Abstract
Some democratic theorists, especially John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, identify pervasive disagreements as “facts” of pluralistic political life, and propose strategies for either mitigating or altogether avoiding especially recalcitrant disagreements. Others—for instance, Chantal Mouffe and Amy Gutmann—suggest that disagreements are not only pervasive but desirable for democratic politics. This article argues that within a democratic context, the value of disagreement should be measured by its reasonableness rather than its termination in agreement between adversarial interlocutors. Plato's Gorgias illustrates such worthwhile disagreement. In the dialogue, the interlocutors approach and sustain disagreement while articulating Socrates’ conception of disagreement as a form of civic care. By sustaining reasoned disagreements, citizens can care for democracy and about each other.
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Notes
See Washington Post, “Specter Faces Raucous Crowd at Town Hall Meeting,” August 11, 2009.
See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). In this work, Rawls endeavors to explain how deeply divided societies can cooperate under universally fair terms. He limits discussion of the “most intractable struggles”—that is, disagreements over religion, philosophy, and morality—to background social conditions. So situated, they cease to be appropriate subjects of study for political theory (4). Unlike Rawls, who assumes that political stability rests on citizens’ shared conception of justice, I will argue that citizens, even when deeply divided over definitions and demands of justice, are capable of reasonable disagreement. By assuming agreement on questions of justice, Rawls evades difficult problems that I will now address.
Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1996); Chantal Mouffe, “Democracy as Agonistic Pluralism,” in Rewriting Democracy, ed. Elizabeth Deeds Ermath (Hampshire: Ashgate Press, 2007), 36–47; Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Ewa Ziarek, An Ethics of Dissensus (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2001); Iris Marion Young, “Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship,” in Democracy, ed. Michael Saward (London: Routledge Press, 2007), 250–74.
Though each of these theorists belongs to a distinctive subset within so-called “difference democratic theory,” for brevity's sake I will refer to them collectively as agonists. In my view, agonism captures the need to balance difference and struggle better than other descriptors, like “radical” or “difference democrat.”
See Iris Marion Young, “Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy,” in Democracy and Difference, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 120–37.
See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 2001).
See Simona Goi, “Agonism, Deliberation, and the Politics of Abortion,” Polity 37 (2005): 54–81.
See Thomas Spragens, Civic Liberalism: Reflections on Our Democratic Ideals (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999).
See Joan Tronto, “Care as a Basis for Radical Political Judgments,” Hypatia 10 (1995): 141–49.
See Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000) as well as Robert Putnam and Lewis Feldstein, Better Together: Restoring the American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003). Like other advocates of civic revival, Putnam laments the steady decline of civic engagement and social capital in America and blames suburbanization, sprawl, television, and similar social factors for its demise (Bowling Alone, 283). He argues that we lose “social capital,” or a sense of community, when we fail to interact with our fellow citizens. Putnam does not, however, grapple with the content of these interactions—specifically, whether individuals are engaging with different points of view or even discussing politics, for that matter. Nor does he develop a conceptual or normative distinction between pro-social civic associations like the United Way and their anti-social alternatives like the Ku Klux Klan (Bowling Alone, 22; 340). By describing civic engagement as a form of care-work, I attempt to address these two shortcomings.
Other theorists have called for revisions to democratic theory and have underscored the value of disagreements between citizens. For instance, John Stuart Mill advocated for this kind of civic engagement. In “On Liberty,” he asserts that while we have no obligation to prevent others from pursuing deleterious life plans according to which they alone reap the consequences—say, indulging a debilitating heroin addiction—we nevertheless owe it to each other to identify better and worse conceptions of the good, and to encourage each other to stimulate our “higher faculties,” even if we must modify conventional etiquette to do so (84–85). Like the aforementioned theorists, however, Mill fails to offer concrete illustrations for how citizens might adopt his advice. Thus I look further back in the canon for a viable example of civic-care practices. See John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty,” in On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 5–130.
