ci 2006 political agency in liberal democracy

Political Agency in Liberal Democracy*

JIWEI CIPhilosophy, Wuhan University & University of Hong Kong

I. THE PROBLEM

DEMOCRACY as a form of government is informed by a composite ofideals, perhaps none more central and inspiring than the realization of the

collective political agency of the “people.”1 This ideal of agency is not quitecaptured in an otherwise very apt and comprehensive definition of democracyas “a matter of making social outcomes systematically responsive to the settledpreferences of all affected parties.”2 For there is a moral-psychological andaffective dimension to agency, and to democracy insofar as it is conceived in

The Journal of Political Philosophy: Volume 14, Number 2, 2006, pp. 144–162

© 2006 Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street,Malden, MA 02148, USA.

*I am indebted to the two reviewers for The Journal of Political Philosophy for their helpfulcomments, especially to David Estlund, who kindly shed his anonymity as reviewer and went out ofhis way to provide extremely detailed and thoughtful suggestions. I am as grateful to Robert Goodin,editor of The Journal of Political Philosophy, for giving me the benefit of his exceptional knowledgeof the field and for suggesting important revisions that have resulted in a better conceived and betterargued paper. I have also benefited from comments on earlier versions of the paper presented atLingnan University in Hong Kong and especially at a conference held at Tsinghua University inBeijing.

1Here are two representative statements of this idea. According to John Dunn, “What ademocracy . . . is, in the consciousness of its individual members, is a formation in and through whichto act together: an endless resonance of interacting awarenesses and an intricate oscillation of whollyfree choices. This is not a picture of what it ever feels like, so much as a proposal for how we mustnerve ourselves to recognize it to be. It draws its dignity from the freedoms which make it up, andabandons, in doing so, any ground whatever for assurance that its consequences can be trusted toprove agreeable. It is no longer an instrument at all—more an inspiring collective voyage (or, if youfind your fellows’ exercise of their freedom alarming or odious, a chastening shared pilgrimage).. . . By viewing the content of democracy so stringently through the prism of free agency, it drawsforce from, and privileges, the view that autonomy is both the key prerequisite and the supreme goalfor any worthwhile human life;” Dunn, “Democracy and the prospects for public and privatehappiness,” paper presented at a conference on “Democracy and Human Happiness,” Kyoto, Japan,April 2002, pp. 17–18. In a similar vein, Raymond Geuss writes: “The second approach todemocracy focuses not on such relatively instrumental advantages (and disadvantages), but on thepurportedly inherent moral superiority of democratic procedures. This line descends from Rousseau,and has become part of the common coin of narcissistically adulatory self-description on the partof ‘democracies.’ The highest moral demand, according to this view, is that a person be free and self-legislating, and avoid dependence on the will of others. The only way to avoid such dependence ina complex society is by a process in which people institute a self-legislating political system.Democracy deserves moral approbation, because in a democracy the people have the (political)power, and to say that the people have the (political) power is to say that they form a self-legislatingcommunity of the requisite sort;” Geuss, History and Illusion in Politics (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2001), p. 123. See also Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy (Berkeley, Calif.:University of California Press, 1984).

2Robert E. Goodin, Reflective Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 1 and thereferences cited therein.

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terms of agency, that eludes description in terms of outcomes alone. Someexercise of power (that is, popular power) is clearly a crucial element of thisdimension of agency, and so is a kind of collective self-consciousness thereof (callit collective political subjectivity) that marks a democratic people. There seemsnothing in politics to equal the prospect of the people exercising power overthemselves (democratic power) and understanding themselves accordingly(democratic subjectivity).

Needless to say, this account begs a host of questions regarding whatdemocratic political agency is and how it should be conceived, what form orforms of it are realistically possible and desirable, and so on. But if democracyis to be the inspired and inspiring ideal it is so often taken to be, it seems thatsome ideal of collective political agency, with its moral-psychological andaffective dimension, is unavoidable, if only in an implicit form, even for thosewho have no time for direct democracy or who reject any Rousseauean accountof the General Will. It is some such ideal, more than anything else in thecomposite of ideals that underpin democracy, that lifts democracy above the levelof the morally mundane and gives it its chief emotional and rhetorical appeal.In keeping with this, a very straightforward account of the moral appeal ofdemocracy in terms of collective political agency presents itself: citizens indemocracies attach fundamental importance to collective political agency;democracy is an effective expression of and means to such agency; and that iswhy most citizens find democracy so appealing and deserving of their allegiance.

But things are not quite the way they are supposed to be. For one thing, it isnot an uncommon feature of modern democracies that a significant number ofcitizens show a certain lack of enthusiasm for or attentiveness to the democraticprocess, as evidenced by the dearth of informed deliberation and relatively lowvoter turnout, among other things.3 For another thing, there is undeniably asizable gap between the ideal of collective political agency explicitly or implicitlyespoused and the extent to which it is put into practice. Admittedly such a gapneed not be a cause for surprise, for it is arguably true of all moral and politicalideals that are at all inspiring. But what is surprising, if we take citizens’ espousalof the democratic ideal of collective political agency seriously, is a furtherphenomenon often observable in modern democracies, namely, that this gap doesnot seem deeply to trouble the majority of citizens in liberal democracies.

It is sufficient for my purposes that such a gap is acknowledged to exist andto be a significant one.4 There is no need to exaggerate the gap. Nor is there anyneed to be very precise about the ideal and the reality of democracy betweenwhich the gap exists. Thus, I will not be concerned to provide either a systematicnormative account of what collective political agency should mean in ademocratic society or an empirical account of exactly how much political agency

3See John Dunn, The Cunning of Unreason (New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 155–9.4Robert A. Dahl acknowledges such a gap, albeit in the most general terms. See his Democracy

and Its Critics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 90.

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is achieved or fails to be achieved by actually existing democracies. Rather, I aminterested in exploring questions prompted by the general, largely unquestioningacceptance of the gap in order to shed light on aspects of the overall characterof liberal democracy.

