The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy

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FEMINIST ENGAGEMENTS WITH DEMOCRATIC THEORY

Noëlle McAfee

Introduction

Democratic theory is manifold; there are those who think of democracy as a representative form of government and those who think of it as direct self-rule. There are those who think of it in empirical terms—for example, charting out the rise and fall of successful democratic regimes (Diamond 2015)—and those who prefer to inquire about the norms that ought to be followed for democracy to work. An empirical focus on democracy zeroes in on the facts on the ground, including people’s actual interests, levels of participation and representation, that is, the actual workings of democratic communities. The normative approach focuses not on what is, but on what ought to be, that is, the proper principles and methods that would be most democratic, and what the ideals of democracy ought to be.

This chapter focuses on the normative rather than solely empirical dimensions of democratic theory and practice. It does so by explaining the normative turn in democratic theory, about forty years ago, which began with John Rawls’ work and continued through Jürgen Habermas’s development of discourse ethics and subsequent work in what came to be known as deliberative democratic theory. Throughout these four decades, feminist theorists have raised key objections and made important interventions that have led to what is today a more robust and inclusive democratic theory.

Democratic Theory in the Twentieth Century

Through most of the twentieth century, political thought took as self-evident that modern day democracies must be representative and that the role of the citizen was to elect its leaders and, if those leaders did a poor job, elect someone else. It also approached democracy with the tools of behaviorism, statistics, and science (hence the rise of “political science” programs). Parting ways with idealistic notions of democracy as self-governance, political thought was taken up by the empirical, the scientific, and the descriptive. What they found did not bode terribly well for ancient models of democracy where each citizen (however delimited that class) had a large role in deciding matters of common concern. Leading political thinkers such as Walter Lippmann and Joseph Schumpeter pointed to the ignorance and apathy of the typical voter and the need for better governance structures and elite rule. Some noted that it would in fact be irrational for people to squander their valuable time on investigating how to vote when the typical person’s vote did not matter anyway (Buchanan and Tullock 1962). Instead of the ideals of democratic self-governance, these thinkers focused on interests, power, and expediency. They were hard-headed realists.

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In that milieu, the philosopher John Rawls’ 1971 book, the unabashedly normative Theory of Justice, caused quite a stir. Instead of reporting on how politics worked in the real world, it provided a justification for how it ought to work and of what kind of principles of justice would square with what a thoughtful public would support as legitimate. Where earlier normative theories rested on supposed universal truths or natural law, foundations that had become untenable in a “post-metaphysical” world, Rawls developed a way to derive principles of justice that were rooted in human reason, not metaphysical absolutes. The key device was a notion of an “original position” where one could imagine oneself behind a “veil of ignorance” as to what one’s fortunes and skills might be in a possible political society. “The idea of the original position,” Rawls writes, “is to set up a fair procedure so that any principles [of justice] agreed to will be just” and this is best achieved by nullifying the “effects of specific contingencies” that some might exploit at the expense of others (Rawls 1971: 136). By imagining themselves behind a veil of ignorance, they disregard their own circumstances in order to arrive at principles of justice that would be best for everyone, no matter their particular circumstances (Rawls 1971: 137). Rawls argued that through such a procedure, any participant would arrive at two principles of justice: one that would guarantee equal rights to basic liberties and another that would set limits to the degree of social and economic inequality, only allowing that which also benefits those at the bottom. After decades of hard-headed (and hard-hearted) empirical theorizing, Rawls provided a theory of justice that was normative and rooted in what would be agreed to by people when they deliberate rationally.

Just two years later, Jürgen Habermas coined the term “legitimation crisis” to point to the ways in which, in liberal capitalist societies, economic systems have become decoupled from public will; and then governmental systems, which act to ease the way for economic systems, and also aim toward independence from the public, trying to maintain public support but with as little public input as possible (Habermas 1975). Thus arises a conflict between the imperatives of systems and the imperatives of society, or between functionalist reason and what Habermas would later call communicative reason. With Rawls, Habermas shares a view dating back to Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, that governmental legitimacy can only be grounded in public will and consent. In this view, only a public can decide political legitimacy and any governmental institutions that disregard the public will hence lack legitimacy. These twentieth-century theories of legitimacy emerged, perhaps not coincidentally, as the Watergate crisis led to large-scale disenchantment with the workings of modern-day political parties and bureaucratic governments. Between the works of Rawls and Habermas and those who worked in the space their works created, the seemingly passé notion that governmental systems were legitimate only to the extent that they could have been authored by a democratic public was rejuvenated. And so the door opened to thinking about the role that citizens themselves could play in democracy.

