philosophy.com

do you sense the totalitarianism?

A couple of events. First a Geoff Pryor cartoon published in the Canberra Times:

The other event is the Australian Financial Review's response to the negotiations over the sale of Telstra by Barnaby Joyce and his Nationals. The Review talks in terms of reforms passed by the Howard Government's control of the Senate being marred by pork barrelling:

Now control of the Senate has opened up a whole new vista, where pork is measured in billions of dollars.There may well be a need to bring rural communications up to scratch, but the $3.1 billion ransom for Telstra's sale reflects the National's price, rather than any rigorous assessment of need.

What is underling this is a concern about the faction versus the national or public interest with the public interest associated with the sovereign will. Pork is associated with faction and national interest is associated with the neo-liberal's economic plan of privatisation.

My interpretation? The privatisation of Telstra is part of the grand plan of economic reform and faction and debate represents a form of corruption of the sovereign will.

You could say that the Review's position is that reform represents the general will of the nation--the general interest that expresses a single indivisible sovereign power--as opposed to the will of all. Consequently, the Nationals, who represent the particular interests, are the enemy within the body politic.

Do you not sense totalitarianism with the AFR position, with its desire for order? The interests of the whole must automatically and permanently be hostile to the particular regional interests of the Queensland Nationals. Don't you sense the absolutism?

I'm not sure how the AFR gets a Hobbesian conception of a single indivisible sovereign power from its economic uititaritarianism--that puzzles me. But I understand that the AFR radically devalues pluralism, political action and the public sphere.

It is not liberalism that the AFR is expressing---since liberalism affirms pluralism.

gatekeeping and digital democracy

The new gatekeepers in digital democracy---the A list or leading bloggers. They---the influential few---are the hubs of opinion-making about the ongoing revolution in media.

Jon Garfunkel at Civitas says:

"The old gatekeepers (media) and the new gatekeepers [bloggers] are not the same. Both, after all, influence what we watch and read. The difference is that the old gatekeepers do so by restricting information. The new gatekeepers do so by manipulating information cascades."

Does the gatekeeping matter?

Not really. That opinion making within the gated community is just a particular conversation on a public stage. Other people come together in other parts of the stgte to discuss common affairs, interact with one another and lay themselves open to the judgement of others.

It is the public realm, the space within which the civil conversation about public things, that is important, not the gatekeeping.

old style blogging

An old fashioned blog post: a linking to other stories with minimal commentary added.

A defence of liberalism

A debate on liberal democracy over at Eurozone.

You can post several times a day doing this, moving from conversation to conversation.

I'm really not sure what the point of this style of blogging is. Is not a conversation more important? Does not a conversation require some participation to keep it going?

the salvation of democracy

George Pell, the conservative Australian Cardinal and Roman Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, gave a speech on democracy to the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty in late 2004. I found it hard to follow but I got the bit about liberal democracy is a world of 'empty secularism' that is over-focused on 'individual autonomy'. This leads to unquestioned acceptance of abortion, euthanasia and genetic experimentation, and to the claim that opposition to such things is undemocratic.

The problem with democracy is that it is neither a value-free mechanism for regulating interests, nor a good in itself; its value depends on the moral vision that it serves, and a secular democracy is lacking in moral vision. Since individualism coupled to equality and freedom is not a moral vision, he suggests 'democratic personalism'is the best form of 'normative democracy'.

By this he means a vision of human beings as centres of transcendent dignity whose existence and happiness are bound to mutual relationships. Democracy serves the flourishing of human dignity and of mutual relationships. He argues that to implement this vision we would need to change culture through persuasion and not political activism.

What he means by 'transcendent' is that we need to recognize our 'dependence on God' and place this at the centre of our system of governance. But, he asserts, 'placing democracy on this basis does not mean theocracy':

"Placing democracy on this basis does not mean theocracy.To re-found democracy on our need for others, and our need to make a gift of ourselves to them, is to bring a whole new form of democracy into being. Democratic personalism is perhaps the last alternative to secular democracy still possible within Western culture as it is presently configured."

He justifies this conception of normative democracy thus:

"The recrudescence of intolerant religion is not a problem that secular democracy can resolve, but rather a problem that it tends to engender. The past century provided examples enough of how the emptiness within secular democracy can be filled with darkness by political substitutes for religion. Democratic personalism provides another, better possibility; one that does not require democracy to cancel itself out."

'us' versus 'them'

When framed by the rhetoric of the war on terror democracy is seen as under threat and our 'way of life needs to be protected from 'them' who hates 'us' and what 'we' stand for. Any dissension or criticism of this division marks one as un-Australian and against 'us', democracy and 'our way of life.'

Jane Mummery argues that in this context there is a need for the commonality of democracy in a liberal nation-state to be informed by pluralism, dissension and undecidability.
She turns to Chanatal Mouffe to help her think through the questioning of the 'us' versus 'them' logic:

"Mouffe argues that 'the belief that a final resolution of conflicts is eventually possible is something that puts [democracy] at risk. For Mouffe (as it also is for Derrida), the democratic project is constitutively agonistic and pluralist. It marks and sustains the practice of contestation rather than any substantive consensual notion of the common good or even a 'we'... As a plurality, Mouffe insists, democracy is necessarily agonistic, insofar as the sustaining of difference is the sustaining of dissension...what this means is that the crucial problem in democratic politics for Mouffe is... the establishing of these democratic equivalences in a process she sees as the transformation of antagonism into agonism...Mouffe argues that every truly democratic community requires that both pluralism and its character of conflict are recognised as constitutive of the public sphere."

The democratic project certainly does not have a clear-cut identity or community. It doesn't need to have. Mouffe is careful to not set any specific identity to this 'we', given that it is constantly under negotiation.

One presumes that Mouffe's conception of democracy, as the agonistic plurality of determinate democratic struggle that undermines the 'us' versus 'them' logic is enframed by particular existing institutions, practices and values of liberal democracy.

publicness and speech in political life

Andrew Gibson's 'Liberalism and Utopian Publics' published in Agora deals with a key category of liberal democracy--the 'public.' How do we understand the public in a digital world? It is presupposed in a digital democracy with the conversation across and between weblogs?

Is it a realm that can still be contrasted with the private realm of the household? Is a realm that is a key part of the political life of the nation-state; a political life where we develop our human potential for reasoned speech and sense of justice?

Gibson says that a public is:

" an associational form that has become increasingly important throughout the modern period in economic, political, and cultural forms of affiliation, though it is still poorly understood. It is a flexible type of social association ideally premised on discursive openness among indefinite strangers."

A public in political life is a social association that presupposes deliberation and conversation since debate with others is a core aspect of political life. It provides the basis for a nonviolent, noncoercive form of being and acting together. Speech represents the difference between commanding and persuading and political speech (debate and deliberation) between citizens has an end in the making of a decision about which particular course of action is to be adopted.

Gibson goes to say more about the ontology of 'public'. He says:

'The constitution of the political public sphere implied the creation of a public with a greatly extended geographic range, incorporating the disparate discourses of indefinite strangers. What is concealed within this complexity is that "the" public of the public sphere was itself composed of multiple miniature publics, that is, mediated spaces of a lesser scale, which have a tighter discursive consistency, closer to the model of corporeal conversation. "Public opinion" in the singular sense is the imaginary summary point of the multiple discussion spaces it knits together in space and time, such as with the combination of a city newspaper circuit, a national radio station and a neighbourhood tavern.'

He develops two aspects of this. The first is the unity of a public:

"For a public to function, that is, for it to cohere and form a social entity that it makes sense to address, instead of remaining at the level of disjointed bits of discourse, participants have to imagine that their own discourse is an integral part of a larger conversation with indefinite strangers."

This is what we do as citizens. Even though we are strangers, we presume that we are engaged in, and a part of, a national conversation about a particular issue: mandatory detention or industrial relations reform.

Gibson says that rhe second aspect of public is public as a social entity:

'To say that a public--such as the public of the nation, of an interest group, or artistic affiliation--is a social entity means that it forms an interpretative world with its own use of language, its own normative assumptions, and sense of active belonging....The various uses of language it draws on are constituted through particular media, ranging from face-to-face conversation and artistic corporeality to print and electronic discourse. In another sense, language-use has to do with the normative horizons and structures of stranger-relationality that are implicit to preferred genres and vocabularies. These substantive horizons derive their orientation from interpretations of the ethical questions common to all cultural forms, questions of what is important and possible, or, similarly, as Warner notes, of "what can be said and about what goes without saying."'

We citizens in Australia presuppose our own interpretative political world with its shared meanings, assumptions, and ethical concerns, which is different from that of the US or Indonesia. Hence the idea of horizons, which they may overlap are still horizons.

Alas Gibson says nothing about the speech of the public in political life.

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Digital Democracy

John Quiggin's presentation to the Adelaide Festival of Ideas was about the significance of blogs and Wiki, given that they restore, and actualize, the early innovation and creativity promise of the internet. Does that mean that the free spirits of creativity are resisting the threat by the bulldozers carving out property rights? John's talk did not go on to link this decentered, networked media, and co-operative Wiki way of constructing knowledge, to citizenship in a liberal democracy.

In various comments to the media the Festival organizers had linked Festival's informed discussion of public ideas to influencing government decisions so as to improve them. Though improve, or making better, was left undefined (I presume they meant something along the lines of a better life and/or a more equitable society), the organizers identified themselves as working within "the project of Enlightenment".

Mark Cully says that he is an:

"...unreconstructed beliver in the enlightenment who's very much against postmodernism. I think that there are truths which can be established. Science progresses and we get closer to the final truth on things all the time. Through science I believe in truth, I believe that informed debate gets us closer to the truth and I think if we have informed debate then there's a better chance that government's might make sensible decisions rather than if there isn't an informed debate. You can't force governments to make sensible decisions, but if you have informed debate there's a better chance of that happening."

The Habermasian understanding of the Enlightenment project argues that the public sphere is a space in which reason might prevail. This is a critical reason that is a part of the democratic tradition, not the instrumental reason of much modern economic practice that is primarily concerned with growth, wealth and prosperity.

Whether this is Quiggin's position is not clear. I am going to attribute to the Festival of Ideas, in the sense that it underpins and makes sense of their practices.

We can take Quiggin's insights a step further by asking: 'Does the internet world of blogging and Wiki change the way we understand democratic politics?' 'Do we need to rethink the modern democratic tradition to understand citizenship in a digital world?'

I suggest that we rethink the liberal political tradition. One presupposition of the Habermasian public sphere, for instance,is that private citizens will enter into the public body by leaving behind their private concerns and focusing rationally on matters of the common good. The very architecture of the Internet pushes us to think beyond the modern antinomies of public and private, rather than simply utilize the old antinomies of classical liberalism under the conditions of digital capitalism. One kind of blogging means thinking critically about public issues from within the privacy of one's home.

An implication of Quiggin's talk is that new technologies should not be treat as purely instrumental means by for pre-existing goals. Such approaches, due to the deeper cultural reconfigurations that are at stake when the material basis of communication changes. I'm interpreting Quiggin strongly, to say that we should view media technologies such as blogging as having transformative powers.

We can develop this perspective through this 1995 text by Mark Poster. He says that:

"The question that needs to be asked about the relation of the Internet to democracy is this: are there new kinds of relations occuring within it which suggest new forms of power configurations between communicating individuals? In other words, is there a new politics on the Internet?"

He says that one way to approach this question is to make a detour from the issue of technology and raise again the question of a public sphere. The question then involves gauging the extent to which Internet democracy becomes intelligible in relation to the public sphere.

Poster says that to frame the issue of the political nature of the Internet in relation to the concept of the public sphere is appropriate because of the spatial metaphor associated with the term. He adds:

"Instead of an immediate reference to the structure of an institution, which is often a formalist argument over procedures, or to the claims of a given social group, which assumes a certain figure of agency that I would like to keep in suspense, the notion of a public sphere suggests an arena of exchange, like the ancient Greek agora or the colonial New England town hall."

It is an exchange understood in terms of an ongoing public conversation, or informed debate by citizens we can add. Or as Poster puts it, the public sphere is the place citizens interact to form opinions in relation to which public policy must be attuned. In the language of the republican tradition it is a space in which citizens deliberate about their common affairs.

The electronically mediated communications associated with the Internet mean that the face-to-face talk gives way to new forms of electronically mediated discourse. Poster points out that there is a history of electronic forms of interaction--he mentions the centralized top-down, information machines (radio and television) and their role in mediating politics. He says that the difference that is introduced by the networked media of the Internet is that:

"...it is a technology that puts cultural acts, symbolizations in all forms, in the hands of all participants; it radically decentralizes the positions of speech, publishing, filmmaking, radio and television broadcasting, in short the apparatuses of cultural production."

And it also allows for, and institutes, a communicative practice of self-constitution. This change in the way identities are structured discloses a space of a postmodern culture.

So what of the question posed earlier: is there a new politics on the Internet? Poster suggests that there is, and that it arises from the way that:

"The Internet seems to discourage the endowment of individuals with inflated status. ...If scholarly authority is challenged and reformed by the location and dissemination of texts on the Internet, it is possible that political authorities will be subject to a similar fate."

If this is so, then it represents a rupture with the old politics of the active expert addressing a passive audience and which only grants the space for the audience to ask a few questions at the end of the speech.

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towards digital democracy

This post over at public opinion raises the issues of digital democracy. It argues for the need to revive and foster the political conversation in this country. A good way to do this is with a festival of ideas, as this provides a platform for people to express interesting, thoughtful ideas on topical issues. But we need to think through the relationship between a festival of ideas and democracy.

The public opinion post contextualized the Adelaide festival in the way that newspapers, radio, television and government spin constitute the informational framework of our lives, and still determine our reception of our ideas on topical issues and the way we put forward competing solutions. Public opinion suggested that the new media of the internet can, and should, provide a pathway out of the historical failure of the mass media to provide a forum for informed public debate by citizens concerned about their country.

Public opinion then criticised festival for failing to make this move to become a part of a digital world. I'm going to give some reasons here for why we need to make the move. It builds on earlier posts here and here

The Internet is new media, not just because of the technology. Though many see the Internet as a place to use words and text, others, informed by television, see it as a world of images and pictures. Public opinion assumed that the new technologies could be deployed to improve democracy, enhance civic discourse, and help the spread of a democratic political culture in oppposition to the commercial use of the internet.

In Australia democracy is representative democracy, what can be called 'weak democracy', as citizenship is limited to voting. Thsi has the following consequences: ordinary citizens can feel privatized and marginalized; the voter votes once every three years and then goes home and watches political events on the news, waits till the next election. Inbetween elections he or she lives privately as a consumer or a client letting her elected representatives do the governing. Often we have party elites and powerful leaders manipulating issues to win over impassioned, but disengaged, subjects, and gain populist approval for their hegemony.

The Adelaide Festival of Ideas introduces the active citizen who are engaged in the discussion of ideas, thereby adding to the idea of active citizens in their neighborhoods, towns, schools and churches. This presupposes social capital and trust in civil society, which is quite different from the social cohesion desired by representative-style liberal governments. The ethos of the festival--informed debate, challenging ideas, trying to shape government decisions--points to participatory democracy. But that is what we don't have in Australia.

One advantage of a Festival of Ideas embracing a digital world is its speed. Computer communication permits instant communication. This does not mean instant thinking; it does mean using the speed to post the festival speeches on a website to enable democratic deliberation. We e-citizens can read then the material at our lesiure, treat the ideas with patience and consideration. We can download them, mull over them, sift them, reconsider them, use them to question our own thinking.

That kind of critical filtering enables us to avoid the instant thinking and chatter in the form of the venting of our unfiltered prejudice and unthought opinions; and so it allow us to develop our civic and political judgement. This provides a space to avoid the mass media's relationship to democracy caused by the media's inclination to reductive simplicity, binary dualisms of left and right. It also allows us the space to explore the complexities and possibilities of the common ground between two polar alternatives.

It is often argued that a digital world has a tendency to divide,isolate and atomize people because of the necessary solitude of the computer terminal. We sit alone in front of keyboards and screens and relate to the world only virtually, our bodies in suspension, whilst we surf the net. Surfing alone leads to the privatization of politics.

This argument fails to take into account the blogging publishing platform with its public posts, comments, linkages, discussion and common deliberation. This provides a forum where those with something to say are obliged to face public scrutiny of their prejudices and publicly defend their views. So we don't just have the solitude or hyper-individualism of the virtual interface.

Benjamin Barber acknowledges the existence of the virtual communities that have been created on the Internet, but argues that they:

"...are narrow communities of interest,in effect, special interest groups comprised by people who share commonhobbies or similar identities or identical political views. Or they are a continuation of communities forged in real time and space. It's one thing to use the net to reinforce an extant community, quite another to create acommunity from pixels alone. And often, communities that use the web to spread their nets do so in the name of resistance and terror-- radical fundamentalist Christians and Islamic Jihad (not to speak of the Neo-Nazi movement)---have all used the internet to forge something like a trans-national political community. Ironically, almost all conference addressing the potential of the newcyber-technology meet in real time and space--their modus operandi standing as a living reproof to the cyber-communitarian theories they celebrate."

But bloggers do create a virtual community from their posts in spite of the partisan nature of political discourse. Barber has another objection:

"It is hard enough to determine whether cyber-community is feasible; even if we assume it is, this leaves open the question of whether democracy is likely to benefit. Representative democracy, founded on the pluralism of interests and groups and rooted in individualism and rights theory, puts little stock in communities to begin with, and its advocates are unlikely to feel benefited by whatever good deeds the new technology can perform on behalf of community. Strong democrats, on the other hand, may feel that the technology’s ultimate benefit to participation will rest entirely on its capacity to contribute to the building of the kinds of community on which spirited participation and social capital depend."

This ignores the value of the online public discussion of ideas, the debate that takes place and the deepening understanding that comes from this conversation. The publishing technology provides micro but interlinked forums for citizens to participate in a conversation that takes us beyond asking a few questions at the end of a well presented talk by an expert in a festival of ideas.

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a situation of emergency requires that ...

I've been listening to the G8 leaders and the conservative commentary on the London bombings. What I'm hearing is a particular kind of discourse that is buried within the chatter about terrorism and the rally around the flag patriotism.

The discourse says that the Islamic terrorists threaten the destruction of democracy itself, with all the values that democracy embodies and protects. In order to combat this threat effectively, democracies need to do acts that are evil in themselves but constitute a lesser evil than that posed by terrorism.

