When I reflect upon Peter Bachrach's political theorizing from the perspective of the heated primary battles of 2008, I am struck by the unusual character of his political insights and commitments—and of how relevant and compelling they are in the current political climate. Peter might be appropriately considered a radical liberal democrat—who focused very sharply on the tensions between radicalism and liberalism as political ideologies, but sought to maintain a close and continually flowing circuit between radicalism and liberalism as bodies of philosophical understanding that could mutually nurture and sustain each other. Under his hermeneutical gaze, Hobbes was not only the father of modern philosophical liberalism but the theorist who instigated the formation of participatory democracy. By clarifying for us the extent to which we lacked foursquare rational props to support our judgments across a whole spectrum of human experience from everyday practical affairs to science, religion, and metaphysics, he cleared a tremendous space for human beings to actively participate in structuring their own lives and shaping their own destinies. In addition to his explicit statements concerning human equality (whose political payoffs would be mostly unusable by a contemporary democrat), there was implicit in Hobbesian theorizing a massive re-inflection of human limitation and possibility that could make participation seem like a plausible complement to his theorizing.

Given the pervasiveness of Hobbes's nominalism—there was no snug, irrevocable fit between words and things even on the level of particulars; his phenomenalist philosophy of science; and his utterly transcendent conception of the nature of God, so that all of the categories and vocabulary of divinity were a function of human translation, without any human being throughout the course of the generations having access to that which was being translated—there was no rationalist or transcendental sanction for any human utterance or activity. Reason and revelation in Hobbes willy-nilly get displaced unto power—as the category that most illuminatingly reflects the limitations that Hobbes has noted in the operations of reason and revelation. If we are not externally constrained to adopt a certain judgment or entertain a certain belief or engage in a particular practice, then it is the energies of will welling up from within—the mobilization of our power—that has most to do with the actions that we undertake in the world. Moreover, power and self-assertion and participation with others in contributing to fashion our identities and propel our initiatives in the world bear an intimate relation to the idea of equality. We come to power and the sharing of power—participation—through a common recognition of our metaphysical disempowerment—of how reason and revelation brutely, objectively considered cannot get us to where they claim they are leading us. I would argue that the original model on a philosophical plane for Peter's yoking together of power, participation, and equality comes from Hobbes.

Peter took over from Antonio Gramsci the idea that the struggle for power, equality, and inclusiveness never ends. In Power and Empowerment, Peter writes about “Gramsci's underscoring of the need to continually democratize leadership strata in a participatory movement—to foster an unending dialectic of hegemony counter hegemony,” so that the relationship between leader and led becomes analogous to “the relationship between teacher and pupil, which ‘is active and reciprocal so that every teacher is always a pupil and every pupil is a teacher’” (Bachrach and Botwinick Reference Bachrach and Botwinick1992). Peter is averse on both descriptive (this is not the way things are) and normative grounds (this is not the way they should be, anyhow) to the totalization of power and embraces the idea of the infinity—or infinitizing—of power relations.

For Peter, it is power as infinity, rather than power as totality (to utilize Emmanuel Levinas's [Reference Levinas1969] distinction), that can help make sense of the ways in which participation generates power. Participation in decision making in public (which includes many corporate) spaces both generates and reflects intra-psychic power. The fostering of intra-psychic power in an interpersonal and group setting reinforces individual attachment to the group—and enhances the power of the group. The participatory group's succeeding to whatever degree in its quest for power renders it politically significant. The political power accruing to the participatory group or network sets the stage for its becoming a target of emulation and rivalry on the part of those excluded by current configurations of power—and so on indefinitely as the cycle continues.

While, on the one hand, power for Peter consists in an imposing presence—in the proliferation of participatory groups and networks, and in regular rotation of roles between leaders and led within those groups as incipient hierarchies begin to get formed—on the other hand, the design of the liberal state is predicated upon power as absence, with the state legitimating and institutionalizing dissent and opposition, which contribute to disarming the mobilization of crass, overt power against the state. It is this substitution of absence for presence that redounds to the stability, longevity, and buildup of power of the state. In addition, in his critique of the corporate corruption of the state, Peter argues that the highest level of power is achieved through adroit manipulation of absence, leaving as few public traces as possible of one's monopolization of the field of power. Peter's notion of “non-decision” (“the extent that a person or group—consciously or unconsciously—creates or reinforces barriers to the public airing of policy conflicts” (Bachrach and Baratz Reference Bachrach and Baratz1970) by controlling the agenda of policy deliberation) represents the epitome of power as absence. What is the relationship between “power as absence” and liberal political theory? Does the increase of democratic political forums really constitute a manifestation of power as presence? How does one distinguish between the good and bad forms of power as absence?

Peter shares with classical liberal political theory the idea that the point of power is to emasculate itself—that is, its destructive impact on human populations and on human psyches. It does this by pursuing a dualistic strategy of both proliferating itself through participatory democratic forums (which undermines and defeats opportunities for concentrating power, thereby unmasking this version of power as presence as the most heightened manifestation of power as absence, after the manner of Madison)—and by rendering itself invisible. Invisibility in turn can be an overtly chosen means for intensifying one's grip on power as in “non-decisions”—or it can be a byproduct or concomitant of one's choosing the most minimal means available for attaining one's power ends—as in a strategy of deterrence, or as in the design of liberal political institutions generally, which by legitimating dissent and normalizing opposition as part of the regular operation of the political process minimize recourse to force and violence and contribute toward the stability of the state.

Peter was a very strong and eloquent participatory democrat who was both highly suspicious of any conception of “objective interest” and who wanted to retain the liberal protection of minority rights even as he pushed for further and further waves of democratic participation. Peter did not believe in any kind of objective fixing of the power positions of individuals—assigning them, against their own personal assessments, to particular classes. Only a person's own critical reflections could expose that he was a victim of false consciousness. In Peter's political universe, a democratic citizen has a constitutional right to be stupid, wrongheaded, and misguided. At the same time, Peter also believed that all of the participatory democratic fervor in the world was no substitute for state-enforced constitutional guarantees and protections of minority rights. In the end, for Peter, democracy cannot be left entirely in the hands of the people.

Given Peter's particular mix of allegiances, I think that the most persuasive way to see him is as a radical liberal democrat. The beauty and elegance of his arguments tend in the direction of teasing out the democratic potential of liberal principles—and their background assumptions. There are protections of minority rights in liberalism and the state remains preoccupied with process and procedure because the state does not have access to an objective, universally defensible body of truths. The only truth that the state knows (and even this can be a subject of contestation) is that it doesn't know.

This vacuum, this absence, can serve as a powerful negative factor fostering the development of continuing and expanding forums of political decision making, encouraging as many people as possible to participate in decisions that affect huge chunks of their lives. The greater equality that these citizens would enact—and the spur that this participation would provide for demanding that the state translate equality into more and more areas of collective life—would be a function of operationalizing the liberal principle of not knowing into ever-expanding programs of life enhancement, and even of political transformation. The absence that lies at the heart of the liberal political vision can be as demanding, energizing, and fulfilling as the most detailed and elaborate political program.

In the contemporary political climate where even officially classified liberals do little to arrest and reverse entrenched structural inequalities, Peter Bachrach charts a bold and innovative and much more egalitarian path for us to follow that in faithful pursuit of the tenets of liberal democracy yields much richer democratic results.