Paradox Of Democracy Research Articles

The Paradox of Democracy in the New Racial Domain

Abstract:Joseph Jones is contributing editor for the AAA's RACE Project column in Anthropology News.

‘What they Seek for is in Themselves’: Quaker Language and Thought in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century American Literature *

This paper argues that Quakerism was an important influence on a number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American writers. Looking at the work of, amongst others, Charles Brockden Brown, Robert Montgomery Bird, Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Greenleaf Whittier, it demonstrates that both the stereotyped depiction of Quakers and the use of Quaker ideas, such as the inward light in literature of the period, helped writers tackle some of the paradoxes of democracy in a young nation. The perceived mystery of Quaker individualism is used in these texts first to dramatise anxiety over the formation of American ‘character’ as either fundamentally unique and unknowable or representative of the whole nation, and secondly for more constructive ends in order to create a language able to express unity in diversity.

Vote / Citizen

Vote / Citizen

Vote / Citizen

Vote / Citizen

Vote!

Vote!

‘Solange, chapter 3’: Constitutional Courts in Central Europe—Democracy—European Union

Abstract: Soon after the accession of eight post‐communist states from Central and Eastern Europe to the EU, the constitutional courts of some of these countries questioned the principle of supremacy of EU law over national constitutional systems, on the basis of their being the guardians of national standards of protection of human rights and of democratic principles. In doing so, they entered into the well‐known pattern of behaviour favoured by a number of constitutional courts of the ‘older Europe’, which is called a ‘Solange story’ for the purposes of this article. But this resistance is ridden with paradoxes, the most important of which is a democracy paradox: while accession to the EU was supposed to be the most stable guarantee for human rights and democracy in post‐communist states, how can the supremacy of EU law be now resisted on these very grounds? It is argued that the sources of these constitutional courts’ adherence to the ‘Solange’ pattern are primarily domestic, and that it is a way of strengthening their position vis‐à‐vis other national political actors, especially at a time when the role and independence of those courts face serious domestic challenges.

The Crisis in Democratic Schooling

Balan continuedfrom previous page on a hopeful note, stressing that democracy in the strict sense is fundamentally concerned with the redistribution of social power traditionally based on conceptions ofmerit. Rancière is especially critical of intellectual discourse—from the technocratic Right or the progressive Left—targeting the excess of democracy itself as either anachronistic, untenable, or an obstacle to wider consensus and the subsequent institutionalization of politics. Echoing Rancière, Zizek acknowledges the role of contemporary capitalism as well as the indeterminate will of the merit-less "'surnumerary"' or the social '"part of no-part,'" which becomes determinate precisely when it manifests as a mass refusal to stand as an inert object of rule and begins to dictate events by articulating a universal, general will. Yet, Zizek is most resonant when he is at his most didactic. His explicit warning—and the basic fact to be accepted—is that there can be no guarantees when one undertakes a "divine" decision to act—divine not because it is supernatural but because it is a decisively sovereign act. A movement possessing any fidelity to the intrusion that is democratic politics can never be undertaken with guarantees. It is always risky, always tiedto theportentofpotentialoutcomes that cannot be predicted. It must become a kind of unknown quantity. And to those wondering ifZizek is seriously inciting bloody revolt and terror, he would likely defer but would waste no time in pointing out the commencement ofapologies for inaction and the a priori domestication of politics itself. Notably, both essays intersect with trajectories regarding the concept of bare life, biopolitics, and the state ofexception as articulated most recently by Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer (1998) and State of Exception (2005). Yet, instead of aligning and concurring with Agamben, both books assume the form ofAgamben's analysis but suggest the inverse ofhis assessment: democratic politics, as a practice, is itself a state of exception. It is indistinguishable because it has no basis or foundation beyond its own event. In fact, Rancière posits democracy as a method "to 'indistinguish' things," to wilfully problematize the straight lines and to render illegitimate all forms ofnaturalized—hence, social and cultural—power. Further, Zizek and Rancière together acknowledge the "democratic paradox": if democracy is in fact an exceptional and "paradoxical condition of politics" (Rancière) undermining the legitimacy to govern, what follows is the unavoidable problem of incorporating and integrating the excessive contents of democratic acts and social insurrection, of translating the "democratic explosion" and remaking society through the "brutal imposition of a new order" (Zizek). The paradox, then, is produced by the anxious recourse to explicitly antidemocratic politics: the threat ofdepoliticization, ofharmonizing, and of "things returning to normal." Thus, democracy itself takes on a particular and problematic temporal character . It tends to become a kind of syntactic element ofpolitical grammar, one momentintegratedinto the well-intended new regime (Georges Jacques Danton: "Let us be terrible so that the people will not have to be") or the malignant remnants, lurking, of the old State. Hinting towards Michel Foucault's analysis, Zizek and Rancière remind us of the basis of the injunction, "Society must be defended." In this context, and pointing toward current anti-political discourses in North America and Europe , Zizek makes direct reference to Robespierre's famous speech, "On the War," where Robespierre argues against his political colleagues regarding the persecution offoreign wars orchestrated in the name ofthe revolution. Robespierre's concern is the shift of focus and attention from the process of insurrection and revolution inside the State—redirecting efforts to an external place only takes the edge off of the democratic movement, obscures social issues, and suppresses politics itself. The connection here to societies structured on cycles of externally oriented primitive accumulation and a permanent and perpetual war footing are obvious. These are ominous suggestions: complacent citizens in State-managed societies who have neither the capacity to diagnose either local or global inequities, nor possess the political literacy or lexicon required to adequately challenge militarism and foreign wars conducted in the name oftheir own democracy. As we continue to cultivate rich discourse and revel in elegantly worded solutions, to where are we directing our political capacities, energies? Detailfrom...

