Prof: But what I wanted
to do today was pursue the discussion of democratic
justice. I talked about it as a
semi-contextual idea that there's a general argument,
which we discussed on Monday, that recognizes the subordinate
character of democratic constraints on the superordinate
goods that people pursue in different walks of life.
And I said it was a
semi-contextual argument with the implication that the way you
work that out varies with time and circumstance.
It varies at different times in
the same setting, but then also it varies across
settings. So if we think about the
traditional family in America in the 1950s,
which is more or less captured, I think,
at least with respect to governing children in this
picture, that's, of course,
very different than the traditional family life we might
find in South Africa in the 1980s.
And where you go depends upon
where you start, and the basic impulse behind
democratic justice is a kind of democratized Burkeanism.
That is to say it recognizes
that along with the anti-Enlightenment theorists
that we never design institutions afresh,
rather we redesign institutions that we inherit and reproduce
into the future. But rather than just reproduce
them into the future in a conservative fashion,
the impulse of democratic justice is to democratize them
as we reproduce them into the future.
And so when we think about
restructuring the family, or restructuring the system of
education, or restructuring any realm of
collective activity, the idea is to take the
inherited systems of norms and practices,
imbue the values that are embedded in them,
learn about them, but then not be uncritical.
Think, rather,
as we reproduce them into the future how they could be
restructured in accordance with the basic impulse of democratic
justice which is to democratize the power dimensions of those
relationships while leaving the other dimensions as unsullied as
possible. We want to democratize.
Democracy is a subordinate
good, but we do not want to interfere with the superordinate
good any more than necessary. So that is a summary statement
of what we did on Monday, but to put some flesh on it I
thought I would walk you through a couple of examples of what
this means when you start actually to apply it.
And I'm going to talk today
about two such examples. One concerns governing children
and another concerns governing the workplace,
and I'm going to walk you through the kind of reasoning
that gets generated if we try to think about the exercise of
democratizing these spheres of life within the constraints of
democratic justice. Now I thought it would be good
to start with governing children because on the face of it,
it presents the most difficult challenge for the argument that
I sketched on Monday. Namely, if you want to have
some notion of collective self-governance,
that is that people have a presumptive say when power is
exercised over them, how is that going to work with
children? And if you want to have some
notion of opposition, how is that going to work with
children? Because after all we don't want
simply mindless opposition. We want loyal opposition.
We want informed opposition,
but young children are incapable of that.
They're certainly capable of
opposition, but not exactly the opposition that we're looking
for. So if you want to say that
democratic justice should apply in all domains where power is
exercised this looks like a pretty hard case,
and I think it presents unique challenges.
For one thing,
the hierarchies that exist over children are inevitable,
and so we have to think about the opposition side of
democratic justice in a way that takes that into account.
On the governance side,
too, we're dealing with a situation where it's impossible
for children to make decisions about their own lives,
certainly at the very beginning. Others are going to have to
make those decisions for them. So on the governance side of
the equation John Locke had this,
I think, exactly right when he said that the only basis for
disenfranchising people is necessity.
So if somebody is unable to
participate, then they should be deprived of the franchise,
but only to the extent that necessity requires.
So for Locke he said children
should be disenfranchised for their "ignorant
non-age" and once that expires they
should be enfranchised. And he also thought that with
respect adults we shouldn't disenfranchise people until
absolutely necessary. Perhaps we find it necessary to
take away people's driving licenses once they turn 85 or at
least start subjecting them to annual driving tests,
but that doesn't necessarily mean we would take away the vote
from them. So the basic Lockean impulse is
only to disenfranchise when necessary and no more than is
required by circumstances. Now that too presents something
of a challenge when you start to think about children because if
you read some books on the history of childhood one of the
things you will quickly discover is that over the past hundred
years or so, there's been a huge lengthening
of childhood. We have invented adolescence.
Adolescence is not a category
that existed a hundred years ago.
Children were thought to be
miniature adults at a much earlier stage.
So if we have lengthened
childhood, lengthened the time at which
people are disenfranchised, after all the incidence of
adulthood begin to accrue around sixteen and seventeen when
people get driving license and so on.
