include and even magnify our own deficiencies of reason, moral character,
and generosity. But to focus on character alone would miss the compulsion
that follows from politics as such. What politics means is that, in part, broken
or missing relationships leave us with incomplete narratives of the Other,
while we also perceive the Other as a threat to something that matters. Under
such circumstances, we (and our allies) will be inclined to complete the
narrative in a vacuum.26
I would be exaggerating were I to claim that such political experiences are
devoid of intrinsic attractions. They are not. Some such attractions are for the
better, as when solidarity with allies helps to affirm common discomforts,
which can lead to liberating self-discoveries. More problematic, however, are
the attractions of solidarity in the face of opposition to a common enemy, an

experience that may fully absorb the self into the group.27 Where the self is
neither discovered nor lost, however, identifying oneself in a "political" mode
will be accompanied by ambivalence, especially when politics emerges in
contexts characterized by close working relationships such as workplaces,
neighborhoods, and families. Anita Hill's critics misunderstood this when
they accused her of "inconsistency" when she refused to cut all her ties to
Clarence Thomas after the alleged incidents of sexual harassment. Perhaps
she could have, but it is more likely that this would have been quite literally
"out of character" for her, just because this would cast her entire identity in
an oppositional mode. No one does this except people who have trouble
relating to anyone at all. Instead, Anita Hill (presumably) tried various
strategies to delimit the modes in which she was "political"-strategies to
strengthen her professional relationships with Clarence Thomas, perhaps
precisely as a means of circumscribing his alleged claims to sexual authority,
thus containing the politicized engagement. Her strategies of contestation
may have been too timid in retrospect (perhaps owing to insufficient protec-
tion against recrimination), but they were not inconsistent.
Like a political relationship, then, a political identity is a rather exceptional
kind of identity, distinguished from other kinds by the disruption of certainties
normally taken for granted, by the raising to consciousness of a threatened
identity, or of a discomfort that had been suppressed. But this is not to say
that a political identity is distinct from other identities, as if it were just one
more of the many identities people have in today's societies. Rather, it is a
particular kind of reflexive attitude that one takes toward one's constitutive
identities. It consists in raising to consciousness one or some of the many
identities that one is-a mother, woman, Italian, accountant, poet, gardener,
home owner, white-water canoeist, member of the Jaycees, soup-kitchen
volunteer, child of a transcendent cosmos, member of the church, baby-
boomer, taxpayer, consumer of health services, American citizen, and so on.
Any of these identities might become "political" should they become prob-
lematic, as when an economic downturn threatens a career, an, unwanted
pregnancy threatens church membership and salvation, a new dam threatens
the local white-water run, a series of new movies casts Italians only as
mobsters, ajob loss includes loss of health insurance, and so on. Such events
give specific identities "salience," to use a term from the behavioral literature.
A political attitude necessarily holds identities as interests, momentarily
raising to consciousness one or perhaps a related cluster of identities.
So a political identity does not stand in for other identities, but alters the
mode in which one holds them. The development of political identities occurs
as common ground fragments, or when an existing lack of commonality is,
for some reason, noticed and exposed. We now trust only our allies, those
who hold similar interests. We harden toward the Other, suspect their motives,
and act strategically toward them, while at the same time, most probably, we
avoid confronting the Other in dialogue, preferring the company of those who
will support and confirm the now self-conscious but insecure identity.
WHAT SHOULD WE EXPECT

DEMOCRACY TO TRANSFORM?
So whatever generative and transformative potentials of radical democ-

racy exist, they must be understood within the context of missing social
grounds and politicized identities. I shall focus on three interrelated possi-
bilities. First, we might expect democracy to transform hardened identities
by generating new social grounds, moving the contested to the merely
contestable. Second, we might expect democracy to cultivate the autonomy
of individuals. Third, we might expect democracy to develop and restore
limited and pluralized patterns of institutional authority.
Building Social Relations by Transforming Identities
We can best see the generative capacities of democracy when we appre-

ciate the exceptional character of politicized identities. Other forms of politics
may restore organization, but only democratic processes can transform
hardened oppositions into other kinds of identities. They do this indirectly,
through structural inducements to deliberate, negotiate, and adjust, as well as
through structural prohibitions against other means of organizing collective
actions. In this way, democratic mechanisms can maximize the opportunities
to create working relationships that engage the wills of the participants.
In a politicized context, of course, one should expect only relative suc-
cesses. In any democratic institution or system, the generative capacities of
deliberative procedures will operate against the background eventuality of
majority rule. And majority rule implies coercive impositions in the absence
of consensus. Still, it makes a difference that deliberative forms of radical
democracy understand majority rule not as an end in itself, but as a structural
inducement to, and as a necessary fall back from, deliberative engagement.
It makes a difference (as I shall suggest below) that losers are heard. And
winning and losing are never as complete (and therefore never as polarizing)
as they are when politics evokes nondemocratic responses. When it works,
democracy ensures that patterns of hardened identities cannot be enforced
systematically, which also ensures that separate and polarized identities

