Subjecthood and Self-Determination: The Limitations of Postmodernism as Democratic Theory

Abstract

The history of Western liberal capitalist society, viewed from the perspective of the growth of democracy, is contradictory. Although the idea of negative liberty at the basis of democracies of the liberal type secured citizens against arbitrary encroachments from the state, at the same time, by securing the rights of property first and foremost, it exposed those same citizens to the more insidious and all-determining undemocratic forces of the capitalist market. The history of liberal democracy thus created the conditions for the flourishing of genuine individuality in a democratic polity at the same time as it undermined those conditions by subjecting all need fulfillment (through which individuality is developed) to market forces. Until the fragmentation of radical movements occasioned by the upheavals of the 1960s, radical theory and practice was minimally unified around the critique of the contradiction between democracy and market forces at the core of liberal society. The fundamental principle of this critique stated that democratic society could flourish if and only if need satisfaction was freed from its subordination to money demand.