See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1971); John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Charles Larmore, “Political Liberalism,” Political Theory 18 (1990): 339–60; John S. Dryzek and Simon Niemeyer, “Reconciling Pluralism and Consensus as Political Ideals,” American Journal of Political Science 50 (2006): 634–49; Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998).
Rawls, Political Liberalism, 36, 214.
Gutmann and Thompson, in Democracy and Disagreement, point out that Rawls's attitude toward state neutrality is a familiar liberal strategy. It therefore is subject to many standard criticisms, including the argument that by bracketing points of disagreement, Rawls neuters democratic politics. Addressing this criticism, Larmore, in “Political Liberalism,” contends that liberalism's “neutrality” is neither devoid of moral content nor motivated by moral skepticism. Rather, liberalism's norms do not appeal to the controversial logics of those comprehensive doctrines to which we adhere (341).
Rawls, Political Liberalism, 37. Spragens, Civic Liberalism, argues that Rawls's notion of justice as the first social virtue is not only unsustainable. “It also improperly discredits thoughtful, morally sensitive, and widely held dissenting views among competing but valid moral imperatives and social goods that require hard choices and compromises rather than the simple imposition of a single preeminent norm” (60).
Rawls, Political Liberalism, 193–94.
Ibid., 35.
Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 127.
Rawls usefully extends Kant's distinction between “rationality” and “reason,” and insists that while the two concepts are mutually supportive, they are nevertheless distinct. According to Rawls's schema, rationality refers to our capacity to generate conceptions of the good and to order preferences. He defines reason, however, much more narrowly: “first … the willingness to propose and honor fair terms of cooperation, and second … the willingness to recognize the burdens of judgment and to accept their consequences.” Reasonable actors are moved by a desire for cooperation, whereas rational actors might not be. See Political Liberalism, 48, 51, 56.
Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 107.
Ibid., 165.
He draws the following distinction between rationally motivated consensus and compromise: “Whereas a rationally motivated consensus rests on reasons that convince all the parties in the same way, a compromise can be accepted by the different parties each for its own different reasons” (166). Thus, Habermas rejects Rawls’s idea of overlapping consensus because it resembles compromise more than rational consensus, and thereby deviates from the “ideal speech situation.”
Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990).
Also see Samantha Besson, The Morality of Conflict: Reasonable Disagreement and the Law (Portland, OR: Hart, 2005).
Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 167, 177. For discussion on the kind of social overhaul necessary to satisfy Habermas's material preconditions, see Archon Fung, “Deliberation before the Revolution: Toward an Ethics of Deliberative Democracy in an Unjust World,” Political Theory 22 (2005): 397–419.
Jeremy Waldron argues in Law and Disagreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) that reasoned dialogue can be embodied in the law: “The claims that law makes … are the claims of an existing (and developing) framework ordering our actions and interactions in circumstances in which we disagree with one another about how our actions and interactions should be ordered … The authority of law rests on the fact that there is a recognizable need for us to act in concert on various issues or to co-ordinate our behavior in various areas with reference to a common framework, and that this need is not obviated by the fact that we disagree among ourselves as to what our common course of action or our common framework ought to be” (7).
See Robert Goodin, “Consensus Interruptus,” The Journal of Ethics 5 (2001): 121–31. For a similar criticism that is addressed specifically to Rawls, see Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000).
Brian Garsten, Saving Persuasion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 185.
Ibid., 210.
Laclau and Mouffe's depiction of anti-capitalist coalitions between feminist and anti-racist groups is a good example of this. Also see Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
Jacque Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), viii.
See Iris Marion Young, “Polity and Group Difference,” 339–64.
Iris Marion Young, “Communication and the Other,” 120–36.
Ibid., 128.
Ibid., 129.
