The gloralisation of democracy as a form of more legitimate
representative government has not been accompanied by genuine efforts to
tackle the problems of democracy, such as the lack of equilibrium between
equality and liberty, the dictatorship of the majority, the actual as well as
manufactured disinterest on the part of the so-called citizens not
participating in the electoral process, resulting in as much as 50 percent of
them not fulfilling their constitutional obligation to vote – the problems
highlighted by no other than the most thoughtful observer of democracy as
a practice, Alexis de Tocqueville. The challenge, thus, for us now is to
widen the universe of democracy in accordance with the historical changes
taking place in social system, as well as in the light of a desired agenda of
social and economic transformation.
In the current discourse on democracy, there is the valorization of
a false tension between freedom and equality. The dominance of the
economies of liberalisation makes us believe that democracy as a political
arrangement has nothing to do with the pursuit of welfare and well-being of people, in the context of a pervasive economic deprivation
Dahl argues: “in an advanced democratic country, the economic
I distribution of goods but to a much larger range of values includi
I would be under-stood as instrumental not merely to the production
democratic politics, have put the issues of welfare and equality on the
Advanced industrial societies today, by the procedure
led a political revolt against the welfare state, on the ground of
protagonists such as Mr. Ronald Reagan and Mrs. Margaret Thatcher have
In the political theatre of democratic societies, the welfare class has
inefficiency and its negative impact on the entrepreneurial floor of society.
democratic values.”
defensive. The conservative counter-revolution in these societies led by
become a “disposable subject of political representation
indispensable subject for political dispensability”. But, in the
and the poor widened but even the middle class has fallen into
poverty as a
a country such as the United State, not only has the gap between the rich
consequence of economic restructuring and de-industrialisation. Thus, people in need of social support in advanced industrial societies are not
only the people who are the vagabonds but also the middle class who are
cannot absolve itself of the responsibility of enhancing what an expert calls
now “falling from grace”. In this context, democracy as a political process
the “functioning and capability” of individuals. The collapse of socialist
economies has not vanished the problem of economic deprivation, a
advocates of democracy have to support programmes of well-being which
contribute to “human capital formation” rather than create perpetual
dependency.
Democracy is not strictly speaking, confined to the political
domain but it ought to pervade all spheres of society. A society consists of
several institutions -family school, firm, university, the press, etc. It may
very well be that while a society’s polity may be governed by the formal
procedure of democracy, its institutions may function in a very non-
democratic manner, as these violently trample upon the dignity of its
individual members.
A case in point is the way Pakistani political parties operate.All
these parties are votaries of democracy, but the way they conduct
themselves inside their own parties is nothing but senseless
authoritarianism. The challenge, thus, now, is to bring the ethos of democracy to the functioning institutions in society. But this is a task
polines, as a competitive bidding for power, cannot perform. It is a task
for reconstructive movements which are animated by a moral desire to
build a good society in the place of systematically produced, pervasive
social immobilisation. Reconstructive movements have to democratise not
only existing institutions, but also place an alternative institutional design
before the citizens, as existing institutions become obsolete in the face of
contemporary changes.
Consider, for instance, Taylorism as an institution of supervision
and management in the workplace. This institution is based upon a taken-
for-granted division between conception and execution and has created a
caste system in the modern workplace between the workers and the
managers. But the new technologies, which structure the workplace today,
require a different king of work organisation where workers and the
managers have to be partners of innovation and competitive performance.
Similar is the predicament in the case of an institution like family.
As women and children are taking their rights with pleasure and dignity
seriously, there is the challenge of giving an alternative institutional design
to family which will fulfil the needs of a democratic personal order. The
question here is not only democratising intimate relations, but also
realising that the infrastructure of personal life is the foundation of a
democratic social order; the challenge now is to realise that intimacy is
democracy.
But democratisation of intimate relations requires a different
striving, other than the one with which democracy has so far been
familiar, namely the one of distribution of power. But the challenge before
democracy, when we go out of the political system and enter the life
world, is to participate in a new enfranchisement where the conflict is not
only between different social groups but also between different kings of
desire—conflict between what an individual perceives as a more desirable
desire and less desirable desire in one’s life. But a resolution of the
conflict of desire cannot be solved in the ballot box, but in the reflective
self of a person. It requires a distinction between attention and distraction
in one’s life.
In fact, as Robert Bellash and his colleagues argue in their
provocative book, The Good Society, that only as a moral quest democracy
can revitalise itself today, since it has taken itself to a blind alley in the subsystems of money and power. As a moral quest, democracy is a mode
of paying attention to the needs of others and the aspiration of the self.
The limits of politics as seizure of power, and the need for a
moral revitalisation of the actors and institutions, is nowhere more
prominent that in the case of the professional order of contemporary
societies, the rise of complex systems, as a consequence of revolution in
science and technologies, have made professionals with expert knowledge,
important in the functioning and governing of society. But the increasing
significance of professionals in contemporary societies is not being
accompanied by any institutional effort to arouse the moral consciousness
in them, not to use their knowledge for enhancing power over those who
do not know and make themselves servants of the “common good”.
The distortion that professionalism introduces in the work of democratic
polity, where policy elites are outside “the effective control by the
demos”, cannot be solved by power politics alone, and it requires a moral
revitalisation of the self and the public sphere.
In our age of democracy, nations are heralding democracy at the
very moment in which changes in the international order are
compromising the possibility of an independent democratic nation state.
Many of the problems that individuals within a polity are faced with,
today, be it ecological disaster, terrorism, pollution or continued
pauperisation defy solution at the nation-state level, since those problems
neither arise there nor are they confined to it but the solution that
democracy offers today to the problems of global contingencies to the
citizens, is, to say the least, outmoded and ineffective.
The challenges for transformation at the current euphoric moment
of democratic transition is to move from democracy in the national state to
democracy in the transitional sphere. But such a move requires a reflective
moral self which is aware of the limits of nationalism, and the need for a
transnational consciousness as the actor of politics and the protagonist of
democracy.