deliberation and representation: squaring the circle
TRANSCRIPT
Deliberation and Representation: Squaring
the Circle
Keith Sutherland, Department of Politics, University of Exeter
Abstract: This paper argues that the ‘deliberative turn’ in
democratic theory could undermine the very institution
(representative democracy) that it is seeking to enhance, unless
steps are taken to ensure that the sample of citizens chosen to
deliberate accurately reflects the interests and preferences of the
whole political community. The model of representative deliberation
proposed in this paper is, paradoxically, derived from Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. Rousseau is best known for his contempt for political
representation, arguing instead that popular sovereignty cannot be
delegated to representatives without compromising the moral equality
(of legislative right) of all citizens required by the social
contract. This obliged him to propose a system of direct popular
sovereignty that was ideally suited for small political communities
like Geneva or Corsica, and of little relevance to large-scale modern
states.
This paper proposes a radical alternative for the composition of the
sovereign legislature – sortition (random sampling by lot). Although
the mechanism originated in 5th century Athens, it has potential for
application in large modern states. Moreover, unlike electoral
representation, statistical sampling by sortition would not
contravene Rousseau’s strictures on popular sovereignty, so long as1 I am grateful to Dario Castiglione, Robin Douglass, Iain Hampsher-
Monk and the participants at the PSA Deliberative and Participatory
Democracy specialist group conference, Bradford University, September
2012, for comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
1
the resultant assembly also followed his call for inner deliberation
(the silent weighing of arguments, followed by voting). Active
political functions, like policy proposal and advocacy, would be
delegated to the physical branch of government, constituted by
different principles. Although Rousseau considered sortition for the
appointment of magistrates in a democratic government he failed to
consider random sampling as a way of creating a legislature that
would be a ‘portrait in miniature’ of the whole citizenry. A
legislature constituted by sortition would enable deliberative
decision-making without alienation of popular sovereignty, as the
‘collective being’ of the sovereign would be represented [in
microcosm] ‘by himself’ (SC, II:1).
2
Starting in the 1980s, the ‘deliberative turn’ in democracy
studies has shifted the focus from quantity to quality –
theorists now being more concerned with approximating the
‘ideal speech situation’ than ensuring that the political
process is based on an accurate representation of the views
and preferences of the wider political community. Jon Elster,
for example, is content with he acknowledges to be a
‘minimalist’ definition of democracy: ‘any kind of effective
and formalized control by citizens over leaders or policies’
(Elster, 1998, p. 98). Elster is unconcerned as to which
citizens get to do the controlling or whether their views
accurately represent those of the majority of their peers.
This is on account of the disdain of deliberative democrats
for the preference-aggregation model (the old orthodoxy in
liberal democratic theory). As the outcome of deliberation
depends on the ‘forceless force of the better argument’
(Habermas, 1981, Vol.1, p.47), it matters little which
citizens are selected to channel this transcendental reality.2
As Jeffrey Green puts it:
The rationalist promise of deliberation makes the
question of who participates secondary, if not irrelevant . . .
what matters is that decisions fulfill the rationalist
promise of an ideal speech situation, not who
specifically gets to engage in the actual conversation
and who, on the other hand, must remain in a position of
spectatorship. (Green, 2010, p.58, my emphasis)
2 As Star Wars’ Obi-wan Kenobi might have said, ‘may the forceless force
be with you’.
3
Deliberative democrats are actually seeking to return to the
Burkean ideal of the deliberative pursuit of the ‘laws of God
and nature’ (Pitkin, 1967, p. 169). At least Burke accepted
the notion of diverse interests (albeit of an ‘unattached’
nature, not requiring a direct relationship between voters and
parliamentary representatives); Elster, however, is content
with the homogeneous notion of ‘citizen’. If there is an
implicit notion of interests it is the Machiavellian/Marxist
distinction between the interests of the popolo and the grandi,
elected parliaments being nothing but committees for managing
the affairs of the latter.
This paper is not hostile to deliberation, only concerned that
the deliberative turn has the potential to undermine
democratic representation. There is an urgent need to ensure that the
sample of citizens chosen to deliberate reflects the interests and preferences of the
wider political community. The same point could be made regarding
participatory theories of democracy – how to prevent the
process being dominated by self-selected volunteers with the
biggest axe to grind. Deliberation/participation must be
representative and the model of representative deliberation
proposed in this paper is (paradoxically) derived from Jean-
Jacques Rousseau – an author who was contemptuous of the very
notion of political representation and actively hostile to
public deliberation.