Jane Mansbridge finds that town hall meetings tend to be dominated by white middle-class men who may have more practice speaking in public forums. She additionally observes that minorities—including mothers and elderly citizens—tend to have more difficulty getting to such meetings in the first place. See Jane Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
Chantal Mouffe, “Democracy, Power, and the ‘Political,’” in Democracy and Difference, ed. Benhabib, 245–56.
That said, researchers are developing technologies that can facilitate care labor. See Amy Harmon, “Discovering a Soft-Spot for Circuitry,” New York Times, 4 July 2010.
Grace Dietmut Bubeck, “Justice and the Labor of Care,” in The Subject of Care: Feminist Perspectives on Dependency, ed. Eva Feder Kittay and Ellen Feder (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 160–85.
Ibid.,163, 170. Though I slightly depart from Bubeck's definition of caring, her insistence on its intrinsically valuable nature parallels my own characterization of reasonable disagreement as intrinsically valuable.
On the endemic inequalities pervading much of the care industry, see Joan Tronto, “Care as the Work of Citizens: A Modest Proposal,” in Women and Citizenship, ed. Marilyn Friedman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 130–48.
Etymologically, however, associating care with discomfort makes sense. The term's nounal form derives from the Old English word caru—the verbial form is carian, meaning “mental suffering” or grief—and gradually came to mean an object of trouble or concern.
Daniel Engster, “Rethinking Care Theory: The Practice of Caring and the Obligation to Care,” Hypatia 20 (2005): 50–74.
In this study, civic care is not intended to be a replacement for theories of social capital. It is intended to be a much needed extension of those theories, one that addresses the dark side of social capital. See Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone, and Theda Sckocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003).
Spragens, Civic Liberalism, 109; Richard Dagger, Civic Virtues: Rights, Citizenship, and Republican Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
For a discussion of how legal professionals might be considered an exception to this characterization, see Arthur Isak Applbaum, Ethics for Adversaries: The Morality of Roles in Public and Professional Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
See Tim Groseclose and Nolan McCarty, “The Politics of Blame: Bargaining before an Audience,” American Journal of Political Science 45 (2001): 100–19; Lanny Martin and Georg Vanberg, “Wasting Time? The Impact of Ideology and Size on Delay in Coalition Formation,” British Journal of Political Science 33 (2003): 323–44.
For insights into the positive correlation between characteristics of patience and high voter turnout, see James A. Fowler and Cindy D. Kam, “Patience as a Political Virtue: Delayed Gratification and Turnout,” Political Behavior 28 (2006): 113–28.
See Susan Bickford, The Dissonance of Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).
Though the Socrates of the Gorgias resembles the Socrates in other Platonic dialogues—particularly the Phaedrus and Protagoras—I will restrict the following analysis the Gorgias alone.
Dana Richard Villa, Socratic Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 26.
Susan Bickford, “This Way of Life, This Contest,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Political Thought, ed. Stephen Salkever (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 126–55.
As Gregory Vlastos also asserts, Socrates is committed to the notion that his interlocutors maintain both good and false beliefs about justice; elenctic arguments will highlight the inconsistency of false beliefs, thereby distilling the good. See Socratic Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
See Charles H. Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); also see John Beversluis, Cross-examining Socrates: A Defense of the Interlocutors in Plato's Early Dialogues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Peter Euben, Corrupting Youth: Political Education, Democratic Culture, and Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
We can see that to the extent that reasonable engagement renders citizens more autonomous, the languages of care and civic liberalism are not always at odds.
See Gorgias, 454b, 548e. His exchange with Socrates reveals that Gorgias is concerned not with teaching or necessarily improving the democratic assembly, but only with persuading it. Unlike Socrates’ elenchus, rhētorikē is not a viable model for deliberative engagement or, by extension, an appropriate model of civic care.
See Gorgias, 448a, 452e. It is worth noting that Gorgias locates politics in formal settings whereas Socrates finds it in the informal agora. By staging the dialogue, the substance of which is political, within the Callicles’ home—the oikos—Plato may be dramatizing the politicization of the ostensibly pre-political private space. Gorgias seems to support this suggestion when he limits the orator's persuasiveness to gatherings (459a).
