Kellogg Institute Conference on Democracy and Democratization - North and South

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Kellogg Institute Conference on

Democracy and Democratization: North and South

Fbio Wanderley Reis

1

The proposed conference is a sort of overflow of some interchanges

related with a study group of the 1982 IPSA World Congress. Regardless

of the formal outputs of the meeting of the study group in the Congress

itself, the efforts made at several occasions to define the objectives of the

group were certainly decisive in originating the very idea of the conference.

They provide, therefore, a natural starting point for this document.

2

The objective initially proposed for the work of the group (in

informal meetings in Moscow, 1979) was the comparative study of Latin

American and European state structures, which were thought to present

convergent trends. Such ideas were stressed in the name then chosen for

the study group: Repression and representation: Convergent trends in

Latin American and European state structures. The bureaucratic-

This text was written as the initial document for the symposium on Issues on

Democracy and Democratization: North and South, which took place at the Helen

Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame, USA, in

November 1983, under the coordination of Guillermo ODonnell and Fbio Wanderley

Reis. Published material relating to the seminar includes: Carlos Acua and Robert

Barros, Issues on Democracy and Democratization: North and South A Rapporteurs

Report, Working Paper n. 30, Kellogg Institute, October 1984; Claus Offe, Societal

Preconditions of Corporatism and Some Current Dilemmas of Democratic Theory,

Working Paper n. 14, Kellogg Institute, March 1984; Andrew Arato, The Democratic

Theory of the Polish Opposition: Normative Intentions and Strategic Ambiguities,

Working Paper n. 15, Kellogg Institute, April 1984; and Douglas C. Bennett,Democracy and Public Policy Analysis, Working Paper n. 16, Kellogg Institute, April

1984.

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authoritarian and corporatist regimes of contemporary Latin America, it

was thought, have European counterparts not only in the more obvious

cases of authoritarianism and military interventionism to be found in

certain less developed South European countries, but also in the corporatist

tendencies shown in more or less recent developments in the political life

of the advanced countries of Western Europe. To undertake the study of

such trends in a comparative and systematic vein seemed rewarding.

Some written notes by myself, which circulated in mid-1980, tried to

go one step further and provide some leads to the prospective group.1 My

chief point was that its comparative concern, if it was to be pursued in a

proper way, inevitably led to a careful consideration of certain big

theoretical questions. Specifically, I argued that the aim of dealing in an

adequate way with the problems posed by authoritarian regimes ultimately

required a comprehensive and sophisticated enough theory of political

change or political development. Accordingly, I pled for boldly tackling the

challenge thus raised and for avoiding the inhibitions brought about by theover-zealous and somewhat irrationalist fears of such sins as

evolutionism and linearism. We should be concerned, so I contended,

with grasping the logic at play in long run processes, or in processes taking

place in apparently widely different contexts; and, however careful we

should also be, of course, to avoid simplistic and rigidly mechanicistic

conceptions, that concern inevitably turned out to involve, to a large extent,

recovering such linearities as may actually exist in operation in those

processes. My notes were made up of some topical theoretical

propositions assumed to be directly relevant to the diagnosis and

comparison of different cases of authoritarian regimes and related

phenomena, propositions which, in turn, were thought to fit some previous

1 Fbio W. Reis, Authoritarianism and Political Development: Proposal of Some Leads

for the Study Group on Representation and Repression, ms.

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theoretical work on political development of my own that tried to build on

a critical evaluation of the recent wave of academic literature dealing with

that subject.2

In the Rio Congreas of IPSA, Alessandro Pizzorno presented a

different proposal, also sketched in a written outline.3 The basic point was

the stress on forms ofsocialcontrol, by contrast to administrative and

political forms of control that, according to Pizzorno, the group initially

meant to address. In his outline, Pizzorno calls attention to a growing

amount of literature, in different fields of the social sciences, which is

now dealing with changes in the modes of social control, particularly in

State organized control, during the process of modernization. He refers, in

his own words, to the historiographical research on the forms of

punishment, detention, total institutions; to the research on the growth of

social disciplines; to the analyses of therapy as a form of social control; to

the analyses of welfare as control; to the descriptions of the recent spread

of networks of surveillance; to the reevaluation of the functions of policeand of the army in modern society; and to the work trying to show the

dialectic aspects in the development of civil rights on the one side and new

forms of legal and administrative restrictions on the other.