Unquestioning acceptance of the gap between the democratic ideal anddemocratic reality raises interesting questions because it is considerably moreextensive than one would be led to believe by much of the public rhetoric aboutdemocracy and the moral intensity of that rhetoric. Compare, also, the calmacceptance of this gap in liberal democracies with how the gap between rhetoricand reality involving socialist ideals troubled citizens in former “communist”societies. It would be a very partial and rather superficial response simply tosuggest that the gap between ideal and reality is much smaller in the case ofdemocracy than in the case of “communism.” There may be some truth to thisclaim, as I will explain later in terms of the existence of some plausible semblanceof political agency. Is it not also possible, however, that something deeper is goingon here: that the gap between the ideal and reality of democracy is not of a kindthat really matters greatly provided that the achievement of other, moreimportant goals is aided by democracy? Is it not possible, to put it morespecifically and boldly, that what citizens of modern democracies—so-calledliberal democracies—are mainly after is not political agency but a plausiblesemblance of political agency of a (liberal) kind that is conducive to, andsufficient for the purpose of, preventing pure domination and protectingindividual freedoms?

I will not pursue an empirical answer to this question (what would anempirical answer look like?) but will instead seek to throw some speculative lighton it by exploring a number of issues that arise in the context of an affirmativeresponse. What is human agency like such that we can speak of there being moreroom for agency in one domain of life (the private life protected by liberalism)than in another (the public life made possible by democracy), and of citizenstaking more interest in one than in the other? What is the broad social contextin which the first domain of agency seems to matter considerably more than thesecond? If the democratic component of a liberal democracy is not chieflydesigned to deliver the collective political agency it promises, what is it that itexists to achieve? If democracy represents a domain of agency that is ofsecondary importance in a liberal democracy, what is the nature of the relationin which it stands to private life as arguably the dominant domain of agency?To the extent that the ideal of collective political agency and the domain ofagency related to it still matter, if only in a secondary way, how do citizensmanage to find the ideal credible given the large gap between it and the realityof public life?

Insofar as the phenomena I address under these and related rubrics bear somesignificant resemblance to reality and my arguments regarding them are wellfounded, my discussion will give flesh and plausibility to the affirmative answer


to the overarching question posed earlier. In this context, what I examine is notso much the empirical reality of democracy as the ideological discourse ofdemocracy (a term to be explained presently) that bears a complex relation tothe ideal of political agency, on the one hand, and to its reality, on the other,and serves to mediate between them.

II. DEMOCRACY AS UTOPIA AND IDEOLOGY

My account is critical of democracy, as may already be obvious, but it is notopposed to democracy. For the critical element in my account is not informedby any system of political values outside of or against democracy but rather byvalues present or at least implicit in the ideal of democracy itself. In this sensethe critique is of an immanent kind, getting its bite from tensions orcontradictions within the ideal of democracy and between democracy as an idealand in practice.5 To be more precise, I distinguish between two discourses ofdemocracy, which differ, among other things, in how they stand in relation to the actual practice of democracy in the modern world. Following KarlMannheim’s terminology, I call these discourses utopian and ideologicalrespectively.6

In explaining the utopian discourse of democracy, I will begin with theobservation that in keeping with a general rule the ideal of collective politicalagency is driven by deficiencies within the corresponding reality (though ofcourse it can be prefigured in partially analogous experiences of agency inindividual and smaller-scale collective life). In other words, the desire for politicalagency that informs the aspiration to democracy is the “negative” desire toescape from experiences of dependency and domination, whose opposite, the“positive” experience of political agency, is yet to be realized.7 There is thus a

5For example, of the four “models” of democracy identified by C. B. Macpherson, there is a deeptension between Model 1 (Protective Democracy) and Model 3 (Equilibrium Democracy), on theone hand, and Model 2 (Developmental Democracy) and Model 4 (Participatory Democracy), onthe other; see Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1977). See also Macpherson’s related distinction between “two meanings” of democracy,namely “the democracy of a capitalist market society” and “a society striving to ensure that all itsmembers are equally free to realize their capacities” (p. 1). I will not be working with Macpherson’sconcepts but the distinction I will draw between the ideological and utopian discourses of democracybears some resemblance to the contrast between Macpherson’s Models 1/3 and Models 2/4.Developmental Democracy and Participatory Democracy, taken seriously, remain largely utopiantoday. So, too, is the normatively attractive ideal of “reflective democracy” proposed by Goodin inReflective Democracy.

6See Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (New York:Harcourt, Brace & World, 1936). Dahl, too, speaks of the “significant utopianism of the democraticideal” in Democracy and Its Critics, p. 5.

7As Alain Touraine puts it, “It is because society is dominated by powers that democratic actionis primarily a matter of opposing institutional practices and rules, which usually serve to protect the powers of the dominant. Democratic action mobilizes a collective and personal will towardliberation, which is by no means synonymous with the rational pursuit of self-interest”; Touraine,What Is Democracy, trans. David Macey (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1998), p. 131. Again,“Democracy is not primarily a set of procedures but a critique of established powers and a hope forpersonal and collective liberation” (p. 132).

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utopian moment to democracy, an imaginative and conceptual leap from thenegation of reality to the affirmation of its opposite, much as there is a utopianmoment to communism, whose original experiential impulse is the negation ofclass-based oppression and exploitation. One crucial difference between utopiandesire and ordinary desire is that ordinary desires, having been satisfied (orbelonging to a category of desires that have been satisfied) before, can draw uponpast experience of satisfaction in the temporal gap between wish and fulfillment,whereas utopian desire is the wish for a state of affairs that has never beenrealized.

