Democratic Autonomy, Political Ethics, and Moral Luck

Democratic Autonomy, Political Ethics, and Moral LuckAuthor(s): Peter BreinerSource: Political Theory, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Nov., 1989), pp. 550-574Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/191396 .

Accessed: 09/05/2014 17:10

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Sage Publications, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Political Theory.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.66 on Fri, 9 May 2014 17:10:24 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=sage

http://www.jstor.org/stable/191396?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


DEMOCRATIC AUTONOMY, POLITICAL ETHICS, AND MORAL LUCK

PETER BREINER State University of New York, Albany

T HIS ARTICLE REPRESENTS AN AITEMPT to vindicate radical democracy from its instrumentalist critics. But it hopes to do so by enlisting the instrumentalist's emphasis on ironic outcomes in political action to the cause of radical democracy. This will entail a substantial revision of one of the standard claims of radical democracy, the claim that to participate in politics in common with others is an intrinsically worthy activity and that it is the intrinsically worthy activity that has priority over all others because only as direct democratic participants do we identify with our distinctly human capacity for rational autonomy. Without abandoning this claim, I shall want to argue that the autonomy afforded by participation goes hand in hand with the intensification of a distinctive aspect of moral conduct that renders the justification of many of our autonomous decisions contingent and fortuitous, namely moral luck. Moral luck refers to the fact that despite our intuitive sense that moral judgments must be applied to actions that we control, which fall under the purview of our autonomy, we regularly judge the conduct of others to be good or bad according to consequences that cannot be predicted with any certainty. Fate and fortune contribute mightily to the justification of our conduct.' With luck, of course, comes irony, and direct democratic politics is intensively subject to the ironies of intention and consequences that come with the exercise of power. Thus, if we democratize political power to small communities of participants in production and locality, we will at the same time intensify the political responsibility for both intended and unintended consequences of our public decisions. This I shall maintain is an inescapable part of the freedom that radical democracy realizes.2

A UTHOR 'S NOTE: I would like to thank William Connolly and an anonymous reviewerfor their very' acute comments on a previous version of this paper. Also, I am much indebted to Ron Jepperson as well as Harvey Goldman, Paul Thomas, Alan Milchman, andJack Gunnellfor their comments.

POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 17 No. 4, November 1989 550-574 i) 1989 Sage Publications, Inc.

550



Breiner / DEMOCRATIC AUTONOMY 551

At the outset of this discussion, I shall avail myself of Weber's argument for a political ethic of responsibility and Rousseau's argument for popular sovereignty. My intent here will be to show precisely how a Rousseauean argument for collective autonomy in spite of itself requires a Weberian argument for a political ethic of consequences, an ethic that takes account of the inseparability of politics from moral luck. I shall maintain this despite Weber's resolute rejection of direct democracy and Rousseau's rather explicit attempts to separate politics from moral luck for the sake of popular sovereignty. I shall then show how recent arguments for radical democracy have accepted Rousseau's arguments without acknowledging his strategies for warding off the influence of fortuitous consequences on political decisions. By avoiding Rousseau's strategies, I shall maintain, these recent democratic arguments render themselves even more in need of a political ethic of responsibility for ironic consequences than was Rousseau; for in these theories there are structural as well as conceptual reasons for adopting such an ethic. I will finally end by suggesting a concept of direct participant democracy that takes moral luck and political irony into account. But first to Weber.

MAX WEBER: DEMOCRACYAND POLITICAL ETHICS

Weber is one of the few modern political theorists to explore the meaning of political ethics - and its attendant ironies - in light of the development of modern politics as a "business." Indeed, he represents one of the most powerful attempts to discredit direct democracy by invoking the ironies of political action that impinge upon political ethics. Weber's political ethics is based on a particular will-based concept of the autonomous person. Against the Kantian notion of a person whose concept of self is identical with the possession of a rational moral will unaffected by the empirical world, Weber develops a notion of the person whose defining feature is a will with no ultimate rational guidance on the choice of ends. Rationality is exercised only in the choice of means. As persons, we are constantly suspended between choosing ultimate values on the basis of inner conviction and taking responsibility for rationally choosing the most effective means of realizing them.3 The intuition that we have a self-and are not merely reacting to inner causality -expresses itself in our willing of values. But we display our reason in understanding the causally effective means of achieving our will. Person- hood and the autonomy that goes with it is most paradoxical indeed, on Weber's account, for our sense of self is found in irrational willing, while our



552 POLITICAL THEORY / NOVEMBER 1989

relation to the world is found only through the reduction of all willing to causal events. Thus-although Weber only alludes to this problem in his methodological writings-the self is constantly threatened with disappear- ance into the chains of causality unleashed by the very means of translating that self into action. What guidance then can be given for such a self in politics?

Weber's answer is that in politics the person, whatever his/her substantive commitments, is confronted with two ideal types of ethics corresponding to the dual features of the self: the ethic of conviction (Gesinnungsethik) and the ethic of responsibility. The "ethic of conviction" is the translation of deontological ethical commitments into political terms. It insists that we need not be responsible for the consequences of an action but only for the "intention" or "conviction" motivating it. If an intrinsically good conviction leads to bad results then it is the world's failure to live up to the conviction, not the actor's failure of practical judgment.4 Acting purely under an ethic of conviction, the agent seeks to live in complete consistency with his/her ultimate values. Actions are the expression of these values. And the goal of all action is to preserve the features of our ultimate value that make commit- ment to it intrinsically worthy. The "Gesinnungsethiker" does not feel obliged to acknowledge the responsibilities that political power imposes upon political actors. Rather he or she is responsible only for keeping a good intention or cause alive, even in the face of inevitable failure.

Weber explicitly denies we can do without convictions and still intelligi- bly pursue politics.! And yet, he insists that an ethic of conviction alone cannot logically be translated into political action, for it forgoes the justification to which any rational political ethic must submit: an account of the necessary means to achieve one's intended end in light of the subsidiary consequences of realizing it.6 Our willed convictions can be justified politically only if they are included within a distinctly political ethic, "the ethic of responsibility." The ethic of (political) responsibility requires the political actor "to give an account of the foreseeable results of [his] actions".7 We may justify our political commitments according to their intrinsic good; however, the prescription for any political action taken in their name will always be guided by consequences.8 And it is the consequences of our political actions for the polity at large or for sectional interests within it that will justify or discredit our political projects. But which foreseeable consequences are relevant to politics and why indeed only "foreseeable" ones? Weber gives both a general and a particular answer to this question.

