Democratic Community: Nomos XXXV

13. Feminism and Democratic Community

13 FEMINISM AND DEMOCRATIC COMMUNITY JANE MANSBRIDGE Advocates of individualism tend to assume a zero-sum game, in which any advance in community entails a retreat in protecting individuality. Advocates of greater community tend to assume no tradeoff between these goods, ignoring the ways community ties undermine individual freedom. This essay proposes advancing selectively on both fronts. Democracies need community to help develop their citizens' faculties, solve collective action problems, and legitimate democratic decisions. But community is in tension with individualism. The challenge for most polities is to find ways ofstrengthening community ties while developing institutions to protect individuals from community oppression. Women's experiences, traditionally neglected in political philosI would like to thank Pauline Bart, Nancy Fraser, Virginia Held, Christopher Jencks, Jennifer Nedelsky, Robert Merton, Susan Okin, Robert Post, my two NOMOS commentators, Carol Gould and David Richards, and Kenneth Winston , who read the manuscript carefully twice, for useful and insightful comments . In particular, I urge that Carol Gould's commentary be read in conjunction with this essay. Some of the ideas in the essay were developed earlier in my "Feminism and Democracy," The American Prospect vol. 1, no. 1 (1990). I would also like to thank the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research at Northwestern University and the Russell Sage Foundation for support. 339 340 Jane Mansbridge ophy, help in both prongs of the challenge, by revealing undervalued components of community and underestimated threats to individual autonomy. I. FIRST PROLOGUE: DEMOCRATIC COMMUNITY Social critics who write about community usually believe that American society in particular and Western societies in general need to redress the balance between individualism and community in favor of community. Redress, they contend, would be good both for the psychological health of the individuals in the society and for the society as a whole.) I argue that communal bonds can improve the competitive status of the group as a whole by providing an efficient way of solving problems of collective action. In a "collective action problem," or social dilemma, each individual 's self-interested action interacts with the self-interested actions of others to produce a lower overall product for the group, and, consequently, for the individuals involved. Faced with these dilemmas, communities often use the sanctions as well as the ties of love and duty at their disposal to induce their members to replace some aspects of their self-interested behavior with cooperation. These sanctions and ties can make the community more materially productive, enhancing its competitive status vis-a-vis other communities.2 I define a "community" as a group in which the individual members can trust other members more than they can trust strangers not to "free ride" or "defect" in social dilemmas, not to exploit the members of the group in other ways, and, on occasion, to further the perceived needs of other members of the group rather than their own needs. The trust that so defines community derives from ties of love and duty creating mutual obligation, from mutual vulnerability (including vulnerability to the others' sanctions), from mutual understanding and sympathy . The stronger the community, the stronger are the ties of mutual obligation, vulnerability, understanding, and sympathy.3 I define a "democratic" community as one that makes decisions in ways that respect the fundamental equality of each citizen , both as a participant in deliberation and as the bearer of FEMINISM AND DEMOCRATIC COMMUNITY 341 potentially equal power in decisions. The appropriate forms of democracy differ depending on the degree of common interest in the polity. The stronger the community, the less useful are aggregative democratic forms like majority rule, developed to handle fundamentally conflicting interests, and the more useful are deliberative democratic forms developed to promote mutual accommodation and agreement. A democracy that is only minimallya "community," with few ties of mutual obligation, vulnerability , understanding, and sympathy, will experience as common interest little more than the coincidence of material interests. As ties of love and duty lead citizens to make the good of others and the whole their own, the incidence of common interest will increase.4 All societies depend for their success partly on the ties of community; democracies do so in their own way. Unlike polities based primarily on traditional or charismatic authority, for example , modern democracies claim part of their legitimacy from an egalitarian, individualistic rationality that assumes underlying conflict. The individualistic formula, "each counts for one and none for more than one," comes...