The Civil Society Reader

16. from Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age

16 Benjamin R. Barber from Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age CITIZENSHIP AND COMMUNITY: POLITICS AS SOCIAL BEING There can be no patriotism without liberty; no liberty without virtue; no virtue without citizens; create citizens and you will have everything you need; without them, you will have nothing but debased slaves, from the rulers of the state downwards. —Jean-Jacques Rousseau But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? —James Madison The State of Civil Society is a state of nature. . . . Man’s nature is Art. —Edmund Burke If government is but the greatest of all reflections on human nature and if, in Rousseau’s inversion of Madison’s claim, a people can be “no other than the nature of its government,” then there is no better way to elucidate the difference between strong democracy and liberal democracy than by comparing how they portray human nature.1 . . . We [have] examined the liberal portrait of human nature, which construed the human essence as radically individual and solitary, as hedonistic and prudential, and as social only to the extent required by the quest for preservation and liberty in an adversary world of scarcity. This conception presented human behavior as necessarily self-seeking, albeit 1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, book 9. The full quotation reads: “I had come to see that everything was radically connected with politics, and that however one proceeded, no people would be other than the nature of its government.” in a premoral way. People entered into social relations only in order to exploit them for their own individual ends. Because modern liberal democracy is an accretion of democracy on a liberal philosophical base, American democratic theory has from its beginnings been weighted down by radical individualism. This association has created tensions within liberal democracy that, because they are rooted in conflicting notions of the human essence, cannot easily be resolved by politics. Marx took note of these tensions in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Rather than resurrecting freedom, he remarked, it produced a profound cleavage between man conceived as an individual member of civil society pursuing his private aims in conflict with others and man conceived as a citizen cooperating in “illusory ” universals—namely, the “political state.”2 In the Grundrisse, Marx offered an alternative construction of human nature as socially determined, a construction that links Aristotle to the modern sociological conception. “The human being,” Marx wrote, “is in the most liberal sense a zoön politikon, not merely a gregarious [geselliges] animal, but an animal that can individuate itself only in the midst of society.”3 The social construction of man is not, however, simply the antithesis of the individual construction formed in social-contract theory. It is dialectical, for it perceives an ongoing interaction by which world and man together shape each other.4 Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann capture the dialectic perfectly in this postMarxist depiction of man’s social nature: “Man is biologically predestined to construct and inhabit a world with others. This world becomes for him the dominant and definitive reality. Its limits are set by nature, but once constructed, this world acts back upon nature. In the dialectic between nature and the socially constructed Barber: Strong Democracy 235 • 2. In On the Jewish Question, Marx writes: Where the political state has attained to its full development, man leads . . . a double existence—celestial and terrrestrial. He lives in the political community, where he regards himself as a communal being, and in civil society where he acts simply as a private individual , treats other men as means, degrades himself to the role of a mere means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers. . . . Man . . . in civil society, is a profane being. . . . In the state, on the contrary, where he is regarded as a species-being, man is the imaginary member of an imaginary sovereignty, divested of his real, individual life, and infused with an unreal universality. (In Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader [New York: Norton, 1972], p. 32.) 3. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. M. Nicolaus (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. 84. In the better-known Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach, Marx and Engels wrote that “the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations” (in Tucker, ed., Reader, Theses on Feuerbach, p. 109). 4. Continental existentialists typically commence the...