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THE IRONIC PLACE OF MOVEMENTS IN DEMOCRATIC THEORY

Traveling by train to Chicago in the summer of 1894, John Dewey met a union organizer. During the spring, the Pullman Palace Car Company had summarily fired employees who were protesting drastic pay cuts. By late June, about a quarter million sympathetic workers were taking part in the American Railroad Union’s boycott of trains pulling the company’s sleepers. With the strike growing, President Grover Cleveland moved to back the railroad companies with force. Just two days before the U.S. Army deployed to Chicago to quell the strike, Dewey wrote to his wife and described his response to meeting the organizer. “I only talked to him 10 or 15 minutes,” he recounted, “but when I got through my nerves were more thrilled than they had been for years” (quoted in Westbrook 1991, 86). The way the union activist captured Dewey’s imagination that day is not really surprising. A supporter of labor, he had already revealed his sympathy for strikes in an essay three years earlier. And throughout Dewey’s career, social movements and dissenting activists, from Progressives to Socialists, riveted his attention and offered crucial material for his conceptualization of democratic life.
Movements had a similar influence on John Stuart Mill, who is often viewed as the preeminent nineteenth-century English theorist of democracy, much as Dewey is seen as the quintessential twentieth-century American democratic thinker. Mill was enlisted as a youth to his father’s political radicalism and was already immersed in debates with Owenite socialists before he turned twenty. He later paid close attention to the work of feminists and Chartists, and even had contact with the International Working Men’s Association. And all these groups and struggles colored his broad understanding of democratization, a project that included proposals for reforming not just elections but also marriage, land tenure, and industrial organization—all in ways that paralleled the proposals of egalitarian activists of his time.
And movements have continued to provoke or inspire more recent democratic theory, as well—for good reason. But despite a need and interest on the part of democratic theorists to understand movements,1 some of the conceptions that characterize their work have prevented a full reckoning of the significance of movements for democracy. Even in responding to movements, theorists have often adopted conceptions that make it difficult to understand the challenges, tactics, and place of movements in democracy. They have made some movement activity seem valueless, or at least irrelevant to the true meaning of democracy—or in fitting movements to fixed ideals, portrayed them in ways that their actual participants would hardly recognize.
The contradictory record of democratic theory’s grappling with movements does not just point to a need to bring movements back in as historical exemplars. It underscores the need for a better way of conceptualizing democracy. The right sort of democratic theory would locate both the challenges and the value of democracy here and now, in the troubled political foreground in which movements make their stands. And it would make a crucial place within democratic theory for common action—both its potentialities and its limits—neither denying, with many elite theorists, that ordinary people can act effectively in politics, nor treating political action as an uninteresting prelude or sequel to deliberation and decision. In addressing these issues, the needed conceptualization would also help explain why it is that social movements have so often been crucial to democratic life. And it would seek to explain why democracy is always an ongoing and unfinished challenge.
In the early sections of this chapter, I show that, despite the inclination to respond to movements, a great deal of democratic theory—especially, but not exclusively, theory in the deliberative and elite modes—has overemphasized familiar, taken-for-granted conceptions about democracy that undermine this aim. These conceptions include ideas that pervade a great deal of democratic thinking, such as the view of democracy, narrowly, as a way of making decisions, or the envisioning of democracy as something that must be walled off from the rest of political and social life. The conceptualizations also include ones particular to a single approach, such as deliberative theory’s elevation of noncoercion to a defining feature of true democracy.
Some more recent democratic theorists, deliberative ones in particular, seem to have recognized these weaknesses, and have gone further in explaining and even embracing aspects of movement action. And so after laying out my initial appraisal of these problematic conceptions in democratic theory, my argument continues by exploring newer attempts to think about movements and democracy, each responsive in some way to the difficulties of the previous one. Much of the relevant debate about democracy and movements has made use of a distinction between ideal and nonideal theory. In particular, some theorists have argued, in effect, that nonideal politics may require movements and their tactics, even though a truly ideal democracy would neither need nor value them. I reflect on the nature of this alluring ideal/nonideal distinction, and then show how it fails to remedy—how in some ways it actually accentuates—the difficulties highlighted earlier. I then explore the possibility of holding on to the ideal/nonideal dichotomy, but putting as much emphasis on nonideal political strategy for the present as on an ideal vision of the democratic future. The crucial example is an illuminating study (Stears 2010) that argues that movement intellectuals in twentieth-century America adopted this very approach. I argue, though, that the history and literature in question is susceptible to a different (and in my view, more promising) interpretation: many of these radical democrats seem to have avoided positing a sharp separation of ideal from nonideal politics, or democratic ends from democratic means.
This potential reinterpretation prepares the ground for a forward-looking survey of ways to transcend the conceptions that have made it so difficult to recognize or appropriately value the democratic significance of movements. A better approach, I argue, would dispense with the ideal/nonideal distinction and focus on what makes democracy precious and precarious in the here and now, and presumably for the indefinite future. It would foreground democracy as a form of active engagement with the many undemocratic tendencies in society—not a retreat behind walls, or a form of interaction between ideally situated citizens. The term active is also crucial. The approach I have in mind would emphasize democracy as a kind of action, recognizing the frequently demonstrated potential of movement activities to reshape society and politics. In so doing, it would avoid elite theory’s tendency radically to deprecate the agency of ordinary people and deliberative theory’s tendency to lose sight of political action, broadly understood, in its overwhelming emphasis on pauses and spaces for ideal decision making.
Of course, if the raw potency of democratic action were the whole story, the recurrent need of movements to resist undemocratic social and political forces would seem inexplicable. So although movements provide the impetus of my argument in this chapter, it is not just movements, finally, that are at issue, but the nature of the challenges they face. The failure to conceptualize movements properly reflects ways of thinking that misunderstand the broader conditions of democratic action. The approach I favor would make a place for democratic action even while theorizing its limits, and the obvious tendency for new challenges to democracy to arise again and again. All this, I argue, points toward an understanding of democracy as a recurrent, active struggle against “alienated” social structures and tendencies. Such a vision, the subject of the rest of this book, would also show why movements are not merely contingently useful or instrumental in creating democratic conditions. Movements do not somehow define democracy (as some would say voting or deliberation do). But they do exemplify the ongoing challenge of acting democratically in a world characterized by alienation.

