Abstract
Unanimity has a peculiar role in democratic theory. On the one hand, everyone knows that there is no such thing as unanimity in a democracy. Democracy encourages a plurality of opinions, and a situation of unanimous agreement would therefore signal the end of democracy. It only exists in fake democracies. On the other hand, it seems necessary for democratic theory to presume that it exists. Like Rousseau, many political theorists concede that democracy presupposes unanimity at one occasion at least. How else could one expect a minority to abide by the decisions taken by a majority? Only a unified popular will, it is assumed, can lend legitimacy to a democratic state.
In The Time of Popular Sovereignty: Process and the Democratic State, Paulina Ochoa Espejo takes issue with this assumption, and the result is both novel and challenging. The central claim of the book is that by conceiving of the people as a process rather than as an aggregation of individuals, it is possible for liberal democratic theory to escape from its current theoretical deadlocks and, so to speak, “get real.” The people are not, and cannot be, united in the way democratic theorists wish them to be. A people “is always in the making or unmaking” (p. 3). Still, the intention of the book is not to use this insight to undermine liberal democratic theory. On the contrary, the point is “to shore it up” (p. 57). The argument is that by thinking of the people as a process rather than as an aggregation of individuals, it is possible to dissolve the problem of how to lend legitimacy to the state in the absence of a unified popular will. More important still, one can unblock the very thinking that divides peoples into majorities and minorities, and so open up democracy to a more radical process of self-creation and change.
Ochoa Espejo is not the first theorist to address the dilemma of popular unification. The problem is a classic one. It has been discussed by thinkers as Rousseau, Sieyès, Derrida, Lefort and Arendt, and in the last decade it has also attracted much attention among scholars concerned with the challenges of globalization and migration. Indeed, if the concept of the people for a long time was taken to be extraneous to democratic theory, it is increasingly acknowledged that one cannot bracket the constitution of the people from liberal democratic theory. Who “we, the people” are is a political question in its own right, and as such in need of justification. Still, this is where Ochoa Espejo parts company with most liberal democratic theorists. Instead of justifying a certain composition of the people, she targets the nature of the people itself. At issue is not the righteousness of a certain way of drawing the boundaries of the people but the very understanding that undergirds such claims to inclusion and exclusion: What is actually a people?
In common usage, the people refers to a collective identity. It can be ethnic, political cultural, or religious. The idea of the people as process, by contrast, is linked to a strand of philosophical thinking which sees becoming rather than being as the fundamental metaphysical category of the world. This means that instead of looking at the people as a collective identity, Ochoa Espejo conceives of the people in terms of action, or more specifically, as “an unfolding series of events coordinated by the practices of constituting, governing and changing institutions” (p. 13). While this coordination is constrained by previous events, it is not driven by a particular logic. The people as process is self-creative, and must therefore be separated both from mechanical and teleological accounts of the people. What these accounts have in common is that they are “deterministic” (p. 60). They “demand a unified people at a specific moment in time” (p. 61) and thereby fail to take “individual freedom and the indeterminacy of nature” into account (p. 60). Unlike mechanical and teleological accounts, the people as process acknowledges the indeterminacy of actions and decisions. It sees indeterminacy as an essential aspect of freedom itself: “In order to feel that a decision is yours, you must experience the feeling of not having yet decided” (p. 80).
One can see many advantages of adopting a process philosophical outlook on the people. One advantage is that it discloses the intimate connection between legitimacy and stability in the liberal democratic justification of the state. Critics of democracy have often complained that the people is an unruly mass incapable of self-government. The worry is that since the people is ever-changing by definition, a democratic order that gives in to the momentary will of the people will not last for long. It will create instability, and so make its own governance impossible. This book effectively deconstructs this argument. It shows that democratic legitimacy does not necessarily come at the price of instability, and herein resides what I take to be its basic mission: to release democratic theorists from their implicit fear of the people. Step by step, it seeks to convince its readers that a democratic people can thrive and persist without the need for unification.
The strongest part of the book is related to this claim. It comes to the fore in a central passage where Ochoa Espejo illustrates how the demand for popular unification may sharpen the very conflicts that it seeks to forestall (pp. 79–82). The example is about a general election that turns out to be inconclusive, which leads to uncertainty about who actually speaks in the name of the people: the election authorities who decide in favor of the present government or the numerous protesters in the streets who claim that the election has been stolen from them. According to Ochoa Espejo, the problem is that the demand for popular unification steers this situation towards confrontation. It encourages us to decide in favor of the one or the other side, and if the conflict cannot be resolved it inevitably leads to “internal breakdown” and political turmoil (p. 82). If one instead perceives of the people as a process, the situation takes on a new significance. It allows us to see that “both camps are part of the people” and that the experience of confrontation may change the initial goals of both camps and therefore “add something to the institutions that result from such events” (p. 82). The argument is that by taking process into account, “the experience of failure, wrong turns, and dead ends” become less threating to the democratic order (p. 81). They become sources of creativity rather than sources of conflict.
This book is admirable in its endeavor to set up a dialogue between process philosophy and liberal democratic theory. At the same time, the intention to shore up liberal democratic theory with the help of process philosophy still leaves many questions. Ochoa Espejo spends much time explaining the riddles of popular sovereignty, and how a process account of the people may dissolve those riddles. What is less developed is the last part of the book, which spells out the significance of this undertaking for the legitimacy of the democratic state. As it now stands, one cannot help suspecting that a process account of the people has more far-reaching implications for the legitimacy of the state than the author herself is willing to admit. If the whole point of the book is to show that we need neither vote nor agree to create legitimate popular rule, it seems a bit strange that the conclusion insists on being loyal to the liberal project. It is not clear why the people as process should be more closely linked to liberal rather than deliberative, republican, or radical versions of democratic theory. The link now appears to be more presumed than accounted for.
This assumed link is particularly evident in the last chapter, which explains the difference between thinking of the people as a process and as an aggregation of individuals. As Ochoa Espejo points out, the people as process “does not claim that a person has a right to vote in all the decisions that could affect her” (p. 179). It merely says that a person has a right to participate in the process of governing institutions, and participating in such processes “does not require prior enfranchisement” (p. 179). But granted that this is the case, a process account of the people seems to do well without the mechanism of election. Perhaps even without the state. So why insist on the connection?
It takes strong conviction to combat another conviction, and underneath this book lies a compelling claim, namely, that “the people is real, and there cannot be a democracy without a people” (p. 200). It sounds simple, but it takes hard theoretical work to get there. The merit of this book is that it opens the door to an entirely new way of thinking the people in action.