DEMOCRACY AND THE NEED FOR AUTONOMY

Journal of Moral Philosophy, 2020

A widely held picture in political science emphasizes the cognitive shortcomings of us citizens. We're ignorant. We don't know much about politics. We're irrational. We bend the evidence to show our side in the best possible light. And we're malleable. We let political elites determine our political opinions. This paper is about why these shortcomings matter to democratic values. Some think that democracy's value consists entirely in its connection to equality. But the import of these shortcomings, I argue, cannot be explained in purely egalitarian terms. To explain it, we must instead think of democracy's value partly in terms of collective autonomy. Our ignorance and irrationality undermine the epistemic conditions for realizing this kind of autonomy. They stop us knowing the outcomes of our political choices. Our irrationality and malleability undermine the independence conditions for realizing such autonomy. They mean our political choices are subject to problematic kinds of interpersonal influence. Thus, at root, the import of the widely held picture is that, if accurate, it closes off this critical aspect of democracy's value.

Philosophy & Public Affairs, 2022

What makes democracy valuable? One traditional answer holds that participating in democratic self-government amounts to a kind of autonomy: it enables citizens to be the authors of their political affairs. Many contemporary philosophers, however, are skeptical. We are autonomous, they argue, when important features of our lives are up to us, but in a democracy we merely have a say in a process of collective choice. In this paper, we defend the possibility of democratic autonomy, by advancing a conception of it which is impervious to this objection. At the core of our account is the idea of joint authorship. You are a joint author of something when that thing expresses your joint intentions. Democracy may not make any one of us sole author of our political affairs, but it can make us their joint authors. It is in such joint authorship, we claim, that the intrinsic value of democratic self-government consists.

The legacy of Cornelius Castoriadis contains invaluable germs for our troubled times. His political thought offers a holistic alternative to capitalist modernity. Castoriadis distinguishes two essential modes of societal organizing – heteronomy and autonomy. In one heteronomous society the laws and institutions that govern our lives derive from extra-social sources, outside of popular control and deliberation. On the other hand, under autonomy established institutional structures and rules are made collectively by all members of society and are therefore always open to challenge, reform and replacement. It has come to be widely accepted that if one heteronomous, essentially hierarchical, order is suffocatively oppressive, then an autonomous one should be so relentlessly free so as to be incompatible with any form of regulation and organization. Autonomy thus wrongly becomes equated with unlimited individual freedom. It is true that autonomy cannot include limitation as we know it today, since the latter has come to be synonymous with austerity. But as every form of social organization, the autonomous one offers and determines roles, values, principles etc. and by doing so it creates certain limitations. But besides its negative side, this limitation plays positive role since it also suggests what should be done and determines certain significations that give meaning to life. But unlike the limitation of heteronomy, predetermined and unchallangeable, the one that takes place in conditions of autonomy is self-imposed democratically by all members of society and open to alteration, or in other words self-limitation. Although every society sets certain limits to its individual members, this does not mean that the latter will necessarily sustain themselves within certain regulatory frame, in which case autonomy allows the attempt at convincing large enough segment of the population to change or expand certain limitations, instead of directly outlawing or forbidding dissent.

European Journal of Political Research, 1993

Schumpeter argued that the norms of what he called the 'classical' theory were unrealisable within modern societies and offered what he believed to be a more realistic alternative. However, his critics accuse him of confusing 'is' with 'ought'. This paper seeks to save him from this criticism. It shows that Schumpeter's attack on the classical model rested on a correct appraisal of the constraints on individual autonomous action within modern societies. Unlike the 'competitive theory' of Downs and others, Schurnpeter's own alternative cannot be treated as a naive apologia for contemporary parliametary party democracy. He was well aware that such systems easily degenerate into oligopolies. Indeed he welcomed this development, viewing the party elections as means for moulding rather than responding to the people's will. Nevertheless, a series of procedural norms underlay his theory which are elucidated with reference to Wittgenstein's account of language.

