Levy - Against Fraternity Democracy Without Solidarity - Oxford Scholarship

10/18/2017 Against Fraternity: Democracy without Solidarity - Oxford Scholarship
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The Strains of Commitment »
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Against Fraternity
Against Fraternity
Democracy without Solidarity
Chapter: (p.107) Against Fraternity
Source: The Strains of Commitment
Author(s): Jacob T. Levy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198795452.003.0004
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter offers a sceptical view of the search for a theory or source of bounded solidarity underpinning democratic
theory and practice. Political coexistence rests on no deeper underlying commonality, whether cultural or civic, national or
ideological. The myth that it does tends to undermine justice, calling forth attempts to suppress internal pluralism and
dissent, and to sharpen external boundaries and barriers. There is no need to imbue political coexistence with deeper
normative or psychological importance, or to look for hidden unity behind apparent political plurality. A proper
understanding of solidarity underlying political membership shows that we can’t have it, shouldn’t want it, and don’t need
it. Drawing on realist political theory, contestatory democratic theory, attention to political parties, and an adaptation of the
political thought of Augustine, the chapter argues that our understanding of political life should recongize that fellow
citizens are strangers merely facing common circumstances.
Keywords: pluralism, political parties, contestatory democratic theory, Augustine, realist political theory
In this chapter I mean to cast doubt on the search for sources of bounded solidarity among citizens of sovereign states as
a foundation for a just polity.1 I argue that the aspiration to ground democratic politics on solidaristic belonging rests on
philosophical mistakes, ideological illusions, and empirical misunderstandings. That is not, I suggest, reason to worry
about the stability of decent, inclusive, and reasonably just democratic politics. When it comes to the fraternal solidarity
aspired to by many theorists, we can’t have it, and we shouldn’t want it; and those aren’t truly problems, because we don’t
need it.
We are Strangers
I begin with what I take to be a moral truth. The inhabitants of a political community are more like strangers who find
themselves locked in a very large room together than they are like an extended family or a voluntary association united in
pursuit of a common purpose. They are not co-members of some potentially evolutionarily fundamental unit of human
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society, like the band or tribe of 50–500 persons. They are not what nationalists falsely claim co-nationals to be: members
of some pre- or extra-political social whole that can make its will felt through politics, some social soul that wears the state
as a body. They are not the particular subset of humanity united by allegiance to some particular political ideal, at any
level of abstraction; even if most people had sufficient political knowledge and sufficiently coherent views to qualify as
holding an ideal, polities contain a perennial diversity of such ideals, and many political values and norms find adherents
across international boundaries. There is no polity made up entirely of liberals or social democrats or civic republicans,
and each of those is found in more than one polity.
(p.108) Neither are the inhabitants of a polity the demarcated set of persons who share in a common inheritance of
advantages and disadvantages, resources, and relationships. Those sets of persons are infinitely complicated, in a way
that the common invocation of ‘a society’ or ‘a fair system of social cooperation’ (Rawls 1999: 84, italics added) cannot
recognize. For example, the accumulated technological knowledge, productive capital, and economic progress from which
most newborn members of contemporary developed societies can expect to benefit are not bound up with the particular
polities into which they are born, any more than the accumulated environmental damage of human industrialization is.
Neither the United States nor Canada nor Sweden nor France is corporately responsible for the economic tide that has
lifted them all over the course of centuries; individual persons or firms do not benefit from that history qua Americans or
Canadians, and so on, but qua persons born in the portion of the whole world that was so lifted. This means that the
members of any particular polity are not united even by a demarcated ‘society’ to which they owe gratitude for the
advantages to which they are born.2
Rather, fellow citizens are in a fundamental sense moral strangers to each other, united only by the shared circumstances
of inhabiting a common political jurisdiction, and not by any prior relationship that legitimizes, grounds, underlies, or
stands outside of those circumstances. Our moral relationship to one another differs in degree, not in kind, from the
relationship among the strangers locked in a room, or passengers on a bus, or any other collection of persons thrown
together by happenstance. Statehood is a big happenstance, much bigger than a bus; but it is still a happenstance. Or, if
one prefers to think in this way, fellow citizens are not strangers for the same reason and in the same way that fellow
humans are not strangers. The shared circumstance of being subject to rule by the same state is not just the same as the
shared circumstance of living on the same planet, but the difference is, again, one of scale, not of deep moral kind.
Mary Ann Glendon once wrote, in a memorable passage that has become beloved of communitarians of all stripes, that
‘[b]uried deep in our rights dialect is an unexpressed premise that we roam at large in a land of strangers where we
presumptively have no obligations toward others except to avoid the active infliction of harm’ (1991: 77). From this, those
who believe that we have—and ought to recognize—robust obligations to fellow citizens work backward to the conclusion
that either we do not roam in a land of strangers, or that we ought not to think that we do. The standard move is to find a
way to reconceptualize the inhabitants of a political community as something more than strangers to each other.
