Rehabilitation of Power in Democratic Dialogic Education

Abstract

The issue of legitimacy or illegitimacy of power is central for practices of democracy, critical dialogue, and education. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the legitimacy of power among the participants in Democratic Dialogic Education. Although in the modern practices of political democracy and existing institutionalized education, the presence of power is not an issue—they all are heavily based on power—the question is whether and how much this power is legitimate and desired for flourishing democracy, dialogue, and education. Starting from the Age of Enlightenment, if not before in ancient Greece, the legitimacy of authority and power in general has been under suspicion. There have been philosophical efforts to delegitimize power and authority, fully eliminate them, or at least subordinate them to intellectual endeavors of a pursuit of reason, science, hard facts, laws of nature, smart democratic procedures, and rational consensus. However, some other scholars argue that this approach ironically leads to results opposite to those that have been envisioned by the Enlightenment movement: violence, intolerance, wars, illiberalism, dogmatism, corruption, fanaticism, irrationality, repressions, and suppression of dissent. Following this criticism, we will try to rehabilitate the notion of authority and power in Democratic Dialogic Education (and, in our lesser focus, in democracy) and discuss what diverse interplays between power and critical dialogue may look like as a result of this legitimacy of power. Before we start, we want to provide a few definitions of the terms we use here. In our view, “power” involves the imposition of ideas, wills, and demands on people who would not engage in these ideas, wills, and demands on their own without this imposition. We define “authority” as legitimate power recognized by the people on whom power is imposed. We view “critical dialogue” as (primarily) ontological testing of ideas similar to Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s (1991) notion of “internally persuasive discourse”, where “internal” is defined as internal to the discourse and not necessarily to an individual (Matusov and von Duyke, 2010).