The republican tradition

In the republican tradition, almost always represented by such thinkers as Aristotle, Rousseau, and, to a lesser extent, Machiavelli, the quest of popular rule is the common good. To achieve this, citizens must recognize that their own good is inexorably tied to the good of their republic. In other words, they have civic duties and responsibilities, such as being politically involved in the affairs of their government, not just in times of danger but on a regular basis. Participation is so critical to republicans because they believe that the abuse of power can occur at any time and the best protection against such a calamity is for citizens to be politically alert and ever ready to defend their liberty and the free institutions of their republic. Holding that the character of the republic depends on the character of its citizens, republicans fear that corrupt citizens—that is, those preoccupied with self-interests, usually material ones—will place republican institutions in serious peril.

Such communitarian writers as Michael Sandel, Phillip Pettit, and Robert Bellah give contemporary voice to republicanism. As with classical republicans, they lament a society that is fractured and individualistic, has no compass to guide it, ignores or disdains tradition, and seems preoccupied with the here and now. For most communitarians, the villain is liberalism, particularly the kind we find with Immanuel Kant and John Rawls. Such critics of liberalism want to imbue democratic citizens with a sense of shared purpose and ask people to think about their responsibilities as well as their rights. Although they recently had a robust presence in the debates on the relationship between liberalism and democracy, communitarian texts make only a few appearances in today's courses, but some communitarian concerns are addressed by Robert Putman's work on civil society.

Liberalism and democracy

When instructors reach for the canon, they are more likely to assign texts by liberals than by republicans. Most frequently, democratic-theory courses include the historical liberalism of Locke through Mill and contemporary expressions of liberalism, particularly the sort associated with Rawls. Liberalism has been seen as historically contextualized, carrying certain assumptions about human nature and society that reflect the thinking of a particular time and place in history. Several instructors ask whether the social, economic, political, and cultural changes, as well as modern democratic aspirations that separate our time from Locke's and Mill's, require a different theory of democracy or else invite important but limited changes in liberal democratic theory and practice.

Locke's Second Treatise is the most often used foundational liberal text, and emphasis is given to his views regarding the natural rights and rational capacity of every human being, the necessity of the consent of the governed, a contract as the basis of government, the importance of legislative power, and the need to protect civil society from an intrusive government. Mill is usually presented as a champion of liberty, but sometimes he and Tocqueville make an appearance with their concern about a tyranny of the majority creating a democratic culture of conformity. Tocqueville's Democracy in America also leads to a discussion of the importance of a rich associational life, the necessity of a diverse press, the conflict between equality and liberty, and his view of “self-interest properly understood.” Liberalism is not the unfolding of any single writer's theory of liberty, so several instructors touch on a variety of liberal thinkers to show how this line of thought has evolved and how some liberals stand in an adversarial position to other liberals, as with Rawls and Robert Nozick, or with Mill and Madison.

When instructors take up contemporary accounts of liberal democracy, most turn to Rawls's Political Liberalism and, to a lesser extent, his Theory of Justice. In these courses, we find such topics as the priority of right over the good, Rawls's denial of a comprehensive moral good, and his arguments regarding an overlapping consensus. Some also reach to his earlier views regarding liberal neutrality, a topic that is invariably challenged. Writers such as Ronald Dworkin and Will Kymlicka are also assigned in order to show how other liberals respond to or extend Rawls. Almost all of these courses also give space to critics of contemporary liberalism—later on, I discuss several. Here, though, I should mention Michael Walzer, who does not fit into any neat category but appears frequently as a critic of Rawlsian liberalism and as an advocate for broadening the concept and practices of democracy.

In many courses, instructors explore whether a certain sort of liberalism and a certain sort of democracy can serve each other, as Rawls believes; whether they require each other even though they sometimes clash, as Norberto Bobbio argues; or whether liberalism depletes democracy of its vitality, as Benjamin Barber says.

Performance democracy

Although republicans and communitarians claim that popular governance should be primarily concerned with the common good, much contemporary liberal democratic theory emphasizes the responsiveness of elected officials to individual voter preferences. The task of politics for performance democrats is to fashion a winning coalition that may or may not be coherent; it is not to search for some mythic common good. We see this approach in what is frequently referred to as the elitist theory of democracy, associated with Joseph Schumpeter. In his frequently assigned text Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy Schumpeter argues that capitalism has taught people to think instrumentally, leading them to ask how they can get the best deal for themselves; not surprisingly, he holds that voters take this disposition into the voting booth. The candidate or party that receives voters' support has convinced them that its program or product is the most attractive one in the current political market.