Indeed, a conviction that runs through not only communitarian and civic republican but also much constitutional, liberal,
and (perhaps especially) democratic political theory is that decent, successful political life requires that citizens have (or at
least believe that they have) special solidaristic (p.109) commitments to one another, commitments that override both
loyalties to smaller groups (ethnic, religious, ideological, regional) and international, transnational, or cosmopolitan
identities. Most fundamentally, states rely for their continued existence on the willingness of some of their citizens to kill
and die on their behalf. More broadly, they rely on a willingness to sacrifice in the pursuit of political cooperation, and that
willingness in turn depends on a substantial degree of horizontal trust that others will do likewise. We need to be willing to
pursue the common good (however that is defined) rather than letting politics devolve into everyone grabbing whatever
they can, whenever they can. We need a shared commitment to justice so that each of us will know that our rights will be
protected even if we happen to be in a minority. We need a sense of belonging together, and not with others, in order to
defuse secession from within and conquest or irredentist capture from without. We need strong sentiments of unity to see
us through times of political turmoil. For those who place emphasis on democratic values in particular, it seems particularly
important to find a shared sense of belonging so that there can be a ‘people’ that meaningfully rules, a people that shares
‘identity, affect, and agency’ (Ferguson 2012: 23).
It is conventional to distinguish accounts of the sources of this solidarity into the civic and the ethnic, or the patriotic and
the nationalistic. I think neither of these distinctions is especially satisfactory. Still, there is some intuitive sense in which
solidarity could be grounded either in a community that precedes and stands apart from the polity, or else in one
constituted in and through political life and political commitments.
The criticisms of the pre-political views—the criticisms of ‘ethnic’ or cultural or nationalist conceptions of membership from
the ‘civic’ side—are too familiar to demand much rehearsal.3 The conceptions of peoplehood involved in them treat
imagined constructions as natural facts that can command allegiance. Now, the mere fact that some social entity is
imagined or constructed does not mean that it is especially plastic, that it is morally unworthy as an object of loyalty, or
that it is a bad thing. But it does mean that it can’t occupy the place demanded of it by normative nationalism, in which it
must be a true fact of the social world independent of and prior to the beliefs of putative members that can generate a
valid criticism of putative members if they are not (or are not sufficiently) loyal to it. Moreover, ethno-cultural conceptions of
peoplehood are difficult to reconcile with full equal membership for those outside the relevant group, and they provide
normative reason to press for greater homogeneity in order to engender greater solidarity. Even when the grounds of
membership are cultural and linguistic rather than ethnic or racial, the tight link between shared citizenship and shared
nationality easily slides into unattractive majoritarian identity politics and threats to the liberty, equality of rights, and
equality of standing of nonmembers.
Indeed, members routinely come under such threat, since (at least in the absence of outside injustice) it is their actions
and choices—whom to marry, (p.110) whether to have children or not, how to raise their children, what language to speak,
what norms to follow—that decide whether and how the cultural people will persist. These two central difficulties of cultural
peoplehood interact: if cultural peoplehood really were a simple fact about the social world, if humanity did naturally divide
into relatively immutable nations, then identifying them and perpetuating them would not require nearly so much
boundary-policing or control over putative members. But in fact the cultural unity that is supposed to ground political
solidarity itself takes a great deal of political work to create and enforce.
The difficulties and paradoxes associated with supposedly ‘civic’ conceptions of the sources of solidarity remain less
familiar, though they have by now been analyzed in depth as well (e.g., Yack 1996; Kateb 2008). The idea that what we
members of a political community share is our adherence to a set of ideals and a constitutional order, and that this
constitutes us as a solidaristic people, is almost always a way to obscure an underlying cultural nationalism of one sort or
another. It is we Americans, or we French, who are joined together in this way, not just anyone in the world who happens
to affirm the supposedly shared political values; and the shared commitment does not provide the answer to the question
‘who are these Americans or these French in the first place?’ ‘Constitutional patriotism’ still depends on the prior existence
of a particular patrie. And the supposedly civic conceptions overlay all of this with a doctrine that is difficult to reconcile
with political dissent. The person who does not support [the dominant understanding of] the shared political values is not
merely a political opponent; he or she is, for example, ‘un-American’ or ‘counterrevolutionary’. If the civic understandings
of solidaristic belonging sometimes provide an antidote to pernicious racial or ethnic exclusions within a polity, they are
capable of generating a differently pernicious slide from political disagreement into the charge of disloyalty. It is no more
true that the citizens of a state all endorse the same political beliefs—no matter how vaguely specified—than it is that they
are all ethno-cultural kin.
We are thus left in the following difficulty. We supposedly need to regard each other as something other than strangers in
order to ground a decent and humane political life together, and to justify the boundary between our political lives and
those of our neighbours. But all of the ways of defining ourselves, such that what unites us internally is more important
than what divides us and yet what divides us from our neighbours is more important than what might unite us—racial
kinship, a shared language, common religious, or political beliefs—are artificial. They all require exaggerating both internal
commonality and external differences for political effect, to distort members’ identities and self-conceptions into a closer
match with the firm juridical boundaries of the (extant or aspirational) state.4 Here the state is sovereign, across that line it
is not; so here we must be us, and across that line they are not. And identity policing of this kind is persistently unfriendly
to the (p.111) decent, humane politics we were ostensibly trying to ground in the first place. In order to get the benefits of
treating each other as civic friends, we justify the constant threat of treating each other as enemies. As Michaele Ferguson
(2012: 27–8) puts it, the ‘commonality orientation’ towards the preconditions of democratic politics ‘pathologizes
uncertainty and disagreement, viewing these as threats to democracy […] it cannot tolerate forms of diversity and
disagreement that defy commonality’.