Another strand of the discourse is that we are caught up in a war on terror. The actions of Al-Qaeda are those of terrorism; terrorism cannot be countered by political means; it can only be met by war. And war entails the use of coercion, force, and violence.

Another strand is that we have to do all that is necessary to ensure the security of the (American, or Austrlaian, or British etc) people. So it is necessary that democracy, with its rights and liberties, may require an abrogation of at least some of its rights and liberties, at least for some persons and for a limited time.

It's a situation of emergency that makes it right to do this in the service of good of the civilised freedom loving peoples.

That is the conservative discourse I've been hearing in the wall to wall media commentary around the London Bombings. It makes me uneasy. But I'm not sure how to tackle it.

What is easy to say is that the state of emergency (or exception) has become the normal:--that is the insight of some of the work of Giorgio Agamben.

But I'm not sure how to deal with the ethics of this. On the one hand we have those saying that it is necessary constraining liberty in democracies to deal with threat of evil. On the other hand, we have libertarians talking in terms of the erosion of basic human rights by the national security state.

renewing social democracy?

These are conservative times we live in, as we learn to come to grips with the impact of living in a global economy, the effects of the culture wars, and the decay of liberalism. These are big changes working themselves out behind our backs and they are transforming the political landscape.

In Australia, you can see the conservatism of the times illustrated by the difficulties the Australian Labor Party (ALP) is encountering in regaining the Treasury benches. David Burchell has an op. ed. in Saturday's Australian Financial Review (subscription required) about the decline in the ALP's percentage of the primary vote. Burchill says:

"From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, Labor's percentage share of the primary vote hovered around the mid-40s. But in the 1996 election it dipped below 40 per cvent and, aside from a brief rally in 1998, has been falling ever since. It's now heading into the mid-30s. This is territory modern Labor has never occupied before. If the trend continues, Labor could cease to be a viable alternative government."

It is not just the ALP vote. The Labor electoral brand is also in trouble as a decreasing number of Australians say that the ALP best represents their views on issues other than the core ones of health, education and enviornment. Burchill says:

'In 2001 and 2004 alike, a mere 27 per cent of respondents identified with Labor as "best representing their views". In other words, little more than quarter of the electorate identifies with what they think of as Labor values. In contrast, almost 44 per cent of respondents now believe that one or other of the coalition parties best represents their views. You could say the ALP is undergoing a crisis of relevance.'

Burchill says the ALP is primarily seen as a big-hearted party of social assistance but little else, whilst its stress on infrastructure rebuilding and skills and training is a slender platform for renewal.

Where to for renewal?

Burchill says that:

"Labor clearly needs to give voters positive reasons to vote for it. Purely defensive commitments to the survival of quality public schooling and public health are not enough---nor is a largely "me-too" approach to economic policy."

The ALP does appear to be locked into a defence of the old welfare state even though Mark Latham, its previous leader, tried to break new ground with his Third Way. Burchill makes some suggestions to what is needed:

"To generate a sense of relevance, Labor needs not just a defence-of-public schooling policy but innovative strategies for quality schooling. It needs not just a policy on hospitals and pharmaceuticals but a general strategy on health improvement and "wellness."'It needs to find creative approaches to welfare and employment that encourage independence and self-reliance, rather than simply reinforcing a now descredited and unpopular culture of welfare dependence."

I reckon that is the right pathway and one that the ALP had started to walk along.

media, democracy, postmodernism, New Right

I'm reading the last chapter of Catherine Lumby's Gotcha: Life in a Tabloid World. The chapter is entitled 'Media Culpa--democracy and the postmodern public sphere.' Tabloids promote democracy is her argument and she spells it out by criticizing a popular conception of the public sphere:

"Many critics claim that that the meaning of publis life and discourse has become so deracinated that it's now meaningless to speak of a vital public life at all...The well spring of democracy, the popular story goes, is an informed and critical citizenry, and most contemporary citizens are neither ---they're the zombie spawn of late capitalism robotically feasting on distraction and spectacle."

This is the topdown modernist view of the mass media tht has its roots in the Frankfurt's School's critique of the culture industry.

Lumby has argued throughout Gotcha that this picture of politics and popular culture:

"...is a one dimensional and hopelessly nostalgic one which ignores the myriad of ways in which the growth of the mass media has actually increased the diversty of voices, ideas and issues which make up public debate and the political arena."

The mass media is no longer the culture industry.Adorno and co have been flicked into the dustbin of history. We now study popular culture, resistance and identity politics.

Lumby then asks: 'how do we make democracy work in a world where diverse media forms compete for diverse publics?' She says that having a public conversation today means actively listening to what people are saying, regardless of how they're the saying it, where they're saying it and why. She adds:

"The top-down model of public discourse, so dear to the conventional left and right, no longer holds. We live in a world which is swaddled by communicaiton media, by films, books, magazines, radio programs, global cable TV, the Internet and video ...... Confronting this new public sphere means grasping the fundamental changes the mass media has wrought in the way we conceive of politics and culture."

Granted. What then?

Lumby says that in this postmodern world we have to rethink the old modernist dualism and assumptions about high and low, private and public, media and life etc given the diveristy of media and the plurality of new voices and groups. The media is become a vast collage of jostling diverse viewpoints, identities and genres; a sphere that is saturated with politics and which requires us to negotiate the different viewpoints and ways of speaking.

That's Lumby's argument. It is basically one about new media forms broadening and radicalising democracy.

It sort of finishes before it gets started. But this kind of postmodern argument has meant that only a handful of diehard Left intellectuals still rave against the culture industry today. The culture industry has been redefined as a respectable academic discipline, "popular culture", and it has long since ceased to be considered the opiate of the masses. It is now a legitimate terrain of contestation that provides scores of emancipatory possibilities.

What if we put the media forms to oneside and focus on democracy.

What suprises me is how hostile Lumby is to the New Right--which is symbolized by the one nation conservatism of Pauline Hanson. The New Right is seen as sinister, as being beyond the liberal pale. It is deeply racist underneath the new concept of "ethnicity".

No attempt is made to understand the undercurrent populist undercurrent that is gestures towards local autonomy, fiscal austerity and participatory forms of democracy.There is no analysis of the New Right's version of the theory of New Class domination and ideology (of political correctness)its critique of liberalism, and the violent populist rejection of liberalism's abstract universalism in favour of concrete particularity.For Lumby the New Right is really the Old Right.

A key flaw with Lumby's postmodernism is that her cultural media politics in favour of increased decomcracy is not connected to federalism. How is it possible to have radical (or direct, participatory or plebiscitary) democracy, without at the same time advocating a rigorous federal system guaranteeing the autonomy of small constituting states and the differences of regional communities?

Without federalism we are left with the centralized nation-state: the interventionist, liberal welfare state and the liberal conception of community as a bunch of abstract individuals coming together on the basis of accidental cultural identity traits.

What happens when you introduce the core categories, such as self-determination, radical democracy and federalism, into the mix? Who then are the real enemies? Who then is the opposition?

I'm on the road to Canberra. I'll post on Derrida and democracy here when I can, either later tonight or early tomorrow morning.

media mangement in liberal democracy

Over at Foucauldian Reflections Ali says that:

"Questioning and permanent questioning is the most important facet of Foucauldian politics. Those who are ruled are entitled to ask how they are being ruled, what are the implications of particular policies for their freedom, well being etc."

In the light of those remarks have a read of Mark Danner's response to Hacker and Cohen's replies to his earlier article How Bush Really Won in The New York Review of Books. It offers an insight into how the media was managed by the Republican campaign team in a presidential campaign. Danner says:

"As so often in journalism, the source offered the reporter access and the scoop; in exchange, the reporter in effect granted the source---in this case, the Bush strategist—the power to shape the storyline. The reporter thus publishes a supposed "inside story" about "scrambling" within the campaign that is in effect a kind of "false bottom" constructed by the campaign itself and intended to "fan the flames" of what is in fact a largely bogus story."

The example mentioned is controversy over the Bush campaign's first television ads, which offered a glimpse of a dead fireman being carried out of the World Trade Center site. In the article the New York Times reporters revealed that the campaign was "scrambling to counter criticism that his first television commercials crassly politicized the tragedy of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks."
Danner adds that:

"The Bush campaign's "shocking stumble" was, in Daniel Boorstin's term, a "pseudo-event"; indeed, our political campaigns are built largely of such pseudo-events and rely fundamentally on the press and the commentariat to play their necessary part in constructing them and conveying them to the public."

It is also an insight how the media is managed by governments in power so they stay in power. The source offers the journalist access and the scoop and the journalist becomes part of the political campaign.

If we come back to Ali's account of Foucault's understanding of questioning, we find Foucault arguing that he does not question modern institutions and practices because he has some definitive alternative. Foucault questions our political institutions and practices including the state because he thinks we are entitled to ask questions about things that affect our freedom from those who rule us in the name of freedom.

Foucault makes a distinction that is very useful in terms of the media management by governments. He distinquishes between the free speech of those who govern and the free speech of those who are governed. He says that those who are governed are entitled, and they can and must question those who govern them. We can question what those who govern do, of the meaning of their actions, of the decisions they have taken; and we can do so in the name of knowledge, the experience we have by virtue of our being citizens.

Foucault and deliberative democracy

Many deliberative democrats would regard the institutions of the liberal state--its constitutional assemblies, legislatures, courts, public hearings--as the most significant venues for deliberation.

The Foucauldian critique of deliberative democracy would highlight the disciplinary function of democracy and its discourse.

The discourse of liberal democracy has its shared set of assumptions and capabilities, which enable its adherents to assemble bits of information about politics into a coherent whole, or organize them around coherent narratives. The discourse of liberal democracy is a hegemonic discourse rather than a partial one.

Focauldians, such as Barry Hindess, would argue that participation in Senate inquiries requires disciplined attendance, putting aside personal convictions, a degree of self-restraint, an ability to talk reasonably. This disciplinary self-control constructs our identities and comportment as willing participants in, and supporters of, liberal democracy.

That has to be conceded. The rules of the game in a Senate inquiry such as this one require the particpants to conduct themselves and to speak in a certain way. The form of communication is restrictive as it is required to be dispassionate, reasoned and logical. It is much more restrictive than this kind of public inquiry, in the public sphere of civil society, which would allow different forms of communication, such as testimony, rhetoric and storytelling. And we have to acknowleddge that some citizens are better than others at articulating their arguments in rational reasonable terms required in a Senate inquiry.

But that does not mean that citzens participating in the Senate's inquiry into different cancer treatments adopt a resigned acceptance of the status quo.

Participation in the proposed cancer inquiry by the Senate requires a citizen to work within the formal institutions of liberal democracy. This is a problem solving context with an emphasis on practical outcomes, as the state is still the political entity for making enforceable collective decisons in response to social problems. The senate inquiry allows citizens the space to question the bio-medical discourse about cancer, and to put a case that some allied health treatments of cancer are worthwhile. It provides a space for citizens to introduce the counter discourse of social medicine.

Does this not allow non oppressive moments?

Secondly, the setting up of the inquiry by Senator Cook was premised on the recognition of difference and the assumption that deliberation is premised on difference. As Senator Cook said:

The health debate is understandably dominated by doctors, heath-care professionals, health bureaucrats and academics, all with the apparent needs of the patient at heart but with transparent self-interests of their own. If this inquiry can stand in the shoes of patients and unambiguously take their point of view, it will be a breath of fresh air.

Not all parties to the disspute about the efficacy of the biomedical and allied health cancer treatments see themselves in competition and are concerned to win the win the argument. Some will operate in terms of this kind of strategic instrumental rationality (the AMA?) but others will operates in terms of dialogue that seeks some form of reasoned agreement though not necessarily a consensus. Agonistic difference is an aspect of the political and so we have deliberation across political difference.

What we will seen in the Senate inquiry is a contestation of discourses--a biomedical one and allied health one-- one that goes beyond the undemocratic contestation controlled by public relations experts, spin doctors and demagogues. And it may well represent a discursive shift in the way we understand cancer.

science & democracy

The politics of science. I can see the shift away from a realist metaphysics, namely:

"...the metaphysical universe of modernity...[that is]...the concept of nature as an objective entity that obeys its own laws and scientists who claim a privileged authority to represent the facts of this external realm and to interpret their implications for our lives. [This gives us] a world in which facts and values, reality and morality, science and politics, and causal necessity and freedom are seen...as dichotomous."

Latour rejects this realist philosophy of science for a more constructivist one. Well you could say that capitalism requires the subjugation of the entire objective world, which includes nature, to ensure its production. Nature must be made to appear under the instrumental control of the capitalist through the use of science and technology.

And there is a big literature on technocracy: on the way that technology and science could bring about a utopia, a society of harmony, security, abundance, and leisure; in order for these ideals to be realized, society would have to conform to the needs of the machine; with this transformation of society and its superstructure needing to be supervised by an elite group of scientists and engineers. Technocracy is a threat to democracy.

I presume this technocratic figure of modernity is what Latour is arguing against.

But I cannot see the new connection between science and democracy, other than a constructivist philosophy of science being more respectful of the multitude of diverse viewpoints, more egalitarian and more deliberative, and its denizens are ready to resolve conflicts through compromise rather than by appealing to unchallengeable knowledge or final truths.There seems to be nothing about an ethically informed and politically engaged science.

Yet technocracy has returned in the new guise of pro-genetic engineering, that defends progress as a good thing, and tells us to trust institutional science to make the right decisions.

That trust should be questioned given the philosophical background of technicism behind genetic engineering. Egbert Schuurman says:

"Technicism reflects a fundamental attitude which seeks to control reality, to resolve all problems with the use of scientific-technological methods and tools. Technicism entails the pretense of human autonomy to control the whole of reality. Human mastery seeks victory over the future. Humans are to have everything their way. We want to solve all problems, including the new problems caused by technicism; and to guarantee, whenever possible, material progress. Technicism obeys two fundamental norms, as if they are the two main commandments: technical perfection (or effectiveness) and efficiency."

That implies that it cannot make ethical judgements.The manner in which, and the means by which the ends of human mastery are achieved through scientific-technological control are not put into question.Nor are the ends that sanction the instrumental means of scientific-technological control.

democracy on the ropes

A quote from Justice Tony Fitzgerald's speech launching Margo Kingston's book, 'Not happy John! Defending our democracy', at Glebebooks in Sydney on June 22:

"My brief remarks will be directed to the damage that mainstream politicians generally are doing to our democracy...Mainstream political parties routinely shirk their duty of maintaining democracy in Australia.

This is nowhere more obvious than in what passes for political debate, in which it is regarded as not only legitimate but clever to mislead. Although effective democracy depends on the participation of informed citizens, modern political discourse is corrupted by pervasive deception. It is a measure of the deep cynicism in our party political system that many of the political class deride those who support the evolution of Australia as a fair, tolerant, compassionate society and a good world citizen as an un-Australian, “bleeding-heart” elite, and that the current government inaccurately describes itself as conservative and liberal.

It is neither.

It exhibits a radical disdain for both liberal thought and fundamental institutions and conventions. No institution is beyond stacking and no convention restrains the blatant advancement of ideology. The tit-for-tat attitude each side adopts means that the position will probably change little when the opposition gains power at some future time. A decline in standards will continue if we permit it....In order to perform our democratic function, we need, and are entitled to, the truth. Nothing is more important to the functioning of democracy than informed discussion and debate. Yet a universal aim of the power-hungry is to stifle dissent. Most of us are easily silenced, through a sense of futility if not personal concern."

There lies the argument for deliberative democracy.

What then is the opposing view?

The opposing view ---the political consensus of the two major parties---is that economic growth comes first democracy second because economic growth creates the pre-conditions for democracy. Economic growth requires strong technocratic governance.

Now you can quite easily argue the other way. Strong economic growth has depended on a well functioning democracy and constitutional stability. What would happen to the economy if we decided our political conflicts through civil war? Australia could not have emerged as a succesful capitalist economy without a stable constitutional base, and a functioning democracy that provides for democratically elected federal and state parliaments.

Tony Fitzgerald's words, " our democracy", "if we permit it", "perform our democratic function, we need, and are entitled to the truth", [m]ost of us are easily silenced', imply us Australians speaking as citizens. Yet the word is never mentioned by Fitzgerald, even though we commonly understand citizenship to be relevant to our understanding of democracy. Is not freedom of political communication and discussion a necessary implicvation of of the Constitution's doctrine of representative democracy?

The question of citizenship is fundamental to looking at the relationship between the individual and the State. How do we determine the rights that flow from citizenship?

Is not the centrality of citizenship is the right to participate in, or to be consulted in government. Citizenship is about democratic participation in government. Citizens are those who have the right to vote. Citizens have the right to participate in, and influence our democratic system.

Does not the development of implied rights in the Australian Constitution also raise the question of whose rights? If you have the right to vote, then do you have the right to rely on the Constitutional protection of free speech in trying to invalidate a law. Do non-citizens have the protection of implied constitutional rights?

Key questions. Yet silence from Fitzgerald.

Has our political language decayed that much that we no longer talk about citizenship? Greg Craven's Conversations with the Constitution is strong on federalism and constitional order but does not explore the relationship of citzenship to the Constitution. And though the High Court is the arch of federalism it has has little to say about citizenship. Neither Craven nor the High Court seem much concerned that the Constitution still doesn't refer to citizenship.

Let me conclude with an insight from an early text by Habermas. In his 1962 work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas argued that the competitive pressures of a free market economy eventually require state intervention and regulation, which in turn produces increased competition and still more regulation. Finally the state becomes a major player in the economic arena and is faced with what he called a "legitimation crisis" -- a set of normative contradictions -- such as the conflict between serving special interests and advancing the common good. A vibrant public sphere is the only safeguard against such a crisis, Habermas insisted. Some form of public discourse about common affairs (dialogue that arises naturally among citizens, rather than the sort orchestrated by the state), as well as an arena in which it can happen, was therefore necessary, he said.

political deliberation: looking back & forward

Parliamentary sovereignty means executive dominance after June 30 2005.

If deliberative democracy is to flourish in the new political situation of executive dominance and parliamentary sovereignty, then we citizens require more than the standard constitutional checks and balances. As Margo Kingston points out, we are lose a lot when the control of the Senate passes to the Conservatives after June 2005.

