STRONG DEMOCRACY Participatory Politics for a New Age BENJAMIN R. BARBER ~ Twentieth Anniversary Edition With a New Preface ~ UNrvesrry oF CALIPORNTA PRESS Brrketry Los ‘ANGELES LONDONChapter Six = Strong Democracy: ze _ » Politics as a Way of Living, Democracy is not an alteriative to. other {ohn Dewey) ‘We hae in mind men whose state of vr tue doesnot rise above that of ordinary people. tho seek notin ideally per= <8 fect constitution, but first tay of ooo Hing. 2 (histo) Zens who are united less by homogenéous interests. than by civic ‘education and who are made capable of common purpose and mu- tual action by virtue of t ie attitudes and participatory insti- “ions rather than their altruism or their good nature. Strong de~ mocracy is consonant with—indeed it depends upon—the politics } of conflict, the socidlogy of plusalism, and the separation of private -and public realms of action. It is no! = the size or the technology of modern ded neither to antiquarian republicanism nor to face-to-face paro- ‘masquerades as democracy i evant alternative to what _ dispositions.8 ‘The Argument for Citizenship Strong democracy has a good deal in common with the classical - democratic theory of the ancient Greek polis, but it is in no. sense identical with that theory. Italso shares much with its cousin liberal democracy, and in practical terms itis sometimes complementary to rather than a radical alternative to the liberal argument. Yet it is dis- tinctive in a number of crucial ways and is a powerful foil for Amer- ican democratic practice. It is a much leds total, less unitary theory of publ advocates of ancient republicanism might wish, but plete and positive than contemporary liberalism. Madisonian wariness about actual human nature into a more hope- and nourished by classical theories of community, civic education; and participation, ‘The theory of strong democra in the ancient sense of a “way of the still more extravagant claim that politics isthe way.of life. It has no share in the republican nostalgia of such'commentators as Han- nah Arendt or Leo Strauss. Modem men and women know too well the dangers of a unitary politics that lays cli the human soul and affects to express man’s “higher nature.” “How small of all that ‘human hearts endure / That part cure,” wrote Samuel Johnson, in what should be the epigraph of every tract urging greater democracy. ‘Yet while recognizing the dangers of totalism, we need not accept the wan residualism of liberal democratic pluralism, which depicts politics as nothing more than the chambermaid of private interests. The history of the twentieth century should have taught us that when democracy cannot respond to the need for community with anything more than a pusillanimous privatism, other, more oppres- i jeologies will step in. That, indeed, was the theme of smocracy offers a different and more vig- litics not as a way of life but asa way Strong Democracy Ge Ha approximation of concord where they do not exist by nature, itis. potentially a realm of unique openness, flexibility, and promise. It is in fact the quintessential realm of change that, while it is occa- sioned by conflict and by the inadequacy of man’s higher nature, becomes the occasion for mutualisin and the superseding of his lower nature. This is perhaps why John Dewey was moved to call jot a formn of associated life but “the idea of community fe itself. : ‘There is an element of hubris in Dewey's almost Periclean vision of political life, but there is moderation as well. Neither the solitary, neatly divine philosopher nor the solitary Hobbesian predator fully embodies that odd creature Homo politicus who inhabits both the an- cient and modern worlds of democracy: dependent, yet urider de- mocracy self-determining; insufficient and ignorant, yet under de- mocracy- teachable; selfish, yet under democracy -cooperative: stubbom and solipsistic, yet under democracy. creative and capable of genuine self-transformation. ‘The stress on transformation is at the heart of the strong. demo- cratic conception of politics. Every politics confronts the competi- ‘tion of private interests and the conflict that competition engenders: But where liberal democracy understands polities as a means of eliminating conflict (the anarchist disposition), repressing it (the disposition), or tolerating it (the ist disposition), strong democracy also aspires to transform conflict through a poli- tics of distinctive inventiveness and discovery. It seeks to create. a interests in terms susceptible to public accommodation (see Chapt ‘understanding individuals not as abstract persons butas citizens, so that commonality and equality rather than separateness are the de- fining traits of human society (see Chapter 9) Open to change and hospitable to the idea of individual and social transformation, strong democracy can overcome the pessimism and cynicism, the negativity and passivity that, while they immunize iberalism against naive utopianism and the tyranny of idealism, | also undermine its cautious hopes-and leave its theory thin and threadbare and its practice vulnerable to skepticisin and dogma tism. Under strong democracy, politics is given the power of human promise. For the first time the possibilities of transforming private © into public, dependency into interdependency, conflict into coop- chin Dewer, The Public an lis Problems (New York: Holt, 1927), p. 148. —