They can vote now at eighteen,
but we still prohibit the imbibing of alcohol until
twenty-one. So it's a gradual exodus to
adulthood and it's an elongated status.
Now there might be
justifications for that. When you move from an economy
that's based on physical brawn to an information-based economy
that's based on education, it may be necessary to lengthen
childhood because it may be necessary for people to acquire
different kinds of skills that were not needed in the
eighteenth or nineteenth century.
So there may be a justification
for lengthening childhood and I'll come back to that,
but it needs to be supplied. The presumption is that you
only disenfranchise out of necessity.
Now there have been movements
from time to time to treat children as miniature adults
from the earliest possible age. There's a famous British school
called Summerhill founded by a man called A.S. Neill who died
recently. And Summerhill was famous for
not having any rules. And the kids could do whatever
they wanted. They could go to class or not
go to class. They could go to bed whenever
they wanted. They could come and go.
There simply were no rules.
And Neill used this as an
example. It was always held up as a
banner by the Children's Rights Movement as an example of what
could be done, and the implicit argument
against authority who structures over children from a very young
age. But I think it was rather
artificial, because after all Summerhill was a private school
where the well-to-do could send their children.
In England it's euphemistically
called a public school, which means a private school,
and it was a cocooned environment where children could
make mistakes without suffering horrendous consequences of those
mistakes. Whereas if you go down to the
Hill district of New Haven and you imagine eleven- and
twelve-year-old children making the sorts of mistakes that you
could make in Summerhill School without consequence for those
kids in the Hill district of New Haven the results would be
life-changingly catastrophic and often are.
So the Summerhill story is,
I think, in that sense na�ve about the larger context of
power relations within which education takes place.
And as we'll see even more
explicitly when I come to talk about democracy in the workplace
you always have to look both at the system of power relations
within an institution, but then also the larger power
context, the power externalities as I
call them, within which the institution
operates. And so I think the Lockean
impulse to have a gradual transition to adulthood makes
sense and it should be bounded by necessity,
which creates the presumption that if we're going to lengthen
this period of dependency, the justification has to be
supplied. So that's on the governance
side of the equation. What about on the opposition
side of the equation? Because children don't have the
capacity to engage in what we're thinking of opposition.
That is opposition where you've
internalized and understood the values of the system into which
you're born and now you are questioning whether they should
be applied into the future. There's not going to be much
opposition either, of that sort,
until children are fairly advanced.
So there's going to be a very
long period in which neither collective self-governance nor
loyal opposition is going to be in any meaningful sense
feasible. Children are going to be stuck
in hierarchical situations and that is the basic material with
which we have to work. How can we think about that?
Well, one argument that comes
to mind once we're considering inevitably hierarchical
situations, is that perhaps hierarchies can check one
another. If you have an inevitably
hierarchical relationship and you think about more than one
hierarchy-- this is, if you like,
another version of ambition counteracting ambition.
You create more than one
authority structure over children with the expectation
that they can then to some degree have competing and to
some degree complementary competencies and will check one
another, and that's the basic approach
that I take in thinking about democratic justice as it applies
to children. We can think of children,
first of all, as having two kinds of
interests, which I call basic interests and best interests.
So basic interests are rather
like Rawls's resources. In that sense my argument is a
resourcist argument comparable to Rawls's and Amartya Sen's,
which we didn't have time to talk about,
and Ronald Dworkin's, which I mentioned to you
briefly. And if you go back to your
notes from our lecture on Rawls, you'll see that I said one of
his most important innovations was to take the focus off
welfare, therefore different measures of
utility, and start, instead,
talking about resources. In his case they were primary
goods. So I talk about basic resources
or basic interests as those things which it's necessary to
vindicate in order for the person to survive and thrive in
the economy as it's likely to exist for their lifetime and in
the political system governed as a democracy.
Children have an interest in
their basic interests being met and others have an interest in
the basic interests of children being met.
