PROXIMITY IMPLIES ACCESSIBILITY, openness, and receptiveness to others. It assumes an absence of hierarchy, an ease of communication, and a certain immediacy of interpersonal relations. It also implies an absence of formalism. A government is said to be close to its citizens if it does not stand on ceremony, if it is prepared to step down from its pedestal to confront criticism directly and engage in debate or seek outside opinions—in other words, if it recognizes that formal institutions are not enough and that it must seek to establish more flexible and direct relations with the people. Since the 1990s, many initiatives of this sort have been attempted in any number of countries: there have been experiments with neighborhood committees, citizen juries, consensus-building conferences, public forums, public opinion surveys, and participatory budgeting, to name a few.1 Although the number of such experiments remains relatively small, the interest they have aroused attests to a profound evolution in our perception of what constitutes a legitimate government. The term participatory democracy has caught on as a way of describing not only these government initiatives but also the popular aspirations to which they respond. Ambiguities remain, however. The phrase, which can be traced back to the politics of the 1960s and 1970s, is actually not very helpful in clarifying what is new in these recent practices.
Calls for “participatory democracy” were a staple of American student protests of the 1960s.2 The expression first appeared in the Port Huron Statement of 1962, the founding manifesto of Students for a Democratic Society.3 Tom Hayden, one of the leaders of the student movement, conceived of participatory democracy as a counter to what he saw as the “inertness” of American democracy in that era. At a time when the Cold War served to justify a cautious, conservative approach to politics by both parties, thereby reducing democracy to its Schumpeterian definition as a choice between competing elites, Hayden’s goal was to bring back a certain idealism and recapture what was best in the American political tradition. His call for participation was thus without socialist or revolutionary overtones. It appealed, rather, to the tradition of the New England town meeting, to the Tocquevillean vision of America as a vast network of voluntary associations. What Hayden had in mind was a more communitarian America that was at the same time more focused on allowing individuals to achieve their full potential. The protesting students took their inspiration not from Karl Marx but from John Dewey, and especially two of his books, Democracy and Education and The Public and its Problems.4 Some saw the movement as the beginning of a “new progressive era,” an allusion to the Progressive Movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which had attacked political corruption, advocated direct democracy (in the form of referendum and recall elections), and criticized a political system dominated by party machines.5
It was thus in the 1960s and after that the idea of participatory democracy caught on in the United States as a general descriptive term for a new civic ideal centered on social movements and voluntary associations. Democracy was to be rooted in civil society rather than in the state, citizens were to express their desires directly, and power was to be decentralized. In the quest for new ideals, a more active idea of citizenship went hand in hand with a more autonomous idea of individuality. Many also believed that greater public involvement in the issues of the day would put an end to sham debates and unproductive confrontations between the parties. Politics would become more sincere, decisions would become more rational, and consensus would become easier to achieve: these were the boons that it was hoped participatory democracy would bring.
The idea spread to other countries during the same period, and it was wielded as both a critique of and complement to existing representative institutions. In Europe it helped to revive old traditions involving associations or councils that harked back to the nineteenth and early twentieth century: Fourierist utopias, Proudhonian visions of politics rooted in civil society, the brief efflorescence of the Paris Commune, the workers’ councils of the period 1918–20, the industrial democracy of the interwar years, and the citizen initiatives of the 1960s. The phrase participatory democracy became a catchall term for social appropriation of the political in all its forms. In France, the autogestion, or self-management, movement came somewhat later, but it, too, reflected aspirations to a more active idea of citizenship and greater individual autonomy in all spheres of existence. Underlying all of this was a radical critique of heteronomy, which had many points in common with the liberal ideal of an autonomous civil society. Permanent direct democracy became the ultimate ideal.6
The 1990s saw further initiatives of this sort. Were these mere revivals of the old participatory ethos? Did the fall of communism in 1989 lead to a softening of earlier critiques of representative democracy? The continuity of vocabulary is misleading. It is true that what was denounced as “representative aristocracy” was firmly rejected, but positive changes also occurred. Although some experiments, most notably in participatory budgeting, were indeed inspired by “tradition,” most should be seen in a different light, for three reasons. First, many of the new initiatives stemmed from decisions taken by governments themselves. Few of them sought to change the decision-making process (by substituting “direct” for “representative” procedures, to oversimplify). Finally, experimentation was limited to specific areas, such as the environment, local government, or governance at the European or international level.
