Equality and Democratic Societies

Abstract

Why should I surrender my private liberties and rights to collective interests? This question has long been fundamental to political thought, particularly since the Enlightenment. Any just political order must in some way manage tensions between members' public obligations and their individual private liberties and interests. Political theorists have explicated various models of the ways polities understand this tension. Jurgen Habermas argues, for example, that while Lockean liberalism interprets human rights, under the rule of law, as the basic expression of moral self-determination, Aristotelian civic republicanism adopts popular sovereignty as the basic expression of communal self-realization (1996:99; 1998a:258). In liberal systems citizens fear the tyranny of the majority and emphasize the human rights of all citizens, while civic republican traditions prioritize civic self-organization such that human rights are binding only as elements of a consciously appropriated tradition (Michelman 1988:1499ff.). Actual socio-economic conditions, however, can cause a shift in focus. Times of material abundance and relative prosperity often shift political systems towards the promotion and securing of private liberties; times of material shortage or political chaos tend to tilt the balance in favor of public obligations to ensure the welfare and security of citizens. Some political thinkers, such as Max Horkheimer, Niklaus Luhmann, and Werner Becker, argue that the causes of these shifts can be explained solely in socio-economic terms. Habermas characterizes such models generally as those that tend toward the "materialization" of law (1998a: 262). Such models tend to emphasize the primacy of welfare rights for the citizenry. Other theorists, however, tend to eschew the notion that this shifting balance is explainable by material or historical factors. Instead they conceptualize the relative differences between liberty and obligation in a more abstract sense. They develop models based on rational choice considerations, reasonableness standards, principles of autonomy, or contract theories. If one were to take a sample of at least some of the better known of these contemporary theorists (e.g., John Rawls, Robert Nozick, T.M. Scanlon), one would be compelled to conclude that for the most part they bestow a highly qualified conceptual priority on private liberties over public obligations. They insist that, ceteris paribus, individual freedoms ought not be sacrificed in the interest of promoting an organized, wealthy, or homogenous society. The material well being of individuals generally is secondary to their autonomy. I shall take as basic for any political theory of democracy, however, the presumption of equality among all of its citizens. This is obviously the principle behind the "one man one vote" principle, the staple of all modern democracies. Given this presumption of equality, each citizen is numerically one, and thus unique, among the many of the same citizenry. As might be expected, the materialist and non-materialist strains of political theory evince a predictable disagreement about what counts as democratic equality. A classic materialist about equality is Marx. One might think that, as a committed socialist, he would have embraced a notion of abstract equality of all citizens. But instead, he characterized equality as the most bourgeois of concepts: "during the time that the aristocracy was dominant, the concepts honour, loyalty, etc., were dominant, during the dominance of the bourgeoisie, the concepts freedom, equality" (4:60-61). Political equality is nothing but an abstraction, conceiving citizens under a universal self-consciousness (3:312). Moreover, he argues that, like any other practical concept, equality is merely an idea the ruling class imposes on the lower class. Marx turns instead to the phenomenon of human labor to find a material notion of equality. There he discovers a "homogenous human labour-power" operative in all forms of production (35:48). …