It is a thought-provoking feature of modern democracy that popularenthusiasm for this form of government is usually at its highest in societies wheredemocracy is yet to be established, such as when the countries in Eastern Europewere still under “communist” rule. One explanation for this fact is that at suchtimes the utopian moment of democracy is preserved intact in a certain politicalinnocence: it is not yet revealed by recalcitrant political reality as utopian in thebad sense, that is, unrealistic and unrealizable, except at the cost of what canstrike the more idealistically minded as corrupting compromises. This kind ofthing can happen to ordinary desires, too, but there are few experiences socomprehensively devastating as a utopian dream turning sour.

Given the utopian moment of democracy, there is unsurprisingly a large gapbetween the theory and practice of democracy (think, again, of communism asa parallel case). This gap stems in part from such institutional factors as the sheersize of modern states and the unavoidable indirectness in the implementation of democracy through representative institutions. It becomes positivelyunbridgeable in the face of the sharp separation, constitutive of capitalism, ofthe “economic” and the “political” so that the operation of the market economy,arguably the dominant determinant of life prospects in the modern world, is freefrom the effective influence of democratic politics.8 What happens as a result, asRaymond Geuss puts it, is that “any individual or finite group of individuals in a modern state with representative democratic institutions is still confrontedwith a massive apparatus of coercion that is not directly biddable” and therefore“the hope that the state-power could ever really be ‘our’ power or fully undercollective control is completely misplaced.”9

This chronic deficiency in political practice is endlessly protested against,compensated for, or explained away in political discourse. The discourse ofdemocracy exists, first, to give expression to real aspirations to liberation fromdependency and domination, aspirations that are renewed in every generationeven as they are dampened in the preceding one. Such discourse—call it theutopian discourse of democracy—is marked by a certain critical distance from

8On the separation of the economic and the political, see Ellen Meiksins Wood, DemocracyAgainst Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), chs 1 and 7; Touraine, What IsDemocracy, p. 143; Dunn, The Cunning of Unreason, p. 151.

9Geuss, History and Illusion in Politics, pp. 128–9 and 129, respectively.


existing democracies and the salutary placing of the ideal of political agency atthe level of the counterfactual.10 The utopian discourse of democracy has becomeincreasingly rare in an age when democracy is entrenched as the dominantpolitical value and the most attractive form of government and yet when realprogress towards political agency faces overwhelming odds against it, not leastthe increasing domination of social and political life by the logic of capitalism,itself hardly subject even in principle to democratic control.

It is the utopian discourse of democracy, or the vantage point made possibleby it, that allows us to identify the more conservative or less radical discourseof democracy as ideological.11 The function of the latter discourse is to achievethe feat of political agency in the imagination, by way of wish-fulfillment, as ifto protect democracy, such as it is, from the consequences of looking the realityof democracy in the face and taking its animating idea of political agency with uncorrupted seriousness. In other words, it serves as “a useful social-psychological emollient, reconciling people to their de facto subjugation to astructure which has much more power than they do and does not always havetheir individual best interests at heart.”12 It is a defining feature of the ideologicaldiscourse of democracy that it presents democracy, as it is practiced in this orthat society, as much closer to being an expression of the political agency of thepeople than it actually is, or indeed could ever realistically be hoped to be, giventhe current politico-economic organization of the world (for better or for worse).Like its utopian counterpart, such ideological discourse has rhetorical excessbuilt into it, but, unlike the former, it passes over the gap between the ideal andpractice of political agency and in so doing allows the rhetorical excess to bemistaken for accuracy of representation of the status quo.

III. DEMOCRACY AND TWO DOMAINS OF AGENCY

The foregoing presupposes some understanding of what political agency is andhow that agency is situated in the larger scheme of things we may call modernlife and society. I will not attempt any fine-grained account of agency but willbe content with a few general observations designed to give a clearer and morerounded sense to the idea that there seems to be more room for agency in onedomain of life (the private life protected by liberalism) than in another (the public

10Touraine’s book, What is Democracy? is a good example. It contains a further feature of muchutopian discourse of democracy: the refusal to confine democracy to politics narrowly conceived.Touraine writes, for example: “To define democracy as an institutional environment that is conduciveto the formation and action of the subject would have no concrete meaning if the democratic spiritdid not permeate every aspect of organized social life, from schools to hospitals, from factories totownships” (p. 143). Wood, in Democracy Against Capitalism, falls in the same category, andexplores the utopian moment of democracy more systematically and in greater depth.

11On this role of utopia in relation to ideology, see Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia(New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 172–3.

12Geuss, History and Illusion in Politics, p. 129.

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life made possible by democracy) and that citizens seem to take more interest inone than in the other.

Since agency is the ability to act, and to do so with a view to achieving somepurpose, agency in a full-fledged sense must involve both freedom of action andefficacy of action. Freedom of action requires, among other things, the absenceof (unjustified) institutional or personal obstruction. Efficacy of action, on theother hand, requires much more, including material and social conditions thatare often beyond one’s control and that may even be beyond the power of societyto make available. It is always an open question whether and to what extentsociety should intervene to improve such enabling material and social conditionswhere it has the power to do so and yet where, owing to scarcity of resources,doing so in some cases may prevent it from doing so in other cases. Taking asociety as it is, without assuming that this is the way it has to be or ought tobe,13 we can distinguish between a stronger notion of agency, which includesboth freedom of action and (a high degree of) efficacy of action and a weakernotion of agency, which features freedom of action and yet lacks efficacy ofaction, though not completely.

One possible scenario that is particularly worth noting is one in which beingable to exercise agency in the weaker sense serves (only) to reconcile people tonot being able to exercise agency in the stronger sense and thus to a politicalarrangement that formally allows freedom of action in a domain of life and yetsystematically prevents efficacy of action in it, especially when inefficacy ofaction in the domain of life in question (say, politics) is compensated for byefficacy of action in another domain (say, private life).

The question, then, is what motivates people to act when they are free to act and yet are systematically thwarted in trying to achieve their purposes by so acting. Given a society rich in negative freedoms, if efficacy of action is constantly lacking in a domain of activity, with no realistic prospect of significantimprovement, and yet there is neither deep discontent with the status quo nordesperately serious effort to improve it, then we may reasonably conjecture thatmost people do not care deeply about the domain of activity in question (saycollective political life), and that there must be some other domain of activity(say private life) that provides an outlet for agency in the stronger sense andprobably matters more to them. Such, I would hypothesize, is essentially the casewith the domain of activity known as (modern) democracy.

