Democracy and Difference E-Book

Anne Phillips

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 363

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

A new emphasis on diversity and difference is displacing older myths of nation or community. A new attention to gender, race, language or religion is disrupting earlier preoccupations with class. But the welcome extended to heterogeneity can bring with it a disturbing fragmentation and closure. Can we develop a vision of democracy through difference: a politics that neither denies group identities nor capitulates to them?

In this volume, Anne Phillips develops the feminist challenge to exclusionary versions of democracy, citizenship and equality. Relating this to the crisis in socialist theory, the growing unease with the pretensions of Enlightenment rationality, and the recent recuperation of liberal democracy as the only viable politics, she builds on debates within feminism to address general questions of difference. When democracies try to wish away group difference and inequality, they fail to meet their egalitarian promise. When yearnings towards an undifferentiated unity become the basis for radical politics and change, too many groups drop out of the picture.

Through her critical discussions of recent feminist and socialist theory Anne Phillips rejects this democracy of denial. She also warns, however, of the dangers on the other side. The simpler celebrations of diversity risk freezing group differences as they are, encouraging a patchwork of local identities from which people can speak only to themselves. Her arguments then combine in a powerful restatement of the case for a more active and participatory democracy. It is only through enhanced communication and discussion that people can respect and learn from their differences.

Leseprobe

Democracy and Difference

Anne Phillips

Polity Press

Copyright © Anne Phillips 1993

The right of Anne Phillips to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1993 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers

Reprinted 2002

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Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 978-0-7456-6826-0 (Multi-user ebook)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset in 10 on 12pt Timesby Graphicraft Typesetters Ltd, Hong KongPrinted in Great Britain by Athenæum Press Ltd, Gateshead, Tyne & Wear

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1   Fraternity

2   So What’s Wrong with the Individual?

3   Universal Pretensions in Political Thought

4   Citizenship and Feminist Theory

5   Democracy and Difference

6   Must Feminists Give up on Liberal Democracy?

7   The Promise of Democracy

8   Pluralism, Solidarity and Change

Index

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for permission to reproduce the following essays:

‘Fraternity’, in Fabian Essays in Socialist Thought, ed. Ben Pimlott (London: Heinemann, 1984), pp. 230–41.

‘“So What’s Wrong with the Individual?” Socialist and Feminist Debates on Equality’, in Socialism and the Limits of Liberalism, ed. Peter Osborne (London: Verso; New York: New Left Books, 1991), pp. 139–60.

‘Universal Pretensions in Political Thought’, in Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, ed. Michèle Barrett and Anne Phillips (Cambridge: Polity; Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 10–30.

‘Citizenship and Feminist Theory’, in Citizenship, ed. Geoff Andrews (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1991), pp. 76–88.

‘Democracy and Difference: Some Problems for Feminist Theory’, in Political Quarterly, 63, 1 (1992), pp. 79–90.

‘Must Feminists Give up on Liberal Democracy?’, in Prospects for Democracy, special issue of Political Studies, ed. David Held, 40 (1992), pp. 68–82.

Most of these are reproduced with only minor revisions designed to edit out repetition or fill in background that had seemed unnecessary at the original time of publication. The main exceptions are ‘Citizenship and Feminist Theory’, which was originally written to a limit of 5,000 words, and has been extended, and ‘Universal Pretensions in Political Thought’, which was written partly as an overview of recent feminist political theory and has been revised and reduced. I have tried not to be over–generous to myself in these revisions, and to let earlier – as well as later – imperfections stand.

‘The Promise of Democracy’ is based on a public lecture given at City of London Polytechnic, March 1992.

‘Pluralism, Solidarity and Change’ is based on a paper given at Bristol Polytechnic in February 1992, in a seminar series organized by Jeffrey Weeks on the theme of ‘Contingency and Solidarity: The Impact of Social Diversity’.

