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