Pizzorno does not seem to have had my notes in mind when writing

his suggestions, but in our conversations in Rio he forwarded the opinion

that, whereas my proposal involved a certain deepening of the current

way of dealing with authoritarianism and related subjects in todays

literature of political science, what is needed is an enlargement and

2 See Fbio W. Reis, Solidariedade, Interesses e Desenvolvimento Poltico, Cadernos DCP, n.

1, March 1974 (also published in Spanish: Solidaridad, Intereses y Desarrollo Poltico,

Desarrollo Econmico Revista de Ciencias Sociales, n. 54, vol. 14, July-September, 1974);and Fbio W. Reis, Brasil: Estado e Sociedade em Perspectiva, Cadernos DCP, n. 2,

December 1974.3 Alessandro Pizzorno, Outline for a Discussion on Political and Social Control (Repression

and Representation), ms.

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diversification of the issues to be considered in connection with those

subjects.

It is my impression that the alternative thus formulated turns out to

involve not merely a choice between two different ways of going about the

study of a certain subject-matter, but rather a fundamental question whose

answer should be sought in the work itself of the group. In other words, our

problem at this point is not one of choosing between deepening (this

word seems to pop up whenever Guillermo ODonnell is around) and

diversification, but rather one of trying to find out to what extent and in

which ways is it necessary or adequate to diversify the issues in order

precisely to deepen our knowledge of the basic theme with which we are

supposedly concerned. To be sure, there seems necessarily to be an element

of circularity here, for we have to achieve some definition of that basic

theme te start with, and this definition may lead to a more or less extended

list of issues thought to be relevant dimensions of it. But a central part of

the problem, and perhaps the only way out of this circularity, has to do withthe articulation of such issues with one another and that, of course, is

where the theoretical sensitivity that seems to me to be crucial to the

prospects of extracting some fruitful results from our wonderings

introduces itself.

From this point of view, if Pizzornos list of modes of social control

dealt with in the literature was to be taken as nothing but a mere list, it

would be easy to show that it is not at all complete as far as politically

relevant forms of social control are concerned. It would be possible to add,

for instance, all the complex field of problems having to do with ideology

in the broad sense of the word (the sense of the sociology of knowledge)

and with its role in connection with social and political control. What kind

of relevance, for example, may the deference aspects of a society based on

caste or status have with regard to our problems? One option, of course,

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would be to propose that these kinds of society should not fall within the

range of interest of the group (a position apparently implied in Pizzornos

suggestion that we should limit ourselves to countries within the same

range in the level of urbanization). But how to deal, in that case, with the

undeniable political importance that deferential behavior continues to

exhibit up to this day in England, and with its obvious links to a traditional,

status-based English society?4 And then, of course, one might ponder that

the caste-like aspects of the social structure and the traits of social

deference associated with them certainly are dimensions to be taken into

account in explaining the endurance and the prospects of an authoritarian

political regime like the Brazilian one despite the fact that the latter

establishes itselt within the context provided by the rapid change of that

social structure and even as a reaction to it.

It seems clear that problems such as these belong in our theme; that

the proper result of efforts to deal with them inevitably involves the

expectation that observations like the ones on the role of deference in theEnglish and Brazilian societies should fit together in an adequate theory of

political change or political development; and that an adequate theory of

political change or political development would ultimately be precisely one

which articulatedin a cogent and empirically sound way the relevant

phenomena at the structural, ideological and political-institutional levels.

Actually, the example of ideology as something that might be added

to Pizzornos list of topics may not be a very good choice, for it appears on

his list at least by implication (for instance, in connection with questions

concerning the mixture or ambiguity, from the point of view of an ideal of

autonomous self-control, to be found in the process through which

individuals internalize social values). But this is beside my main point.

4

See, for instance, Robert D. McKenzie and Alan Silver, The Delicate Experiment:Industrialism, Conservatism and Working-Class Tories in England, inParty Systemsand Voter Alignments, edited by S. M. Lipset and S. Rokkan.

