The Real World of Democratic Theory

Ian Shapiro

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781400836833
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this book Ian Shapiro develops and extends arguments that have established him as one of today's leading democratic theorists. Shapiro is hardheaded about the realities of politics and power, and the difficulties of fighting injustice and oppression. Yet he makes a compelling case that democracy's legitimacy depends on pressing it into the service of resisting domination, and that democratic theorists must rise to the occasion of fashioning the necessary tools. That vital agenda motivates the arguments of this book.
Tracing modern democracy's roots to John Locke and the American founders, Shapiro shows that they saw more deeply into the dynamics of democratic politics than have many of their successors. Drawing on Lockean and Madisonian insights, Shapiro evaluates democracy's changing global fortunes over the past two decades. He also shows how elusive democracy can be by exploring the contrast between its successful establishment in South Africa and its failures elsewhere--particularly the Middle East. Shapiro spells out the implications of his account for long-standing debates about public opinion, judicial review, abortion, and inherited wealth--as well as more recent preoccupations with globalization, national security, and international terrorism.
Scholars, students, and democratic activists will all learn from Shapiro's trenchant account of democracy's foundations, its history, and its contemporary challenges. They will also find his distinctive democratic vision both illuminating and appealing.

CHAPTER ONE

John Locke's Democratic Theory

INTRODUCTION

THE DEMOCRATIC tradition has ancient origins, but contemporary formulations are generally traced to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's discussion of the general will in The Social Contract , published in 1762. Joseph Schumpeter went so far as to characterize Rousseau's account as the “classical” theory of democracy, even though his was really a neoclassical view—an eighteenth-century adaptation of the ancient Greek theory in which democracy had meant ruling and being ruled in turn.¹ Many commentators have followed Schumpeter's lead in treating Rousseau as the father of modern democratic theory, yet it is my argument here that John Locke merits the distinction. He developed the elements of an account of democracy that is more realistic, far-reaching, and appealing than is Rousseau's, and it has greater continuing relevance than does Rousseau's to contemporary democratic thinking. Locke conceived of the relationship between people and ruler as one of authorship at a more fundamental level than did Rousseau, placing the authorizing people, acting collectively, at the center of his account of political legitimacy. Yet, unlike Rousseau, he did not reify collective action or the general will in ways that have since been debunked by social choice theorists. Moreover, Locke's democratic theory had other dimensions as well, ranging over accounts of the moral equality of persons, what we might today describe as a political rather than a metaphysical approach to moral and political disagreement, and a strong defense of majority rule as the wellspring of institutional legitimacy.

Some will find my suggestion jarring not so much for the invidious comparison with Rousseau as for the fact that Locke is typically portrayed as a theorist of individual rights rather than of democracy. In the debate over the ideological origins of the American Revolution, for instance, the Lockean view is contrasted, as a rights-centric one, with a civic republican interpretation of the founders’ self-understandings. There has been no suggestion by protagonists on either side of that debate that Locke's view was democratic.² Add to this the fact that Locke spent almost no time discussing political participation or representative institutions, and the prima facie case for him as a democratic theorist seems decidedly bleak. It is my contention, however, that the deep structure of Locke's account of politics is profoundly democratic. His understanding of the moral equality of persons lends itself better to democratic than to liberal thinking, even if his is not the “strong democracy” characteristic of the participatory and deliberative democratic traditions.³ Moreover, as an institutional matter his defense of individual rights is nested in, and subordinate to, majority rule—casting his historical role as a proto–liberal rights theorist in a dubious light. This last contention is not new. As long ago as 1940 Willmoore Kendall noted that Locke's partiality to majority rule lived in tension with his account of individual rights.⁴ Kendall saw this as a deficiency of Locke's theory, whereas on my account his defense of majority rule is part of a more sophisticated view of institutional legitimacy than Kendall was able to grasp. Another way to put this is that although Locke was no theorist of democratic participation, he was an innovative theorist of democratic legitimacy.

