Democracy in crisis

Violence, alterity, community

Stella Gaon

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781847797384
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica cinematográficas

This volume explores the political implications of violence and alterity (radical difference) for the practice of democracy, and reformulates the possibility of community that democracy is said to entail. Most significantly, contributors intervene in traditional democratic theory by boldly contesting the widely-held assumption that increased inclusion, tolerance and cultural recognition are democracy's sufficient conditions. Rather than simply inquiring how best to expand the 'demos', they investigate how claims to self-determination, identity and sovereignty are a problem for democracy and how, paradoxically, alterity may be its greatest strength. Drawing largely on the Left, continental tradition, contributions include an appeal to the tension between fear and love in the face of anti-Semitism in Poland, injunctions to rethink the identity-difference binary and the ideal of 'mutual recognition' that dominate liberal-democratic thought, critiques of the canonical 'we' that constitutes the democratic community, and a call for an ethics and a politics of 'dissensus' in democratic struggles against racist and sexist oppression. The authors mobilise some of the most powerful critical insights emerging across the social sciences and humanities – from anthropology, sociology, critical legal studies, Marxism, psychoanalysis and critical race theory and post-colonial studies – to reconsider the meaning and the possibility of 'democracy' in the face of its contemporary crisis. The book will be of direct interest to students and scholars interested in cutting-edge, critical reflection on the empirical phenomenon of increased violence in the West provoked by radical difference, and on theories of radical political change.

Part 1

Alterity as a crisis for democracy

1

‘Don’t blame me!’ Seriality and the responsibility of voters

Robert Bernasconi

Personal interest and the secret ballot

Within democracies, politicians are called upon to take responsibility for their decisions, but surprisingly little is heard today about holding voters responsible for the decisions that they make when electing their representatives. The rhetoric of voters is represented by the bumper stickers that say, in effect: ‘Don’t blame me’. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the nineteenth century in Britain, the idea of the voters’ responsibility to the nation as a whole took hold for a time. The circumstances surrounding its appearance help to explain what was meant by it. The idea arose when the franchise was still severely restricted, and it spread because it provided a way to negotiate the gap between a growing belief in democracy and the fact that the majority of the nation was excluded from the electoral rolls. The resulting tension gave rise to a powerful reformist movement, but many supporters of reform, like many supporters of the status quo, claimed that, to the extent that those who had the vote understood themselves as responsible or answerable to those who did not, the latter could be said to be taken into account. However, as the suffrage was extended, the idea of the responsibility of the voter to the people as a whole largely disappeared, as if it was no longer necessary, because ‘everybody’ – with striking exceptions, like women and, in the United States, African-Americans – could vote and they could vote as they wanted. In this chapter, I review this history and, on its basis, argue for a new notion of the responsibility of the voter better suited to address the new problems facing democracies today, not the least of which is the fact that many of the most pressing problems – such as poverty, climate change or disarmament – are global and so far exceed the powers of even the most powerful democracies that it barely makes sense for voters in the other, less powerful, democracies to consider them under the present system.

In early nineteenth-century Britain, elections could easily be bought, particularly in ‘rotten boroughs’, as constituencies with few voters were called. Two main ideas for reforming the situation were proposed. Some wanted to expand the size of the electorate so as to make the buying of elections more difficult, whereas others believed that the introduction of the secret ballot would better protect the integrity of the process. However, the secret ballot also contributed to the introduction of a new, more insidious form of corruption, insofar as it transformed the experience of voting in such a way that it helped to legitimate a distorted idea of democracy, one in which each individual seeks an advantage over his or her neighbours, without much regard for their fate or the fate of the nation as a whole, let alone the distant others, forgotten in their own countries.

As I shall show, some of the early advocates of the secret ballot saw the danger even before the new system of voting was introduced, but they changed their minds too late to stop its introduction. They recognized that the secret ballot would distort the relation of the voter to other members of the electorate. If a voting system isolates the voters at the very moment when, for an instant, they exercise their main political function, it encourages them to think of themselves as separated from society, with interests unique to each of them. Voting, which had until that point been a public act, now took place in private and so was, in a fuller sense, privatized. It was not only that, because nobody had to know how one voted, one was no longer under the same burden of having to explain one’s vote. Even more important was the fact that one now voted as an isolated individual who answered not to others, but only to one’s own conscience (Bulkeley, 1839: 48). This meant that, particularly when employing the usual techniques of self-deception, it was easier than hitherto to vote simply from personal interest. As Fraser’s Magazine put it in 1831, ‘He who votes by ballot votes as an individual, he who votes before the world votes as a component part of a public body’ (quoted in Park, 1931: 55). The way to ‘buy’ elections under the secret ballot was not to intimidate voters, nor offer to pay them directly, but to promise to pass measures that would benefit some at the expense of others and to warn voters that their political opponents would harm their political interests. There was nothing new about partisanship and the pursuit of self-interest; what was new was the growing belief in representative democracy.

The democratic systems that evolved first in the West, and that have spread from there, have an extraordinary resilience: even when the vast majority of people are disaffected with their governments, they rarely seem to blame the system, still less look to change it. Today, such debates about democracy as we do have – about whether there should be a paper trail for machine voting, whether convicted felons should be allowed to vote, or whether limits can be placed on campaign funding – are confined to the mechanics of democracy and only occasionally touch on the question of the fundamental principles of democratic government, such as those that arise whenever a majority overrides, not just the interests of a minority, but their rights, particularly when that minority can be identified as other than the majority by virtue of race, ethnicity or religion. However, the extraordinary changes the world has undergone in the last fifty years or so, in particular the way that, as a result of both globalization and global warming, every country is impacted by other countries to an unprecedented degree, call for a complete rethinking, not only of international organizations like the United Nations, but also the way individual voters think of their own nation’s relations to all others and to other nations as such. Whereas voters in poor countries face an unprecedented lack of autonomy, because the decisive issues are not determined within the borders of their own countries but by international organizations and foreign governments, the rich democracies focus on maintaining their advantage. That is why I attempt here to develop a notion of responsibility that lives up to the political challenges of today and tomorrow. This notion of responsibility helps to legitimate the widespread experience of the citizens of the richer nations that they have a responsibility to the whole world and to future generations, just as some in the nineteenth century articulated a sense of the voter’s responsibility to the nation as a whole. Above all, this new notion of political responsibility is needed to correct the tendency, so widespread within traditional ethics, to limit our responsibilities and maintain the individual’s good conscience, particularly as these same techniques are now employed by transnational companies to serve their shareholders at the cost of their employees and the poor countries that host them (Bernasconi, 2005).

My aim in this chapter is thus threefold. First, by examining the nineteenth-century debate that led to the introduction of the secret ballot into Britain, I will show how the invention of a certain technology of democracy – the ballot box was understood in that way – shaped and transformed the understanding of democracy by allowing private concerns to dominate over the public interest. By engaging in such a genealogy I want to highlight aspects of the contemporary democratic process that we too readily take for granted. Second, by highlighting the role that the new notion of responsibility, long before it became a recognized philosophical concept, played in political debates in Britain in the 1820s and 1830s, I want to make a contribution to the history of concepts, albeit one motivated by an interest in Sartre’s idea of hyperbolic responsibility and – although it is less clear in this chapter – Levinas’s notions of infinite responsibility. Finally, and this is the most important task, I want to ask whether the early nineteenth-century discourse on responsibility can offer any assistance for this new task in this new context. If, in this chapter, I turn back to a few select moments in the history of democracy, it is not out of an inappropriate nostalgia, but to elucidate how the current understanding of politics in general, and democracy in particular, has been shaped by institutional practices that were formed some time ago. My thesis is not that public voting should be restored. There are no doubt contexts where this would be appropriate and would have the desired effect, but one cannot simply turn the clock back. But, at a time when democracy is in crisis, with opinion polls showing that it is widely agreed that it is not working, there is every reason to think about why our democracies take the form they do. Only then are we ready to understand what improvements have to be made in each particular context.

The collective responsibility of the electorate

If one thinks of democracy as simply majoritarian rule, then there seems little need for the idea of the voters’ responsibility to the nation as a whole. Under the open ballot, the idea of voters being answerable for their votes had been associated with what was called the ‘moral’ or ‘legitimate’ influence of the major landowners, who had in an earlier time been thought to have embodied the best interests of the country at large, because the wealth of the country was concentrated in their hands (Moore, 1976: 233–4). Once the majority of the voters were to be found in the cities, the role earlier theorists had accorded to the landowners became a thing of the past, and so, for the most part, did the idea of the responsibility of the voter. In this view, the idea that voters had a certain responsibility to represent non-voters survived largely as part of the justification of the exclusion of women from the vote, long after universal suffrage had been declared. Husbands were in some sense also representing women, and John Stuart Mill argued that a man had to answer to his wife and daughters, albeit only in relation to issues ‘specially affecting women’ (Mill, 1977: 334). Of course this conception says nothing to the question of the inclusion of unmarried women and widows. But there is another account of public voting that can be given, which ties it in with a richer account of responsibility than this seems to suggest and which gives a more powerful place to alterity.

The history of the term ‘responsibility’ points to a stronger tie between the ideas of responsibility and representative democracy. The English noun ‘responsibility’ and its equivalents in French (responsabilité) and in German (Verantwortlichkeit) first appeared in the late eighteenth century in the context of democratic politics and stock companies: the minister is responsible to the people as the directors of a company are responsible to the shareholders (Bernasconi, 2008). Initially, the term ‘responsibility’ was a virtual synonym for accountability in one or other of these spheres. Thus, in 1787, James Madison, arguing that elections ‘produce’ responsibility, insisted that it must be limited to objects within the power of the responsible party, in this case the elected representative (Cooke, 1961: 423–4). However, by 1815, Benjamin Constant, in his treatise De la responsibilité des ministres, sketched the logic of a new conception of responsibility that would eventually separate the notion of responsibility from that of accountability. A minister is held responsible to the people, not for breaking the law, which is a matter for the courts, but for the legal misuse of power. It is a feature of this misuse that it cannot be codified or specified in advance except in the vaguest possible terms (Constant, 2001: 441 and 460–1). Hegel, who read Constant, seems not to have been convinced of the need to make a clear distinction between responsibility and accountability; nevertheless, in his discussions of the Chinese mandarins who were held to answer even for events beyond their control, he employed the term ‘responsibility’ because no guilt could be attached to them (Hegel, 1996: 137). But, although philosophers were slow to see any need to introduce this new term into ethical discussions, it quickly came to play a role in public discourse (Henriot, 1977). Indeed, later in this chapter, I shall document John Stuart Mill, in 1859, using the term ‘responsibility’ to refer to a feeling that has its source in the gaze of others and that can lead one to do the right thing, whereas six years later he will say of ‘the feeling of moral responsibility’ that it is the ‘feeling of liability to punishment’, thereby identifying it with what I call ‘accountability’ (Mill, 1979: 454).

Already in the 1830s, to be held responsible is to be held answerable in a very different sense from the way criminals are held accountable for breaking laws that are clearly stipulated ahead of time. Trustees, who are called upon to execute someone’s wishes, are responsible not just for following the letter of the instructions given to them, but also for following the spirit of that person’s intentions. The idea of responsibility readily suggested itself to writers on voting practices because the voters increasingly came to see themselves as exercising a trust: that is to say, the few on whom the right to vote was conferred were considered trustees for those who had no vote, both by supporters and opponents of the ballot (Mill, 1830: 8; Smith, 1839: 17). In this way, the legitimation of the system came to depend on the idea that the voter was under an obligation to vote with an eye to the general interest. That was why, when in Britain the call was introduced to move from open voting to a secret ballot in an attempt to eliminate or at least reduce the occasion for bribery and intimidation, there were many who balked at the idea that the privatization of electoral politics could secure the public interest. In the twentieth century, public voting survived within the trade union movement, but, when the British government moved to restrict it, the reasons for maintaining it had been largely forgotten by the general public.

An examination of the history of the debate surrounding the introduction of the secret ballot in both France and Britain shows how the gaze of the Other was supposed to function to promote responsibility. That the process of voting could be a group activity in which the people come together to celebrate their unity was an idea proposed at the time of the French Revolution by Paul-Philippe Gudin. Gudin actually supported the secret ballot, which was mandated for the election of the legislative assembly in 1791, but he believed nevertheless that all the people of Paris, not just the voters, should gather in one place so that all the votes be cast at the same time and ‘under the eyes of citizens, and those of the wives and children’ (Gudin, 1791: 237). He wanted the election to be a public festival, as if he wanted to counteract the alienating experience of voting in secret. He entitled his book Supplément au contract social, and one way in which he differed from Rousseau was in his admiration of the English system of open elections. He clearly believed that popular assemblies around France would be more civilized than the drunken electoral meetings that Hogarth documented in England (see Bindman, 2001). Rousseau had virtually excluded the possibility of a thriving democracy in a populous country like France or England, but Gudin saw large assemblies in which everyone could see the others and celebrate their presence as a solution to that problem. Rousseau had advocated the public gaze as a means of keeping the representatives in check (Starobinski, 1988: 231), but more than anybody at that time he had richly exposed the dangerous ambiguity of the gaze. It was not only a safeguard, but, by creating the desire to be looked at, it could lead to vanity and envy (Rousseau, 1992: 47). The gaze of the Other can call one to one’s democratic responsibility or subvert one’s judgement.

The problem Gudin was trying to address was the fundamental one of the conditions of possibility of a democratic society as it had already been identified by Rousseau: the problem was how, beginning from separate individuals, one could generate a sense of the people as a people, such that their decisions would be binding on all of them, even those who disapproved of the policy and had voted against it. Rousseau’s answer was that changing the organization of society was not enough: what alone could legitimate this process was a transformation of human being, and it has seemed to many that the transformation could ultimately be accomplished only by a level of violence that was unacceptable. Rousseau, in Of the Social Contract, was already clear that a majority of voters voting in terms of their particular interests would not secure the interests of all. On his analysis, the problem lay in the vast gulf separating the will of all, which might be ascertained by totalling the votes cast by individuals, and the general will, which can be ascertained not by asking each voter whether he or she is in favour of a proposal, but by asking each voter – without the benefit of political discussion, political parties or opinion polls – whether ‘the people’ are or are not in favour of the proposal. Rousseau’s explanation of the need for this shift was that to be in a minority on such a vote was not to be defeated, but simply to be mistaken (Rousseau, 1994: 201). To be sure, that assumed one already identified oneself not with one’s particular interest but with the whole. This was the problem Gudin had attempted to solve through a transformation in the technology of voting (Bernasconi, 2000).

Whereas the French introduced the secret ballot in 1791, with only a few exceptions, by contrast, in Britain, voting in parliamentary elections remained public until 1872 and then became secret only after a long and often acrimonious debate in which the underlying principles of democratic theory were articulated and refined. It is that discussion which is important here. Until the secret ballot was finally introduced, individual votes were often a matter of public record. In many districts, commercial printers would publish poll books that not only recorded how the electorate had voted, but sometimes also their addresses and occupations (Vincent, 1967). In Britain, the leading advocates of the secret ballot were i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1 Alterity as a crisis for democracy
• Part 2 Alterity as a provocation to democracy
• Index