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More to the point is the observation that Pizzorno himself is emphatic in

placing the problem of the increase or decrease of social and political

control in relation with the process of modernization: this relation is seen

by him to be the question toward which is geared most of the above

mentioned literature, as well as the intellectual debate at large. Moreover,

he is also explicit in pointing toward the relations between liberal

democratic institutions and forms of control as probably the central

concern of our group. Thus, Pizzorno is not, most certainly, up to merely

enlarging our prospective list of problems; rather, the objective of

structurally grasping the process of modernization (of achieving a theory of

change) and the problem of the role to be played in this regard by the

proper understanding of the relationships between different analytical

dimensions are of course crucial also to him.

3

A couple of themes seem to emerge naturally at this point as issues

to be faced. Firstly, whether we think that we need a theory of political

change (in which the social aspects stressed by Pizzorno contributed their

share) or a theory of overall change in which the articulation between the

social, political and other aspects might be properly grasped, there is

no way out of the verification that our problem such as stated leads

inevitably to nothing less than the problem of a theory ofpolitics. This may

perhaps seem farfetched or excessive at a certain light. But I think most

would agree that an adequate way of rephrasing Pizzornos concern with

enlarging and diversifying the scope of our themes would be to say that it

amounts to arguing that the social aspects are also political. Personally, I

agree with this statement, and the question, then, seems to me to be what is

it that makes it sound reasonable which amounts to asking what is the

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political. In connection specifically with authoritarianism and related

subjects, I actually think that some issues that are made much of in current

debates are largely the consequence of conceptual confusion regarding that

basic question. Suffice it briefly to indicate here the conceptual and

methodological imbroglio produced around the much debated notion of the

autonomy of the political, regarding which tbe current controversies can

be shown to mix up at least the following issues: (a) the question of greater

or lesser neutrality of the state apparatus with regard to antagonistic

classes or social forces; (b) the question of greater or lesser presence or

initiative on the part of the state as opposed to society in general

(stateness, as it is usually called in the English language literature); (e)

the question of the degree of consolidaton of the rules of the game or of

political institutionalization, which in principle can vary independently of

the degree of stateness or of neutrality and is sometimes called

autonomy of the political arena; (d) the question of the autonomy to be

ascribed to the political sphere however defined in terms of its causalrelationships with other spheres in different analytical models. I have

myself, in my previons work, arrived at a certain view of the questions

involved here that I claim to be able to straighten much of the confusion; I

naturally think, therefore, that we could profitably devote part of our efforts

to such questions.

The second of the two themes mentioned above is related to the first

one. It has to do with the practical and normative concern that is present

from the beginning in the attempted definition of our subject and with its

connections to the analytical problem of achieving a theory of politics.

Clearly, what we are concerned with from the practical and

normative point of view is ultimately democracy. From that point of view,

a crucial issue is then the one of how deep should we look for democracy

in order to satisfy the ethical requirements that can be shown to underlie

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our initial interest in such themes as authoritarianism, representation and

repression: is political-administrative democracy enough, or should we

look for social democracy? Pizzorno will perhaps allow me to cite

another oral observation made by him in Rio to make my point clearer: the

one that our concern with (political) democracy is pharisaic obviously,

though these are not Pizzornos words, because the latter may coexist with

various forms of social authoritarianism. And again, one way of

rephrasing, from the present point of view, the proposals contained in

Pizzornos outline is that we should be concerned with democracy not only

as a set of (political-)institutional arrangements, but also (or rather) as a

way of life.

I think it is possible to argue that the analytical problem of a theory

of politics is also linked to the question of democracy and that we have

much to gain by keeping explicitly in mind certain connections between

questions arising both from the normative and from the analytical points of

view. The conventional reference to power relations in the definition ofpolitics and of the subject-matter of political science can be shown to be

acceptable despite its apparently realistic and neutral cast only

insofar as it involves the assumption that power is a problem at the

practical level. In other words, we, as political scientists, are interested in

power relations only insofar as as they are intrinsically problematic: just as

there is no politics in the relation between a dog and his human master, so

there would be no politics in a society of slaves where there hypothetically

be no chance whatsoever for the latter of ceasing to be slaves and affirming

themselves autonomously, or where the only interests to count were once

and for all those of the master. Autonomy of the participants at least

potential autonomy is thus a condition for a power relation to qualify as

political, which means that the interests of each participant must

necessarily count at least potentially. We need only one step further, of

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course, to recover Hannah Arendts view of politics, which, in diametrical