On the other hand, as we shall see, if efficacy of action is regularly preventedin this kind of setting and yet the domain of activity in question is supposed tomatter, say, as a constitutive fiction of a democratic state, it is quite possible thatlack of the agency sought is covered up and compensated for, to one degree oranother, by an imaginary feeling of agency. Such a feeling of agency can in turn

13We can always take issue with a political arrangement for setting limits to human agency thatare unnecessary or for setting limits in the wrong place or unfairly.


motivate people to exercise their freedom of action in the absence of efficacy ofaction in this domain of activity—with one degree of engagement or another inrough proportion to their degree of consciousness of their lack of efficacy. Thisalso seems to be the case with (modern) democracy.

IV. DEMOCRACY AS AN INTERMEDIATE AGENDA

In the democratic conception of government, political agency is pitched at a verydemanding level indeed, the people somehow ruling themselves (though muchhangs on the understanding of “somehow,” of course). So conceived, politicalagency is arguably incompatible with the very form, indirect or representative,that modern democracy for the most part has to take. For what representativedemocracy makes possible is not the people ruling themselves but the peoplechoosing those who rule, ostensibly in their name but in reality often in waysbeyond their effective control.14 Admittedly, choosing those who rule involvessome degree of collective control, often if not unfailingly a major contributingfactor in achieving gains in fairness and social progress, and one can argue aboutwhat can reasonably and realistically be expected of democracy as a system ofgovernment subject to collective control. But surely this is not anywhere nearthe maximum that democracy is supposed to achieve, nor what is responsiblefor democracy’s ultimate appeal as something that is morally inspiring asreflecting the moral and political agency of the people rather than merelysomething that is instrumentally useful in contributing to better government.Why is it, then, that few in liberal democracies seem to be greatly troubled bythe gap between the high ideal of collective political agency and a political realitythat falls considerably short? To some extent, this may be a matter of citizensholding different views about what can reasonably and realistically be expectedof democracy as a system of government, with the very understandable resultthat the gap between ideal and reality can appear much smaller to some than toothers. But the existence of a sizable gap must be undeniable even for those withthe most cautious assessment of democracy’s moral potential if democracy is toretain its core ideal of collective political agency and its power to inspire. If thisis so, an explanation for the untroubled acceptance of the status quo must besought elsewhere.

Recall that the ideal of political agency is formed against the backdrop of the negation of the experience of domination. While domination is most fullyovercome in the realization of political agency, it can be significantly reduced bya political arrangement that, strictly speaking, falls short of political agency.Democracy is just such an arrangement, one that is clearly not a system of pure

14Even this is a tall order, strictly speaking, given the usual meagerness of the range of options,so what more realistically happens is the people rejecting candidates for public office and exercisingretribution against blameworthy office holders at election time. See Dunn, “Democracy and theprospects for public and private happiness,” p. 13.

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domination.15 That this is the case is shown by the fact that the amount ofdomination that remains in the democratic form of government (the amount maywell be significant) is compatible with a stable and sustained feeling of agencyon the part of those dominated. In other words, the significant reduction ofdomination is reflected in the room the democratic form of government leavesfor activities, political and otherwise, that can generate a feeling of agency overtime.

This state of affairs may be captured in terms of the difference between full-fledged political agency (the highest desirable degree of popular power) and theabsence of pure domination. The prevention of pure domination, of an “evenflow of subjection,” has been aptly called the “minimal democratic agenda ofworst case risk-reduction.”16 This objective is achieved in the liberal-democraticform of government not so much by realizing the power of the people as bylimiting the power of government. Thus, the experience of domination, sourceof the original impulse behind the aspiration to democracy, is to some extentovercome and yet this is achieved without making good the ideal of politicalagency as expressed in the utopian moment of democracy. As John Dunn putsit, “There is a far stronger case for their [democratic institutions] providing,whilst they remain in working order at all, at least some insurance against oneparticularly dire political threat—the threat of permanent oppression of a clearmajority by a small or very small minority whom they keenly detest. . . . Thereis little doubt that the attractions of precluding it figured quite prominently inthe initial allure of democracy as a state form.”17 It is this intermediate state ofaffairs, distinct from full-fledged political agency, on the one hand, and frompure domination or tyranny, on the other, that is characteristic of the practiceof the democratic form of government. This is no mean achievement andconstitutes a powerful case for the democratic form of government, even withall its shortcomings. Yet equally, this is patently not what democracy is supposedto be all about—hence the room for, and need for, immanent critique.

Corresponding to this limited agenda are forms of agency that fall short ofthe people ruling themselves and yet do display some measure of power and giverise to some feeling of power: the power to reject candidates for public officeand to exact retribution against blameworthy office holders at election time. Suchlimited forms of agency may not possess enough moral and emotional appeal tofigure prominently in public rationales for democracy but undoubtedly play arole in bridging the gap, if only psychologically, between the espousal of the highideal of political agency and the actual achievement of the more modest goal ofprevention of pure domination.

15Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy, p. 42, refers to this role of democracyin terms of “protective democracy for market man,” a model of democracy that is “neither inspiringnor inspired.” This role of democracy also figures centrally in what Macpherson calls “EquilibriumDemocracy” (p. 78).

16Dunn, “Democracy and the prospects for public and private happiness,” pp. 16–17.17Ibid.