When the term participatory democracy came into vogue in the 1960s and 1970s, it was wielded by social movements that sought to change the power structure by taking power away from institutions and parties and giving it to citizens. In recent years the stakes have been different. The new participatory mechanisms are usually put in place by governments. Why? In part to regain legitimacy that has been undermined by the “crisis of representation,” although it is difficult in this respect to distinguish between cause and effect. But governments also take these steps for functional reasons. In some cases, there are institutional voids that need to be filled, to deal, for instance, with social controversies generated by new technologies. In response to a variety of issues fraught with radical uncertainty, such as how to regulate genetically modified organisms, how to dispose of nuclear waste, and how to deal with novel health issues, governments have resorted to devices such as “mixed commissions”(of citizens and scientists) and “citizen forums”.7 Governments also need better information-gathering networks to facilitate decision making in the face of multiple veto players. Hence participation has become a means of government. Citizen power is not enhanced, as the vocabulary associated with these new practices shows. We hear of “informational circuits,” “cooperative spaces,” “town hall meetings,” and “citizen training”. As the mayor of one Paris district put it in discussing a new experiment with “neighborhood councils,” “democracy is above all information”.8 Such initiatives are a far cry from the old ideal of self-management and direct democracy. The preeminence of representative institutions is not challenged, and their structure is not at issue. It is more a matter of assisting the representative system, making it interactive, forcing it to become more transparent and open.
The new participatory bodies have very limited scope for intervention. They generally deal either with complex and controversial issues or with local government. There is nothing like “participatory democracy” broadly construed. At most one can speak in vaguer terms of a “new democratic spirit”.9 In strictly political terms, the influence of these new initiatives is limited, and the best way to describe their operation is in terms of “governance” and “functional democracy”. A further indication of this limited scope can be seen in the popularity of these new forms of participation at the international level, as if they were workable only at the extremes, to deal wither with the very near or the very far away, in any case at some remove from the basic political structure of the nation-state. Interestingly, the first constitutional mention of the term participatory democracy was at the European level, as if it were somehow useful to compensate for the political deficit due to the absence of a mobilizable demos.10 In this respect as well, it is abundantly clear that the participatory democracy of the early twenty-first century is different from that which attracted the attention of activists and theorists thirty or forty years ago. In order to appreciate its role, we must therefore examine its features more closely.
In the theoretical realm, the development of a new vocabulary signaled recognition of the change, but the theme was never developed. In the United States in particular, the “deliberative turn” of the 1990s marked a change in direction, as talk of “deliberative democracy” supplanted the earlier vogue for “participatory democracy”.
A new sphere of democratic activity is emerging. It is organized around various experiments in participation and deliberation of the sort just described. It has been estimated that in Britain, roughly 1 percent of the adult population regularly participates in activities of this kind (neighborhood committees, citizen juries, investigative commissions, etc.).11 Observations elsewhere find roughly the same order of magnitude of participation, which generally involves a handful of activists who convene in a variety of different settings.12 In France, what is striking is that the number of “participants” is roughly the same as the number of “representatives”.13 In other words, there is a world of political activists that exists more or less in parallel with the world of professional (or at any rate institutional) politicians. The vitality of democracy depends on the relation between these two worlds. This is a well-known fact, which has been the object of a good deal of sociological research. By contrast, there have been far fewer studies of episodic participation in organized groups dealing with public issues. But the studies that we do have indicate a much higher level of occasional participation in informational meetings and public debates, especially in connection with local issues. To gauge the real vitality of citizen participation, however, we also need to look at a third dimension: less formal and more individualized engagement in public life. Interest in public affairs can also be gauged by looking at the number of people who read newspapers, tune in to political broadcasts on radio and television, discuss politics with friends and colleagues, see information on the Internet, and contribute to activist groups. One of the few studies of the subject, sponsored by the British Election Commission, estimated that there are roughly 15 million conversations about politics in Britain every day.14 The various forms of what might be called diffuse citizen involvement therefore deserve attention.