In the Social Contract Rousseau makes a clear distinction between
government and sovereignty, insisting that the latter cannot be
represented. The former, however, was a delegated
administrative function: the ‘prince’ could either be the one,
the few, or the many (monarchy, aristocracy or democracy), but
was a mere servant of the sovereign popular assembly. Rousseau
4
insisted that sovereignty remained with the assembly of the
whole people – it cannot be delegated (‘alienated’), or
represented, without compromising the natural freedom and
moral equality (of legislative right) of all citizens required
by the social contract. This presupposed direct democracy,
Rousseau’s insistence that popular sovereignty could not be
alienated leading him to deride representation as a remnant of
the age of feudal ‘barbarism’ (Shklar, 1969, p. 94):
The people of England regards itself as free; but it is
grossly mistaken; it is free only during the election of
members of parliament. As soon as they are elected,
slavery overtakes it, and it is nothing. The use it makes
of the short moments of liberty it enjoys shows indeed
that it deserves to lose them. (Rousseau, 1998, p. 96)
In the (pre-lapsarian) state of nature all men are free and
equal and Rousseau’s concern was to maintain (or, more
accurately, artificially re-manufacture) this after the fall
from grace (the acquisition of possessions) necessitated the
(contractual) formation of society. Political representation
destroys equality as, in the act of election, men alienate the
legislative power to a small political elite. Freedom and
equality being, as he argued in the Discourse on Inequality, the two
sides of the same coin, inequality leads inevitably to
dependency, corruption and enslavement (Hampsher-Monk, 1992,
p. 183).
Rousseau claimed that his direct-democratic proposals were
ideally suited to small communities, such as his native Geneva
(where only a small number of inhabitants possessed citizen
status) or the poor and scantily-populated island of Corsica.
5
How to extend the principle of inalienable popular sovereignty
beyond such small communities was a nigh-intractable problem,
one solution being confederation (about which he said very
little). A federation of thirty-three smaller states is
recommended for Poland, but in general Rousseau viewed
federations as little more than defence leagues.
Another proposal was ‘to make the government site alternately
in each town, and to assemble in them by turns the estates of the
country’ (Rousseau, 1998, p. 93, my emphasis). The latter
proposal has echoes of the classical Athenian principle of
rotation, whereby democracy was characterised as ‘ruling and
being ruled in turn’ (Aristotle, 1988, Book VII, Ch. 3).
Unfortunately Rousseau’s casual suggestion for spatial
rotation (as opposed to the Athenian temporal version) only
merited one sentence in the Social Contract; so those who wish to
construct practical proposals along Rousseauian principles are
obliged to extrapolate beyond the text. I’m all too aware that
this places me in uncomfortable company as practical attempts
to (mis)apply Rousseauian principles have led to the Terror
and the Killing Fields. Rousseau, however, was insistent that
his interest was in practical politics, not just utopian
ideals – hence his acceptance of offers to be ‘legislator’ for
Corsica and Poland (Wokler, 1995, p. 13). My neo-Rousseauian
constitutional proposal is thus offered in the spirit of the
author’s original intentions, although I am more hopeful than
him of an effective outcome.3
3 ‘Let the states of Europe run to their ruin, Rousseau was convinced
that reform was useless and impossible.’ (Shklar, 1969, p. 7)
6
Representation and the General Will
I hold then that Sovereignty, being nothing less than the
exercise of the general will, can never be alienated, and
that the Sovereign, who is no less than a collective
being, cannot be represented except by himself: the power
indeed may be transmitted, but not the will. (Rousseau,
1998, p. 25, my emphasis)
Rousseau’s distinction between ‘power’ and ‘will’ in politics
was derived from his (Cartesian) anthropology which drew a
sharp distinction between the moral (mental) and the physical
domains. Rousseau was well acquainted with Descartes’
philosophy, albeit heavily mediated by Malebrancheian
theology. Rousseau’s Savoyard Vicar in Emile makes significant
use of both Cartesian method and mind-body dualism and
Rousseau ‘develops sophisticated arguments for and from these
Cartesian views’ (Westmoreland, 2012, p. 1), notwithstanding
his overall contempt for metaphysics (Shklar, 1969, p. 71).