V. THE DWINDLING IMPORTANCE OF POLITICAL AGENCY IN THE MODERN WORLD

Yet this minimal democratic agenda is not necessarily a second-best objective, oran objective that can only be negatively conceived in terms of the avoidance orprevention of the worst-case scenario. For there is a countervailing rationale fordemocracy, one that is perhaps best expressed in terms of Benjamin Constant’sdistinction between the freedoms of the ancients and the freedoms of themoderns.18 According to that rationale, the point of democracy remains agency,but it is agency of a different kind and on a different scale: agency as expressedin the freedom of individuals to live their private lives by their own lights and witha minimum of interference from the government. This is not at all surprising, forit is in the domain of private life, a domain increasingly shaped by the ethos ofconsumerism, that people in the predominantly capitalist liberal democracies arebest able, and most extravagantly encouraged, to exercise their agency in termsof both freedom and efficacy, and it is in this domain that their exercise of agencymeets with least political resistance and the greatest social approval.19 As C. B.Macpherson has argued, distinguishing between a moral view and a market viewof liberal democracy: “So far, the market view has prevailed: ‘liberal’ has con-sciously or unconsciously been assumed to mean ‘capitalist’.”20

Thus, the democratic form of government is relevant and important, andworthy of allegiance and defense, only (or largely) insofar as it is an indispensablepolitical instrument for limiting the power of government to interfere withindividual lives. It matters relatively little whether government is strictly “by thepeople” as long as government does not interfere with individuals in their pursuitof their private lives. Democracy is thus seamlessly continuous with liberalism,limited government and extensive individual rights, and as such its real point liesnot in realizing the political agency of the people but in protecting the agencyof individuals qua individuals.21 That this kind of protection, rather than the

18See Benjamin Constant, Political Writings, trans. and ed., Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1988), in particular the essay entitled “The liberty of the ancientscompared with that of the moderns.” On the broader intellectual context in which Constantoperated, see Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996),pp. 168–77.

19See Friedrich Nietzsche’s explanation of this phenomenon in terms of power in Daybreak, trans.R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), aphorism 204.

20Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy, p. 2. Macpherson made his assessmentnearly thirty years ago, but this assessment remains valid today, if anything with an extra poignancygiven by the ending of the Cold War. See also: Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism; John. S.Dryzek, Democracy in Capitalist Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); and AndrewGamble, “The limits of democracy,” Reinventing Democracy, ed. Paul Hirst and Sunil Khilnani(Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 117–31.

21For this reason, as Geuss observes, “the political sphere in the modern world is not the realmof the keenest and most intense pleasures and final self-definition;” Geuss, History and Illusion inPolitics, p. 94. And as Dunn writes, “the personal freedoms of [the moderns]—the liberty to live aswe personally choose—are balanced by an inevitable sense, and a potentially perfectly accurateappreciation, of our own personal political inconsequence;” Dunn, The Cunning of Unreason, p. 292.

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securing of political agency in itself, is the real underlying rationale of democracyis borne out by a kind of mostly lukewarm and inattentive interest in democracy’sdaily operations (when it is not under threat) and yet a fierce commitment to itsnot being replaced by a less democratic form of government.

To be sure, this kind of protection is provided by the liberal component ofliberal democracy in the form of negative freedoms, and in this sense it has littledirectly to do with democracy in the narrow sense. But the liberal componentof liberal democracy is organically or integrally related to the democraticcomponent in that, on the one hand, the provision for negative freedoms helpscitizens in liberal democracies satisfy the need to feel like agents, thereby relievingpressure on the democratic ideal of collective political agency and, on the otherhand, the democratic process supplies an extra layer of guarantee that the greatvalue attached by the masses of citizens to private life and negative freedomswill be respected by those who govern in their name.

Modern democratic politics revolves around the freedoms of the moderns intwo senses. Such politics exists, first, to safeguard individual agency in the privatesphere through the codification and protection of rights and, second, to facilitatethe production, and if necessary bring about the redistribution, of goods forprivate consumption. In stable democracies, as long as individual freedoms aresafely in place and a consensus exists as to what these freedoms should be (whichis not always the case), the central issues of politics become the redistribution ofresources in the private sphere and the possible effects of such redistribution onproduction. When the private sphere is not under threat (and most of the timeit is not), and when what is to be gained or lost from one pattern of redistributionrather than another does not make a huge difference to one’s personal prospectsor is something one cannot reasonably hope to influence (as is quite often thecase), most people understandably show no great passion for the chance toparticipate in democratic politics.22

VI. THE ROLE OF IDEOLOGY IN THE FORMATION OF FREEDOMS OF THE MODERNS

When he distinguishes between the freedoms of the ancients and the freedomsof the moderns, Constant in effect identifies two domains of agency or, in his

22In this light, the findings made by John R. Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse in StealthDemocracy: Americans’ Beliefs about How Government Should Work (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2002) and described as “surprising”—that “[t]he last thing people want is to bemore involved in political decision making: They do not want to make political decisions themselves;they do not want to provide much input to those who are assigned to make these decisions; andthey would rather not know all the details of the decision-making process” and that “[m]ost peoplehave strong feelings on few if any of the issues the government needs to address and would muchprefer to spend their time in nonpolitical pursuits” (pp. 1–2, emphasis added)—should come as nosurprise. For the authors’ own explanation of their findings, see Chapter 6 of their book. Empiricalevidence of an “anecdotal” kind, also concerning the U.S., comes in Robert E. Lane, PoliticalIdeology: Why the American Common Man Believes What He Does (New York: Free Press, 1962),p. 83.


own terms, two domains of “power” and hence two different sources of“pleasure.” As he explains it, the shift from the ancient domain of agency to themodern one follows a pretty simple logic: the ancients embraced their particularset of freedoms because it gave them the largest scope for agency, and themoderns have opted for a different set of freedoms for exactly the same kind ofreason. Both the ancients and the moderns seek agency and the feeling of agency.What sets them apart is just where this search happens to find the most ampleopportunities:

The share which in antiquity everyone held in national sovereignty was by no meansan abstract presumption as it is in our own day. The will of each individual hadreal influence: the exercise of this will was a vivid and repeated pleasure.Consequently the ancients were ready to make many a sacrifice to preserve theirpolitical rights and their share in the administration of the state. Everybody, feelingwith pride all that his suffrage was worth, found in this awareness of his personalimportance a great compensation.