opposition to the seemingly obvious and trivial definitions of current

textbooks, turns out to exclude power from the sphere of politics. As is well

known, that is done by resorting to the model provided by classical

Athenian democracy, which inspires Arendt to look at the experiences of

commanding and obeying, of governing and being governed, as pre-

political experiences which do not belong in the realm of free

communication that would be proper to politics.5

This is not the place, of course, to deal at length with such complex

issues. But the above seems enough to sustain in a preliminary way the

proposition that, besides our practical motivation and the resulting

normative concern with democracy, it is democracy that is essentially at

stake also at the analytical level of a theory of politics. That has

unavoidable consequences also at the level of a theory of political change,

in which the analytical and the practical are further entangled. Let me just

add that, seen from either the analytical or the practical point of view orstill from the point of view of their articulation, the question of political-

institutional democracy versus democracy as a way of life (social

democracy, in a sense that goes beyond the experience of the welfare state)

admits of some important shades. It has been fashionable among

sociologists and political scientists, some years ago, to look for the social

conditions of political democracy. Would it be an adequate extrapolation

from a concern with social democracy of the sort sponsored by Pizzorno

that this quest should be seen as a futile one, i.e., that once you have the

social conditions you have democracy tout court and that you either have

those conditions anddemocracy (including political democracy) or dont

have democracy at all? Or else, granted the importance to be normatively

5 See especially Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago, The University of

Chicago Press, 1958.

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ascribed to deep and socially rooted forms of democratic life, would it be

proper to raise the interrogation of the possible contribution of political-

administrative democratic mechanisms in helping to createsocially

democratic forms of life to look, that is, for the political conditions of

social democracy?

Mixed up with these interrogations there is the problem of the proper

way to conceive of and deal with the institutional dimension of social

and political life, as opposed to other dimensions or perhaps to the other

dimension, that of the basis, infrastructure or substratum. Indeed,

discussions of the institutional or institutionalized aspect or dimension of

socio-political life tend to exhibit a profound ambiguity of serious

consequences, for these words point alternatively to two features or sets of

phenomena that are not only difterent, but even, from a certain point of

view, seemingly opposed to each other. On the one hand, institutional or

institutionalized is often used to indicate those traits of social life which

are akin to Durkheims idea of social coercion, that is to say, which haveto do with the objective and ready-made aspect of social reality that gives

to it its peculiar opacity at any particular moment and of which

individuals and generations are the somewhat passive products. On the

other hand, however, they are also used (especially the word

institutional) in connection with the idea of mechanisms or

procedures the merely institutional level which are thought of, by

contrast to the givenness, rigidity and opacity of the former traits and to

some extent within the constraints imposed by them, as being much more

liable to deliberate manipulation (to institution-building). In other words,

we have the institutional both ascontext and as object. Of course, the

problem of achieving full democracy is a problem of changing the

institutional as context (and it may come as a surprise to some that

institutional seems to become in this case synonymous to certain uses of

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structural that seem to refer precisely to the level of the substratum,

which I take to be a further indication of the conceptual confusion

prevailing here); but the question is, how does the institutional as object

relate to such a task? I would say that it is the realmpar excellence of

political action, that it is through the institutional as object that we may

expect to be able effectively to act over the institutional as context. The

merely institutional becomes, in this light, anything but mere from the

practical point of view just as the analytical challenge of grasping the

two-way connections between both levels or aspects becomes crucial.

4

I have argued that potential autonomy of the participants is a

condition for a relation to qualify as political. The idea of autonomy,

moreover, is obviously of central interest to us as the opposite of

repression. Thus, I think it deserves some elaboration here, especially sinceit seems to me to lead into some important ramifications of our general

theme.

