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February 19, 2007
A review by Daniel Weinstock of Alain Renaut's Qu'est-ce qu'un peuple libre?: Libéralisme ou républicanisme; a text that recognizes French form of republicanism is a particular expression of a theoretical tradition, whose core normative commitment is a commitment to government aimed at the common good, rather than at the conjunction of individual goods. The other core commitment of this French Republican tradition is:
the notion of citizen virtue.
The guiding idea here is that if one wants politics to be governed by the common good, then citizens themselves must be educated in such a way as to be motivated by the common good, rather than by their own contingent good. Closely associated with this is a commitment to positive freedom....according to which freedom consists in overcoming one's enslavement to one's passions and contingent interests. Finally, French republicanism is wary of the institution of political representation, as it is of any political mechanism that stands in the way of citizens being able to bring their republican virtue directly to bear upon political decision-making.
Renaut connects this expression of the republican tradition with The Federalist Papers, which is also integral to the republican tradition.
The authors of the Federalist, and in particular James Madison, were quite convinced that human passions had to be taken as they are, and that the hope of reforming human nature through education is doomed. Recognizing the plurality of political factions Republican institutional design replaces republican virtue being exercised in an unmediated fashion with various "checks and balances" famously described in Federalist are other instances of mechanisms that attempt to realize the common good as a "system effect" of well-designed institutions.
Renaut argues that republicanism must be liberalized by integrating what is, from the French point of view, the "lost" federal republican tradition of Madisonianism. So where to then?
Renaut argues for democratic deliberation to be included in the republican tradition on the grounds that citizens need to are somehow actively involved in the deliberation and debate surrounding the laws that govern them, rather than seeing these laws simply as instruments externally provided to protect individual pursuits. The strategy is to address the conditions that will prevent liberal societies from degenerating into a morally unattractive form of solipsistic individualism.
This can provide citizens with a "stake" in political institutions that will make society less likely to lapse into individualism, and has merits connected to the value of collective self-determination. The problem here, as Weinstock points out in the review, is that for many deliberation theorists:
democratic talk only counts as deliberation if a number of fairly exigent requirements are satisfied both by democratic interlocutors and by the deliberative setting itself. What results is a highly artificial and stilted conception of democratic talk, one that is even less likely to perform the sociological, "Tocquevillean" functions that Renaut identifies as necessary correctives to standard liberalism than a more unfettered democracy might be, since citizens are called upon to contribute to deliberation not on the basis of what really matters to them (such things being ruled out of court by deliberativists as making the identification of democratic consensus more difficult), but rather on the basis of a rarified conception of political identity poles apart from their real, everyday, "encumbered" identities.
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