Democrats—small “d”—perennially face boundary problems. How, after all, can democrats justify principles and practices concerning inclusion and exclusion when everybody making decisions about everything is both impractical if not impossible, and also—let us admit it—not always desirable. Distinctions among people, issues, and systemic provisions for participation must be made, justified, and legitimated. Ideals of “pure” democracy still haunt us, though, rendering democratic systems in general particularly vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy, failed idealism, and practical ineptness. The first of the books under review here levels just such charges, specifically against participatory democracy, while the second, recognizing disappointments but still optimistic, looks for ways to increase participation in, of all quarters, the professions.
Robert J. Lacey begins American Pragmatism and Democratic Faith, which focuses on participatory democracy, with a discussion of the Port Huron Statement, the manifesto issued by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in June, 1962. Albert W. Dzur begins Democratic Professionalism with a thorough survey of the meanings of deliberative democracy. Together, these authors offer responses to the challenges of democratic inclusion/exclusion by a pessimistic realist (Lacey, for whom unrealized ideals ought to be cast off as dangerous illusions) and an optimistic realist (Dzur, for whom ideals that overreach practice can still keep us, modestly, trying).
For Lacey, faith in participatory democracy—with its commitment to increasing inclusiveness and to collective decision making underwritten by moralized notions about the improving effects of democratic practices and public policies generally—seems so counterfactual as to represent a kind of political bad faith. He thus writes of Sheldon Wolin, his exemplar (along with Benjamin Barber) of the participatory democrat: “It is no wonder that [Wolin's] democratic theory, in the context of modernity, ends on a melancholy note. The open universe seems but a dream in a world increasingly dominated by technology, in a world where everything would come to an abrupt halt without our established routines, procedures, and processes. Ephemeral and elusive, democracy is a precious experience that can never be sustained long enough to yield its purported epistemological or psychological benefits” (pp. 195–96).
Experiences of participatory democracy may offer a kind of high (as Hannah Arendt approvingly noted) but, for Lacey, they are an escape from, and not a corrective for, essential features of the flawed world we inhabit. He cannot then value efforts to build, à la Barber, a “strong democracy.” Indeed, his argument concludes, to the contrary, that we should be “spectators” of politics, no more. Instead of becoming involved, Lacey would have us direct our fix-it requests to established institutions that “guide the behavior of political actors with incentives and deterrents, carrots and sticks,” for on his view, “[l]eaders will respond to the wishes of us spectators if the institutions in which they operate reward and punish them” (p. 256).
Believing that participatory ideals lead us astray from such a realistic understanding of human motives and desires, Lacey writes in order to inoculate others against democratic faith via his distilled critique of the pragmatism of John Dewey, William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and C. Wright Mills (the latter a hero of the New Left). His purpose is to demonstrate the failures of what he considers pragmatism's “three tenets” concerning “truth, human nature, and free will.” Asserting that “pragmatist assumptions require a leap of faith that most intellectually honest critics are not willing to take” (p. 10), he characterizes them as the “faith” 1) “that truth is probabilistic,” 2) that “man [sic] himself is a social construct” and therefore “mutable and educable,” and 3) that “people have free will” and so, specifically, “will actually go to all those darn meetings” (pp. 17–19). (Such shifts in tone characterize his writing.)
Lacey contends that history disproves these tenets, arguing that “to assume that man [sic] is a soft piece of clay that can be molded into any conceivable shape or form … invites the kind of political hubris or overreaching of which we should remain forever wary, especially in the wake of twentieth-century totalitarianism” (p. 233). While his critique here echoes the libertarianism of F. A. Hayek, I think it fair to note that few realists would quarrel with Lacey's reminder that “[t]o some degree, we will always harbor a lust for power and material gain, and in our darker moments we will demonstrate an alarming capacity for evil and an uncanny ability to witness the misery of our fellow men [sic] with little or no sympathy” (p. 233).
Pragmatism's faith in collective decisions—a faith which Dzur, too, avoids despite advocating more open discussions—is, Lacey argues, contradictory. The equation of the majority viewpoint with truth is supported by neither evidence nor logic: “In other words, democracy does not produce truth or transform us into other-regarding creatures” (p. 246). For Lacey, this confusion about truth is exemplified in the writings of James. Having chosen a “finite God” to avoid the abyss of belief in an omnipotent God who countenances evil, James was then unable to justify any choice except by claiming “the most satisfying belief as true” (p. 54). Lacey considers this perspective contradictory: “The problem is,” he writes, that “Christianity may have emotional and psychological benefits, but we only enjoy them if we believe its principles are universal and timeless. If I observe Christianity in the pragmatic spirit, will it not fail to give me satisfaction and thus fail to meet the pragmatist test of truth?” (p. 12).