Does this mean the historical Locke was a democrat? Up to a point, albeit a debated one.⁵ The gravamen of my claim here has more to do with the logic of his argument than with his intentions, but I mean to show that even they exhibited a democratic hue that has not been fully appreciated. As a matter of personal biography we know that Locke evolved over the course of his life: a fairly conservative, or, at any rate, apolitical person in his early adult years—one who gave unreflective endorsement to authoritarian political arrangements—he became a political insurrectionist in Shaftesbury's circle in the 1670s and after. His political outlook expressed itself mainly in terms of the great issue of the day: whether there is a legitimate right to resist an illegitimate monarch to the point of removing him by force. Locke famously concluded that there is indeed such a right. This argument might be thought to have little consequence for democratic politics, dealing, as it does, with the legitimacy of revolution. Moreover, it seems clear that in some respects even the Locke of the 1680s and after distanced himself from the most radical political movements of his day. Without delving deeply into these historical controversies, I will argue that Locke's account of the conditions under which revolution is legitimate is nonetheless decidedly democratic in its assumptions, and that the ever-present possibility of legitimate revolution has significant democratic consequences for thinking about day-to-day politics.

I begin with an exploration of Locke's account of three dimensions of human moral equality, where I show that his inclusive view of all human beings as equally God's property, as intrinsically rational, and as the “authors” of the state was advanced for his day and, moreover, exhibited a fundamentally democratic egalitarian outlook. This is followed by a discussion of Locke's views on toleration and dissent, where I show that, in addition to embracing a comparatively capacious view of toleration for his own day, Locke's justification for the limits on toleration that he advocated was in some respects akin to the mature John Rawls in his “political, not metaphysical” mode, though Locke's political, not metaphysical stance turns out on close inspection to be more thoroughly political (and less problematic) than does Rawls's. This leads to a discussion of Locke's account of the relations between majority rule and institutional legitimacy, where I argue that Locke's embrace of majority rule was less starry-eyed than that of subsequent democratic theorists, but that it was by the same token more attractive given the realities of politics in pluralist societies.

HUMAN MORAL EQUALITY

The first and most basic sense in which we are equal, for Locke, is as God's property. Here we need to elucidate both the senses in which we are equal and those in which we are God's property, since both turn out to be relevant to subsequent democratic understandings.

Starting with the latter, Locke's view of humans as God's property is a special case of his workmanship theory by reference to which authority, ownership, and even authentic knowledge are all rooted in acts of creative making. This theory was developed as a consequence of Locke's position on the nature and meaning of natural law. If one took the view, common among natural law theorists of his day, that natural law is eternal and unchanging, this threatened another notion many thought compelling: that God is omnipotent. By definition, an all-powerful God could not be bound by natural law. Yet if God is conceded to have the capacity to change natural law, then we cannot declare it to be timeless. Locke wrestled with this tension without ever resolving it to his own satisfaction, but in his moral and political writings he came down decisively in the voluntarist, or will-centered, camp.⁶ He could not relinquish the proposition that for something to have the status of a law, it must be the product of a will. By adopting this voluntarist view, Locke aligned himself with other will-centered theorists of the early Enlightenment, notably the German natural law theorist Samuel von Pufendorf.⁷

We find similar reasoning in Locke's Essays on the Law of Nature , delivered as lectures at Christ Church in 1663–64. Here, Locke's treatment of human capacities was linked to his theology in a different way; it rested on his categorial distinction between natural right and natural law, which explained human autonomy. Rejecting the traditional Christian correlativities between right and law, Locke insisted instead that natural law “ought to be distinguished from natural right: for right is grounded in the fact that we have the free use of a thing, whereas law is what enjoins or forbids the doing of a thing.”⁸ What humans perceive as natural law is in fact God's natural right; an expression of his will. In this sense right is prior to law in Locke's analytical scheme.⁹ Locke's theory of ownership flows naturally out of this scheme, transforming the workmanship model of knowledge into a normative theory of right. It is through autonomous acts of making that rights over what is created come into being. Making entails ownership, so that natural law is at bottom God's natural right over his creation.¹⁰ Locke's frequent appeals to metaphors of workmanship and watchmaking in the Two Treatises and elsewhere underscore that for him men are obliged to God because of his purposes in making them. Men are “the Workmanship of one Omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker…. They are his Property, whose Workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one anothers pleasure.”¹¹

