Democratic Community: Nomos XXXV

3. Shared Understanding and the Democratic Way of Life

3 SHARED UNDERSTANDING AND THE DEMOCRATIC WAY OF LIFE CHRISTOPHER J. BERRY In a book ofthat title I coined the term "the idea of a democratic community" to encapsulate, and interrogate, a significant strain in contemporary political speculation.l I sought to capture the essence of this by presenting this "idea" as, in a Hegelian dialectical sense, the preservative transcendence of liberalism. According to my presentation, supporters of the idea understand liberalism as the theoretical counterpart to the practice of contemporary capitalist democracies and criticise it for being excessively individualistic and insufficiently democratic. For these reasons they insist, on my gloss, that it must be transcended. But to transcend is not to reject root and branch and there is, and here is the Hegelian provenance that I am attributing to the idea, an acknowledgement on their part that liberalism contains genuine "goods" that must be preserved. It is being true to the idea if, as a working shorthand, we identify the core of these goods as a notion of self-legislation-individuals are both loci and sources of value whose decisions, actions, beliefs, and so on must be respected by other individuals. For the democratic communitarians , the goods acknowledged in this way constitute a positive principle worthy of preservation. But the acknowledgment also serves a defensive function by circumscribing the req67 68 ChristopherJ. Berry Ulslte idea of community. They require this circumscription because they are aware that communitarianism can easily be made to appear authoritarian or anti-liberal. This authoritarian reading follows if the community is accorded some superior or ultimate value that, accordingly, can permit the interests of its individual members, their capacity as self-legislators, to be over-ridden in the name of the community's greater good. To forestall that potential danger the supporters of the idea insist that the communitarianism they support must be qualified as "democratic." Here I pursue the assumption implicit in this manoeuvre, namely, that democratising the community solves the problem of any apparent illiberalism. We can identify two ways in which, in principle, a solution could be found. However, these differ fundamentally. The first looks on democracy as a procedure. The way to organise a community so that it does not act illiberally is to ensure, by means of what we might term an external control, the presence of certain democratic processes or institutions. This emphasis on procedure or method aligns this first way with Schumpeter's analysis of democracy, or at least accords with a conclusion that he draws.2 The distinctive character of the second is perhaps best captured as rejection of the Schumpeterian account. Instead of a conception of democracy as a set of neutral processes and institutions it is put forward as a value in its own right.3 Democracy is not viewed as an external control policing the proper (nonilliberal ) operation of a community but as integral to that normatively loaded operation. A community that is democratic necessarily embodies values that will solve the problem of illiberal authoritarianism. On this second conception the ideas and values that democracy of itself possesses necessarily imply a distinctive conception of community. The two are internally connected. Of these two ways, the second best meets the aspirations of the advocates of a democratic community. Because, thanks to the internal conceptual linkage between democracy and community , it follows that not only is democracy integral to a proper community but also that a true, authentic (proper) democracy embodies the values of community; only through this fusion can SHARED UNDERSTANDING 69 liberalism be aufgehoben. Accordingly, I focus on this second way, using the first solution, democracy as a procedure, as a foil. My strategy is to utilise a notion of "shared understanding" and relate these two different solutions, these two models of democracy , to a systematic ambiguity in that notion. COMMUNITY AND CO-OPERATION Some preliminary analysis is necessary before the notion of "shared understanding" can be analyzed. In my book two key features ofa "transcendent" community were identified: the idea ofcommunity enjoys a conceptual priority to that of the choosing or will-full individual and, second, the goods associated with community express themselves non-competitively. Alasdair MacIntyre conveys the idea ofa noncompetitive community in his conception of a "practice.,,4 Inherent in any practice , he argues, are certain standards. These standards constitute "internal goods." Practices are non-competitive in the sense that for one individual to achieve the inherent standard, or...