cannot be (systematically) institutionalized. Democracy holds open the
space, as it were, within which to build. While nothing guarantees that
democracy can always or even most of the time alter identities and social
relationships in desirable ways, if it can be done, democracy is the way it is
likely to happen because it limits the capacities of participants to impose
solutions by coercive means, which will always be experienced as external
to identity. Democracy is a priori preferable because no other political method
attunes individuals to diversities and commonalities through the procedural
tactic of foreclosing alternatives to working things out.
With respect to identity, we might expect democratic deliberation to evoke
transformative responses for two reasons. First, democratic transformations
build on the fact that political identities are rarely exhaustive: a political
identity is one self-conscious moment, evoked by discomforts, challenges,
hardships, and insecurities. When a hardened identity cannot be enforced, a
democratic context will encourage (but only encourage) individuals to open
to their own inner diversity, if only to maintain enough connection with others
to negotiate. Second, for those who participate, deliberation mitigates the
narrative vacuum into which individuals are drawn as they take up politicized
identities. It can provide alternative narratives and more information, while
often challenging simplistic stereotypes. For both reasons, we might expect
democratic contexts to transform politicized identities into one more of the
multiple identities that cohere within a biographical strategy and location.
Within the self, democracy engages the tension between the diversity of
identities that we are and the hardened identities that politics evokes from us.
If democracy provides opportunities for desirable transformations of
identity that other forms of politics do not, does it also have intrinsic
capacities to transform identities and build new social relations? I think that
it does, but I shall not make this stronger argument here. The kind of analysis
most relevant is associated with Habermas, who seeks to show that language,
when structured as discourse (that is, in public spheres where nonlinguistic
force is controlled by a fabric of rights and entitlements), has implicit within
it an ethics of reciprocity and recognition and generates a force toward
consensus. These potentials reside in the close connection between the
structure of linguistic assertion and the pragmatic relationships through
which people reproduce their lives. Habermas does not argue (as many
mistakenly read him) that consensus is necessary or even likely. What he does
argue is that if consensus is possible in a situation of conflict, then discourse
is the means most likely to generate a consensus that is consistent with the
autonomy of participants.
But the generative capacities of democracy are also delicate, easily sub-
verted by social and political context. When identities are politicized in
patterns that leave few, if any, settled commonalities upon which to draw,
then these generative capacities will work badly, if at all. When oppositions
of race, class, culture, education, and geographic location overlap (as they
now do in cleavages between inner cities and suburbs in the United States),
there may be so little shared experience and settled social interactions that
deliberation may simply reinforce existing oppositions. Democracy is more
likely to have a generative capacity when individuals can take many relation-
ships (and their associated identities) for granted, since these will amount to
patterns of social and psychic investment that circumscribe politicized
spaces, while also providing inducements to work things out.
Still, these are contingent limitations. A democratic theory should not
conflate the oppositional identities that political relations evoke with what it
means to be an individual-reifying, in effect, a moment of a process. Thus
the problem with the standard liberal language of the self (the kind associated
with Madison, Bentham, James Mill, American pluralism, and rational choice
theory28) is not that it uses the adversarial language of autonomy and interests,
nor even that it views political life in adversarial terms. Democracy is not an
expression of community, but a response to conflict. Rather, the problem is
that standard liberal theories treat the contingent, politicized identities of
individuals as if they were ontological characterizations, leaving them unable
to conceptualize the transformative possibilities located in the tension be-
tween politicized identities and the diversity of ways in which selves are
connected to others. When standard liberal democratic theory construes
voting as the essence of democracy, for example, it reifies the political
moment of opposition in the form of an institution, missing the transforma-
tions that occur as a result of reestablishing damaged relations or creating
new ones.
Developing Autonomy
Do democratic experiences make people better? Radical democrats have

commonly held that they do, that democratic participation makes people
better citizens who are more tolerant of others and more attuned to social and
public goods. While democracy may indeed develop such political virtues,
even if successes are limited here, it may underwrite less appreciated and
apparent goods. Democracy, at least in its deliberative form, may induce
individuals to understand that certain of their interests and identities are
indeed distinct from those of others. It may help to generate, or at least
reinforce, autonomy.29 We should count autonomy as a transformational good

of democracy regardless of its successes in other respects, simply because
one is better off knowing what one wants, even if one loses.
Autonomy, as I use the term, is a cognitive capacity to take up a reflexive
attitude toward the interests, desires, commitments, and entanglements that
constitute one's life. This reflexivity allows for critical judgments-both with
respect to one's own needs and desires and with respect to the values,
interpretations, and performances of social life. Autonomy is a future-
oriented capacity, since it allows for a distancing from entanglements that
determine the self, opening the possibility that they could be otherwise.30 This
is why autonomy is an intrinsically political capacity: it assumes and de-
scribes an awareness that social relationships could be different than they are
and so anticipates political possibilities. Moreover, it does so in a way that is
congenial to democracy since it also implies a capacity for public self-
representation through discursive argument and justification.
But even though autonomy is a distinctively political, even democratic,
capacity-certainly a capacity necessary for deliberative forms of democracy
to work well-it is unlikely that democracy could develop autonomy sui
generis. Rather, we might expect autonomy to develop through a specific kind
of relationship between the political and the social, between politicized
awareness of difference and social connectedness. Politics, as I suggested
above, brings with it an awareness of separateness: from the perspective of
self-identity, one becomes political just when one discovers a divergence
between one's own judgments and those of others. But whether one is
autonomous in this discovery of separateness is another matter altogether.
One's judgment may simply reflect received group attachments. One may
misunderstand one's own separateness; one may have been convinced,
against one's interest, to become a partisan; one may have intuitions into
separateness but not know the reasons; one may know the reasons, but lack
the validation of others in ways that turn experiences of separateness into
politicized identity. Autonomy is not something one has, but a capacity one
develops to interrogate political moments of separateness in light of real,
possible, or imagined challenges.
Autonomy may be encouraged by democratic possibilities: after all,
anticipating one's own voice spurs one to develop a voice. But democracy is
likely to be only one condition of autonomy. There are, for example, very
basic cultural conditions of agency of the sort Max Weber was concerned to
explain. The very idea that it is possible to alter social life, that collective
actions could, if necessary, be organized, must be culturally available. And,
as Tocqueville noted, habits of collective initiation and action are more likely
to develop where there exist social patterns of engagement, association, and
cooperative action.31 Autonomy may sometimes require new forms of social

