1. Of course, as partly mentioned earlier on, these are questions Ferrara asks, and asks himself only indirectly, trying instead to address the conceptual and moral foundations of certain theories on which certain practices are based. He does this bearing in mind both a philosophical awareness of the problems in order to present them correctly, and social theory competence so as to try to at least attempt to provide an answer.
Ferrara’s essay demands many considerations, but I will restrict myself here to just two. I will set them out in Paragraph 3 after briefly summarising Ferrara’s argument in Paragraph 2 , albeit only to the extent it is linked to my observations in Paragraph 3. I will therefore not address nor repeat the transcultural analyses that Ferrara has presented to underline points of agreement and conflict between democracy and other non-Western cultural contexts, but I will assume their validity. I will proceed in this manner to a certain extent because I do not have the competence in the field of social theory to do otherwise and also because my strictly theoretical interest in Ferrara’s essay concerns the organisation of assertions rather than their content.
2. The overall framework within which Ferrara situates his reflections is that of the paradigm of multiple modernities, initially proposed by Shmuel Eisenstadt, according to which there is an important distinction between the phenomena of modernisation and Westernisation[1]. Ferrara contaminates this paradigm with a more conceptual or theoretical-political reflection on what appear to be the aspects that most characterise modern liberal representative democracy.
Furthermore, I believe this paradigm is extremely productive, especially since it sweeps away a diehard fallacy, and one I have always found toxic, according to which, in elaborating modern patterns of political association, the West can “resort to its own internal resources while others must be inspired only by external variables.” [2] This seems to be a vision with a primary defect, placing everything that is not Western in a condition of perpetual minority, or rather even better described as a conditioned minority. It is conditioned, more specifically, to be prepared to listen to the voice of its (Western) master and to the capacity to apply its dictates, thereby achieving adulthood following a path of increasing stages of emulation. It is for this reason that I believe that one of the merits of this approach is that of providing a vision, so to speak, that is effectively less ethnocentric, but above all less “racist” in its premises. It is true that democracy is a success story in the West, but one cannot exclude a priori that this success may be achieved in other locations of the planet and not necessarily following the same identical model that succeeded here, hence by extension from the Western particular to the global universal.
Of course, and this must be admitted without reservations (as Ferrara himself does), democracy is the result of Western history, and starting in a certain part of the world it ended up becoming a shared objective, as well as the form of legitimate government par excellence. It is in this success, however, as Ferrara appears to wish to remind us, that there are the seeds if not of its fall, of its loss of values. The intrinsic praise there is in the word “democracy” and in foreign policies that, right or wrong, wave the flag of democratic commitment, seems to push in a direction that risks creating a distorted perspective; hence “accrediting a vision of democracy as a simple ensemble of procedures that can be exported anywhere.” As Ferrara reminds us, “It is also descriptively inaccurate: Egypt and Tunisia were countries where elections were held — in fact Mubarak was re-elected for the fourth time with an overwhelming majority — and it would be an utter mystery why people would want to risk their lives in order to obtain what they already have, if democracy were to be equated with voting.”
So I believe that this is the first point that should be established, and that Ferrara effectively establishes; real democracy is characterised by the presence of a “spirit of democracy” and (democratic) rituals without a (democratic) political culture amount to little.[3] One will, however, at this point, have to understand whether this spirit needed to achieve democracy is the outcome of just one version of modernity (Western modernity, specifically), or instead “whether a diversity of paths of progression “from decency to democracy” can be reconstructed on the basis of the different religious and civilizational bedrocks upon which decent polities rest.”
Ferrara’s answer, in an extremely synthesised form, is addressed at the second option and states, more or less, the following. There are moments of convergence between democracy and non-Western cultural configurations, consisting in a triple orientation towards the common good, equality and the intrinsic value of individuality. This orientation is then, in a variety of ways, intertwined with an acceptance of pluralism and consensus as the foundation for the legitimacy of institutions, which seem to provide two additional elements on the basis of which some kind of compatibility between democracy and non-Western cultures can be measured. Ferrara adds that there are also moments of dissonance. Firstly, the centrality of the idea of subjective rights such as the prerogative of the single individual to stand against authority and potentially against the entire political community. Secondly, the positive meaning of political battles and conflict, which perhaps “can lead to the better articulation of points of view, to a better public choice, to a selection of a more efficacious leadership, to an invigorating sense of a political community of equals who jointly determine the fundamentals of their shared life.” [4]
In this sense, Ferrara concludes that, “adequate consonances can be found in all historical religions for most of the major components of the “spirit of democracy”: namely, for an orientation to the common good, for a positive notion of pluralism, for a notion of legitimate rule as resting on the consent of the governed, for the equality of the citizens, and for a positive appraisal of individuality ” while “the priority of rights over duties and the valuing of contestation and agonism within democratic life as the two components, within the “spirit of democracy”, for which it is most problematic to find equivalents in non-Western and non-Protestant cultures.”
