Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

150
DEMOCRACY TODAY
world claim to be democracies – what democracy actually means in
practice is sometimes quite difficult to discern. It is all very well for Ian
Shapiro to claim that ‘different people understand different things by
democracy’ (Shapiro 2003: 3) but surely the term cannot extend from
the very narrow - majority rule – to the very broad - encompassing all
that is humanly good? Leaving the empirical questions aside for the
moment, in the theoretical debates too, there is significant divergence:
as Larry Diamond noted a decade ago, ‘so serious is the conceptual
disarray that more than five hundred and fifty subtypes of democracy
are identified in Collier and Levitsky’s review of one hundred and fifty
(mostly recent) studies’ (Diamond and Plattner 1996: 20).
The lack of consensus around the meaning of democracy has
created significant problems such that some have alluded to a ‘crisis’
in modern political science (Ricci 1984: 297; Held 1987: 272). David
Ricci, in The Tragedy of Political Science (1984) suggests that the conflict
between the commitment to science and the commitment to the good is
responsible for this crisis: that is, that research is driven by empirical
(specifically quantitative) concerns on the one hand and by normative
concerns on the other and the two seldom meet. What is somewhat
curious about this divergence is that when political science began to
emerge as a modern academic discipline in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, classical political theory had a great impact:
political philosophy began with moral reflections on and attempts to
justify political structures in the context of established cultural, social,
economic and historical considerations. The concern with political
ideals and duties was accompanied by a preoccupation with ascertaining
which political institutions produce the optimum – usually
in the normative sense – type of society and individuals. Evidence of
this can be seen in the works of Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes,
Locke, and Rousseau among others. Today however, political science
is concerned with that which is empirically manageable; and because
concepts such as justice, nation, rights, patriotism, society, virtue and
tyranny cannot be operationalised, they are devalued, studied only by
an ‘insightful minority’ who
remain faithful to the conversation concerned with the good life, wisdom,
genuine human needs, illuminated by the intelligence derived from a study