connectedness to provide the confidence one needs to become a political
agent. Labor organizations and feminist consciousness-raising groups serve
such functions. Moreover, autonomy may depend on relations of care
and intimacy that are sheltered from contest. Autonomy may require the
affirmations of family, friends, support groups, or perhaps even therapy-
affirmations that bury contest, at least for the moment. Autonomy no doubt
depends also upon critical skills that are honed within the classroom, within
which we assume (often wrongly) that political topics are engaged primarily
for developmental purposes, while sheltered from immediate consequences.
I am not, of course, arguing that families, schools, and the like cannot or
should not become arenas of democratic engagement, especially when they
do not serve their developmental functions owing to discomforts and injus-
tices within them. Rather, the point is that, for any individual and at any point
in time, there must exist a balance between those relationships that are
politicized and those that are not. An autonomous self must be able selectively
to suspend trust, to dislocate social relations, to risk the possibility of evoking
coercive reactions from others, and this means that the self must be able to
reach into itself, without, for the moment, risking all other comforts and
securities. For democracy to have its transformative effects on the self may
require that individuals have securities and connections that cannot them-
selves be gained in politicized contexts. Without achieving this threshold-
itself the most difficult of political problems-we should not necessarily
expect democracy to cultivate autonomy. Where such thresholds are reached,
however, we might expect democracy to evoke and develop autonomy, in
part because opportunities for voice anticipate skills and capacities cultivated
outside of politics proper, in part because experiences of political deliberation
may also support autonomy.
Generating Institutional Authority
The third area within which we might expect democracy to have genera-
tive effects is institutional authority. This is not an effect that radical demo-
crats typically emphasize or even notice. They should, however, if only
because collective organization is inconceivable without authority. As
Anthony Giddens has emphasized, authority, in the form of trust, is more
necessary than ever in societies with high degrees of differentiation, just
because differentiation also implies extensive interdependencies.32 For any
individual, the more interdependencies, the greater will be the scarcity of
time, knowledge, and attentiveness relative to the numbers of decisions that

affect his or her life.
Much received wisdom-expressed most clearly by neoconservatives-
holds that democratic challenge and authority are incompatible. Crozier,
Huntington, and Watanuki, for example, write in The Crisis of Democracy
that "a pervasive spirit of democracy may pose an intrinsic threat and
undermine all forms of association, weakening the social bonds which hold
together family, enterprise, and community. Every social organization re-
quires, in some measure, inequalities in authority and distinctions in function.
To the extent that the spread of the democratic temper corrodes all of these,
exercising a leveling and an homogenizing influence, it destroys the bases of
trust and cooperation among citizens and creates obstacles to collaboration
for any common purpose."33 On this view, whether authority is technical or
moral, the principle is the same: authorities can hold institutions together only
because they have special access to scientific or moral truth, by virtue of their
education, spirituality, lineage, or position in society. One does not vote upon
truth nor equate it with public opinion. When turned against authority,
democracy-especially in its discursive, questioning modes-can only be a
corrosive force.
Neoconservatives get the problem partly right: they understand, as liberals
often do not, that today's societies are extensively politicized. And their
diagnosis of the consequences is not altogether wrong. Democracy does
corrode the authority of those who make claims to obedience and trust that
they hope to insulate from challenge. And certainly where democratic chal-
lenges are successful, traditional institutions are threatened-if only because
their authorities have suppressed so many potential conflicts.34
Yet it is odd to blame democracy for failures of authority: more often, trust
in authority is lost when the (democratic) means of "chastening authority"
(in George Kateb's terms35) are absent or malfunctioning. Authorities main-
tained by unquestioned tradition and unconditional obedience are especially
prone to dissolution through abuse, and they leave cynicism and suspicion in
their wake. Institutions that have lost their authority cannot work well because
they are less likely to evoke initiative, creativity, and cooperation from the
individuals who live and work within them.
Under such circumstances, authority can be regenerated only by extending
the possibilities of democratic challenge, by empowering individuals to
demand justifications and rebuild relations of trust.36 The literature of man-
agement in the last decade testifies to this point: progressive managers are
interested in workplace democracy because it seems a solution to problems
of institutional lethargy.37 Democracy will not, of course, renew uncondi-
tional relations of trust and obedience. But if by "authority" we mean patterns

of trust within and between institutions whose reach is limited and functions
pluralized by the goods they serve, then democracy is good for authority and
can regenerate it when traditional forms are lost.38 Democracy can be good
for authority: relations of authoritative inequality-necessary to any kind of
institution-require justifications in tenns of the goods of that relationship.
We recognized this point long ago in the area of scientific authority and
other forms of knowledge: without challenge, the authority of knowledge
becomes hollow. We recognize the importance of challenge in a more limited
way in representative democracy: a representative retains authority, he or she
is "trusted," just to the extent that he or she can be called to account. The
same holds, at one remove, for the authority of law.39 Nor is the principle
different in the case of moral authority, a point I shall develop briefly in the
following section. So authority would not disappear in a radical democracy;
rather, it would become specific, limited, pluralized, and contestable, and
would be continually renewed and energized just because of its contestable
status. In contrast, where possibilities for democratic contestation are weak,
authority is fragile, as the recent fates of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes
have shown.
POLITICAL UNCERTAINTIES AND