This compensation no longer exists for us today. Lost in the multitude, theindividual can almost never perceive the influence he exercises. Never does his willimpress itself upon the whole; nothing confirms in his eyes his own cooperation.

The exercise of political rights, therefore, offers us but a part of the pleasuresthat the ancients found in it, while at the same time the progress of civilization, thecommercial tendency of the age, the communication amongst peoples, haveinfinitely multiplied and varied the means of personal happiness.23

The unspoken assumption in this extraordinarily perceptive sketch of ancientand modern freedoms is that people act in such a way as to obtain the mostabundant expression of agency. The moderns, remarks Constant, set muchgreater store by individual independence than the ancients, and his explanationfor this difference—“the ancients when they sacrificed that independence to theirpolitical rights, sacrificed less to obtain more; while in making the same sacrifice,we [moderns] would give more to obtain less”24—is most suggestively couchedin terms of relative quantities of power. It all boils down to the fact that (otherthings equal) human beings prefer a greater scope for their agency to a lesserone. What is particularly striking when we compare the ancients and themoderns in this way is that humans seek the most abundant expression of agencyand yet they are flexible with respect to the activities in which they do so.25 Thismeans that over time they gravitate towards whatever domain of activity affordsthe greatest scope for agency. This domain constitutes the dominant domain ina society, and indeed it bespeaks the very nature and spirit of that society.

How a dominant domain of agency is formed is left largely unexplored byConstant. He does suggest, though, that the ancients and the moderns find

23Constant, Political Writings, p. 316.24Ibid., p. 317.25In a similar vein, Nietzsche distinguishes between “the cause of acting” and “the cause of acting

in a particular way” and regards the former as fundamental. See his The Gay Science, trans. WalterKaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), aphorism 360.

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themselves occupying radically different circumstances, having to do with suchthings as the size of states and the abundance of means of personal happiness,and that these circumstances set the parameters within which individuals goabout realizing their agency. On this basis, we may spell out the logic inConstant’s account of the evolution of freedoms from ancient to modern timesas follows: over time the domain of activity that comes to occupy a central placein public conceptions of freedom is that which allows the most abundantexpression of agency, accompanied by the greatest feeling of agency, that ispossible under existing social and material conditions. Here lies Constant’sinvaluable contribution to our understanding of the nature of social and politicalchange.

There is one crucial factor, however, that Constant leaves out of his account,namely the crucial role of ideology in the formation of a dominant domain of agency. Liberal ideology has invested an inestimable amount of intellectualenergy, on the one hand, in rendering epistemically prominent and morallysignificant the modern domain of agency—Constant himself set an illustriousexample—and, on the other hand, in redefining democracy, the nearest modern counterpart of the chief freedom of the ancients, so that it has more to do with limited government than with popular power and, just as important,so that it is confined to politics so narrowly defined as to be conceptuallydiscontinuous from the whole “private” sphere of the economy. It is true that the dominant modern domain of agency has its material and socialconditions of possibility, not least those that make up the capitalist mode ofproduction. Yet this domain could not have emerged, let alone acquired itspreeminent status in the modern world, without the contributions of liberalideology. For a domain of agency is not only a field of doings but a field ofmeanings, and therefore every (dominant) domain of agency must be coupledwith a (dominant) ideology.

An ideology is, among other things, a filtering mechanism that serves to rendercertain things visible and meaningful and certain other things invisible or at leastless visible or meaningful, and it works best when it renders itself invisible, too.In the case of the freedoms of the moderns, while the capitalist mode ofproduction opens up a vastly more extensive field of potential activities to bepursued by individuals qua individuals than ever before, liberal ideology servesto give shape and value to these activities, constituting a field of meanings knownas private life. Likewise, while the capitalist mode of production leaves littleroom for certain kinds of potential activities, liberal ideology serves to remove,or better still, to prevent from arising in the first place, the very desire for suchactivities and belief in their value and possibility. Thus, the liberties of themoderns are not freedoms to pursue discrete activities in a value-neutral settingbut the freedom to realize a unified set of ideologically engendered meanings.After all, only meaningful freedoms, freedoms that hang together in a meaningfullife, are freedoms worth bothering about.


However, it would be inaccurate to say that liberal ideology imparts meaningsto otherwise meaningless activities of commerce and consumption, of profit-maximization and pleasure-seeking. For it is only through the ideologicalconstruction of meanings that those very activities become identifiable asactivities, as possible loci for the worthwhile and sustainable expenditure ofenergy. Indeed, it is only through such ideological construction that a certainfield of doings and meanings becomes conceivable as a site of freedoms, and, bythe same token, of unfreedoms.26 At the same time, what might otherwise appearas unfreedoms—not least the pathetic lack of power of the “employee” withinthe capitalist relations of production—are attributed to impersonal laws ofhuman nature and of the economy, and thanks to such attribution, certainexperiences are simply not conceived and thematized in terms of freedoms andunfreedoms and therefore cannot be fully perceived as such. In this way, liberalideology, in our time increasingly divested of its erstwhile elitism,27 furnishes a conceptual horizon on which those activities informed and promoted byconsumerism and the culture industry acquire visibility and importance as a fieldof freedoms. The same conceptual horizon renders invisible—or at leastmarginal, and usually definable in terms of opposition to the most easily visible(think of anti-globalization and environmental movements, for example)—allpotential activities that would be radically at odds with the capitalist economicand social order, just as it places in the category of human nature and economicnecessity all those obstacles to human agency that inhere in that order. In ourtime this conceptual horizon has become so settled, especially since the end ofthe Cold War, that its ideological character, indeed its very existence, is all butlost from view, and hence what Constant calls the freedoms of the moderns haveacquired the status of freedoms as such—an expression of natural, spontaneousand universal preferences.