Besides the obvious sphere of overt physical coercion, the questions

brought about by the idea of autonomy arise in connection with the various

faces of what we may call, for the sake of brevity, ideological

manipulation. Such as I conceive of here the area of problems covered by

this term, it includes those issues touched upon in Pizzornos outline that

have to do with the ambiguity or tension, to be found in the socialization

process, between self-control and social control or between autonomy

and repression. Such as stated by Pizzorno, one of the questions in this

regard is whether the internalization of social values by the individual

during the process of socialization should be seen as social control or not,

in the quite negative sense the term social control has in his text.

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Pizzorno cites Foucault and the British social historians, who, with their

description of the growth of disciplines, tend to show that the process of

discipline formation is an exercise of coercion often consciously promoted

by the institutions of the State and of the capitalist organizations or in any

case explicitly required by the conditions of the modern social order.

This line of work certainly contains an important contribution. But I

think something also important is missing, to wit, a more acute awareness

of the links between autonomy and identity, on the one hand, and, on the

other, between identity and precisely those elements of the socialization

process indicted as expressions of social control or coercion. In other

words, it is meaningless to speak of autonomy unless there is an agent that

may be thought of as asubjectwhose identity is to be autonomously

affirmed and this identity is inevitably produced, in the case of the

individual, largely through the process of being socialized into the

opacity of an institutionaiized collectivity. Autonomy, therefore,

supposes certain elements of social coercion as given and necessary inthe process of identity formation at the level of the individual. And this

linkage between the social and the individual levels is probably the chief

warrant of the possibility of speaking also ofcollective identities or

subjects as such a theme that imposes itself forcefully and brings about a

whole new range of problems if we are not willing to deny the socio-

psychological reality of groups or collectivities without giving up the

healthy cautions of a methodological individualism.

Of course, there is nothing very original about stressing this dialectic

between social coercion and individual autonomy, which, even if we stick

to the field of political thought narrowly defined, can be traced at least to

Rousseau. But, beside the question of the articulation between individual

and collective identities, another interest of bringing up these problems

here is to emphasize the idea that the question of autonomy has to be

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considered within a context of self-reflection and thus to link our

concerns to important efforts currently being made in connection with

critical theory, especially by Jrgen Habermas. In my opinion, such

efforts are liable to important criticism with regard to some of their

fundamental epistemological assumptions and to the political theory

deriving therefrom. But, in emphasizing the connection between

emancipation (as the process from which individuation and autonomy are

to come about) and the reflexive assimilation of those elements of social

life pertaining to its dimension of institutionalization and tradition, they do

contribute to show with special force what there is of problematical in the

willingness to appreciate such elements only in a negative light, as

repression and coercion.

To provide some brief indications of the tenor and range of the issues

and difficulties emerging in this regard, let us take again the above

mentioned passage of Pizzornos outline on the relationships between self-

control, discipline formation and social control. Pizzorno himself remarksthat it would be intellectually unsound to address the question with the

aim of deciding whether self-control is a product of coercion or of a free

process of social interaction. It is certainly necessary to aggree with and

reinforce this note of caution, not only for the links I have been stressing

between self and coercion itself, but also because it is hard to see what a

free process of social interaction may actually mean if we have in mind

that this phrase occurs in a context where emphazis is laid on the coercive

character of the very process of socialization with the consequence that

any actual process of interaction will necessarily take place among people

already submitted, to some extent, to coercion. But if we take the British

social historians mentioned by Pizzorno and look, for instance, at E. P.

Thompsons Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism, whose

general point is precisely to show time regulation as disciplining and

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control and to examine some ideological distortions associated with it, we

had better be prepared for stumbling on gigantic qualifications like the

following one: If the theoreticians of development so desire, we will

accept that the ancient popular culture was in many ways passive,

intellectually empty, lacking in dynamism, and to make it plain poor.

Without disciplining time we could not have achieved the demanding

energy of industrial man; and whether this discipline is obtained through

Methodism, Stalinism or nationalism, it will make itself present in the

developed world.6 This is certainly the point of Pizzornos remark on the

growth of disciplines as required by the conditions of the modern social

order; but there unquestionably is more to this passage by Thompson than

would allow the willingness merely to recognize in time discipline an

exercise of coercion, however functional for capitalism or modernity.

Rather, the ambiguity introduced by the positive ring of Thompsons

concession to the theoreticians of development seems clearly to reach

much more basic points, which, in my opinion, have epistemologicalramifications of important consequences to our theme.