We all have an interest in the
raising of literate competent people so that they can
participate in the democratic political order in which we're
all going to operate. And then best interests are
something quite different. The best interests of children
are to thrive as well as possible,
to be all they can be, to be happy,
fulfilled, successful human beings,
loved and capable of love, and all of the other things
that we think of that it's important for children to
develop. And the argument is that we
should think of the state as the ultimate fiduciary of children's
basic interests, and parents as the ultimate
fiduciary of children's best interests.
This raises the question,
what is a fiduciary? Again, this comes from Locke
when thinking about children, that Locke makes the argument
when he's discussing children, he says--well,
I'll put it into twentieth century words or twenty-first
century words, but the basic idea is,
what do you do if you raise your child,
you do your best for them, you pour resources into them,
you pour energy and affection into them,
you do everything right and they turn around at the age of
eighteen and they say, your kid says to you,
"Dad I think you're a schmuck.
I'm out of here.
I don't owe you anything."
And you start slamming your
fist on the table and you say, "After all I've done for
you...." Locke wants to say this
argument doesn't fly. Why doesn't it fly?
Why doesn't it fly?
"After all I've done for
you," what's wrong with that argument as a basis for
thinking about what children owe their parents?
You could take this from a
Lockean point of view or a Rawlsian point of view.
Think.
Why is it a terrible argument?
I've done these things for you
now you owe it to me to go to law school or whatever it is,
support me in my old age. Any guesses?
Yeah?
Student: Well,
the child has no choice to participate in the power
structure that it's been in for the past eighteen or so years.
Professor Ian Shapiro:
Exactly, so and for Locke obligation is based on consent,
social contract theory, consent.
Yeah, so you've got it right.
That's Locke's reason and so he
says, "If your child at the age of eighteen says,
'You're a schmuck. I'm out of here.
I don't owe you anything,' all
you can really do is conclude that you failed as a
parent." The child doesn't owe you
anything because-- and as I said,
in Rawlsian terms the fact that this child is your child is,
from the child's point of view, morally arbitrary.
They didn't do anything to
become your child. So your power and authority
over the child is the power or authority over the fiduciary,
but it's in the nature of a fiduciary arrangement that the
child doesn't owe the fiduciary anything.
You elected to have that child
and you internalized the risk that that might happen when the
child turned eighteen. So Locke says,
"You're basically out of luck.
What you can do is threaten to
disinherit them but that's about it."
And indeed, I think that might
be the best argument for allowing inherited wealth ever
devised that there's no other way for parents to control their
children. But in any event,
short of that you're out of luck.
So that's the notion of a
fiduciary relationship. The charge does not owe
anything to the fiduciary, and the fiduciary relationship
persists only as long as the charge is incapable of
exercising that authority for themselves.
So why think of the state as
having fiduciary authority over basic interests and the parents
having fiduciary authority over best interests?
Well, one reason going in is
what I've already mentioned that once you think of an inevitably
hierarchical situation to some degree you want to have
hierarchies checking one another,
ambition counteracting ambition. But it's not just that.
It's more than that.
If you think about basic
interests these have to do with survival,
basic medical care, and so on, whereas best
interests have to do with the sorts of things it would be
absurd to think the state would be any good at:
knowing your child, caring deeply about your child,
wanting your child to survive, having what we called earlier
interdependent utilities that are connected to your child's
welfare and thriving. Those are not things that can
come from government officials almost by definition because
they involve things like care, and affection,
and all of the things that make for the superabundant good of
rearing a happy child to have been realized.
And indeed, when you think
about what is it that we think of as tragic when a child winds
up being raised in an orphanage is precisely that that is
missing. They're being raised by people
who do not care passionately and intimately about them.
So you can see why it would
make obvious and intuitive sense to think of parents as the
guardians of, fiduciary guardians of
children's best interests. Why should the state be the
fiduciary guardian of the basic interests, apart from the fact
that we don't want to have one hierarchy?
Well, there are certain kinds
of things parents might choose to do out of convictions about
children's best interests that have an impact on their capacity
to survive and thrive as members of a democratic polity and as
able to function in the economic system as it's likely to exist
for their lifetime. The Amish chose,
in a famous case Wisconsin versus Yoder they wanted to keep
their kids out of school after age fourteen even though the
state of Wisconsin, through its democratic
mechanisms had decided that you really need to go to the school
to the age of age sixteen in order to learn the skills
necessary to participate in the political order and in the
economy as it's likely to exist for your lifetime.
