Just Democracy: The Rawls-Machiavelli Programme (Ecpr Essays) - Softcover

Philippe Van Parijs

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1907301143 ISBN 13: 9781907301148

Publisher: ECPR Press, 2011

Synopsis

Philippe Van Parijs is one of the world's leading political philosophers. In this book, he argues that the purpose of democracy should be to promote justice - we need not just democracy (in the sense of unqualified democracy) but a just democracy. Machiavelli and Rawls must be brought together. In a series of provocative and timely essays, he explores what creating such a just democratic political system would involve in order to tackle such issues as intergenerational justice, multiculturalism and linguistic diversity. He illustrates his arguments with examples drawn from the European Union and his native Belgium.

About this title

About the Author

Philippe Van Parijs holds doctorates in philosophy (Oxford) and the social sciences (Louvain). He is professor at the Université of Louvain, where he has directed the Hoover Chair of Economic and Social Ethics since its creation in 1991. He has been a regular visiting professor at Harvard University and at the University of Leuven, and has held visiting positions at many other institutions around the world. His books include Evolutionary Explanation in the Social Sciences (1981), Marxism Recycled (1993), Real Freedom for All (1995), What's Wrong with a Free Lunch? (2000) and Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World (2011).

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Just Democracy

The Rawls-Machiavelli Programme

By Philippe Van Parijs

ECPR Press

Copyright © 2011 Philippe Van Parijs
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-907301-14-8

Contents

List of Figures and Tables, 
Foreword, 
Acknowledgments, 
Chapter 1: The Rawls-Machiavelli Programme: Political Institutions as Instruments of Social Justice, 
Chapter 2: Justice and Democracy: Are they Incompatible?, 
Chapter 3: Contestatory Democracy versus Real Freedom, 
Chapter 4: The Children's Vote and Other Attempts to Secure Intergenerational Justice, 
Chapter 5: Should the European Union Become More Democratic?, 
Chapter 6: Power-sharing versus Border-crossing in Ethnically Divided Societies, 
Chapter 7: Must Europe be Belgian?, 
Chapter 8: Belgium Re-founded, 
Chapter 9: Electoral Engineering for a Stalled Federation: A Country-Wide Electoral District for Belgium's Federal Parliament, 
Chapter 10: Anything (Even) Better than the Pavia Proposal?, 
References, 

CHAPTER 1

the rawls-machiavelli programme: political institutions as instruments of social justice

Suppose you discover that there is a conflict between justice and democracy, which should you choose? This is the simple question that triggered the inquiry reflected in the present set of essays. You may dismiss this as a non-question, because your notion of justice is so comprehensive that it entails democracy, or because your notion of democracy is so rich that it encompasses justice. It is sound intellectual policy, however, not to make our concepts too fat. Fat concepts hinder clear thinking and foster wishful thinking. By packing many good things under a single label, one is easily misled into believing that they never clash.

I have therefore opted for a thin definition of democracy as a form of collective decision-making that combines three elements: free voting, universal suffrage and majority rule. On close inspection, each of these elements requires further clarification and turns out to be a matter of multi-dimensional degree. Furthermore, once a plausible conception of social justice is spelled out, albeit only in rough outline, the interesting question turns out to be, not whether democracy or justice need to be given up when they clash, but how democracy should be structured and constrained in order to best serve the objective of social justice. We don't just need democracy. We need just democracy.

Optimal or maximally just democracy, in this sense, is certainly not maximal democracy. A 'democratic deficit', therefore, need not be a lamentable defect. It may be a sensible condition of the most effective pursuit of sustainable social justice. What should optimal democracy look like? This question is most unlikely to admit of a universal answer. Rather, it calls for a set of place- and time-specific conjectures about the likely effects of various possible democratic designs. The formulation and critical discussion of such conjectures forms what I shall here call the Rawls-Machiavelli programme.

This programme has two components. The first one consists in spelling out what one should regard, on due reflection, as a defensible characterization of a just society. This can – and in my view must – be done broadly in the spirit of John Rawls' (1971) A Theory of Justice, though without taking the nation state as the self-evident frame of reference. The second component consists in reflecting on which, among the millions of ways in which political institutions could be organized, provides the most promising way of securing social justice so characterized, given what political agents are or can feasibly be made to be. This can be understood as an intellectual enterprise akin to Niccolò Machiavelli's (1517) in his Discorsi sopra la prima Deca di Tito Livio, though obviously replacing, as the standard of effectiveness, conduciveness to the greatness of Rome by the propensity to foster the realization of social justice in our societies and in our world.

The essays collected in this volume all fit into this Rawls-Machiavelli programme but they fall far short of implementing it in systematic fashion. Most of them illustrate its potential and its limits by discussing specific issues. The longest essay addresses the challenge of how to structure and constrain our democracies so as to best (or least badly) serve the requirements of intergenerational justice. The optimal shaping of Europe-wide democracy is a concern present throughout the volume, not only in the essays explicitly devoted to it. And several essays, including all the most recent ones, focus on the specific problems that arise in the context of ethnically divided countries. In these essays, I predictably pay special attention to the predicament of my own country, Belgium. This is so in part because my familiarity with is history and current situation boost the confidence with which I feel I can use it to illustrate problems that arise far more widely. In addition, this reflects my growing involvement, along with fellow Belgian academics from both sides of the language border, in a public discussion about the country's institutional future that has been growing both in intensity and in philosophical interest.