To all of this I would add the concern that there is no non-question-begging reason that we should only care about decent,
or liberal, or just coexistence with our fellow subjects of the same state, and that the aspiration to solidarity almost
intrinsically comes at a cost to just policies with our fellow persons outside the state’s boundaries. By this I do not only
mean such obvious but grave problems as that nationalist and patriotic sentiment can be marshalled in support of war.
Thinking of justice as tightly connected with shared membership is all too compatible with treating non-members outside
the borders as outside of considerations of justice. Guantanamo Bay is a conspicuous example, of course. But consider
too the grave injustices—distributive and otherwise—associated with the policing of borders against immigration. For the
sake of preserving a political community’s sense of mutual belonging that is said to underlie its members’ just and
peaceful coexistence, the poor from elsewhere are turned away with barbed wire and bullets, or live vulnerable extra-legal
lives if they succeed in entering. There is, I think, something especially perverse about justifying the right of states to
unilaterally limit immigration for the sake of a solidarity that is supposed to ground social justice, as if outsiders to the state
are outsiders to the moral category of those owed just treatment. The enthusiasts for bounded solidarity often reason on
the basis of a crisis within democratic states about how citizens view each other; I confess that I see graver moral crises in
the world about how those inside each state treat those outside of it (see also Abizadeh 2008, 2012.)
This is my basis for saying of bounded solidarity as a foundation for decent liberal democratic politics that we can’t have it
and shouldn’t want it. The solidaristic description of what those subject to the same government share is too far from the
truth about our social condition; and in trying to hide or change that truth, states and nation-building projects do too much
real moral damage. In the remainder of this chapter I will argue that this is not a counsel of despair, because we don’t
need it.
The Justice of Babylon
It has been very common not only in contemporary political theory but also in among canonical political philosophers of
the past to claim some foundational (p.112) unity for political society, whether by nature or by common will and choice,
whether pre-political or civic.5 But there is, at least, one important exception: Augustine.
In Jeremiah 29, the prophet Jeremiah tells the Jews held captive in Babylon that God has instructed them to continue to
live their lives: build houses, plant fields, marry, and have children in the place where they now find themselves. ‘And seek
the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the LORD for it: for in the
peace thereof shall ye have peace’ (Jeremiah 29:7). The Israelites are not told to enter into fellow-feeling with their
captors, or to forget that they are in captivity; but the peace of the city is peace for them as well.
While Augustine believed that the City of God offered a true unity of those—living, dead, and angelic—united by a
common love (of God), he denied that worldly cities, real political societies, could do so. The great mass of humanity, the
sinful inhabitants of the City of Man (which encompasses the fallen angels and the living and dead damned), could hardly
truly unite among themselves, each being driven primarily by a love of his or her respective self. Still less could they truly
morally unite with the inhabitants of the City of God with whom they are intermixed in this life. A polity is necessarily
disunited in the most profound way possible: it encompasses the saved and the damned.
In Book XIX of The City of God, however, Augustine draws on the example of the Jews in Babylon in order to deny the
inference mentioned earlier, made by Mary Ann Glendon, from ‘land of strangers’ to ‘no obligation’. While the inhabitants
of the City of God and those of the City of Man cannot combine into any truly morally unified whole in a political city, they
are nonetheless bound together by circumstance, and that circumstance calls forth obligations. They benefit from ‘the
temporal peace which is for the time being shared by the good and the wicked alike’. He calls this ‘the peace of Babylon,’
because it is of this world, where the saved live in captivity for a time. This differs from the ultimate peace available to the
saved in Heaven, but is a genuine temporal good nonetheless (1998: 962). Those who love God know that this world is
not their true destination, but they relate to it as morally responsible travelers should to their means of travel. The saved
regard themselves in their time on earth as ‘a captive and a pilgrim’ (1998: 946); but during the pilgrimage, ‘even the
Heavenly City’ [that is, the community of the saved, part of whose membership is at any time alive on earth] ‘makes use of
earthly peace…and desires and maintains the cooperation of men’s wills in attaining those things which belong to the
mortal nature of man’ (1998: 947). ‘For the time being […] it is advantageous to us also that [those estranged from God]
should have such peace in this life; for, while the two cities are intermingled, we also make use of the peace of Babylon’
(1998: 962).
It seems to me that the value of this account does not lessen in any way if we do not share Augustine’s belief in the
Christian God, or his hopes for the City (p.113) of God. Even in the face of the most metaphysically profound disunity,
even in the face of a kind of moral enmity, we who live in Babylon together make use of its peace together, and ought to
try to cooperate in attaining that peace as best we can. If we do not share his theological commitments, we might not think
that our mutual estrangement has metaphysical significance; we might think that we are never so wholly alien from our
fellow humans as he imagines. We might only be Jews in literal Babylon, not Christians in metaphorical Babylon; but we
could still draw the lesson from Augustine that even radical estrangement is compatible with a shared duty to the peace of
the shared city.