While Rawls’ theory rejuvenated normative political philosophy, it also opened itself to charges from two distinct but interconnected realms: communitarians and feminist care ethicists. Drawing on Aristotle, Hegel, and the civic republican tradition, communitarian thinkers (such as Amitai Etzioni, Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, and Michael Walzer) worried that the classical liberalism resurrected in Rawls’ Theory of Justice glorified the individual over community and rights over responsibilities (Daly 1994). With some leaning left (e.g., Walzer) and others leaning right (namely MacIntyre), they shared an understanding of human beings as social creatures who do not originate prior to their social conditions. In many ways they echo, and some like MacIntyre (1999) draw explicitly, on feminist criticisms of liberal theory. (Habermas, to whom I will return below, shares the communitarians’ view of individuation being a social process.) Hence they criticized Rawls’s central device of the original position from which deliberators decide what the principles of justice should be.

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Likewise, feminist ethics of care theorists worried about liberalism’s tendency to value the universal over the particular and justice over care. (See Chapter 43 in this volume on ethics of care feminism.) Beginning with Carol Gilligan’s criticism of the Kantian bias in mainstream developmental psychology (Gilligan 1982), a bias that saw principled universalist reason as superior to context-sensitive reason and care, ethics of care theorists have sought to show the importance of the role of care in the development of individuals and society (Gilligan 1982; Ruddick 1989; Kittay 1999; Held 2006). Where liberal theory would relegate care to the private realm as a private matter unfit for politics, ethics of care theorists argue that care has a place in the public realm. Moreover, they argue, many of the qualities that are cultivated in the home are much needed in public life.

It was not just the communitarians and ethics of care theorists who took on liberal democratic theory. As Alison Jaggar explained in her 1983 book, Feminist Politics and Human Nature, approaches as different as liberal, radical, Marxist, and socialist feminism were all concerned with liberal democratic theory. Liberal feminists did much to call into question some of the underlying misogynist elements of liberal democratic theory, including the very idea of the “man of reason” (Lloyd 1979) as well as the social contract (Pateman 1988). Liberal feminist critics of mainstream political philosophy called into question the supposed gender-neutrality of terms like “man” as well as the sequestering of the household from political scrutiny, which allowed men heads of households free rein in the household along with supposedly being able to represent the interests of their dependents in public life. But most importantly, they questioned the supposed objectivity and neutrality of leading political notions of justice, freedom, and autonomy, ideals that emerged most clearly during the Enlightenment era of eighteenth-century Europe.

For the past century, philosophers, including feminist theorists, have vigorously debated the status of such ideals as reason, principle, truth, freedom, justice, and autonomy. Are they metaphysical truths about human nature? Or, more modestly, are they ideals we hold as measures by which to judge existing conditions, virtues that might be achieved through historical progress? Or, as some argue, are they hopelessly patriarchal notions founded on a binary dichotomy of male reason and its feminine other, marginalizing and denigrating important features that allow communities to flourish, such as emotion, relatedness, particularity, and care?

Radical feminists for the most part turned away from all “male-stream” political philosophy and identified the violence and domination at the root of patriarchal systems. MacKinnon (2005), for example, argues that feminists’ focus on where it is and isn’t appropriate to treat women differently (e.g., with maternity leave) completely overlook the fact that the social system was set up to oppress and exploit women. From a radical feminist perspective, governments are tools of a patriarchal ruling class and should be dismantled or rejected altogether.