The foregoing remarks suggest the need for a critical look at somewhat hasty allegations about citizen disengagement. What is actually happening is not disengagement from politics but rather a transformation of political involvement. The locus of democratic activity seems to be shifting to civil society, and people seem to be looking for new ways to express themselves. This change marks the close of two centuries during which attention came to be centered on more institutionalized forms of political activity, the focus of which was taken for granted: power and the state were singular nouns. Hence there were instruments of action on one side and mechanisms of command on the other: this was the context that shaped the democratic imaginary. The idea of popular sovereignty linked what seemed to be a well-defined subject (the people) to a well-defined object (the general will). The referendum came to be seen as the clearest form of social appropriation of the political. Although it was often difficult to organize referendums, they nevertheless defined the horizon toward which democratic practice was ultimately directed. The representative system was seen as a mere technique of political organization. Whereas elites and nobles emphasized the distinction between democracy and representative government in order to justify their doubts about democracy, most citizens projected what remained of the ideal of direct social power into the term representative democracy. The idea of a “mandate” bridged the gap between the two notions by treating representatives as a mere extension of the will of the represented. The mandate was thus the point where hope (for fusion of the two aspects of democracy) converged with disappointment (when the bond between them stretched or broke). We are no longer living in that world. The concept of mandate no longer suffices to bridge the gap between government and society and can no longer establish a sufficient degree of proximity. In practice, other ways of expressing political demands have come to the fore, and other types of political involvement have been found.
Proximity—to focus on the essential—is no longer seen as a variable of position associated with a status (that of the elected official). It is rather seen as a quality of interaction. Citizens are no longer content merely to cast their votes. They take part in a permanent process of expression and reaction, in which they adopt the “counterdemocratic” participatory modes of surveillance, veto, and judgment. They also seek information by attempting to force government to explain and justify its actions. They challenge its claims and keep a wary eye on its every move. The scope of this interactive democracy is much broader than the electoral-representative system. It involves activist groups and other forms of diffuse political action, which can both reinforce and contest what the government does. These informal networks form invisible institutions that are an essential part of the structure of contemporary democracy. Their importance has been widely recognized. But understanding of their true nature has been obscured by the widespread use of a catchall term: democracy of opinion. This phrase does at least reflect the urgent need to rethink political life, but it also acts as a screen by reducing the multiple varieties of new political forms to a single category. Those who point in a general way to “the role of the media” similarly impede our understanding. Hence we need a more precise description of the political functions that the diffuse new forms of democratic interaction serve.
Two such functions are essential. The first is justification, which comes about through the interaction of government explanations with social interventions. Proximity here refers to openness, accessibility to questions, and capacity to engage in open exchange. Deliberative democratic theorists have focused on the conditions under which deliberation becomes possible, but they have not paid much attention to exchanges between leaders and citizens. This is a very important phenomenon, however, and it goes well beyond the rather formalized confrontation between majority and opposition. In order for this broader discussion to take place, the legitimacy of the participants must be recognized and the solidity of their arguments evaluated. The result is what might be called “rapprochement through confrontation”. The daily battle over justification plays a decisive role in this regard—a role that is as important as regular electoral competition. It challenges the credibility of political leaders. The legitimacy of government is thus strongly dependent on the way in which this interaction proceeds in each issue area.
The second important function of democratic interaction is the exchange of information between government and society.15 This communication serves the government as an instrument; for civil society actors it is a form of recognition. The interaction brings government closer to the citizens, who feel that they have been listened to, while at the same time it makes society less unpredictable from the standpoint of leaders. The informational dynamic therefore has positive psychological as well as cognitive effects.