Bollards, Bunkers, and Barriers: Securing the National Mall in Washington, DC

In this paper I examine the paradox of democracy and hypersecurity in one of the most significant urban public spaces in the USA, the National Mall in Washington, DC. I explore the 2002 comprehensive security plan for the National Mall. The security plan has generated heated public debate over how to improve security in a post-September 11 world, and protect highly symbolic space, while also preserving the open character of the USA's most visible and used public spaces. I conclude that so far issues of terrorism and national security have trumped concerns about public access on the National Mall. As a result this could both change the symbolic landscape as well as impede active forms of political protest, marches, and demonstrations. These changes are significant, yet have occurred without genuine public debate and participation in the planning process.

Between Disagreement and Consensus: Unravelling the Democratic Paradox

The idea of a rational consensus has become an increasingly controversial dimension of recent democratic theory as radical democratic theorists have challenged the ways in which liberal democracies deal with political disagreement and contestation. As a result, several theorists within the liberal tradition have attempted to incorporate models of dissent in their democratic arguments but this paper contends that they tend to result in forms of majoritarianism or proceduralism which reflect the original limitations that inspired the radical democratic critique. A more useful approach is one that recognises that contestation is inherent to democratic politics and understands that the paradox of democracy is the need to embrace the impossibility of establishing rational consensus in democratic practice.

Benhabib's Cosmopolitan Imperative

Benhabib’s Cosmopolitan Imperative Steven Johnston (bio) Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 220 pp. $25.00 (paperback) ISBN 978-0195183221 Internet culture operates according to certain norms. One of them — - Godwin’s Law — - governs deployment of the Nazi analogy in theoretical conversation and political disputation. Godwin’s Law does not deny per se the validity of such a comparison; rather, to preserve the value and force of the comparison, it frowns upon its indiscriminate use. This stricture has led, in turn, to the presumption that the first person to invoke the Nazis in a discussion has both ended and conceded the argument. Nazis are for losers. Seyla Benhabib’s first lecture in Another Cosmopolitanism, “The Philosophical Foundations of Cosmopolitan Norms,” begins with a section entitled “The Eichmann Trial.” Benhabib ostensibly discusses the kidnapping and trial for heuristic reasons, but the reader might well be concerned with the possible political effects of her startling introductory textual alliance with the Nazis. It’s not so much that the rest of Benhabib’s reflections are reduced to afterthoughts. It’s the suspicion that the reader is being set up to reach, without a full airing, certain problematic conclusions that Benhabib herself declines explicitly to draw: namely, that normative cosmopolitanism will and should flourish, everywhere. Another Cosmopolitanism posits a political world in flux. “We have entered a phase in the evolution of global civil society, which is characterized by a transition from international to cosmopolitan norms of justice” (15–16). The former govern relations between and among states; the latter pertain to “individuals as moral and legal persons in a worldwide civil society” (16). With rampant ethnic cleansing, state terrorism, torture, extralegal rendition, secret prison camps, political and economic refugees, and mass migrations, this is a necessary and welcome development. Benhabib not only affirms the changes underway; she theorizes how best to augment, enhance, and disseminate them. And this is where things get tricky. How do you reconcile the imposition of cosmopolitan norms, the right to universal hospitality, crimes against humanity, and the right to have rights (to employ Arendt’s formulation) with the democratic will of self-governing sovereign states? This is problematic not only with people already committed to democratic principles and values; it is also and especially problematic where there is no such prior commitment. Democracies, of course, can reflexively reconstitute themselves; insofar as self-legislation means self-creation and self-definition, peoples cast and recast themselves through politics (34, 36). They possess the ability to close the gap between actuality and idealization. Other peoples may need assistance closing it. Benhabib’s quest for closure draws inspiration from Rousseau. Her theorizations rely on a hypothetical future in which the democratic paradoxes engendered by cosmopolitanism have been overcome through a series of democratic mediations. We live, however, in the interim. What, for example, is to be done about Kosovo, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, and Iraq? This is where the Eichmann affair, bidding to become cosmopolitanism’s veritable Munich, paves the way for an aggressive posture toward contemporary political phenomena. How often can we allow justice to be delivered decades after the fact by show trials, whether of Eichmann or Saddam Hussein? Benhabib’s ethos not only allows for humanitarian intervention, it positively welcomes, even encourages, it. She acknowledges the distance between the moral force of cosmopolitan norms and their enforcement. In the case of Kosovo, NATO negotiated it properly. In the cases of Rwanda and Darfur, the world watched — - and blinked. Benhabib laments the inconsistency and suggests an undeniable obligation to intervene, implicitly necessitating a resort to violence which becomes not only inescapable but potentially routine. In her 2002 book, The Claims of Culture, Benhabib wrote: “To be sure, sometimes the hermeneutic conversation is far from civil, egalitarian, and mutually enriching: Wars, conquests, and plunders bring cultures and civilizations together as much as le doux commerce and other peaceful transactions. Some conversations are confrontations; and confrontations can be more or less violent. They may not permit a Verschmelzung, a melting together and into one another. They may present us with tragic alternatives in which there are winners and losers...” (34-35). In Another Cosmopolitanism, however, Benhabib does not pursue...