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Socialist and Marxist feminists focused on issues of class and the economic reproduction of labor, e.g., the role of housewives as unpaid tools of capitalism. Capitalism, they note, is founded on the “primitive accumulation” of resources through exploitation and the unpaid labor of the household. Along with other leftist critics going back a century, they generally saw the state as a “superstructural” outgrowth of capitalism. Any notion that democracy itself could lead to freedom and equality, or vice versa, was simply naïve given that capitalistic governmental structures would never tolerate full and equal participation.

Looking back now from the vantage point of the second decade of the twenty-first century, it is easy to see that through much of the twentieth century, especially through the Cold War, political philosophy had its eyes trained on forms of governance and on economic systems. Moreover, these were seen as thoroughly entwined, so much that it seemed to be a truism that capitalist economies accompanied liberal democracies, welfare state systems went with more socialist politics, and planned economies went with communist party led governments. If an anomaly arose, such as the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile, a coup d’état quietly orchestrated by the United States Central Intelligence Agency quickly and conveniently restored the world order (Prados 1986: 315–322). Whether liberal or Marxist, socialist or anarchist, political philosophers, feminists included, theorized largely about forms of governance and the kinds of economies they fostered.

Almost entirely absent was any attention to the practices of the people themselves or to the networks of associations and civil society they moved within. Few theorists recognized the political power of associational life. In fact, while theorists were ruminating about the state and states were engaged in their machinations, many people within oppressive regimes were organizing themselves in ways that created nascent but very real political power. In Poland during the 1980s, the Solidarity labor movement defied the oppressive state to take to the streets. In Czechoslovakia of Eastern Europe, firmly on the other side of the Iron Curtain, people were defying laws against meeting outside Party sanctioned meetings to form literary societies, to read books, put on plays, to “act as if they were free until they became so” (Goldfarb 2006). One of the very few theorists to recognize this kind of power was Hannah Arendt who, in her 1958 masterpiece, The Human Condition, described the power that springs up in the space of appearance when people come together to speak and act on matters of common concern. This is a power potential—a power with, not a power over—that emerges in their coming together and dissipates when they move apart. Arendt’s work remained largely idiosyncratic to her, though a certain young Jürgen Habermas did pay attention.

The Sea Change in Democratic Theory

Up through the 1980s, Soviet-backed communist parties ruled the countries of the Eastern Europe, claiming to be “the People’s” parties. But in at least two of these countries, Poland and Czechoslovakia, the people themselves were quietly organizing (Goldfarb 2006). So when opportunities arose as the Soviet Union began to crumble and pulled its tanks out of Eastern Europe, the real people’s civic organizations began to call the lie of the faux People’s parties. During a few heady weeks in November 1989 the Czechoslovakian citizen group, Civic Forum, protested, brought down the government, and from its membership produced the first democratically elected president of Czechoslovakia since 1946, Vaclav Havel. Poland had a longer history of a self-organized public apart from the state apparatus, thanks to the labor movement Solidarity and the somewhat less repressive state. Finally recognized by the government in February 1989, Solidarity negotiated a process for open and democratic elections, leading to the end of authoritarian rule. The most memorable part of the end of the Cold War was the opening and then the fall of the Berlin Wall, precipitated by a hapless bureaucrat who on November 9, 1989, announced that the wall was open for passage and then thousands of East Germans seizing the opportunity. But it was the work of regular citizens in their associations in civil society that paved the way for peaceful transition. (The best counterexample is Romania, which had neither a memory nor a practice of civil society and in December 1989 summarily executed the dictator and his wife, hardly a peaceful transition nor a good omen for any future democracy.)

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The fall of the Berlin Wall not only ended the Cold War, it also ended political theorists’ exclusive focus on the state. Previously, debates between liberals, socialists, and Western Marxists (who had long eschewed Soviet-style communism), had all revolved around matters of state governance and economic systems. With the supposed triumph of capitalism and liberal democracy, liberal theorists’ positions stayed mostly the same, but those on the radical left were rather unmoored since their old categories no longer seemed to matter. In fact, when the Cold War ended, all the Marxists seemed to disappear. As Douglas Kellner explains it,

With the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and then the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s, . . . there was a turn against many versions of Marxism and toward newer forms of postmodern and poststructural theory and multicultural approaches of a variety of forms, often based on identity politics, as well as a turn by many former leftists to liberal theory and politics. Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy helped shape an influential version of post-Marxism that criticized the orthodox model and developed a model of “radical democracy” based on “new social movements.” A later dialogue between Laclau, Judith Butler, and Slavoj Zizek continued to reconstruct the Western Marxist project on poststructuralist and multicultural lines.