In general, Weber argues, we can predict that most people will not act according to our highest expectations of them when we mobilize them on




behalf of our political projects. We may assume that most people are capable of collective autonomy, but we should not be surprised if they exhibit merely rage and resentment when politically acting on behalf of this goal. We can in effect be responsibility for the consequences of expecting too much from people. More importantly, political action is paradoxical; that is, in political action there is typically an ironic relation between our political projects (our intentions and convictions) and the consequences of pursuing them: "The final result of political action. . . stands in a completely inadequate and often paradoxical relation to its original meaning."9 Indeed, Weber is arguing, it is precisely the "paradoxes" of political intention and political consequences that determine the "foreseeable" results for which we are responsible. The political actor will be responsible for foreseeing that most political action will have paradoxical outcomes that will significantly affect ourjustifications for our original political projects. But what kind of paradoxes? This leads us to Weber's specific answer.

There are moral paradoxes that derive from the fact that "politics operates with very special means, namely power backed by violence."'0 These paradoxes arise because political means that are all aimed at imposing one's will upon others-violence is merely the limited case for the exercise of power -tend to undermine the translation of such intrinsic goods as gener- osity, truthfulness, love, or domination-free social relations into political action. The conscious pursuit of such ends in politics will most frequently lead to the realization of their opposite." But by the same token, "in numerous instances the attainment of 'goods' ends is bound to the fact that one must be willing to pay the price of using morally dubious means or at least dangerous ones - and facing the possibility or even probability of evil subsidiary consequences."'2 In politics, it is the deviant case that good means can be deployed for the sake of good intentions without the danger of harmful consequences.

These moral paradoxes of politics are framed by paradoxes that I would call paradoxes of fortune and fate. These are not paradoxes of the morality of ends and means - although they surely influence such moral paradoxes -

but of the unintended causes at work in the use of political power for one's goals. Weber stresses the contribution of fate or "impersonal forces" both inner and outer to unintended outcomes, although he is certainly not the first to do so. Weber somberly dismisses those who would assume modern politics could provide the political actor with occasions to test his/her virtu against the paradoxes of fortune."3 Instead, he suggests, the paradoxes of political intentions and ironic outcomes are governed by a kind of sociological fate. This fate is identical with the process by which politics is rationalized into




an ongoing "business" with its own professional expertise, routine, and division of labor.

Indeed, the particular foreseeable consequences, both intended and unintended, for which we are responsible arise from our inescapable locatedness in the modern business of politics, even when we oppose it. To wit, as political actors we are responsible for decisions resulting from the defects of the activity and organization of the business of politics, even if we cannot correct them.'4 And the major defect is that all political initiatives, if they succeed, will dissipate into the routine domination of bureaucratic administration. But in arguing this, Weber is not merely reminding professional political actors of their ethical responsibility for foreseeable outcomes. He is also using his political sociology to criticize the most formidable opponent of the modem business of politics, the radical democratic and socialist projects.

Both the radical democratic and socialist attempts to create collective autonomy under a self-determining society, argues Weber, have not taken into account the foreseeable paradoxes of pursuing this goal. For the struggle for such a goal is caught in the logic of charisma and routine domination. The goal will be fought for through the exertions of the masses, who must be organized by charismatic leaders under a disciplined political machine that "intellectually proletarianizes" its following."5 And if this leadership machine is successful, this mass following will now be organized under the routine "Herrschaft" of "political Philistines and banausic technicians."'6 Even more significantly, the attempts of socialists to reverse the expropriation of the producers from the means of production, and of radical democrats to decen- tralize power both in state and economy are doomed to failure."' For the formation of the modern state is characterized by a political expropriation process that cannot be merely understood as the mirror of capitalist economic rationalization at the level of politics. Instead, we notice that the development of every major social institution in modernity is accompanied by an expropriation of the means of social activity from those agents who pursue that activity. And this expropriation is not driven by the law of value but by the needs of technique and discipline:

Everywhere the same thing: the means of control [Betriebsmittell within the factory, the state administration, the military, and the university institute is, by means of a bureau- cratically sub-divided human apparatus, concentrated in the hands of the one who rules that apparatus. This is in part determined purely technically, by the kind of means of production [Betriebsmittel]: machines, protection, etc.; in part, however, it is determined simply by the greater efficiency of this kind of coordination of human beings: through the development of "discipline," military, administrative, workplace, and organizational discipline. In any case, it is a major error to hold that this separation of the worker from




the organized means [of power] is purely characteristic of the economy and ultimately the private economy. [author's emphasis]18

The political expropriation process that creates modem politics for Weber is one aspect of a general phenomenon: the division of labor of power within every social institution. And this division of labor has a twofold necessity: It is driven by the technical imperatives of pursuing the social activity, be it the imperatives of production, cost accounting, the application of the means of violence, or the procedures of research; but it is also driven by the predictability of social action that modem techniques of discipline are able to elicit from the division of labor. It is, indeed, our reliance on the rational predictability of human behavior that such disciplines create that, according to Weber, makes the expropriation and centralization of power so indispensable to us. Thus, the particular attempt directly to reappropriate the means of power of the state and the economy and to place these means, for example, under the control of local communities or worker's councils-a model with which Weber was acutely acquainted -could only temporarily democratize political power. The attempt to institute such democratic models of power would merely result in the strengthening of this multiple expropriation process, as everyday administration of popular decisions would slip into the hands of trained administrators; aside from this dissipation of democratic power, such models will always be dependent on the predictability and technical efficiency that the dispossession from power in industry, science, military, and administration generates. Viewed in political-ethical terms, then, the radical democrat and socialist will be responsible for discrediting the goal of collective autonomy for generations -all this because of an inadequate political responsibility for the (sociologically) foreseeable consequences. 19

Weber is able to combine conviction with a political ethic of responsibility only by rejecting radical democracy and democratic socialism as responsible political goals. Strong forms of democracy are opposed to a political ethic that takes into account the foreseeable paradoxes of political power to which any political project will be subjected. Only a form of plebiscitary leadership democracy is adequate to the foreseeable paradoxes of political power.20