3. In attempting to develop the two considerations mentioned in the beginning, I wish to first establish a premise. It is difficult for me not to agree with Alessandro Ferrara on these issues, as we both share the spirit animating John Rawls’ Political liberalism[5]. The backdrop for Ferrara’s essay, thus the spirit, seems to me to be the idea that people, albeit divided as far as their religious, moral and metaphysical beliefs are concerned, can find in their respective perspectives the resources needed to adhere to a stable and fair political system. A system therefore founded not on a mere modus vivendi, hence ultimately consequent to a degree of crystallization of power relations, but on reasons of justice in which all that is political is a subset of values towards which the private devotions of each individual converge, creating political loyalty.
In Ferrara’s essay these ideas can, in a sense, find a generalisation at a global level. The very core of the values that substantiate political liberalism can be found within different cultural realities, albeit experiencing “local” declinations and adaptations. Thus multiple modernities. We therefore do not necessarily have to be total liberals in order to achieve democracy. It is sufficient for us to accept liberalism’s political variants, therefore through the introduction of institutional expedients belonging to the liberal tradition and guaranteeing individuals a minimum of fundamental rights, mainly those that can uphold their political cooperation.
Within this framework of general agreements, I would like to now draw attention to two specific points regarding which I believe one can raise two different, and in my opinion, important questions, to a certain extent criticising but also completing Ferrara’s analysis. The first concerns the relationship between individualism and the idea of subjective rights. Ferrara correctly takes into account a series of both Western and non-Western traditions that are sceptical as far as subjective rights are concerned and target “the idea of rights “in general”, as preordained to any legal action and as the “property” of individuals.” Whether it is the Muslim world, which sees rights as an means for compensating damage or an illegality, or the Catholic world, which, in opposition to the Lutheran upheaval, insists on reciprocal benevolence, it is possible to trace here and elsewhere movements and traditions that are suspicious of the centrality of subjective rights.
On this point, however, one is under the impression that Ferrara tends to separate the issue of the relationship between respect for individuality and the importance of subjective rights in a way that is functional to his more general thesis, implicit in the consonance/dissonance dialectics, hence the attribution of value to the individual is able to go hand in hand with a rejection of the idea of subjective rights. I find this thesis questionable, at least in the general form presented by Ferrara, arising, in my opinion, from a lack of clarification concerning the type of rejection envisaged regarding subjective rights, which for certain theories concerns the doctrine of subjective rights, while for others the value-based contents this idea conveys.
Now, if Ferrara’s thesis concerns the idea of subjective rights, it is clear that a thesis in favour of an individual’s value can be separated from the idea of subjective rights without leading to problems. Jeremy Bentham is illustrative in this sense. Although his definition of rights as “nonsense upon stilts” is extremely well-known, and although he may seem an assertor of “individualism without rights”, as far as a justification of public choices is concerned, in reality his moral theory (utilitarian) presupposes the existence of subjective rights and of restrictions to the legislator’s work (and, one should add, it is no coincidence that Bentham is considered the forefather of a specific theory concerning rights, the so-called Interest theory[6]).
It seems to me more controversial that such uncoupling could occur if it is the value-based content implicit in the idea of subjective rights that diffidence is aimed at. In such cases, as are most of the cases quoted by Ferrara in his essay, it seems precisely that the rejection of the idea of subjective rights is the picklock used to dismantle the importance of individuality, or, at least in certain cases, the individual is subordinated to “collective” needs.
Ultimately, my point is that while it is certainly true that there are individualist theories that do not require the idea of subject rights in order to work, it remains, to say the least, doubtful that there can be individualist theories (or at least theories not hostile to individualism) which reject the value-based content of rights. Therefore, if the idea of subjective rights is linked in a more direct and organised manner to individuality’s value, and if in certain cultures there is a rejection of the value-based importance of the idea of subjective rights, perhaps one must accept the need to move individualism to dissonances.
