many leftist call for democratic self rule based on the cultivation of practices which nurture citizens capable of autonomous democratic self-rule in which practices and authorities are understood as something we must actively, consciously agree to and participate in, rather than merely accept them as natural. in the name of democracy, it is argued, a social order might seek to transcend its own naturalized arbitrariness. Amy Gutmann calls this project 'conscious social reproduction':
"For a society to reproduce itself consciously it must be non-repressive. It must not restrict rational consideration of different ways of life. Instead it must cultivate the kind of character and the kind of intellect that enables people to choose rationally...among different ways of life."
The politics of world construction encompasses those aspects of our daily practices in which we ask one another whether what we do everyday reproduces the social world as we would wish it to be when we think about such things as justice, progress, and the 'good society.' Here, political participation is not a choice. It is a fact of life insofar as we always already live in and through social institutions. Participation in world construction, for example, can be 'privately' justified as earning a living or supporting a family; it can be disciplined by ideological social control or constrained by a technocratic ethos. It is not whether to participate in the politics of world construction that is at stake in many of our debates; rather, what is at stake are the qualities of consciousness attending such participation. For those who regard democratic dignity as served only by a politics of responsible world construction, that is, conscious social reproduction [CSR], none of these private or ideologically driven motives is sufficient.
If there is a characteristic rhetoric connected with CSR, it is that of intersubjective social transparency. Here, an awareness of the self as socially embedded is necessary for the political dignity of knowing that, whatever our formal 'credentials,' we are factually implicated, for good or ill, in how the social world is built through our part in its daily reproduction. It should follow, then, that we appropriate that dignity not just through an abstract act of voting, but through a politics of deliberation.
The naivete that infuses such a conception of politics is due, in part, to the under-theorized nature of this political vision applied to contemporary society. If taken seriously, the injunction to participate in this manner makes the creation and sustenance of public forums for the realization of democratic citizenship an issue that is at the heart of all public policy debates. And yet, is this view of politics as world construction reasonable? Hopelessly utopian? Perhaps even tyrannical?
Advocates of CSR often dismiss criticism as if they could only be conservative or reactionary. They may well be; yet, it does not follow that we shouldn't attend to the impetus behind these objections in order to ask ourselves what they might mean for the practical work of actually creating a politics of CSR.
There is a common theme that runs through the various arguments advocating CSR which points to the sociological distinction between formal and substantive rationality. In place of the formality of a rights-based democratic politics, CSR emphasizes the search for substantively good reasons for life's concrete and situated practices. From this standpoint, only CSR can save democratic politics from technicism. Only a dialogic democracy can redeem interest judgments from the manipulation of images; can redeem representation from simple delegation to putative experts; can redeem zeal from bureaucratization; can redeem empathy from the demagogues of sentimentality.
For many theorists of democracy, a politics of CSR seems the inevitable outcome of human progress. And yet, there are dissenting voices implicit in the literatures of the social and political theory which can be typified into three classes of argument: the potential for tyranny, the structure of modern society, and the possible violation of human nature.
CSR, it can be argued, carries with it requirements for its implementation that are tantamount to tyranny. It reflects a singular vision of the good society, one of universal concern for political life and its pre-eminent status of citizenship. Given that many, perhaps most, people may not possess such an interest, or wish to manifest it only periodically in defense of valued ways of life (family, work, ethnicity, community, etc), CSR would require standards of conversation and levels of self-scrutiny and disclosure that are, in practice, intrusive and coercive. CSR would be perceived by many as an enforced search for personally intolerable standard of coherence between private conduct and public ideals including--as has been argued against Habermas-- at the level of language.
The sheer complexity of modern society is the basis for a second class of arguments against CSR. Institutional differentiation and specialization means that no one person is capable of envisioning the whole of society. Myths, assumptions, trust, values and norms--assumed to mean the same things to people who espouse them--these are what hold society together. Like Dostoevsky's grand inquisitor, truly worldly people understand that bread, mystery and authority are the pillars of order.
Such arguments, often dismissed as elitist and incompatible with democratic freedoms, need not be seen as such. Social complexity allows for a multiplicity of selves and a norm of privacy that underwrites liberty. True, this is a negative liberty, the right to be left alone and free to choose when to enter politics, however defined. The price is a principle of legitimacy that is understood as suffrage through periodic acts by a 'public' whose life is essentially lived outside of the polity. To object to the preservation of an "outside" to politics, or to subject it to a standard of constant politicization, is to abandon the balance made possible by modern societal complexity, between freedom as illusion and freedom as reality.
A third objection to CSR is based on its relentless injunction to subject potentially all social practices to the rigors of public articulation. Here it is argued that the social world is held together through non-contractual solidarity, a kind of non-rational domain of social life that must remain unexamined if we are to ever get much accomplished. Good outcomes as well as bad are possible precisely because so much of social life is left unspoken. The linearity of spoken accountability may subvert the poetic simultaneities of practice in which the good that is served by practical judgment, is subverted by having to defend it on principle. If the risk be taken at all, through forums and deliberations appropriate to CSR, they need to be, in some sense, separated from those political process of formal administration and decision-making. But how can such boundaries be maintained in practice without regulations of byzantine complexity whose legalism would stand in stark contrast to the perceived conversational authenticity they are intended to protected?
Finally there is the possibility of arguing against CSR in the name of human nature. Perhaps human beings require faith in some unquestionable background in order to undertake the risks of action. Perhaps CSR is but another name for that presumptuous intellectualism which the Scottish Moralists criticized in those who thought the social world was envisionable enough to be consciously planned. Perhaps the human spirit is collectively too fragile to bear the ambiguities of perpetually informed consent.
Episodic forums in the form of debates, assemblies, juries, testimonials, lectures, and the like no longer satisfy what we mean by the need for 'free' or 'public deliberative spaces.' It is both exhilarating and agonizing to consider how, in the name of democracy, a social order might seek to transcend its own naturalized arbitrariness. Is that the end point of any crusade against a technocratic politics? Should we regard popular sovereignty as that radical sense of informed consent appropriate to a politics of conscious world construction? These are but a few questions commended to our imagination, for they are, I think, necessary in our quest
to define democracy more adequately for modern life, and in that quest to find new boundaries between what we hope to achieve and what we dare to dream.
kelley