(Kellner 2005)

For many theorists post-1989, what became really interesting were civil society and the public sphere, namely the non-governmental arenas of public life, the very spaces from which eastern-European challenges to communism emerged. Propitiously, Jürgen Habermas’s book of the 1960s, Strukturwandel der Öffenticheit, was translated into English just after the wall fell as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. While the reviews were mixed, the book added a new dimension to the word, public, from a mass of people with little power to a network of people capable of creating sound public opinion and will on matters of public concern. Now seen as a potent political actor, the public, along with its space, the public sphere, drew the attention of political theorists from many orientations. Politics suddenly seemed to be about much more than state and economy, it was also about civil society and the public sphere, about inclusion and identity, about new social movements, and, increasingly over the next decade, about public deliberation.

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While this all looked good for progressive politics, the feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser quickly raised a key concern: Was Habermas’s conception of the public sphere empowering for women, or was it another patriarchal construction? Fraser pointed out that a notion of a unitary public sphere could easily become masculinist and exclusionary; and so she called for notions of multiple publics, some strong and some weak, including counterpublics that would allow for the development of public voices from those who have been excluded, including women’s groups, from the mainstream of society (Fraser 1992). This piece seems to have had an effect on Habermas’s thinking as he later developed a theory of a more decentered and pluralized the public sphere (Habermas 1996).

Discourse Ethics

With the turn from state to society, much political theory of the 1990s took up the question of how to make the political system—understood broadly to include the public sphere—more democratic, not just with electoral politics but with the ways in which society overall deliberates and chooses (see Barker et al. 2012). This “deliberative turn” in politics was aided by Habermas’ new discourse ethics, which built upon his two-volume work, the Theory of Communicative Action (TCA), and paved the way for his subsequent work on deliberative democracy. Previous thinkers in the history of philosophy, especially Kant and Hegel, had identified reason as an inherent faculty of the subject, a kernel of hope for the eventual development of a more rational and just society. Contrary to this philosophical thinking, Habermas argues against the old idea of a presocial being with a monological or purely individual capacity for reason. Following G. H. Mead’s pragmatic account of socialization, Habermas argues that we are individuated through a social process of role taking, being called to and responding. If our individuation and development as rational beings is socially constituted, then we can hardly appeal to an Enlightenment notion that reason would lead to freedom and justice.

So in many respects, Habermas is just as skeptical as many contemporary feminist theorists about there being any antecedent metaphysical truths. At the same time, though, Habermas refused to dispense with the ideal of reason itself. Instead of residing in the subject as some kind of faculty, he located it pragmatically in the social realm as a set of presuppositions that made communication possible. “I call interactions communicative,” Habermas writes, “when the participants coordinate their plans of action consensually, with the agreement reached at any point being evaluated in terms of the intersubjective recognition of validity claims” (Habermas 1990 [1983]: 58).

Habermas identifies three validity claims that people are making as they reach agreement through speech acts: “claims to truth, claims to rightness, and claims to truthfulness, according to whether the speaker refers to something in the objective world . . . , to something in the shared social world . . . , or to something in his own subjective world” (Habermas 1990 [1983]: 58). These validity claims are pragmatic presuppositions that make discourse possible. If we did not hold them, we would not bother to talk with each other. But at the same time, that we do tend to hold them means that we are easily preyed upon, for example in celebrity endorsements of products that may not be as good as the celebrity says. When the validity claims are warranted, speech can go well; when exploited, the result can be systematically distorted communication, that is, manipulation. Habermas calls the first communicative action and the second strategic action. That others will prey upon our expectations is not reason to abandon hope; rather, those validity expectations are the source for identifying and calling out manipulation.

