Page 209 - Communication and the Evolution of Society
P. 209
186 Communication and Evolution of Society
did not understand his ideal contract only as the definition of a
level of justification; he mixed the introduction of a new prin-
ciple of legitimation with proposals for institutionalizing a just
tule. The volonté générale was supposed not only to explicate
grounds of validity but also to mark the place of sovereignty.
This has confused the discussion of democracy right up to the
present day.
I am thinking for one thing of the discussion of council
democracy.1® If one calls democracies precisely those political
orders that satisfy the procedural type of legitimacy, then ques-
tions of democratization can be treated as what they are: as or-
ganizational questions. For it then depends on the concrete social
and political conditions, on scopes of disposition, on information,
and so forth, which types of organization and which mechanisms
are in each case better suited to bring about procedurally legitimate
decisions and institutions. Naturally one must think here in pro-
cess categories. I can imagine the attempt to arrange a society
democratically only as a self-controlled learning process. It is a
question of finding arrangements which can ground the presump-
tion that the basic institutions of the society and the basic political
decisions would meet with the unforced agreement of all those
involved, if they could participate, as free and equal, in dis-
cursive will-formation. Democratization cannot mean an a priori
preference for a specific type of organization, for example, for
so-called direct democracy.
The discussion between representatives of a normative theory
of democracy on the one side and those of a “‘realistic’’ or em-
pirical concept of democracy on the other has gone just as badly.?°
If democracies are distinguished from other systems of domina-
tion by a rational principle of legitimation and not by types of
organization marked out a priori, then the opposing critics are
missing their targets. Schumpeter and his followers reduce de-
mocracy to a method for selecting elites. I find this questionable,
but not because, say, this competition of elites is incompatible
with forms of basic democracy—one could imagine initial situ-
ations in which competitive-democratic procedures would be most
likely to produce institutions and decisions having a presumption-
of rational legitimacy. I find Schumpeter’s concept questionable