The same holds for this Rawls-Machiavelli programme as for any other research programme: the proof is in the pudding. The essays collected here are no more than a very modest foretaste of the prospective outcome of a well-informed, critical and imaginative justice-driven instrumentalist approach to political institutions. For the sake of those who may be tempted to dismiss this approach without tasting any of its output, however, it may be useful to briefly deal with two principled objections to it.

Firstly, universal suffrage, which is part of my thin definition of democracy, is a minimal interpretation of political equality. Is it not obvious that something like political equality should be part of any plausible conception of justice? Democracy, in this light, would not be a contingent tool for justice, but a necessary component of it. There are two interpretations of this objection. On the first one, the right to vote is part of the possibilities, the opportunities, the real freedom that justice (as I understand it) requires should be sustainably distributed in maximin fashion, i.e. so as to maximize the possibilities of the worst off. But the possibility of casting a vote every so many years, possibly to no avail, is a very small thing relative to many other things one might wish to do with one's life, indeed so small that the requirement of universal suffrage, and more generally of political equality, could easily be overridden if deviance from it could sustainably yield a distribution of life chances more favourable to the worst off.

On a second and more persuasive interpretation, the reason why universal suffrage matters to justice, has nothing to do with the fair distribution of opportunities. Justice is here understood as being not only a distributive matter, but also a matter of equal respect, of equal dignity, of equal recognition. Once such a view is adopted – as I now believe it must be – it seems that no just political system can deprive some categories of the right to vote or deliberately give some categories greater weight in the voting procedures. Or at least it cannot do so without a special justification consistent with equal dignity. As argued in some of the essays in this volume, it may be possible to justify, for example, an over-representation of smaller ethnic groups or of those most likely to care for the interest of the young or the unborn. Justice as dignity, however, is inconsistent with denying voting rights to some members of a society throughout their lives. On this basis, it can be said that no society can be just without being democratic for intrinsic and not just for instrumental reasons. I am now willing to say that, as Rawls no doubt was, but given the extreme thinness of this democratic constraint, this concession hardly shrinks the space within which the Rawls-Machiavelli programme can operate. Knowing that, for intrinsic reasons, a just polity must be a democracy leaves wide open the question of which, among the countless democratic setups, is, for instrumental reasons, the just one.

A second objection to the Rawls-Machiavelli programme challenges the philosophical arrogance it seems to entail. Who do we think we are, political philosophers, to feel entitled to decree what justice demands and shape democracy accordingly, rather than modestly let the democratic will determine what the content of justice should be? Political philosophers, and the institutional engineers they might inspire, are fortunately not in a position to despotically impose their personal conception of justice and the corresponding institutions. A democratic majority must decide. But this must not stop political philosophers from telling that majority what it should decide and why, including as regards institutions that will modify its own functioning and lead it to take decisions different from what it otherwise would. As argued at some length in connection with intergenerational justice (see Chapter 3), this task is not self-contradictory, or possible only when it is not useful. But for it to make sense, the conception of justice to which it appeals must be defensible with arguments that embody an equal respect for each citizen's conception of the good life and an equal concern for their interests. This is the case for the conception of justice as 'real freedom for all' and other conceptions in the liberal-egalitarian family to which appeal will be made throughout. No reason, therefore, to shy away from arguing for bold justice-inspired institutional reforms and trying to persuade political actors to go for them. This is not a manifestation of philosophical hubris. This is an essential part of what our societies and our world can expect from their political philosophers and from the latter's active interaction with a broad range of social scientists.

With short-sighted, media-dominated and increasingly volatile electorates, with effective decision-making needing to operate on an ever larger scale, the sort of thinking illustrated in these essays is more important than ever. Rather than yielding to populist calls for 'more democracy', we shall have to think carefully about how the structure of collective decision at the various levels can be designed to best serve a conception of social justice defensible before all. However inchoate the present essays may be, I strongly believe that they are illustrative of an intellectual endeavour that must be intensified and amplified if a concern for social justice is to have a major impact on the future of our societies and of our world.

CHAPTER 2

justice and democracy: are they incompatible?

In February 1992, I was invited to give a talk on democracy at the University of Brussels' Seminar in European Political Theory. I had just published a book whose title was a question, 'What is a Just Society?'(Van Parijs 1991), and I had just completed the last full draft of another book, whose title summarized my answer to that question: 'Real Freedom for All' (Van Parijs 1995). Hence, I focused naturally on the relationship between democracy and justice. In the process, I gave a first rough formulation to the central thesis of this set of essays, i.e. the view that democratic institutions should be treated as sheer servants of social justice. This view was inspired, in particular, by reflection on an intriguing feature of the Indian Union's impressive political system.

