Abstract
Michaele Ferguson’s admirable book, Sharing Democracy (Oxford, 2012) lays out a democratic theory that “prioritizes the active practice of sharing a life together with plural others” (163); the goal is to supplant theories that seek or promote some objective commonality binding democratic citizens to one another. Key to this theory is an argument that the goal of politics (understood as its telos, more than as its outcome) is political freedom. This political freedom is achieved through and felt in experiences of “democratic interagency,” collective action in which we each contribute our distinctive voices and visions to the cacophonous, unpredictable, and unsteerable processes by which groups shape the world together.
Ferguson’s paradigm of the mode of politics she advocates is the protest; Occupy Wall Street is her emblematic example. An Arendtian, Ferguson distinguishes herself from Sheldon Wolin, who sees true democracy as episodic or rare. She hopes, in contrast, for a state of affairs in which something like Occupy is a continuous, not occasional activity. Ferguson provides a powerful account of the freedom to be experienced in Arendtian action, and its human value, and richly plots the conceptual architecture necessary to sustain a commitment to being political in this way. Nonetheless, I disagree with some key points in the democratic theory that she builds from the Arendtian idea. Before I turn to those disagreements, let me lay out the structure of her argument.
Ferguson begins (chapter 1) by explaining why the idea of “commonality” has such a powerful hold on democratic theorists (she includes me here). Many theorists, she argues, take the concept as necessary to the production of a shared identity for a demos, to the emergence of affective ties within the demos, and to the possibility of a form of collective agency grounded in the idea that the “will of the people” is our own will. Then, she argues that an “objective picture of sharing,” which is also a “passive” view of sharing where it is possible to “have some objective thing in common,” often lies beneath the move to rely on an idea of commonality. Building on Arendt, she next argues that we should instead embrace an “intersubjective picture of sharing.” On this picture, we share “when we interact with other people to try to make sense of the world together.” This sharing is active and foregrounds intersubjective interpretive and communicative work.
Having laid out this framework, Ferguson uses it to reconstruct fresh approaches to identity, affect, and agency in order to answer the question of how those phenomena are to be understood in the absence of any concept of commonality. Here she draws on Linda Zerilli’s critiques of feminism’s reliance on a commonality concept and proceeds by means of critical engagement with the work of Robert Putnam, Jürgen Habermas, David Miller, Will Kymlicka, and Charles Taylor. Finally, she pulls it all together with a reading of protests in Egypt and the United States, not only Occupy but also the 2006 immigration protests, to concretize her account of democratic interagency, and of “democracy sense,” which is what she wants above all to cultivate. This “democracy sense” is “the awareness that humans exercise agency together with others in shaping the world in which we live, the understanding that we can imagine the world differently than we do now, and the sense that each of us has that capacity for world-building freedom within us” (11). Among the critiques, the treatment of Robert Putnam’s 2006 Skytte Prize lecture, published in 2007, as “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the 21st Century,” is a stand-out and should be recommended reading for anyone whose work intersects with the impact of Putnam’s research program.
Now for the disagreement. While I agree with Ferguson’s starting point, namely, that we should cultivate and build our politics on what she calls “democracy sense,” and I agree in full with the three prongs of her definition of that idea, in Talking to Strangers, I explicitly disavowed the “commonality” idea (xxi) and took myself to be arguing for a political vision based on something quite like the democratic interagency for which Ferguson argues. Yet as I reflected on her critique, I realized that she had indeed put her finger on a difference between us, one that works its way all the way through our respective arguments, leading ultimately to my view that her picture of democracy is incomplete.
The heart of the matter turns, I think, on a distinction that Ferguson makes between “truth claims” and “political claims.” Truth claims are claims that something is such and such a way, or that “we, the people” are such and such a way. Political claims are claims that we ought to organize our shared life by imagining x or y to be the case, for the time being at least, until we decide to imagine z to be the case instead. Ferguson uses this contrast to build her distinction between the “objective picture of sharing” and the “intersubjective picture of sharing.” For instance, when I argue in Talking to Strangers that the photographs that emerged out of the school desegregation crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, had an epiphanic power to reveal the racialized structures of the American public sphere, I am attributing truth-telling powers to the photographs and am also myself making a truth-claim about the nature of the 1950s public sphere as well as a truth-claim about what Americans shared in the 1950s, namely, a racialized social structure. This means I have an “objective” picture of what Americans shared.
Rather than offering such truth-claims, I should, Ferguson argues, have been offering “political claims”: “hermeneutic claims about how we should make sense of and understand the world we share” (51). Ferguson continues: “Such claims seek the agreement of others, seek to persuade others, and seek to shape the way others see the world that we share intersubjectively” (51). The point is that we should see our political conversations as consisting of “competing claims about how to make sense of the world, rather than truth claims about what simply is.” But what truth-claim—and Ferguson’s book is full of them, see her definition of “democracy sense” for a first example—is not a political claim? For all its difficulties and complexities, we can’t abandon the concept of truth.