ANTIPOLITICAL TEMPTATIONS
I do not want to portray deliberative forms of radical democracy as easy

or obvious. Politics, experienced as social groundlessness, more often evokes
precisely the contrary response, namely, that its uncertainties-which I have
been portraying as inherent-reflect collective, ultimately global, failures to
impress a moral form upon political life. So many readers will accept,
perhaps, my description of politics in the language of social groundlessness
but find my response lacking: does not such groundlessness demand a
"strong" response? Should we not be thinking about how to "ground" and
contain politics, precisely because its groundlessness does not allow for
guarantees against evil? Should we not attempt to locate, however elusive the
project, some kind of certainty that politics can be measured by its movement
toward discovery of true interests or by its alignment with the Good? Did I
know what I was doing when I invoked Lyotard?
While democracy can offer possibilities that other responses to politics
cannot, it cannot promise meaningful identities, secure futures, or guarantees
that lives will be spared division and devastation. It may, as I shall suggest,
serve to contain uncertainty (and do so very significantly). But it does so
indirectly by recognizing irreducible uncertainties in political life and design-
ing institutional responses that build on this recognition. Other responses to
politics promise more, and-although they offer more either thoughtlessly
or irresponsibly-they do cohere with our natural distrust of politics. For this
reason, it is especially important for a radically democratic theory to come
clean about politics, since it asks individuals to take on responsibilities and
risks they are naturally inclined to avoid.
Let us grant, then, that a democracy extensive enough to have generative
and transformative features would also have attendant risks. For example, the
risk of autonomy, which such democracy would help to evoke, is the risk that
comes with some suspension of connectedness and trust in interdependence,
if only at certain points in one's life. More generally, the pervasive potentials
for contest that democracy would bring into the open means individuals can
no longer view any relationship with absolute certainty, even if one regards
most relationships as "settled" most of the time. To a large extent, of course,
democracy is only the messenger of what has already transpired in late
modern cultures and represents a productive response: risk is inherent in any
relationship that is settled only by reference to its intrinsic goods. As Anthony
Giddens has emphasized, such "pure relationships" are "double-edged": they
"offer the opportunity for the development of trust based on voluntary
commitments and intensified intimacy." But because pure relationships are
"shorn of external moral criteria," they are vulnerable as a source of security
at fateful moments and major life transitions.'
Not all social entanglements are as central to the integrity of the self as are
intimate relationships. Nonetheless, when we consider that political engage-
ment may require individuals to venture onto groundless terrain in an era of
pure relationships, we can also see why political terrain might be experienced
as especially threatening to identities "shorn of external moral criteria." It is
no wonder, then, that the very developments that generate new opportuni-
ties for democracy-that is, the extensive politicization of society-also
generate new antipolitical temptations and fundamentalist responses.41
Nonetheless, the best defense against the uncertainties of politics is a
democratic response. Some of these defenses are well recognized and part of
the "protective" tradition of liberal-democracy whose lineage dates to
Madison and James Mill, a tradition that conceives of voting and political
rights as protections against arbitrary political power.42 It is the tradition of
radical democracy, however, that responds most directly to the social groun-
dlessness of politics by focusing on the generative and transformative capaci-
ties of democracy. Democracy is distinguished by its capacities to move the

