Dissonances: Democratic Critiques of Democracy

Preface

p r e f a c e In 1999 I published a book with a collection of articles I wrote during the two decades preceding it. I titled it Counterpoints because, as its subtitle indicates, these texts deal with authoritarianism, democracy , and their mutual implications. The present volume is another collection of articles, published after Counterpoints. Its title, Dissonances , expresses my feelings about the democracies we have achieved in Latin America and elsewhere, and my belief that they must be submitted to what the subtitle indicates: Democratic Critiques of Democracy . This entails a double reference. On one hand, we should never forget the horrors of the authoritarian regimes that plagued a good part of Latin America. This is the point of no return, and nothing will ever justify returning to such regimes. On the other hand, the flaws of our present democracies are as serious as they are evident. In view of this, not a few people fluctuate between condemning these democracies as mere masks concealing sinister interests, and the conservative resignation that “this is how we are and nothing can be much diVerent.” I believe, however, that everyone, intellectuals included, must conduct a severe and detailed critique of the characteristics and workings of these democracies, while never forgetting the point of no return. Of course, this is often diYcult; people in government are not particularly keen on criticisms, and the beneficiaries of the status quo have in their favor powerful ideologies, often dressed as a (pseudo) economic science, that tell us that the best we can hope is for a very restricted, and ultimately depolitized, democracy. Struggles for the broadening and improvement of democracy can and should take place in many social locations. In my case, in addition to some interventions in public arenas, a natural way to participate, as I do in this volume, is by discussing ideas about democracy and its correlates. One of the central characteristics of so-called neoliberalism is to consider politics and the state as the source of most social evils ix and, consequently, to try to reduce politics and the state to a minimal expression. These ideas, among other things, have guided strenuous and, in most cases, deeply damaging eVorts at dismantling the state in Latin America. Furthermore, the same ideas appear, albeit less explicitly, in several theories that have won great influence in the past two or three decades . Among these theories I highlight the “minimalist” or “Schumpeterian ” views, according to which democracy is reduced—and should be reduced—strictly to the political regime. In these theories the subject of democracy is the voter, not the citizen. This excludes from democracy the full dimension of citizenship, which is not only political but also civil and economic (as well as cultural, a topic I omit in the present volume). A frequent argument of those who propose the minimalist view is that, if we abandon the conceptual refuge of the regime, we wind up confusing democracy with everything we like— and thereby the concept loses all practical and analytical value. I discuss these topics in chapter 1 of this book, where I elaborate a position that I believe both embraces the various dimensions of citizenship and avoids the just-mentioned criticism. In the same chapter I stress the intimate, jointly constitutive relationship of democracy with the state, not only with the regime. This argument requires clarification: another typical reductionism of the main contemporary currents in the social sciences consists of conflating the state with its bureaucracies. This leads to a view of the state as purely external society, and from there it is a short step to concluding that the state is in a structurally zero-sum relation with society— almost everything that the state extracts diminishes society’s resources. Whether intended or not, this vision has made a significant contribution to the anti-statist pathos of neoliberal ideologies. But the state includes other dimensions, no less fundamental than its bureaucracies. Among them, as I argue in chapter 1, the state is also a legal system. This system, on one hand, is an indispensable support of the democratic regime and its freedoms and, on the other, textures and organizes manifold social relations. In this sense the state is not external to society; when its legal system functions in reasonably adequate ways, it is a fundamental factor in and for the ordering, previsibility , and energizing of social relations. These initial reflections on the state and democracy have led...