Power, to Rousseau, is the property of the physical domain but
the most important faculty of human beings qua moral agents is
free will: ‘the capacity to choose is the most fundamental
human trait, the one that most clearly separates man from the
rest of the animal world’ (Shklar, 1969, p. 57). As soon as
you elect a representative you alienate your own will to
another and thereby lose the freedom that is your natural
right: ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains’
(Rousseau, 1998, p. 5). The subtitle of the Social Contract is
‘Principles of Political Right’, but his book makes no appeal
to the liberal-individualist call to throw off our chains by
reclaiming our ‘natural rights’. The Social Contract ‘shows how we
can live in the chains of our society without compromising our
7
freedom’ (Barker, 1971, p. xxxvi). This involves not the
alienation of our will to that of another (our
‘representative’), but the realisation that our own will is no
different from the ‘general will’, citizens being asked to
decide whether a legislative proposal is:
conformable or not to the general will, which is their own . .
. When, therefore, the opinion opposed to my own
prevails, that simply shows that I was mistaken, and that
what I considered to be the general will was not so. Had
my private opinion prevailed, I should have done something other than I
wished; and in that case I should not have been free.
(Rousseau, 1998, pp. 108-109, my emphasis)
Thus the social contract does not depend primarily on
institutional arrangements, as in Hobbes and Locke, so much as
a cognitive and volitional realignment (Urbinati, 2006, p. 89)
or a ‘positive transcendence of our previous selves’
(Hampsher-Monk, 1992, p. 178). The use of the word
‘transcendence’ is intentional as it indicates the origins of
the general will in seventeenth-century French theological
debates. (Riley, 1988)
Rousseau contrasts the general will with the will of all (the
aggregation of individual preferences) – the role of each
citizen, when voting on the outcome of a legislative proposal,
being to divine the general will rather than to state his own
preference. It is this aspect of Rousseau’s thought (albeit
reformulated by Kant) that deliberative democrats have adopted
as the normative model for their own procedures. But this
being the case it’s unclear why all citizens would (in
principle) need to participate, as a small sample would be
8
expected to vote in a similar manner to the whole. As Nadia
Urbinati puts it:
If issues under the sovereign’s scrutiny presuppose a
true/false inference, why should everyone’s presence be
required? Since reason does not depend on numbers,
everyone does not have to reason in order for the general
will to be detected . . . This means that a few people,
or even one as Kant pointed out, could detect the truth
and give the right answer. (Urbinati, 2006, p. 88)
So, if there is no need for everyone to attend in order to
establish this ‘god’s eye’ perspective, why not elect
representatives? The principal reason is the inevitability of
factional and partial preferences: ‘the practice of [elective]
representation would artificially recreate a multitude of
independent interest-bearers and would make their private will
the law of the state’ (Urbinati, 2006, p. 65). This would
undermine the very moral equality of all citizens that made it
rational for them to enter the social contract in the first
place (ibid.). As Bernard Manin has argued, election is based on
the ‘principle of distinction’ (Manin, 1997, Ch. 3), which
ensures that some animals are a lot more equal than others.
So that rules out preference election for the sovereign
legislature, but if it’s not practical for all citizens to
attend the assembly in person (especially in large extended
states), then why not resort to some form of random sampling?
– establishing what Robert Dahl referred to as a ‘mini-public’
or ‘mini-populus’ (Dahl, 1989). There are two different issues
at stake here from a Rousseauian perspective: 1) epistemic
(consequential) and 2) normative (political equality).
9
1. Epistemic (consequential)
The role of those attending the general assembly is not
so much indicating their personal preference as
registering their opinion as to what is the general will.
When they vote on a legislative proposal, assembly
members are not (supposedly) pursuing their own
interests, but expressing a view as to what is in the
general interest. If decision-making is an epistemic act,
rather than (as in liberal democracy) the registering of
a preference, then there is a wealth of social-
psychological evidence suggesting that the optimum way to
get the ‘right’ decision (epistemically speaking) is to
establish a small but cognitively diverse group of people
(Estlund, 2008; Landemore, 2008; Page, 2007; Surowiecki,
2004). If politics is simply ‘attending to the general
arrangements of a collection of people’ (Oakeshott, 1962,
p. 112), there is no way of knowing in advance what
particular cognitive skills are required, hence random
sampling by lot (sortition) would be the best way of
establishing a sovereign legislature that is a
statistical microcosm of the whole citizen body.