We might even think that our captivity lacks the possibility of later liberation promised both to the Jews and (in Heaven) to
the saved Christians. We might think that our shared journey lacks an emancipating destination. But we could still regard
each other as fellow travellers with a shared responsibility to the means of our travel, as fellow captives in a social world
we did not make or choose,6 with a shared responsibility to its maintenance.7 And our understanding of that peace, of
those responsibilities, ought to be such that it could call forth support even among strangers.
The division of citizens between the saved and the damned is an especially politically problematic one, and not only
because of the moral distance between the two camps. In contemporary terms, each of these groups is a transnational as
well as substate community; we might easily think that Christians in the Roman Empire share a more important
community with Christians in other polities than they do with their fellow citizens. Indeed, Augustine does think that. But
that sense of ‘more important’ does not lead him to advocate secession or irredentism; neither does it lead him to tell
Christians to judge whether they should serve in the military based on the religious identity of Rome’s enemies. The peace
of Babylon and the political-legal order that makes it possible is not to be broken in the pursuit of substate of transnational
Christian unity. (Neither, of course, should it be broken in the pursuit of any political unity of the City of Man.) It has its own
claims on us.
Now, Augustine followed Jeremiah in describing what we achieve in Babylon as ‘peace’; he specifically denied it the
higher word ‘justice’. But this was not at all because justice required solidarity. Augustine makes frequent sardonic use of
a definition of a true republic or commonwealth found in Cicero: it is the affair and property of a people, and a people in
turn is ‘not every assembly of a multitude, but an assembly united in fellowship by common agreement as to what is right
[justice, ius] and by a community of interest’ (1998: 78).
That kind of unity we can never really have, since the inhabitants of the Two Cities live side by side, with some loving God
and others loving themselves; and so we can never have a true people or a true republic. ‘Justice’ is what those united in
such an imaginary republic would pursue, but is conceptually (p.114) independent of the unity. (Being a people, a republic,
or a commonwealth conceptually depends on unity; justice does not.) Rather, Augustine reserves the word for a condition
in which each is rendered their due—including the Christian God. ‘What justice can we suppose there to be in a man who
does not serve God?’ (1998: 952). And this is not to be expected in the fallen world; ‘[t]rue justice […] does not exist other
than in that commonwealth whose Founder and Ruler is Christ’ (1998: 80). Justice is more than we can ever expect on
earth, not because we lack unity, but because justice is so elevated a moral condition that fallen humans cannot reach it
on their own. This, I think, is why David Miller (2012) treats Augustine as a source of a political theory that aims impossibly
high, almost precisely the opposite of the way in which I am using his thought: Miller emphasizes Augustine’s use of the
concept ‘justice’ at the expense of his broader treatment of political life.
I see no compelling reason to follow Augustine in his idiosyncratic usage of ‘justice’. The deformed ‘peace’ that even
members of a robber band seek to maintain among themselves echoes the deformed ‘justice’ Plato identifies in the
equivalent circumstance. Augustine holds that what a human polity offers is sufficiently valuable that Christians are called
to civic participation and service, even as soldiers or judges who risk spilling innocent blood. His strange usage, however,
requires him to characterize the legal system and its officials as only serving peace, when it would have been far more
natural for Romans (as it is for us) to maintain the linguistic connection through ius between judges and a judicial system
on the one hand and justice on the other.8 The rendering to each their due—punishment to the criminal, possession to the
owner, restitution and damages to the injured, payment to the creditor—is for us as for the Romans the core enterprise of
a legal system, and justice is the virtue of that system. Augustine distinguished the true eternal peace of Heaven with the
limited but valuable peace of Babylon; he might easily have done the same with justice. If we can have a peace of
Babylon, a peace shared with strangers, we can have a justice of Babylon, too. Indeed, what Augustine insists on only
calling ‘the peace of Babylon’ is a kind of ‘justice of Babylon’: justice among strangers who take seriously their shared
circumstances without ceasing to be strangers.
This is of course a partial sense of what we mean by ‘justice’, and an advocate of solidarity might emphasize this.
Strangers interacting at arm’s length can—so the objection would go—work out mutually-disinterested reasons for
respecting each other’s negative rights to life and limb, and institutions for the protection of property and enforcement of
contract. ‘Justice’ in the sense usually meant by Hume or Smith thus might be sustainable in the absence of feelings of
affirmative mutual commitment among the citizenry. But what we mean by ‘justice’ is often more expansive than that—
especially since the rise of welfare-state liberalism and social democracy, and since Rawls shifted the philosophical terrain
by arguing for ‘justice as fairness’, but not only since then (Fleischacker 2009).
(p.115) Although I think that the ‘justice’ of life and limb, property and contract is the core meaning of the concept and has
been unduly neglected in some recent philosophy, I do not mean my critique of solidarity to depend on that thought.
Distributive justice, too, is possible among strangers; I do not think it is different in moral-psychological kind from ordinary
justice. There is a common view that treats the preservation of peace and the protection of negative rights as
sociologically and psychologically easy, and distributive justice of various kinds as hard. The better argument seems to me
that provided by Canovan (1996) that liberal negative rights, the rule of law, and social peace rest on a social foundation
of mutual trust in much the same way that redistributive policies do. She takes this to mean that liberal states need, or
benefit from, a sense of national belonging as much as social democracies do, but we might as easily say that social
democracies need it as little as liberal states do. Both, to be sure, rely on norms of trust and reciprocity to some degree,
but these need not extend either to all fellow citizens/nationals or only to fellow citizens/nationals.
The Augustinian, chastened, sceptical view about how little fellow citizens have in common is always difficult for many to
accept, even among those who recognize both the imaginary basis of national or patriotic identity, and the problems with
suppressing internal diversity and exaggerating international difference. Even they commonly dismiss the option of
treating each other as strangers. Augustine’s advice seems too psychologically unlikely; it requires that we be detached
and yet engaged, alienated and yet active. Without some sure way to bind us together, we must fly apart into our interest-
group corners or individual self-interest or worse.
I think this is a mistake, one born in part of theorists’ greater trust in hypothetical guarantees than empirical likelihoods. If
we begin as a people, then (theorists imagine) all of our decisions will be made in a unified spirit and in ways that treat
each other morally well, and so the problem is to find a foundation for that peoplehood. I suggest that we will never have
political stability guaranteed with the certainty of a philosophical proof, and yet wealthy constitutional democracies have a
great deal of political stability and peace to them. While there is perennial injustice even in constitutional democracies (on
more or less any theory of justice), there is a great deal more justice than we should expect if justice had to rest on a deep
political consensus or cultural unity that we have yet to attain.
The theory that members of a political society must have a consensus about justice and/or a shared sense of belonging
that unites them to each other and differentiates them from the rest of the world before they enter into ordinary politics, or
else they will not be willing to make sacrifices for each other’s sake and will not be willing to treat each other justly,
predicts a very different world from the one we inhabit. I don’t mean to romanticize really-existing constitutional
democracies, but only to emphasize that they really do exist, and that (p.116) there is considerable justice in them. There
might be more or less at one time or another, in one democracy or another, but there is never as little as we would
imagine if unity, solidarity, and consensus were the prerequisite to attaining it.
This is partly because procedures to allow us to live with disagreement are a deeper fact of human sociability than
philosophy has traditionally been comfortable acknowledging (Hampshire 2000). Some have thought that this meant
making particular political procedures the objects of consensual allegiance and shared loyalty, but that view rapidly turns
into a variant of constitutional patriotism, demanding a more enthusiastic endorsement of the locally-operative rules than
seems either called for or compatible with dissent. We are capable of cooperating under institutions that we don’t feel
deep allegiance to, that we view as only provisionally and instrumentally useful: the political procedures of Babylon, as it
were. Even without a deep hold on our allegiances, those procedures can help us live with our disagreement; and even in
the face of that disagreement, we are capable of making progress towards justice.
Disagreement and Parties
Citizens of constitutional democracies typically interact with their states’ political processes in a mediated way: through
political parties. Many of them, much of the time, seem to care more intensely about their parties’ fortunes than they do
about the procedures regulating partisan contestation. They might believe in fair play and believe that in a general way
their party ought to play by the really important rules (though they are often quick to think that the other side ‘started it’
when it comes to dirty political tricks, and to excuse their own side on that basis). But they feel a greater passion about
their party than they do about the arcana of electoral law, the choice between parliamentarism and presidentialism, or the
difference between proportional representation and first past the post.
This imbalance of passion of course led early modern republicans to think that factional—partisan—disagreement was
incompatible with republican self-government. What we have found since the eighteenth century is just the opposite;
contestation among organized political parties are apparently a prerequisite for democratic politics in a large modern state.
There are democracies with proportional representation and those without, democracies with independently elected
executives and those without, democracies with monarchs and those without, democracies with judicial review and those
without, democracies with written constitutions and those without; but there is no democracy without political parties.
There is a kind of organized disharmony or disunity that sits at the heart of modern democratic politics, while theorists
(p.117) still struggle to articulate the bases for unity. Moreover, these parties can seemingly violate the basic commitment
to the self-contained unity of the state. There are stable constitutional democracies with secessionist parties, and there
are stable constitutional democracies with parties that belong to transnational assemblies of parties that emphasize
political cleavages across national boundaries.