These two interactive processes—justification and information exchange—establish a much stronger and much richer relationship between citizens and leaders than does a mandate. Not only is this relationship more substantial, it is also more durable. The control aspect of the mandate—the subjugation of representative to represented—is also transcended. Society asserts its control over government in a different, less hierarchical way (and in any case the mandate was rarely effective in establishing control). To be sure, it is government that first moves closer to society with its explanations and information. But citizens also feel stronger when they understand the world better, when they are better equipped to grasp the issues of the day and to describe and interpret their own experience. Their feelings of distance and loss of control are in fact a consequence of ignorance. A world that is opaque is also alien. It is a world in which it is easy to feel dominated and powerless. On the other hand, government feels less remote and more manageable when its workings are easier to understand. It sheds its haughtiness and moderates its tone. It becomes more transparent and less arrogant. And citizens who share in information and knowledge adopt a new attitude toward their leaders. They gain power not by “seizing” or “commanding” it but by inflecting it, by persuading it to operate differently. What interactive democracy gives you then, is a new social economy of proximity and therefore a new sense of empowerment.
This new interactive democracy moved to center stage after 2000, as the legitimacy of electoral-representative institutions gradually eroded. But the earliest analyses of this type of relationship between citizens and leaders date from a much earlier time: the last third of the eighteenth century in France. There is an objective reason for this: the English were the first to propose theories of representative government, which had gained a foothold in England, whereas the French, who had nothing comparable, made do with reflections on the emergence of what people began to call public opinion and its impact on the relationship between government and society.16 The philosophes observed that, although nothing had changed institutionally under the absolute monarchy, the clamp on civil society had been loosened, making opinion a force to reckon with. Opinion was perceived at the time as a sort of informal general will. For Jacques Necker, it was “an invisible power, without exchequer, guards, or army, which can nevertheless dictate its laws to the city, the court, and even the royal palace”.17 When Jacques Turgot championed the revival of the Provincial Assemblies, he emphasized the informational benefits to be derived from this institution, though to be sure there was nothing “democratic” about his motives. He pointed out that society would feel that it had been treated with respect, in return for which the task of government would be greatly eased.18 The interaction between government and public opinion was even perceived at the time as more “modern” than the representative system, which reminded people of ancient, not to say archaic, institutions (think of Rousseau, who associated representation with the Middle Ages). Thus only a few years before the French Revolution, people with advanced ideas thought much more about strengthening the role of public opinion than about electing representatives.19
History would soon establish a different set of priorities and other images of political progress by identifying the citizen with the voter. Nevertheless, the idea that representation is merely one aspect of what we might call a general economy of political interaction persisted. It will come as no surprise, moreover, that this was especially true in the liberal circles that were most resistant to the idea of universal suffrage. For these liberals, the persistence of this idea was a way of justifying their resistance to extending the vote. It allowed them to dream of a future democracy in which the right to vote was not equally distributed. Paradoxically, it was the conservatism of liberals such as Guizot and Charles de Rémusat that led them to develop some very new ideas about the relation between leaders and people (and that is why Habermas would acknowledge their influence on his theory of communicative action).20 Their basic intuition was to consider the press as a means of government and not simply a liberty. They saw it as the crucial vehicle of a new type of political communication. Publicity, Guizot observed, revealed the government to the public and vice versa.21 If the true function of the press was to serve as a means of government, Rémusat noted, it was because “in our great modern empires, with their large populations, citizens can communicate with one another and discover one another’s opinions only through the press, and only through the press can the authorities receive and give enlightenment. This exchange is necessary if citizens and authorities are to march in the same direction”.22 What is distinctive about modern society, he continued, is that “society stages itself as a spectacle”.23 From the standpoint of political communication, the role of electoral mechanisms is ultimately secondary. Elections matter not as expressions of the people’s will but as one element of a much larger system for the generation and circulation of information and opinion.24 A leading jurist of the period therefore wrote that “through the press every individual enjoys the right to give advice [to the government] and truly has a consultative voice in public affairs. Every French citizen can thus participate indirectly, to the extent of his abilities, in the action of the public authorities. For true statesmen, this method, which is open to all, is a hundred times more influential than an isolated vote in an electoral college”.25 The very term democracy thus began to be used in an expanded sense in the 1820s. Although it was still associated with the notion of popular sovereignty, it acquired a more sociological connotation. It was also understood to describe the quality of the bond between government and society, with reference to ongoing unimpeded interaction between the two.26