Important issues for deliberative democracy are at stake here. As Ali Rizvi says in his post, 'Towards Theorising Postmodern Activism,' at Foucauldian Reflections:

"One of the main functions of capitalist governance is to normalise the ideas, to neutralise them, take the sting out of them etc. through placing them within the discourse, and then constantly multiplying the discourse rather than repress them through inhibiting the discourse. Repression is not a chosen strategy because it is not effective in the long run among other things." (See papers, work in progress, notes etc. if link does not work).

To counter this we citizens will need a variety of spaces for us to express our views and to engage in political debate on public issues. A lot of work will be required from liberals and radicals to contest the spin and normalizing of what Margo calls an alliance of Big Government, Big Media and Big Industry.

These spaces for genuine political deliberation in a liberal polity by citizens have been few and far between in the past, as indicated by this passage from Tom Fitzgerald's last Nation editorial, when he passed the baton to Nation Review in July 1972:

"The liberal and radical strains in Australian intellectual life, though substantial in number, are always struggling to have a vehicle of communication… whatever the reasons for the difficulties they are persistent and liberals and radicals, without sinking their differences, must love one another or die as an articulate force in this country."

Nation Review eventually expired, sometime in the late 1970s I think.

This lack of public space to engage in political debate means that our oppositional discourses (ie., the shared means we have of making sense of the world embedded in language) become impoverished. Often the assumptions, judgements, contentions, and dispositions lie unquestioned by others, and we become dogmatic and closed in our thinking. We cannot afford to allow that to happen over the next six years.

We need to create new spaces.

Margo Kingston's recent book, Not Happy, John! indicates that she is alive to this, and has been thinking about it off and on for a while. (See my previous posts here and here. ) She argues that the Liberal Party under John Howard has become a party of social conservatism and market fundamentalism, and more closely aligned with the conservative English Tories and American Republicans, than any genuine (social?) liberal party.

Margo explicitly addresses the renewal democracy in her last chapter of Not Happy, John! Entitled, 'Democrazy: Ten Ideas for Change', it starts from this quote by 'Gara LaMarche at the Open Society Institute’ in the US. He says that progressives:

"...have been in the posture of criticism for so long, have had to spend so much time fending off attacks on hard won gains, and on values and institutions we hold dear, that we have virtually lost the capacity for critical imagination. We can't see the forest we would like to dwell in because we are trying to protect tree after tree from the buzz saw."

I've suggested that 'the forest we would like to dwell in' is best described as deliberative democracy. Maybe, just maybe, it is liberalism that depletes our democratic political imagination?

I would argue that constitutional liberalism is thin on creating the diverse spaces that would enable debate and dialogue, as the institutions of the state have been their main focus of political deliberation. They focus on the House of Representatives, the Senate, the judiciary etc. Thus Carmen Lawrence's focus is on strengthing the parliamentary institutions so as to empower parliament against the dominant executive. Lawrence suggests:

"* establishing joint Estimates and Legislation Committees with power to question public servants and Ministers from either House, take submissions and commission independent research;
* giving Parliamentary Committees the power to put up legislation arising from their inquiries - especially if the government has refused to respond to its recommendations;
* allowing private bills with the backing of a set percentage of voters to be brought on for debate by a sponsoring MP;
* commissioning citizens' juries or deliberative polls on contentious and complex policy matters – getting together cross-sections of ‘ordinary Australia’ to hear the arguments and discuss the merits of issues as wide-ranging as water conservation and free trade agreements;
* inviting expert and community representatives to address the chamber in session and engage in debate with members; and
* strengthening freedom of information legislation."

Good ideas. But that kind of reform of Parliament is out of the question for many a long year. Remember the radical centre has been wipped out. The Greens? Not until they obtain the balance of power in the Senate. That is up to a decade away.

Carmen's proposals suggest a benign inclusion into the institutions of the state. The ACF is an example of this inclusion through its linkages to the ALP. As conservatives traditionally act to repel destablizing threats to the established order, so they will be wary of political inclusion. We need to look elsewhere. To active citizenship.

So what do Margo and her social liberal colleagues suggest on how to address the above problem? Do they shift beyond the institutions of the state to civil society? Do they start developing the idea of an oppositional civil society?

The suggestion in this post suggests a new website where journalists and Australian citizens can trust each other and work together. This is what Antony Lowenstein calls internet activism, which is idea 8 in 'Democrazy: Ten Ideas for Change'. Presumably, this is going to something along the lines of the US sites that Antony mentions, such as MoveOn.Org, and Prwatch.org and Adbusters.org

It is at this point that we need to introduce some theory by returning to Ali Rizvi's work on Foucault's understanding of the double character of freedom. Ali says:

"The apparent paradox of capitalism is that in order to increase the utility and productive capacity of individuals and populations it requires to keep expanding the ambit of freedom and diversity, but in order to make individuals and populations docile and hence governable and manageable, it needs to limit this diversity by setting limits so that it remains manageable. ....

....Capitalism resolves the dilemma through realising the double role freedom can play. Freedom is central for the functioning of a capitalist system not only as the precondition for enhancing utility and diversity, but for its double role as the precondition of enhancing diversity and imposing singularity on multiplicity."

It is here that Foucault makes an important point. On Ali's interpretation:

"Foucault’s claim is that in capitalism the governance of diversity is maintained through freedom itself and not (primarily) through repression. Capitalism’s interests are not fulfilled by curbing and limitations per se. ... Foucault defines "government’ as the structure (ing) of the possible field of action of others" ,....The Capitalist logic is based on a realisation that freedom is the essential element of ‘government’ (management) in the sense that capitalism recognises the ‘double’ character of freedom. To desire freedom is not only to expand the arena of choice (diversity) but it is also to make oneself governable (manageable)."

The net activism being created by Margo is situated itself within the double character of freedom and government rationality.

Hayek: constitutional liberalism

The basis for legitimacy says Hayek in a constitutional system is the existence of a system of laws that cannot be easily changed. The basis of legitimacy is the rule of law, not popular sovereignty.

A quote:

"The fundamental distinction between a constitution and ordinary laws is similar to that between laws in general and their application by the courts to a particular case: as in deciding concrete cases the judge is bound by general rules, so the legislature in making particular laws is bound by the more general principles of the constitution. The justification for these distinctions is also similar in both cases: as a judicial decision is regarded as just only if it is in conformity with a general law, so particular laws are regarded as just only if they conform to more general principles. And as we want to prevent the judge from infringing the law for some particular reason, so we also want to prevent the legislature from infringing certain general principles for the sake of temporary and immediate aims." F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty

Does that mean the people cannot change the liberal constitution through a referendum?

I raise the question naively because there is a tension betwen the idea of liberal constitutionalism ( that the powers of government should be exercised within strict limits) and democracy (the will of the people is paramount). Democracy represents a threat to the rule of law.

Update
For Hayek the organization of society is already given, as the market order has evolved spontaneously.The institutions which define the market order and protect liberty and progress are in existence. The rule of law as a set of general rules is constitutive of the market order and has emerged and evolved with it.

So the task of politics is to protect the sphere of liberty from encroachment. Moving beyond this spells disaster and leads to the dark night of totalitarianism.

from liberal to deliberative democracy

In the last chapter of her recent Not Happy, John! book, 'Democracy: Ten Ideas for Change', Margo Kingston says that the book's central premise is:

"...that just about every citizen, whatever, their political colouring, can unite on the need for an honest, open, fair, and representative democracy. If we get that then we all will have a chance to have a say, and the representatives of all of us have a chance to debate and decide the policies our society believes to be in its interests."

Democracy does need defending. And the defence of democracy has a core issue for the social liberals gathered around Margo Kingston's Webdiary.

But why representative democracy and not deliberative democracy?

We should raise this question because liberalism has been fairly silent on the issue of democracyas the emphasis is on the protection of freedom against the state (and oppressive democratic majorities) through legal means. Even John Stuart Mill, who sought to promote more expanded and informed public debate, wanted to contain that debate and prevent it from upsetting the rationality of government.

Does not contemporary liberal democracy represent a compromise between liberalism (individual rights) and democracy (popular control)? Is not liberalism premised on an account of politics as the pursuit, interaction and aggregation of private individual interests?

The competent and passionate citizens associated with Webdiary are part of the deliberation on public issues around the power structures operating the smooth constitutional surface of the liberal state in Webdiary. They are engaged in a collective discussions and decision making about Webdiary. In their critical deliberation they are transgressing liberal constitutionalism (limited government, the rule of law, and rights as a "negative" protection against arbitrary governmental interference with one's beliefs and activities). On this account individuals are left largely to their own devices in their pursuit of happiness. In these endeavors, persons rely on the principal engine of social cooperation, the free market. This is the Manchester liberalism' of the mid-nineteenth century, which has resurfaced as libertarianism, or more commonly economic rationalism.

My judgement is that the political grouping around Webdairy stands for social liberalism and the ethical state. Which means what?

Margo puts her understanding of left liberalism this way:

"Small l liberal voters have very strong views about the relationship between the citizen and the State. That was the beginning of liberalism hundreds of years ago when the struggle first started to take power away from the kings and dictators and repose it in the people. So civil liberties, civil rights and personal privacy have always been important to liberals.

In a traditional sense the left side has the view that the state is good for you, and the right side has the view that it is wise to keep the State at arms length at all times and have firm structures in place at all times to keep it that way and preserve the right to challenge and have independent adjudication."

Margo tacitly claims that lefty social liberalism is a development of liberal constitutionalism and as an heir of the classical liberals. The left liberal emphasis is on freeing people through the welfare managerial state, centralized government, redistributing income, reforming the public’s social attitudes and values (multiculturalism, reconciliation, the republic etc) and the managerial revolution to entrench the power of the administrative bureaucracy.

You can argue that during the twentieth century the people voted to hand over power to "public administrators" and the judges, who became the agents for practicing democracy on our behalf. Democracy was not equated with meaningful self-rule but with being socialized by administrators.

This social liberalism would be see as a deformation, not a development, of classical liberalism. That would be the argument of Frederich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, for whom “liberalism” meant an economy free from the burdens of excessive government.That is the debate within liberalism that has been going on for around 30 years or more.

What Margo is arguing is that the whole notion of a centralized state that takes power from the hands of the many and place it in the hands of a detached few is anti-democratic. Hence the shift of emphasis away from liberalism to democracy, deliberation and citizenship in her Not Happy, John! Under the managerial state freedom has been seized by bureaucratic elites who now seeking control over the day-to-day affairs of individuals.

If we make the move to democracy, then we need to talk in terms of different kinds of democracy. Thus mass democracy is a government that rules in the name of the "people" but is highly centralized and operates increasingly with an ethnic-cultural core. It is a bureaucratic empire that distributes political favors and provides a minimal level of physical protection, but is no longer capable of or interested in practicing self-government. It is the democracy of the Whitlamite ALP.

Mass democracy can therefore be contrasted with deliberative democracy.

political deliberation

I am reading Margo Kingston's Not Happy, John! The core of the book is about the Howard Government's attack on Australian democracy, a defence of democracy from this attack, and some positive ideas about how we citizens can set about deepening democracy.

I did find some parts of the book naive. In Harry Heidleberg's chapter, called 'Ever More Democratic', Harry writes:

"The [media] moguls need to be reminded that in a democracy the people run the joint. We delegate our power to our political representatives but we don't do so without caveats. We know they can't be trusted with unlimited power so the Senate was designed to mitigate the power of the House of the Representatives. ....That's why a large number of people habitually vote one way in the House of Reps and another in the Senate...John Howard seeks to undermine the balance of power by detoothing the Senate, but he won't get away with it because the framers of the Constitution were smart enough to write us into the equation. Sadly for Howard we need to approve his power grab, and that will never happen."

Alas, the people voted Howard a majority in the House and Senate in 2004. He didn't have to grab power. It is was democratically given to him by the people. So we citizens become passive observers in the theatre of our democracy.

Nor did we, the people, ever run the joint, as Harry claims. The executive did within the constraints of the Senate. We, the people, had little say over the neo-liberal economic reforms of the Hawke/Keating Government in the 1980s and 1990s.

What Harry has put his finger on though is the way Margo Kingston's Webdiary "short circuited a ritualised Canberra-style debate where slogans are tossed back and forth in mindless synchronicity."

Webdiary is a part of deliberative democracy, as it is a place where public reasoning about public issues can, and does, take place. Even though Webdiary is tucked inside the big corporate media, and it is on the edges of Fairfax that the idea of political deliberation is actually being put into practice.

Harry Heidleberg gives the following account of his experience of the Webdiary process:

"The Webdiary trip taught me that ....[if] both sides [of politics] adopt a take-no-prisoners style of debate we end up with a barren sterile discussion in which the language may be strong, but the blows are as meaningful as those we see in World Championship Wrestling. Denunciations become hollow and laughable. I've learnt that meaningful blows are the ones you land against yourself or the ones where you let your guard down and give your opponent a free go."

Another word for Harry's 'process of engagement' is political deliberation. This involves reflection, participation, being amenable to changing judgements, persuasion rather than coercion, and the discussion and debate being run by citizens.

The limitations of Harry's piece is that though he sees democracy is under threat there is no reflection on deliberative democracy. He talks about core democratic values in terms of threat to media diversity, the lack of education to empower citizens and the failure of ethics in government and business. These are road blocks to a better democracy.

Democracy is seen in terms of bringing people back into democracy. And the touchstone of democracy is seen as people running the joint. But there is no reflection on the constitutional liberal understanding of democracy.

Deliberative democracy

The turn to deliberative democracy makes sense in the light of these examples of the political intimidation of public debate on matters of public importance.

Deliberative democracy highlights the way that democratic legitimacy depends on the ability or opportunity to participate in the effective deliberation on the part of those citizens subject to collective decisions. To participate in deliberation means argument, rhetoric, humor, emotion testimony, story telling or gossip. It implies an emphasis on a strong critical theory of communication, an oppositional civil society and a public sphere as sources of democratic critique and renewal. Deliberative democracy implies changing views and opinions, reasoned agreement through deliberation and and a critical voice.

This is a different conception of democracy to that of rational choice theory, which treats democracy as the strategic pursuit of goals and interests on the part of individuals and other actors. Democratic politics is seen as a contest in which individual actors compete for advantage.

I am going to put the conflict between deliberative democracy and ratinal cholice theory (politics as economics) to one side as my interest is in the way that deliberative democracy is embodied in the everyday work of the Australian or American Senate.

Saying this places me at odds with Hannah Arendt and Jurgen Habermas.They retrieve a deliberative rationality from the reasonable public discourse embodied in Aristotle's phronesis and praxis in the classical polis and rework in opposition to a hegemonic instrumental rationality in modernity.

Arendt's duality is in terms of politics (free relaxed discourse of elite individuals about matters of principle, liberty, particpation etc) and the social, which the world of inequality, crime, poverty, work .unemployment and environmental problems that is dealt with by the expert instrumental rationality of bureaucrats and administrators.

Habermas' duality is the lifeworld of social interaction where individuals construct and interpret their identity of themselves, morality, asethetics and common culture. This is constrated to the system, which is the world of state and economy ruled by instrumental rationality, cost efficiency and technical manipulation.

Arendt locates deliberation in politics not in the social, whilst Habermas locates deliberation (communicative rationality) in the lifeworld not the system and he seeks to defend the lifewold against further colonization from the system. By saying that deliberation (deliberative democracy) operates within the Senate, I am locating it within the world of instrumental rationality.

executive dominance

I have often argued for a revival of Parliament as a more significant part of the political system, often centring on the role of the Senate, or a growing of the scope for the Senate's committee input. This is a check and balance on the dominance of the executive. It is the powerful role of the Senate and the work of its committees that constitute the structural checks on the powers of Ministers and the executive.

On this account the villian is the executive, the victim is the House of Representatives and the saviour is the Senate.

Things are beginning to change as a result of the last election. It is a historic change.

The flavour of federal Parliament is that things are inwaiting for June 30th 2005, when the Coalition has control of the Senate. You can feel the muscle of executive dominance building up. The Coalition is in no hurray to rush their legislation through the next seven months. They can afford to sit and wait, as the Coalition will have a stranglehold on the Senate for around a decade.

Even if the ALP regain the House of Representatives in 2007, it will face a Coalition controlled Senate.

So how do we understand executive dominance?

My understanding is the executive dominates and controls the Parliament as a consequence of a disciplined two-party system. The party that has the majority of seats in the House of Representative can legislate and govern with few retrictions on its legislation.

The constitution appears to assume that parliament holds the executive to account. The Constitution does not codify that role or provide Parliament with accountibility mechanisms outide simple majority rule such as, independent Speaker, committees chaired by non-government members, Parliamentary confirmation of senior appointments to the public service and statutory authorities.

All we have are the conventions of reponsible government surrounding ministerial accountablity to Parliament. And I am not sure what that means anymore.

In contrast, Craven appears to argue that our constitutional system depends for its efficacy on a pervasive constitutional psychology.

In his Conversations with the Constitution Greg Craven talks about the fear of executive dominance. He says:

"This fear is the negative polarity of a profound ambivalence toward the executive. On the one hand, we are alarmed by it, and wish to limits its powers. On the other hand, we are highly depend upon it, demanding that it order our society and protect us from all ills, mortal, moral, and monetary. Simply, we expect our executive to govern us, but worry that they will take that expectation to heart."

Craven goes on to diagnose a fatal disease of executive government in our political tradition.

"There is only one fatal disease of executive governments in our tradition: an administration can survive being 'uncaring', 'unresponsive', even 'cruel' or 'dictatorial', but let a consensus form that it is 'weak' and it will succumb more quickly than a cane toad in an icebox.This is our relationship with the executive: we fear and mistrust it as the constitutional equivalent of a standover man, but if it is not adequately ruthless, we will despise it like a ruckman without punch."

This is about psychology of power exercised and not about the conventions that constrain executive dominance through responsible government. It is the psychology of strong government through executive dominance.

I would suggest that the fatal disease is that the political parties control the executive and the executive controls parliament (both the House and Senate).The major obstacle to reform is the increasing constraint of party discpline, as no political party is going to place limits on their power.

The disease is the vacuum in the heart of the Constitution about the exercise of political power by a dominant executive. The remarks by Justice Kirby in a recent speech are a counter to this. He says:

" ...in a federation, with a written constitution, the notion of unchecked legislative power, that can diminish fundamental human rights without hindrance or protection from the courts, is not likely to prevail in the long run, in the antipodes anymore than elsewhere."

