Democratic Community: Nomos XXXV

14. Feminism and Democratic Community Revisited

14 FEMINISM AND DEMOCRATIC COMMUNITY REVISITED CAROL C. GOULD What contribution can feminist theory make to the conception of a democratic community? In recent years, feminists have drawn on women's experiences as the basis for a reconstructed political theory. They have sought to revise or replace the models of contract, or of the marketplace, or of formal justice with alternative models derived from the relations of care and mothering and from women's experiences of inequality and domination .1 Some feminist theorists have also put in question what they regard as a prevailing Western model of rationality, sometimes characterized as logocentric, which they see as underlying the political conceptions. But there have been few attempts to articulate the connection between feminism and the important part of political philosophy that may be characterized as democratic theory. In this context, Jane Mansbridge, in her chapter "Feminism and Democratic Community," offers a useful and detailed summary of the feminist literature focussing on two central contributions that bear on the concept of democratic community: namely, feminism's sensitivity to the phenomenon of unequal power, and the distinctive emphasis on the dimension of care and commonality that derives in part from the experience of mothering. She advances a perceptive critique ofgratuitous gen396 FEMINISM AND DEMOCRATIC COMMUNITY REVISITED 397 dering and of gender coding. She also points to the need for a notion ofdemocracy as not simply atomistic or adversarial, which is a theme she has developed at length in her earlier work. Her present chapter, therefore, provides a point ofentry for an analysis of the contributions that feminist theory can make to democracy and of some of the limitations of the contemporary debate. One general difficulty in Mansbridge's account arises because despite the dose analysis of unequal power, care, and other relevant aspects of women's experiences, she does not yet make explicit how these concepts contribute to a theory of democratic community. Perhaps how these forms of women's experience would enrich democratic theory is evident, and maybe a tacit understanding of all this is implied by her account. But it seems to me that after offering rich materials for such an interpretation , Mansbridge stops short and fails to proceed to the conceptual articulation of the transformations feminism can make in democratic theory. Here, I wish to explore some of the contributions that feminist theorizing concerning the care perspective and the critique of domination can make to democratic theory and to the concept ofdemocratic community in particular. However , I wish to be more critical than Mansbridge about the limits of the mothering/familial model for politics. DEMOCRACY AND DEMOCRATIC COMMUNITY To assess the feminist contributions to democratic theory, it will be helpful to operate with a basic normative conception of democracy to which these ideas can be shown to be relevant. It is no longer necessary, however, to hark back to the dassicalliberal theory of democracy to show how it ought to be transformed. Such a development has already taken place, in diverse but related ways, in the work ofrecent theorists like C. B. Macpherson, Carole Pateman, Jane Mansbridge, and Benjamin Barber.2 In this context, I prefer to make use of the construction of the transformed theory of democracy that I develop in my book Rethinking Democracy,3 particularly because it already reflects the contribution of feminist themes to some of the basic political norms. In fact, it was an early and ongoing concern with the 398 Carol C. Gould critique of domination, with the idea of individual and gender difference in the critique of abstract universality, and with the nature of social relations-all of these partly defined in feminist terms, as well as in contexts of social theory more generallythat led to my conviction about the central importance of democratic theory in critical social philosophy.4 To put it briefly, the central constitutive idea ofthe conception of democracy that I develop is that of equal rights of participation in decision making about common projects and common activities. This equal right is grounded in equal positive freedom, that is, an equal right to the conditions of self-development. Positive freedom goes beyond negative freedom as freedom from constraint in focussing on access to, or the availability of, means or conditions for exercising agency and effecting one's choices, and through this enabling the differentiated development of individuals. I argue that individuals have prima facie equal rights to the...