The Amish didn't dispute that,
but what they said was, "We have learned from
experience that if we allow our kids to go to school after age
fourteen, the odds that they will leave
the Amish community go way up."
Well, that's not a good
argument for allowing them to prevent their kids getting an
education. And so I think the Supreme
Court made the wrong choice when it agreed with the parents in
that case. Or think of a different one,
where Christian Scientists are of the view that a child in need
of a blood transfusion shouldn't get it because of their
religious beliefs. And this is a case,
again, where I would argue, eventually if you can't
persuade them the parents should lose,
the state has a fiduciary obligation to the child to allow
it to survive and not suffer the consequences of not having a
lifesaving blood transfusion. On the other hand,
there are other cases we could talk about.
For instance,
parents might object and have objected to certain kinds of
books being used in the schools, where the goal is to promote
literacy, on the grounds that they object
to the moral message within the books.
And they go to court and they
challenge the use of certain kinds of books that convey moral
messages that the parents find objectionable.
And in cases like that,
the burden should fall to the school district to show that
there isn't some other way they could meet their obligation to
teach literacy that didn't infringe on the parents' best
interests, conception of the child's best
interest which includes their moral education.
So in those kinds of cases the
parents should win. There will sometimes be murky
cases. There will sometimes be
disagreements about whether or not the state is vindicating the
basic interests in a way that's as unobtrusive as possible as
the parent's capacity to meet the best interest.
And I think you have to create
procedural mechanisms in which those disagreements are played
out, and much of that chapter that I
had you read for today is concerned with what those
procedural mechanisms might be. It's also the case that it
might change over time. So, for example,
we might initially think that things like sex education belong
in the area of best interest because this,
after all, has to do with the system of morality that a parent
wants to communicate to their child,
and we have deep pluralism of values.
Different parents have
different value systems and that's understood,
and therefore we don't want one moral code to be forced on all
children about matters of sexual morality,
and that could be the status quo for a long time.
But then along comes AIDS and
suddenly sexual morality becomes a public health matter,
and so it then may recast how we would think about the
division of fiduciary authority between parents and the state
over the sexual education of children.
And because it becomes a public
health issue it may be the case that one would insist on certain
kinds of sex education going on in the schools,
although it would have to be designed to be as unobtrusive as
possible of the parent's conception of the children's
best interest. And they'll tussle about that,
they'll disagree about it, they'll go to court,
but that is a healthy tussle from the point of view of the
larger conception of democratic justice.
Because really what you want to
do is have a system in which both hierarchical orders,
namely the parental fiduciary order and the public fiduciary
order are to some extent held accountable and checked by the
claims of one another. And so this is one
institutional model, and it's actually not that
different from the one that exists in the U.S.
today when you think about it,
that the state does reserve authority over children's basic
interests, and when parents become
physically abusive or endanger the life of a child,
we will step in and do something.
But short of that,
for many very good reasons, we leave the parent to decide
the best interest of the child immune from interference by the
state, and we try to create mechanisms
that limit the ways in which fiduciary interests of the state
are vindicated so as to allow the freest possible hand.
Of course there are huge areas
of controversy with this because often the state will delegate
its authority over basic interest to parents,
and so we'll allow private schools and that sort of thing,
and then we have to manage the resultant knock-on effects of
that when the school system fails,
or it teaches things that are at fundamental odds with the
principles of a democratic society,
and those sorts of tensions are inevitable once you have a
dual-regime system. And you need to create
mechanisms whether it's courts or systems of administrative
appeal, or whatever it might be in
which these parties can check one another and hold them to
account. Because the state has so much
more power, I argue the burden should often
be adjusted accordingly, and it should be easier for
parents to challenge what public officials do than the other way
around. And so you get into fine
nuances of institutional design that are intended to accommodate
the basic power disparities. But so that is,
if you like, an adapted Lockean view of how
one would think about governance over children that is modified
by the principles of democratic justice.
