Jane Mansbridge is a professor of sociology and political science at Northwestern University and is a member of the Civic Practices Network Advisory Board. This paper was delivered at the PEGS Conference, February 11-12, 1995.
The conclusion that participation in democratic decisions positively effects citizen character began, I will argue, with the observation of small-scale democratic practice. Until de Tocqueville saw and reported on the effects of actual participation in New England town meetings, no philosopher had made the explicit claim that participation in democratic politics improved the participants. Arnold Kaufman, Carole Pateman and other political theorists of the l960s and l970s developed that claim. The theory flourished with the growing practice of participatory institutions, and passed from the center stage of political theory in part because the practice ebbed, in part because empirical political scientists could not demonstrate any positive effects on individual character of democratic participation.
In l960, Arnold Kaufman wrote that democratic participation -- by which he meant exercising real power over the decisions that affect one -- would improve, generally, one's "powers of thought, feeling and action." Carole Pateman refined the concept of participation so that it required not just some power, but equal power, and concluded that participation of this sort would improve one's sense of political efficacy. Peter Bachrach, with whom I am inclined to agree, did not think any form of participation, even participation with equal power, was automatically good for the participants, but believed rather that we should judge different forms of participation by how much they helped the participants see clearly where their interests lay. Benjamin Barber concluded that participation in direct, not representative, democracies increased an individual's sense of commonality.
The earliest theories about the effects of participation began in America with de Tocqueville, just as our own generation's version began in America with Arnold Kaufman on "participatory democracy." Subsequent theorists promoting the theory of educative effects often assumed that their ideas derived from a long line of such theorizing, stretching farther back, often to the Greeks. In this, however, they were wrong. Although the idea that active participation in political life helps develop human faculties has been in some sense available in Western thought since the fifth century B.C., and is implicit in, or derivable from, certain arguments in Aristotle, Machiavelli and Rousseau, neither Aristotle nor Machiavelli nor Rousseau explicitly made this claim. Conclusions to the contrary stem primarily from our own generation's growing conviction that human development is an important goal in the practice of democracy. That conviction, I believe, built most heavily on our own experiences, although it appropriated threads, often originally meant rather differently, from earlier philosophers.
Aristotle did not say anywhere that participating in the decisions of the state makes an individual develop in character, justice or goodness. The context of his writing implies instead that living under the laws of a good polity helps develop the justice, goodness and proper quality of character that he sought. Both Aristotle and others, including perhaps Solon himself, understood the search for good laws in a relatively static way. Just as human beings can discover the preexisting and eternal natural laws for physics and astronomy, so too can they discover the terrestrial laws under which men can develop as nature intended.
Other sections of Aristotle's Politics demonstrate how the participation of the many in a decision may make the decision better. Again, however, the text says nothing about how that participation may make the many better. Instead, several passages point out that various classes -- e.g. "the very rich" and "the very poor," or the "mechanics, shop-keepers and day labourers" of the city -- are, whether through nature, through habits derived from their positions in society, or simply through their lack of leisure, either not well suited or actually unqualified for political participation. Aristotle did not suggest in these passages that participation in governing might improve these individuals' capacity for governing.
Even in the truncated section of the Politics on education - - of which some, perhaps, is lost -- Aristotle never reached the point of discussing the educative effects of participation itself. This section does raise the tantalizing question, "Which way of life is the more desirable -- to join with other citizens and share in the state's activity, or to live in it like an alien, absolved from the ties of political society?" Although the question's very language seems to require the first of the two choices, Aristotle answers cautiously by first favoring the participative "life of action," then qualifying the meaning of action to permit substituting for active political participation "speculations and trains of reflection followed purely for their own sake."
Aristotle's description of citizenship as "deliberating and judging," and of taking turns in office as involving "considering...the interest of others" provides material from which later thinkers could construct a theory of the educative value of participation. But he himself did not explicitly draw such modern conclusions. Aristotle placed on the intellectual agenda of the western world the idea that the purpose of government was to develop the character of the citizenry. He did not say that this development should or would come about through political participation.
As Hanna Pitkin points out, Machiavelli's "vision of manly Citizenship" placed a high value on internal political conflict, which brought productive results if, as in Rome, it was "ended by debating," with the result of "law," rather than, as in Florence, "by fighting," with the result of "exile and death." In Rome, the people's desire to share power with the nobles was "reasonable;" in Florence, the people's desire to rule alone was "harmful and unjust." Machiavelli's "Citizen image...is neither selfish nor self-sacrificing, but a way to 'give thought to private and public advantages'...."