Movements in Democratic Theory

Joseph Schumpeter wrestled with the problem of movements from his first writings on democracy because of his lifelong concern with the transformation of liberal capitalist societies.2 Although he is known primarily for his elite theory, which presents democracy as a stable form of elite rule, his writings in fact display a keen attention to the way the spread of democratic beliefs and practices might alter societies fundamentally. World War I and its aftermath sparked the spontaneous election of popular “councils” in central and eastern Europe, the spearhead of a movement whose leading organizational innovation was the injection of democratic practices into military, political, and industrial hierarchies.3 Schumpeter was soon arguing, in surprising harmony with socialist writers of the time, that self-managing councils could eventually be the means of a democratic transition to socialism. During World War II, long after the council movement had faded, but in the wake of fierce unionization battles in the United States, Schumpeter argued that the labor movement and its pursuit of industrial democracy were undermining a main pillar of capitalism, the hierarchical workplace. Schumpeter’s ultimate response, though, was to consolidate a revised elite theory of democracy that suggested further dangerous democratic transformations could be warded off.
Deliberative democracy’s encounter with movements has developed quite differently. It is not the product of sweeping reflection on history and democratic change. It is rather a sustained exploration of an acute dilemma: the desire to embrace the democratic aims, values, and discursive accomplishments of many movements, coupled with principled disapproval of the decidedly nondeliberative methods and arguments so often used by movements. John Rawls, in particular, was drawn to the examples of the U.S. abolition and civil rights movements, which sought to overturn institutions that radically undermined any claim of America to be democratic. The difficulty for Rawls was that so many activists for these causes made arguments and mobilized adherents based on religious views that not everyone could share, rather than using arguments drawn from more widely shared “public reason,” as required by his understanding of deliberation (1996, 247–254). Other deliberative theorists have referenced different movements, but it is less the specific causes or claims of movements that account for theorists’ attention than it is awareness of the repertoire of tactics that have characterized modern democratizing protest. Iris Marion Young lists some of these: “demonstration and direct action”; “street marches, boycotts, or sit-ins”; as well as “picketing, leafleting, guerilla theater, large and loud street demonstrations, sit-ins, and other forms of direct action, such as boycotts” (2001, 670, 673).
Beyond the particular aims and trajectories of elite and deliberative theory, there are, in fact, quite good reasons why democratic theorists of all kinds should reflect on political and social movements. First, movements of one sort or another have been crucial in shaping the measure of democracy now enjoyed in countries like the United States and France, or the Philippines and Tunisia. Movements have also introduced and popularized much of the institutional repertoire of democracy upon which theorists, in turn, reflect, from universal suffrage to participatory management. There are also, of course, the democratic values—above all, equality and freedom—that have been posited, enriched, and made more concrete by prominent movements. And taking a wider view, movements have often democratized the whole culture in which contemporary political theory takes its small place. These movement contributions are something more than just examples. They have been preconditions, sometimes unacknowledged, for democratic thinking.
Still, all these contributions may be seen, of course, as merely contingent or instrumental. Some would surely argue that democracy is one thing and the struggles of movements to enact it quite another. Movements might have been important—even necessary—for achieving universal suffrage, but one could still argue that universal suffrage defines democracy while movements do not. In making such arguments, philosophers have at their disposal an alluring set of dichotomies. We must not confuse what is intrinsically valuable with what is only instrumental, some would say, nor ends with means, nor the causes of democratization with democracy’s true meaning. In the case of democracy, at least, there are some real drawbacks to thinking in this binary way. And in fact, there is something about democracy itself that should elicit an approach that avoids the opposition of ideal and nonideal.