Receiving rewards and avoiding costs is the game that performance democracy plays. The rationality that voters use to judge politics is instrumental, similar to the kind that Anthony Downs develops in his economic theory of democracy. In the syllabi under review, readings by performance democrats are invariably followed by critical appraisals. A few, such as E.E. Schattschneider's Semisovereign People and Peter Bachrach's work, fall within the framework provided by performance democracy. Much more often, the critics of performance democracy stand outside and critique from a different vantage point. (I address these below.)

Pluralism

For some time, the dominant descriptive model of liberal democracy has been pluralism, which sees a political world populated by interest groups—none of them powerful enough to dominate the political system, but each able to influence policies in issue sectors that command its attention. For pluralists, specific policies reflect interest group bargaining and compromise. This theory gives citizens, through the groups to which they belong, a presence between elections; it relies heavily on equilibrium models to explain and often justify current political practices and outcomes.

The pluralist model, largely developed by Robert Dahl in the 1950s and 1960s, makes its way into many courses. Instructors ask whether it really works today as originally presented and whether, even at its best, it meets some of the elementary standards of democracy. To pursue these questions, they often assign recent works of Dahl, such as Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy where he argues that American pluralism, although essential to democracy, nevertheless serves to stabilize injustice and inequities.

Many instructors go beyond Dahl's revisions and assign works that argue that inequality skews the political agenda, favoring the privileged and their issues. These readings question the adequacy of competitive-market models of politics to meet democratic ideals, finding that the strategic advantages of some groups in civil society enhance their political standing and that the disabilities of other groups diminish their presence and influence.

Participatory democracy

Participatory democrats think that citizens can and should have a consequential role in their own governance, even in a heterogeneous, mass society becoming more and more bureaucratic and increasingly specialized. They see representative government as skewing matters in favor of those who are already privileged and showing partiality toward specialists over ordinary citizens; but they do not find this state of affairs to be inevitable. Their arguments make their way into several courses to offer a politics with an intense public presence in a decentralized polity and, sometimes, in the workplace. Such engagement, they argue, enables citizens to work with one another on common projects, have greater control of the political agenda, and exert more citizen influence on public policy.

However, this is only part of the story for participatory democrats. They see participation itself as a good that fosters political efficacy, broadens civic orientations, encourages tolerance and cooperation among citizens, and strengthens local civil competencies in a world where technical expertise threatens to crowd out the goals and aspirations of democratic citizens. Such are the views of John Dewey, Carole Pateman, and Benjamin Barber (the most-often-assigned participatory democrat).

Deliberative democracy

Even though democracy has placed a heavy emphasis on speech since the Greeks, there has long been a suspicion of the demagogue and the power of rhetoric, which can distort important matters and manipulate citizens. Today's discursive democrats see a much broader problem challenging democracy. For Jürgen Habermas—the most frequently assigned discursive democrat, generally represented by his book Between Facts and Norms—civil society has been corrupted by concentrated power and money. Habermas writes that democratic space has been colonized by forces with an agenda written apart from—and often antagonistic to—the demos. In this view, political speech has become debased, as it hides the deficiencies of contemporary democracy.

Deliberative democrats generally have faith in the future of democracy but worry over its fate when speech conceals rather than reveals. John Dryzeck wants public discourse to be critical and self-reflective but believes that today, it freezes inequalities and fosters exclusion and domination. For her part, Seyla Benhabib challenges Rawls for shrinking the importance of public reason and neglecting the social nature of discourse.

Inclusive democracy

Inclusive democrats are not willing to settle for a universal franchise and formal rights for everyone. Essential as these things are, they do not confront practices that dominate and oppress many people politically, culturally, economically, and psychologically. The task that inclusive democrats set for democracy is to identify and challenge such debilitating practices and to recognize every person as a full-fledged citizen. For these democrats, exclusion is embedded in a wide range of institutional practices and reinforced by much theorizing (communitarian and liberal as well as performance and pluralist).

Although inclusive democrats frequently disagree among themselves and theorize as feminists, critical race theorists, identity theorists, or multiculturalists, they present both challenges and opportunities for democrats. We see this in the frequently assigned work of Iris Marion Young, who finds many forms of power and expressions of domination today. Like many other inclusive democrats, she is skeptical of Rawls's rational actor because it posits only one way of thinking about how to proceed and ignores the multiple sources of identity and domination. Susan Okin, Anne Phillips, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Will Kymlicka are also represented in the syllabi, often taking opposing positions over the meaning and reach of inclusion.

Non-Western political theory

In the syllabi I reviewed, there is very little discussion of democratic theory from outside the West. When the non-West does make the reading lists, the focal point is the threat that emanates from there (and the vehicle is Samuel Huntington's “The Clash of Civilizations”) or else democratization abroad (as with Larry Diamond's work).