Mobilization for the purpose of achieving universal suffrage would later, in the 1880s and 1890s, establish yet another set of priorities, shifting the primary focus back to “le sacre du citoyen,” or the “sacred” exercise of the right to vote. Once that right was firmly established, however, initial disappointment with the result led to renewed questions about the meaning of democracy—on all sides. Socialists denounced the “formal democracy” of the individual voter, following Marx’s condemnation of the consequences of divorcing the citizen from “social man”. Republicans became alarmed by the rise of populism and the consequent threat that democracy could turn against itself. Thus a new round of reflection on the meaning of democracy began. In France, the leading republican philosophers, most notably Alfred Fouillée and Charles Renouvier, advocated a return to a prudent liberal approach: serious effort should be made to educate the people and to ensure that institutions were staffed by functionaries with the requisite abilities. Throughout Europe some called for democracy to be replaced by a representative aristocracy of sages.27
More novel ideas also emerged. In Leçons de sociologie, for example, Émile Durkheim offered an original analysis of democracy as communication between society and what he called the “governmental consciousness”.28 He began with two observations. First, an “arithmetic understanding” of democracy would no longer do, because in the absence of unanimous elections, there are always people who are not represented, and because a majority could be “as oppressive as a caste”. Second, a functional administrative view of the state was also unsatisfactory. For Durkheim, the state was also “the organ of social thought”. The role of democracy needed to be rethought with this idea in mind. Democracy corresponds to a symbiosis of government and society (in contrast to despotic and aristocratic regimes, in which power is isolated). “The closer the communication between the governmental consciousness and the rest of society, the more that consciousness can understand, and the more democratic the society,” he wrote. “Hence democracy is defined as a maximum extension of this consciousness”.29 Durkheim explicitly contrasted this approach with theories of the imperative mandate, which were in vogue at the time in extreme-left circles as a remedy for the crisis of representation. For the sociologist, the separation of government from society was a necessity rather than a curse. The role of the state was not only to reflect society as it is but also to contribute to society’s reflection on itself so as to assist in the formation of a true collective consciousness. It was essential, however, that this functional distinction be complemented by a joint effort of deliberation within society and permanent interaction between society and the state. These two features together defined democracy, which for Durkheim was both a regime type and a social form.30 After Necker and Guizot, who took the first steps toward a modern theory of public opinion, Durkheim went further still by laying the philosophical groundwork for a deliberative theory of democracy in conjunction with a communicative conception of political action. The task that faces us now is to develop these ideas to account for the transformations that are taking place in democratic societies around the world today.
In procedural terms, to represent means to execute a mandate, to act in another person’s place. Representation is therefore a form of substitution, and it can be organized by specifying the terms of that substitution. In interactive democracy, this conception of representation no longer makes sense. To be sure, there is still a gap between the people and their leaders, but this gap is no longer conceptualized in terms of a mandate. The people do not aspire to become leaders. Indeed, they recognize that, as a functional matter, power must exist in a separate sphere. The government then acquires some of the characteristics of a reflexive authority, whose task is to formulate an endless stream of projects and ideas in relation to which the various elements of society can situate themselves, reevaluate their expectations, and gain a better appreciation of what they accept and reject. Proximity is not understood as a matter of diminishing distance but rather as openness, as the ability to participate sincerely in the relationship of mutual revelation between government and society. Hence representation no longer has a procedural meaning, nor does it suggest any form of identification. Instead, it is defined as a form of effort, which has both cognitive and informational dimensions. It plays a role in the political production of society by structuring a process of permanent exchange, not only between government and society but within society itself. It thus transcends the usual distinction between participatory and deliberative democracy. The idea of representation therefore becomes divorced from the idea of election as a particular moment in time. It refers instead to an ongoing process.
This type of reflexive-representative effort leads to a new conception of social generality. The point is no longer to express a supposedly preexisting totality, “the people”. It is rather to elicit awareness of many different situations and to encourage the expression of many different possibilities. This is one dimension of the aim to involve everyone in public deliberation, to achieve universal participation. But that is not all. The first theories of deliberative democracy sought to substitute a procedural generality for a social one. Interactive democracy goes further: it aims for permanent generalization. This involves continual striving for inclusion as well as constant reaction and interpretation. In a sense, politics becomes less concrete, but this does not mean that it loses its social moorings. Gone are the ideas of a demos and a general will, if we take these things to be already constituted. In their place, however, comes a new recognition of the need for constant generalization of the social.
