Which Equalities Matter?

Anne Phillips

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745668284
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Democracy and democratization are now high on the political agenda, but there is growing indifference to the gap between rich and poor. Political equalities matter more than ever, while economic inequality is accepted almost as a fact of life. It is the separation between economic and political that lies at the heart of this book.

1

Democracy and Equality

Equality is now off the political agenda; nobody these days believes people can or should be made equal. This is true enough in one sense, very far from true in another. Economic equality has certainly fallen into disuse, tainted as it is by the failures of socialism, and made to seem hopelessly out of kilter with celebrations of diversity and choice. But if some aspects of equality have dropped out of fashion, others have come more prominently to the fore. Equality between the sexes is now considered such a defining characteristic of contemporary (Western) morality that journalists have begun worrying about the horrible effects this is having on the boys; racist classifications and hierarchies have been discredited, if not yet silenced; while the idea that democracies should respect and accommodate minority cultures and practices has come to be regarded as part of the meaning of equal citizenship in a multicultural world. Against this background, it would be absurd to say people have lost interest in equality. The more telling point is that in the weird mix of more with less equality, there has been a parting of the ways between political and economic concerns. It is the separation between these two that lies at the heart of this book.

The separation is particularly marked when you consider the high importance now attached to democracy, and the way that enthusiasm for political equality combines with complete lack of interest in its economic counterpart. One might, I suppose, see the explosion of interest in democracy as a matter more of prudence than of equality: people could be said to favour democratic forms of government, not because of any grand commitment to human equality, but simply because these are safer than the other alternatives. But even if prudential considerations loom large in the justifications for democracy, they have always combined with deeper assertions about equal worth. Democracy implies a rough equality between people in their influence on political affairs, and this expression of political equality rests on and reinforces profound notions about social equality. When Jeremy Bentham said that each should count for one and none for more than one, he did not mean this as a grand statement about human equality; but this deceptively simple dictum turned out to convey a daringly egalitarian ideal. Democracy is never just a system for organizing the election of governments. It also brings with it a strong conviction about the citizens being of intrinsically equal worth.

Set alongside the history of man’s inhumanity to man, this statement sounds a long way from what people actually believe, but as a principle regulating how societies should treat their citizens, it has achieved almost foundational status. We do not have to defend it by reference to divine injunction or by evidence that all humans are the same. Equality has become the default position, the principle to which we return when arguments for inequality have failed. Even the most vigorous defence of inequality typically starts from some statement of egalitarianism, employing equality before the law to defend the inequalities of private property, or equality of opportunity to defend inequalities in income and wealth. Where people continue to promote institutions premised on social inequality, they usually do so in terms that pretend the inequality away. Supporters of the British monarchy, for example, no longer claim that those of royal blood are ‘better’ than the rest. They talk, rather, of the monarchy as a protection against the vicissitudes of parliamentary politics, an important part of the national heritage, or more simply a tourist attraction and entertaining show. Arguments premised on social inequality no longer work. Few now care to defend inequality on non-egalitarian grounds.

Democracy erodes assumptions of natural superiority, and the experience of living in even the most enfeebled of democracies encourages citizens to look askance at privileges of history or birth. What was once taken for granted comes under closer scrutiny: in recent years, this has included closer scrutiny not only of the rich and powerful, but of the relationship between the sexes, the unequal treatment of white and black citizens, and the one-sided assimilationism that threatens the integrity of minority cultural groups. Egalitarianism, in this sense, is getting stronger rather than weaker, and its force is the more remarkable when compared with the painfully slow progress of earlier centuries and decades. Political equality was put on the European agenda in seventeenth-century challenges to the powers of hereditary monarchs, and was subsequently extended to query all kinds of pretension based upon birth; it was only, however, with the transition to modern representative democracy that it translated into anything approaching one person, one vote. Nineteenth-century battles over the suffrage whittled away at the property qualifications for citizenship, but voting rights for women were only conceded (with great reluctance and misgivings) in the first half of the twentieth century, and as late as the 1960s, the Southern states of the USA were still denying black people their right to vote. It was not until 1994 that South Africa held its first non-racial elections.