Purloining John Adams’s phrase, such a body would be ‘an
exact portrait, in miniature’ (Adams, 1988, Letter to
George Wythe of Virginia, 1776); in Rousseau’s words, the
‘collective being’ of the sovereign would be represented
[in microcosm] ‘by himself’ (Rousseau, 1998, p. 25).
2. Normative (political equality)
From a normative perspective an allotted sample would not
undermine the exacting requirement for equality
presupposed by Rousseau’s social contract, as all
10
citizens are equally (un)likely to be selected. More
importantly the law of large numbers would suggest it would make little
difference which citizens happened to be included in the sample – the
outcome would be the same. This presupposes a strict
separation of administrative and legislative functions
(along Rousseauian lines) and balanced provision of
‘adequate information’ for the allotted citizen
legislators to consider (Rousseau, 1998, p. 29;
Sutherland, 2012). If the role of the legislative
assembly is restricted to voting up/down legislative
proposals from delegated officials then, so long as the
sampling process is accurate, the sample size large
enough and the discursive input identical, any number of
assemblies would, ex hypothesi, return exactly the same
outcome (the ‘general will’). As Rousseau observed in his
‘Considerations on the Government of Poland’ the liberty
of the individual citizen would be preserved so long as
the general will (common interest) prevailed. If the
assembly were an ‘exact portrait, in miniature’ of the
full sovereign body then such an outcome would involve no
alienation of natural equality or liberty. If anything
those citizens who failed to draw the golden ticket in
the National [political] Lottery would be the lucky ones
as political jury service would no doubt be just as
tedious as its judicial namesake.
Consistency of decision-making in an allotted assembly
presupposes a mandate that is restricted to up/down voting on
legislative proposals from delegated officials. Such was
Rousseau’s proposal, which reserves ‘speaking, proposing,
dividing, and discussing’ to delegated government officials
11
(Rousseau, 1998, p. 106); compare also (Mill, 1991, Ch. 5).
This would be undemocratic in the eyes of modern readers, so
additional provision for democratic policy generation might
well be required (Sutherland, 2008, pp. 157-160), but that is
not the concern of the present paper. Suffice it say that for
the allotted assembly to introduce policy proposals would
involve an alienation of sovereign equality, as the
statistical mechanism that underwrites random sampling applies
to aggregate judgment alone, as opposed to the speech acts of
individual allotted members (Sutherland, 2012). Rousseau’s
primary concern was that the body (or person) who proposes
legislation should be different from the body that passes it
into law: ‘He who frames laws, then, has, or ought to have, no
legislative right’ (Rousseau, 1998, p. 42).
A structural parallel can be drawn here with the principles
established by James Harrington in the Commonwealth of Oceana
(1656), although Harrington viewed the relationship of
legislative innovators and the sovereign people in terms of
the need to balance interests rather than a shared notion of
the common good. In Harrington’s scheme the Senate proposes,
but the popular house, constituted by a mixture of election
and sortition, disposes. Harrington likened this to two
children seeking a way to divide a cake in an equitable
manner:
For example, two of them have a cake yet undivided, which
was given between them: that each of them therefore might
have that which is due, ‘Divide’, says one to the other,
‘and I will choose; or let me divide, and you shall
choose’. If this be but once agreed upon, it is enough:
for the divident, dividing unequally, loses, in regard
12
that the other takes the better half; wherefore she
divides equally, and so both have right. (Harrington,
1992, p. 22)
Although a randomized sample might appear a poor substitute
for the whole citizen body, the opposite is true. One of the
problems with mass democracy is ‘rational ignorance’ (Downs,
1957), whereby individual votes have little causal efficacy:
‘having the liberty to cast [my vote] is roughly as valuable
as having the liberty to cast a vote on whether the sun will
shine tomorrow’ (Hardin, 2003, p. 179). Voters (both in
elections and plebiscites) have no good reason to take the
considerable time and effort required to determine what is the
best policy for the national interest, as their individual
vote makes little difference to the outcome. Rousseau was
suspicious of the rhetorical and strategic use of language
that was characteristic of political debate as it foregrounds
disagreement and ‘would make citizens suspect that the general
interest is not categorically normative’ (Urbinati, 2006, p.