It happened some months ago, in a peculiar village on the banks of the Volga. After a long series of toasts at the end of the meal to mark the completion of the Summer School in which I had participated, a man in his sixties, Professor of Philosophy at the Academy of Sciences and active collaborator of the Gorbachev Foundation, came up to me. 'You are Belgian', he said to me and had I been Canadian or Swiss, or even Spanish he would doubtless have spoken much the same. 'You know that for us, living in the former Soviet Union, Belgium represents something important. Because it constitutes a rare example of a multi-national state which has succeeded. At the Gorbachev Foundation we were and remain very attached to the Soviet Union, not because it was soviet but because it was a union. And we believe that only such a union can guarantee not just an effective protection of the minorities within its diverse regions, but also a higher degree of solidarity between its more prosperous and its poorer regions'.

Listening to him speak, I felt myself becoming more and more embarrassed (as no doubt I would too, had I been Canadian) thinking of the most recent vicissitudes in the chronic and ever-present disputes which characterise the multi-national state which he believed was so successful. At this point, I was thinking in particular of the demand to secede from the national social security system that had been forcefully made by a collection of Flemish cultural organisations. According to these organisations, each of the two peoples which make up the Belgian state should have the right to fashion, according to its own preferences and with its own resources, all interpersonal transfers, and it was thus urgent to put an end to the current system which transferred each year from Flanders (Dutch speaking, more prosperous and more populated) to Wallonia (French speaking, less prosperous and less populated) from 3 to 4 per cent of their respective Gross Domestic Products (GDP).

The connection between these two examples (and a handy point of departure for this essay) is that both the dislocation of the USSR and the possible breaking up of the Belgian social security system move us away from implementing a conception of justice that involves a strong solidarity across the frontiers between peoples, while at the same time rightly - appealing to a concern with achieving more democracy. For a people's right to determine its fate and to fashion its social policies in its own way is closely linked with what is customarily meant by the ideal of democracy. This double example thus enables me to sketch the thesis that I will try in a moment to substantiate by using two further illustrations: contrary to the misleading impressions conveyed by political rhetoric, the relation between democracy and justice, very far from expressing a pre-established harmony, is on the contrary highly problematic.

1. WHICH JUSTICE, WHICH DEMOCRACY?

Before going any further with these illustrations, I must define what I mean here by justice and what I will call democracy. As I believe not only in the virtues of Ockam's razor, but even more in those of a conceptual trimmer – I hate fat concepts into which one sinks and becomes entangled – I will offer in both cases a deliberately simple, even simplistic, definition. I will define democracy as the combination of majority rule, universal suffrage and free voting. Of course, each of the elements of this definition requires further specification. But since my argument is largely independent of their exact characterization, I will not dwell on this semantic matter, except to stress that this is a purely procedural definition of democracy: what makes a society democratic is that public decisions are (ultimately) taken according to a procedure which satisfies the three conditions mentioned, and not that these decisions are conducive to some specific substantive result.

Further, I will define justice as the maximinning of material conditions, possibly subject to satisfying certain constraints, such as respect for fundamental liberties. What makes a society just, in other words, is that thanks to its institutions the conditions of the least advantaged among its members are made (lastingly) better than what would have happened if other institutions (satisfying the same constraints) had been chosen. In this characterisation of justice, I deliberately use the indeterminate notion of material condition, which can be specified for example in terms of income, potential income, wealth, standard of living, endowments, resources, capabilities, social and economic advantages, etc. For simplicity, however, I will suppose here that net monetary income constitutes an adequate index of this material condition. It is the maximin, applied to this variable, which constitutes the criterion of justice. However, an argument analogous to the one presented here applies a fortiori to more egalitarian conceptions of justice (that is, to conceptions which imply that a worsening of the condition of the worst-off can lead to more justice if it produces a greater equality of conditions), and also, though more weakly, to more aggregative conceptions of justice (that is, to conceptions which imply that a worsening of the condition of the worst-off can lead to more justice providing it gives rise to an improvement in the average situation). The maximin will consequently be used here as a privileged member of a larger family of criteria of distribution.

Even if one takes account of these caveats, the conception of justice put forward here remains particular and controversial. On the one hand, it is a liberal conception of justice, in the sense that it makes no appeal, in deciding what is just, to some particular conception of the good life; instead, it is intended to be compatible with equal respect for the various conceptions of the good life which co-exist within our pluralist societies. This first limitation is scarcely a problem, in the sense that the great majority of contemporary conceptions of justice are also liberal in this sense. But the conception of justice proposed here is not simply liberal. It is also solidaristic, i.e. it requires an equal concern for all citizens, an equal consideration of the interests of all members of society. Solidaristic conceptions contrast with entitlement conceptions, which regard justice as nothing other than the absence of any violation of individual natural rights, presumed to exist prior to all social institutions.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: ECPR Press
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1907301143
• ISBN 13: 9781907301148
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 188