My thanks to David Held at Polity Press, who first suggested that I put together a collection of my essays and has given me much encouragement as well as useful advice; and to Sandy Thatcher at Pennsylvania State University Press, who helped make it a positive pleasure to have two editors working on the job. The essays themselves span a period of nearly ten years, and I will not even attempt to thank the friends who contributed so much through discussion and conversation, comments on early drafts, or responses to the initial publication. I would like, however, to register my intellectual debts to Carole Pateman and Iris Marion Young, whose work has been so important to the development of feminist thinking on democracy and difference.

I am grateful to the Nuffield Foundation, which provided me with a Social Science Research Fellowship in 1992–3 to work on issues of democracy and group representation. The introduction and final essay were completed during the first stages of this project, which grew out of the theoretical explorations that are represented in this volume. Work on earlier essays was made easier by the generous research time allowed me by London Guildhall University, which sheltered me from some of the more unhappy consequences of rapidly rising student numbers.

My thanks, finally, to Ciaran Driver, who has always been willing to discuss thorny issues of democracy and gets little in return when it comes to discussing economics; and to my sons Declan and Anthony, for putting up (if not without protest) with the irritability and self–obsession that often accompanies writing.

Introduction

There are two stories of democracy that circulate today, and, like most tales of political endeavour, they allow us to choose between a happy ending and a future that is still unresolved. Both stories imply progression, and both regard the current moment as in some sense exceptional. The first tells of a long march of history from the early democracies of the Greek city states, through the initially non-democratic nation states and empires of Europe, and out into the liberal, representative democracy that is the appropriate form for today. In this tale, most of the twentieth century appears as a horrifying diversion. Liberal democracy was challenged on the one side by the authoritarian nationalism of fascist regimes, which set loyalty to the nation above citizen rights and physically eliminated unwanted communities, and on the other side by the repressive totalitarianism of communist regimes, which set the rhetoric of equality above the accountability of government and also eliminated millions of people. In the less troubled heartlands of liberal democracy, malcontents continued to appeal to outdated notions of direct democracy as their alternative to representation, or insisted that political rights were empty when superimposed on economic inequality. Fortunately for us, the story goes on, these alternatives have been roundly defeated. Liberal democracy may not yet be the dominant political arrangement in the world’s nations, but it has at last won the battle of ideas. All kinds of adjustments are still possible or desirable, but the basic outlines of the appropriate democracy are finally and firmly in place.1

The second story tells it differently, and takes up the tale at a different point. Skimming rather rapidly through the earlier chapters, it pauses mainly to note the extensive prohibitions that have kept so many people out of the political community, up to and including much of the twentieth century. No period, either in the past or the present, then serves as a model for democracy; and all the battles between direct and representative, liberal and socialist, protective and consensual democracy appear as a sub-text to the central drama, which only now begins to unfold. As universal suffrage is almost universally adopted, the main interest in this story lies in the continuing exclusions from substantial citizenship, and the problems that are associated with equality in the context of difference. It is noted, for example, that women can now vote on official parity with men, but that this has only mildly dented the masculine political dominance. Jews, Catholics and Muslims usually enjoy full civil and political rights, but religious minorities often feel excluded from their country’s political culture. Most democracies are now a mosaic of different cultural and ethnic groups, but the homogenizing myths of country or nation mean that only some of these groups will feel they are full members of the political community. How are democracies to deal with divisions by gender or ethnicity or religion or race, and the way these impinge on political equality? What meaning can we give to the political community when so many groups feel themselves outside it? How can democracies deliver on equality while accommodating and indeed welcoming difference? The questions then turn on the kind of politics that can recognize and legitimate group difference while resisting fragmentation into discrete and local identities, and the kind of solidarity that becomes possible if we give up on the presumption of an undifferentiated humanity. The story is left deliberately open-ended, but with a strong sense that these are the issues that will dominate the future. There is reference back to some of the earlier explorations of democracy in a plural society, as in the consociational democracies of Western Europe. But, most typically, there is reference forward to the urgency with which these issues are now posed: in the continuing phenomenon of a second-class citizenship for women; in the internal and persistently racial politics of the United States of America; in the dissolution of the Soviet Union; or in the destructive nationalisms of Central Europe.