Let's switch and talk about
employment relations, very different world.
We're now dealing with
competent adults who are presumed to know their own
interests. We don't need to have fiduciary
arrangements and paternalistic judgments at all,
and we can imagine a system in which everybody takes care of
their own interests. Now, if you think about the
governance of the firm, as I said, firms are
hierarchical organizations in which employees have to do what
employers tell them. This is generally thought to be
efficient. There are debates about whether
firms are too hierarchical. If they become too
hierarchical, they may become less efficient.
And indeed, in the 1960s and
'70s there was a movement trying to argue that democratically-run
firms would be more efficient than hierarchically ordered
firms. Huge literature on that,
but the best book on this subject was written by Henry
Hansmann, now in the Yale Law School,
a book which I commend to you all called The Ownership of
Enterprise, which I discuss some in that
chapter on democracy in the workplace.
And Hansmann pointed out that
if democratically-run firms were more efficient,
we would have seen them emerge all over the economy.
If democratically-run firms
were more efficient they would have outcompeted the
hierarchical firms. And indeed in the '60s and
'70s, part of the reason people made those arguments was they
observed that Japanese firms were much less hierarchical than
American firms, and also they thought they were
much more efficient. There were all these studies
showing Japanese car firms had three layers of management
whereas American car firms had seven layers of management,
and Japanese car firms were more efficient.
That didn't look so good after
the 1990s rolled in and Japanese firms turned out not to be very
efficient at all. There were similar arguments
about what appeared to be democratic firms in a part of
Italy called Mondragone that was thought to be very efficient,
but subsequent studies showed that actually these firms were
not very democratically-run at all and they were basically
controlled by the banks that controlled their capital.
And so it was rather na�ve to
expect democratic firms to be efficient.
And indeed, as Henry Hansmann
points out, you only really find that
democratic firms are efficient in circumstances where everybody
can do every job like law firms, or taxicab companies,
or plywood co-ops in the northwestern US,
where everybody has an interchangeable role.
Then democracy doesn't come at
any cost to efficiency. This is a combination of the
ancient ruling and being ruled in turn.
If we can all do everything we
can be egalitarian about it. And the Buchanan and Tullock
observation that I talked to you about earlier,
namely when we have disagreements and you create a
lot of procedure that will be time consuming precisely because
we have disagreements. We have different interests.
So Hansmann says,
"In large firms or firms where you have old workers and
young workers, they'll have very different
interests on things like pensions.
Young workers will want one
thing. Old workers will want something
else. And if you start to have a lot
of democratic procedure in those kinds of circumstances it's
going to come at an efficiency cost because they're going to be
sitting in meetings all day arguing about their pension
benefits and not working on the assembly line.
So it's not surprising,"
Hansmann says, "that in most industries,
in fact, you do not get democratic firms for efficiency
reasons." Efficiency is the superordinate
good. Firms are there to produce
goods and services that make money,
and if you don't do it more efficiently than the next person
you're going to go out of business.
So from the point of view of
pure efficiency it seems like you're not going to get a lot of
democracy in the firm. That's the cold harsh reality
from the perspective of 2010. And the literature advocating
democratic firms has this kind of kumbaya quality that is
difficult to take seriously in the contemporary world.
Firms are going to be
hierarchical. Then we have the problem,
well, so how should we think about the hierarchies within
firms, given the fact that they're
sites of greatly unequal distribution of power?
So different players have
different options. For instance,
if you, and this is where I would disagree with Hansmann,
if you're a shareholder in a firm and you don't like what the
firm is doing, you have a very easy option.
You can just sell your shares
and buy shares in another firm. No problem there.
And so Hansmann says we should
think of shareholders as enforcing democratic
accountability in firms. I don't think that's a very
plausible way to go because shareholders have very low exit
costs. If you don't like the way a
firm is run you buy shares in a different firm.
They're not going to exercise
much democratic control of what goes on within the firm.
Think about employees in a firm.