For more on legal bedrocks and parliamentary sovereignty see this post.

truth in politics

Raymond Gaita's understanding of truth in politics does away with any understanding of truth as Truth (ie Absolute Truth). He has a far more prosaic understanding of truth. He says:

"Anything that counts as serious reflection will acknowledge itself to be answerable to the contrast between how things appear to us and how they are. Everyone knows that we must struggle to adjust distorting perspectives, free ourselves from prejudice, try to resist propaganda, try to resist the fashions of the times, try to overcome vanity and fears, try to resist our vulnerability to sentimentality, bathos and cliche, and so on. This is as true of narrative as it is of philosophy. These efforts are not efforts to be objective with a capital "O", they are just what it means to try to be objective in its ordinary, workaday sense of efforts "oriented towards truth".

What then is this more ordinary workaday understanding of truth?

"To seek to avoid sentimentality, for example, is to seek to avoid falsehood, as much as efforts to check on the facts are efforts to avoid falsehood. But then, one could put the point the other way about - perhaps more congenial to those who fear that talk of truth disguises an inclination to reach for a capital "T". To try to be truthful, to orient one's efforts towards truth, is nothing more than to make one's efforts answerable to those critical concepts whose applications mark our efforts to overcome vanity, seek out of the relevant facts, overcome sentimentality and so on."

We have this everyday sense operating in terms of politics around the Tampa affair or going to war with Iraq. There was a lack of honesty here. That honesty has lead to distrust between governors and governed, between politics and people. The straight talk of politicians and them being level with the people has given way to lies and spin to keep themselves in power.

Keeping themselves in power is all that matters. Everything is now bent towards ensuring this end. Even sections of the media particapte. Politics is about war and destroying the enemy. Distortion, polemics and misrepresentation have become standard operating procedure of the conservative media.

Gaita concludes his essay by saying:

"The mendacity that now pollutes the life of this nation provokes a degree of understandable cynicism that makes trust an almost saintly virtue. Lower standards and a diminished regard for truthfulness in the public institutions entrusted to serve our need for truth - most notably in the universities and media - make it difficult for us to develop the kind of judgement necessary for trust to be lucid. Both undermine the space in which we must try to learn again about the nature of political virtue and what it can mean for politics to be a vocation."

We do need to recover the old language of political virtue and the old sense of politics as public service and not as a career. But it is a political language that has been emptied out of any public meaning in a neo-liberal world.

Gaita: truthfulness in politics#3

Gaita's argument now shifts away from the decay of political language to defending the idea of politics as a vocation based on love of country. He does so by mentioning an objection:

"The idea of politics as a realm sui generis - a realm whose distinctive concerns are not merely the satisfaction of our pre-political interests (security, economic wellbeing and so on and nor merely a combination of these and moral concerns) - has its dangers. Its potential slide into romanticism is obvious enough."

He makes no mention of the obvious danger of romanticism. This is a gap because he makes much of the romantic category of the nation as a spirit of the people. Is the danger of romanticism this?

Gaita responds to the above objection by saying that idea of politics as a realm sui generis merely elaborates the:

"...implications of what it means to have that identity-forming attachment to a country that we call patriotism and distinguish it from its false semblance, jingoism."

Gaita says that the aftermath of war the fear is that patriotism (love of country) will degenerate into jingoism and, in response, we should link responsible citizenship with internationalism or cosmopolitianism. He says that it would be a mistake to yield to this internationalism:

"It is just a fact of human life that many, perhaps most people, develop identity-forming attachments to places and to institutions. Not all of them, it is true. Trees have roots whereas human beings have legs, author George Steiner reminded us. But most people don't like to wander all their lives, especially not at the beginning of their lives nor at the end. The human soul needs warmth, and for most people that comes from belonging, from being in surroundings that are familiar and to which they have affectionate attachments.For most people, their deepest attachments are local, to a particular part of a country, perhaps a farm or a town, sometimes a city."

He makes no mention of the environment (ecology) that we are a part of, identify with, and care for its natural heritage. There is no connection to a dwelling ethics or needing to live differently on the land.

Gaita says that often this love of country comes into awareness when we have lost our country in the sense that:

"....and live under foreign occupation, denied the right to speak their language, to honour their national institutions, to fully remember their past and to pass on its treasure to future generations. In such terrible circumstances people realise that responsible love of country will seek protection for what is loved and is owed to future generations. In modern times, the means of protection is almost always the nation state, for it alone has the necessary military power, of itself, or more commonly, in alliance with other nation states. Protection is sought not just for the institutions of citizenship - the rule of law, democracy and so on, as these might be relatively interchangeable between different countries - but also for those institutions as they are infused by the spirit of a particular people."

We can also say that love of country comes into awarness when we have realised that we have trashed the country and laid waste to the environment in the name of economic development.

The above paragraph can be interpreted as a response to Chris Sheil's objection that he has no idea of what Gaita is talking about. Chris says:

"....the essay slips and slides its way along, completely discombobulating me about two-thirds of the way through by conflating 'love of country' and my own idea of 'belonging', which again presses on my reject button. All in all, as I can't really tell what he's talking about, or as I can't accept his emotional and personal premises, I've no idea if he makes his case."

Why the emotional rejection button on love of country?

What is the problem here? Love of country has been distinguished from jingoism and internationalism and identified with attachments to place (locality and region), to the country (both landscape and institutions) and to a responsible love (care and concern) that seeks to protect what is loved (valued) and owed to future generations (eg., healthy rivers and good universities). It is about both democratic institutions and the Australian development and understanding of these ---eg., the welfare state.

Do we citizens not want to use politics to protect our universal health care ssytem and our wilderness areas? Protect them because they enable us to live a flourishing life, well lived?

Gaita: truthfulness in politics#2

In the previous post Gaita had argued that the implication of the connection between truthfulness in politics and love for country is that ethical considerations are integral to a serious conception of politics. Gaita mentions the Aristotlean (and Marxist) dictum that the ethical requires completion by the political, without mentioning what that actually means.

He argues for a modification of this by considering a classical objection, that ethics and politics are in deep ways irreconcilable. He mentions Plato and Max Weber's 'Politics as Vocation' essay.

His argument modifies the Aristotlean dictum by acknowledging the need for politicians to have dirty hands. Gaita says that:

'Readiness to do evil when it is necessary to safeguard the conditions of political communality is, as Weber put it, the most salient aspect of the "ethic of responsibility" that defines a political vocation. But it defines it only when it is in genuine tension with what he called the "ethics of absolute ends."....Politicians must, as politicians, sometimes do what morally they must not do. That dilemma, soberly acknowledged, constitutes the misery and the dignity of a political vocation.'

Gaita says that a politics that fails to acknowledge that tension in political reality is suspect:

"Politics that avoids or subverts that tension declines into moralism of a kind that threatens the conditions of political communality, into reckless adventurism or into the ruthless pursuit of economic or strategic interests justified by appeal to necessity when none exists."

However, Gaita then makes another qualification.

He says that acknowledging the reality that politicians must sometimes lie if they are honourably to rise to the responsibilities of their calling "is a far cry from the cynical expectation that politicians will lie to protect their parties and even their careers."

That is fair enough. Then he makes a good point about our political language:

"Because our political language is now so debased, we think little of the difference between what belongs to the very nature of politics, and what, contingently if pervasively, politicians do. There is no good reason to think that our expectation that politicians will routinely lie to promote party and career is an insight into the nature of politics. It seems, to the contrary, to reveal incapacity to understand the possibilities in politics. Our cynicism is not so much a moral failing as it is the expression of how impoverished our life with the language of politics has become."

Gaita says that what often looks like a conflict between ethics and politics is more likely to be a conflict within ethics.

What this part of his argument is trying to do is to show that the flaw in someone who says that politics is always answerable to the ethical. His argument is that such a position :

"...is as dangerous to a sober sense of political responsibility as the belief that it is never answerable to the ethical. In their different ways, but just as surely, each undermines an understanding of the integrity of a politics that must rise to a lucid love of country. Most - perhaps all - loves stand in complex, sometimes tense, relations to ethics. Love of country is no exception."

And so we come back to the touchstone of love of country. It is this particular touchstone that many people on the left will have big problems with. Chris Sheils is one example. Chris says that:

"The essay gets off to an impossible start, imo, by standing on the notion of 'love of country'. Can you 'love a country', I immediately wonder? What is love? What do we mean by 'country'"?

Chris gives an answer in terms of 'belonging.'This can be developed in terms of belonging to a place that is our home which we care about.

Gaita says that from his love of country perspective, the common view, that the pervasive mendacity of the Howard Government does not seriously threaten the interests that politicians are elected to promote and protect, is a form of cynicism. It is cynicism that "expresses not not so much the abandonment of standards as the loss of key political concepts." Thus we come back to Don Watson's idea of the decay of public language. Gaita says that a sign of this conceptuual loss:

"A sign of the conceptual loss that I have been pointing to can be seen in the fact that in the universities, serious talk of a vocation gave way to talk of a profession and that in politics, talk of a vocation moved quickly past talk of a profession onto talk of a career. Perhaps that is why so many people accept that there is nothing in the very nature of politics, as there is in professions like law or medicine, for example, that should make politicians ashamed to lie as often as they seem to - ashamed, not just as human beings but as politicians. Few people believe that politicians who lie regularly disgrace their profession. The ethical standards of a profession do not only regulate the conduct of its practitioners, they define what it is to be a professional of this or that kind. Were they merely regulative rules, like the rules of the road, observance of them could not be a deep source of pride and satisfaction, so deep as to be partly constitutive of a person's identify."

He adds that our failure to see politics as more than a career is more than the effect of longstanding disillusionment with the conduct of politicians.

It is also about our historical memory that what were once standards constitutive of an honourable profession (and before that, a vocation) are now merely rules (considerably relaxed) that protect us from the low behaviour that we have come to expect of many politicians.

Hence the decay of our political language. Raymond Gaita says that he puts his point about the decay of political language (ie. a conceputal loss) because it would be misleading to say that we have ceased to believe in vocations. He says:

"We have not, for good or for bad reasons, come to believe that the concept of a profession is better suited to characterising the defining responsibilities (in both senses) of teaching, nursing, doctoring and so on. Rather, the concept has fallen away from us, or perhaps we from it. We see it only intermittently and dimly. Certain ways of speaking have gone dead on us."

What replaces this old way of speaking and acting (comporting) is the scripted and rehearsed language of political marketing.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Raymond Gaita: truth in politics#1

There is an essay by Raymond Gaita, the Australian Catholic philosopher, on truth in politics in Friday's Review section of the Australian Financial Review. This is a topical issue given the Children overboard affair in Australia in 2001, the bad reasons advanced for the Iraq war, and the Swift Boat Veterans affair in the current US presidential race. Truth in politics is about trust in politics.

Basically Gaita ties a practical conception of truth in politics to patriotism (love of country,) and he sees the mendacity of the Howard era as polluting that love. He re-establishes the classical tradition between ethics and politics in which the ethical requires completion by the political and the political is answerable to the ethical.

I will spell out Gaita's argument because it is a complex one, and few people would argue for the truthfulness in politics from the perspective of a love of country. Christopher Sheil says that he cannot even understand what Gaita is talking about. Many would be, and are, sympathetic to this response.

Gaita starts argument by introducing Paul Keating's Redfern speech:

"Even if the lies of their politicians do not at all affect their material interests, pervasive mendacity can defile citizens' love of country, making it impossible for them to love clear-sightedly without pain. In one of the great speeches of our recent history, former prime minister Paul Keating expressed his pained love for Australia in the shame he felt because of past injustices and our refusal to acknowledge them adequately in full truthfulness. "We took the traditional lands, committed the murders, took the children," he said in his 1992 Redfern address."

We need to tell the truth in politics because of our concerns about our countryin which we live. Gaita says that the 'we' in the above passage refers to:

"...a "we" of fellowship - the kind people mean when they suffer together or rejoice together, or the kind they mean when they speak of their common mortality and intend to refer to more than the fact that all human beings die."

This fellowship (fraternity) is a political one of citizenship.

Gaita then goes onto link truth to a need for truth.Truth and truthfulness matter to us in politics for at least three reasons. He describes the first reason thus:

"Most obviously they matter because they bring practical benefits. We....want our bridges to stand, our doctors to cure us, our lawyers to defend us competently, and so on.....we even encourage people to seek truth for non-practical reasons - for its own sake - because we hope that it will increase the yield of groundbreaking work."

Gaita says that the second reason why truthfulness matters in politics is the need for:

"....the truthfulness of the institutions that can give her the information she needs - most obviously, independent media. Those institutions are the instruments that are necessary to satisfy a need for truth that is not itself instrumental. It is consistent, however, with that kind of need for truthful institutions - political and others.."

Gaita says that the third concern for why truthfulness matters in politics is:

"... Lovers of their country [needing] politicians to honour that love. Citizens who also love their country can hold their politicians to account when the mendacity of their politicians affects their material interest and when it undermines their capacity of be lucid about important events or aspects of their lives. They can also hold them to account when their mendacity defiles anything that counts as the serious love of country."

Gaita then says that tying truthfulness in politics to love of country does not mean equating our need for truthfulness with the national interest:

"An adequate conception of the national interest will include our interests as citizens but it will also include our interests as patriots. Inclusion of the latter is not consistent with a conception of politics in which truthfulness is needed only for the former - to satisfy the first two of the three concerns that I elaborated earlier. To put it simply: no one who believes that love of country matters can seriously believe it is in the national interest to undermine the conditions that make lucid forms of it possible."

So the guiding criteria for our need for truthfulness in politics is not truth as correspondence with a fundamental reality, truth as coherence of theory, or truth as a hermeneutical disclosure. It is a practical conception of truth based on our needs as a political beings who love for country they inhabit.

Love of country is Gaita's touchstone. What does Gaita mean by that?

Gaita makes two points. He says that we can distinguish the real form of love from its many false semblences (eg., infatuation) and that the language of love works with distinctions between truth and mendacity. He then poses some rhetorical questions:

"Why then should we not conclude that those Australians who do not care about the mendacity of the Howard era cannot rightly describe whatever attachments they have to Australia - even if they are fierce - as love of country? Would we credit anyone with a serious conception of the love of country - a conception that is distinguished from jingoism - who denied that mendacity could pollute that love? And can anyone seriously deny that Howard's government has been deeply and pervasively mendacious? "

Gaita then answers as follows:

"Howard's cynical pact with the electorate - he insulates himself from the truth and much of the electorate lets it pass for so long as its material and security interests are satisfied - has undermined the possibility for Australians to celebrate lucidly the love of country that he so often professes to feel and to have promoted."

The implication Gaita draws from this argument is that ethical considerations are integral to a serious conception of politics. This makes contact with the classical Aristotlean tradition of political philosophy.

What is problematic with Gaita's argument is the way he makes fraternity and love of country the end point of truthfulness in political life. We need truth about political life, not to just to celebrate our love for country, but to help bring about or realize the good life. So we love our country because it has that political form of life which enables us to lead the good life----a flourishing life well lived.

Gaita has a truncated notion of the relationship between ethics and politics.

Henry Giroux says:

"We need a new language for politics, for analyzing where it can take place, and what it means to mobilize alliances of workers, intellectuals, academics, journalists, youth groups, and others to reclaim, as Cornel West has aptly put it, hope in dark times."

But he does not suggest what that new language is apart from the gesture to democracy.

the roots of democracy

Henry Giroux sees that neo-liberalism is not just about governing free markets withe light hand of regulation. He rightly sees it as a political philosophy. He says that neo-liberalism:

".... is also a political philosophy and ideology that effects every dimension of social life. Neoliberalism has heralded a radical economic, political, and experiential shift that now largely defines the citizen as a consumer, disbands the social contract in the interests of privatized considerations, and separates capital from the context of place. Under such circumstances, neoliberalism portends the death of politics as we know it, strips the social of its democratic values, and reconstructs agency in terms that are utterly privatized and provides the conditions for an emerging form of proto-fascism that must be resisted at all costs."

He gives no acknowledgement of community as a counter force. Instead he focuses on the state, education, critique in order to "link the matters of economics with the crisis of political culture and to connect the latter to the crisis of democracy itself."

Democracy has no roots in community. Where then are the roots of democracy?

discounting democracy

In contrast to the forgetting of the democratic tradition by Hardt & Negri in Empire Henry Giroux both highlights that tradition and says how it is being undermined by neo-liberalism. The title of his paper is Neo-liberalism and the demise of democracy.

Giroux says:

"In its capacity to dehistoricize and depoliticize society, as well as in its aggressive attempts to destroy all of the public spheres necessary for the defense of a genuine democracy, neoliberalism reproduces the conditions for unleashing the most brutalizing forces of capitalism. Social Darwinism has been resurrected from the ashes of the 19th century sweatshops and can now be seen in full bloom in most reality TV programs and in the unfettered self-interests that now drives popular culture. As narcissism is replaced by unadulterated materialism, public concerns collapse into utterly private considerations and where public space does exist it is mainly used as a confessional for private woes, a cut throat game of winner take all, or a advertisement for consumerism."

Giroux goes on to say that within the discourse of neoliberalism, the notion of the public good is devalued and, where possible, eliminated as part of a wider rationale for a handful of private interests to control as much of social life as possible in order to maximize their personal profit. He says that free-market fundamentalists and right wing politicians view government as the enemy of freedom (except when it aids big business) and discount it as a guardian of the public interest.

Downsizing democracy: the FTA

A good example of downsizing democracy is the Free Trade Agreement with the US, even though serious concerns have been raised about the deal.

The negotiations for this agreement have taken place behind closed doors and will be legally binding on all levels of government with little amendments being made to the enabling legislation for the FTA, which is currently being passed in the Australian parliament. It is all been rushed through in due haste with little by way of due process

This agreement grants transnational corporations an investment agreement with a complaints mechanism which would enable foreign investors to challenge laws which harm their investments and to sue governments for damages. The model preferred by corporations is the infamous disputes process of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the US, Canada and Mexico. Corporations have used this process to sue governments for millions of dollars on the grounds that environment or health and safety legislation has harmed their investments.

Most of the new environmental regulations in the Murray-Darling Basin are designed to claw back water for environmental flows and protect the regions biodiversity. These regulations harm the profits of agribusiness hence compensation needs to be paid for the restrictions on trade.

Australian citizens have no say in this even though it impacts on their attempts to repair the ecological damage wrought by past economic growth.

decline of citizenship?