Constitutional Courts in Central Europe - Democracy - European Union

Soon after the accession of eight post-communist States from Central and Eastern Europe to the EU, the constitutional courts of some of these countries questioned the principle of supremacy of EU law over national constitutional systems, on the basis of their being the guardians of national standards of protection of human rights and of democratic principles. In doing so, they entered into the well-known pattern of behaviour favoured by a number of constitutional courts of the older Europe, which is called a story for the purposes of this article. But this resistance is ridden with paradoxes, the most important of which is a democracy paradox: while accession to the EU was supposed to be the most stable guarantee for human rights and democracy in post-communist States, how can the supremacy of EU law be now resisted on these very grounds? It is argued that the sources of these constitutional courts' adherence to the Solange pattern are primarily domestic, and that it is a way of strengthening their position vis-a-vis other national political actors, especially at a time when the role and independence of those courts face serious domestic challenges.

Direct Democracy Paradox: State Fiscal Policies in the United States and the Threat of Direct Initiatives

AbstractMany studies have argued that the initiative process in U.S. state governments strengthened the proximity between the citizens' preferences and policy output. In contrast, this study hypothesizes that the direct initiative process weakens, rather than strengthens, the link between citizen preferences and state fiscal policy. Governments respond to the threat of initiatives but only those of conservative agendas. The results show that while the level and the progressivity of tax rates in the states without direct initiatives are influenced by citizen preferences, those in states with direct initiatives are more conservative than those without direct initiatives and the former are insulated from the influence of the citizen preferences.

The Paradox of Democracy

The Paradox of Democracy

The Freak Election Bet and the Performance of the Democratic Paradox

The article examines the ritual meaning of the “freak” bet of the late nineteenth century, primarily as this took place in the city of Philadelphia. I propose that an election ritual can be thought of as an embodiment of the so-called “democratic paradox” put forward by Chantal Mouffe. The tension of the ritual lies in the question of whether it is able to satisfy competing demands on the modern polity and the citizens who compose it. I argue that the freak bet was an attempt to “think through,” or publicly communicate, some of the paradoxes of modern liberty. It did not succeed in providing a definitive answer, since, as I suggest at the end, it is in the nature of liberal democracy that such an answer will not be forthcoming.

'Solange, Chapter 3': Constitutional Courts in Central Europe - Democracy - European Union

Soon after the accession of eight post-communist states from Central and Eastern Europe to the EU, the constitutional courts of some of these countries questioned the principle of supremacy of EU law over national constitutional systems, on the basis of their being the guardians of national standards of protection of human rights and of democratic principles. In doing so, they entered into the well-known pattern of behavior favored by a number of constitutional courts of the older Europe, which is called a Solange story for the purposes of this article. But this resistance is ridden with paradoxes, the most important of which is a democracy paradox: while accession to the EU was supposed to be the most stable guarantee for human rights and democracy in post-communist states, how can the supremacy of EU law be now resisted on these very grounds? It is argued that the sources of these constitutional courts adherence to the Solange pattern are primarily domestic, and that it is a way of strengthening their position vis-a-vis other national political actors, especially at a time when the role and independence of those courts face serious domestic challenges.