The movement has been bumpy and much contested, and yet there does seem to be a ratchet effect associated with political equality: it is rare for any country that has achieved universal suffrage to go back willingly on this. There are still those who consider men intrinsically superior to women, or regard white people as intrinsically superior to black. There are many who regard the political preferences and judgements of the poor as of negligible account. However pervasive such sentiments, they rarely end up in campaigns to deny the despised ones their political rights, and it is mainly when people have convinced themselves that the others are not ‘really’ citizens of the same country that disenfranchisement is raised as an issue. The exceptions are important, but the notion that all adults should have the same basic rights is too well established for significant deviation.

The movement, if any, is in the opposite direction, towards making the equality more substantial rather than giving some of it away. Democracy holds out a twin promise of political equality and popular power, and while the practice of actual democracies has been discouraging on both fronts, these promises have continued to fuel activity designed to make reality live up to the ideal. On the political front (in contrast to the economic) this is a period of marked innovation – surprisingly so, perhaps, considering that the world historic victory of liberal democracy was supposed to bring about the ‘end of history’ and curtail now pointless debates. For a short time at the end of the 1980s, radical democrats were seriously on the defensive. It was bad enough to be troubled by self-doubt, to wonder whether it really made sense to call for a more participatory democracy when everyone around seemed so deeply bored by politics, or whether elite rule was after all inevitable and it was utopian to talk of popular control. Faced with an explosion of explicitly liberal democracies,¹ those dreams became even harder to defend. For a brief moment, it seemed there was nothing more to be said. There was only one kind of democracy, and the majority of the world’s countries had come round to adopting it. Radicals regrouped themselves within the broad framework of liberal-representative democracy, abandoned what now seemed the embarrassing opposition between bourgeois and socialist democracy, distanced themselves from traditions of direct or participatory democracy, and quietly made their peace with the duller routines of competitive elections.

The moment of consensus proved, however, only a preamble to renewed discussion of the forms and principles of democracy. Constitution building in Eastern Europe, Latin America and Africa reopened questions about federalism, forms of representation, and the nature of electoral systems that turned out not to be so neatly settled; while in the established democracies, new (as well as some older) questions were raised about the inadequacies of the liberal settlement. Some of the criticisms take up unfinished business that should have been sorted out decades ago. The British election in 1997 brought in an economically conservative but constitutionally radical Labour government. This marked the end of the road for a hereditary House of Lords, set in train the devolution of power to independent assemblies in Scotland and Wales, and raised the real possibility of an alternative to the first-past-the-post system for electing representatives to the House of Commons. The belated acknowledgement that a second chamber composed of hereditary peers is at odds with modern democracy is an obvious example of unfinished business. The introduction of new systems of proportional representation (agreed, at the time of writing, for the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly and looking likely for the House of Commons as well) merely brings Britain into line with the practices of other liberal democracies; while even the more novel arguments that have linked changing the electoral system to raising the proportion of women in politics can be illustrated by reference to near neighbours in other parts of Europe.² The attention devoted to constitutional reform none the less marks a new departure in British politics, reflecting widespread disenchantment over a number of years with the institutions of existing democracy.