contested into the realm of the merely contestable. There are no more reliable
means of defending against uncertainty in postmodern societies. In contrast,
the risk inherent in failing to take on the riskiness of democracy is to increase
dangers to identity in the future. This is why authoritarian situations are often
the most likely to produce totalizing needs for transcendental guarantees,
often expressed in the symbolics of nation, race, or religion. Guarantees such
as these, often held because the lesser securities of everyday life cannot be
counted upon, leave differences to be resolved by coercion. This is the surest
way to reproduce insecurity.43
Democracy and Moral Sources
Even so, democratic theorists have not been immune to more benign
antipolitical temptations. One form these take is a theoretical alignment
between democracy and moral identity.44 We would like a good politics, and
we would like to say that democracy aligns with morally sound identities.
And yet I have avoided positing any necessary relationship between democ-
racy and moral identity, even though (1) I understand any identity, including
moral identities, as potentially within the domain of politics, and (2) of all
possible responses to politics, democracy is the one that best allows individu-
als and communities to craft their lives with moral integrity.
There are, however, important tensions between moral and political iden-
tities, tensions that must be anticipated by the terms of democratic theory.
The most sophisticated accounts of moral identity, such as Charles Taylor's
Sources of the Self, hold that the self locates itself by holding the Good in
view, and it solidifies its identity in relation to this vision.45 The meaning the
self ascribes to life depends in large part on this kind of moral location. A
good public order would presumably express the Good that individuals hold
in view, in this way giving political life meaning, significance, and direction,
as well as containing the evil of which politics is capable.46
It cannot be disputed that most individuals do (and should) constitute
themselves by holding to a moral vision of one sort or another; nor can it be
disputed that public life is intimately related to how individuals solidify their
identities around these visions. The question is how this kind of identity
relates to the mode of self-identity intrinsic to political engagement. Those
who identify the self in terms of the Good always understand this identity to
be "foundational"-meaning that it encompasses all other identities and
serves as a standard against which to measure them. Political identities are
thus viewed as expressions of, or deviations from, the Good. It is this ordering
of the relationship between self, politics, and the Good that fits badly with
democracy-not because democracy is incompatible with the Good (as Plato
seemed to think), but because the Good could not possibly have a founda-
tional relationship to politics.
The difficulty lies in the idea of a foundation itself. To be a foundation, an
identity has to be certain. And because of the uncertain nature of politics-its
social groundlessness-such identities cannot be found within political rela-
tionships. Instead, paths to certainty lead through knowledge (epistemology)
or faith (revelation). Certainty, if possible at all, is sought in a relationship
between mind and cosmos, while politics emerges from relations between
people. Here, the idea of a moral or ethical "foundation" is not right or wrong;
it simply makes no sense. On the one hand, if individuals agreed on criteria
of the Good-if the Good had the sociological status of universality-then
there would be no politics, but only technical problems of coordinating
collective actions. On the other hand, if criteria have to be argued, then
whatever political authority moral identities come to have is achieved by the
discursive contest and persuasion enabled by democracy, not because they
have a "foundational" status. It is not that moral visions cannot have political
authority, but rather that their authority depends on politics-today, espe-
cially deliberative politics-since this is what allows people to be convinced,
to take on a moral identity as their own.47 Tracy Strong is right to argue that
political authority is (logically) prior to moral authority, simply because it is
impossible to have moral authority without agreement, and moral agreement
cannot be imposed politically without violating its essence.48 Moral commit-
ments only have a purchase on action when selves are already constituted as
moral agents by their relations to the "we." And establishing this relationship
is a political, not a moral, problem. This is also why Hannah Arendt claims,
with characteristic exaggeration, that "truth" is fundamentally antipolitical.49
And this is no doubt why Socrates gives up his apparent project of identifying
politics and the Good at the end of the Republic, where, in the Myth of Er, he
has Odysseus's soul renounce politics for the life of an "ordinary man who
would mind his own business."50
Democratic responses to politics are not likely to provide the certain
identities that, for example, Charles Taylor seeks of an ordered cosmos.51
Does this mean that democracy somehow excludes questions of moral
identity and agreement? Does democracy mean giving free play to interests,
all of which are regarded as morally equivalent? No. The point of democratic
politics should be to move moral identities into the realm of the shared, the
taken-for-granted, while leaving open the possibility of contest. Only then do
moral identities have political authority, but only because they moved
through "the political." In such cases, the democratic virtue of the self consists
not of an adherence to any particular moral identity, but rather in its
autonomy-that is, its ability to take up and sustain a reflexive relationship
to moral identities, so that they might be argued and sustained. In political
space, any particular moral identity will have a political status and is thus
held by the self as an interest-absolutely essential to an individual's identity,
perhaps, but politically equivalent to other moral identities. To say, as a
democrat must, that moral identities are politically equivalent does not
indicate moral equivalence. It simply indicates that it is desirable for morally
superior arguments to establish their superiority by discursive (rather than
coercive) means.
A democratic response to politics receives and underwrites moral author-
ity by holding open the deliberative spaces. Democracy is not a necessary
condition for moral concerns to have an impact upon politics, as attested by
heroic examples from Ghandi to the mothers of the "disappeared" in Argen-
tina's dirty war. But injecting moral commitments into the fabric of politics
should not require heroism, and a democracy should protect spaces for moral
persuasion-the most fragile of public spaces-so that moral voice requires
something less than heroism.
Democracy and True Interests
It is more common, however, for radically democratic theories to avoid

altogether the claim that a political system ought to align human identities
with the moral identities. But they are often attracted to a surrogate: that a
radical democracy would dispel false needs and interests (consumerist,
individualist, privatized interests) while allowing true interests (creative,
social, and civic) to emerge. This is a proposition that democratic theorists
ought to avoid, for the same reasons detailed above. If democracy means
anything, it is that individuals are empowered to interpret their own needs
and interests and to speak and act on behalf of their own self-understandings.
Yet even radical democrats who avoid antipolitical comforts can and must
insist that individuals may, in deliberative contexts, discover that what they
had preferred was not in their interest, or they may discover interests of which
they were unaware. The notion that democracy develops autonomy, a claim
I defended above in modified form, implies that individuals may hold
mistaken conceptions of their own interests and that democracy may (under
some circumstances) help to dispel such mistaken conceptions. Recognizing
that needs/desires and preferences do often diverge (and that this diminishes
autonomy), a theory of democracy should be oriented toward creating insti-
tutional environments that encourage the self-examination of preferences that