Pitkin's citations from Machiavelli lead us to conclude that he approved of conflict, debate, law instead of war, accomodating the interests of different groups, reasonable demands, and considering both private and public interests. They do not, in my reading, say anything about what Machiavelli believed happened to citizens in the course of debate.
Hanna Pitkin, however, is a theorist of our generation. She glosses these passages by concluding that Machiavelli's Citizen image "concerns the transformation of narrowly defined self- interest into a larger awareness of one's ties to others, one's real stake in institutions and ideals." Turning to Aristotle, she writes,
one may be reminded of the ancient Greek understanding of man as by nature a polis creature, developing his full potential only in shared responsibility for the nomos by which he lives.I believe this, and similar passages, to be a misreading of Machiavelli, prompted by our generation's concerns for development through political participation.Like Aristotle, Machiavelli suggests that this type of manhood, this development of potential virtu, can only be achieved in actual experience of citizen participation. Only in crisis and political struggle are people forced to enlarge their understandings of themselves and their interests.
Although Machiavelli was undoubtedly concerned with educazione in a broad sense, and although he undoubtedly believed that political experience (e.g. the experience of being overrun by the enemy when one has not held to one's first principles) taught people valuable lessons, he does not seem to have said explicitly that particapation in decision-making, through debate and deliberation, for example, changed the participants either for the better or for the worse.
The Christian revolution, which intervened between Aristotle and Machiavelli, made development of character a matter for Church and God rather than the state. Rousseau, in the eighteenth century, had therefore consciously to reach back to classic ideals to introduce the idea that the character of the regime will affect the character of the citizens.
As far as I can tell, it was Rousseau who first brought into the language of normative political philosophy the phrase, "development of the faculties." The development he was concerned with was moral. Like Aristotle, he thought that the job of the civil state was to make men just. In his own post- Christian understanding, however, he had this justice require an internal moral transformation.
The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they had formerly lacked. Then only, when the voice of duty takes the place of physical impulses and right of appetite, does man, who so far had considered only himself, find that he is forced to act on different principles, and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations. Although, in this state, he deprives himself of some advantages which he got from nature, he gains in return others so great, his faculties are so stimulated and developed, his ideas so extended, his feelings so ennobled, and his whole soul so uplifted, that, did not the abuses of this new condition often degrade him below that which he left, he would be bound to bless continually the happy moment which took him from it for ever, and, instead of a stupid and unimaginative animal, made him an intelligent being and a man.In Rousseau's view, only the civil, or political, state can bring justice to humankind, allowing human beings to act, for the first time, morally, as opposed to simply compassionately, as they often acted in the state of nature. However, the sense of justice arises only with the institution of private property, private property entails inequality, inequality brings with it invidious comparison, and invidious comparison degrades humanity. To combat this degradation, while retaining justice, private property, and the "chains" on natural freedom that the civil state inevitably entails, citizens must come to will the common good. Only when citizens genuinely will what is in the common interest rather than in their own particular interests can the degradation attached to civil life be combated and its moral promise fulfilled. This change in human nature is a matter of "substituting a partial and moral existence for the physical and independent existence nature has conferred on us all." By genuinely willing what is good for all, human beings can take up a new identity as part of a larger whole, and can experience the laws that result not as coercion, but as emanations from the better part of their beings, which Rousseau identified both with reason and with the good of the whole. For this transformation to take place the members of the polity must be, prior to the social contract, "already bound by some unity of origin, interest, or convention." Among other things, the citizens must be relatively equal: "no citzen shall ever be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself." The "habit" of acting according to the common interest must become engraved on the hearts of the citizens.
What generates this transformative development of the faculties? First, good laws. Second, a civil religion that will promote social unity and make each citizen "love his duty." Finally, perhaps, the natural healthy instincts of humanity, which, when not subverted by bad institutions, lead human beings to develop in the way that is best for them. Reading The Social Contract carefully, I see no passage in which Rousseau explicitly says that participation in the making of political decisions will engender or even maintain this transformation.
Rousseau believed deeply in participation. Without participation, the citizens are not free and the state is dead. Moreover, in Rousseau's theory, participation in the sense of willing the laws oneself makes the people who engage in it better. But this willing does not entail deliberation, or any of the things we mean by political participation. It means instead recognizing what is in the common good (for example, the cooperative move in a prisoners' dilemma) and acting upon that recognition. Rousseau opposed deliberation.
Rousseau never stated explicitly that the act of participating itself develops the faculties by directing each individual's will to the common interest. If anything, the causal arrow is reversed. A concern for the common interest causes one to participate. When each cares more for the common happiness than for his own, "every man flies to the assemblies."