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From this theory of communicative action it was a short step to discourse ethics, a theory of how moral agreement can be reached communicatively. Unlike non-cognitivists who think there is no truth of the matter on moral claims, Habermas argues that there is a truth. But unlike emotivists who think these truths are simple empirical observations of likes and dislikes, moral “truths” are not empirical but linked to a social reality of interpersonal relationships in which people are trying to decide together what to do (Habermas 1990 [1983]: 60–61). Any “truth” of such matters arises through agreement. Discourse ethics is based on a principle of universalization (U), which holds that “[a]ll affected can accept the consequences and the side effects its general observance can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of everyone’s interests (and these consequences are preferred to those of known alternative possibilities for regulation” (Habermas 1990 [1983]: 65; emphasis in original).

But the trouble with something like U, Habermas realized, is that it is impossible to know abstractly whether any given norm could pass this test, hence the need for another principle, D, for the Discourse Principle. D holds that a norm for action—that is, a decision about what ought to be done—is valid if all those affected by it could accept it in a reasonable discourse. So where U posits the more general claim of universalization, D brings it down to earth by testing whether people would actually agree to it in their discussions with others. In a post-metaphysical era only actual agreements that people are willing to make with each other can provide justification, certainly not abstract appeals to truth or validity.

The upshot of Habermas’s discourse principle is a conception of legitimacy that does not rely on metaphysical or objective truths. What is valid is only what withstands the tribunal of public judgment. This shows how radical democracy really is—and always has been—to those who want truth to be independent of the vagaries of public opinion. This is what makes democracy’s “truths,” which are always contingent and up for revision, so threatening to philosophers like Plato and his heirs who wanted truth to be timeless and constant. The radical side of Habermas’s theory is that it is non-foundational in very deep way. But the rub for Habermas’s position is that it is also hard for it to be cognitivist, even though Habermas wants his theory to be cognitivist. What is the cognition, that is, what is the truth that discourse ethics tries to get a hold of? Is there a truth waiting to be discovered by discourse ethics? Habermas seems to think there is, though not in any straightforward way. It is to be found through a rational, procedural form of deliberation.

First, moral-practical judgments will be based not on subjective opinions, emotions, and opinions but on reasons that participants offer in their discourse (Habermas 1990 [1983]: 120). These reasons have cognitive content that others can accept or deny, unlike statements of preference that have no hold over anyone else. In principle if someone agrees with a reason then that person is compelled to go along with what follows from it. (If I agree with reasons against the death penalty then I ought to agree that the death penalty is wrong.) The upshot is that all who agree with a set of reasons for some moral judgment should share the same moral judgments. Unlike preferences, reasons compel agreement. And to the extent that all agree, then the judgment is universal. Second, the U principle “works like a rule that eliminates as nongeneralizable content all those concrete value orientations with which particular biographies or forms of life are permeated” (Habermas 1990 [1983]: 121). So, reminiscent of Rawls’ original position with its veil of ignorance, any particular contingencies or particularities should be stripped away. They are not only irrelevant to deliberations about normative issues, they also distort these deliberations. The goal is for deliberations to be as impartial as possible. This is the only way people might possibly get hold of any truth of the matter.

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Many poststructuralist theorists and feminist theorists are deeply suspicious of there being any truths waiting to be discovered by rational discourse or otherwise. Moreover, many worry that the focus on rationality, universality, and objectivity in effect sidelines the concerns and perspectives of those on the margins and ends up maintaining systems of domination and exclusion.

Feminist Responses to Discourse Ethics

Of the overlapping worries, first is the worry that the model of the self is too atomistic, shorn of any social roots or attachments. Rawls’ deliberator behind the veil of ignorance is a prime example of this error. As Virginia Held has noted, such a view, going back to Hobbes, presumes that the self emerges as a full-grown adult with no assistance of a mother or community (Held 1993, 2006). Habermas, as noted above, eschews the philosophy of a monological subject in favor of a view of individuation occurring through socialization. Still, his insistence that, when it comes to discourse on normative matters people should set aside their particularities, subjects his theory to this criticism. As care ethicists, communitarians, and some pragmatists have long pointed out, it is our particular solidarities and attachments that both make us who we are and dispose us to look after the welfare of others.