Interaction—our third figure of proximity—thus defines a new type of relationship between government and society. It does not refer simply to the behavior of political leaders, as was the case with the concepts of attention to particularity and presence. Interaction implies first of all that leaders immediately react to society’s concerns. These reactions come in the form of responses to society’s exercise of oversight, protest, and judgment in order to exert pressure on leaders to change their decisions. These interactions take place not only in the public arena and in the eye of the media but also in numerous less-obvious sites. Not all the action is in the streets or on the front pages of the newspapers. The old term silent majority acknowledged the existence of a gap between what takes place in the depths of society and what is most prominent in the public eye. On occasion the silent would suddenly find their voice at the ballot box, to everyone’s surprise.
The development of the Internet has upset the old balance between the hidden and the visible. Everything is now out in the open. Public opinion used to exist only when it was represented (by polls or in the media or else when given voice by a political party or other group). Now it has a direct and autonomous existence. Nothing is hidden on the Web, but by the same token nothing is quantified or measurable. This has changed the conditions under which leaders react to society. Now they have to react not only to major confrontations, with unions, say, or over important issues of the day, but also to countless minor discords, which are exacerbated and multiplied by the power of the Internet. The phenomenon has gained in importance as political identities have disintegrated. New dividing lines have emerged in connection with a growing range of issues. This has weakened the very notion of a majority. Together, these changes have completely transformed the relation between leaders and people. Leaders need to be able to interact more and faster, with all the risks that this new capability implies.
We must now integrate all these disparate elements in order to gain a fuller understanding of the new institutions of interaction. The fragmentation of social expression had strained the electoral-representative system to the breaking point. The advent of universal suffrage led to the formation of parties as mediators between society and the electoral system. The parties helped both to maintain equilibrium and to promote democratization. What we need today is an equivalent of the parties to help organize the new relationship between government and society, which is both more down-to-earth and more fragmented than the old.
The purpose of this book is to offer a broad overview of changes affecting democratic political systems, not to engage in political or constitutional engineering. Nevertheless, we can offer a few indications of what direction thinking about this problem might take in the future. How can the necessary functions of expression, representation, and interaction be brought together? The key institution might take the form of a public commission. Its role would be to inventory needs and demands, supply clear analyses, organize debates, and propose an array of choices. These commissions could take a variety of forms: among the possibilities are citizen juries, issue-based conventions, and forums of experts. None of these suggestions is new, but the use made of them to date has been too narrow and too often limited to the collection of expert opinion. One should rather think of public commissions as acting as “enzymes” of public interaction.31 Their role will develop and gain in complexity as time goes by. In the future, government decisions will not be seen as legitimate unless they have been developed, debated, tested in public forums of this type. Citizens will come to understand that democratic government means organizing this kind of interaction in as open and cooperative a way as possible.
I will not propose a model of a public commission here, but it may be useful in any case to enumerate some of the functions that such a commission might serve and to suggest a few ideal types. The interface between government and society needs to be rethought, and an examination of past experiments with public commissions might be a good place to start. What we need, for governability as well as democratization, is new combinations of three basic elements: organized political representation, immediate social expression, and expert knowledge.
The creation of this new type of institution cannot be done in isolation. The enterprise needs to be linked, for example, to a social reconstruction of the journalistic profession. During the French Revolution, the invention of the representative system was closely tied to new thinking about the democratic function of the press. Journalists such as Camille Desmoulins, Brissot, and Louis-Marie Prudhomme were as important as Sieyès and Robespierre. Condorcet himself edited two newspapers. During the Progressive Era in the United States, the muckraking press took the lead in rethinking the role of journalism in democracy. Robert Park’s contributions were as essential as the more philosophical work of John Dewey.32 Indeed, throughout history, democracy has never progressed without reinventing the press, and it suffered whenever the quality of the press declined. This was the case in Europe, for example, after World War II. Yet it is clear that in many countries today, the media are crumbling (France is a particularly depressing example). Irresponsibility, fecklessness, and corruption are everywhere. The new interactive democracy cannot flourish until journalism has been revived, for journalists are needed to animate public debate, to investigate social problems, and to decipher complex issues. And journalism cannot be revived unless social science helps to raise the level of public debate. Once again, history shows that democratic progress has always coincided with changes of intellectual paradigm. Activists, journalists, and social scientists must therefore combine their efforts if progress is to be made.