Empirical political science has been well ahead of normative political theory or philosophy in the study of parties in
democracy (see Stokes [1999] for an overview). There has begun to be some work that takes partisanship seriously as a
part of democratic theory (Rosenblum 2008; Muirhead 2006), alongside some other work that puts disagreement and
contestation at the centre of democracy (Waldron 2000; Honig 1993; Shapiro 2003; Bellamy 2007; Ferguson 2012, and to
a lesser extent Pettit 2012). But the idea of regulated disagreement, of partisan contestation rather than solidaristic
commitment as foundational, has been slow to take hold in other areas of political theory—or in the tacit political theory
often relied upon in political science or political sociology. This is, perhaps, especially surprising given the role that parties
have had in shaping the boundaries of civic inclusion. The expansion of the franchise has routinely very often been driven
by partisan contestation: a winning party enfranchises a pool of voters who it thinks will disproportionately support it:
propertyless white males, African-Americans, the working class, women, eighteen-year-olds, and so on. This has most
often been the party aligned with the group’s underlying political preferences; it has occasionally been another party that
sees the enfranchisement as inevitable and hopes to win political gratitude from the previously excluded. (Think of the
lowering of the American voting age to eighteen under Richard Nixon.) In either case, the franchise has not typically been
extended on the basis of the universalistic solidarity among citizens. Parties, with long time horizons that extend beyond
one parliamentary or presidential term, have used expansions to secure electoral advantage.9
I do not mean to be a Polyanna or Whig about this process. (I am too Augustinian to be a good Whig.) I mean only to point
out that, once political parties took on their modern form in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they
became the vehicles for the expansion of civic inclusion in democratic states. It was a kind of antagonism, not solidarity,
that defined the sphere of membership. Indeed, I think this has been true in more ways than just the expansion of the
franchise. Parties have acted as intermediaries between marginally-included groups (e.g., new immigrant populations)
and the state, providing access to public services and public protection in exchange for electoral support. Those
populations did not have to wait for a universal consensus that they were equal members of a solidaristic whole; party
machines acted long in advance of that consensus. The process was imperfect, corrupt, and exploitative; but the
alternative was exclusion, not a normatively more-attractive mechanism for inclusion.
(p.118) And so, to return to a question from the previous section: this dynamic has applied not only to the protection of
such civil rights as voting but also to the so-called social and economic rights. The electoral dynamic is clear: parties have
reason to secure the long-term loyalty of segments of the electorate by providing them with material benefits. And, while
the growth in benefits may slow or stop, we almost never see them genuinely taken back as a matter of domestic politics;
the party that opposed their creation rarely repeals them once in power. There are occasionally genuine reductions driven
by serious threats to a state’s international fiscal viability, but not by ordinary electoral politics and alternation in power.
Thus, as Robert Dahl (1995) noted long ago, ‘all democratic countries have mixed economies’.
I said in section 4.1 that among the reasons for worry about solidaristic foundations for justice within the state is that they
push against consideration of justice outside the state, philosophically and psychologically. If I am right in the first-order
judgement that immigration barriers and trade restrictions between rich and poor countries are crucial cases of injustice in
the contemporary world, or if for that matter a shortage of international development aid is such a crucial case of injustice,
then it is perverse to seek greater justice by encouraging greater nationalistic solidarity. At this stage one might
reasonably ask how matters are improved by relying instead on partisan contestation, which is after all contestation for
votes among voters and potential voters, that is usually to say, among citizens and potential citizen residents. Where is
the mechanism for taking the just interests of outsiders into account here?
As I emphasized in section 4.2, nothing here is meant to offer guarantees; I think the search for them at the level of
normative theory is misguided. But it remains true that partisan contestation involves a two-level commitment, neither of
which is obviously internationalist or cosmopolitan: first, solidarity of a sort among partisans, and second, commitment of a
drier sort to the procedures and institutions that regulate the contestation. The potential immigrants, potential traders in
poor countries, or potential aid recipients are not constituencies to which parties have any electoral incentive to appeal;
and the commitment to the procedures is state-level just as much as civic patriotism is.
And yet, it seems to me, this two-level character itself marks a relevant difference from solidarity bounded by the nation-
state. To see why, consider the arguments offered by anti-immigration parties and candidates—an obvious place to look
when objecting to the idea of partisan democracy as generating fair treatment of outsiders. It is hardly ever the case that
anti-immigration parties openly argue that immigration should be reduced or stopped for the sake of the party. In the USA,
conservative and Republican critics of immigration have often expressed this thought sotto voce, worrying that the
demographic changes associated with Hispanic immigration will gradually doom Republican electoral prospects. But even
in the case of Republican campaigns built primarily around attacking immigrants and immigration, (p.119) this idea rarely
plays any noticeable part in public argument. Candidates don’t run for office on the platform that immigration is bad for the
Republican Party; they do so on the platform that immigration is bad for the United States. In other words, they do so with
reference to (bad) arguments about the American national community, while making solidaristic appeals to voters qua
members of the national community.
If such appeals are seen as suspect, they could not easily be replaced by appeals to partisan solidarity. The two-level
character of partisan democracy makes naked appeals to partisan interest obviously ugly, whereas the idea of solidaristic
belonging morally whitewashes exclusionary appeals to the supposed interest of the nation-state community as a whole.