This is an interesting thesis. The reviewer of Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public by Matthew A. Crenson & Benjamin Ginsberg states it simply. He says that the authors state that:

"....for more than two centuries ordinary citizens have served as the “backbone of the western state” (p. x), but, they contend, emerging political relationships at the national level of U.S. government are rapidly bringing the era of the citizen to a close. Somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, the authors assert, policy elites became disengaged from the political public because a mass base was no longer needed for influencing and manipulating public policy. By documenting the evolving disregard for citizen judgment and influence in national policy circles, this book confirms that the creeping sense of political impotence spreading across the United States is not without foundation."

And Australia we might add.

Robert Heineman is the reviewer writing in Independnet Review. He elaborates the above thesis by saying that Americans have been transformed from citizens who are effective political participants into customers who are recipients of government services. Citizens have been marginalized as political actors. Their leaders no longer need concern themselves about collective mobilization of opinion because, intentionally or unintentionally, they have disaggregated the citizenry into a personalized democracy.

Similarly in Australia. Citizens have been marginalized as political actors and become consumers. What has developed is interest-group liberalism in which government becomes little more than a broker for competing interests, whilst the interest groups function without public support. These interest groups focus on the techniques of policy influence in Canberra and the state capitals rather than on broad political appeal. Consequently, the dynamic of insider-group politics has engendered a public policy bereft of publics.

It is difficult to gist of the rest of Downsizing Democracy. It would appear that non-elected public officials---meaning the federal bureaucracy?--- has become exceptionally adept at disaggregating the political public into personalized interests. These governmental forces--the bureaucracy?---seek greater distance from a democratic base.

In Australia it is not likely that a countervailing political power will develop in the form of political parties who move toward mobilization of wider publics, or act to support more institutionally responsible government. The political parties themselves have increasingly moved away from their democratic base. And they have little incentive to make the federal government more democratic. They find the corporate style of governance suitable and they are unwilling to embrace democratic reform

separation of powers

A well known quote from Montesquieu:

"...the accummulation of all powers legislative, executive and judicial in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced as the very definition of tyranny."

The republican response to this problem of tyranny, whether democratic or government, is the separation of powers.

The statement of the authoritative principles of the constitutional order of the Australian republic comes from the High Court. It is the republican schoolmaster providing the ongoing education and constitutional morality that is required for an effective rule of law.

Reading Strauss in the light of Peter Costello's Christian ethics

Those conservative who are pro the war in Iraq and terrorism are saying that the Muslims are attacking us--ie., Anglo-Americans-- for what we are, for our heritage and for what we think. It is not for what we do--occupying eg., Iraq.

This conservative political rhetoric informs us that the radical Islamists are offended by the Western world’s democratic freedoms, civil liberties, inter-mingling of genders, and separation of church and state. They hate us. That is why their target us with their bombs.

Now conservatives are known for their defence of the traditional principles, institutions and values of the contemporary West. And yet their defence of the revealed religion of Judaic-Christianity stands at odds with their celebration of market liberalism and commerce. Has not commerce been substituted for faith and revealed religion? Does not Costello's appeal to Christian morality appear to be an old-fashioned, pre-modern morality (the Ten Commandments) from the perspective of commerce in modernity?

One response to this line of questioning has been the exoteric and the esoteric distinction. They say one thing and mean another. The exoteric creed is the official, public doctrine, the creed which attracts the acolyte in the first place and brings him into the movement as a rank-and-file member. The esoteric creed is the unknown, hidden agenda that is known to the inner circle.

The distinction is widely used with the Washington neocons. Their official exoteric story is that the Iraq war was driven by the historical necessity of responding to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US. The neoconservative vision is based on two tenets: one is building "democracy" not only in the Middle East, but throughout the entire world; the other is establishing what they call the "benevolent global hegemony" of a rising American Imperium, an "empire of liberty."

And the neocon's esoteric story? This is where it gets a bit confusing and messy here. Some say it has to do with the old Trotsky idea of permanent revolution and the cult of power. Others say it is the Abu Ghraib Prison photos.

At this point Leo Strauss is introduced to make sense of it. However, let us put that way of talking about Leo Strauss to one side, and come at it another way that is also informed by Strauss.

Liberal modernity commands a duty to obey the rule of law, seperates church and state, subordinates religion to the state and celebrates Adam Smith's commercial way of life. What do contemporary religious conservatives who are alss economic liberals say here? Peter Costello, the federal Treasurer, says:

"Unfortunately today we see the legacy of our Judeo-Christian traditions fraying all around us. It is almost as if the capital deposit has been drawn down for such regular maintenance that the capital is running out. The maintenance demands are unending. But we are not building up the capital required to service it.
We despair of the moral decay in our community. Drug barons compete for the distribution rights to sell drugs to our children. We see moral decay in much of the rap music which glorifies violence or suicide or exploitation of other people. My partial view of hell is where people pursue their own insatiable gratification at the expense of and to the destruction of others."

What do we do?

Instead of placing reason and revelation into opposition Costello would say that liberal modernity needs self-restraint. Religion can help to provide to prevent relativism, moral decay and nihilism. Costello says:

"...I do want to suggest that a recovery of faith would go a long way to answering this challenge. And a government cannot, should not, get into that endeavour. If our church leaders could so engage people as to lead them to faith we should be much richer and stronger for it...And this is the point I would like to make. There are many that have not, in their hearts, acquiesced to the kind of decay which is apparent around us. They do not believe it is right. They earnestly pray for the expansion of faith and yearn for higher standards...Their inner faith keeps them going. And they join with other citizens who share the blessings that heritage brought to our country, something for which we can all give thanks. And in doing so we determine that we will not take these blessing for granted. We will not become complacent. We will each to our own ability nurture the values which were so important in bringing us to where we are today and which we need so badly to take us on."

The passions are subordinated by reason with the help of revealed religion.

The problem with all this is that it leaves out any consideration of the political regime and the rivalry of political opinions regarding justice and the common good. What is missing is any conssideration of political philosophy as distinct from the utilitarian economist's reduction of these opinions to naked self-seeking interests and ceaseless striving to make money. The economists make the Australian regime a clever economic growth machine rather than a political community.

Where do we look for the foundations for the Australian regime? Presumably in the Constitution of our founders? The Constitution, with its checks and balances and divisions of powers is the founding of the Australian regime. So how do conservatives interpret this document and its background texts? Does not the constitution have a central and respected place in the teaching of political things?

Did not the Constitutional founders create a nation and was not the Constitution dedicated to the principles of a low utilitarian liberalism? It certainly was not a Lockean liberalism based on natural right constitutionalism.

Is Costello saying that liberalism is not solid? That it needs the revelation of Christianity to give it's political reason solidity?

Empire: nation state & democracy

What Hardt and Negri forget in their return to the cosmopolitan roots of the internationalism of the old socialists is the democratic tradition of the nation-state. The nation-state is seen as bad. What is good--the struggle to make the nation-state more democratic---is forgotten.

Hardt and Negri do say that:

"Proletarian internationalism constructed a paradoxical and powerful political machine that pushed continually beyond the boundaries and hierarchies of the nation-states and posed utopian futures only on the global terrain."

However, the paradox lies with being defeated yet winning, not democratising the nation-state. This is their argument:

"Today we should all clearly recognize that the time of such proletarian internationalism is over. That does not negate the fact, however, that the concept of internationalism really lived among the masses and deposited a kind of geological stratum of suffering and desire, a memory of victories and defeats, a residue of ideological tensions and needs. Furthermore, the proletariat does in fact find itself today not just international but (at least tendentially) global. One might be tempted to say that proletarian internationalism actually "won" in light of the fact that the powers of nation- states have declined in the recent passage toward globalization and Empire, but that would be a strange and ironic notion of victory. It is more accurate to say, following the William Morris quotation that serves as one of the epigraphs for this book, that what they fought for came about despite their defeat."

A global world did come about. It was one created by global capital that trashed the conditions and employment of the old manufacturing working class during the 1970s and 1980s.

Hardt and Negri then go to give a brief historical account of the struggles of the working class. Their blindness to the process of democracy within the nation-state remains. They say:

"The struggles that preceded and prefigured globalization were expressions of the force of living labor, which sought to liberate itself from the rigid territorializing regimes imposed on it. As it contests the dead labor accumulated against it, living labor always seeks to break the fixed territorializing structures, the national organizations, and the political figures that keep it prisoner. With the force of living labor, its restless activity, and its deterritorializing desire, this process of rupture throws open all the windows of history. When one adopts the perspective of the activity of the multitude, its production of subjectivity and desire, one can recognize how globalization, insofar as it operates a real deterritorialization of the previous structures of exploitation and control, is really a condition of the liberation of the multitude."

Nothing about the welfare state, citizenship or deliberative democracy.The nation state in modernity represents a state that imposed rigid territorializing regimes on labour; fixed territorializing structures, and figures of impriosnment. Nothing about the working class becoming a part of the social contract and creatively dealing with the pressure on working class conditions through a social wage.

So what we get is a closed and bounded nation state and an international working class acting as agent of rupture that throws open all the windows of history. This is close to mythmaking.

What we need to do is think in terms of the international system and the international economy in a way that includes a constitutive role for the nation-state.

police action+universal values

Hardt and Negri write that through the transformation of supranational law, the imperial process of constitution tends to penetrate and reconfigure the domestic law of the nation-states. They then describe this transformation of supranational law. They say:

"Perhaps the most significant symptom of this transformation is the development of the so-called right of intervention. This is commonly conceived as the right or duty of the dominant subjects of the world order to intervene in the territories of other subjects in the interest of preventing or resolving humanitarian problems, guaranteeing accords, and imposing peace. The right of intervention figured prominently among the panoply of instruments accorded the United Nations by its Charter for maintaining international order, but the contemporary reconfiguration of this right represents a qualitative leap. No longer, as under the old international ordering, do individual sovereign states or the supranational (U.N.) power intervene only to ensure or impose the application of voluntarily engaged international accords. Now supranational subjects that are legitimated not by right but by consensus intervene in the name of any type of emergency and superior ethical principles. What stands behind this intervention is not just a permanent state of emergency and exception, but a permanent state of emergency and exception justified by the appeal to essential values of justice. In other words, the right of the police is legitimated by universal values."

This refers to the intervention into Iraq by the UK, the US, Australia etc. We can say that was an emergency situation; an exception. The UN was shunted aside. The late justification for the intervention was the universal values of freedom and democracy. So we have state of emergency and exception justified by the appeal to the values of justice.

But is it a permanent state of emergency and exception?

lobbyists & public reason

One of the things that I notice about federal Parliament was how its long corridors are filled with groups of organized lobbyists going about their business. Groups of them are everywhere. And they start early---around 8.30 am. After doing some of the rounds of those they were trying to persuade they would hang about Aussies---the coffee shop in Parliament House--- with mobiles glued to their ears. They are taking a break whilst they waited for the next set of appointments. They were (mostly) men with a purpose who had a glint in their eye and a determined gait.

Most of the lobbyists were trucking off to the minsterial offices. Some (the big energy companies) camped in the foyer of Ministers offices. The ministeral entrance to Parliament swarmed with their comings and goings. Many, from the big end of town, had far more more direct access to the Ministers than did the individual Senators. Is this not a probelm?

So what was their business? What were the lobbyists up to? What were they trying to achieve? What was the significance of all this activity of persuasion and cajoling? (The energy companies cajole rather than persuade.)

For many lobbying is seen to be benign as it is a part of the workings of democracy. It is the process of pluralism and persuasion at work, not the existence of violent factions with a sword in their hand. On this account lobbying is more a briefing rather than political warfare. It is the way political reason worked.

I saw it differently. In the field of health the briefing was the appearance. The reality was armed antagonism. The lobbyist groups (eg., the AMA) were a band of warriors who had declared the right to evaluate self-protection in its own way and to act accordingly. Each had claimed the right to judge the political as a conflict between friend and foe.

This is interpreting the actions and statements of the lobbyists through the eyes of Carl Schmitt. I saw them representing commercial power and so they were a counter force to the liberal state. Though many of the business lobbyists did not possess political power, many of them were were in a position to prevent the state from exercising that power. Thus the energy companies prevented the efforts to give a greater role to renewable energy.

If Parliament is what is left of the original lethal clash between king and commons, and is the continuation of this civil war, then it is a form of warfare that has renounced killing and is carried on by other means. The lobbyists represented the intensification of the internal antagonism in civil society.

For Schmitt the pluralism of democracy means a hollowing out of the power of the state, the fragmenting of political unity, and ongoing destablizing division. Unity can only be maintained when two or more parties recognize common premises of the Constitution. The ethic of the state becomes the ethic of the Constitution, and it is the Constitution that forms the ground of real political unity.

Will this be called into question with the forthcoming industrial relations legislation We saw something of this warfare in the 1990s when Peter Reith was Minister of Employment and Industrial Relations. Remember all that conflict on the wharfs?

Schmitt's Hobbesian account makes sense.

The danger is that in a liberal democracy the Constitution becomes to be seen as the little more than the rules of the game and its ethic degenerates into the convention of fair play. The threat of conflict getting out of hand is part of the politically possible present. It is the threat the political order must continually ward off.

Political conflict

My month to six weeks contract work to do philosophy inside the machinery of federal Parliament is drawing to a close.

My very intense experience over the last month of dealing with the conflicts within the political machinery of the state reaffirmed Carl Schmitt's thesis that the essential political distinction is the one between friend and enemy.

That distinction is fundamental and elemental.

Without it the strife, chaos and passion of politics makes little sense. Politics in Parliament is a case of armed autonomous armed groups (political parties) confronting one another across a shifting political battlefield. It is a kind of ongoing civil war.

Within that battle field fear is the key emotion. The fear of being destroyed by one's enemy.

Outside the media prism the conflict within political life looks like mud slinging. But inside the political institutions the conflict has a different existential quality. In the Concept of the Political Carl Schmitt describes it this way:

"Only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme cases of conflict. Each participant is in a position to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent's way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one's own form of existence." (p. 27)

A federal democracy means that there are institutional boundaries to the conflict that constrain the ever threatening potentiality of war and uncertainity arising from the radical subjectivity of Schmitt's statement----that every person is the judge of good and evil. The institutions place limits on the likelihood of perosns being allowed to resort to violence to defend their judgements.

However, the threat of danger is ever present. As Thomas Hobbes indicates the essence of war iconsists not in the actual fighting but the known disposition to do so. Within Schmitt's enemy concept is the ever present possibility of conflict.

Democracy and Language

Still on the road.

Don Watson in Death Sentence writes

"Democracy depends upon plain language. It depends upon common understanding. We need to feel safe in the assumption that words mean whatt they are commonly understood to mean. Deliberate ambiguity, slides of meaning, obscure, incomprehensible or meaningless words poison the democratic process. They erode trust. Depleted language always comes with a depleted democracy."

We end up with empty gestures.

public language#4

In Death Sentence Don Watson gives a good description of the way that language is used within the friend/enemy political machinery of parliamentary politics. He writes:

"In the diabolical environment of politics, unreasoning forces forces throw up unreasoning things like red herrings and dead cats and fling them in the path of journalists. Politicians come forth willing to say anything, and without regard to ordinary civility. Their opponents are rank hypocrites, they say: they've heinous secret plans that all the outward signs disguise. And often it emerges that these outrageous accusations have some truth about them, because politics does throw up hypocrites and liars. In keeping with the evolution of such political animals, among journalists horrible cynics emerge. "

It's a reasonable account. You only have to watch a "debate" in the House of Representatives online to see this kind of low life (slimeballs) in action. And all the posturing, ranting and tirade of abuse is done with an eye to the camera on broadcast day. It's called getting your message across ; or getting your through to the electorate.

It looks so different watching it at the other end of the camera. It turns you off. If you listen to several hours of this on the computer you realize that most of them are parroting the party line to score petty political points. You know they have nothing to say when they suddenly puff themselves up, become all impassioned and go about how evil the other side is and wonderful their side is.

There is no policy making being done here.

So what are the consequences of this use of language by instrumental reason? Watson gives a good account. He says:

"For the [public] language the consequences are terrible: catchalls, cliches, and nauseating platitudes are all rolled out. Syntax is mangled. Reason goes up in smoke. The truth is less significant than the political contest. The question is not, Which is the better argument? It is Who won? Or What was the outcome? Along with reason and enlightenment language goes out the window."

The irony, of course, is that the fervent supporters of neo-liberalism, economic reform and globalization said they stood for the liberal values, reason and enlightenment. It was their old-fashioned social democratic opponents who stood for prejudice, tradition and irrationality. And yet their use of language indicated that they had no time for enlightenment, let alone understood what that cultural heritage of dialogic reason, democracy and citizenship meant.

Don Watson: Death Sentence

My attention is focused on public language at the moment. A friend loaned me a copy of Don Watson's Death Sentence The Decay of Public Language. In the introduction Watson writes:

"Public language is the language of public life: the language of political and business leaders and civil servants – official, formal, sometimes elevated language. It is the language of leaders more than the led, the managers rather than the managed. It takes very different forms: from shapely rhetoric to shapeless, enervating sludge; but in every case it is the language of power and influence. What our duties are, for whom we should vote, which mobile phone plan we should take up. In all these places the public language rules. As power and influence are pervasive so is the language: we hear and read it at the highest levels and the lowest. And while it begins with the powerful, the weak are often obliged to speak it, imitate it."

The book says a lot of what I'd noticed when I listened to politicians speak their particular kind of sludge in Parliament.

But Watson has an explanation for the contemporary sludge. In the first chapter Watson writes:

"The public realm has been in decline since governments retreated from the economy and private companies moved into take their place. The operation extends well beyond privatised public utilites in gas, water, electricity and transport. Economic revolution has transformed our institutions---colleges and universities, hospitals and medical practices, the public service itself----and transformed our relationships with them in doing so. And as the private sector has replaced the public it has found itself obliged to pick up function and responsibilites that had belonged to governments. They pick them up in different ways, and they use a different term for them: they call it investing in social capital."

Yes and no. He's right about the economic revolution. But social capital refers to community and civil society not the state.

Never mind. Those working in the world of public policy in Australia speak coporate speak these days. That is the main point. Hence words such as 'flexibility', 'internationally competitive', 'downsize', 'the triple bottom line' and 'self-regulatory'. It's a 'global' style.

It is not the language of rhetoric and persuasion.

public language#2

In the few days of last week that I spent visiting federal parliament in Canberra I listened closely to the public language of the politicians. What was the language of their rhetoric I wondered.