Why does this account of natural law and God's workmanship matter for the moral equality of persons? Two reasons. First, because we are all God's creatures, on Locke's account, we were all protected from being owned by one another. It might ring strange to the contemporary ear that Locke felt the need to deny that people can be one another's property, but his central preoccupation in the First Treatise was to refute defenses of absolutism that appealed to Adam's “Right of Dominion over his Children.”¹² Conventional defenders of absolutism, notoriously Sir Robert Filmer, had contended “that Fathers, by begetting them, come to an Absolute power over their children.”¹³ Locke insisted, by contrast, that God makes children and uses their parents for that purpose. Parents are “but occasions for [children's] being, and when they design and wish to beget them, do little more towards their making, than Ducalion and his Wife in the Fable did towards the making of Mankind, by throwing Pebbles over their Heads.”¹⁴ Were parents givers of life, Locke conceded, they might have some sort of quasi-ownership claim, but they are not. Even in this hypothetical eventuality, Locke resists the absolutist case by arguing that “every one who gives another any thing, has not always thereby a Right to take it away again,”¹⁵ and he insists that because the woman “hath an equal share, if not greater,” in nourishing a child, the creationist theory in any case does not justify paternal absolutism. It is “so hard to imagine the rational Soul should presently Inhabit the yet unformed Embrio, as soon as the Father has done his part in the Act of Generation, that if it must be supposed to derive any thing from the Parents, it must certainly owe most to the Mother.”¹⁶

Regardless of these calculations, Locke is unequivocal that Filmer's case fails for the more fundamental reason that to give life “is to frame and make a living Creature, fashion the parts, and mold and suit them to their uses, and having proportion'd and fitted them together, to put into them a living Soul.”¹⁷ Parents do not fashion the child and, most commonly, do not even intend to create it; they do so as a by-product of the instinctive desires God has placed in them. “They who say the Father gives Life to his Children, are so dazzled with the thoughts of Monarchy, that they do not, as they ought, remember God, who is the Author and Giver of Life.”¹⁸ Parents have fiduciary responsibility for their children on Locke's account, but it expires upon their maturity. Parents are obliged to provide for their children “not as their own Workmanship, but the Workmanship of their own Maker.”¹⁹

This is why Locke insists that children are not born in a “state of Equality , though they are born to it.” Adults have “a sort of Rule and Jurisdiction over them when they come into the World, and for some time after, but 'tis a temporary one.” The bonds of children's subjection “are like the Swadling Cloths they are wrapt up in, and supported by, in the weakness of their Infancy.” Developing age and reason loosen these bonds, “till at length they drop quite off, and leave a Man at his own free Disposal.”²⁰ The power to command “ends with nonage.” Thereafter, although “honour and respect, support and defense, and whatsoever gratitude can oblige a Man to the highest benefits he is naturally capable of, be always due from a Son to his Parents; yet all this puts no Scepter into the Father's hand, no Sovereign Power of Commanding.”²¹ The only legitimate sanction at the parent's disposal is the power to withhold in...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction : Revisiting Democracy's Place
• Chapter One : John Locke's Democratic Theory
• Chapter Two : Tyranny and Democracy: Reflections on Some Recent Literature
• Chapter Three : Problems and Prospects for Democratic Settlements: South Africa as a Model for the Middle East and Northern Ireland?
• Chapter Four : Players, Preconditions, and Peace: Why Talks Fail and How They Might Succeed
• Chapter Five : Containment and Democratic Cosmopolitanism
• Chapter Six : The Political Uses of Public Opinion: Lessons from the Estate Tax Repeal
• Chapter Seven : The Constitutional Politics of Abortion in the United States
• Chapter Eight : Democratic Justice : A Reply to Critics
• Appendix to Chapter Three: Surveys of Israeli Business Elites
• Appendix to Chapter Six: Polls on the Repeal or the Fairness of the Estate Tax
• Index