Well, it depends a lot on the
situation. So just to fix intuitions
consider this. Why do I talk about a surfer's
paradise? The Belgian political
philosopher Philippe Van Parijs wrote a book called Real
Freedom for All in which he said--
it's a kind of post-Rawlsian book about justice.
Van Parijs, he runs something,
by the way, called the Basic Income Network,
which I urge you to take a look at his website.
It's quite interesting.
He basically says,
"Everybody should be paid the highest sustainable wage
regardless of work." This is sort of Sweden on crack
or something. Everybody should be paid the
highest. Even surfers should be paid.
That's Van Parijs' view.
In European parlance,
it's called the social wage. They should have the highest
social wage possible. So imagine that that a surfer's
paradise is the utopia Van Parijs defends in that book
Real Freedom for All. Think at the other end of a
continuum what we might call a Dickensian nightmare.
A world in which there's no
health insurance, no unemployment insurance,
no welfare state, no social security,
nothing. So obviously every actual
economy exists somewhere on this continuum from the Dickensian
nightmare to the surfer's paradise.
And so what I want to say is,
"Well, that affects a lot of what goes on within the
firm." Because if we're living in a
Dickensian nightmare--go back to the example I mentioned last
time. Think of an employer who's in a
hierarchical relationship with a secretary and says to the
secretary, "Unless you go to bed with
me I'm going to make sure you get fired."
So now an employer is abusing
the position in the hierarchy. Well, if this is a Dickensian
nightmare, the secretary's going to be terrified because the
costs of losing that job are enormous.
They're going to lose their
health insurance. There's no unemployment et
cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
You're going to be thrown out
into a pretty horrible cauldron. If you're living in a surfer's
paradise the secretary can walk away at much lower cost to
themselves. And I'm not talking about the
question whether the secretary is actually fired,
or actually walks away, but simply the knowledge both
parties have that in the Dickensian nightmare the exit
cost for the secretary are enormous,
whereas in the surfer's paradise the exit costs for the
secretary are very low. That structures the power
relations within the firm. So the basic intuition here is
when we ask the question, "How much should the state
regulate what goes on in firms? The answer is,
"Well, it depends." It depends upon where you are
on this continuum because if you're closer to a surfer's
paradise there's less reason for the state to create lots of
protections for workers within the firm which are going to come
at an efficiency cost by assumption.
Appeals, processes,
defense of union rights, grievance procedures,
burden shifting to employers when there are disputes.
All of that comes at an
efficiency cost. But so the notion is that if
it's a Dickensian nightmare, the worker's basic interests
are threatened, then democratic justice would
not say the worker should internalize those costs,
rather the employer should. But as you move towards the
surfer's paradise then there's more reason to say that the
worker can internalize some of the costs of hierarchy in the
firm because the costs of leaving are comparatively
smaller. And so you have,
as I said, a semi-contextual argument.
What this regime should be like
depends on the power externalities within which the
power internalities of the firm actually take place.
And one of the desirable
features of this I think is that it leads you to rethink
relationship between capital and labor.
Marx thought that's the basic
conflict, workers on one side capital on the other.
But now if you think,
say, about something like health insurance.
We have a system now where
health insurance is provided through employment,
which moves you more into the Dickensian nightmare direction
because you lose your job you lose your health insurance.
And employers compete with one
another by offering-- you know, Yale says,
"We offer better health benefits than working for
whatever it is, Harvard or Columbia."
So employers compete with one
another, but the truth is all of the
employers would be better off if they didn't have to compete and
everybody had health insurance. So there's a kind of collective
action problem. What looks like,
especially once we get into strikes and bargaining disputes
between employees and employers, what looks like a conflict
between capital and labor can be re-conceptualized as,
really, it's a collective action problem among firms.
They all compete at the margin
over things like benefits, but in fact they would be
better off if health benefits were taken off the table
entirely and funded through the tax system.
So what looks like a conflict
between capital and labor is actually a collective action
problem among firms. Another advantage of this,
I think, is that it does not put the
best in conflict with the good in that to the extent you have a
regime like this you give firms the incentive to support the
expansion of the social wage because what do capitalists
want? What do managers want most?