Ferguson hopes to replace the concept of truth with a concept of “intersubjective validity.” Thus, she writes, “Things are not objectively common to us. Rather . . . commonness is a quality of the human experience of the world: things are common only when we experience them as shared with other subjects” (47). This leads Ferguson to argue that “the confirmation of others shows that a person’s subjective perception of [for instance] the table has intersubjective validity; the table is not just for her but for all perceiving subjects” (48). She concludes, “Our sense of reality depends upon the presence and confirmation of others” (49).
But what happens to the minority perspective in this account? A key feature of the minoritarian experience is that the reality of that experience is often denied by majorities. Minorities too often find themselves in a position in which the dependence of their sense of reality on confirmation by others would erode their ability to give an account of things that exist or take place but that are not seen by most people. This is perhaps a good way of thinking about what Ralph Ellison is doing with the concept of “invisibility.” That concept asserts the idea that things can exist or occur or “be real” even when they do not receive intersubjective validation. Minority reports are commonly described as “speaking truth to power” precisely because those who are privileged in contexts of structural domination are not in a position easily to perceive, on their own account, the underside of their privilege.
A particularly chilling example of the failure of intersubjective validity as a standard can be found in Elie Wiesel’s Night. Here the source of the problem is utterly different than in Ellison’s treatment of the concept of invisibility. The problem is not the invisibility of structural domination but the incomprehensibility of deliberate genocide. In his memoir, Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize–winner and Holocaust survivor, writes about how the inhabitants of the little town of Sighet treated the one man who kept telling them what was coming as a fool. He was a modern-day Cassandra, pouring out the truth but considered mad. What he described seemed to make sense only outside sanity’s tree-ringed grove, which is to say, outside the bounds of intersubjective confirmation. As a consequence, none of the villagers escaped while escape was possible.
Ferguson would probably respond by concurring that cases of political extremity might require a different orientation to politics than that which she fleshes out in her book. Thus, in her concluding paragraph she writes, “Shifting to a freedom-centered view of democracy has political costs. . . . Given the dominance of an orientation to outcomes, I would err on the side of cultivating our capacity for political freedom. There may be situations, of course, where short-term goals should be prioritized: for example, in matters of life and death, oppression, and human dignity. Yet by and large, I believe democracy would be best served if, like Occupy, we prioritize instead the active practice of sharing a life together with plural others” (163).
The examples Ferguson gives in her conclusion are not, however, merely the stuff of episodic seriousness for which we could have a supplemental politics but the core target of politics generally, that against which we must constantly defend ourselves. The question, then, is what tools we need in order to protect ourselves against those sorts of dangers and vulnerabilities and what sort of democratic theory can both foster the “democracy sense” that Ferguson espouses and take seriously matters of life and death, oppression, and human dignity. The legitimacy of making truth-claims about structural features of our shared socio-economic worlds as part of our political argumentation is critical. On Ferguson’s account, that which is structural—of economies, of social orders—ceases to exist, unless we can convince most people that it does.
Pragmatists—like William James—took beliefs, and (implicitly) truth claims, to be rules for action about which one should always ask what sort of world this truth claim would bring about, and whether we want to live in it. The pragmatist approach to truth thus erases the distinction between truth claims and political claims, but this is not to fall into an entropic relativism. Instead, as the philosopher Robert Brandom puts it in an argument about the nature of inquiry, our concepts (or our “imaginaries,” to use Ferguson’s language) “answer for the ultimate correctness of their application not to what you or I or all of us take to be the case but to what actually is the case.” 1 In other words, we can evaluate the accounts that result from our inquiries as working better or worse, and therefore as succeeding or failing as truths. As Jeff Stout puts it, “Democratic social criticism too is a form of inquiry. Its standards require critical attention to the question of who dominates whom in families, economies, and polities.” 2 Here too our inquiry must “answer for the ultimate correctness of their application not to what you or I or all of us take to be the case but to what actually is the case.”
Such pragmatism might be termed “strong corrigibilism.” This is not merely the idea that in some domains it is very hard to come to know the truth about matters and so we are limited to a perspectivalism that accepts that certain domains of experience will look different from each situated subjectivity and that we must all accept the fallibility of our beliefs about them. Despite the necessary perspectivalism that attends our effort to understand “the demands of excellence, . . . the harm we inflict on others, and . . . our complicity in evils” (Stout), it is also the case that we inevitably participate in inquiry about those matters, and that those practices of inquiry answer ultimately for the correctness of their application to what actually is the case. Our collective ability to test and weigh the truth-claims that are generated through practices of moral inquiry and democratic social criticism should generate a dynamic of constant self- and collective-correction. This is what we are after, and what emerges from the pragmatists’ insights about precisely how truth claims are also political claims.
I may be making too much of Ferguson’s distinction between truth claims and political claims, just as I think she is making too much of it. Perhaps we are closer than I can see. I would be glad to stand corrected.