83). Nevertheless citizens still need to be ‘adequately
informed’ (Rousseau, 1998, p. 29) and, given the necessary
facilitation, a small sample of citizens will be more likely
to take the effort to inform themselves if they know that
their vote will carry some real causal power. This would
suggest limiting the size of the randomly-selected assembly to
the minimum necessary to establish the level of cognitive
diversity required for sound epistemic judgment – several
hundred at most.
13
Representation and the Will of All
Rousseau’s contemporaries would have understood the volonté
générale primarily as a secularized version of a religious
notion – the general providence whereby God ruled the world
and intended to save all souls (Riley, 1988). The notion of a
‘common good’, separate from the preferences of les particulairs is
much easier to understand in this context, once secularized
and socialized by Montesquieu and Diderot (Riley, 1988, Ch.4).
Rousseau had a profound, and distinctly Pelagian, faith in
natural religion and his whole oeuvre is best understood in
this light – the Discourses are a secular reworking of Genesis
(the abandonment of Eden and the construction of Babel) and
his remarks on legislators and the creation of new states
follow the Book of Exodus (Wokler, 1995, p. 82).
Nevertheless the general will has, for modern sensibilities,
totalitarian associations – it’s one thing to accept that
one’s views and preferences are those of a minority, but it’s
quite another to learn, alongside Winston Smith, that one is
simply wrong and in need of re-education. It is reassuring
then to understand that Rousseau himself did not rule out
aggregation (in the absence of ‘partial organisations’
[political parties and factions]) as a heuristic device:
There is often a great deal of difference between the
will of all and the general will; the latter considers
only the common interest, while the former takes private
interest into account, and is no more than a sum of
particular wills: but take away from these same wills the pluses and
minuses that cancel one another, and the general will remains as the sum of
the differences. (Rousseau, 1998, p. 29, my emphasis)
14
But if we are going to let private interests back in,4 we need
to ensure that the sample of citizens chosen accurately
reflects the distribution of interests in the larger citizen
body. Random sampling has the added benefit of generating a
microcosm that is proportionately representative. Although
Rousseau made an unfavourable comparison between the will of
the ‘body’ of the people and that of a ‘portion’ (Rousseau,
1998, p. 27), a portion and a (statistical) sample are not the
same thing. A portion of cake may or may not have a cherry on
top, whereas a sample of soup, if properly stirred, will
contain all ingredients in proportion to their presence in the
whole cauldron (otherwise it is not an accurate sample). In
this respect there is no essential difference between the
sample in the ladle and that remaining in the pot. A random
sample of several hundred persons would return an accurate
gender balance, and would also represent political views and
interests in proportion to their prevalence in the wider
public. If the larger society were divided along the
conservative/liberal continuum (say) 60/40, one would expect
4 The meaning of this ‘plus/minus principle’ is disputed, Janusz
Grygienc, for example, arguing that it refers only to the outliers –
if one could eliminate partial associations then ‘the personal wills
of individuals will cancel one another out, while the remaining votes
will express the general will’ (Grygienc, 2013, p. 50). Although this
may respect the principle of the general will/will of all
distinction, Rousseau provides no guidance as to how to implement it
in a non-aggregative manner, ie there is no empirical way to
determine whether citizens are determining the general will or
indicating their own preferences/interests. It would also suggest an
equivalence between the general will and the median viewpoint, which
would be immediately rejected by those who argue for a politics of
principle.
15
the microcosm to be divided in a similar manner. In sum, just
as an opinion poll is held to accurately reflect the
preferences of the whole society, the same would be the case
for a sortition-based microcosm, the added advantage being
that the microcosm would be more likely to make an informed
judgment as it would not be subject to rational ignorance. In
James Fishkin’s words:
a representative microcosm offers a picture of what
everyone would think under good conditions. In theory if
everyone deliberated, the conclusions would not be much
different. So the microcosm offers a proxy for the much
more ambitious scenario of what would happen if everyone
discussed the issues and weighed competing arguments
under similarly favourable conditions. (Fishkin, 2009, p.