brings them closer to needs.
Do claims such as this one imply that a radical democratic theory must
also have a way of distinguishing true and false interests? And if not, does
democratic theory then become committed, by default, to the doctrine of
revealed preferences (that a person's interests are what they say they are)?
Neither conclusion follows. It is one thing to recognize that self-conceptions
of interests change as people develop and that individuals can hold self-
defeating views of their own interests. But it is another to develop criteria of
distinction. To do so would be to understand the term interest outside of its
political context (where it implies a political recognition of voice) and to
interpret it in an epistemological context. The extensive debate over true and
false interests has taken place primarily in epistemological contexts. This is
clear, for example, in the methodological reasons Nelson Polsby gives for
equating interests and revealed preferences in his Community Power and
Political Theory. He does not think that social scientists are well placed to
judge for individuals what is in their interest.52 He is probably right. But this
does not mean (as Polsby seems to imply) that individuals cannot or do not
hold preferences against their interests. Rather, it means that the relationship
between a social scientist and his or her subject is not likely to produce the
distinctions of truth and falsehood typically required of research. Indeed, to
demand this would already be to opt for the view that individuals hold their
interests prepolitically, in a relationship between their own cognitive faculties
and their needs and desires, for this would be the only way interests could be
transformed into facts about individuals. But to make these methodological
assumptions is already to take a theoretical stand in favor of the activity of
self-judgment over democratic processes that may induce transformations of
interests. This is why the doctrine of revealed preferences (held not just by
American pluralists but also by economists and most rational choice theo-
rists) is not politically neutral: by means of a theoretical postulate, it excludes
the self-transformative possibilities of democracy.
Thus the entire debate about true and false interests is in some sense
misplaced because it maps a counterfactual image of a completely constituted
and transparently knowable self onto politically contingent selves. This is
precisely the model of self-representation strong democrats ought to reject in
favor of a model of political self-representation and reflexivity. The criteria
of true and false interests are constituted within such democratic relationships
and-as an epistemological matter-we can only know them- within the
context of such relationships.
CONCLUSION
Radical democrats hold that individuals will respond positively to political

opportunities when they are empowered to decide things that matter and that
these responses generate desirable effects on individuals, political culture,
and political institutions. To be sure, we still don't know whether democratic
opportunities would evoke such responses, because in today's societies the
domain of democracy is narrow, empowerment is limited, and opportunities
to make a difference in the course of everyday life are rare. The relationship
between political engagements and outcomes is too remote to know whether
the hopes of radical democrats hold good.
If my argument is correct, however, radical democrats would do well to
recognize the inherent discomforts of politics, while purging their theories of
concepts that obscure its exceptional demands. They should ask whether,
when opportunities present themselves (as they sometimes do), people will
jump at the chance to become active participants. If they don't, it may not be
just because our culture induces apathy and excessive individualism but also
because of unattractive features of politics as such. Radical democrats must
therefore think about how institutional designs could lessen and contain the
risks of politics while still offering the means to articulate and negotiate its
discomforts. At the very least, deliberative spaces must be set aside within
and between institutions and formalized in ways so as to make voice easier
and more egalitarian. These spaces must be protected by a fabric of rights,
welfare supports, and egalitarian patterns of ownership in ways that limit the
risks for those who would move onto socially groundless terrain. And while
the core of radical democracy should consist in deliberative processes,
standard adversarial procedures have a place where an irreducible pluralism
of interests (or time constraints) limits the capacities of deliberation to
produce decisions. Debates, voting, litigation, and other adversarial mecha-
nisms can defend against social groundlessness through formalization and
sometimes (as in the secret ballot) through silence-which our postmodern
condition assures a continuing place in political life.
NOTES
1. I survey these ideals in "Democratic Theory and Self-Transformation," American