This paper arises as a result of two closely related preocupations. The first one deals with a future perspective of the new popular movements in Argentina, particularly active since the events of December of 2001. The second one comes from far back, and refers to the role of national states, especially those of the capitalist periphery, like Argentina, in the present world scenario, characterized by globalization and the warlike preponderance of USA. The overall category which links both is the autonomy. On one hand, since the expansion of neoliberal globalization, the " national state " has become a controversial matter. Not only due to his size or format but also its funcionality in the world market. This is very significant for every national state, but it is especially important for the capitalist perifery. The neo liberal policies of the 1990´s, which undermined the economic, social, political and cultural basis of the weakened Latin American democracies, were centred on the full subordination of national states to the logic of circulation and accumulation of capital at global level. This caused the desertion of the state from key roles of social reproduction and, at the same time, a resurgence – disorderly, contradictorily but potentially disruptive– of social practices aimed at confronting or solving the problems brought about by the neo-liberal hegemony. Simultaneously, in recent years, influenced by the local and global struggles, the idea that social emancipation and alternative political construction do not have to conquer state power as their principal goal has spread. Instead of this, emancipation has to start from the potentiality of the collective actions which emerge and take root in civil society to construct " another world ". In this paper, seen from the perspective of the Argentine experience, we try to raise questions about the chances and limits that the concept of autonomy has to gestate and to mantain through time emancipatory collective actions, and analize the contradictory role of the national state for and in political struggle. The crisis of the neoliberal model installed in 1976 by the military dictatorship and taken to its maximun expression during the nineties, exploded in Argentina at the end of 2001. On the 19th and 20th of December, hundred of people protested in the street and provoked the fall of Fernando De la Rúa´s government. The archetypical slogan of those days "que se vayan todos " (QSVT), expressed the absolute, visceral and unanimous rejection to the powerless government and the neoliberal model. The QSVT included the request that the all leaders (specially politicians, but also unionist, judges, businessmen) who had been pushing the country to the disaster disappear.

International Philosophical Quarterly, 2013

According to Thomas Christiano, autonomy-centered arguments for democratic rights are not successful. These arguments fail to show that there is anything wrong with citizens who want to trade-off their political rights in exchange for more autonomy regarding their private affairs. The trade-off problem suggests that democratic participation is not necessary for leading a free life. My reply employs recent work in the republican tradition. The republican conception of freedom as non-domination supports the incommensurability of the public and the private aspects of autonomy. Christiano overlooks that trading-off the normative conditions of one’s public autonomy results in agents who are mere subjects to the dominating will of those citizens who retain their democratic rights. Since democratic decisions apply to all citizens, the privatized members end up being dominated, especially with respect to the collective determination of the very border separating the private from the public realm.

Democracy is in crisis. This crisis is the paradoxical outcome of its triumph over its erstwhile rivals. Having prevailed over the totalitarian projects of the first half of the 20 th century it has developed in such a way that it is now undermining its original goals of individual and collective autonomy. Modern liberal democracy – the outcome of an inversion of the values of tradition, hierarchy and political incorporation – is a mixed regime. It involves three different dimensions of social existence, political, legal, historical/economic, and organises power around these. A balance was achieved after the upheaval of World War II in the form of liberal democracy, on the basis of reforms which injected democratic political power into liberalism and controlled the new economic dynamics it had unleashed. This balance has now been lost. Political autonomy, which accompanied modern historicity and its orientation towards the future, has been overshadowed by economic activity and its pursuit of innovation. As a result, the very meaning of democracy has become impoverished. The term used to refer to the goal of self-government, it is now taken to be fully synonymous with personal freedom and the cause of human rights. The legal dimension having come to prevail over the political one, democratic societies see themselves as 'political market societies', societies that can only conceive of their existence with reference to a functional language borrowed from economics. This depoliticisation of democracy has facilitated the rise to dominance of a new form of oligarchy.

2004

The thesis aims to justify liberal democracy on the cultivation of autonomy amongst its citizens. The potential of deliberative democracy and associational democracy to achieve this cultivation are then critically evaluated It is suggested that autonomy has intrinsic value and an intrinsic connection to democracy, particularly in Western democracies. Deliberative democracy is justified as the most suitable model of decision-making to cultivate autonomy due to its enhancement of public reason, speaker and hearer autonomy. All three factors therefore encourage reflective preference transformation. which is the defining mark of deliberative democracy. A perfectionist case of deliberative democracy is further presented and associations in civil society are evaluated as a location of deliberative democracy. It is argued that the associations can achieve this by fulfilling four functions: they can be venues for subsidiarity; provide information and representation; be schools of democracy;...

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GCSP Web Editorial, 2014

From Scotland to Iraq or Hong Kong, from Ukraine to Mali, many potential disputes or actual conflicts have erupted because populations aspire to systems of governance recognizing their right to manage their own affairs. In case such a right is suppressed by domination, the struggle for autonomy can turn violent and even lead to a fight for separation or full-fledged independence. Both history and the current realities abound in examples of situations in which internal autonomy has offered the best solution to conflicts but was rejected or ignored, thus paving the way for senseless bloodshed. It is time for the international community to learn those lessons and act in a preventive fashion to uphold autonomy as a conflict prevention mechanism.