Deep Democracy: Community, Diversity, and Transformation (review)

Deep Democracy: Community, Diversity, and Transformation. Judith M. Green. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. Pp. xv + 243. $70.00 h.c. 0-8476-9270-1; $21.95 pbk. 0-8476-9271-X.

My first inclination upon beginning to read Judith M. Green's Deep Democracy: Community, Diversity, and Transformation was to hope for a sequel. While the book offers a generous helping of philosophical and social theories meant to deepen democracy, I was hoping also for a how-to manual on saving the world. After some consideration, however, I now realize that a how-to manual is exactly what Green has written. Though the book's main theme is theorizing about deepening democracy at the level of community, state, and world, it offers clear examples from Green's own experience in community-building consulting, as well as a subtle, but profound and carefully constructed, lesson in deepening the democratic nature of philosophy itself. It is both a call for other voices and a guide to using those often diverse (and sometimes seemingly conflicting) philosophies toward a unified cause beyond the profession.

In pragmatic style, Deep Democracy deals with the problematic. Green points to the issues of "existential nihilism" (problematized by Cornel West) and "ontological rootlessness" as contemporary pathologies to be cured by the medicine of radical critical pragmatism. As Green suggests throughout the book, formal democracy, while loyal to American history, is not sufficient for dealing with the dangerous results of our social pathologies. What is needed is a "deeper conception of democracy that expresses the experience-based possibility of more equal, respectful, and mutually beneficial ways of community life" (vi; emphasis in original).

Green begins her study of deep democracy by first showing that democratic communities that value equality and respect are possible in an increasingly diverse society. Contrary to Iris Marion Young's argument (which Green outlines in the first chapter) that the ideal of community results in homogeneity (and thus little respect for difference), Green's claim is that social life can actually enhance our sense of the other. From the point of view of the pragmatist idea of the social self, "the either/or polarity between the individuated self and the social self" dissolves when we understand that the individual self emerges from the social environment. For Green, strengthening communities will strengthen individuals and their interactions. Likewise, stronger individuals will further contribute to democratic communities.

Deep Democracy, in many ways, navigates the often-treacherous waters between sameness (and absolutism) and difference (and relativism). This is true for race, gender, and even philosophical traditions. With a chapter on Jurgen Habermas and pragmatism, we see Green's critical edge as she points out Habermas's occasional misreadings of John Dewey and George Herbert Mead. This criticism, however, always works toward suggesting improved interactions, even among theorists. This is perhaps one of the brightest elements of Green's work here--she does not point out philosophical problems (including those in pragmatism) just for the sake of philosophical criticism, but always with the aim of working out the contributions of various theories to deepening democracy.

This pluralism in philosophy and community is the primary means throughout Green's project by which deeper democracies will be made possible. After discussing the more traditional (but still enlightening) foundations in pragmatism of education, pluralism, coalition-building, and transformative action, Green adds to these foundations for deep democracy voices that traditionally have been marginalized, even within philosophy. In bringing the differing voices of feminism and multiculturalism to the "theory table," Green aims to show a broadened pragmatism's ability to use diversity toward better communities. In fact, Green, in the admirable expanse of her own philosophical knowledge, shows that philosophers such as Jane Addams, Alain Locke, and Martin Luther King Jr. already are at the pragmatic theory table. Especially with Locke's "critical relativism" and King's "prophetic pragmatism," Green also offers a very informative introduction to the thought of these philosophers...