VII. THE PLAUSIBILITY OF THE IDEOLOGICAL DISCOURSE OF DEMOCRACY

A. THE ABSENCE OF OBTRUSIVE EXTERNAL DETERMINATION IN

LIBERAL DEMOCRACIES

It is equally noteworthy that while citizens remain largely untroubled by the gap between the high democratic ideal of collective agency and democraticreality, they continue to espouse that ideal or at least to speak of democracy with a degree of moral intensity that would make little sense in the absence

26As I have argued in “Justice, freedom, and the moral bounds of capitalism,” Social Theory andPractice, 25 (1999), 409–38 at pp. 429–31, one major strand of the ideological discourse ofcapitalism involves the “moralization of freedom.” I would now revise that statement and say insteadthat freedoms, as sites of meaningful activities, are always already moralized.

27See John Skorupski, Ethical Explorations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), ch. 9.

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of such a high ideal. That they are able to do so is a political necessity given that collective political agency is a constitutive fiction of a democratic society. But why they are able to do so must be explained in terms of someplausible semblance of political agency. Such semblance is, to a large extent,manufactured by the ideological discourse of democracy, which does its workby systematically mistaking limited government for popular power. But—andthis is worth emphasizing, not only in the interest of explanatory accuracy butalso to give liberal democracy its due—it is rendered plausible by two features,among others, of the liberal-democratic system that are far from being purelyimaginary.

The first of these features (I deal with the second in the next section) is theabsence of obtrusive external determination in liberal democracies. Now, agencyis opposed, in one sense or another, to external determination, but it is importantto distinguish between two types of external determination: (a) determinationthat takes the form of the direct and overt use of legitimized coercion (in modernsocieties such use of coercion is monopolized by the state), and (b) determinationby a set of factors that are not themselves directly or overtly coercive and yetare kept in place or backed up by the coercive institutions of the state (thecapitalist market being one example, and heterosexual marriage another). Thefirst kind of external determination, involving the use or potential use of directand overt coercion, is highly visible. The second kind can be as pervasive anddecisive, sometimes even more so, yet it is marked by the absence of directcoercion and hence its power of determination may be covert, even invisible, andthis makes a huge difference when it comes to the feeling of agency. For this kindof external determination, however causally powerful or even overwhelming, is compatible with some feeling of individual agency, some feeling of self-determination. We may thus, for example, be ill at ease with state authority, evenif democratic, and yet be quite comfortable with the not directly or overtlycoercive yet positively overwhelming causal power of the capitalist market. It isquite possible for “the hapless and always largely involuntary consumers of . . .overarching economic structures”28 to think of themselves as agents as long asthe fact of massive external determination is not held up before their very eyesby the obtrusive presence of direct coercion, something that is avoided most ofthe time in stable liberal democracies.

This is not surprising. For we always seek, while engaged in a practice, tomaintain our feeling of agency within it, however powerful the forces of externaldetermination, and we stop short only of conscious self-deception. We do so aslong as we do not want to give up the practice, as we would be forced to doonce we became irredeemably conscious of self-deception, of deluding ourselvesinto a feeling of agency when there exists no remotely plausible way ofattributing causal efficacy to ourselves.

28Dunn, “Democracy and the prospects for public and private happiness,” p. 12.


B. “FREE AND FAIR” ELECTIONS

The ideological discourse of democracy has a further source of credibility in theall-important fact of periodic elections, which serve as symbolic enactments ofthe collective will or free sovereign choice of the people, and which in turn arerendered credible by the equally crucial fact of universal suffrage. At their mosteffective, such symbolic enactments seem to make it possible for individual votersto identify with the elected representatives and thereby gain a measure ofvicarious agency—especially, though not necessarily, if the elected representativesare ones for whom one has cast one’s vote.

Elections can serve this symbolic role because they are not merely symbolic.After all, a tangible and to some extent substantive process does take place. Inthis process, provided that it is “free and fair,” voters register their preferenceswithout coercion or pressure; politicians have to reach out to them for theirhearts and votes; previously elected officials and representatives who have mostoffended the electorate are voted out of office; those who win an election do soby securing the majority of the vote (however this is conceived); the policies ofthe newly elected government will bear some relation to the vote and to theexpression of preferences on which it is based, and so on.

All these empirical facets of elections increase the likelihood that voters willbe able to attribute political power to themselves, that is, the likelihood that theywill be able to perform the attribution and do so in a way that is plausible tothemselves. Whether such attribution corresponds to “reality” is another, verycomplicated, matter. Suffice it to say, for the purpose of approaching democraticpolitical agency in terms of ideology, that there are conditions under which theattribution of power to a collective subject in the shape of the people is relativelyeasy or plausible (most importantly, to those whose own political agency is atstake) and other conditions under which such attribution is difficult orimplausible. There is little doubt that elections, even in the absence of thereflective or deliberative dimension sometimes thought (entirely correctly fromthe normative point of view) crucial to them, add very significantly to theplausibility with which attributions of political power to the people can be made.

Whether the act of voting “really” counts, for an individual voter on thewinning side, as being “partially causally responsible” for the course of politicsis open to debate.29 What matters, as far as the attribution of political agency isconcerned, is that there can be enough tangible reality (of the kind mentionedabove) to elections for voters on the winning side to experience some feeling ofagency, however attenuated or short-lived. It is even possible for those on thelosing side to experience a modicum of the same feeling simply for having casta free vote, for their will has not in any way been discounted (in an importantsense it has counted and been counted) even though its content has not been

29See David Estlund, ed., Democracy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 20, 21.

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realized. One of the things the ideological discourse of democracy can do so wellis to stabilize and magnify this feeling.