Territoriality and the Democratic Paradox: the Hemispheric Social Alliance and Its Alternatives for the Americas

The civil society opposition to economic globalization, at times referred to as the ‘anti-globalization movement’, is often seen as unleashing new democratic energies. Some suggest that part of what we are witnessing is some form of deterritorialization of the democratic experience. What is often missing from this claim, however, is a more thorough evaluation of the images of democracy drawn by the movement itself. The first section of this paper will draw from various readings of the democratic experience in view of providing a conceptual framework capable of problematizing the equivalence between democracy and territoriality. On the basis of this understanding of democracy, a second section will offer a reading of the document Alternatives for the Americas prepared by the Hemispheric Social Alliance, a large coalition of civil society groups located throughout the Americas that has organized opposition to the Free Trade Area of the Americas. This document offers a unique opportunity to assess the anti-globalization movement's vision of democracy. The paper's reading of the document reveals a tension between territorial and non-territorial forms of envisioning democracy.

The Democratic Paradox and Cosmopolitan Democracy

Democracy's narrative on the source of legitimate political power contains a fundamental paradox which surfaces most clearly whenever there is an attempt to inaugurate a new democratic order. The new order is meant to be founded upon the consent of an authority — the people — which can only exist as such after the order is created. This research note begins with an examination of how this paradox re-emerges with the attempt to theorise cosmopolitan democracy, and how it leads such a theorisation into a logical impasse. Rather than seeking a way out of this impasse however, the second half of this note explores how the paradox may in fact be seen as leaving an irresolvable tension within the modern democratic imaginary which may lend itself to the project of theorising forms of post-national democracy.

Temporality and the paradoxes of democracy

Post-Marxist and poststructuralist ontologies of the political have been important reference points for recent discussions of democracy in critical human geography and related fields. This paper considers the conceptual placement of contestation in a strand of democratic theory often denigrated by these approaches, namely theories of deliberative democracy informed by post-Habermasian Critical Theory. It is argued that this concern with contestation derives from a focus on the relationships between different rationalities of action. It is proposed that this tradition of thought informs a distinctively phenomenological approach to understanding the situations out of which democratic energies emerge. In elaborating on this phenomenological understanding of the emergence of political space, the paper proceeds in three stages. First, it is argued that the strong affinities between ontological conceptualisations of ‘the political’ and the ontological register of canonical spatial theory squeezes out any serious consideration of the plural rationalities of ordinary political action. Second, debates between deliberative and agonistic theorists of democracy are relocated away from questions of ontology. These are centred instead on disputed understandings of ‘normativity’. This move opens up conceptual space for the analysis of phenomenologies of injustice. Third, using the example of debates about transnational democracy in which critical theorists of deliberative democracy explicitly address the reconfigurations of the space of ‘the political’, it is argued that this Critical Theory tradition can contribute to a distinctively ‘topological’ sense of political space which follows from thinking of political action as emerging from worldly situations of injustice. In bringing into focus this phenomenological approach to political action, the paper has lessons for both geographers and political theorists. Rather than continuing to resort to a priori models of what is properly political or authentically democratic, geographers would do well to acknowledge the ordinary dynamics and disappointments which shape political action. On the other hand, political theorists might do well to acknowledge the limits of the ‘methodological globalism’ that characterises so much recent work on the re-scaling of democracy.

De democratische paradox van de RKSP. De 'leer van de uiterste noodzaak' als uiting van de groeiende eensgezindheid tussen katholieken en sociaal-democraten in het interbellum

The democratic paradox of the Roman Catholic State Party (RKSP). The ‘doctrine of the last resort’ as an expression of the growing solidarity between the Catholics and Social Democrats during the interbellumBetween the First and Second World War, coalition-building was fairly problematic in Dutch politics. This was partly caused by the refusal of the Roman Catholic State Party (RKSP) to form a government coalition with the Social Democratic Labour Party (SDAP). On several occasions, the leadership of the party argued that the RKSP would only agree to collaborate in a so-called ‘Roman-red coalition’ out of ‘sheer necessity’. In the literature, roughly two interpretations of the Catholic refusal can be discerned. According to the first interpretation, the RKSP rejected a government coalition with the SDAP because the leadership of the party thought that the ideological differences between both parties were insurmountable. According to the second interpretation, the Catholic leadership refused to collaborate because it was afraid that the Catholic party would disintegrate as a result of the internal schism. In this article, it is claimed that the first interpretation is not tenable, and the second only partly. The refusal of the RKSP leadership to collaborate with the SDAP did not signify Catholic division or a clash between Catholic and social democratic principles but, paradoxically, a growing Catholic unity and a growing consensus between both parties. However, for the Catholic leaders a Roman-red coalition was a taboo subject since it would force the party to explicitly recognise that the Catholic and social democratic ideologies were reconcilable.

Introduction

Introduction