I realized that the public language of federal parliament is a machine language. Instrumental reason now uses a managerial language that is constrained by the opinion polls and media spin. It is focused on manipulating public opinion. It avoids the need to think about public policy in any depth.

Most of what I heard in Parliament was fog. Marketing fog. Some of it was corporate speak based on the command and control structure of politics. To participate you had to master the mind numbing style of managerial speak.

At a coffee shop I overheard a health bureaucrat talk in terms of nodes, value-added communication, networks between silos and enhancing customer choice. Everyone was customers.

There were no citizens. I wondered where they'd gone.

Cartoons & rhetoric

Cartoons play a very important part in political life of Australia. The engagement with a serious political issue in the form of a readable and visual immediate cartoon reaches a wide variety of people in the electorate. It has far more effect than the editorial column or journalist/opinion piece. Cartoons also enable politicians to laugh at themselves when the same criticisms in print would get their backs up and place them on a war footing. Cartoonists, more so than journalists, are seen as standard-bearer for integrity and truth that expose the politically powerful as having no clothes.

But there is a tradition that reaches into everyday life. One that has it roots in the graphic art of Honore Daumier:

Rue Transnonain, 1834, Lithograph

Leunig is an Australian cartoonist with a philosophical sensibility. That sensibility informs his insightful social commentary that takes him beyond being one of your everyday political cartoonists. Leunig steps into the flows and rhythms of everyday life and he starts asking questions that disturb:

Leunig
Good huh. The cliches of political life are exposed for what they are.

It show the hollowness at the heart of our political culture--the way our highest political values have been hollowed out.

Wait, there is more of this fine example of the modern mode of Socratic questioning that scratches where it irritates:

Leunig

Leunig's cartoons appear about four times weekly in the Melbourne Age He is a much loved Australian cartoonist whose philosophical explorations, and questioning of the dissonances of everyday life have become a template for a critical reflection on Australian culture.

That template is a laconic, poetic, ironic mode of questioning.

In defence of the Senate

Australia has both federal and Westminster institutions of government. In this amalgam of federalism and responsible government the emphasis of the former is on diversity and difference, whilst the emphasis of the latter is on unity and efficiency.

The Westminster system of parliamentary democracy is one a majoritarian democracy in which cabinet as the executive controls the lower house through strong party discipline. It controls the numbers in the lower house and it is responsible and accountable to the legislature for the actions and activities of the government. This effectively makes the bureaucracy subservient to the legislature and to the executive.

Those calling for a further round of market reforms highlight the Westminister side of government in Australia. They see federalism as a block to efficient government, which the reformers model on a business or corporate model of the executive. Federalism, for them, primarily means a powerful Senate that constrains the power of the executive to implement its legislative program. This power was deliberately conferred on the Senate by the constitutional framers, but the Senate has evolved within this constitutional framework to redefine its role and place in Australian politics.

Hence the calls for reforming the Senate to make it subservient to the executive. The criticism is that the Senate is a relic of the pre-1911 parliamentary order when undemocratic upper houses held co-ordinate power with lower houses. This is misleading since the Senate in Australia is elected through proportional representation(established in 1948). The senate increasingly represents minority interests ignored by the two party system as the votes for the two major parties continues to drop.

Though it often fails to represent its state territory's due to the two party system, the Senate has widespread democratic legitimacy. The Senate's relative independence from the executive means that it is able to introduce through its powerful committee system a degree of delay, questioning and revision of government legislation. Thus the Senate is able to hold partisan governments to account, and it has a genuine opportunity to influence public policy. Consequently, the Australian Senate is one of the most powerful upper houses in Westminister-derived parliamentary systems.

It is no suprise that it is the executive that is the least satisfied with the activity of a powerful Senate, whilst public opinion has acted as its protector. Public opinion fears the despotism of the unchecked power of the executive that is based on the rule and whip of party members in the lower houses. The Senate has institutional credibility and public trust judging by the public submissions to its Senate committees and participation by citizens in public hearings.

Doing something about the Senate nearly always means reducing the Senate's independence from executive control and this is always framed in terms of the Senate delaying and frustrating their legislative programes due to the presence and disruptive potential of the minor parties. The justification for the reform of the Senate is the government's popular mandate to govern (ie., pass its legislation) even though voter support for minor parties and independents is steadily growing.

Australian citizens express their distrust of the increasing power of centralized government in two ways. First, by the tactical use of the Senate to check the power of the political executive and, secondly, by consistently voting down proposals for the constitutional reform of the Senate (only 8 of the 44 proposals have been successful).

The power of the Australian Senate is too substantial for it to seen as a second chamber, an upper House (eg., the House of Lords) or a House of Review. It's power makes it a co-ordinate authority that shares legislative power with the House of Representatives. If the history of the House of Representatives can be interpreted as one of decline of its power vi-a-vis the executive, then that of the Senate if one of increasing power that is open to the ethos of political equality.

Resignation

This is being noted. Posner argues that accept democracy as we find it. Itds all to do with balancing competing interests.

judicial activism=end of democracy?

I do not know the First Things November 1996 symposium that connected the end of democracy to the judicial usurpation of politics. Apparently, that symposium generated a lot of discussions about judicial activism, democratic legitimacy, and the intellectual framework of America's conservative movement in history.The debate has been collected in a book.

The theme resonates with recent posts at philosophy.com.

Going back to the original symposium I can see that Robert H. Bork made arguments that are very familar in Australia. The activist Supreme Court has overstepped its Constitutional authority in that "The most important moral, political, and cultural decisions affecting our lives are steadily being removed from democratic control." Bork says that in extending their powers, the judicial activists on the Supreme Court have usurped the legislative process. Hence they must be stopped through a series of legislative and cultural reforms.

The specific issues tackled by the Supreme Court in the US and the High Court in Australia are different but the conservative argument is the same: the judicial actions that add up to an entrenched pattern of government by judges that is nothing less than the usurpation of politics. The question posed by First Things in the Introduction to the Symposium is quite radical: "whether we have reached or are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime."That question has not been posed in Australia, as far as I know.

Personally I am sympathetic to judicial activism by the High Court in Australia in terms of discerning implied rights to free speech implied in the Australian Constitution and the laying to rest the myth of terra nullius in the Mabo case. These accord with my lefty politics.

However, my republican understanding of politics is similar to that articulated by First Things. They say:

"Politics, Aristotle teaches, is free persons deliberating the question, How ought we to order our life together? Democratic politics means that "the people" deliberate and decide that question. In the American constitutional order the people do that through debate, elections, and representative political institutions. But is that true today? Has it been true for, say, the last fifty years? Is it not in fact the judiciary that deliberates and answers the really important questions entailed in the question, How ought we to order our life together? Again and again, questions that are properly political are legalized, and even speciously constitutionalized. This symposium is an urgent call for the repoliticizing of the American regime."

I can only but occur. As I do with the federalism as devised by the founders of the Constitution:

"The democracy they devised was a republican system of limited government, with checks and balances, including judicial review, and representative means for the expression of the voice of the people. But always the principle was clear: legitimate government is government by the consent of the governed."

Same situation in Australia.

So I have a problem on my hands.

I am going to have to work through this debate in the different issues of First Things.

free market + democratic deliberation

The theme that I have been exploring is the tension between the free market and democratic deliberation. My argument is that the embrace of the free market has meant putting a lid on democratic deliberation. I have called this 'putting the lid on' the conservative moment that nestles inside the libertarian market liberalism.

You can see the squashing of democratic deliberation most clearly around environmentalism because of the latter's critique of the values of economic growth that underpins neo-liberalism. Crudely put, the neo-liberalsim say that global marketplace reigns supreme. There is a lot of money to be made in biotech, in irrigated agriculture and in generating greenhouse gases. Even if those activities turn our inner and outer worlds upside down it does not matter. Money does. Case closed.

The afterword by those who make this case is that Governments should show leadership. By this is usually meant compressing democracy deliberation, constraining democratic institutions, governing through the free market, putting a lid on dissent and pushing on with reform. The job of the reforms is to ensure that the market rules supreme and that society is shaped, or adpated, to the tendencies of the global market.

It's crude I know. But that was what I had in the back of my mind when I was lookig at Chief Justice Murray Gleesons' Boyer Lectures. If the High Court was the defender of the constitution, then did that mean that the High Court was also defending democracy? The answer that I came away with was no. The High Court would defend federalism. That is not the same thing because you can have a federalism in which democracy is being hollowed out by the pressures of the global market.

Coming to that judgement made me very sad.

Constitutional Silence?

This text by Chief Justice Murray Gleeson is the Boyer Lectures of 2000. In the first part of the 6 lectures entitled, A Country Planted Thick with Laws, the Chief Justice is exploring ideas that connect up with our previous discussions about interpretation and the Australian Constititution.

For instance, Gleeson says that we can best approach the Constitution in terms of an understanding of the past and a concern for the future:

"Our Constitution also has a past and a future; it does not merely exist in the present. It was fashioned as a basic law, an instrument of government, by people whose concerns and values were in some respects different from our own. It will apply in the future to a society that will have undergone changes we can scarcely imagine. Disputes about constitutional interpretation sometimes concern the manner in which contemporary judges respond to its history and the future. Arguments occur about the meaning and effect, in our current circumstances, of various express provisions of the Constitution, and about the justification for finding implications in its terms. "

So interpretations over the meaning of the Constitution, as well as conflicts over these interpretation, play an important part in understanding the Australian Constitution.

That accords pretty much with what we have been arguing in our earlier posts. To put in more legal terms the emphasis on interpretation involves a rejection of formalism. This holds that a judge identifies the relevant legal principles, applies them to the facts of a case, and logically deduces a rule that will govern the outcome of the dispute. Interpretation is more aligned with legal realism, which holds that in most cases before courts present hard questions that judges must resolve by balancing the interests of the parties and ultimately drawing an arbitrary line on one side of the dispute.

How then do we undertake this interpretation? What guides our interpretations so that we do not wander off into the swampland? Do we not need guides to prevent philosophers with no legal training from stepping outside the constitutional legal tradition? How do we ensure good interpretations?

Gleeson suggests a guide in terms of political principles underlying the Constitution. He says that the certain unstated principles that underpin the text of the Australian Constitution:

"... breathe life into it, govern its interpretation, define the role of the nation’s political institutions, and guiding the evolution of the [Australian] system of government."

One of these principles is the rule of law. The rule of law means what?

Gleeson says that public law is not the enemy of liberty; it is its partner. He displaces the libertarian conception of law as a constraint upon freedom and creativity or a set of rules designed to stifle initiative and enterprise and moves towards a more republican conception of the law as restraining and civilising power. The rule of public law the rule of law vouchsafes to the citizens and residents of a county or state, a predictable and ordered society in which to conduct their affairs. It seeks to promote justice and individual liberty is in its function as a restraint upon the exercise of power, whether the power in question is that of other individuals or corporations, or whether it is the power of governments. He says:

"The basic law of Australia—the Commonwealth Constitution—limits legislative and executive and judicial power. When the jurisdiction of a court is invoked, and the court becomes the instrument of a constraint upon power, the role of the court will often be resented by those whose power is curbed. This is why judges must be, and must be seen to be, independent of people and institutions whose power may be challenged before them. The principle that we are ruled by laws and not by people means that all personal and institutional power is limited."

Gleeson identifies federalism as another unstated principle behind the Constitution. He says that federalism is the special characteristic of the Australian Constitution, which determines its legal and social importance. So what is the characteristic of federalism? Gleeson says:

"The word ‘federal’ takes its meaning from the Latin word for a treat. The self-governing colonies became, at Federation, states of the newly created federal union. The terms and conditions upon which the people of those colonies agreed to that course are set out in the Australian Constitution. ...The Constitution created—and is the basic law of—the Australian nation. One of its principal functions is to allocate governmental authority between the political entities which form the component parts of the Federation. A federal system of government requires a formal written agreement that divides functions and powers. Such an agreed and legally binding division of powers and functions is the essence of federation.

The people of Australia voted to unite in a federal union, upon certain terms. Those terms, which in many respects require interpretation, and which have to be applied to changing conditions and circumstances, define and constrain the powers by which we are governed. The Constitution is a specific and fundamental manifestation of the rule of law in our society."

Okay. To put in Hegelian terms the Constitution embodies a metaphysics. Hence there is scope for a philosophy of the law---jurisprudence.

So what about interpreting the Constitution in terms of citizenship? Does not citizenship have something to do with the rule of law and federalism? Do not citizens make the law? Did not citizens structure the political body in terms of federalism to prevent the concentration of political power. So would not citizenship be another unstated political principle underpining the Australian constitution. As we have seen the Constitutional text barely mentions citizenship. The text is notable for the lack of citizenship and yet liberal democracy is structured around citizenship.

Gleeson does not mention citizenship in this lecture. So we can come at it in terms of the current understanding of citizenship in liberal democracy.

The current understanding of liberal democracy is that representative democracy is a form of elitism. There are two considerations here.

First, ''liberal democracy'' is what the ancients called ''mixed government.'' Republicanism understands "mixed government" in the following way:---with monarchical elements in the Crown, aristocratic elements in the Senate and Supreme Court and democratic elements in the lower house. This structure was intended to be a balance of interests and so what we call ''representative democracy'' is what used to be understood as elective aristocracy.

So what about the democratic bit in the House of Representatives? How do we interpret that? Well, it is commonly understood in terms of a realism in which
democracy is a system in which would-be rulers compete for the people's vote. On the acount given by Joseph Schumpeter the number of voters does not greatly matter; what matters is that the government is the winner of a genuinely competitive election. Schumpeter emphasizes democracy is as competition between elites. In this conception there is a distrustl of ordinary citizens, whose views he thought irrational and ill informed. Hence we citizens can choose the competiting once every three years at election time. What should happen between elections was that the voters should not put pressure on government, but should simply allow it to govern.

A class of professional politicians as the elite and passive citizens is the realist understanding representative democracy. We are not citizens making our own laws or having a say in decision making on this account. And the House of Representatves is controlled by a dominant executive that makes many of its decisions behind closed doors.

Can we go then back to the Constitution and re-read it in terms of its unstated principles of citizenship? Why not re-read the Constitution in terms of the unstated principles of democratic citizenship. Suprisingly Gleeson appears to suggest caution at this point. He appears to place obstacles in the way. He says:

"One thing, however, is clear. Whatever room there may be for debate about the meaning of what the framers of the Constitution said, either expressly or by implication, and subject to the possibility of constitutional change, we are bound by their choice not to say certain things. We can interpret what they provided, and we can make implications from what they said where that is appropriate. But if they remained silent upon a matter, and legitimate techniques of interpretation cannot fill the gap they have left, then we are bound by their silence. In some respects, what the Constitution does not say is just as important as what it says."

Silence? Surely we need to intepret this lack? Does the silence mean that the rule of law is a restraining and a civilising of democratic power. Does it act to keep to citizens in their place? Are there legitimate techniques of interpretation to probe the silence. Gleeson does not say in this early lecture called A Country Planted Thick with Laws.

What we can say is that there are a lot of spaces in the law of the land for philosophy to probe as a public reason.
next

Hermeneutics, free speech & democracy#2

In the previous post we rejected two ways of interpreting the meanings of the Australian Constitution as a historical text. These were the argument that meaning of the Constitution is a literal one and that its meaning is equivalent to the intentions of the framers of the Constitution. The circle of interpretation is an integral part of law and undermines Sir Owen Dixon's claim that legal reason is a method of high technique and strict logic.

We now come to the third argument mentioned byLawrence Solum The third argument, he says, holds that "because the meaning of the first amendment is relative to the many particular interpretive traditions in our pluralistic culture, there can be no single true theory of the first amendment."

Thus we have different interpretations of citizenship about which the Australian Constitution is silent. If we turn to the Kim Rubenstein article we discover two conceptions of citizenship. There is the legal formal notion that is primarily concerned with the legal status of individuals within a community. For instance, in Australia citizens are contrasted with permanent residents, temporary residents and unlawful non-citizens. The legal issues associated with the formal status include the acquisition and loss of citizenship; the criteria for citizenship by grant; dual or multiple citizenship; and discrimination based upon citizenship status.

In contrast, we have the normative notion of citizenship. This discusses citizenship in non-legal, normative frameworks in a variety of ways, primarily in terms that look to the material circumstances of life within the polity, and notably to questions of social membership and substantive equality In this way the normative notion is much broader than the legal notion, as it is concerned with how persons and the way persons should act and be treated as members of a national community.

Hence hermeneutics must grapple with the spectre of relativism given the absence of absolute knowledge. The above argument, that there can be no single true theory of the first amendment, implies that meaning is created by the reader (judges) so is specific to each reading or textual 'performance'.

A basic hermeneutic response to this argument about the relativity of many different reasons is that, in confronting other beliefs and other presuppositions about citizenship, we can see the inadequacies of our own and transcend them. Secondly, the very tradition of legal interpretation of the constitution establishes a set of canonical problems and incorporates standards of truth and legal justification. Over historical time, from the perspective of these standards, the interpretations provided by the legal tradition (the sum total of all readings, past, present, and future) will appear inadequate:----as is indicated by the High Court's shift to reading the Australian Constitution in tems of implied rights. What is happening here is that legal rationality is opened up to guidance that another tradition may provide. This implies a willingness to accept the posssibility of better options and interpretations; and a willingness to accept that one's knowledge and interpretation of the constitutional text is always open to refuation or modification from the vantage point of another perspective.

The emphasis here is on a critical approach that concentrates on the process of reading and interpretation rather than on the text as object. As Lawrence Solum states it, what develops is a tradition of interpretation that is embodied in the opinions and judgments rendered in cases that deal with the constitution.

What can we say of this process of law as interpretation? Though the Legal positivists were right in that legal rules are part of the legal system as H.L.A. Hart described it; the legal system is also part of a tradition that embodies principles and policies. So the judges, in being a part of this system, have a duty to continue the legal tradition and on the whole do so.

The tacit implication of this hermeneutical response is a rejection of the separation of law and morals, the view that the law is an autonomous discipline and that judicial method cannot legitimately be influenced by political, social or economic factors. The hermeneutic account presupposes that the liberal and democratic ideals of liberal society are also embodied, upheld and defended in Western systems of law. Hence public law is best understood as an interpretation of the political practices of a society. In deciding a legal case, judges decide in accord with the interpretation of the society's institutions and legal texts that best fits and justifies the society's history and practices.