Now whatever the merits of his ethic of responsibility, Weber's assessment of radical democracy is flawed in significant ways. First, his account of the irreversibility of the political expropriation process rests on an account of the hierarchical division of labor that is only partially correct. What this account overlooks is the fact that the division of labor is a power relation in which the very definition of efficiency is itself relentlessly fought over. There is no objective standard of efficiency that corresponds to a particular formal




division of tasks, but several standards over which those who perform the tasks and those who impose them are in constant conflict. And these standards correspond to different conceptions of property, of need, of relevant social goals. What is at stake, then, in such conflicts is precisely how much and what kind of control is necessary to perform a social task.21

Second, Weber's sociological argument for the necessity of the psychic and intellectual proletarianization of the masses in modem politics is circular. Denying the mass of citizens an opportunity to develop their political capacities, Weber infers they are incapable of exercising them. Perhaps, he might insist such opportunities cannot be created within the modem business of politics. But this claim depends on his assessment of the irreversibility of hierarchical discipline in the division of labor -a claim that we have just found to be questionable.

Third, he misconceives the meaning of direct democracy, because he assumes it must prove its efficiency as a form of domination (Herrschafts- form) rather than as a dynamic expansion of popular sovereignty evolving from the process of participation itself. As merely an administrative form, it could not possibly appear as a valid form of politics.

Fourth and last, his sociological analysis of relevant means, ends, and consequences under rationalized politics is strongly inflected by his concept of personhood, which locates our initial commitments in a will-centered concept of the individual. If this is so, then Weber's sociology of political rationalization supports his political ethics only tautologically. Weber selects the relevant political consequences supporting his ethic of political personhood from a sociology that is already constructed from the vantage point of his concept of the person. This would lead us to suspect that a concept of the person based on the notion that we can achieve autonomy only in making common decisions with others would secrete a different sociological assessment of the relevant consequences of political action from that of Weber. Should our suspicion prove correct, an ethic of political responsibility for consequences might prove to be compatible with the radical democratic model of politics.

But even if Weber is wrong in his political-ethical assessment of radical democracy, he still, I think, is right that political action is uniquely subject to a consequentialist ethic of political responsibility; and our acceptance of this claim will affect our concept of the personal and collective autonomy in significant ways. What Weber is pointing to in his ethic of political responsibility is that political action is uniquely subject to "moral luck." What is moral luck and what is its relation to politics?




MORAL LUCK AND POLITICAL ACTION

Moral luck is the notion that a strong concept of moral autonomy cannot immunize us from the role that personal and external contingencies play in justifying or discrediting our conduct. It thus includes in our assessment of an action the contribution of fate or chance to its outcome. To be sure, our concepts of autonomy both personal and collective depend on an intuition that we have a capacity to will actions for ourselves by means of our own reason and that this capacity is not an incidental feature of our agency. Indeed, it is an essential feature of our concept of human dignity and worth. But without denying this, the concept of moral luck points to the radical incom- pleteness of such conceptions. It points to the fact that if we apply moral assessment only to those actions or features of an action that are under our control, we will lose most of the moral assessments we commonly make, because most of them are applied to what we do, not merely to what is under our control.22 Therefore, in addition to those features of our conduct that directly flow from our will, we must include those features that we do not control but contribute to the success or failure of our actions: the situation in which we act, our attributes of character, prior influences on our behavior, and above all the unintended consequences of our actions.

Moral luck will therefore compel us to reinterpret the meaning of personal identity and responsibility. A full concept of free agency will demand that we take responsibility for the unintentional aspects of our actions -or even the aspects that we foreseeably cannot intend.23 Detachment from these features entails a loss of identity and not its maintenance, because it leaves us with a disembodied will detached from the world in which we act and take responsibility. And yet, our reliance on the world to gain identity as agents is paradoxical. For our identification with the unintentional causes to which we have contributed, or the feelings and capacities that are beyond the control of our will, or the circumstances in which we act but do not create, threatens to dissolve the self into events beyond its control. Thus, moral luck means we will have to take responsibility for a self we have brought about through our actions, yet one we have difficulties in identifying with: The dilemma is that we must incur the risk of identifying the fortuitous outcomes of our actions as our own or face detachment from the world.

This dilemma will have a crucial implication for the way in which we justify our actions. For whatever our practical reason dictates we ought do, be it according to the Kantian universalization principle or a Rousseauean general will, the justification of our actions will be retrospective. It will depend on antecedent circumstances outside the control of our will.24



558 POLITICAL THEORY! NOVEMBER 1989

For politics, this will mean that our initial prospective justifications for political action in terms of the projects we are trying to achieve will prove inadequate: Despite strong reasons for undertaking a political project, justification will be retrospective. We find out whether we have vindicated our political intentions or projects only after the relevant consequences have occurred. Only then can we say that our initial reasons for deploying power in a certain way with a cost to other values is correct and that our project is what we claimed it was, say the realization of equality, the overcoming of domination, the concrete realization of the common good.

If our justifications for political action tend to be retrospective descrip- tions, then politics imposes a far more demanding concept of responsibility for self than a theory of will-centered autonomy. For as political actors we incur praise and blame for a self that events beyond our control - the extemal historical situation, the inner qualities of character, and unforeseen circumstances - impose upon us. For power unleashes effects that we cannot often foresee. We cannot in politics know all the causes at work on the political means we deploy to reach our goals. We cannot take into account the reaction of all other political actors to our policy. And most important, power affects and alters the very context in which our political actions are interpreted, often lending our actions a meaning quite different from the one that motivates our action in the first place. The consequences of deploying the means of power define what we actually did and who we are for others. And although we cannot often subjectively identify with the self that political action imposes upon us, we are responsible for that self nonetheless.

This problem of responsibility for self has particularly dogged theories of direct democratic participation, because the claim to equalize power through participation has always rested on the communitarian claim that only by making decisions in common do we identify with the part of our self that is essentially human. But this has meant putting democratic participation beyond luck. The emblematic theorist of this move is Rousseau.