Before briefly addressing such ramifications to close these notes, let

me just further stress the dialectic tension between institutionalization as

coercion, on the one hand, and autonomy, on the other, by reference to

questions related to time and time discipline in a somewhat different

context. I have in mind Adam Przeworskis discussion of the role of the

need for free time in connection with the transition to socialism in a

recent article.7 To be sure, the issues of socialism versus capitalism and of

the conditions and meaning of a transition to socialism present, let it be

noted parenthetically, an obvious relevance to the discussion of democracy

6 Quoted according to the Spanish translation, in E. P. Thompson, Tradicin,Revuelta y

Consciencia de Clase (Barcelona: Editorial Crtica, 1979).7 Adam Przeworski, Material Interests, Class Compromise, and the Transition to

Socialism,Politics and Society, 10, n. 1, 1980.

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at the fundamental level to which our interchanges up to this point have led

us. I will not, of course, undertake here any detailed analysis of

Przeworskis subtle arguments. My point is only to note that, by raising

free time to the position ofthe radical need that satisfies a number of

requirements through which it is rendered crucial to the discussion of the

transition to socialism (it is shared across class divisions of the capitalist

society and generated by capitalism; it can in principle be satisfied by the

material conditions developed under capitalism, and yet it cannot be

satisfied under capitalism; and its satisfaction is both a necessary and a

sufficient condition for socialism),8 he ends up with a conception of

socialism in whichsociety itself (in any sense of the word that would

satisfy someone with even a modicum of sensitivity toward the historical

nature of social life and its implications) has necessarily been abolished.

Free time, he argues, is necessary and sufficient for socialism because it

constitutes basic freedom from want, labor, andsocially induced

constraint.9

Repeatedly, Przeworski lays emphasis on the de-institutionalizing implications brought about by free time: Socialist

society (...) would be organized without being institutionalized. Freedom

means deinstitutionalization; it means individual autonomy.10 If these

quotations already make clear that the notion is completely lacking of a

linkage between individual autonomy and the assumption on the part of the

individual of an identity that is largely definedsocially (that is to say,

through necessarily institutionalized social relations which are the bearers

oftraditions), such a lacuna becomes particularly visible in some remarks

concerning family relationships: The family is no longer an institution:

people organize cohabitation as and if they cohabitate. We are no longer

8

Cf. Przeworski, Material Interests, op. cit., p. 146.9 Ibid., p. 150; my emphasis.10 Ibid., pp. 151 and 153.

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born, as Sartre put it, in the image of our dead grandfather.11 Of course,

even if we grant that the family as the basic cell of socialization, as we

know it today, may be changed or cease to exist, it would be necessary, for

this transformation to have the effects regarding individual autonomy that

Przeworski associates with it, that society itself changed into a memoryless,

unigenerational, instantaneous entity. Otherwise, how to avoid that we

come to be born in the image of the dead educator of our educator, whether

our grandfather or not? Moreover, is this actually something to be desired

in the name of the ideal of autonomy itself? Wouldnt autonomy involve

rather the tense definition of ones identity and of ones corresponding

goals and norms through the critical reference to those belonging to

previous generations, dead or alive, kin or non-kin?

This may be, perhaps, somewhat unfair to Przeworski, insofar as the

above emphasis on the socio-psychological aspect of the institutional

dimension of social life plays down another side that there certainly is to

his discussion, to wit, the constraints on the individuals life chancesbrought about by the need to work and ultimately by the division of labor.

The themes underlying Przeworskis discussion of the transition to

socialism in the passage in question are indeed multiple. However that may

be, I think Przeworskis text is also illustrative of something else often

found in discussions dealing with the general theme of autonomy and

emancipation. I refer to a certain distrust of the instrumental side of

human activity which appears either in a utopian view of a sort of general

socialreconciliation made possible by the assumpton that the lesser task of

producing material abundance has already been completed, or in the

longing for a somewhat idealized past (either indefinitely remote or just

pre-industrial) wheresocialrelations and links as such are seen to prevail.