What I have outlined above is Ronald Dworkin's theory of interpretation.Dworkin holds that:

"....judges should decide hard cases by interpreting the political structure of their community in the following, perhaps special way: by trying to find the best justification they can find, in principles of political morality, for the structure as a whole, from the most profound constitutional rules and arrangements to the details of, for example, the private law of tort or contract." (Dworkin 1982, p. 165).

On Dworkin's theory of judicial interpretation, there are two elements to a good interpretation of a constitutional text. First, insofar as an interpretation justifies the particular practices of a particular society, so the interpretation must fit with those practices in the sense that it coheres with existing legal materials defining the practices. Second, since an interpretation provides a moral justification for those practices, it must present them in the best possible moral light.

This gives us a way to probe the republican conception of citizenship that sits buried in the republican dimension of the Australian constitution and embodied the actual practices of the body politic.

Hermeneutics, free speech & democracy#1

The brief mapping out of my hermeneutical perspective in the previous two posts provides me with a position from which to engage with Lawrence Solum's early paper on hermeneutics and free speech in the liberal democracy of the USA. The engagement will probably be over several posts and I will more or less bounce off Lawrence's paper to develop a broader public reason that will include political and legal reason.

This connection between hermeneutics and free speech is an important one in Australia because the High Court has judged that there is an implicit right of free speech in the Australian Constitution. The argument behind the High Court's judgement and ruling was that a liberal system of government in Australia, which was based on a representative democracy and enshrined the right to vote, was meaningless without freedom of speech to discuss and debate "political and governmental matters" and to criticise and critique decisions of all levels of government - commonwealth, state and local. There is a lot of interpertation in that.

That judicial process of constitutional interpretation has been condemned by conservative politicians as amounting to a usurpation of parliamentary supremacy. The High Court has been accused of "stealing" power from the people of Australia. This dubious political argument (dubious because it is really a defence of executive dominance) implies a particular interpretation of the Constitutional text; it is one that implies the reading implications in relation to the Constitution is a radical move rather than the diversity of interpretations of the implications of the constitutional text being part and parcel of the constitutional landscape for over a century.

The Australian constitution is very a reified text. It is almost a sacred document--a bible. Only those who understand its mysteries----the priests---can comment. The lawyers are the priests. But not any lawyer mind you. It's really the province of the Constitutional lawyers who have access to, and can understand the arcane language of the expert commentaries.

Lawrence's paper is concerned with the search for an adequate theory of the first amendment freedom of speech. His concern is that a theory of free speech is required for the practice of judicial interpretation of the first amendment.
He argues that:

"...that Jurgen Habermas' theory of communicative action can serve as the basis for an interpretation of the first amendment that fits the general contours of existing first amendment doctrine and provides a coherent justification for the freedom of speech."

After briefly spelling out Habermas' theory Lawrence moves into considering the interpretation of free speech in the US Constitution. Why interpretation? Because there are competing interpretations in circulation. Hence there are problems associated with interpreting the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and we can add, the implied rights in the Australian Constitution Lawrence mentions them:

"The first argument is that the first amendment has a plain meaning that does not require a theory for its interpretation....The second argument is that the first amendment should be interpreted in accord with the specific intent of its framers.... The third argument is that because the meaning of the first amendment is relative to the many particular interpretive traditions in our pluralistic culture, there can be no single true theory of the first amendment."

The first argument has been called literalism in Australia. It has been deeply entrenched and it does not see the need for hermeneutics, since it presupposes that understanding the constitution is unproblematic. We can just read the plain words. Greg Craven defines it this way:

"The essence of Australian constitutional literalism is that the words of the Constitution are to be given their ordinary - that is their literal - meaning. What this means in simplistic terms is that the Constitution means what it says. The document is to be read as an ordinary piece of English language, and the words to be ascribed their every day meaning. The essence of literalism is thus that the Constitution may be read in much the same way as a telephone directory or the instructions to a model aeroplane kit, with the assistance of a dictionary, but not much else."

But what if the words were not clear or self-evident about the federal relationship between the states and the commowealth? What then? Do we not need some way of interpreting what they mean? Could there not be interpretations that misunderstand about this federal relationship? Historical understandings are situated in history and we approach the constitution from particular perspectives.

Lawrence quickly rejects the first argument---the 'plain meaning view of free speech--- on the grounds that it implies the self-interpreting constitutional text. Hence the meaning of the text can be gleaned without the aid of some interpretive method. Yet, as Lawrence, points out, some passages of the First amendment of the US constitution:

"..if considered in isolation, are ambiguous or obscure. Likewise, the text of the first amendment may be too indeterminate to be understood in isolation. What does speech mean? Are movies, radio programs, picketing, or campaign expenditures speech? The text refers only to Congress, but the first amendment has been interpreted to apply to state legislatures as well as executive and judicial action."

And in Australia, is the Townsville council's by-law 82E, which bans soapbox orators from its mall, an infingement on free speech? To understand the implications of free speech we need some understanding of the political philosophy that sits behind, and enframes the constitution. There are ambiguities here---eg., republican and liberal conceptions of citizenship--- that do need to be resolved. As Greg Craven argues the effect of literalism has been:

"...to de-emphasise the concept of federalism as a controlling consideration in constitutional interpretation. This follows inexorably from the fact that federalism is part of the basic frame of the Constitution, and suffuses that entire document, underlying as it does virtually all the dispositions of the Founding Fathers. The effect of literalism's exclusive insistence on the primacy of the words has been to drastically limit the use which can be made of this controlling constitutional principle in the interpretation of the Constitution."

Hence we misunderstandings. The intervening historical developments that have taken place have separated the framers of the Constitution and the interpreters. Ther has been a shift in focus and philosophy in that period, and this ha given rise to distorted constitutional understandings of a centralizing liberalism.

So literalism, the plain meaning conception of interpretation, is inadequate. As Greg Craven says:

"...the real problem for literalism in constitutional terms is that the Constitution has never been remotely like a telephone directory or a set of instructions for a model aeroplane. In fact, the Constitution is the product of a complex range of historic intentions, designed to produce a blue-print for an exceptionally evolved form of federal government. These intentions are those of the Founding Fathers, who haggled and wheedled for a decade over the exact type of Constitution which Australia was to possess. In this connection, what literalism inevitably means in practical terms is the de-emphasising of this historic constitutional intention. Literalism, with its exclusive emphasis upon the words as they appear in the text, must ultimately be destructive of any recourse in direct terms to notions lying at the heart of the Founders' vision, such as a broad concept of strongly decentralised federal government."

Interpretation is not something alien imposed on the text since the constitution is itself a historical interpretation of the political traditions of the British nation state and the US constitution. It is a distillation and reworking of these, and so the text needs to be understood historically, rather than as some foundational set of Euclidean axioms.

One popular approach to legal hermeneutics is the second argument that Lawrence mentions. We can go back to the intentions of the framers of the constitution. This sort of appeal is made by Greg Craven in a previously quoted passage when he says:

"In fact, the Constitution is the product of a complex range of historic intentions, designed to produce a blue-print for an exceptionally evolved form of federal government. These intentions are those of the Founding Fathers, who haggled and wheedled for a decade over the exact type of Constitution which Australia was to possess."

This return to what particular persons intended at a particular time gives us the touchstone that we require to resolve the ambiguities. The textual meaning of the Constitution is then equated with the author's intentions.

Lawrence approaches this argument in terms of the debates within the hermeneutical tradition, and Gadamer's criticism of the romantic hermeneutics of Schleiermacher. Lawrence says:

"Gadamer does not criticize Schleiermacher on the ground that intentions are irrelevant to interpretation. Rather, Gadamer observes that our understanding of original intent is necessarily conditioned by our own situation and concerns. Thus, our description of an author's original intent necessarily reflects our perspective."

We can go back and read the transcripts of the constitutional convention debates in which the constitutional issues were sorted through to discern the intentions of the framers; but we would interpret these texts from our own perspective. Understanding a text requires one to apply the text to one's own situation.

We do have difficulities here with intentions because, as Lawrence points out, the intentions of the framers were at the least ambiguous and complex. Thus there was little mention of citizenship in the Constitution. What does that mean? Does that mean that citizenship was of no import? How can you have a liberal nation state without citizens?

The meaning of the Constitutional text is not what it appears. As Kim Rubenstein points out:

"Citizenship concerned the drafters acutely and they made a conscious effort to exclude the term from Australia’s foundational legal document."

They did so in order to exclude the Chinese and Indian residents in Australia. Does that mean intentions are important? To the extent of trying to make sense of the silence about citizenship in the constitutional text. Lawrence highlights the difficulties in saying yes:

"...the notion that constitutional meaning can be constructed out of intentions is problematic for more general reasons. The difficulties can be illustrated in a series of questions: (1) Whose intentions are to count? This question suggests a host of possible answers: (a) the intentions of the drafters of the first amendment itself, (b) the intentions of the members of Congress who voted to propose it to the states, or (c) the intentions of the members of the state legislatures that ratified the Bill of Rights. Given the many different possible "authors" of the first amendment, subsidiary questions arise: What if there were conflicting intentions?

How should the conflicts be resolved? (2) What sort of intentions should be used? Again there are many possibilities: (a) abstract intentions about the principles underlying the first amendment, or (b) concrete intentions about the application in particular cases. What if more general intentions conflict with more specific ones? (3) What psychological states count as intentions? Are hopes, predictions, or convictions intentions?"

What we actually do here is to construct the intentions of the framers. We do this by constructing the historical background to the discussions on citizenship that took place during the Constitutional Conventions in order to understand the perspective of the framers’ intentions not to define citizenship in the Constitution.

blogging and democracy

I see that Ken Parish has an article on blogging that is a response to the one by Tim Dunlop. For my comments on Tim's article see here and here

Ken is more sceptical about blogging than Tim, as he argues that the role of blogging is more akin to functioning as fire alarms rather than as public intellectuals. He sets out his case clearly:

"Tim Dunlop makes a less than compelling case for blogging public intellectuals as agents for a truly informed citizenry. Schudson suggests that the entire project may actually be unattainable: 'Political theorists are eloquent about public life, the role of public intellectuals, the necessity of a public sphere, and the virtues of the common good, but there is a time also to think further on the private life ... on the joys of appreciating a sunset, humming a tune, or listening to the quiet breathing of a sleeping child ...'"

Public versus private. That old liberal duality once again. It should really be called into question rather than taken for granted, since many weblogs are about making public the private lifeof webloggers whilst those that are about public life introduce a lot of webloggers private life.

On a first read, what struck me about Ken's piece was the emphasis on numbers of readers of a weblog, rather than the blockages to the circulation of ideas in the public sphere. I thought that it read just like media analysts talking about circulation numbers of newspapers as a criteria for a viability. Hell, it won't be long before there is talk about advertising on weblogs and bloggers as small business people decrying attempts at regulation of their activiities.

On first impressions I interpreted Ken as reading the diverse weblogs through the eyes of journalism. His duality is light hearted tabloidism versus serious broadsheets, and he connects audience size to a populist writing style and subject matter.

If you view weblogging from the public intellectual perspective, then the concern is with the circulation of ideas. As McKenzie Wark puts it:

"Its a public intellectual's job to debunk intellectual fads and fashions. But it is also part of the job to broker new ideas from the margins into the mainstream. Its on this score that all too many of our overpaid newspaper pundits are failing both their readers -- and their editors. None of which would matter were it not for the stranglehold on some key editorial gatekeeping and intellectual brokering functions presently held by folks who actually seem proud of their own ignorance."

Debunk means criticism. Wark maintains that criticism is dead, finished, kaput. That leaves us with the brokering of ideas.

The public sphere in Australia is in pretty poor state in terms of the exchange of ideas. What is highlighted by this approach is the gatekeeping functions that moderate the degree of openness or closure in each of the media vectors where a sense of public life might occur. McKenzie Wark describes this closure quite well:

"I don't know which is worse, old cold warriors looking for new enemies-of-the-people to pretend are under the bed, or what I would call the curse of the Whitlam ascendancy. You know who I mean: people who by 1970s standards were enlightened, informed and forward thinking, but by 1990s standards are ignorant, obsolete and out of touch. One has to admit that the collective utterances of these two old cohorts makes for some great unintentional comedy. Howlingly stupid, ill-informed, incoherent ranting about postmodernism, poststructuralism, feminism, political correctness and all the rest.... some once revered names have spent the last few years depreciating their own reputations, speaking about books they haven't read, concepts they haven't mastered, spectres that haunt only their own impoverished imaginations."

This afflicts the blogosphere in Australia. Blogging does need to be contextualised as it is but one part of the diverse media that constitutes the public sphere. On this account we come back to distinquishing between some of those spaces that are open enough to renewal to be thriving and those that are not.

So what is Ken saying on this? The implication he draws is that it is necessary to go tabloid to keep the readers interested. He has some good arguments for this position.

Ken redescribes Tim Dunlop's republican conception of citizen self-rule and participation into an ideal, and then contrasts it with the actuality of modern western democracies where there is little or no inclination towards increased civic or political participation by citizens. We have a void between republican rhetoric and democratic actuality. The central criticism of the republican conception of informed and active citizen is that this tradition demands too much of citizens, as it expects citizens to follow public affairs in all of their particulars. It is just not possible for us as citizens do this.

Ken's response to the void in democratic rhetoric and theory is to adopt Michael Schudson's idea of the "monitorial citizen." Rather than try to follow and being informed about everything, the monitorial citizen scans the environment for events that require responses. For many purposes, merely scanning the headlines is sufficient. So:

"...political bloggers are best seen as self-selected monitorial citizens, keeping the bastards honest on behalf of the silent, politically disinterested majority."

Hmmm. I'm willing to accept the monitoring. I monitor what is happening and and select the bits of news that sit with the concerns of public opinion. But I do not accept the "silent, politically disinterested majority" bit, as my fellow citizens are also monitoring the news in variety of diverse ways from a wide variety of media. I write about it. Many don't. Some do not have the time. Others do not have the training. But many other citizens in civil society do engage in intellectuals in and around their work.

What does need to be displaced is the universal intellectual speaking on behalf of humanity on public issues within a common culture. It is all much more situated and particularized than that, since we all monitor from our particular perspectives and in the light of our specific concerns. The common public world forms out of differnt groups of people bringing their particular and different perceptions, stories, interests, passions and modes of reasoning to bear on common objects, events or concerns. There are many public spheres with their overlapping circles.

So what follows from bloggers being self-selected monitorial citizens? For Ken it is this:

"... to the extent that bloggers aspire to be cyberspace fire alarms or monitorial citizens who affect society and the political process in however small a way, they can't help but come to terms with Zaller's observation that the quickest and most potent way of doing so is to adopt some of the familiar techniques of tabloid journalism: racecourse journalism; infotainment; sensationalised, beat-up controversies and all the rest."

That says learn from Rupert Murdoch. Okay. Fair point. So what does that mean? For Ken it means this:

"If occasional outbreaks of tabloid sensationalism are the price that must be paid for bloggers to attract a large enough general audience to fulfil a meaningful monitorial citizen role, perhaps it's a price worth paying. As long as the bread and circuses stunts are interspersed with more meaty analytical posts, intellectual depth and rigour need not be sacrificed."

What else does Murdoch tell us about intellectual practices? That television, not newspapers, is the central media today. And television is a visual culture not a literary one. So why not experiment with a visually orientated weblog. Why not follow the visual style and practice of women's magazines? What not explore different and more experimental ways of writing?

This suggests that we bloggers do more than monitor issues and act as fire alarms. As Mackenzie Wark puts it, we are also "in the business of opening vectors of communication to different kinds and instances of speech and finding ways to negotiate their irreconcilable qualities." We bloggers are in that business because of the hardening of the arteries of a gentrified mainstream 'public sphere' along the major dividing lines by which public things are organised. But there are also little imperceptible cracks in the edifice of things along which change will come.

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the light hand

I have often wondered about the content of this old post. I have puzzled about how often free market commentators in public policy give priority to the free market at the expense of democracy. Democracy is consistently downgraded or ignored and the fre market is the toucstone of everything. I sense an anti-democratic tendency when I read their interventions into public policy, but I have never bother to unpack it. Nor have I bothered to unpack the deep hostility to green legislation that is passed to protect the environment.

Thus my memory of reading Milton Friedman is that equates democracy with freedom and then with the free market. What is left out of the picture is democracy in the sense of a broad based voter participation in the political process. See this article which reinforces my memory.

What we get from the free market economists is the spontaneous free market versus the coercive state, the policy prescription that market forces should play a central role in our lives, and that government interference with market forces should be strictly limited. What we get is libertarianism without citizenship; a libertarianism that has socialism in its sights; a socialism structured around operfect knowledge, coercive commands, particular ends, ‘social justice’, and the political will.

But it is an odd sort of libertarianism. As I read their texts and weblogs I am reminded of Robert Menzies observations on Australian liberalism:

"The sturdy individualists in the country who resent any political interference apply for it every week. There is hardly a section in the community today that doesn't in one breath protest its undying hostility to Government activity and, in the next breath, pray for it."

The picture that you get the free market economists is that the Australia economy is moving towards the "free enterprise" system where competition produces firm efficiency, dynamism and wealth creation. The Australian federal and state governments are pictured as uninvolved or unimportant in these processes. They stay out of the way of market actors, do not try and pick firms or technologies as winners and losers, and if they intervene, it is only to make sure that competition is maintained through a light regulation. I presume the dream is for market players to regulate themselves.

Of course there is much going on in Australia that slips by accounts such as this downsizing Leviathan, upgrading freedom and seeing socialism everywhere. Take the conservatism that so often comes with the free market package: a conservatism that refers to nation as distinct from the market. This talks in terms of a people unified, a dominant historical narrative, national character traits:----one continent, one nation, one people. Underneath this is a strong sense of order and authority. See this post on the unity of the nation by a Burkean conservative. What we have here is a strong state defending the nation's borders and defending the West against Islamic enemy.

What then of democracy? The liberal nation-state is not just a Leviathen solely into command and control. It is a liberal democracy. Well, the logic of the free market position is being deeply suspicious of government and political processes. THe logic of this position is to see democracy as dangerous, in the sense that the legislation of the legislatures can encroach on freedom. If democracy as the rule of the majority is a threat to liberty, then democracy is a set of procedures and institutions designed to allow the citizenry to participate in public affairs by removing and replacing certain public officials. Democracy can only ever be only a means to an end—the end being freedom. If democracy is a device to produce liberty, then it is only justified if it produces liberty: ie., individuals pursuing their own ends within their own private spheres. If democracy fails to produce liberty, then it undermines the market order.