They want flexibility at the
plant level. They want to be able to turn on
a dime, and layoff people,
and do something differently, and compete in the twenty-first
century in a totally new way than they were competing two
years before because that's what you need.
The name of the game is
flexibility, adaptability, nimbleness, all that stuff.
That's what firms want.
That's what they need.
And if they know that the
closer you get to a Dickensian nightmare the more cumbersome
regulation they're going to have,
and the more you move toward a surfer's paradise the less
you're going to have, then they have an incentive to
try and move the society toward the surfer's paradise.
So corporations will get behind
expansions of health insurance and so on.
And there's a certain realism
to that because if you go and study the history of the
expansions of the welfare state despite what you might read in
the newspapers what you will find is it never happens unless
business gets behind it. The big expansions of the
social wage, the big expansions of the
welfare state even in countries like Sweden have only occurred
in circumstances where business gets behind it and supports it.
So you want an industrial
management regime that distributes the incentives in
such a way that they will do it. So those are two examples of
how we can think about democratizing the power
dimensions of social institutions while interfering
with the superordinate goods as little as possible.
And that's the basic impulse of
the argument of democratic justice.
Now if you take a step back and
you think about democracy over the past couple of centuries,
you know, I talked to you some about Alexis de Tocqueville.
He made two points about
democracy. He had a love-hate relationship
with it. I told you he was in many ways
a critic of it, but he did say two things about
it, one that it was inevitable. "The gradual progress of
democracy," he said in the preface to the
1848 edition of Democracy in America,
"is something fated. It's providential.
It can't be stopped."
And the other thing he said is
that, "The thing about democracy is it has wild
instincts. What we need to do is try and
domesticate it, not get rid of it.
We can't get rid of it.
We can't stop it so we must
domesticate it." Well, I think both of those
claims were partly correct. It is true Tocqueville was
correct to think that democracy is an idea with world-historical
force. It will always be appealed to
by people who experience injustice,
and they will always demand democratization if they find
their social circumstances unsatisfactory.
So I think this notion is
partly right. But even though democracy is an
idea with world-historical force, I think he was partly
wrong to say that the progress of democracy is inevitable.
There have always been advances
for democracy and then setbacks. We had the French Revolution.
We had a disaster.
In 1830 we had a democratic
revolution sweep Europe. By 1832 the monarchies had been
restored. 1848, again,
we had democratic revolutions sweep Europe,
and by 1851 they had been undone.
1989, we had democratic
revolutions, huge new wave of democracy,
but some of those democracies came under real threat in places
like-- fell apart in Algeria in 1991.
We know what happened in
Rwanda, although things have turned around again since.
Or if we look at Pakistan in
the last three or four years. We see that we shouldn't think
of democracy as inevitable, this sort of Francis Fukuyama
idea that history is intending in some direction.
To the extent you think
democracy is valuable really what you have to do is work to
promote it and sustain it. Likewise when we talk about
Tocqueville's second observation that democracy has wild
instincts and it needs to be reined in.
We need to, as he put it,
"educate democracy to limit its wild instincts,"
and make sure that it doesn't destroy other good things,
superordinate goods. In his case,
of course, freedom was the most important good that he didn't
want democracy to compromise. But I think the same argument
applies with respect to efficiency,
with respect to many of the superordinate goods that people
strive after and cherish. So we always have to be wary of
the capacity of democracy to undermine other goods.
But, and this is where I think
Tocqueville overstated the case, that does not mean we should
overlook democracy's capacity to undermine bad things in the
world. To the extent we can
democratize power relations without interfering with
superordinate goods, we can have a tremendous effect
for good whether it's the abolition of slavery,
whether it's the limiting of exploitation in the workplace,
whether it's the protection or the restructuring of the law of
marriage to prevent the domination of women.
These are all areas in which
the basic democratic impulse to democratize social relations has
improved them. And so it doesn't mean it'll
always be successful. Sometimes it'll fail.
It requires creative ingenuity,
the capacity to try things out and change them when they don't
work, but the basic impulse of
democratic justice is to take inherited institutions,
democratize them as we reproduce them into the future,
leaving a better world than we found.
Thank you very much.