The latter form a certain idealization of a social and undisciplined pre-

11 Ibid., pp. 151 and 150.

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industrial past is perceptibly present in the above cited article by

Thompson: it is there the dominant underlying counterpoint to the

denunciation of time discipline as repression and functional capitalist

ideology, despite the important qualification previously quoted, which

amounts to an uneasy recovering of instrumental man. Przeworskis

article illustrates the former (utopian) manifestation of that distrust in

perhaps two ways. Firstly, by explicitly excluding from the definition of

socialism such aims as individual creativeness or the realization of

human potential; rather, socialism is to be seen as a society in which

objective conditions have been abolished, in which people are at every

moment free, in which nothing is prior and given, in which life is not an

instrument of survival, and things not instruments of power, in which all

values are autonomous...; this goal will only become reachable,

furthermore, on the conditions that the movement for socialism regains the

integral scope that characterized several of its currents outside the dogmas

of the Internationals, that it becomes a social movement and not solely aneconomic one, that it learns from the womens movement and

reassimilates cultural issues. Secondly, by also explicitly minimizing (in

connection with his prescription of de-institutionalization, and

unconsciously playing with the double meaning of institutional) the

importance of institutional instrumentalities (our institutional as object)

in socialist democracy to the benefit of integral freedom: political parties

are not the unique repository of the unity of theory and practice; and

Socialist democracy is not something to be found in parliaments, factories

or families.12

But it is in Jrgen Habermas that we find the deliberate and complex

mixture of the past (as tradition) and of utopia in recovering the social

against the instrumental. As is well known, he has as a crucial reference

12 Ibid., pp. 152 and 153.

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point in his work the Aristotelian distinction between technical and

practical (elaborated upon by Hannah Arendt particularly in The Human

Condition), which is paralleled by Habermass own distinction between the

contexts ofwork, or purposive-rational action (that is, either

instrumental action or rational choice or their conjunction), and

interaction, or communicative action (symbolic interaction).

Now, this distinction has important epistemological unfoldings, for

the separation of those two contexts is intended to provide the grounds for

opposing a technical type of rationality to a practical one, which are both,

in turn, made to correspond to different types of science or knowledge,

seen as guided by different types of interest. Thus, technical rationality and

technical interest would correspond to the empirical-analytic sciences,

which have in logic their tool and criterion parexcellence. Two other

types of science, historical-hermeneutic sciences (in short, history) and

critical sciences (Marxism, as critique of ideology, and psychoanalysis,

as a sort of critique of neurosis), would correspond largely to the sphereof practical knowledge and of the practical interest, where we are no longer

in the realm of instrumentality and efficacy, but rather in the realm of

symbols, consensual norms, communication and the intersubjectivity of

mutual understanding. There is, however, an important proviso. Putting

aside some problems of interpretation that cannot be dealt with here,

whereas the historical-hermeneutic sciences are turned toward the

possibility of a consensus between subjects who act within the framework

of a self-conception that is brought to them by tradition, in the case of the

critical sciences the practical interest becomes an emancipatory interest,

that is to say, an interest devoted to eliminating the restrictions and

distortions that are imposed upon the process of communication by the

factors of domination, ideology and neurosis, which, in turn, crystallize, so

to speak, in tradition itself. Critical science, therefore, on the model of the

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psychoanalytic dialogue, is by definition oriented toward a future condition

or anticipated state (in terms of psychoanalysis, the cure), abstractly

described in terms of a situation of pure communication or ideal speech-

situation in which those involved (particularly the patient, or, at the

properly sociological level, those collective and individual subjects hitherto

submitted to power relations and ideological manipulation) can

autonomously recognize the validity of statements regarding themselves a

recognition to which are pertinent not only criteria oftruth, but also, given

the links of the emancipatory interest to autonomy and identity, of

authenticity. Besides, such a condition of pure communication is not only

conceived of as a sort of end result of the successful interchange between

analyst and patient (or what might be taken as their sociological

counterparts from the point of view of the critique of ideology), but also as

a methodologicalprescription which resorts to what Habermas calls

reflexive theories that is, theories devoted to emancipation, such as

Marxism and psychoanalytic theory (provided they are both divested of thepositivist or scientist ingredients that both Marx and Freud are accused

of having brought to their work). In other words, the anticipated state of

transparent communication (explicitly described, in its extreme form, as a

counterfactual assumption, though a necessary one) can only be

approached through a process that, even as a process, strives for

competent communication, itself free of power, ideology and

rationalizations in the psychoanalytic sense.13

My purpose in making this compact presentation of some central

points of Habermass ideas is twofold. On the one hand, I want to stress

that they involve, from a certain point of view, a very acute perception of

the entanglement and complexities in the relationships between tradition

13

See, for instance, Fbio W. Reis,Poltica e Racionalidade, Belo Horizonte,UFMG/PROED/RBEP, 1984, for the appropriate presentation and discussion of

Habermass ideas.