Hence it would be appropriate to suspend democracy to protect the market order; suspend democracy in favour of a totalitarian regime that protects the market order by upholding in the institutions that uphold the market order, such as private property. Thus the whole Chile phenomenon: the free market economists from Chicago supporting Pinochet's dictatorial regime. Today it is the greens who are the enemy because they use the legislature to pass green legislation that restricts freedom.

We get stuff like this circulating through the media:

"This is why the free market systems of the West increased prosperity, and raised social and environmental standards, while the command and control systems of the communist bloc destroyed both physical and social capital and degraded the environment."

What people like Alan Oxley quickly passed over is the way the free market systems in Australia have increased prosperity and degraded the environment.

Green influenced legislatures improve the environment by fiat and the compliance with policies is secured by sanctions.

That is my reading of the logic of free market economists. It is confirmed by Alex Robson in this article in the CIS Policy magazine. Democracy for Robson "merely merely specifies that certain public officials may retain office at the pleasure of the majority of voters, and that is all." Those who see democracy as popular sovereignty are demagogues who have corrupted the true meaning of democracy--a procedure for electing political leaders. These demagogues stand for the tyranny of the majority.

What we can infer from this is that free market economists such as Friedman and Robson do not value the participation of citizens in politics as much as they value individuals participation in the market. The sphere of politics is subordinate to that of the market.

Beyond economics: character & citizenship

One of the tasks of philosophy.com is to provide a philosophical pathway out of the neo-liberal economics, which is now the hegemonic public philosophy in the world of public affairs. Let me sketch some.

In contrast to neo-liberalism's free market talk of consumers, prices, competition, efficiency and economic reform (eg., to create a national electricity market) and competive market solutions for public policy problems, we have the political talk of citizenship, public reason, democracy, political disagreement, the common good and the good life.

That contrast can be seen in the way we talk about the subject. For the utilitarian economist the subject is taken to be an economic one; a machine motivated by self-interest. This subject stands outside history, has no culture and is indifferent to the concerns of moral community. It's an axiomatic conception, designed to get the deductive logic machine working in terms of working up the mathematical equations to create a model of the competitive economy.

The political understanding of the subject has two pathways away from the economic one.

The first is a realistic move: the human subject is not abstract and disembodied. The political subject---the citizen---is embodied or gendered, belongs to a social class, and is a embedded in a historical and national form of ethical life (family, civil soceity and the state).

The second pathway is to concentate on the character of the historical embodied subject in a liberal society. A liberal society is only going to work if the subject has a character that upholds the values of a liberal society; has been educated in some way to acquire the liberal virtues; and has the dispositions that would enable him or her to live in a liberal society as a citizen, rather than treat the other members as objects to be robbed. This is the pathway that leads to some kind of virtue ethics.

These pathways intersect with the broad critique of the self-assertive, self-grounding autonomous subject of modern metaphysics. You could say that liberalism has a liberal conception of the good life that is grounded on a particular liberal conception of character as the good liberal citizen. This makes explicit what liberalism officially denies but tacitly affirms: namely that it is neutral between different and competing individual conceptions of the good life whilst affirming the liberal way of life as the best form of the good life. Liberalism is not truly neutral with regard to substantive theories of the good as it says it is, since it necessarily presupposes some views of the good and rule out others. It presupposes a liberal conception of the good and rules out non-liberal ones.

The implication is that the liberal state intervenes to promote or shape a substantive vision of human development for the liberal market order it is creating through economic reforms. This intervention (through competition policy privatisation, deregulation etc) qualifies the liberal state's respect for individual liberty, over and above the standard exception when the exercise of individual liberty exercise jeopardizes the rights and interests of other individuals. So the liberal state is in the business of shaping the character required for a liberal market order in a big way.

Liberalism has a tacit understanding on the sort of person the agent is in a liberal order. Though neo-liberalism works a competitive market lightly regulated with rules, it also has a conception of character. It places a big emphasis on the entrepreneur who takes advantage of the opportunities provided by the competitive marketplace to increase wealth. The good or successful entrepreneur needs to have certain characteristics or virtues to be capable of acting in the required innovative, free wheeling manner in the market order. Here the entrepreneurial character sizes up practical situation in the market order properly, and then exhibits the virtue called for by the situation.

A similar move is done by political liberalism. This place the emphasis on the character of citizen, and to say that a good citizen in a republic requires specific virtues such as autonomy/independence, critical thinking and the capacity to understand the different views of others. A good citizen, for instance, is one who is capable of balancing their self-interest with the common good of the republic; and can do so in our current multifaceted moral landscape where there are many layers of moraland political issues at stake.

This pathway of character criss-crosses with the Foucauldian emphasis on forms of governance to shape a free subject's capacity to be be a cetrtain kind of person. It criss-crosses the "postmodern"pathway carved out by Emmanuel Levinas and the ethical turn of criticism in thinkers such as Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Jean-François Lyotard, and John D. Caputo. This postmodern pathway recoils from the modern idolatry of the ego and it argues that this idolatry often involves injustice to the other. This injustice is frequently enacted in cultural practices of scapegoating, the projection of repressed instincts into the forms of demons and monsters, and the reduction of the foreign other to the same in laws of immigration.

It also criss-crosses with a virtue ethics that figures out how we can do the right thing in specific situations without the rigid following of a moral code to the letter (rule-based and duty-based ethical systems) that leaves open only one possible ethical choice. It is a practical understanding of the singular situation confronting us in the here and now; one based on a making sense of the singular situations in which life is lived by telling stories to locate them in a broader narrative.

Underpinning this emphasis on character is a virtue ethics that includes the emotions in human rationality and which holds that virtue is a character trait one needs for Eudaimonia, to flourish or live well. When this ethics is linked to the political (political conflict and political participation) one character trait is a welcoming of alterity, and an openness to the alteration of the (character of the self) through political debate and dialogue with others. This opens up into deliberative democracy.

So there are many pathways out of the neo-liberal economics that reduces politics to economics.

limiting democratic politics

One of the things that I have noticed with the free market commentators is how often they give priority to the free market at the expense of democracy. These comments have been fairly consistent on public opinion so I am going to use this post to try and construct the public philosophy behind the comments. What I will explore is the tensions and contradictions between capitalism and democracy.

One response to the persistant left wing bias of a public broadcaster (the ABC in Australia) is to privatise it. This is a way of dealing with the dark forces ----evil that lurks in the heart of the national broadcaster says Frank Devine. It means that the ABC becomes a media company providing information services and entertainment for urban lefties (the ones with totalitarian tendencies) who claim a privileged place in the order of society. Alternatively, says Devine, the corporation could be cut free of the taxpayer and mutualised through a million Australians raising $500 a year each to keep it going.

The argument for cutting the public broadcaster free of the taxpayer is that paying for it out of general revenue is middle class welfare for the urban lefties--and that ultimately smacks of socialism. It is government telling us what to think. This undermines the liberal order, as it leads to enslaved minds, no sturdy individuals and stagnation and servitude. It is pretty much Hayek's old road to serfdom thesis. Underneath the serfdom thesis sits the view that the citadel of Anglo-America is under seige from the dark forces of German historicism.

Hence we have a liberal order that is onguard against socialism, is based on economic co-ordination through markets, and where politics is kept to a minimum. Presumably politics is organized so as to preserve the values of the liberal social order. It is an active government to ensure that the right institutions are created to release all the spontaneous energies and talents of entrepreneurial individuals. The right institution is one based on market exchange, as it facilitates the spontaneous energies of individual initiative in creating wealth, prosperity and innovation.

There is silence about the public broadcaster being a watchdog for democracy or the media being the fourth estate. The media are seen as commercial enterprises providing media services for consumers who have the freedom to choose what they want to receive or hear. Democracy is barely mentioned, or it is mentioned in passing that they do not care much for democracy. It is the competitive market they get excited about, and there is sense that political institutions are subordinated to the market. The polity is a sphere of coercion whilst the market is the sphere of freedom. Thus democracy and capitalsim are placed in opposition.

If there is a marked silence about democracy then the silence about citizenship is deafening. The topic is avoided. We are primarily consumers in the marketplace pursuing our own interests. Yet, as citizens we have civil rights that provide protection from the state (basic legal rights to property, personal liberty and the principle of equality before the law); political rights (the right to vote, to speak and to hold political office) that facilitate participation in a liberal democratic state; and social/welfare rights (entitlement to a universal redistribution of income in the form of unemployment benefit, superannuation, universal education and medical care). These social rights in social democracy established a safety net of resources from which those citizens who had fallen on hard times could collectively make claims to the state for income support, and so continue to be able to fully exercise their civil and political rights.

This political rights indicate that we have a liberal democracy in the form of parliamentary governance as well as a market order. If we presume that removing the restrictions/regulations on media organizations means that they will become ever more concentrated and powerful (Rupert Murdoch is a good example of this), then the democracy that is favoured is one that is compatible with the concentration of power in giant corporations. Democracy is trimmed to suit the concentration of power in the market. If parliamentary governance can be more or less democratic, then what is favored is a form of parliamentary governance that melds with plutocracy and the concentration of corporate power.

This limited democracy is one in which there are passive citizens who vote for different governing elites who offer themselves and their political packages up for election at periodic intervals. Between elections public opinion has little place or role to play. That means public opinion has little role to play in going to war with Iraq, which was inbetween elections. If you have problem with that democratic deficit as a citizen, and you don't like the Howard Government taking Australia to war, then you can vote them out in the next election.

There is nothing here about democracy reflecting citizens’ policy preferences and judgements based on citizens engaging an issue, considering it from all sides, understanding the choices that leads to, and accepting the full consequences of the choices they make. The democratic deficit is built in to the very design of liberal democracy and, as the justifications for the Iraqi war showed, we have attempts to persuade and manipulate domestic public opinion through publicity and spin that fabricate non-existent threats.

The dangers to a liberal order come through democracy, as it becomes the means for an assault on a liberal order and so endangers the market order. Democracy is seen as the doctrine of popular sovereignty (the mob) and there is a strong tendency towards demagoguery (populism). So democracy must be organized to ensure that it supports liberal principles. Liberal principles are the only true ones.

Thats the construction of the public philosophy. It is rough but it will do.

Now I want to turn to the way in which democracy is beign kept in place--the techniques deployed, if you like. You can this at work in this event, which involves Peter Costello, the federal Treasurer. The event is about Costello's proposed charities legislation that clamps down on critique.

Now Costello waxed lyrical about charities in his civil society speech a few weeks ago. (My comments on this speech here. The comments by John Quiggin can be found here,whilst those by Steve Edwards are here.)

Costello's positive remarks about civil society and voluntary organizations nurturing social capital need to be read in the context of the radical transformation of the Australian welfare state. This transformation the role of government from big to small has resulted in reduced social services, restricted and altered eligibility criteria for the remaining social programs, and the increased policing of unemployment benefits under the guise of mutual benefit.

The neo-liberal dismantling and re-ordering of the Australian welfare state means that the nation's most marginal citizens are rapidly losing their ability to participate in Canadian society. It means that the poor are not merely poorer under a neo-liberal regime (less services), they are also less deserving of basic social rights. The moral order of a market society does away with social justice and replaces it with charity. Since market outcomes in terms of liberty and prosperity are deemed just, the poor become second class citizens.

Costello takes a much dimmer view of charities in civil society this time round. He is addressing is the overlap between between civil society and democratic politics in the key disqualifying section from the draft charities Act. (Margo Kingston has the core bits of the Act here scroll down). What the draft Act establishes is that a charity is a not-for-profit body with a charitable purpose for the public benefit, and which 'does not have a disqualifying purpose'. If a charity does have a disqualifying purpose it is not a charity, and will be denied charitable tax benefits.

What is meant by disqualifying purposes? The draft Act is clear:

8. Disqualifying purposes

(1) The purpose of engaging in activities that are unlawful is a disqualifying purpose.

(2) Any of these purposes is a disqualifying purpose:

(a) the purpose of advocating a political party or cause;

(b) the purpose of supporting a candidate for political office;

(c) the purpose of attempting to change the law or government policy;

if it is, either on its own or when taken together with one or both of the other of these purposes, more than ancillary or incidental to the other purposes of the entity concerned.

Little ambiguity there. The intent is clear. It seeks to clamp down on those charities that also acting as advocates or criticise public policy. They cannot speak out about the failures to provide sevices for the increasing numbers of homeless people in our cities.

If we put Costello's civil soceity speech to Anglicare and his Charities legislation together, we get the following. Though charities in civil society do good by picking up the people falling through the holes in welfare society but they cannot speak out about what is going on. Margo Kingston is on the ball--see here and here.

So what does this legal instrument say about democracy? It puts a lid on the formation of public opinion through public debate. And this from a advocate of liberty and a free society. What we have is democracy as a method of choosing governments between competing poltical elites; but it is a democracy emptied of substantive content and divorced from the doctrine of popular sovereignty.

bloggers as active citizens

In his great article on blogging and democracy Tim Dunlop makes a link to bloggers as active citizens. But he skates over what is meant by citizenship. Tim says:

"John Dryzek, an Australian political scientist, once wrote that "one might argue that political education, participatory action, and successful social problem solving could together help constitute a community fully capable of steering its own course into the future. The distinction between citizen and expert would lose its force.

What I am saying is that there is a strong overlap between the idea of a "public intellectual" and an active citizen, and if we stop concentrating on "the" intellectuals and think instead about intellectual practice, then the distinction between the two melts away, loses its force - or at least thehard edges somewhat ease.

I'm not saying that this means "we are all intellectuals" in some Monty Python sense. But I am saying that the distinction between "the" intellectuals and the citizens is often overstated and tends to be anti-democratic, assigning the vast mass to the passive role of spectator in most societal debates.We see this form in most conferences.

And here's where blogging comes in. Blogging changes all that to an extent that wasn't imaginable even a year ago. What Tim understands is that, in giving an increasingly legitimate forum to anyone who can hold the attention of an audience, blogging has provided at least one of the technical means of dissolving the division between intellectual and citizen.

What sort of citizens are these? Tim does not say apart from indicating that they are active and not passive, and by explictly linking bloggers to the new citizenship in the subheading of his article. What is the new citizenship as distinct from the old citizen? Again Tim does not say. Are we to infer that the new citizen is active as opposed to the old citizen being passive? If so then the argument is circular.

I want to open this up a bit by saying the new citizens are republican citizens. The core of the republican tradition can be found here (courtesy of Legal Theory blog), whilst an account of classical republicanism can be found here

Why turn to republicanism? The answer is simple. If political liberalism is primarily a theory of rights, then republicanism is primariiy a theory of citizenship. See here For those who see politics through the eyes of aesthetics this is useful.

The first point. Despite the apparent circularity of Tim's 'bloggers as active citizens' argument he is on the money here. There is a good reason to connect bloggers to active citizens because this is what is actually happening on the ground. A good example is provided by their contribution to, and their being a part of, the Reynolds+Ryan/Windshuttle fabrication of history debate. This continues to circulate through the public sphere as well as in history circles in academia.

For the recent round in Australia, see my post on writing history; Christopher Shiels guest post on Road to Surfdom here; Ken Miles post here on Lyndal Ryan's responses to Windschuttle's criticism of the inferences of her footnotes; Gummo Troksty's posts on Windshuttle's philosophy of history ; comments on Stuart Macintyre's paper On 'fabricating' history" at "Troppoarmidillo. There is a summing up by Christopher Shiels here. For outside Australia, see Erin O'Connor and Henry at Gallowglass.

That's being pretty active even, if there are limitations of coherence in this blogging debate. What we get here are bloggers being active in the affairs of the community--a public spiritedness--- whilst retaining a commitment to individual liberties and idiosyncracies.

So how can republicanism help us to spell out this new active citizenship? If we put the constitutionalism and federalism to one side, a key idea in the Standford Encyclopedia is the idea of the state in a free republic (an independent and self-governing people) being required to promote freedom as non-dependency of its citizens. The state should arrange things so that citizens are not exposed to a form of political domination that makes them unfree.

The Standford Encyclopedia post is written by Philip Pettit I would add that republicanism holds that the state should also act to ensure the conditions that enables citizens to use their autonomy to participate in public debates on matters that are of concern to them. Preserving and facilitating the prerequisites of citizenship means not only ensuring that each citizen has the means to live, work, and think freely, but is also encouraged to actively take part in the political process through deliberation and political activism. We are free when we are participating as autonomous members of self-governing political communities.

J.G.A.Pocock summarizes this classical republican idea well. He says:

"What makes the citizen the highest order of being is his [sic] capacity to rule, and it follows that rule over one's equal is possible only where one's equal rules over one. Therefore the citizen rules and is ruled; citizens join each other in making decisions where each decider respects the authority of the others, and all join in obeying the decisions . . . they have made."

This activity of ruling and being ruled, the life of politics, is a distinctively public activity. Autonomy means both thinking for oneself, participating in political life, and shaping our own lives. According to the classic republican tradition freely participating in the shaping of civic life is what it means to be fully human.

The low costs and the low technical knowledge required to run a weblog facilitates this autonomy, as it gives us ordinary citizens our own medium. Though this still has the form of being a virtual soapbox in the park that is linked to other soapboxes, the weblog does address an important problem of inequality. The inequality here is some individuals having a greater voice in politics than others. This inequality results not just from varying inclinations toward political activity, but also from unequal access to vital resources (such as education) and political participation depending on contributions of money rather than contributions of time.

Republicanism holds that this autonomy of citizenship is used to enhance the common good of the republic (ie., the interests citizens hold in common as an independent and self-governing people). Hence freedom has a positive as well as a negative aspect. So there is concern with civic virtue (the capacities and practical knowhow of citizens) and its fragility. This civic republicanism highlights an impoverished legal vision of citizenship in Australia, and it points to a liberal democratic political system that does not articulate a public philosophy that deals with civic virtue.

The best we get in Australia is the idea of social capital as volunteerism without connecting Australian democracy to civil society. What does not resonate here in Australia is Alexis de Tocqueville's idea of citizen's involvement in family, school, work, voluntary associations, and religion having a significant impact on their participation as voters, campaigners, donors, community activists and protesters. What is elided in Australia is the central issue of involvement: of people coming to be active and raising the issues that concern them.

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Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 08:20 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack