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
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