To address these concerns, especially the challenge that Carol Gilligan poses to one of his heroes, Lawrence Kohlberg, Habermas has sharpened his Hegelian distinction between ethics and morality, that is, between Sittlichkeit and Moralität, or between the good and the right (Habermas 1990 [1983]: 175–182). It is true, he grants, that in our actual communities, particularity matters; but when we are trying to ascertain universal moral principles, particularities and solidarity have to be set aside. But this “response” to feminist criticisms only served to sharpen the divide.

Another worry is that Habermas’s discourse ethics valorizes some forms of speech over others, especially in how it came to be used in deliberative democratic theory. In her essay, “Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy,” Iris Marion Young criticizes the ideal of deliberative speech for the way that it valorizes the kinds of speech practiced by those in power and sidelines the modes of speaking engaged by those on the margins, such as greeting, rhetoric, and storytelling. Young’s criticism got a lot of traction, leading many on the left, especially those concerned about multiculturalism and identity, to write off deliberative democratic theory as antithetical to a more multicultural politics. (As noted below, Habermas’ later work addressed Young’s real-world concerns, offering a “de-centered” account of deliberation that she came to champion.)

Some feminist theorists, who have more sympathy to Habermas’s project, argue that there is a conflict between those committed to, on the one side, a critical theory of social change, and on the other, postmodern feminists and other feminists who criticize reason itself (e.g., Benhabib et al. 1995; Meehan 2000). They claim that postmodern philosophers (a) eschew reason altogether and (b) engage in reason to debunk reason. Hence, they argue, critics fall into a “performative contradiction.” This argument reprises a claim that Habermas made repeatedly in his Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, arguing that Derrida and other postmodernists had fallen into this trap. The problem with his criticism and like ones of his followers is that postmodern theorists do not eschew the ability to make claims and offer reasons; rather, they are worried about claims that stretch too far and try to say too much, often at the expense of other voices and concerns. A more accurate claim is that feminist theorists more broadly have questioned the primacy of reason as an attribute for being human. Stretching back to Aristotle, philosophers have made this claim broadly, saying that what distinguishes us from other animals is our ability to reason and speak, and also noting that men seem to be better able than women to reason. The feminist response to this claim has been twofold: (1) give women enough education and they can reason like men do (Wollstonecraft 1792); and/or (2) that the strict delineation between reason and other attributes, such as feeling, is overdrawn and masculinist (Lloyd 1983).

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The most trenchant critics of discourse ethics and deliberative theory are those who follow the agonistic model of radical democracy where the very search for consensus is seen as anti-democratic (e.g., Mouffe 1999). Many feminists who draw on Hannah Arendt’s political theory find this agonistic critique of deliberative theory to be persuasive. But Arendt can also be used to support a deliberative model of politics. In Arendt’s “space of appearance,” it is true that there is debate and disagreement, but there is also a search for deciding together what ought to be done (Lederman 2014).

Conclusion: Deliberation in a Decentralized Public Sphere

Feminist calls for a less idealized and more inclusive politics seem to have made their way into Habermas’s work following his writings on discourse ethics, namely in Between Facts and Norms (1996) where instead of pure rational proceduralism we get an account of how democracy can operate in complex modern societies. Here deliberation occurs throughout society from the informal decentered public spheres of public life to more formal bodies that are able to translate publicly generated public will into law.

Iris Young, whose 1996 article did so much to disparage deliberative theory, found Habermas’ new account to be much richer and more promising (Young 2012). Other feminist theorists also found this decentered approach promising (Jaggar 1998; Mansbridge 2012). Its virtues include the possibility of more diversity and inclusion, the recognition of alternative venues for political action, and the linking up of informal spaces otherwise unrecognized as political. While it would be a stretch to say that Habermas became a feminist, it is no stretch at all to say that feminist engagements with discourse ethics made this theory as inclusive and robust as it is today.