NOTES
NOTES Prologue 1. Readers may recall the famous July 5 speech in 1852 by Frederick Douglass, in which he asked his audience the meaning of the holiday to the American slave and eloquently answered: “To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license, your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless, your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery” (included in Foner-Taylor 1999:188–206; the quotation is at 196). My point is broader, but certainly includes this perspective on the democratic experience. 2. Inequities of this sort are of course familiar to everyone, including theorists of the liberal democratic state, but there is a widespread belief that the state can and should be the solution to such problems, whereas in practice the state exists because it represents these biases and draws its strength from representing them. Hayward (2003:503) has recently argued further that the state reinforces differences either by ignoring them (as private matters with which the state cannot interfere) or exacerbating them by public policy. For instance, states may build upon existing neighborhood inequalities by “localizing collective problems on the ‘other’ side of [racialized urban boundaries]”; that is, locating polluting facilities in black communities. 3. Several historical developments make the present an appropriate period in which to consider a widening of the discourse about democracy. Two major elements are the extremely large increases in education that have occurred since the Second World War, which along with economic prosperity give women and men options not previously available. In addition to this increase in human capital is the decline in citizen interest in, and respect for, existing governments, a lack of interest reflected in declining electoral participation; prestige rankings of members of Congress, in addition, usually put them somewhere below used car salesmen. On the overall critique of contemporary democracy see, for instance, Bok (2001), Hibbing and Theiss-Moore (2002), Nye et al. (1997). 4. The Downs approach, combining individualism with a bottom-up approach to democracy was characteristic of a wide array of theorists, from political economy to political philosophy (Simon 1945/1965, Buchanan and Tullock 1962/1965, Riker 1962, 155 Schelling 1963, Olson 1968, Rawls 1971); it has remained largely outside the specific field of political theory, where scholars emphasize either the state as the sole political institution or identity-based social groups as the alternative affiliation for the underprivileged. 5. The idea of individual self-government as a perspective alternative to the conventional idea (of group self-government as a process that occurs only for societies as wholes) joins with the theme of everyday human activity as an open-ended existential game, to move the analysis toward a classical model (Socrates and Plato) rather than the modern one (Hobbes, Locke, and so on). The emphasis is on personal analysis and participation in social activity, rather than the justification for the existence of government. 6. John Gunnell has argued that the state as a meaningful concept was never relevant in the American context but was merely imported by German-trained political scientists who sought thereby to define political science as “an autonomous field” of study, and to “underwrite the legitimacy and authority of political science” by separating it from the vulgarity of politics (1993:58). Criticism from postmodern political science was similar to that from political theorists; Mitchell (1991) argued that the supposed state was so intertwined with social and economic forces that no boundaries could be empirically drawn to define its existence. Connolly (2000:169) comments that “the secular idol now gives off a hollow sound whenever it is tapped.” Dumm (1996: xxiii) remarks that “the primary framework for being free in the modern age of Western capitalist democracies is losing its grip on the imagination of the citizens of the world.” 7. Political science and political theory participated in a consensual but not entirely amicable divorce as a result of the so-called behavioral revolution of the 1960s, when new methods of data gathering and statistical analysis became popular among members concerned with empirical research, while students of theory preferred to remain associated with an older normative tradition. Efforts to bridge the gap, from both sides, failed in the immediate aftermath of the breakup, but have continued and show greater prospect of success in the present day. 8. A recent example is White’s (2000) analysis of theorists representing four schools of...
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