One implicit message of the Social Contract, however, strongly supports the idea that political participation itself develops concern for the common good. Rousseau modeled his political ideals not only on Greece and Rome, but on Geneva and the Swiss communes that in his day made their decisions democratically, in direct assembly. To the extent that Rousseau believed that what he preached was practicable, he did so because he had seen it work in Switzerland. He tells us, with a conviction that may derive from first-hand experience, later romanticized:
as long as several men in assembly regard themselves as a single body, ...the common good is everywhere apparent, and only good sense is needed to perceive it. ...When, among the happiest people in the world, bands of peasants are seen regulating affairs of State under an oak, and always acting wisely, can we help scorning the ingenious methods of other nations...? A state so governed needs very few laws; and, as it becomes necessary to add new ones, the necessity is universally seen. The first man to propose them merely says what all have already felt, and there is no question of factions or intrigues or eloquence in order to secure the passage into law of what every one has already decided to do, as soon as he is sure that the rest will act with him. Theorists are led into error because, seeing only States that have been from the beginning wrongly constituted, they are struck by the impossibility of applying such a policy to them.Having seen the people of Geneva, and perhaps also of rural Switzerland, in their local assemblies, Rousseau argued that they would not be likely to be fooled by the demagogic tricks that worry the theorists. Why would they not be fooled? Why, in my terms, would they instead be likely to understand and act upon their real interests? If we stick solely to Rousseau's words, the answer must be that the people's constitution, which combines their laws and their habits, is sound. But such an external source would not be consistent with Rousseau's understanding of education generally -- that although a tutor (or legislator) must create the appropriate context, learning itself must come from within.
To achieve moral liberty one must prescribe a law to oneself. Nor would postulating an external source of inner understanding be consistent with the actual experience of face-to-face democracies. Taking a lesson from our own experiences, we can surmise that Rousseau saw and took in, although he did not report, the ways in which the process of meeting face to face under an oak tree or in a town hall reinforces, and perhaps even creates, the habit of thinking often of the common interest. It is less clear that the experience of face-to-face assembly encourages citizens to understand their interests when these differ from the common interest (a condition in which Rousseau's civil government simply would not apply), but even here the process of local assembly democracy affords some safeguards that let citizens withstand the many pressures toward pseudo-consensus. Rousseau's description of meeting under an oak and his underlying theories of morality and education point toward a conclusion on the educative effects of participation that he did not enunciate.
Rousseau's phrase, "the development of the faculties," was to take root and bloom with marvelous and unexpected flowers in the soil of German romanticism. Many of the Romantics took this idea out of its political context, and portrayed individual development as a relatively isolated, spiritual quest, like the quest of Goethe's Faust, which tore the seeker away from his fellow men rather than making of him a Rousseauian being whose fulfillment came only through adopting the common interest as his own.
Wilhelm von Humboldt, who greatly influenced John Stuart Mill, typified this apolitical -- even anti-political -- approach. Humboldt began his early work on the state with the words: "The true end of man...is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole." "Therefore, the object "towards which every human being must ceaselessly direct his efforts, and on which especially those who design to influence their fellow men must ever keep their eyes, is the individuality of power and development." For this there are two requisites, "freedom, and variety of situations."
This individual development, Humboldt believed, proceeded from the crude substance of sensuous perception to the "purest form," which "we call idea." The greater the variety of sensuous perceptions, the richer the resulting form. Humboldt advocated a minimal state because he believed that a minimal state permitted maximum variety, "in which each tries to develop himself from his own inmost nature, and for his own sake." In Humboldt's vision, both the direction and the reason for development derive only from the individual. The community is irrelevant, and the job of the polity is to keep out of the way.
Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, and other German thinkers urged against individualist Romanticism the idea that human faculties were best developed in society. Their work did not, however, argue that the democratic process itself had important effects on human development.
It was Alexis de Tocqueville, writing after he returned from America, who first claimed that participation in the making of democratic decisions developed individual character. De Tocqueville's claim derived not only from the intellectual currents of his time, which were almost obsessed by the development of the faculties, but also from his experience of the New England town meeting -- the same experience of face-to-face democracy that had implicitly inspired Rousseau. "Town meetings," wrote de Tocqueville, "are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people's reach, they teach men how to use and how to enjoy it."