Political Science Review 86 (March 1992): 8-23.
2. While proponents of this view differ in their analyses, there is widespread convergence
on this point. A few examples include Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of CaliforniaPress, 1984); Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Robert Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1989), part 6; John Dryzek, Discursive Democracy (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1990); James Fishkin, Democracy and Deliberation (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1991); Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vols. 1
and 2, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984, 1987), Facticity and Validity:
Contributions to the Discourse Theory of Law and the Democratic Constitutional State (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), "Three Normative Models of Democracy," Constellations 1
(April 1994): 1-10; Bernard Manin, "On Legitimacy and Political Deliberation," Political
Theory 15 (August, 1987): 338-68, Claus Offe and Ulrich K. Preuss, "Democratic Institutions
and Moral Resources," Political Theory Today, ed. by David Held (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1991), 143-71; Thomas Spragens, Reason and Democracy (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1990); Cass Sunstein, "Preferences and Politics," Philosophy and Public Affairs 20
(1991): 3-34; Michael Walzer, "The Civil Society Argument," Dimensions of Radical Democ-
racy, ed. by Chantal Mouffe (London: Verso, 1992); Daniel Yankelovich, Coming to Public
Judgment: Making Democracy Work in a Complex World (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University
Press, 1991); Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1990).
3. While radical democracy has a lineage that one can trace to Rousseau, few radical
democrats explicitly embrace the unitary form of political community that Rousseau seemed to
advocate when he conceptualized the General Will as a kind of self-realization. Still, some
identification with Rousseauian community and democracy remains, for example, in Benjamin
Barber, Strong Democracy, and Carole Pateman, Participatory and Democratic Theory (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press. 1970). Conceptions of democracy that draw on the
somewhat less closed Aristotelian forms of communitarianism include David Norton, Democ-
racy and Moral Development (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Spragens,
Reason and Democracy; and, less explicitly, Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M.
Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, The Good Society (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1991). Perhaps most damaging is the failure of most radical democrats to identify assumptions
that equate democracy and community inherited from Rousseau as well as the early Marx,
allowing critics to identify participatory democracy with unitary forms of community. Critics
include Niklas Luhmann, Political Theory in the Welfare State, trans. John Bednart, Jr. (New
York: Walter de Gruyter, 1990), chap. 8; George Kateb, The Inner Ocean: Individualism and
Democratic Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 52-6; and Giovanni Sartori,
The Theory of Democracy Revisited (Chatam, NJ: Chatam House, 1987), chap. 15. Radical
democrats who have explicitly distanced themselves include Paul Q. Hirst, Law, Socialism, and
Democracy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986); Cohen and Arato, Civil Society and Political
Theory; Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, chap. 6; and William Connolly, Iden-
tity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1991) and in Political Theory and Modernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), chap. 3.
4. Habermas makes this point in "Three Normative Models," 2-10, esp. 4; cf. Warren,
"Democratic Theory," 13-4.
5. John Dewey provides one of the most explicit and problematic statements of this
assumption in "The Ethics of Democracy," John Dewey: The Political Writings, ed. by Debra
Morris and Ian Shapiro (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993). See also Barber, Strong Democracy;
Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintus, Democracy and Capitalism: Property, Community, and the
Contradictions of Modern Social Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1986); and Frank Cunning-
ham, Democratic Theory and Socialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
6. Russell Jacoby, "Can We Talk? We'd Better-Or Else Multicultural America Is in Big
Trouble," The Washington Post, Sunday, June 26, 1994, C1-2.
7. Cf. William Ian Miller's intricate analyses in Humiliation (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1993).
8. Cf. Barber's definition of politics in Strong Democracy, p. 120, as "a necessityfor public
action, and thus for reasonable public choice, in the presence of conflict and in the absence of
private or independent grounds for judgment."
9. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den
Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), ix, xiii, 139-41.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid, 138.
13. Ibid, 150. The point that contemporary politics increasingly reflects a divide between
fundamentalist and pluralist responses is central to William Connolly's Identity/Difference.
14. Lyotard, The Differend, 150; cf. Jean-Francois Lyotard, "The Wall, the Gulf, and the Sun:
AFable," Politics, Theory, and Contemporary Culture, ed. by MarkPoster (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1993), 270. Cf. Habermas's claim that deliberative democracy is the appropri-
ate form of politics for a "decentered society" that "no longer needs to operate with the notion
of a social whole centered in the state and imagined as a goal-oriented subject writ large." "Three
Normative Models," 7-8.
15. Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macy (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 17. Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 13.
16. Luhmann, Political Theory; cf. Danilo Zolo, Complexity and Democracy, trans. David
McKie (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992).
17. Cf. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, parts V, VI.
18. Cf. Cohen and Arato, Civil Society, chap. 7.
19. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1.
20. Michael Walzer's Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983) is organized around
the insight that modernity involves a recognition that humans inhabit different domains of
goods-what he calls a "social differentiation of goods"-and that these goods ought to have
distinctive institutional enablements. To a large extent, he argues, we already recognize distinc-
tions between goods of membership, security and welfare, markets, merit-based offices, educa-
tion, family, religious institutions, and political life. Each answers to different needs, existential
restraints, and social relations. Walzer's list is not complete (for example, aesthetics and
therapeutic self-reflection both answer to their own criteria and involve parallel institutional
distinctions). But his insight is sound: the richness and profundity of modernity is that it
distinguishes different kinds of goods and in this way develops as well as anticipates the
multiplicity of the human condition, and thus the multiplicity of human potentials.
21 Robert Jay Lifton, The Protean Self (New York: Basic Books, 1993). Cf. Jiirgen
Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, trans. Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1992), chap. 7; Kenneth Gergen, The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life
(New York: Basic Books, 1991).
22. Cf. Emesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London:
Verso, 1985), 181.
23. This point is made with regard to feminism by Anne Phillips, Engendering Democracy
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), and is central to much of the literature on new social
movements. See esp. Alain Touraine, "An Introduction to the Study of New Social Movements,"
Social Research 52 (Winter, 1985): 749-87; Claus Offe, "New Social Movements: Challenging
the Boundaries of Institutional Politics," Social Research 52 (Winter, 1985): 817-68.
24. Cf. Gunter Teubner, "Substantive and Reflexive Elements in Modem Law," Law and
Society Review 17 (1983): 239-85; Jurgen Habermas, "Law and Morality" The Tanner Lectures
on Human Values, ed. by Sterling M. McMurrin, vol. 8 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press,
1988), 219-79.
25. Cf. Michael Walzer's view of democracy as boundary patrols between goods in Spheres
of Justice, esp. chap. 12; and Tracy Strong's account of politics as "boundary maintenance"
between the spheres of vision, will, and memory, each of which have different criteria of validity,
and each of which is necessary to self-identity. The Idea of Political Theory: Reflections on the
Self in Political 7ime and Place (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990).
26. Cf. C. Wright Mills, "Situated Actions and the Vocabularies of Motive," American
Sociological Review 5 (1940): 904-13.
27. The limiting cases of group absorption of the self are most precisely articulated
by J. Glenn Gray in The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (New York: Harper and Row,
1959), a remarkable set of reflections about the attractions of war.
28. Warren, "Democratic Theory," 8-11.
29. For an elaboration and defense of this point, see Mark E. Warren, "The Self in Discursive
Democracy," The Cambridge Companion to Habermas, ed. by Stephen White (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995).
30. My descriptions here borrow from critical theory. See, e.g., Jurgen Habermas, The Theory
of Communicative Action, vol. 2, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1987), 96-111;
Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norn, and Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986),
chap. 8; and David Held, Models of Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987),
chap. 9. See also, however, Christine Di Stefano's thoughtful analysis in "Trouble with
Autonomy: Some Feminist Considerations," Feminism, ed. by Susan Moller Okin and Jane
Mansbridge (Aldershot, UK: E. Elgar, 1994).
31. Cf. Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
32. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modem Age
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 18-9; cf. Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power: Two
Works by Niklas Luhmann (Chichester, U.K.: Wiley, 1979).
33. Michael Crozier, Samuel Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: A
Report on the Govemability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (New York: New York
University Press), 162-3.
34. Cf. Claus Offe, Contradictions of the Welfare State, trans. John Keane (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1984), chap. 2.
35. Kateb, The Inner Ocean, chaps. 1, 3.
36. This is the essential democratic point in Habermas's ideal speech situation. Cf. Dryzek,
Discursive Democracy, 70.
37. John Kotter and John Heskette, Corporate Culture and Performance (New York: Free
Press, 1992). To date, however, most businesses remain unwilling to go beyond the rhetoric of
democracy by devolving powers and protections.
38. I develop this argument extensively elsewhere. See Mark E. Warren, "Deliberative
Democracy and Authority," American Political Science Review 90 (1996): 46-60.
39. Richard Flathman argues this point extensively in The Practice of Political Authority
(University of Chicago Press, 1980).
40. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, 186-7. Cf. Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and
the "Politics of Recognition" (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 36, for similar
points.
41. Connolly, IdentityIDifference.