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEA U: RADICAL REPUBLICANISM BEYOND LUCK

Rousseau's theory rests on seducing calculating self-interested individuals in liberal society into a bargain, one in which they will lose their individual interest by submitting themselves to a general will that they create and in which they become voting members. Through the creation of a political association based on a general will, Rousseau argues, we come to recover




our human essence as beings capable of legislating for ourselves and taking moral responsibility for our conduct. And from this new vantage point we come to see the instrumental calculating self that made the original bargain as having a thoroughly misconceived concept of its interest. For our interest is now in achieving moral freedom under a general will.

But why can the general will realize our essence in a way that a contract merely guaranteeing our right to maximize our utility does not? The reason for this, according to Rousseau, is that the structure of the general will as the common will of a voting assembly enables each individual member simul- taneously to legislate moral laws to himself/herself, as he/she is legislating to all members. And this is possible because under the political body created by this contract, the political sovereign is related to the state as an active moral will is related to the passive body -that is, it gives it general commands; and by the same token, the citizens participating in the sovereign are identical with the subjects who submit to the laws of the state.25 They, too, gain an identity between their moral will, which commands, and the body, which obeys. But this identity between individual moral will and body can only be maintained if the citizen remains identical with the subject; and this in turn depends on an identity between sovereign and the state. Should the legislative sovereign - the general will - be separated from the subjects who obey the laws, moral freedom or "autonomy," the very purpose of this republic, will be destroyed: "The essence of the political body lies in the union of freedom and obedience so that the words 'subject' and 'sovereign' are identical correlatives, the meaning of which is brought together in the single word 'citizen.""

It is therefore the business of the members of the sovereign to pass laws that at once express and maintain moral autonomy -that is, maintain the identity between citizen and sovereign. And this is accomplished only if the citizens are steadily at work asking what the general will (or the common good) demands, debating proposed answers to this question, expressing these answers in laws, and voting to accept or reject these laws on the basis of a majority vote.27 Rousseau points out that as a practical matter the size of majority required for any law can be varied according to the gravity of the decision on the one hand, and the need for a quick decision on the other.28 What is crucial in public deliberation is to pose the question correctly. If the question for debate is posed as to what the majority prefers - that is, whether the majority approves the law or rejects it - then public decision will be reduced to the aggregated private interest of citizens, and the decision taken will not be an expression of moral autonomy. Only if the debate consists of an interrogation into which law corresponds to the general will, into whether




this proposal is "advantageous to the state," will the decision taken be an expression of moral autonomy, and hence the right one.29

Rousseau thinks such a dialogic process of deliberation, of questioning the meaning of the general will in public, will have the consequence of leading to laws beneficial to the state as a whole. However, he regards this as a by-product of the internal goods that are coextensive with civic participation. The central good of participation does not consist in the fact that beneficial laws result from it-after all, finding laws beneficial to each individual in a state might be accomplished equally well by a technically adept aristocracy or monarch -but rather that the citizens themselves legislate general laws for the whole community. For in this way citizens become not just autonomous, that is, self-legislating, but moral. And not just moral but morally responsible. They develop duties to one another freely incurred; they regulate their desires by their reason - here a practical reasoning about what constitutes the common good; they develop a sense of egalitarian justice over inegalitarian private interest; above all, they develop a principle of right for all public matters.0 Once again, on Rousseau's argument, the good that accrues to citizens through participation in the general will is internal and transformative, not private and consequentialist.3" The "utility" of this concept of political right consists in the education of citizens to identify the act of legislating the general will with the regulation of their own individual conduct according to a moral will.

Indeed, as Rousseau conceives the general will, we will be protected from all significant ironies and paradoxes of political action that expose the justifications of our public decisions under an impartial common will to moral risk. Public decisions under the general will should not rely on the luck of who we are, of prior influences, of unforeseen consequences, of local circumstances for their ultimate justification. If we ask the question, What will conduce to the common good?, we will be immunized from moral luck.

And yet, Rousseau is acutely aware that the preservation of moral autonomy under the general will is extremely fragile, both as a foundation for right and as the basis for utility. And so he adopts several strategies to strengthen the popular sovereign against intrusion by the paradoxical consequences of fortune and fate. I shall discuss two of them briefly. The first strategy Rousseau adopts is to distinguish the general will from the will of all. The general will is always a simple statement about what counts as the public good at this moment. It is never mistaken, he insists, if we assume that in every public discussion of the sovereign about the general will there is an answer that corresponds to the public good but that we as citizens do not always discern it.32 It cannot be undermined by the consequences of imposing




the general laws that express it because it is a logical attribute, not a by-product of our autonomy. The will of all, by contrast, is the aggregation of all the individual preferences of the members of a polity. As has been shown repeatedly, first by Rousseau's own contemporaries and more recently by Kenneth Arrow, the aggregation of individual preference orderings will not translate into a social preference ordering that all individuals would accept as theirs. Numerous unintended paradoxes ensue from this, perhaps the most important being that pure majority voting based on the private interest of each voter will fail to produce a public interest. It is in light of this dilemma that Rousseau insists that if we rely on the will of all, agreement on public good will consist only of what is left over when all the individual preference have canceled each other out: It will consist of those matters for which no one has a private preference. All unintended fortuitous outcomes of public decisions - especially those in which our individual interest fails to be be registered in public decisions-inhere for Rousseau in majority decisions expressing the will of all. And these paradoxes are overcome as soon as we subscribe to the general will.

A second strategy focuses on the implementation of the general will. Here, Rousseau separates the general will of the sovereign from the government. The govemment is responsible for translating the general laws of the sovereign into a particular will that takes into account the local circumstances, the particular interests affected, and the problems of effectively applying the law to all citizens equally.33 Now the sovereign assembly must elect the magistrates of the govemment and exercise sufficient power over it to prevent it from becoming detached from the general will and aiming purely at the satisfaction of private interests - this it can do by assembling frequently, and, if need be, by sacrificing the government and constituting a new one.34 However, there is a tendency of government to develop a "corporate will" of its own in the very process of effectively adapting general laws to particular circumstances. And if this will separates from the sovereign, citizens will no longer exercise autonomy: The body will no longer be subject to the will; the subject of the laws will no longer be identical to the citizen who makes them. And the members of the political association will begin "to live outside of themselves."35 If, however, the supremacy of the popular sovereign over the government can be maintained, the government can protect the public deliberations of the general will from the intrusion of private interests with its numerous attendant paradoxes. It will also protect the popular sovereign from the uncontrollable and fortuitous effects of translating laws into practice. And above all, its magistrates can be held responsible for all harmful effects - both preventable and unpreventable - of translating the general will




into a particular will. In other words, government can be made responsible for moral luck, for the paradoxes of deploying power, leaving the general will a pure expression of public good. Thus, the people, the morally autonomous citizens of the state, become responsible only for the decisions that they control. And despite their freedom to deliberate upon and choose general laws, fortune will play no role in the justification of their public decisions. The members maintain continuity of communal self against the threats of private interest and the contingencies of exercising effective political power.

