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December 29, 2006
The quote below is from this review by J. Angelo Corlett, of David R. Hiley's Doubt and the Demands of Democratic Citizenship.In this text Hiley responds to the public cynicism in the United States concerning the current state of politics and the widespread distrust of governments within the U.S by arguing that the answer lies in citizenship that includes a certain kind of skepticism by citizens of a truly democratic society. It is the kind of skepticism that entails citizens' doubting in the midst of decisions that must be made in the context of disagreements between citizens. Corlett says:
In a time when the U.S. empire seeks to continue to spread its form of alleged democracy around the globe through a morally unjustified use of deadly violence, it is imperative that books written on democracy carefully explain precisely why democracy is a good thing, and what distinguishes good forms of it from impostors. In a certain way, the author attempts this in articulating a version of deliberative democratic citizenship. But his glibly and repeatedly implying that violence is something that is not appropriate in democracy promotes confusion and ignorance of the particular ways in which long-standing traditions in philosophy have argued meticulously about when violence might be morally justified. This is particularly true in the case of the U.S., a country the government and a majority of the citizens of which recently approved and permitted an institutionally and morally unjust regime to rise to power in recent years, only to then approve and permit it to invade two countries on false and unjust pretenses, killing thousands of innocent citizens. One would think that, under precisely such conditions, political violence is quite morally justified against such an evil regime.
Democracy is in need of serious philosophical defense rather than assume that a deliberative or liberal democratic kind of society is the benchmark of justice.
Democracy is paid lip service to these days even as it is being undermined. We do need to distinquish between liberalism and democracy in modernity, which came together in the 19th century (eg., John Stuart Mill) but which are not necessarily related.
Neo-liberalism, for instance, is about competitive markets not democracy, and it has very little to say about the project of a radical and plural democracy. I would argue that neo-liberalism in its utilitarian form of economic liberalism disconnects the idea of liberty from democracy as it critiques both the redistribution of the welfare state and the increasing intervention of the state in the economy. Utilitarianism is still hegemonic in liberal economic and political philosophy in Australia, but it has little to say about the democratic project of modernity or the nature of the political.
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