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