It would seem, then, that the citizens of Rousseau's popular sovereign do not need Weber's political ethic of consequences. Such an ethic would most likely only be needed by the elected magistrates of the government. However, this neat separation between citizen and magistrate is not as unproblematic as Rousseau makes it appear. For under this arrangement, the citizens of the popular sovereign are not merely protected but also isolated from the subsidiary consequences of their decisions. And without an ethic of responsibility for external consequences to supplement an ethic of the common good, they may pay a very high price indeed for their splendid isolation. To be sure, they experience the internal consequences of political decisions -

the political education to autonomous choice, to generalizing interests, to communal obligation-but they do not directly experience the particular external effects of translating their decisions into practice. The danger here is that by taking responsibility only for the decisions under their control, only for that part of a policy informed by the general will, they will discover the external consequences of their decisions only with the onset of breakdown or at least crises. For unseen effects may erode the relation between citizen and subject, between moral will and body, and once this erosion is complete the citizen will no longer possess the autonomy to reverse it. If we accept Rousseau's argument, then, we are led to the ironic conclusion that a political association based on popular sovereignty can preserve the moral autonomy of its citizens as legislators and subjects of general laws -their self-identity as human beings - only by denying them an education to the external consequences of their decisions. (This is underscored by Rousseau's sugges- tion that citizens should only be allowed to meet with one another in the assembly to avoid the emergence of private factions.36) The alternative is that they will communally experience the discontinuity of self that typically accompanies the identification of what we did with the features of our actions beyond our control. And then, indeed, democratic self-legislating autonomy will need an ethic of moral luck.




THE DEFENSE OF STRONG DEMOCRACY

Surprisingly, many recent theorists of participatory democracy have ignored this problem as well. Indeed, although they have largely adopted Rousseau's argument that participation can be made relatively immune from moral risk, they have often ignored his strategies of ensuring such immunity. Consequently, they have opened themselves to elitist critics of various kinds who argue that they have an insufficient account of the ironies of political action -ironies, as we have seen, for which Rousseau has provided some answers. This has left no room to argue for participatory democracy as both an enlargement of moral autonomy and as a deepening of responsibility for external and often paradoxical public consequences of decisions, bad or good. This neglect has given recent radical democratic arguments their distinctive shape - at once emphasizing the educative effects of self-legislation, yet filling the content of that legislation with what Rousseau would call the corporate or particular will.

Most recent theorists of radical or participatory democracy essentially follow Rousseau in their justifications for popular sovereignty. Like Rous- seau, they maintain we need moral autonomy to be self-respecting human beings and live self-respecting human lives. Yet moral autonomy, they argue, can only be realized through direct participation of equal citizens in decisions affecting the whole community. We can only become self-legislating when we have the resources to do so; and only by decentralizing the means of decision to small units in which we directly participate will we put these means into our hands.37 More important, we need some standard of right to act in a morally autonomous way; and for an egalitarian community, this standard can only be provided by a concept of common good that we at once create and impose on ourselves. If we all are assumed to be capable of autonomy, there is no justification for a differential good relative to moral capacity. Finally, the act of participation is not simply a means to moral autonomy, it is a means that is itself the emergence of the end. We gain the capacity for self-legislation by continually participating in it. Thus, the goods of participatory democracy emerge out of the process of participation itself. No instrumental justification for participation will do. Thus, according to a recent definition, "strong democracy" is "politics in the participatory mode where conflict is resolved in the absence of independent grounds . . . through the participatory process of ongoing, proximate self-legislation and the creation of a political community capable of transforming dependent private individuals into free citizens and partial private interests into public good."38




On this definition of democracy, not even agreement on the common good is assumed; rather it emerges out of public discussion about what we want to legislate to the community at large. Thus, in contrast to Rousseau, no fundamental act of precommitment to the general will is necessary to prevent the dissolution of participatory politics into private interest.39 More than even Rousseau, present-day participatory democrats view the activity of politics as not just deciding in common but speaking in common. Speech under radical democracy is not about private interests but about common matters. All participants must have the opportunity to speak, for it is in this activity that we learn to reason about public matters and translate our reasonings into action. One might even say, with Hannah Arendt, that the main activity of citizens participating directly in the public is public speech.' It is this activity of proposing and debating in which we discover the interests we have in common. It is also through speech that we exercise power in radical democracy.

But this does not mean that anything may be said. There is an internal standard that governs all deliberations: All arguments must be framed not in terms of what I or we want, what I or we prefer, but in terms of what would be good for the community as whole.4" The most persuasive argument would then be the one that would show which proposal would most benefit the community. And this in turn entails a principle of equality according to which all decisions should benefit and burden all citizens equally.42 To propose a policy advantageous to some sectional interest would be inappropriate for public discussion.

Yet, to realize this standard of public decision making in practice, participatory democrats have had to confront Weber's multiple expropriation process. This has meant adapting Rousseau's argument for popular sovereignty under the general will for the purpose of democratizing those areas of society that Rousseau viewed as distinctly characterized by a corporate will translating itself into a particular will-the contexts that are particularly prone to ironic outcomes. To be specific, most radical democrats have sought to introduce democracy into local administration and the workplace. The upshot of this has been that most recent radical democratic theories advance a model of participatory politics that has a paradoxical relation between its ends and its means structured into its institutional form - and this aside from the paradoxes of political action characteristic of all direct democratic political action. This has meant that the content of the general will in such contexts as worker's control over production or local democracy consists of decisions beneficial to the corporate will or the particular interests of the institution. Thus, the intrinsic good of legislating the common will in the




workplace or the locality is in constant tension with debate over the details of self-administration and implementation, and this is so even if the issue is, for example, the investment policy of the firm or the maintenance of the integrity of the locality. Under the putative general will, debate fluctuates between sustaining the corporate will of the city or firm and satisfying the particular interests of its members.43