The native of New England...takes part in every occurance in the place; he practices the art of government in the small sphere within his reach; he accustoms himself to those forms without which liberty can only advance by revolutions; he imbibes their spirit; he acquires a taste for order, comprehends the balance of powers, and collects clear practical notions on the nature of his duties and the extent of his rights.What precisely is the character that democratic participation develops? De Toqueville often seems to be arguing that participation develops a conservative character -- practical, incremental, with a taste for order, clear about duties to others and the state, and conscious of the extent or limits of one's rights. Like Rousseau, however, de Tocqueville is also interested in developing commitment to the common good. And unlike Rousseau, he says explicitly that the practice of democracy -- or at least the practice of face-to-face democracy -- helps develop this commitment. He writes that "the passions that commonly embroil society change their character" when they find a vent in township democracy. This change in character derives from a structure of power distributed so as to interest "the greatest possible number of persons in the common weal." De Tocqueville even implies that this process takes place on the national level, for without specifying that the cause is political participation, de Tocqueville claims that in the United States "the interests of the country are everywhere kept in view; they are an object of solicitude to the people of the whole Union, and every citizen is as warmly attached to them as if they were his own."
Not only political participation in township democracy, but also participation in voluntary associations produces an interest in the common weal, for de Tocqueville is thinking of voluntary associations when he writes, "feelings and opinions are recruited, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reciprocal influence of men upon one another."
As for the process by which this transformation comes about, de Tocqueville makes what seems in today's predominantly adversary polity an illogical leap from citizens having an interest in their own affairs to their developing an other-regarding interest in the common good. De Tocqueville is not conscious of this leap because to him a town can be as much one's own as can a personal possession. He writes that a centralized state will accustom a man to "submit," "enervate" him, make him "indifferent to the fate of the spot which he inhabits," and lead him to look upon "the condition of his village, the police of his street, the repairs of the church or parsonage" as things that "do not concern him and are unconnected with himself." Uninvolved in deciding about his polity, such a man will not have "the spirit of ownership nor any ideas of improvement." De Tocqueville's political "ownership," like Mill's later vision of the effects of political participation, is entrepreneurial in spirit, modelled on the experience of a single person with that person's own property. Yet it is grounded in community. It sees no conflict between the individual's and the community's good.
John Stuart Mill, influenced by von Humboldt, de Tocqueville, and by what he later termed a general preoccupation with the "right and duty of self-development," which he thought was "pushed by a whole school of German authors even to exaggeration," was the first to make the effect of participation on individual character a major argument for democracy. Mill published his On Liberty two years before Considerations on Representative Government, where he makes this argument in its fullest form. The two works together indicate both which faculties Mill thought ought to be developed in general and which faculties he thought democratic participation would develop.
As the epigraph for On Liberty, Mill took from von Humboldt the following statement:
"The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument unfolded in these pages directly converges, is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity."Mill argued that liberty produces diverse human development, and that such diverse development is good both for the individual and for society. Against political or social bans on heretical opinions, he wrote that the heretics themselves are not the greatest losers:
The greatest harm done is to those who are not heretics, and whose whole mental development is cramped, and their reason cowed, by the fear of heresy. ...Not that is is solely, or chiefly, to form great thinkers, that freedom of thinking is required. On the contrary it is as much and even more indispensable, to enable average human beings to attain the mental stature which they are capable of. There may have been, and may again be, great individual thinkers, in a general atmosphere of mental slavery. But there never has been, nor ever will be, in that atmosphere, an intellectually active people.In this vision, independent thought leads, through the marketplace of ideas, to truth. As a consequence, society as a whole benefits from liberty. Individuals benefit as well, because the bold and vigorous life is a higher form of life in itself than one of cramped development.
Mill concluded On Liberty by departing from the analysis of the effects of liberty to consider development alone. In this final section, he made for minimal government the same kinds of argument that a few years later he would make for democratic participation. After arguing that people should make their own decisions because doing so produces better outcomes ("there is no one so fit to conduct any business, or to determine how or by whom it shall be conducted, as those who are personally interested in it"), he adds, critically for our discussion, that people should make their own decisions because doing so promotes self- development:
... in many cases, though individuals may not do the particular thing so well, on the average, as the officers of government, it is nevertheless desirable that it should be done by them, rather than by the government, as a means to their own mental education -- a mode of strengthening their active faculties, exercising their judgment, and giving them a familiar knowledge of the subjects with which they are thus left to deal. This is a principal, though not the sole, recommendation of jury trial (in cases not political); of free and popular and local municipal institutions; of the conduct of industrial and philanthropic enterprises by voluntary associations.This passage looks forward to On Representative Government more than it sums up the preceding pages in On Liberty. Its first sentence is completely compatible with the argument that being left alone promotes self-development. Yet the examples in the second sentence -- participating in jury trials, local institutions, and voluntary associations -- do not, as one might expect, illustrate protecting one's "private" realm from the intrusion of the "public." Instead, these examples illustrate the virtues of public participation. They will recur in On Representative Government. Continuing his transition from private to public interest, Mill suggests in the closing pages of On Liberty that in another work he will discuss more fully
the practical part of the education of a free people, taking them out of the narrow circle of personal and family selfishness, and accustoming them to the comprehension of joint interests, the management of joint concerns -- habituating them to act from public or semi-public motives, and guide their conduct by aims which unite instead of isolating them from one another.In these passages, Mill moves within On Liberty itself from advocating minimal government (following Humboldt) to advocating participatory government (following de Tocqueville).