Bringing Movements Back In: Conceptual Missteps

Although Schumpeter and a substantial number of deliberative theorists have strived to account for movements, their efforts have often misfired. In large part, this is due to problematic conceptions or frames. These ideas are widespread, appearing within a number of different scholarly “models of democracy,” as well as in wider political discourse. They are not flatly wrong, but partial and limiting—distorting when accepted uncritically, without an acute sense of their limits. The fact that these conceptions are shared by the two leading scholarly approaches—elite and deliberative democracy—despite their otherwise stark differences, illustrates how widespread they are.
In order to grasp the problems with these different frames, it may help to consider first the sort of periods in which so many democratizing movements have been active. These are historical periods that are both stimulating and troubling for democrats to study, marked at the same time by democratic failure and democratic promise. The civil rights movement exemplified skillful, sometimes virtuosic democratic action while challenging the enduring racial caste system of the American South. Movements like those that brought down East European communist regimes in 1989 were marked by a similar contrast, in this case between vibrant mass action and dominating, ossified states. The council movement, likewise, was a creative attempt to reclaim public influence over runaway social forces in the midst of capitalist crisis and at the end of an extraordinarily destructive war waged by crumbling, despotic empires.
In short, the kind of historical periods I have in mind are characterized by two features. First, during these critical periods, many people have been subject to institutions or social forces that diminished their political agency, hindered their collective capacities to manage their lives, forced necessities on them, and enabled oppression. Yet, second, despite such harmful social forms, these critical democratic periods were also characterized by democratic promise, sometimes because there were arenas in which ordinary people managed their common affairs on terms approaching equality and freedom, and sometimes because of robust movements that sought to achieve democratic goals, not in spite of but in response to the injurious forces and institutions. Because of these glaring deficiencies, on the one hand, and the democratic promise, on the other, we may say that such critical democratic eras were marked by an interacting duality in which, for example, some people struggled collectively to tame runaway economic forces in the public interest. The ability to come to terms, theoretically, with such critical epochs is one rough marker of success for any conception of democracy.

Deliberative Theory and the Problematic Conceptions

Deliberative theory claims that a special form of political discourse—deliberation—is the heart of democracy, the practice that makes it legitimate.4 Proponents depict deliberation in various ways, but most portrayals stress something like Bohman and Richardson’s formulation: “the idea of publicly giving reasons to justify decisions” (2009, 253). The main emphasis of the deliberative literature, then, is on the norms that should govern individuals as they reason with others about political decisions. And these often take the form of quite stringent prohibitions. “Classic” deliberative theory has been “defined in opposition” to many of the most familiar and pervasive features of modern politics—in contrast, that is, “to self-interest, to bargaining and negotiation, to voting, and to the use of power” (Mansbridge et al. 2010, 64).5 Deliberative theory, because of its characteristic concerns, is disposed to cast movements in a very particular light. Movements are generally understood to be collective challenges to dominant groups, ranks, and structures in society mounted by relatively weak or excluded people. Deliberative theory understands the difficult situation of movements largely discursively, suggesting that they represent those people excluded from or disadvantaged in political discourse.6
Deliberative theory’s banishment of many of the ordinary conditions and practices of politics as we know it points to its adoption of a problematic conception of democracy, the first that we shall consider and one that informs several other such conceptions. This is the view of democracy surrounded by fortifications that separate it from the rest of the political world—in deliberative theory, the view of democracy as a refuge. This intramural vision of democracy can find different expressions. Proponents interested in fostering current attempts to deliberate may emphasize the “design of deliberative institutions” today for “the exclusion of extra-political or endogenous forms of influence, such as power, wealth, and preexisting social inequalities” (Bohman 1996, 36). Or, like Jürgen Habermas, they may posit civil society itself as a sort of barrier that can “absorb and neutralize the unequal distribution of social positions and the power differentials resulting from them” (1996, 175). The design of deliberative experiments by scholars, foundations, and governments offers a practical illustration of this wall-building approach. Deliberative conditions are so different from ordinary politics that these assemblies require painstaking construction, including careful selection of deliberators from the general public, judicious production of briefing materials, random assignment of deliberators to small groups, and the empowerment of moderators—all to ensure an institutional context favoring deliberation (Ackerman and Fishkin 2004; Fournier et al. 2011).
But if the “refuge” idea stands out in the work of those who consider how it might be possible to introduce deliberation now, it is just as much a part of those arguments that treat deliberation primarily as a set of ideal norms quite distant from present practice. In these cases, however, it is not space and institutional walls, but time and imagination that project democracy as a distant refuge. Consider, for example, Jack Knight and James Johnson’s frank admission that the “sort of equality” required for democratic deliberation to begin includes conditions almost unimaginab...