The response of radical democratic theory to this problem has been to follow the lead of de Tocqueville and recast it into an argument favoring participatory democracy." Two arguments have been made. First, it is argued that direct participation in locality and in industry provides citizens with both the social preconditions and the political capacities to make judgments on the national level. In industry, Carole Pateman points out, participation in such matters as work coordination, selecting managers, and deciding on investment policy not only creates a form of substantive equality for the worker, but also develops a feeling of political efficacy and political skill that carries over to judgments on the national level. For by exercising power in the plant with others, the individual worker is able to generalize from the experience of exercising authority in the plant to the exercise of authority in governmental structures.45

This leads directly to the second argument and this one is crucial, for it is argued that the consequences of decision making at the level of the workplace and in local communities tend to reinforce the individual's capacity for autonomy, that is, his or her capacity to legislate general ends for him/herself. In tum, to insist that such participation must also lead to efficiency of (productive) output is to fail to understand the fundamental justification for democratic participation: namely, that it is an education to human autonomy. Thus, Cohen and Rogers argue that a "principle of democratic legitimacy" can

freely acknowledge that as people shift among different types of work and spend time debating the problems facing a particular workplace and the relationship between that workplace and the democratic order, there may in fact be some loss of potential output (even if total output were growing). If there were such a loss, by conventional criteria, workplace democracy could be regarded as "inefficient," but that is because those criteria apply only to losses or gains in material output, and not to losses or gains in human autonomy.46

And Pateman argues that

the justification for the democratic system in the participatory theory of democracy rests primarily on the human results that accrue from the participatory process. One might characterize the participatory model as one where maximum input (participation) is




required and where output includes not just policies (decisions) but also the development of social and political capacities, so that there is "feedback" from output to input.47

And the output consists of the continuous development of "political efficacy," "political competence," and political responsibility.48

Now such arguments do not deny that the justification of autonomous decisions taken by direct democratic forms in the workplace or locality are dependent on their consequences; but they assume that the fundamental standard by which to judge democratic consequences is the reinforcement of the capacities for self-legislating freedom itself. And this rests on a further assumption that is fundamental to all recent participatory theory: That a properly organized participatory democratic order, one that provides sufficient scope for deliberation and decision making, can contain the consequences of democratic decisions so that they will foster the transformation of the participants into morally autonomous agents.

I would like to suggest that this justification for participatory democracy under Weberian conditions is persuasive in its own terms but significantly incomplete. And it is incomplete in several senses. First, it defines the relevant consequences of direct participation too narrowly, including only those that directly reinforce the transformation of the participant's capacities for legislating common ends to him/herself. Thus, the participant is not responsible for reconciling the tension between the more instrumental particular effects of decisions -the by-products of implementation of a policy or technique -with the more developmental ones. It is simply assumed one can always bring instrumental consequences into line with developmental ones - or, in the worst case, that one can safely sacrifice the latter to the former. Second, it assumes that as we become more skilled at making political decisions at the local plant or community level -for example, by equalizing benefits or burdens while maintaining efficiency -we automati- cally become more capable of achieving a moral autonomy that has the common good as its standard. There may very well be a paradoxical relation here, one in which we discover that we become skilled in promoting the corporate will of our community or plant only at the expense of the common good of the political society. Or, alternatively, it may turn out that we can only be effective in promoting the common good as a guide to our democratic choices if we inhibit our skill at local politics. In this case, a simple inclination toward finding the common good is necessary rather than political sophistication. Third and most important, it could very well be that the educative effects of direct political participation, especially for the realization of autonomy, cannot be attained as a deliberate goal of politics. Given the ways that political participation enhances the contingency of political outcomes,




such radical democratic goals as autonomy, community, and development of capacities for practical judgment may tum out to be by-products of common decision making rather than explicit goals. And the more we make them the explicit object of political decisions, the more their realization eludes us.49

In making this last point, I am not denying that direct local participation educates our capacity for positing public ends and legislating them to ourselves. What I am saying is that whether we achieve these goods in democratic politics is often dependent on our not intending them as objects of political deliberation and decision. I am also saying that this irony is particularly structured into the contexts in which participatory democracy seeks to reappropriate the means of power. In brief, without Rousseau's strategies of containment, and perhaps even with them, the practice of democratic autonomy inspired by him requires a political ethic of moral luck, a political ethic of responsibility for political paradoxes.

RADICAL DEMOCRACY, FREEDOMAS PARTICIPATION IN MORAL RISK

What then does direct participant democracy look like from the vantage point of a political ethics of moral luck? In a sense, it does not change so much as we notice certain neglected features about it. It is still true that we can only realize the intrinsic good of autonomy if we bring the political means that once belonged to disciplinary regimes and formal chains of command under the power of directly democratic institutions. The good realized through participation in deciding both particular problems of administration and general policy is still our distinctive capacity to collectively prescribe ends that we obey, and to do so on the basis of our reasoned deliberations. But we must now recognize that it will be inadequate to argue, as do Rousseau and present-day theorists of participatory democracy, that participation under a self-created general will entails that we are primarily responsible for those political decisions that are under our control.

For both sociological reasons and reasons intrinsic to the process of participation itself, participatory citizens are responsible for the foreseeable and unforeseen consequences of the power they exercise. Indeed, the very process of participation renders them intensively responsible for such consequences, for radical democratic decisions depend on public discussion rather than on a purely impartial standard of the common good. And the freedom of such discussions consists precisely in our inability to predict their outcome, that is, to predict what decision will finally be taken and whether




it in fact will correspond to the common good.50 Moreover, the power exercised in making democratic decisions - a power that is exercised in the process of discussion and deliberation itself-is only efficacious because decisions that were previously routine have now become contingent. Radical democracy reverses Weber's expropriation process only at the price of predictability - a price I believe to be worth paying; but the democratic side of this bargain entails that luck will play an increased role in whether decisions happen to be good ones or not. And yet even in arguing for a strong connection between moral luck and the democratic autonomy of participatory political associations, we can still "foresee" certain determinate ironies, much as Weber could for his vocational political actor.

Let me suggest a few of the kinds of political irony to which radical democracy might regularly be subjected. The first we might call ironies of control. This set of ironies arises from the tension between the need for regular implementation of policies and the need to prevent autonomy from being eroded through the bureaucratic expropriation of political means. Any decision taken by a participatory community at the workplace or at the level of local administration will presumably always have at least two goals corresponding to the inextricable connection of autonomy to outcomes we contribute to but do not control. On the one hand, it will seek to preserve the goods that arise from the process of collective decision making - autonomy, solidarity, and egalitarian justice in particular. On the other, it will seek to have policies imposed with reliability and reasonable coordination. The problem is that the effects of coordination will tend to erode the sphere of decisions we leave open to collective deliberation. And so the goal of all public decisions will be to uncover means of carrying out decisions that will increase democratic control rather than diminish it.5' But we cannot predict with certainty whether democratic decisions will have this outcome because increased democracy would introduce increased scope for a kind of deliberation that is only intelligible if it is not engineered. Thus, time and again democratic decisions within participant democracies will consist of a gamble that the control that is necessary for execution will provide for the needs of their members without eroding communal autonomy. Indeed, one might view radical democratic decision making as necessary precisely because it probes the different causal effects of control and their meaning for autonomy. Such "inquiry" has not usually been possible in liberal capitalist society.

A second set of ironies we might call ironies of equity. These ironies concern the fact that redistributions for the sake of equality most frequently take away from some for the benefit of others even if general equality is achieved. And while this is indeed an outgrowth of substantive equality - that




is, an equality that seeks to create the preconditions for autonomy-the participants will oftentimes have to deny themselves the nondemocratic Aristotelian claim of unequal distribution for unequal contribution in favor of promoting numerous equalities so that all will share the developmental possibilities of participation.

A third variety of ironies we may call ironies of coercion. Radical democracy gambles that it can drive violence out of history and with it the state as a monopoly of legitimate violence. And yet if the previous two ironies will always persist, the need to apply coercion may persist as well, although now under truly democratic control. In particular, coercion may be necessary in resisting the tendency within each sphere of activity toward the expropriation of the means of power that attends control and coordination. It may also be necessary to reestablish equity when unforeseen outcomes of democratic decisions strengthen the power or privileges of certain sectional interests at the expense of the polity.

A fourth set we may call ironies of political invention. This is perhaps the most nebulous of the ironies of radical democracy, for these political ironies result from the unpredictable political inventiveness that may be released with the political capacities that radical democracy may mobilize. Participant democracies may discover solutions to public problems that surpass normal moral terms of civic virtue or common good or just distribution, and yet, these will still be seen as expressions of a general will that democratic citizens impose upon themselves. After all, social and political invention may very well be a result of simplifying political virtue. Thus, Rousseau's attack on the corrupting effect of social sophistication on the political judgment of citizens under the general will may be a strategy of releasing political ingenuity rather than repressing it."2

A final set of ironies we might call ironies of resistance. This set of ironies may be the most important of all. Radical democracy may never be a settled institutional form but very likely will always exist within a "state" as an institution that coordinates social powers over a territorial space."3 Such coordination always works against the will to legislate public decisions through local units. Hence a participant democratic political association in workplace and in community will usually be making decisions in resistance to the claims of the state, to say nothing of the claims of the institutions in which it is locally realized, to monopolize the means of power. Thus, some of the decisions it will make will be decisions on how most effectively to preserve its power to legislate for itself against the constant tendency for the state to expropriate political means for itself. Indeed, it may be here where the argument becomes especially relevant that the internal ends of autonomy,



570 POLITICAL THEORY/ NOVEMBER 1989

the cultivation of the common good, self-respect as an equal member of a community, and the cultivation of the public judgment are not goals we can achieve by directly aiming at them. For these goods may only emerge as by-products of seeking to preserve and expand the powers of radical democratic forms of politics. In other words, the very goods of radical democracy may in fact be only achievable as ironic effects of trying to act as effectively as possible in making specific instrumental decisions about the preservation of local power against the coordinating claims of the state. This may be the final and perhaps most important irony connecting radical democratic politics to a political ethic of moral luck.

These ironies leave us with still one nagging question. How far does the responsibility of citizens extend in participatory associations, because they surely cannot be responsible for each and every outcome of their decisions however remote or unforeseen? To answer this question adequately would require a separate inquiry but a few tentative remarks would be in order. Clearly, citizens of participatory associations would be responsible for the injuries to the common good of society, solidarity, and substantive equality brought about by self-aggrandizing corporate decisions, even if this emerged out of an attempt to bring equity to the workplace or locality. They would also be responsible for the longer range outcomes of decisions seeking to ensure substantive equality in respect, in distribution of social and political resources, and in sharing of benefits and burdens -this would be especially the case if such decisions were to discourage necessary contributions to the common good. Furthermore, if many of the goods of participation do indeed emerge out of a tension between participatory associations and the claims of the state, a certain instrumental deployment of power will be necessary that may very well violate the dignity that all citizens deserve. Thus, participant citizens will be responsible for the by-products of deploying coercive means to maintain their autonomy especially if the by-product is a mixed outcome, the preservation of the will of the political association and a loss of social solidarity. As for leaders, obviously democratically chosen leaders would have to take greater responsibility than participating citizens for consequences of the kind just mentioned. But in a true participant democracy, it is difficult for citizens to cast full blame on an individual leader as they themselves have directly chosen him/her willfully and after some deliberation delegated to him/her responsibility for the paradoxes of political action. Unlike Weber's model, in which the professional politician takes full responsibility for foreseeable ironic outcomes because the mass is deemed incapable of willing political ends and taking responsibility for their realization, the participant democratic model must assume that responsibility between dem-




ocratic citizens and leaders is shared. Obviously, there are numerous tensions here that we cannot resolve abstractly.

CONCLUSION

Is this notion of democratic autonomy worth achieving? It is, I think, if democratic autonomy as an intrinsically worthy activity is still worth attain- ing, because to link the intrinsic concept of democracy to one that includes political irony does not discredit the former so much as provide a more adequate account of the conditions for its attainment. To be sure, when we connect the freedom of democratic self-legislation to political irony we face a far more difficult and demanding freedom than radical democrats have typically argued for. To deliberate and choose public policies in common becomes not just the realization of autonomy and community but also a necessary education to ambiguity of outcome and constant political struggle against routinized domination. This may, however, be the only public freedom available to those who hope to reverse the Weberian political expropriation process and recover democratic autonomy. One last irony: Even if I am correct on this point, it may still be true that the democratic freedom to participate in moral risk with others can only be realized if we pursue a model of democracy that promises to extirpate such risk from politics once and for all. After all, without Rousseau's justification for moral autonomy under the general will, we may find neither a motivation nor an intelligible justification for pursuing strong democracy at all. It is this double irony that draws us continually back to Rousseau's model for guidance on the meaning of radical democracy despite the sobering power of Weber's consequentialist ethic of political responsibility.

NOTES

1. I draw this term from Bernard William's "Moral Luck" in Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.) 1 also have profited greatly from the response to this essay of Thomas Nagel also called "Moral Luck" in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

2. This problem is addressed in a somewhat different way than it is here by William Connolly, Politics and Ambiguity (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). Connolly seeks to secure a space for ambiguity in democratic politics so as to prevent democratic political practice from reproducing various discourses of control in the name of autonomy and transpar-




ency. For Connolly, the attempt to realize an autonomous self through democratic participation incurs the risk of creating disciplines that tend to normalize all difference. Without denying this may be a fundamental danger of not just liberal but also direct democratic theories of politics, I shall argue here that truly direct forms of democracy are unavoidably tied to ambiguity precisely because they enhance rather than diminish contingency in political life. This contingency is a crucial part of the freedom they claim to realize.

3. Max Weber, GesammelteAufsatze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1975), 132, 226. Hereafter called GAW. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

4. Max Weber, Gesammelte politische Schriften (Tiuubingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1972), 552. Hereafter called GPS. English translation of "Politics as a Vocation" in Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber (Oxford University Press, 1946), 121. Hereafter called GM. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

5. GPS, 547. 6. GPS, 553. 7. GPS, 552, GM, 120. GAW, 505, English translation, The Methodology of the

Social Sciences, trans. and ed. by Edward Shils and Henry Finch (New York: The Free Press, 1949), 16.

8. See Dennis Thompson, Political Ethics and Public Office (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 5-6.

9. GPS, 547. 10. GPS, 550, GM, 119. 11. GPS, 554, GM, 123. 12. GPS, 552, GM, 121. 13. GPS, 558-559. 14. GPS, 524. See Thompson, Political Ethics and Public Office, 5-6, 64. 15. GPS, 544, GM, 113. 16. GPS, 557, GM, 125. 17. GPS, 510-511. 18. Max Weber, "Der Sozialismus," MWG, I/15, (Tuibingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck],

1984), 608-609. GPS, 510-511, GM, 82; GPS, 511, 512-513, 518, GM, 83, 84, 89, 295. Asimilar argument is made in Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1979), 135-169.

19. GPS, 558. 20. GPS, 532-533, 536-537, 394-395. 21. This critique is developed in Dietrich Reuschemeyer, Power and the Division of Labor

(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), 36-53. 22. Nagel, "Moral Luck," 26. 23. Williams, "Moral Luck," 29. 24. Nagel, "Moral Luck," 33-35. 25. Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. by Maurice Cranston

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 61-62. 26. Rousseau, The Social Contract, 138. Rousseau's point here is that as long as we remain

self-legislating citizens we avoid submission to events beyond our control within and outside of us.

27. Rousseau, The Social Contract, 149. 28. Rousseau, The Social Contract, 154. 29. Rousseau, The Social Contract, 151, 154.



Breiner I DEMOCRATIC AUTONOMY 573

30. Rousseau, The Social Contract, 64-65. 31. Carole Pateman, The Problem of Political Obligation (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1985) 154, 156. 32. Rousseau, The Social Contract, 72, 150-15 1. 33. Rousseau, The Social Contract, 103. 34. Rousseau, The Social Contract, 106. 35. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, trans. by Roger Masters and

Judith Masters (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1964) 179. 36. Rousseau, The Social Contract, 73. 37. For a recent debate over the meaning of political equality in decentralized forms of direct

democracy, see Philip Green and Robert Dahl, "What is Political Equality," Dissent (Summer, 1979), 351-368.

38. Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 132.

39. Pateman, The Problem of Political Obligation, 154, stands out for recognizing that political obligation in modern participatory association depends on the creation of a general will through an explicit act of promising.

40. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 25-27, 50-52.

4 1. Barber, Strong Democracy, 200-201. 42. Pateman, The Problem of Political Obligation, 155-156, 187. 43. See Barber, Strong Democracy, 128, 135. Also see Jane Mansbridge, BeyondAdversary

Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 44. See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. by George Lawrence (New

York: Doubleday, 1969), 511. "It is difficult to force a man out of himself and take an interest in affairs of the whole state, for he has little understanding of the way in which the fate of the state can influence his own lot. But if it is a question of taking a road past his property, he sees at once that this small public matter has a bearing on his greatest private interests and there is no need to point out to him the close connection between his private project and the general interest." The best recent version of this argument is still Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 24-25, 50.

45. Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory, 43, 47, 50. 46. Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers, On Democracy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 164. 47. Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory, 43. 48. Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory, 46. 49. See Jon Elster, Sour Grapes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 91-100.

Elster argues that the goods of democratic participation, such as dignity, political education, and solidarity, cannot be achieved as intentional goals but only emerge as by-products of decision making to solve concrete instrumental political problems. Although I agree that this is frequently the case, what such an argument overlooks is the reverse irony: That often the pursuit of ideals of dignity, political autonomy, and solidarity, may have the unintended instrumental result of capturing a space where democratic activity governed by the previous irony can take place.

50. This has been emphasized by Arendt, The Human Condition, 232-236. 51. For an attempt to view democratic decisions in this "more or less" way, see Frank

Cunningham, Democratic Theory and Socialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 25-35.

52. Rousseau, The Social Contract, 149-150. 53. 1 derive this notion of the state from Michael Mann, "The Autonomous Powers of the

State," States, War and Capitalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 17, 29.



574 POLITICAL THEORY/ NOVEMBER 1989

Peter Breiner is visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at the State University of New York at Albany. He is presently completing a book on democracy and political irony in Max Weber's Political Theory.



Documents

Democratic Autonomy, Political Ethics, and Moral Luck