The new interactive democracy thus holds out the promise of real progress. But proximity is also as beset with problems as the previous two figures of democracy. The first danger is that the demand for interaction will be reduced to a set of formulas for governance, that is, turned into a mere tool of management. Too many experiments with participatory democracy have ended this way. Society must make the new methods its own and develop those that contribute most to reshaping the relationship between leaders and people. There is an ideology of participation that fails to draw a clear distinction between electoral-representative democracy and the new interactive democracy, as if the two could somehow be fused. A certain ideology of proximity also needs to be rooted out. If interactive democracy is to come into its own, it must be distinguished clearly from the democracy of opinion, participatory democracy, and the democracy of proximity. These older terms give too narrow an idea of what is at stake. They keep attention focused within the traditional electoral-representative system, merely referring to the various parameters that describe it: opinion (a parameter of subjectivity), participation (a parameter of scope), and proximity (a parameter of scale).
At the present stage of our development, this last factor is particularly important. To reduce proximity to a mere parameter of scale obscures what is actually at stake. The resulting idealization of the local is doubly misleading. First, it elicits overly simple responses to the dilemmas of representative government. Local leaders are idealized as exemplars of both impartiality (because they are above the parties) and proximity, leading to an a priori understanding of what democracy is about. The local becomes a sort of icon of political good. Second, the idealization of the local also conceals what has actually changed in the relation of citizens to politics. If the local is celebrated as a symbol of the success of the representative system, in contrast to the national, where democracy is said to be “in crisis,” we fail to grasp the true situation in which democracy finds itself today and neglect the major structural changes that it has undergone.
It is more useful to observe that, together, impartiality and proximity have altered the terms of the problem of representation. They are two distinct and complementary ways of avoiding the issue of representative difference. The figure of impartiality leads to a positive new interpretation of the distance between citizens and institutions. Distance becomes a virtue instead of a constraint or a lesser evil. By contrast, the figure of proximity reduces the distance between government and society but without altering the nature or role of electoral-representative institutions. It achieves a pragmatic rapprochement. Evolution in both of these dimensions has radically transformed the debate about representative government. This has led to a new understanding of the meaning of the distance between people and leaders and therefore of the economy of representation itself.33
1 For an overview in French, see the various works of Loïc Blondiaux and Yves Sintomer. In English, see Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright, Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance (London: Verso, 2003).
2 The essential works are James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (1987; reprint Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); and Paul Berman, A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 (New York: Norton, 1996).
3 The Port Huron Statement is included as an appendix in Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets. Tom Hayden, the statement’s principal drafter, borrowed it from one of his professors at the University of Michigan, Arnold Kaufman: see Kaufman, “Human Nature and Participatory Democracy,” in Carl J. Friedrich ed., Responsibility (New York: Liberal Art Press, 1960).
4 The drafters of the Port Huron Statement first met in the John Dewey Discussion Society at the University of Michigan. See Alan Ryan, “Dream Time,” The New York Review of Books, 17 October 1996.
5 Peter Levine, The New Progressive Era: Toward a Fair and Deliberative Democracy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).
6 For a contemporary theoretical interpretation of these issues, see Pierre Rosanvallon, L’Âge de l’autogestion (Paris: Seuil, 1976). On the French case in general, see Frank Georgi, ed., Autogestion: La dernière utopie (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2003); and Hélène Hatzfeld, Faire de la politique autrement: Les expériences inachevées des années 1970 (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2005).
7 See M. Callon, P. Lascoumes, and Y. Barthe, Agir dans un monde incertain, as well as the important report Des conférences de citoyens en droit français, Jacques Testart, Michel Callon, Marie-Angèle Hermitte, and Dominique Rousseau, eds. (Paris, 2007).