194)
Although Fishkin pays lip-service in this passage to the
Habermasian notion of deliberation as ‘good discussion’, his
derivation of the term is not from the German Deliberative Stimme
(deliberative voice) but from the Latin libra (weight), in which
the role of the de-liber-ator is to weigh competing arguments
(Sintomer, 2010, p. 36; Sutherland, 2012). Rousseau’s
preference for silent deliberation (and hostility to
discursive procedures) was derived from his distinctly
protestant faith, according to which the individual only
needed to examine the ‘immortal and heavenly voice’ of his
inner conscience to reveal the truth (Rousseau, 1971, p.
1111). He agreed with Pascal that le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne
connaît point (Riley, 2001, p. 147). Unfortunately this sounds, to
modern secular ears, as little more than an appeal to
uninformed prejudice, hence Fishkin’s insistence that
16
deliberation requires balanced information and the weighing of
competing arguments.
Although Rousseau (and Harrington) sought to insulate the
legislative assembly from discursive input – the tyranny of
the ‘Empire of Opinion’ (Shklar, 1969, Ch.3), modern
deliberative norms presuppose well-balanced argument for and
against the motion under consideration. Whether this would
require randomly-selected decision-makers to participate in
speech acts is a further question, Fishkin insisting (private
communication) that vocal small-group deliberation is a key
element of opinion modification. Perhaps this is on account of
E.M. Forster’s epithet ‘how do I know what I think until I
hear what I say?’ Note, though that Forster coined his quip
during the heyday of behaviourism (that's why Dan Dennett
chose to popularise it), and psychologists and philosophers
(other than Dennett) are now more comfortable with fluffy
terms such as ‘cognition’ or even ‘consciousness’. We are all
perfectly capable of silently communing with our inner selves,
including those who are doubtful as to the divine provenance
of their instinctive intentions.
Trial juries deliberate before returning their verdict, but
this is primarily on account of the judicial requirement for
unanimity. Fishkin relies on carefully trained monitors to
protect the small-group sessions in his Deliberative Polling
experiments from domination by the speech acts of persuasive
or high-status members. Whilst that might be acceptable for a
deliberative opinion poll, not so in the case of a legislative
assembly on account of Juvenal’s little problem of quis custodiet
ipsos custodes? (who shall guard the guards?). This would suggest
that Rousseau’s model of silent inner deliberation followed by
17
voting is the correct one for an allotted legislative
assembly.
Sortition is agnostic as to whether the vote tally of an
allotted assembly indicates the general will or the
aggregation of preferences (the will of all). Deliberative
democrats exhort participants to vote on the basis of the
former, whereas liberal democrats are more disposed towards
the latter. Sortition as a tool is amenable to both
interpretations.
The role of religion
Although the computer sampling techniques that make sortition
the tool of choice for modern advocates of descriptive
sampling were not available to Rousseau, he was fully aware of
rotation and allotment as the natural way to establish the
government in a democracy (Rousseau, 1998, p. 110).
Nevertheless he did not consider any form of sortition for the
legislature, and one can only speculate on his motives. The
rejection of sampling can be partially explained by Rousseau’s
attempt to respect the free will of all citizens – if I did
not directly will a collective political decision then my
liberty has not been respected. But the practical need for
decision outcomes required an educational system that trampled
on the very liberty that it was attempting to preserve. In
Emile, Rousseau advises the tutor to
let [the student] think he is master while you are really
master . . . there is no subjection so complete as that
which preserves the forms of freedom; it is thus that the
will itself is taken captive. (Rousseau, 1920, p. 84, my emphasis)
18
In addition to the blatantly illiberal tone that Rousseau
adopts here, it is also hard to understand what sort of
mechanism could refashion a Cartesian will that is ‘purely
spiritual and wholly inexplicable by the laws of mechanism’
(Rousseau, 1950, p. 29). Will is either free in the counter-
causal sense or it can be explained by psychological
mechanisms. Many philosophers have tried (and failed) to
bridge this gap.
