Amos's River of Justice

Tag: J.J. Rousseau

  • Patriarchy Weakens Participation by Women

    There is a contradiction between progressives defending democratic principles, and proponents of the traditional family.  This conflict is not limited to the well-known dispute between the Democratic Party and Conservatives in Congress.  The problem is much older and far-reaching than that, as illustrated in this article by Chandrakala Padia.  She concludes that when it comes to feminist issues there is not much difference between  liberal theory and the elitist model of democracy. The theorists all assume that the structure of social relations and inequality has no effect on political equality and democratic citizenship.  I would argue that patriarchy weakens participation by women and strengthens oligarchy.

    Western Women and the Specter of a Traditional Standard

    Today, after 200 years of women’s ‘liberation’, the issue is further clouded by the fact that Western women are held to the traditional standard in more subtle ways.  It has been argued that the failure to account for the structural difficulties women face in political participation has crippled the development of democracy.  Today, as members of Congress strive to return women to more traditional roles, this is a serious problem for democracy.  Chandrakala Padia’s article is a good way to begin this discussion.

    Theoretical Models of Democracy

    Padia states that current political practices are the result of four theoretical models of democracy.  The participatory model of democracy, attributed to J. J. Rousseau, is the last of four models, but in her opinion it is the most hopeful model for the democratic citizen.  The other three theoretical models will be discussed following the discussion of the participatory model. They are: the Protective model of Bentham and J. S. Mill; the Developmental model of J. S. Mill; and the Elitist model of Joseph Schumpeter.

    The Participatory/developmental Theory of Democracy

    The participatory/developmental theory is my category, not Padia’s.  I’m trying to lessen the confusion of J. S. Mill being categorized under two of the models: Mill developed both the protective model of democracy with Jeremy Bentham, and Rousseau’s classical participatory model.  (For Padia, ‘classical’ refers to a model that retains its moral content.  By comparison, she says the elitist model has been emptied of its moral content.)

    J. S. Mill

    J. S. Mill agreed with the protective model of Bentham but he valued participation more than Bentham.  Padia calls his model the developmental model of democracy.  Mill differs from Bentham in the following way: for Bentham, participation only ensured that private interests of each citizen were protected.  But for Mill participation had a much wider function.  It is central for the maintenance of a democratic polity and a participatory society.  So Mill advocates for adult franchise (including female franchise).  He thinks subordination of one sex to another is wrong in itself and hinders human improvement.  Therefore, it should be replaced by perfect equality.

    However, Mill also agrees with Rousseau on the social inferiority of women.  He assumed that wives would always be willing to accept the ‘natural’ arrangements, and failed to see sources of male authority over women outside of legal forms, such as economic authority.  He ended up promoting liberty in the political realm and subjugation at home.  In Mill’s model, patriarchy weakens participation by women and strengthens oligarchy.  He disguises his patriarchal bias by separating the private and public lives of women.

    The Patriarchal Influence of Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel

    One explanation for this is that both Mill and Rousseau use the patriarchal logic of Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel.  These men believed that men by nature possess capacities required for citizenship and justice, while women by nature lack such political morality.  For Mill this is a contradiction, because he also argued that individuals develop a sense of justice through participation in a wide range of public institutions.  It would be more logical if he had called for women to develop their sense of ‘political morality’ through participation.

    According to Padia, “the inadequacies of Mill’s analysis arise from his support for the public private dichotomy.  He tries to adorn woman with all political rights, but deprives her of equal status in the family…”

    The most charitable excuse that can be made for Mill’s patriarchal bias is the dogmatic influence of the Greek philosophers.  In spite of their oligarchical leanings, their writings have become the undisputed foundation of what passes for reason, even in societies that call themselves democratic.  This is not rational.  Patriarchy weakens participation by women and strengthens oligarchy.

    J. J. Rousseau

    Rousseau’s indifference to women is also in conflict with his own theory.