Gorgias, 454b, 456b.
See Gorgias, 457b.
Ibid., 459b, 463b, 465b.
Ibid., 457d.
One need only look to the cottage industry of books outlining progressive and conservative talking points, popularized by pundits and their critics, to understand how such exchanges usually play out.
Gorgias 449a–b.
Ibid., 461b.
His name of course derives from pōlos, meaning “colt.” Socrates makes an early pun of this at 463e.
Gorgias, 448e–449a, 461c–d, 462c, 463e, 466c.
Ibid., 466b.
Ibid., 470c, 475c 476e–477b.
Ibid., 478d–e.
Sung-Woo Park. “Politics of Soul-Care: Socratic and Platonic Political Life and Its Modern Reclamations” (Ph.D. Diss., University of Chicago, 2002).
Gorgias, 473e.
Ibid., 474a.
Some might interpret Socrates’ claims that he disregards the majority as evidence that he opposes democracy. However, if I am correct in asserting that Socrates engages a larger audience by publically performing his elenchus, then this comparatively democratic dialectical argumentative format can be extended to the larger Athenian community.
Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); also see Villa, Socratic Citizenship.
Gorgias, 482e–483a.
Kahn argues that in the text, shame highlights this point—the orators’ shame in declaring that all pleasures are equally good is unsustainable.
See Gorgias, 497a, 499b, 500a, 507a.
Gorgias, 512e–513a.
Or, as Callicles warns Socrates, one's life (486b).
Gorgias, 513e.
Ibid., 517b–c.
Ibid., 518c.
Ibid., 519a.
Ibid., 519c.
This claim underscores Socrates’ definition of politics as an activity that aims toward justice. For him, injustice is a symptom of inconsistent belief. Accordingly, political technē is the reconciliation of consistent belief through elenchus. Hence, Socrates’ claim that he is “one of a few Athenians … to take up the true political craft and practice the true politics … because the speeches [he makes] on each occasion do not aim at gratification but at what's best” (521d).
Peter Euben similarly suggests, “Suppose the point is to stimulate argument and debate, to have Athenians become more thoughtful about what they had done and could do in the future” (Corrupting Youth, 205).
Gorgias, 480d.
Bonnie Honig puts this point forcefully in Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics. She further argues that consensus theorists falsely assume that their models will soothe all that ails politics. Furthermore, the “assumption that it is possible and desirable to contain or expel the disruptions of politics has antidemocratic resonances, if by democracy one means a set of arrangements that perpetually generates popular … political action” (4).
Jeremy Waldron, Law and Disagreement, 15.
See Roger Brown, Social Psychology (New York: The Free Press, 1986); Diana Mutz, Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative versus Participatory Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). For further discussion of deliberation exacerbating political cleavages, see Gerald Gauss, “Reason, Justification, and Consensus: Why Democracy Can’t Have It All,” in Deliberative Democracy, ed. James Bohman and William Rehg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 205–42; and Ian Shapiro, “Enough Deliberation: Politics Is About Power,” in Deliberative Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement, ed. Stephen Macedo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 28–38.
I draw the war/sports analogy from the words’ Greek roots: antagonist is derived from the Greek for “rival” where agonist referred specifically to combatant in a game. At the risk of torturing the analogy, we might also consider the practice of one-time sports rivals playing on the same team in a different context. For example, Steven Gerrard and Fernando Torres are teammates for Liverpool FC in the English Premier League, but play for opposing national teams during the World Cup. Such context-dependent coalition shifts are also prevalent in politics, as when MPs vote differently or similarly depending on the specific bill placed before them.