Although God’s will (the original source of the concept of the
volonté générale) ‘is essentially and naturally general; in
Rousseau, men’s [postlapsarian] will must be made general – a
problem he more than once likens to the problem of squaring
the circle’ (Riley, 1988, p. 245). To Rousseau the sense of
public spiritedness presupposed by the general will had to be
cultivated artificially – civilized man otherwise being
motivated by vanity and competitive selfishness (amour propre) –
although amour propre, rightly cultivated, can lead to love of
fatherland and civic virtue. As well as specifying an
educational system that only preserved the forms of freedom,
he also afforded a central place to the role of civic religion
in generating ‘sentiments of sociability’.5 The public emotions
of civic religion (a recent modern example being Danny Boyle’s
celebration of the National Health Service in his opening
ceremony for the 2012 Olympics) need not conflict with private
religious belief, although Rousseau concluded that the
5 Rousseau might well be viewed as the first sociologist of religion:
‘since God is unknowable, religion was simply a matter of
psychological need and social utility. He was a complete agnostic,
but with a difference: although he did not know, he did not care’
(Shklar, 1969, p. 108). One thing that Rousseau and Burke had in
common was a shared belief in the social necessity of religion.
19
universalist and other-worldly claims of Christianity were
incompatible with the needs of the polis. The need for social
cohesion led him to insist that all citizens should put on their
Sunday best and rush eagerly to congregate together in the
assembly. Mass participation in the legislative decision-
making process is important psychologically in order to establish
‘ownership’ of the decision (especially for the dissenting
minority): ‘a second function of participation in Rousseau’s
theory is that it enables collective decisions to be more
easily accepted by the individual’ (Pateman, 1970, p. 27).
Rousseau’s secular – and highly Pelagian – civic religion,
just like the sacred variety, is primarily an instrument of
social control, hence his insistence that all should
participate. The very notion of the general will required an
extraordinary, and entirely illiberal, degree of ‘national
socialization’:
[love for his country] makes up his whole existence; he sees
nothing but his country, he lives only for her; the minute
he is alone, he is nothing, the moment he loses his country
he is no more; if he is not dead, he is worse than dead.
(Rousseau, The Government of Poland, cited in (Hampsher-Monk,
1992, p. 173))
Just like medieval church-going, participation in the assembly
should be compulsory, as citizens will probably need to be
‘forced to be free’ (Rousseau, 1998, p. 18). Whether the
general will is determined or uncovered by the assembly vote
is a contested point (Bertram, 2012; Wyckoff, 2011). However,
irrespective of which side you take in this debate –
democratic or epistemic – the numbers participating would make
no difference to revealing the general will, but would make a
20
big difference to implementing it without having to resort to
the Thought Police.
Carole Pateman is less concerned with the need for civic
education to generate the sentiments of sociability required
for the smooth running of the political system as the
intrinsic educative merit of political participation (in this
respect Rousseau anticipates J.S. Mill and G.D.H. Cole). The
thought police are redundant as ‘each individual is “forced”
through the participatory process into socially responsible
action’ (Pateman, 1970, p. 26). Pateman also charts a ‘third
way’ between deterministic and epistemic interpretations of
the general will by arguing that ‘the law has “emerged” from
the participatory process and it is the law, not men, that
governs individual actions’ (Pateman, 1970, p. 24).
Rousseau’s ideal polity, however, was a society of small,
peasant proprietors – mass participation is simply not
possible in large modern states, and ethnic diversity and
multiculturalism means that there is less chance of a unifying
civic narrative (Goodhart, 2013). We are also rightly
suspicious of the foundational role of the legislator, a
Wizard of Oz-style figure who puts decisions ‘into the mouths
of the immortals’ and ‘can make the gods his oracle’
(Rousseau, 1998, p. 43). But is no reason to share the despair
that Rousseau felt at the end of his life as, notwithstanding
widespread cynicism over our existing political arrangements,
citizens are still prepared to accept the authority of the
outcome of elections, even though their own direct
participation in the process is negligible. If this is the
case for election then, given the necessary education in
statistical representation (Levinson, 2010; Mansbridge, 2010),
21
along with growing evidence that ordinary citizens are capable
of returning decisions that are no more irrational than those
of experts and professional politicians (Fishkin, 2009;
Tetlock, 2005), there is reason to believe that sortive
(sample-based) democracy might eventually achieve a comparable
or even higher level of acceptability than the existing
electoral alternative, without the need for the enforced
collectivism (and suppression of discursive politics) that
Rousseau thought necessary.
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