Values of Good, Truth, and Love in Participatory Budgeting in Poland

Abstract

Literature suggests that government instruments, rooted in the traditional modernist representative democracy, do not effectively protect the common good due to the moral hazard problem, and as a solution, it proposes citizen participation. However, just like over the last century public administration experienced a smooth and almost invisible passage from modernist instruments – informed by Aristotle – to postmodernist ones with a Marxist background, participative governance serves to replace the universal values of Latin (Western) civilisation by the ideas of neo-Marxist new ethics. This is the case of participatory budgeting that cannot effectively enhance financial accountability for the protection of the common good because it infringes on the value of truth. What is worse, by “the liberation from freedom” that it proposes is detrimental to the common good. The solution seems to lie in philosophy, that is the love of wisdom, and in true love.