In his promised work, On Representative Government, Mill specifies a little more exactly the three forms of individual development -- virtue, intellectual stimulation, and activity -- that he expects political participation to produce. This triad of categories, borrowed from Benham, had appeared in On Liberty as "[un]selfishness," "comprehension," and "conduct." In On Representative Government, they appear as "the capacities, moral, intellectual, and active." Moral development has to do with caring for the general interest rather than one's selfish interests, intellectual development with originality and cultivation, and active development with energy, courage, and enterprise. In On Representative Government, Mill contends that political participation promotes all three capacities. His argument runs as follows: because it is the most important task of government to promote the development of its citizens, and because the distribution of power has a greater influence on self-development than any other influence except the religious, the ideally best form of government is one in which citizens both have "a voice" in the sovereign authority and, at least occasionally, are "called upon to take an actual part in the government by the personal discharge of some public function, local or general." The way Mill put this is worth quoting in detail:
It is not sufficiently considered how little there is in most men's ordinary life to give any largeness either to their conceptions of labor or to their sentiments. Their work is a routine; not a labor of love, but of self- interest in the most elementary form, the satisfaction of daily wants; neither the thing done nor the process of doing it introduces the mind to thoughts or feelings extending beyond individuals; if instructive books are within their reach, there is no stimulus to read them; and in most cases the individual has no access to any person of cultivation much superior to his own. Giving him something to do for the public supplies, in a measure, all these deficiencies. If circumstances allow the amount of public duty assigned him to be considerable, it makes him an educated man.In this passage, "largeness" means not just any thoughts or feelings extending beyond individuals, but specifically an unselfish concern with the public good. Nor does any form of democratic participation produce these results, but specifically doing something for the public, participating in public functions such as jury duty or parish office. This responsibility for others makes one less selfish.... A benefit of the same kind, [as in Athenian juries and assemblies,] though far less in degree, is produced on Englishmen of the lower middle class by their liability to be placed on juries and to serve parish offices; which, though it does not occur to so many, nor is so continuous, nor introduces them to so great a variety of elevated considerations as to admit of comparison with the public education which every citizen of Athens obtained from her democratic institutions, must make them nevertheless very different beings, in range of ideas and development of faculties, from those who have done nothing in their lives but drive a quill or sell goods over a counter. Still more salutary is the moral part of the instruction afforded by the participation of the private citizen, if even rarely, in public functions. He is called upon, while so engaged, to weigh interests not his own; to be guided, in case of conflicting claims, by another rule than his private partialities; to apply, at every turn, principles and maxims which have for their reason of existence the common good; and he usually finds associated with him in the same work minds more familiarized than his own with these ideas and operations, whose study it will be to supply reason to his understanding, and stimulation to his feeling for the general interest. Where this school of public spirit does not exist, scarcely any sense is entertained that private persons, in no eminent social situation, owe any duties to society, except to obey the laws and submit to the government. There is no unselfish sentiment of identification with the public.
Mill advocated individual development in unselfishness primarily for its effect on government stability, and only secondarily for the good it might do the individual. Although he has sometimes been misinterpreted on this point, Mill's ultimate goal was a social, not an individual one. In this, he departed greatly from von Humboldt.
Mill did not advocate equal power in decisions as the kind of participation that would achieve this educative effect. He was arguing for "a voice" in politics, not an "equal voice.". He believed, for instance, that the "very peculiar circumstances" which made town meetings in New England produce "better results than might be expected" could not be duplicated in England. Rather, Mill believed that the educative effect of participation works through both the vote and public office. Having a vote (not necessarily an equal vote) induces people to come to their own decisions about policy. It is through "political discussion and collective political action that one...learns to feel for and with his fellow citizens and becomes consciously a member of a great community." Taking local administrative office, however, is the "chief instrument" of the public education of the citizens, because in such offices a citizen has to "act for public interests, as well as to think and to speak." Acting produces a greater sense of responsibility than merely reading newspapers and attending public meetings.
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II. The sixties
III. Fading from view
References
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