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(or institutionalization, a word that Habermas himself employs to

indicate something to be contrasted with his counterfactual situations of

pure communication) and emancipation (or the achieving of autonomy),

a perception that is often lacking in other authors. Furthermore, the

thorough exploration by Habermas of the epistemological ramifications of

that substantive theoretical problem results, in my opinion, in the most

explicit and elaborated formulation of the quite widespread distrust with

regard to the instrumental dimension of human activity that I mentioned

above. On the other hand, Habermass solution to his at once theoretical

and epistemological problem, which amounts to affirming the rights of

practical reason against technical rationality and at consequently

looking for the conditions of emancipation and autonomy in the pure

realm of communication and speech, seems to me to make it short and

provocative, though perhaps a bit arrogant a failure. Habermass work

thus represents, in my view, at once a particularly worthwhile challenge for

those who may wish to probe at somewhat deeper levels the problemsassociated with democracy and emancipation from repression, as well as a

promising way to advance with regard to such problems, if we are just

capable to try and demonstrate his failure and show the reasons for it.

This is perhaps provocation enough for a text having the aims of the

present one, and I will anticlimactically put an and to it here. Maybe I

should indicate, though, that the critique to be undertaken in this regard

finds, in my opinion, invaluable resources in the life-long work of Jean

Piaget, which, by solidly establishing on empirical grounds an

operational conception of intellectual development and its

correspondence with the unfolding of the process of socialization (with the

dialectic there prevailing between the development of the sense of self or of

ego identity and autonomy, on the one hand, and the increasing capacity to

recognize the autonomy ofothers, on the other hand), permits grasping the

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unbreakable links between instrumentality and communication, or between

work and interaction not without emphatically including the moral

components of the latter term of these antinomies. Besides, a central

element of that critique deals with the category ofstrategy. For this

category, playing a clearly intermediate role between the polar terms of

work and interaction (in the sense that it is unequivocally a form of

instrumental action that takes place in a social or interactive context), is

not only a source of insurmountable difficulties for Habermas, but also an

indispensable theoretical tool I would say the crucial tool for the

analysis of politics.14 To close on a polemic note by recovering something

suggested in previous quotations from Przeworski, it is the inevitable

presence of the strategic element in any effort at merely organizing social

relations of whatever kind that renders hopeless the idea of achieving

organization without power and so without institutionalization. Whence

the socially ubiquitous and temporally permanent presence of politics and

the ever puzzling character of the question of how to achieve a conditionthat be no end of politics (no mere administration of things) and yet be

compatible with individual autonomy without degenerating into

generalized belligerence. In short, how to achieve full and institutionalized

democracy.

5

I suggest, thus, that the focus of our conference be the problem of

democracy and of change toward democracy or of democratization; that

we consider this problem from the standpoint of the articulation both

between the structural, socio-psychological and institutional dimensions

14 The critique of Habermas along these lines can be found in my Poltica eRacionalidade, op. cit.

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and between an analytical approach and a practical one; and that we

attempt the task with the disposition to embark even if tentatively on

the theoretical and epistemological revision that may turn out to seem

necessary. Admittedly, this may perhaps look, from certain points of view,

as not very focused a focus. I hope the above discussion has been

successful in showing at least the plausibility of the opposite presumption,

i.e., that we thus do have a focus, and perhaps even in indicating that that

focus is a necessary one if we expect to be able to pose in an adequate way

certain basic questions concerning democracy, authoritarianisms and

political transformation or development.

Kellogg Institute Conference on Democracy and Democratization - North and South

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Transcript of Kellogg Institute Conference on Democracy and Democratization - North and South