    Rousseau expects individuals to develop a sense of responsibility through the participatory process.  He is convinced that, as a result of participating in decision-making, the individual can be educated to distinguish between his own good and bad impulses and desires, and to harmonize the two states of public and private citizenship.  Further Rousseau finds a close connection between participation and control; for the more a man participates the more control he gets over the political process.  And it is here that one can see the true meaning of freedom.  For unless each individual is forced, through participation, into socially responsible action, there can be no law which ensures everyone’s freedom.

    But then he argues that women’s distinct position and functions are those that are natural to her sex.  He justifies the absolute rule of men over their wives, the confinement of women to their home after marriage, and a strict moral education for women, so that family life may not be disturbed by transgressions.

    The entire education of women must be relative to men.  To please them, to be useful to them, to be loved and honored by them, to rear them when they are young, to care for them when they are grown up, to counsel and console, to make their lives pleasant and charming, these are the duties of women at all times and they should be taught them in their childhood…

    Misogyny and its Antidote

    Rousseau even promotes the idea that the female sex is the source of major evils in the civilized world.  Like Mill, he contradicts the essence of his own theories of democracy.  These contradictions should be the focus of democrats going forward.

    If Patriarchy weakens participation by women and strengthens oligarchy, the recognition and elimination of patriarchal attitudes in democratic theory would begin to address this tendency toward oligarchy.  Padia thinks there is reason for hope in a new type of democratic theorist:

    Thus we find that both Rousseau and Mill accept the patriarchal suppression of civil liberty, and look on domestic life as having no bearing at all on public life which is one of the many defects of the participatory model.  But, I hasten to add, this cannot be said of political philosophers like Carole Pateman, who are also proponents of participatory democracy.

    Carole Pateman

    According to Pateman, the concept of participatory democracy comprises three ideas:

    1.  “Individuals and their institutions cannot be considered in isolation from one another.” for we may add the improvement of an individual importantly depends on his membership of a wider whole.  Indeed, says Pateman, what is required is the maximum participation of people in all spheres of society; for it would on the one hand help in developing individual talent, and, on the other, lend richness and variety to the fabric of participatory society.
    2. “Spheres such as industry should be seen as political systems in their own right, offering areas of participation [in] addition to the national level”.  And here the authority structure should be so organized that maximum workers may participate in decision-making.  This would slowly lead to the abolition of the permanent distinction between the owners and the owned.
    3. Participation means not only taking part in elections, but also having an effective voice in the making of decisions.  it also means that people have the power to change their own decisions if they do not yield the desired results.

    One Democratic Ideal is Still Missing: Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity

    Even though these points provide key features of democracy, Chandrakala Padia finds that an important component is still missing.  Participation should be regulated by the three cardinal ideals of democracy–liberty, equality, and fraternity.

    A mere extension of the range of participation does not guarantee that the working together is making for a desirable goal.

    Still, Padia gives Pateman the credit for insisting on the ideal of sexual equality.  She asserts that neither the equal opportunity of liberalism, nor the active participatory democratic citizenship of one and all can be achieved without radical changes in personal and domestic life.

    Basic Tenets and Theorists of the Elitist Model

    Most writers today adhere to the elitist model of democracy.  This is where the cumulative effects of the patriarchal bias, and the oligarchical structures that arise from it, become apparent.  The basic tenets of the elitist model can be stated as:

    1. It’s the leaders who really matter and not the masses they lead.  Michels says the majority are ‘predestined by tragic necessity to submit to dominion of a small minority, and must be content to constitute the pedestal of oligarchy’.
    2. Democracy is merely a method for arriving at political, administrative, and legislative decisions, and is hence incapable of being an end in itself.
    3. Active participation of the people leads to totalitarianism. Schumpeter says, “Party and machine politicians are simply the response to the fact that the electoral mass is incapable of action other than a stampede…”  The people, Sartori says, only ‘react’, they do not ‘act’.  Therefore it would be wiser to accept the facts as they are, because trying to change them would endanger the very stability of the political system.

    Stability is Emphasized by Elitist Theorists

    Stability is emphasized by elitist theorists.  According to Schumpeter, stability comes from the long-lasting nature of political loyalties, and flexibility comes from the fact that it’s the elite who wield the power in a democracy.  They are supposedly able to overcome any threats to the system by virtue of their superior intellectual gifts.