42. C. B. Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977), chap. 2.
43. Cf. William Connolly's analysis of "the second problem of evil" in Identity/Difference,
chap. 1.
44. Cf. Alan Gilbert, Democratic Individuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990), who is concerned primarily with establishing the certainty of moral commitments
necessary to democracy, and Norton, Democracy and Moral Development.
45. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
46. In Sources of the Self, Taylor does not explicitly link his Augustinian vision of moral
sources to democracy, nor even to any particular vision of politics. Politics appears primarily as
a residual category, a danger defined in the modem period by our falling away from cosmologi-
cally grounded visions of the Good. Taylor's theological response to politics follows from (1) a
view of identity as self-defining in such a way that social space (with its intrinsic goods,
commitments, relationships, and generative capacities) is reduced to a matrix of irreconcilable
preferences (a view he moderates in Multiculturalism and the "Politics of Recognition"), and
(2) a reading of modernity as a series of serious but failed attempts at meaning, failed because
they fall away from cosmological guarantees into a groundless subjectivism. With such defini-
tions of the problem, differences are (logically) irreconcilable, leaving no (logical) space for the
generative possibilities of democratic responses. Cf. Robert Bellah, et al. The Good Society, esp.
chap. 6.
47. The importance of Habermas's "discourse ethics" is that it alters fundamentally the
relationship between politics and foundational arguments by showing how discursive engage-
ments can generate ethical commitments. See Jurgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and
CommunicativeAction, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Sherry WeberNicholsen (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1990).
48. Strong, The Idea of Political Theory, chap. 5.
49. Hannah Arendt, "Truth and Politics," Between Past and Future (New York: Viking,
1961). Cf. Benjamin Barber's similar point in The Conquest of Politics: Liberal Philosophy in
Democratic Times (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).
50. Plato, The Republic, Book X, 620c-e.
51. See Taylor's telling criticism of Habermas, that his discursive conception of democracy
fails to connect the self to an external moral order, and thus fails to guarantee against the loss
of meaning. Sources of the Self, 510.
52. Nelson Polsby, Community Power and Political Theory, 2d ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1980), chap. 12.
Mark Warren teaches political theory at Georgetown University. He is author of

Nietzsche and Political Thought as well as articles on Marx, Weber, Habermas,
Nietzsche, and democratic theory, and is now working on a book entitled Democratic
Transformations of the Self.

Why Should We Expect From More Democracy

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Why Should We Expect From More Democracy

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What Should We Expect from More Democracy?

: Radically Democratic Responses to Politics

Radically Democratic Responses to Politics

THEORIES OF RADICAL DEMOCRACY hold that if individuals were

POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 24 No. 2, May 1996 241-270

DEMOCRATIC RESPONSES TO POLITICS

Whatever potentials democracy has, it has because democracy is a good

Politics as Social Groundlessness

Politics, I am suggesting, is difficult because it emerges within arenas of

forms of shared knowledgeability fray and become contestable, so that the

pressures for collectively binding resolutions, whether the collective is the

endedness, or organized uncertainty."" Democracy is not, in other words, an

Politics as Extensive Contestability

Differentiation of the goods and principles of institutional authority occurs

impossible to weave together within a life project. Politicization implies that,

A model of democracy such as this one, attractive among many delibera-

the attractions of solidarity in the face of opposition to a common enemy, an

WHAT SHOULD WE EXPECT

So whatever generative and transformative potentials of radical democ-

Building Social Relations by Transforming Identities

We can best see the generative capacities of democracy when we appre-

systematically, which also ensures that separate and polarized identities

Do democratic experiences make people better? Radical democrats have

reinforce, autonomy.29 We should count autonomy as a transformational good

cooperative action.31 Autonomy may sometimes require new forms of social

Generating Institutional Authority

time, knowledge, and attentiveness relative to the numbers of decisions that

tional relations of trust and obedience. But if by "authority" we mean patterns

POLITICAL UNCERTAINTIES AND

I do not want to portray deliberative forms of radical democracy as easy

ties of democracy. Democracy is distinguished by its capacities to move the

Democracy and Moral Sources

Democracy and True Interests

It is more common, however, for radically democratic theories to avoid

tutional environments that encourage the self-examination of preferences that

Radical democrats hold that individuals will respond positively to political

1. I survey these ideals in "Democratic Theory and Self-Transformation," American

41. Connolly, IdentityIDifference.

Mark Warren teaches political theory at Georgetown University. He is author of

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