Let me hasten to add that I am not attempting to answer the highlycomplicated question of why people vote, a question that naturally arises giventhe overwhelming odds against any individual voter making a difference to theoutcome of an election. All that I am suggesting is (a) that the act of voting canengender some feeling of agency, and (b) that this feeling of agency in turn can lend a measure of credibility to talk of political agency in the ideologicaldiscourse of democracy.30 If these modest claims are roughly correct, then nomatter how far elections are from being a “genuine” expression of collectivepolitical agency, they do serve to ease, if only briefly, the strain of attribution ofpower to the people. In other words, even though citizens in liberal democraciesfail to achieve a high degree of political agency, itself an ambiguous value giventheir preference for the freedoms of the moderns, they are nevertheless able to maintain a considerable feeling of political agency, in keeping with theconstitutive fiction of the democratic form of government. They are able to doso to the extent that the ideological discourse of democracy and the institutionof elections (along with other mechanisms of democracy such as provisions forimpeachment and referenda) combine to give some seeming plausibility to theattribution of power to the people. Where such plausibility exists, it will not besurprising if they succumb, if not always wholeheartedly, to the rhetoric ofpolitical agency. And the chances are that they will continue to succumb to suchrhetoric as long as they have reason to hold on to the democratic form ofgovernment, which they will given its crucial role in the protection of thosefreedoms of the moderns they value so highly.

The amount of reality required to generate a feeling of political agency is not a fixed quantity, however, but depends on what alternative politicalarrangements are available and whether any of these alternatives affords greaterscope for political agency and yet is in keeping with the central place of thefreedoms of the moderns. Compare a liberal democracy with a society in whichthe discourse of political agency is part of the dominant ideology and yet no

30With this limited purpose in mind, it is worth commenting briefly on two accounts of votermotivation that are relevant to my concerns. In “The ethical voter,” American Political ScienceReview, 69 (1975), 926–8, Robert E. Goodin and K. W. S. Roberts suggest that voters go to thepolls for moral or civic reasons, and once there they express ethical (rather than egoistic) preferences.This is a very plausible hypothesis, explaining, among other things, why voters value trying, not justsucceeding. What this account does not explain, and perhaps is not intended to explain, though, isthe element of excitement that is sometimes if not always part of the experience of voting. Thisaffective dimension to voting, beyond fulfilling a civic duty or expressing moral preferences, is hintedat in a different account of voter motivation. According to this account, “a voter gets a psychologicalkick, or boost, or thrill from voting,” which comes from the satisfaction of expressing oneself, evenin the absence of material effect (this is how Estlund (ibid, p. 19) summarizes the view of GeoffreyBrennan and Loren Lomasky, whose essay is included in the volume). This account, as it stands,seems more a description than an explanation. What is missing from it is the role of the ideologicaldiscourse of democracy, in tandem with the actual opportunity to vote and its aggregative efficacy,in creating a feeling of agency.


“free and fair” elections are available for the choice of major public officials. Inthe real world, there has been no shortage of societies that in one way or anotheremploy the democratic discourse of political agency without the correspondingreality of elections, and in comparison the use of such discourse in a liberaldemocracy must seem positively credible. Thus, even when the range of optionsin a democratic society is meager and the quality of public deliberationsuninspiring, this must be set against the fact that there are societies where thediscourse of democracy, not least of political agency, figures in the dominantideology and yet few mechanisms of democracy exist that render it remotelyplausible. Insofar as this kind of comparison is easily available, a plausiblesemblance of political agency can emerge in a liberal democracy, not throughmeasurement against the ideal of collective political agency that supposedlyinforms the democratic form of government, but through comparison withaltogether shabbier pretenders to democracy.31 Indeed, one important functionof the ideological discourse of democracy in liberal-democratic societies is toshift the focus of comparison from the former to the latter. In this way, liberal-democratic societies depend for much of their moral and rhetorical appeal oncomparison with those societies superiority to which does not vindicate theirclaim to political agency and yet does serve to enhance the credibility of theirideological discourse. One can admit, with Dunn, that “A modern democraticelectoral system is an exceedingly crude device for relating what a given set ofhuman beings hope for, fear and dream of to their selection of a set of temporaryrulers,”32 and still prefer the democratic form of government to any other system.

For one thing, the democratic form of government provides more room forpolitical agency than can be said of any alternative and competing models ofgovernment currently or recently in practice. For another thing, and moreimportant, even if the amount of political agency made possible by liberaldemocracy is rather limited, this must be balanced against the fact that thislimited degree of collective agency contributes, and does so in an integral way,to the protection of important areas of individual agency. After all, it is suchindividual agency, realized in the domain of private life, that matters most forthe vast majority of moderns, supplying the ultimate, if a somewhat indirect andby no means the sole, rationale for democracy.

VIII. CONCLUSION

However, the ideal of democracy—the rationale of democracy in terms ofpolitical agency—always lurks in the background, real and vivid despite its

31As Dahl puts it, “Today, the idea of democracy is universally popular. Most regimes stake outsome sort of claim to the title of ‘democracy’ . . . In our times, even dictators appear to believe thatan indispensable ingredient for their legitimacy is a dash or two of the language of democracy;”Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics, p. 2. Hence the (immanent) comparability of virtually all regimesby the standard of democracy, and the relative credibility of the claim made by liberal democracies.

32Dunn, The Cunning of Unreason, p. 145; see also p. 158.

considerable vagueness, for without it democracy would lose its mostfundamental moral appeal and with it much of its claim to our principled supportand allegiance. By the standard of this ideal, all actual democracies are severelycompromised attempts at the real thing, and the perception that this is the case is part of the explanation for the cynicism and apathy that beset manydemocratic societies. It says a lot about the state of democracy in the modernworld that this form of government tends to inspire the most unadulteratedenthusiasm in societies that are yet to adopt it, and that those societies that haveadopted it tend to depend for much of their self-confidence and appeal to otherson comparative advantages that fall a long way short of making good their claimto political agency. Its rhetoric notwithstanding, the real achievement of moderndemocracy has been the prevention of pure domination, a highly laudableachievement that has gone hand in hand with the dubious ideological feat ofmaking this reality pass for the realization of political agency.

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ci 2006 political agency in liberal democracy

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