All but two of the courses examined lack democratic theorizing by writers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Non-Western democratic theorists deserve a hearing. It is important to know how and where they differ from us in terms of democracy and why they often have different democratic priorities than we do. Non-Western scholars remind us that there are many theories of democracy and that democracy often builds on the traditions and experiences that characterize a particular people and its history. Aung San Suu Kyi works with her own Buddhist tradition in order to build a theory of democracy that addresses the needs, opportunities, and disabilities of her society. Along with numerous other non-Western democrats, she claims that democracy is not possible without a deep and abiding commitment to basic human rights. Many, such as Mahatma Gandhi, are particularly interested in the relationship between modernity and democracy, and look toward a decentralized polity and economy to diffuse power. In Gandhi's case, we also find an argument linking nonviolence with democracy. Others, such as Nelson Mandela and Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, are concerned about the impact of economic globalization on democracy, particularly its propensity to intensify inequalities between rich and poor countries and to fortify domestic oligarchies.

Globalism

With its penchant for markets, growth, and efficiency, globalism is seen as the defining characteristic of our age. For some, this means the expansion of democracy and economic development in poor countries. Others dispute this assessment, finding that globalization impoverishes many countries and leads to the contraction of the state everywhere, including the democratic state. In this view, what the public wants does not determine public policy; the demands of global markets do. If globalization is a fact of life, then there is little room for democratic efficacy but considerable space for a fatalistic outlook that hands over the direction of policy to impersonal markets. Still, only one instructor's syllabus among those under review asks whether and how globalization intersects with democratic ideals and practices. Among democratic theorists concerned with these issues are David Held and Jean-Marie Guehenno.

Postmodern democrats

Postmodern democrats make a few appearances in the syllabi and generally build on the work of Michel Foucault, who claims that we need to abandon state-centered conceptions of power and recognize that power is everywhere and ever ready to discipline us. With William Connolly, the most frequently assigned postmodern democrat, we encounter someone who fears the homogenizing and normalizing force of modernity and finds that its push for unity and agreement suppresses the ambiguity he believes democracy requires. Chantal Mouffe wants democracy, not liberalism or Enlightenment rationality, to be primary and pursues a postmodern pluralism.

Democracy and the economy

A wide-ranging literature links democracy and the economy, but little of it appears in these courses on democratic theory. Some republicans hold that citizens need a secure life in order to meet their civic obligations. Others warn about the dangers of concentrated wealth. Concerns about the way economics is related to politics extend from Aristotle to Charles Lindblom and the late C.B. Macpherson, whose works were widely read in modern political theory courses a few decades ago but make only one appearance in this batch. In his early work, Rawls reflects a serious interest in distributive matters; but these writings are not showing up on the contemporary syllabi. It should also be noted that for all of the attention accorded to inequality in these courses on democratic theory, very few of the readings focus on economic inequalities and the way class intersects with other forms of inequality, such as race or gender.

The modern democratic state, in one form or another, is still a welfare-state, albeit a shrinking one under attacks by neoliberals who have become a driving force in many democracies. Nevertheless, neoliberals such as Kenichi Ohmae are conspicuously absent from the syllabi, as are defenders of the welfare-state and some of its recent critics on the left, such as Claus Offe and Sheldon Wolin, although two courses include a reader on radical democracy that touches on some of these perspectives.

The national security–state and democracy

Only one course in the lot explores the relationship between the military and democracy—a puzzling omission, especially considering the extraordinary role that security matters play in contemporary American life. Military policy, strategy, tactics, intelligence, and parts of its budget are largely concealed from the public gaze. Yet democracy rests on a commitment to transparency, which most democrats see as essential for democratic accountability.

There is no discussion about the ways a liberal democracy protects itself in a national emergency. Part of the government's recent policy has been to detain individuals who are suspected of participating in acts of terrorism. However, none of the courses asks whether or to what extent a liberal democracy can suspend its own commitments to basic rights in a national emergency and remain a liberal democracy. One effort to explore the relationship between national security and liberal democratic theory comes from Alan Gilbert, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan has explored the relationship of secrecy to democratic governance.

Guess who's not coming to dinner

I have highlighted important themes that are underrepresented in the syllabi, but there are also several prominent democratic theorists who seldom make the cut, including Charles Taylor, Sheldon Wolin, and Hannah Arendt. Given her wide-ranging influence in democratic theorizing, Arendt's two meager listings on the syllabi suggest that however much contemporary theorists turn to her to deepen their understanding of democracy or criticize her views in their own writings, she is generally overlooked in the classroom. Also underrepresented are critics of democracy, with Plato and Carl Schmitt each limited to a couple of appearances.