Other developments have more explicitly challenged dominant conventions of liberal democracy. The revival of civic republicanism (particularly strong in the United States) challenges the proceduralist understanding of democracy as a neutralist shell within which individuals pursue their own private interests and gains, and argues for a politics of strong civic engagement as the condition for free self-government.³ The literature on deliberative democracy attacks the ‘thin’ democracy that treats politics as a glorified market, and argues that the quality of democratic decision-making depends on sustained conditions for dialogue, deliberation and talk.⁴ In growing contestations around political presence, people have rejected the complacent understanding of political equality as no more than the equal right to vote and stand for election, and argued that the persistent under-representation of women and members of ethnic and racial minorities threatens the democratic validity of decision-making assemblies.⁵ Concern with what is perceived as the cultural imperialism of many liberal polities has sparked extensive discussion of the conditions for multicultural citizenship, including whether minority groups might require differential rights and facilities in order to be guaranteed the status of equals.⁶ None of these proposes a wholesale dismantling of the practices of liberal-representative democracy: everyone seems to envisage a democracy in which there will continue to be competitive elections, still organized primarily under the umbrella of national parties, still producing a minority who will function as representatives of the rest. All none the less push firmly against the limits of existing practice. New issues then combine with older questions to reopen debates on democracy.

Political equality as a confidence trick?

Democracy is not a new issue. The novelty is the willingness to deal in what previous generations would have disparaged as ‘merely’ political reforms; and the perception that democracies have failed to deliver even political equality to many of their constituent groups. For much of this century, initiatives to deepen democracy tended to fall into one of two categories. Some looked to alternative political arrangements as a way of achieving more equal and active participation: the decentralization of decision-making; perhaps more decisions taken in mass meetings than by distantly elected representatives; greater use of the referendum or citizen’s initiative so as to maximize popular power. Others focused on underlying social and economic arrangements, arguing that people could never be politically equal if they still lived in an unequal world. The self-declared ‘realists’ went off in a third direction, claiming that any dissonance between ideals and reality merely proved the ideals out of date: if we could just bring ourselves to see that democracy is no more than a novel and convenient way of selecting political elites, we could free ourselves from disabling resentment and the disruptive pursuit of popular power. As far as commonsense understandings are concerned, the realists probably won the day. But for the significant minority that still views democracy as an unfulfilled promise of citizen equality, one recurring question has been whether to prioritize political or economic change. Does the prospect for further democratization depend primarily on the kinds of political or legal arrangement a society adopts? Or do institutional differences fade into irrelevancy when compared with the abolition of private property or initiatives to tackle the unequal distribution of income and wealth?

The answer, almost certainly, lies between these two (we need better institutions and more substantive equality) but there has been a powerful strand of thinking through this century that has disparaged any preoccupation with medium-term institutional reform. Marxists, in particular, came to regard political equality almost as a confidence trick, a surface egalitarianism that obscures or legitimates deeper inequalities in social and economic life. In his essay ‘On the Jewish Question’, Karl Marx argued that the real meaning of political emancipation was the emancipation of civil society from the state: a political annulment of distinctions based on birth, rank, education, occupation or religion that freed these distinctions to do whatever they could in the sphere of civil society.⁷ The distinction between Jew and Christian was made politically irrelevant, but this did not mean people were emancipated from religion. On the contrary, in the land of the most complete political emancipation (in Marx’s view, the United States), religion was more pervasive than ever, almost as if it had received an extra boost from the secular separation of church from state. By the same token, Marx noted, the political annulment of private property (the declaration that all citizens have equal rights regardless of their property status) does not abolish private property. If anything, it frees private, egotistical, property-owning man to wreak whatever havoc he wants in the unbridled regions of civil society. Though Marx claimed to see political emancipation as a big step forward, his support for it only makes sense within a framework that views the heightening of contradictions as the necessary preliminary to further transformation. The essence of his critique is not that political emancipation goes so far but that it does not yet go far enough (always a reasonable enough basis on which to support inadequate initiatives). The problem for Marx is that it actively frees market relationships from the moral constraints that had previously held them in check.