For discussion of “loving” political coalitions, see Elizabeth V. Spelman, “Have We Got a Theory for You! Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism and the Demand for ‘The Woman's Voice,’” in Feminism and Philosophy: Essential Readings in Theory, Reinterpretation, and Application, ed. Nancy Tuana and Rosemarie Tong (Oxford: Westview, 1995), 494–507; for proposals of so-called “civic friendship,” see Spragens, Civic Liberalism.
Socrates’ prize (convincing everyone that justice is best) differs from Callicles’ prize (the personal glory of defeating Socrates before an attentive audience). Their incompatibility suggests that only one actor can carry the day.
See Besson, The Morality of Conflict; and Thomas Nagel, “Moral Conflict and Political Legitimacy,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 16 (1987): 215–40. There is also a lively philosophical debate over the epistemic significance of disagreements in society which should inform political theory. See Ernest Sosa, “The Epistemology of Disagreement,” in Social Epistemology, ed. Adrian Haddock, Alan Millar, and Duncan Pritchard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) and Adam Elga, “Reflection and Disagreement,” Noûs 41 (2007): 478–502.
Joshua Cohen, “Reflections on Habermas on Democracy,” Ratio Juris 12 (1999): 385–412.
Ibid., 396. On Rawls’ criterion of reciprocity, see John Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” in Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 578.
Cohen, “Reflections on Habermas on Democracy,” 397. Cohen also explicates what many theorists mean by a “reason”: “Generically speaking, a reason is a consideration that counts in favor of something: in particular, a belief, or an action….What is needed is not an account of what a reason is, but of which considerations count as reasons. And the answer to this question depends on context: Whether considerations count in favor in the relevant way depends on the setting in which they are advanced. Applying this point to the issue at hand: A suitable account of which considerations count as reasons for the purpose of an account of democratic deliberation will not take the form of a generic account of what a reason is, but a statement of which considerations count in favor of proposals within a deliberative setting suited to the case of free association among equals, understood to include an acknowledgement of reasonable pluralism.”
Cohen, “Reflections on Habermas on Democracy,” 396.
See Thomas Christiano, “Must Democracy Be Reasonable?” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 39 (2009): 1–34. Like the agonists mentioned above, Christiano is reluctant to grant that even minimal consensus is desirable for democracy: “Given our fallibility about the truth in moral and political matters and the importance of disagreement in spurring us on to improve our understanding of moral and political truths, even the weak type of consensus Cohen celebrates carries with it a serious danger of self-delusion and intellectual stagnation” (4).
Besson, The Morality of Conflict, 117.
In Political Liberalism Rawls defines “basic structure” as “a society's main political, social, and economic institutions, and how they fit together into one unified system of social cooperation from one generation to the next” (11).
Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 62.
Several studies in cognitive development and political psychology attempt to identify such benefits. See Pedro Cobo and Josep M. Fortuny, “Social Interactions and Cognitive Effects in Contexts of Area-Comparison Problem Solving,” Educational Studies in Mathematics 42 (2000): 115–40; and Robert Huckfeldt, Ken’ichi Ikida, and Franz Urban Pappi, “Patterns of Disagreement in Democratic Politics: Comparing Germany, Japan, and the United States,” American Journal of Political Science 49 (2005): 497–514.
See Cass R. Sunstein, Why Societies Need Dissent (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).
Washington Post, “President Speaks at Healthcare Summit,” 5 March, 2009.
Diana Mutz, Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative versus Participatory Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), chapter 3.
Ibid., 33, 44.
Mutz notes that while some deliberative theorists predict that citizens should stand about a 76 percent chance of coming into contact with cross-cutting exposure, survey data reveal that this estimate is closer to 34 percent (Ibid., 39).
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I would like to thank Michael Lienesch, Jeff Spinner-Halev, and especially Susan Bickford for their supportive and insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank Ernie Zirakzadeh and the anonymous reviewers at Polity for their help in improving the final draft.
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Miller, J. Caring to Disagree: Democratic Disagreement as Civic Care. Polity 44, 400–425 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2012.5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2012.5