The second point that I believe deserves greater consideration concerns instead the subject of consensus and conflict. In order to explain myself, I will start by quoting Ferrara: “To give just one example, it is one thing for majority rule to operate in contexts where the political culture admits of and even invites fruitful confrontation in the public arena, it is quite another for the same procedural rule to operate in contexts where close majorities up to 60% are perceived as indicative of a pernicious “split” or “rift” within the deliberative body and not fully legitimated in pursuing their ends. In some contexts unanimousness is suspicious, it reeks of hidden oppression or bribery; in other contexts unanimousness is the highly appreciated sign of a successful “mediation”. Thus we can have a distinction between democratic cultures which are tendentially consociationalist and democratic cultures that tend towards a more agonistic view of the process.”
Therefore, it seems possible to state that while in the West we fear excesses in consensus, elsewhere societies split into two or more parts are far more feared. One could in a rather rough and oxymoronic manner summarise this as Bulgaria and the Balkans. If this is true, it seems to me, however, that the author is posing two different questions here; a) Must democracy rely on a certain type of consensus, free and authentic consensus (once again the case of Mubarak’s Egypt in which it is doubtful that this was the case)? b) Must democracy minimise conflict? The first question obviously has a positive answer, the second can also have a negative one, the need for a degree of institutional conflict management notwithstanding (which Ferrara of course mentions).
Whether or not democracy requires free and authentic consensus seems to me a genuinely political-philosophical question, while whether or not conflict enriches or destabilises democracy seems to me instead to be an important sociological-political issue. I am not, of course, using this distinction to raise the issue of the distribution of disciplinary competences, but to pose a question that seems to me of the conceptual kind and thus pertinent to political philosophy. Are we sure that conflict (not the mere possibility of dissent and/or the mere possibility of articulating this dissent at a political level) is so important for defining democracy, to the extent that, in some parts of the planet, the suspicion of conflict is enough to qualify it as a source of democratic dissonance? Once again roughly speaking, are perhaps non-Westerners right on this point? On the other hand, it does not seem to me a coincidence that Ferrara speaks of democratic cultures which are tendentially consociationalist as opposed to democratic cultures that tend towards a more agonistic view of the process, but significantly qualifies both cultures as “democratic”. In brief, is conflict part of democracy or is it only part of one of the forms democracy can assume, whether or not this form is desirable?
4. In conclusion, Ferrara’s essay has numerous merits, but in particular the merit of making us think in greater depth and less superficially about issues linked to democracy and democratisation. In this sense the essay is also a useful exercise against ethnocentric shifts which are, above all, not very accurate or excessively simplistic also at an explicatory level, as well as being not very convincing as far as a justification is concerned. It does, in any case, remain true, or at least it seems so to me, that these are questions that will never be easy to answer in a definitive manner, not so much, as some might suggest, because these are issues imbued with politics and thus subject to easy manipulations, but rather because a country’s level of democracy is also a question of degrees. Between the white of a perfect level of democracy and the black of its total absence, there are a myriad of shades of grey, about which there can be very reasonable controversy. It is for this reason, I believe, that it is necessary for us to try and organise in the best possible way our conceptual processes (and more specifically our ideas concerning individualism, subjective rights and conflict), so they will have the greatest possible grasp of the realities we are analysing. All this while aware that reality is multiform, and above has the unpleasant tendency to escape and thereby remove itself from our understanding.
Translated by Francesca Simmons
Notes
[1]Shmuel Eisenstadt (ed.), The Protestant Ethic and Modernization. A Comparative View, New York, Basic Books, 1968.
[2]D. Sachsenmeier, J. Riedel, S. Eisenstadt (eds.), Reflections on Multiple Modernities. European, Chinese and other Interpretations, Leiden-Boston, Brill, 2002, p. 58).
[3]The subject of the important book by Martha Nussbaum, Emozioni politiche. Perché l’amore conta per la politica, Bologna, il Mulino, 2014
[4]As Stuart Hampshire stated Non c’è giustizia senza conflitto, Milan, Feltrinelli, 2001.
[5]John Rawls, Liberalismo politico, Milan, Comunità, 1994.
[6]On this point see Francesco Ferraro, L’utilità dei diritti, Pisa, ETS, 2013, pp. 151-4.