8 On this experiment in the 20th Arrondissement of Paris, see Loïc Blondiaux and Sandrine Lévêque, “La politique locale à l’épreuve de la démocratie: Les formes paradoxales de la démocratie participative dans le XXe arrondissement de Paris,” in Catherine Neveu, ed., Espace public et engagement politique. Enjeux et logiques de la citoyenneté locale (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999).
9 Loïc Blondiaux, Le Nouvel esprit de la démocratie (Paris: La République des idées-Seuil, 2008).
10 The proposed 2004 Constitutional Treaty of the European Union distinguished between participatory democracy and representative democracy, defining the former as “an open, transparent, and regular dialogue with representative associations of civil society”. See Article I, 47.
11 Quoted in Tom Bentley, Everyday Democracy (London: Demos, 2005). See also Paul Ginsborg, The Politics of Everyday Life: Making Choices, Changing Lives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
12 Brazil seems to be one of the most advanced countries in this respect, with a participation rate of 2 percent.
13 France has approximately 450,000 elected representatives of one sort or another, or about 0.7 percent of the population.
14 See Bentley, Everyday Democracy, p. 31.
15 See Jacques Gertslé, ed., Les Effets d’information en politique (Paris: l’Harmattan, 2001); and John A. Ferojohn and James H. Kuklinski, eds., Information and Democratic Processes (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990).
16 On this subject, see the work of Mona Ozouf, Keith Baker, and Roger Chartier. Note that in the eighteenth century, the term opinion referred to both the old notion of “vulgar thought” (a legacy of libertine scholars) and the modern notion of “social generality”.
17 Jacques Necker, De l’administration des finances de la France (Paris, 1784), vol. 1, p. lxii.
18 See also the “functional” arguments in favor of freedom of the press in, for example, André Morellet, Réflexions sur les avantages de la liberté d’écrire et d’imprimer sur les matières de l’administration (London, 1775); and Guillaume-Chrétien Malesherbes, Mémoire sur la liberté de la presse (Paris, 1788).
19 “What does ‘representation’ mean?” asked Jean-Baptiste Suard. “What is it that representatives can represent, if not public opinion?” Quoted in Dominique Joseph Garat, Mémoires historiques sur le XVIIIe siècle et sur M. Suard, 2d ed. (Paris, 1829), vol. 2, p. 94.
20 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MS: MIT Press, 1991).
21 Guizot: “The freedom of the newspapers should have the effect of continually revealing France to itself, of making the entire nation visible to the government and the government visible to the nation”. Le Courier, July 1, 1819.
22 Charles de Rémusat, De la liberté de la presse (Paris, 1819), p. 12.
23 Ibid., p. 35.
24 Guizot: “What characterizes the institutions that France has and to which Europe aspires is not representation or elections but publicity. . . . Publicity is the foundation of our institutions, the ultimate end as well as the primary ingredient”. See “Des garanties légales de la liberté de la presse,” Archives philosophiques, politiques et littéraires (Paris, 1818), vol. 5, pp. 186–187.
25 Denis Serrigny, Traité du droit public des Français (Paris, 1846), vol. 2, p. 3.
26 See P. Rosanvallon, “The History of the Word ‘Democracy’ in France,” Journal of Democracy, October 1995.
27 On this point, see the well-known works of Vittorio Emanuele Orlando in Italy, Adolphe Prins and Émile de Laveleye in Belgium, and Albert Venn Dicey in Great Britain.
28 Émile Durkheim, Leçons de sociologie: Physique des mœurs et du droit (Paris: PUF, 1950). See lectures 7–9 on “civic morality”.
29 Ibid., p. 102.
30 Hence his two definitions: (1) “democracy is the political form whereby society achieves the purest consciousness of itself. The greater the role of deliberation, reflection, and critical spirit in public affairs, the more democratic the people”. Ibid., pp. 107–108. And (2) “Democracy is a regime in which the state, while remaining distinct from the mass of the nation, is in close communication with it”. Ibid., p. 118.
31 I borrow the term from Philip Pettit, Republicanism.
32 Robert E. Park, Le Journaliste et le sociologue, with an introduction by Géraldine Muhlmann and Edwy Plenel (Paris: Seuil, 2008).
33 This leads to a complete reformulation of the historical debate about localism in the American and French revolutions. See, in particular, the federalist critique of the ravages of localism.