To make an appeal in terms of the welfare of the Republican Party is to offer one’s own desire for political power as a
reason to others, in a way that is self-undermining. To make an appeal in terms of the well-being of Americans has the
appearance of moral virtue: patriotism, other-regardingness. Insofar as parties contest for control of the government of a
state, and have to appeal to the electorate as a whole, their public normative arguments are drawn away from their own
narrow interests. Their actions in government may be narrowly partisan, but they face rivals with an incentive to call them
to account for that. ‘Your promotion of your party’s interest is unfair’ counts as a serious criticism; ‘your promotion of our
co-nationals’ interest is unfair’ sounds almost paradoxical against the background of solidaristic beliefs, and is likely to
sound to nationalistic voters like praise. This means, I think, that a diminished belief in bounded solidarity at the level of
the nation-state will not just be replaced with comparably exclusionary membership at the level of the party. This is no
guarantee that partisan democracy will be fair enough to outsiders; but it is reason to suspect that it will be more fair, as
the force of national solidaristic appeals diminishes.
The Contractarian Distraction
The American and French Revolutions took place under the influence of the republican hostility to parties, and an element
of normative opposition to partisanship is perhaps explicable in those countries’ constitutional traditions as stemming from
that source. But the persistent philosophical attraction to a foundational idea of solidaristic unity, and a reluctance to
embrace partisan contestation, seems to me older and more widespread than the American and French republican
traditions.
At the risk of extreme oversimplification: the natural law tradition stemming from Aquinas adapted Aristotle’s naturalism.
Political societies tend towards justice and true community; they naturally express and reinforce an (p.120) underlying
natural social unity. Humans’ natural political-sociability leads to the organization of real political societies, which habituate
us towards and enable us to pursue our true virtuous purposes. The early-modern Protestant transformation of natural law
theory that became social contractarianism did away with the idea that polities or social unity were natural, but retained
the very strong link between a polity and a social unity organized around the pursuit of justice. Indeed, contractarians
foregrounded this emphasis on unity, and laid the intellectual groundwork for our contemporary debates on horizontal
solidarity as a foundation of political life.
This does not mean that social contract theory was consciously a propaganda tool in the hands of centralizing
modernizing states seeking to defeat medieval institutions and their ancient-constitutionalist defenders. Although it is
plausible that Hobbes, Grotius, and Locke in various ways hoped to serve a legitimizing function, they were engaged in
genuine philosophical enquiries. But as I have argued elsewhere (Levy 2009, 2014) there was a powerful fit between the
emerging early modern political form, the Weberian state, and this early modern intellectual school. The unitary state—by
which I mean state officials and the institution of the state itself, not the citizenry—benefits from citizens’ belief that unity is
legitimate, even normatively demanded. It tends to seek ways to encourage that belief (‘One nation, indivisible’). What
contractarianism offers philosophically, the modern state looks for ideologically—using ‘ideological’ in something like a
Marxist sense, though substituting the modern state itself for the capitalist class. Those who govern a state (even a
temporary partisan majority) have a perpetual reason to pretend that a state is solidaristically unified, and to try to
perpetuate the belief that good membership in a polity requires placing the polity ahead of subgroup loyalties or
international sympathies.
I think something like this helps to explain the use of contractarian fictions in democratic societies such as the nationalistic
American Pledge of Allegiance, and the widespread use of a language of universal consent and civic or national solidarity
belied by the partisan and contestatory practices discussed earlier. This is especially true for a state at war or at risk of
war, but the phenomenon is more widespread. From the origin of the American party system onwards, Presidents have
come to office claiming—falsely—that ‘we’ are all Federalists, ‘we’ are all Republicans. Partisan triumph is rhetorically
dressed up as an overcoming of division.
This ideological use of unity, I suspect, reinforces the philosophical prejudice in its favour, a prejudice diagnosed in
different ways by the sceptical or ‘realist’ liberal school and by agonistic democratic theorists (Honig 1993; Williams 2005;
Galston 2010; Levy Forthcoming). Neither social contract philosophy or its contemporary neo-Kantian offshoots is mere
ideology, but they fit into a background narrative about the shape of the social world that we accept too uncritically.
(p.121) Indeed, I think that my argument in this chapter is an extension of one part of David Hume’s critique of social
contract theory. Hume argued—rightly—that hypothetical or imputed consent never adds the normative force to the
legitimacy of the state or the duty to obey it that contractarianism supposes. Consent is a valid source of obligation, so
those seeking to legitimate the state and ground obligation to it characterized our relationship to it as consensual. There
was no relevantly real or explicit consent, so they described those subject to a state as having implicitly consented or as
being legitimately treatable as if they had consented. This was justified in turn by the usefulness of the state, one way or
another: it kept persons safe from the war of all against all, or protected their property and liberty against the
inconveniences of social life without known and impartial judges of disputes, for examples. Hume’s insight was that this
last step did all the normative work: we are bound to the state because the state is useful. The detour through consent
was a loop that could be snipped out of the path. Good or bad, the argument rested on that last step, and sending it the
long way around via imaginary consent couldn’t improve it.
Much the same is true for arguments for the motivational or normative force of national solidarity. I don’t at all deny that
our social life together requires some degree of moral commitment, some sense of justice, in order to have some chance
of being just. My claim is not that just institutions are likely to arise or be stable out of nothing but calculative self-interest.
