Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

Unitarian critiques
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DEMOCRACY TODAY
Unitarian critiques target the alleged formalism and proceduralism of
basic concepts of democracy. When they reject formalism they really
mean to reject politics.
They argue for a substantive democracy. This often goes beyond
the moves of the perfectionist critique, which aim to establish a particular
virtue as central and decisive. It usually heads toward rejecting
politics per se as a separate area of social life with its own dynamics
and demands.
Unitarian critics would like to merge democratic politics with some
other process (economic self-management, communal self-organization,
religious and cultural expression). Democracy then means the result
of this merging, in which political and social elements fuse, or politics
and culture unite.
From this perspective it makes sense to oppose any concept of
democracy that underlines the autonomy and distinctiveness of politics.
This line of criticism of democracy as autonomous politics has
a long history on both left and right in political and social thought in
the last several centuries.
Instead we should insist on the value of a specifically democratic
politics, which means a politics at some distance from other social relations.
Within that politics, deliberation, participation, agenda control,
and all the rest have independent standing as virtues that might be
achieved in varying degrees and in different combinations. That is
what it means to assess democracy as a political project.
2. Democratic virtues and forms of democracy
Accounts of democracy often propose a happily positive view of a
number of distinct elements of politics, such as participation and
deliberation, without thinking much about their possible tensions.
At relatively low levels, these attributes do tend to go together. Yet
at higher values there are conflicts among these democratic virtues
(e.g., between participation and inclusion; or between deliberation
and agenda control).