    Joseph Schumpeter

    The main proponent of the elitist model is Joseph Schumpeter, who wrote Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy in 1942.  Mosca, Michels, and Sartori also support this theory.  This model contends that the classical (moral) model rested on  empirically unrealistic foundations.  It asserts that democracy can never lead to the improvement of mankind, and that participation has hardly any value in itself.  The purpose of democracy is simply to register the desires of people as they are, not to contribute to their ennoblement.

    Democracy is simply a kind of market mechanism: ‘the voters are the consumers; the politicians are the entrepreneurs’.  The role of people is merely to produce a government, not to ensure that it be efficient and right-minded.  According to Schumpeter: “…the democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote”.

    Bernard Barelson

    According to Barelson, classical theory concentrated on individual citizens and ignored the political system. It did not realize that limited participation and apathy have a positive function for the system.

    Robert Dahl

    Robert Dahl thinks classical theory is invalid and inadequate for his own theory of polyarchy, or the rule of multiple minorities. Following Schumpeter, he says democracy is a political method that centers on the electoral process. Elections are central in providing a mechanism that controls leaders by non-leaders. He says political equality must not be defined as equality of political control or power for lower socio-economic status groups. Political equality means universal suffrage. But he warns of dangers in increased participation by ordinary man. It could lead to polyarchy and decrease stability.

    Giovanni Sartori

    Giovanni Sartori, who wrote Democratic Theory in 1942, said there is an unbridgeable gap between ‘classical’ theory and reality. He claims the democratic ideal (the ideal of leveling) works against democracy and participation leads to totalitarianism. He recommends not trying to increase participation. Power resides in those who avail themselves of it.

    Harry Eckstein

    Eckstein said that we must understand the nature of non-governmental social relationships in families, schools, economic organization, etc.  He claims that you can’t democratize some authority structures such as socialization in school and family, and some capitalist organizations. They resist change and therefore add to stability.

    Participation for the majority is the participation in the choice of decision-makers. The function is protective and protects individuals from arbitrary decisions by elected leaders. This justifies the democratic method, in his view.

    Conclusion

    The entire body of democratic theory leans toward oligarchy.  This tendency has been disguised, even by the defenders of participation.  In retrospect, the rise of the elitist model seems inevitable.  This model does not limit itself to the supposed flaws of women; it is hostile to the participation of both sexes.

    Many of the tactics we saw in the 2016 and 2020 elections, as well as the insulting attitudes about progressive goals, can be explained by the party establishment’s acceptance of the elitist model.  Patriarchy weakens participation by women and strengthens oligarchy.  The remedy is a participatory model of democracy as represented by Carole Pateman and other feminist theorists.  However, its effectiveness would depend on whether we are able to  restructure social relations in the home.

    American Democracy Owes a Debt to Indigenous Americans

  • American Civil Religion and the Enlightenment

    In his theory of American Civil Religion, Robert Bellah attempted to attribute America’s sense of community to a common religious factor independent of the church. He said that a specifically American ideology has worked to form a homogenous and unified culture from unrelated immigrants. Because of the United States’ unique beginning, Civil Religion is uniquely crucial to Americans’ sense of unity ((Bellah, Robert Neelly, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial. University of Chicago Press. 1992)). However, it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who first argued that every society needs a purely civil profession of faith to integrate all members. For this reason, the idea of civil religion should be examined in the context of the Enlightenment.

    Surveys have shown the concept of Civil Religion is a useful model in analyses of American attitudes ((Baker, Wayne. America’s Crisis of Values: Reality and Perception. Princeton University Press. 2006)). However, after the attack on the Twin Towers some were shocked when they observed that the concept has no brakes. Americans, both Republicans and Democrats, went willingly to war in Iraq based on questionable evidence for the presence of al Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction. Apparently Civil Religion provides no moral compass. In fact, since the fall of the Soviet Union, ‘civil religion’ has been a euphemism for a religion of war. The Enlightenment has been criticized in similar ways.

