Democracy and Its Critics
Hale, Dennis
BOOKS Sell-government depends on our selves I can still remember the most shocking revelation to which I was exposed as an innocent young college student. It was not about God, sex, or drugs. It...
...Will it ever get better...
...In the process of defending democracy, Dahl identifies three main lines of what he calls "adversarial" critics, the most important of whom are advocates of "guardianship," i.e., Platonists, who believe that only trained pilots should be navigating the ship of state...
...Equality, for example, has meant many things to many people, but in democracy, Dahl reminds us, it must at least mean that each citizen is invited to develop his or her capacities to their fullest, a task which requires some degree of self-government...
...Some of the best parts of the book are Dahl's efforts to work through these problems...
...tliat is relevant to the kind of world in which we live or are likely to live in the foreseeable future...
...Robert Dahl is the Sterling Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Yale, and he has seen many sophomores come and go-perhaps too many...
...I've been teaching for eleven years, so I've seen a few sophomores myself, and have learned that in answering sophomoric questions the trick is to get the student to look in the other direction while pondering the answer-to see the problem from another angle, to see, in fact, the question behind the question...
...Dahl doesn't do this...
...When we despair of democracy, after all, we are not giving up on "process"- we are entertaining profound doubts about our fellow citizens and even about ourselves...
...Democratic theory is a "web" with many strands, he argues, some from the ancient Greek city-states, some from the republican cities of the Renaissance, Some from the struggles over representative government in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries...
...Necessary, but-as Dahl himself concedes-not always sufficient...
...The key word, though, is aspire...
...taken all around...
...Unfortunately, Dahl does not move the problem much beyond Madison's tenth Federalist Paper, in the large state, citizens participate through representative elections and through interest groups, a form of democracy he long ago labeled "polyarchy...
...Has it, therefore, lost much of its ancient value...
...The last chapter is devoted to a consideration of how polyarchies might be made more democratic-for example, by ending poverty, bringing more democracy to the workplace, and using, "telecommunications" (computers and interactive cable TV) to reduce the knowledge monopoly of the "policy elites...
...He also provides a Cook's tour of democratic theory...
...A]ll the institutions of polyarchy [elections, interest groups, free expression, etc.] are necessary to the highest feasible attainment of the democratic process in the government of a country...
...First, it suggests that modern democratic states are about the best we can expect (since they are the most recent expression of this evolutionary advance), a possibility so depressing as to choke off any further thought (and send sophomores running to business school...
...it is one I could have managed myself, as a sophomore, but it would not have satisfied my friend, whose doubts may have masked a deeper concern...
...Many of these elements do not fit together very comfortably, leaving both citizens and theorists confused...
...If a man can't believe in democracy, what can he believe in...
...Possibly...
...Robert A. Dahl Democracy and Its Critics the Platonists, who have always tried to warn democrats against extravagant expectations of the "demos," and who have had much to say about political education-about which Dahl says almost nothing...
...And what is the modern democratic state Dahl wishes to defend...
...and its citizens are passionate believers in equality...
...None of which, I'm afraid, would have satisfied my college friend...
...No defense of democracy will satisfy our deepest doubts unless it points the way to a restoration of what Chesterton called the "romance" of citizenship, a project that will require more than just a modification of procedures, even more than a settling of old philosophic quarrels over majority rule and minority rights...
...I am afraid that not many Americans see citizenship as something to be reached for...
...I think I was actually a sophomore at the time...
...And second, it prevents us from learning too much from democracy's critics, including, especially, An important cause of the confusion over what democracy means in our present world is that it has developed over several thousand years and stems from a variety of sources...
...At the time, I could not imagine a more bewildering intellectual lapse than this...
...Most people probably already believe in this defense...
...Dennis Hale "best feasible system...
...What was once a prized possession, to be fought for or even hoarded by a small minority, is now freely given to all...
...it is also governed increasingly by bureaucratic institutions, both public and private, in which the democratic principle is hard to find...
...Each of these characteristics, moreover, is inevitable...
...Or is that another question...
...What is more, a close look at democratic ideas and practices is bound to reveal a considerable number of problems for which no definitive solution seems to exist...
...it is governed by representative institutions, rather than by citizens directly...
...My aim in this book is to set out an interpretation of democratic theory and practice...
...It was about politics...
...One of my classmates confessed to me that he had lost his faith in democracy...
...Greek, Roman, medieval, and Renaissance notions intermingle with those of later centuries to produce a jumble of theory and practices that are often deeply inconsistent...
...How worried should we be...
...they see it, no doubt, as something they already have-and from one point of view, of course, they are right...
...This prejudges the discussion, obviously, in two ways...
...It may well require the salvation of our souls-which is what the best sophomores are really worried about, anyway...
...He defends democracy by demonstrating, pretty convincingly, that it is the DEMOCRACY AND ITS CRITICS Robert A. Dahl Yale University Press, $29.95, 397 pp...
...An MDP society typically has three characteristics, each one of which poses problems for democratic theory: it is large...
...But I believe that no interpretation of this kind can be satisfactory unless it deals fairly with the major problems posed by...the critics of democracy...
...But Dahl's history of political theory is meant to resolve these confusions by seeking comfort in evolution, in the manner of a college text: the human race struggles through one intellectual quagmire after another, pushing ever upward to the modern democratic state...
...For example: Why isn't democracy better than it is...
...But the question of what democratic citizenship can mean in an "MDP society" is the most important political question we face-especially now, as "democracy" in some form is making fresh inroads into the Soviet bloc, even as our own democratic institutions are wearing thin...
...the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried...
...Or: Given democracy's obvious shortcomings, what are we to do...
...He calls it a "modern dynamic pluralist society," or "MDP society" for short...
...This is what we might call the Churchillian defense...
...His is a literal answer...
...This is, in the end, the finest justification for democracy-that it allows each member of the community to aspire to the dignity of citizenship, a dignity once reserved for the few...
Vol. 117 • January 1990 • No. 1