This particular critique of political equality has dulled through subsequent years, for as the possibilities inherent in universal suffrage became more apparent, people employed their newly won political rights to set limits to market egoism and introduce morality into the market sphere. Governments now protect workers from the more excessive demands of their employers, provide a humanitarian safety net that keeps people out of the direst poverty, and impose at least some of the requirements of justice on the operations of the market economy. Marx’s conviction that political emancipation would free civil society from politics no longer seems so plausible, and most criticisms of political equality have fallen back on the lesser point that it goes so far but not far enough. For socialists in particular, the operation of the market economy and the nature of capitalist production have been seen as impediments to political equality. Formal equalities mask substantive inequalities, and failing a major assault on the principles of the market economy, the minority will hold on to its power. Economic equalization then appears as the necessary condition for greater political equality.

That revolutionary socialists should see economic inequality as subverting the pretence of political equality will come as no great surprise. The more remarkable point is that the economic limits to democracy were so widely canvassed outside this camp, and that many of the leading post-war theorists of democracy and citizenship focused on social inequality as the main obstacle to the development of democratic equality. T.H. Marshall’s influential analysis of the relationship between civil, political and social rights gave the impression that the battle for civil and political equality was virtually won (at least in the established democracies), and turned attention to the social rights to employment, education, or a decent standard of living that Marshall regarded as necessary to full membership of the citizen community.⁸ Though the conclusions they drew did not usually include a commitment to welfare reform, much of the work of American political scientists followed a similar pattern. The major studies of political participation in the 1960s and 1970s identified the unequal distribution of political resources as the biggest block to equal participation in politics; again and again, these turned out to be a function of the unequal distribution of education and income.⁹ Robert Dahl, once reviled by radicals as the mouthpiece of a complacent pluralism that saw democracy as rule by elites, has argued that the inequalities generated by market society are in tension with the promise of political equality, and has suggested that the next great democratic revolution must involve significant restrictions on the freedom of the market in order to address this problem.¹⁰ The notion that political equality is subverted by the persistence of economic inequalities is not peculiar to the Marxist tradition.

Across a reasonably wide spectrum of post-war opinion, there seemed to be a consensus that specifically political reforms had gone as far as we could expect them to go. We had universal suffrage, regular competitive elections, relatively secure guarantees regarding freedom of expression and freedom of association. We clearly lacked the active citizen participation that some have liked to imagine as part of the practice of Athenian democracy. Given, however, the size of the modern nation state (and the fact that, unlike Athens, it recognizes all adults as citizens), we probably had as good a system of political representation and democratic accountability as could be hoped for under current conditions. The results patently failed to deliver either equality of political influence or substantial popular control, but those who worried about this were more likely to focus on underlying social and economic inequalities than put their faith in further programmes of political or constitutional reform. The main exception were the proponents of participatory democracy – who had a few heady years in the 1960s and 1970s – but most of these were also committed to programmes for economic reform. Through much of the second half of the twentieth century, those troubled by the shortcomings in existing democracy have looked to social and economic transformation as the key to fuller equality.

The starting point for this book is that this pattern has now been reversed. Current work on democracy is notable for its preoccupation with equality in a context of difference: whether equal citizenship for women and men means denying or acknowledging sexual difference; whether equal treatment for minority cultures is compatible with imposing majority practices and norms. Because much of this explores subtler forms of exclusion or disparagement, it has been less focused on economic ‘conditions’. Current work is also notable for its interest in institutional and constitutional design: whether the rights and freedoms of citizens are better protected by majority rule or a Bill of Rights interpreted by an independent judiciary; whether electoral systems based on proportionality will be better able to deliver a fair representation of women and a country’s ethnic and racial minorities; whether extensive use of the referendum or citizen’s initiative endangers minority interests or promotes popular power. Politics, in this sense, has made a come-back. Commenting on the constitutional preoccupations of parties and governments in post-communist Eastern Europe, Claus Offe and Ulrich Preuss note that from the Marxist-Leninist perspective that used to guide these countries, the new emphasis on getting the political institutions right looks lik...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Democracy and Equality
• 2 Taking Difference Seriously
• 3 Does Economic Equality Matter?
• 4 From Access to Recognition
• 5 Deliberation and the Republic
• 6 Equal Yet Unequal?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index