For Lacey, then, the pragmatist faith is confused, groundless, and dangerous. He would thus have us step back from such credulity and recognize that “theorists who write about political parties, legislatures, and institutions generally may be able to teach us far more about democracy than either the foolish or sullen participationists ever could” (p. 256)—so long, one assumes, as such “realistic” theorists are safely pessimistic about improving humankind.
Despite the fact that he focuses on the stolid professions (medicine, law, journalism, and the academy), Dzur counters such a turn from politics to authority. This is startling, for qua professions, these occupations remain, after all, based on expert knowledge that trumps opinion, obviates nonexpert debate, and justifies self-regulation. Nonetheless, Dzur suggests that while some of the distinctive qualities of professions do render them exclusive, there remain realistic possibilities to enhance public efforts at virtue—at “doing better” in both the instrumental and the moral sense Lacey scorns—on the boundaries where professions and citizens meet. Referencing Dewey, Dzur points out that “large-scale social and economic forces are the major factors in laypeople losing both will and ability,” but while “radical critics are right that professionals are key intermediaries between the public and these forces, they have missed, first, how professionals can help or hinder the public's ability to understand and shape their effects and, second, how professionals themselves are vulnerable to these same large-scale social and economic forces” (p. 103). He then reminds us that such critics—for example, Ivan Illich and Michel Foucault—are often themselves professionals: “This suggests that there are internal resources available for a new, more democratic mode of professionalism” (p. 103).
Dzur knows that elites can fail us. He thus considers a set of civic reforms of the professions, ranging from the provision of character training centered on the emulation of exemplary civic professionals, to the clarification of the principles that ought to guide professional decisions, to the establishment of better incentives and regulations, if necessary backed up by the threat of legal sanction. Dzur argues that such measures make a difference, and are indeed consistent with traditional public service strictures regarded as “social trusteeship.” But he also sees that they are nonetheless insufficient, which leads him to pose a question inspired by the writings of Dewey: “What,” after all, “is it to serve the public good without an adequate understanding of the public?” (p. 274). Dzur's answer is that public service makes sense only if there exists a real public that wants to be heard concerning consequential decisions that impact their lives. Lacey, the pessimist, would likely fear a slippery slope from this notion of public voice to “delusions” of participatory democracy. But Dzur is no “participationist.” His optimism and respect for human capacities (in contrast to Lacey's anxieties about our proclivities) are supremely realistic, based on the idea that humans are indeed flawed, and that for this very reason, properly conceived ideals are necessary to motivate us to work for moderate, not final, goals. In advocating for a vision of deliberative, democratic, professional practice, Dzur situates himself between “liberal and pluralist democratic” theorists (such as Robert Dahl, John Rawls, and William Riker) and “communitarian, republican, and participatory democratic theorists” (such as Ben Barber, Carole Pateman, Frank Michelman, and Michael Sandel) (pp. 24–25).
On a less theoretical level, to keep his argument for public–professional deliberation from seeming just plain wrongheaded (would you want your doctor to consult your neighbors before diagnosing your illness?), Dzur presents informal case studies in bioethics, public journalism, and restorative justice. Here, we see professionals such as Cole Campbell, editor of the Virginia-Pilot in 1993, clustering reporters “into teams oriented around readers' issue interests such as public life, education, criminal justice, public safety,” and holding “community conversations” in which “public listening” as well as speaking allow reporters and the public to seek meaning beyond information (pp. 146–47). These examples demonstrate that professionals need not always treat us as clients, patients, wards, and dependents, and that given proper professional training and acculturation, more equalized discussions and engagements are possible. Dzur quotes Harry Boyte, whose “public work” also informs this book: “‘Professionals must,’ as Boyte says, ‘put themselves back into the mix of interests and views that comprise a diverse group of people,’ ‘attend to the larger public meanings and purposes of the discipline or profession,’ and create ‘settings for interactive civic learning’” (p. 256). In the same vein, Bruce Jennings advises bioethicists to share “the responsibility of building reflective moral spaces for public debate,” and to “‘participate in it [such debate] as well’” (p. 242).
Dzur's belief in deliberative democracy suits professional/public collaborations, and one can imagine that it might moderate Lacey's fear of participatory inclusiveness. At the same time, Dzur is no more credulous than Lacey regarding the possibilities of mass public deliberation. But, drawing on the writings of Jürgen Habermas, Dzur recognizes that bureaucratization and professionalization are always in danger of shrinking the sphere of democratic politics, privileging elites, suppressing the forms of contestation essential to combat injustice, and—by separating deliberation from action and its responsibilities—transforming citizens into clients (pp. 35–36). Democracy is not just instrumental, not just a (particularly messy, contentious, inefficient) way of getting things done, or of discussing together what ought to be done by someone else. Activists and thinkers from John Dewey and Jane Addams through Students for a Democratic Society and members of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee are needed reminders that democracy in action is also an end in itself, a way of living, and not only problem solving, together.