    One goal of the Enlightenment was the end of Europe’s Absolutist political organization.  Although Absolutism had been a response to the religious wars of the Reformation, it was seen by the ‘Philosophes’ as an unnecessary annoyance.  Two additional Enlightenment concerns were the equality of man and the place of morality in politics.

    The Enlightenment was an historical period beginning with the eighteenth century and ending with the French Revolution in 1789. The term Enlightenment also refers to a method of thought developed during this period, which remains influential in political theory. The movement has always inspired a certain degree of mistrust. In the eighteenth century, the term ‘philosophe’ was meant to distinguish Enlightenment writers from other philosophers. The Philosophes were considered ‘popularizers’ of a doctrine, working to influence public opinion in their favor. In the most violent years of the French Revolution, the ideas of the Enlightenment were further discredited because of their perceived role that revolution.

    The theory of political Absolutism, which the Philosophes worked to discredit, is attributed to Thomas Hobbes, who observed during the turmoil following the Reformation that humans fear each other. Hobbes argued that an external sovereign was necessary to maintain order in society. But Enlightenment thinkers had a very different view of human nature, arguing that reason creates a virtuous public individual.

    In the Absolutist pursuit of peace, Hobbes had declared that personal beliefs must remain private. Publicly, people were expected to agree with the religion of the monarch. But the Philosophes had no memory of the religious conflicts that Absolutism had tried to address. This ‘forgetfulness’ has been an enduring characteristic of modern political rhetoric, one result being that Enlightenment assumptions were in conflict with the experience of the past ((Koselleck, Reinhart. Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society. Oxford, New York. 1988, p. 39)).

    The Enlightenment’s religion was deism, which holds that although God created the world, he is no longer directly concerned with the trials and tribulations of humanity. According to critic Reinhart Koselleck, Enlightenment thinkers put reason and the will of society in the place of God (p. 56). In retrospect, it seems clear that one of the unforeseen functions of the Absolutist state was to transition from the Christian focus on the heart of man to the Enlightenment’s obsession with society as a whole. Along the way, the foundation of western thought became a philosophy of materialism.  Now all causes are economic or social.  In this view, and in my opinion, Capitalist ideology and Marxist ideology can be seen as two sides of the same materialist coin. Critics have argued that if the Enlightenment was not successful it is because the system had no transcendent values. Such a system degenerates to physical, biological, and economic considerations, and causes more problems than it solves.

    Strangely, although Enlightenment thought has become inseparable from Christianity their former differences are no longer discussed. In an older critique from the Catholic point of view, Hilaire Belloc argued that both Absolutism and Enlightenment were solutions for society in lieu of former religious solutions and interpretations. More specifically, he argued that unrestricted capitalism was not a Christian concept. True to his religious point of view, he also argued that capitalism was only made possible by changing social circumstances and by Calvin, who divorced good works from the possibility of human salvation. The only motivation left for industry was personal economic gain ((Belloc, Hilaire. The Crisis of Civilization. Fordham University Press. New York. 1937, pp. 116, 126)).

    Of course, the guilds and city-states of the middle Ages were another restraining influence on unbridled capitalism. The guilds saw capitalism as different from the economy of the free cities only in its requirement for large amounts of capital. Guild rules guarded against this type of competition making it possible for the common man to become a master of his craft and establish his own shop. The cities of the middle Ages had become free by petitioning the king for a charter. In this way they had cut out the middlemen in the collection of rents and taxes, including Catholic bishops who were an integral part of the feudal system and who collected rents in their own behalf.

    The theory of civil religion assumes that other countries differ from America because they share a cultural and religious background Americans never had. However, Europe and America were involved in many of the same philosophical and political debates. And both countries have struggled to find a basis for community in lieu of the church’s influence.

    See Also:

    Nomads and City Dwellers: Institutions, Worldview

    The Current Political Discourse: America’s future

    From Thomas Hobbes to John Locke: Putting Ayn Rand Through Her Paces

     

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