Augustine, after all, was making an argument to Christians that they had moral reason to participate in, support, and
protect the Peace of Babylon, not that it would arise naturally and needed no looking after. But at best, it seems to me that
bounded solidarity is a way of describing an unnecessary loop in the path between the beginning sense of justice and the
eventual willingness to pursue just policies: I believe in justice, therefore I feel an affective connection to my co-nationals
and co-citizens, because it is through such affective connection that I will be motivated to pursue just policies. And at
worst, it can be much worse than that: a moral-psychological perversion of the sense of justice into action that promotes
injustice. The strategy of indirection, of trying to cultivate an enhanced sense of justice by cultivating a stronger
commitment to national solidarity seems to me both unnecessary and dangerous.
The possibility of political life amongst strangers whom one knows to be strangers, of politics being one social thing that
has its uses and its rules rather than the social thing that trumps all others, of civil arm’s-length relationships with those
who are neither friends nor enemies (though they are sometimes rivals), of living with disagreement and managing it with
no real hope of reconstituting as based on some deeper agreement: we easily imagine these to be harder than they are.
Conversely, we imagine it to be easier than it is to find some way of redefining those who share our accidental
circumstance of politics as brothers in fraternité. We overlook what works in practice, as the joke goes, because it does
not work in theory. But in so doing, we (p.122) perpetuate the intellectual drive for a unity than is deeper than we should
really hope for.
Acknowledgements
I presented this chapter at the ‘Strains of Commitment’ conference at the European University Institute; the annual
meeting of the Association for Political Theory; the UC Berkeley workshop on moral, political, and legal theory; Duke Law
School; the Centre de Recherche en Éthique; and the University of Tulsa. Thanks to David Miller, Clarissa Rile Hayward,
and Renata Barreto-Montenegro for comments in those settings, and to Diane Shnier, Elisa Muyl, and Kelsey Brady for
research assistance. I thank Keith Banting and Will Kymlicka and two anonymous referees for comments on the
manuscript, and Banting and Kymlicka for generously accommodating this chapter’s contrarianism in the present volume.
Research for this chapter was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada.
Notes
References
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Cambridge University Press.
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Brubaker, Rogers. 2004. Ethnicity without Groups. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
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Notes:
(1.) See Keith Banting and Will Kymlicka’s Introduction to the present volume.
(2.) In an American context, that means that the view espoused by Senator Elizabeth Warren and President Barack
Obama and famously summarized by the sentence ‘you didn’t build that’ is more wrong than right. It is true that the
individual entrepreneur, firm, or wealthy individual benefitted tremendously from the social position of coming into
existence in an already-wealthy world with technological, financial, and infrastructural contributions made by others over
centuries. It is not true that the United States government is even a fair proxy for all of those contributors, to say nothing of
actually itself being the cause of the contributions. In philosophical terms I have in mind both John Rawls’ (1999) idea of a
shared system of social cooperation and David Miller’s (2007) sense of intergenerational national responsibility for social
success and wealth.
(3.) See Brubaker (1996, 2004); I expand on these ideas and their relevance for normative theory in Levy (2000: ch. 3,
2004).
(4.) On the dishonesty involved in this, see Kateb (2008); on ‘extant or aspirational’, Brubaker (1996).
(5.) I offer an extended critique of such doctrines of unity in the history of political thought in a companion paper to this
chapter, ‘Contra Politanism’, available at: <http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2125187> (accessed 1
October 2016). This paper’s sympathetic use of Augustine is meant to complement that paper’s critical account of many
modern political theories.
(6.) NB: This is not at all the same as the Marxist ‘fellow-travellers’.
(7.) I did not come to Augustine through Arendt, and it is only well after I began to think along these lines that I recognized
the overlap with her theory of politics. (p.123) Accordingly, I have nothing to add about the literature on Arendt and
Augustine, but I should note the connection. See Arendt (1996) for the beginning of her reflections on Augustine, though
he remained a constant presence as she developed her mature political ideas. See Arendt (1958) for her fullest account of
the importance and the challenge of thinking of worldly polities in foundationally pluralistic rather than monistic terms.
(8.) As an aside, I also think it is odd within Christianity to think of the human relationship to God in the legalistic terms of
repayment of debt; the Latin caritas and the Greek agape are far more usual, both in different ways suggesting a
generous love very different from the remedial and legalistic virtue of justice.
(9.) We rarely see the reverse phenomenon happening openly: disenfranchising the other side’s voters is risky and invites
severe electoral punishment. The post-Reconstruction Democratic Party in the American South is the only example I can
think of. Disenfranchisement at the margins, for example, the contemporary American Republican Party’s efforts to lower
African-American turnout indirectly through voter identification laws and felon disenfranchisement, are of course possible.
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The Strains of Commitment »

Democracy without Solidarity

Chapter: (p.107) Against Fraternity

Source: The Strains of Commitment

Author(s): Jacob T. Levy

Publisher: Oxford University Press

The Justice of Babylon

Disagreement and Parties

The Contractarian Distraction

Bellamy, Richard. 2007. Political Constitutionalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Brubaker, Rogers. 1996. Nationalism Reframed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ferguson, Michaele. 2012. Sharing Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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