Rewriting Democracy: Cultural Politics in Postmodernity by Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth

Author:Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth [Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, International Relations, General
ISBN: 9780754649724
Google: WJAbba8_w04C
Goodreads: 5369877
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2007-01-15T13:29:37+00:00

Democracy, Equality and Difference

Theories of democracy occupy a somewhat contradictory position within critical and postmodern thinking. On one hand, democratic politics represent a cardinal – if only partly realized – element of what has come to be understood as a modern political project. Its core values of equality, reason and freedom are normative in conception and at the same time as they often have been exclusionary in their effects. On the other hand (and this is in large part due to its unrealized nature), democracy has been given a new lease of critical life as a political rationality potentially open to radical revision – especially as a less guilty alternative to the high modern politics of authoritarianism, or the evidently failed politics of the Marxist left (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Mouffe 1992; Trend 1996; see also Hirst 1990; Fraser 1997a).

One key challenge to the idea of equality as distinctly, perhaps dangerously, modern, centers on notions of ‘difference’. The claims of various politics of difference are seen to run counter to democratic assumptions of universalism in respect of legal rights and social entitlements (Young 1990; Gould 1996; Benhabib 1996). The politics of difference seems counter to the unitary notion of ‘the people’ that underpins modern democracy as a political system. Attempts to re-write democratic politics in light of theories of difference tend to engage with issues of equality and social justice on two levels. The first has to do with the subject of politics, and the claim that formal equality within democratic theory ignores differences between individuals and groups, especially along lines of gender, ‘race’, culture, sexuality, disability, and so on. The second concerns the content of politics, and may be summarized in shorthand form as a shift from the politics of distribution to the politics of identity (Benhabib 1996: 4); or what Nancy Fraser terms a move from issues of ‘redistribution’ to those of ‘recognition’ (Fraser 1997b). Principles of equality, if they provide the basis for legal justice, do not speak to those questions of difference which have become so acute for a politics of social justice.

These are important critical arguments, but arguments that can founder on over-simplification. The notion that formal or legal equality within democratic systems fails to recognize difference is now rather commonplace. A tension between equality and difference – while it has provided a key framework for thinking about how feminist claims might or should be advanced (see Phillips 1987) – has become greatly extended and somewhat overworked. Questions of equality and difference harden into unexamined and unhelpful oppositions, especially in the absence of the analysis of power that is so crucial to feminist perspectives. Meanwhile, the politics of redistribution has become an easy target for ‘postsocialist’ critique (see Fraser 1997a; 1997b), even as it disappears from the agenda of ‘postsocialist’ government. Is a principle of formal equality, however, necessarily incompatible with a concern for difference? Are questions of distribution simply separate from questions of recognition?

Charles Taylor has argued that issues of equality and difference originate commonly in a politics of ‘recognition’ (Taylor 1992; 1994).

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