Democracy is not just confined to the political
domain, but it pervades all spheres of society. Ours is an age of democracy.
Democracy as a form of government, characterized by elections and the
installation of a “representative” government, is becoming a global phenomenon.
The fall f the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and domestic and global
changes in Latin Africa, Africa, and West Asia (the Middle East), have brought
democracy to pleases and shores where it was undreamed of a few decades ago,
giving people a taste of freedom.
The globalization of democracy as a form of more
legitimate representative government has not been accompanied by genuine
efforts to tackle the problems of democracy, such as the lack of equilibrium
between equality and liberty, the dictatorship of the majority, the actual as
well as manufactured disinterest on the part of the so-called citizens not
participating in the elector a process, resulting in as much as 50 per cent of
them not fulfilling their constitutional obligation to vote -- the problems
highlighted by no other than the most thoughtful observer of democracy as a
practice, Alexis de Vaudeville. The challenge, thus, for us now is to widen
the universe of democracy in accordance with the historical changes taking
place in social systems.
In the current discourse on democracy, there is
the lionization of a false tension between freedom and equality. The dominance
of the economics of liberalization makes us believe that democracy as a
political arrangement has nothing to do with the pursuit of welfare and
well-being of people, in the context of a pervasive economic deprivation and
inequality. But advocates of democracy have now to realize and inequality. But
advocates of democracy have now to realize what Robert Dahl argues: “in an
advanced democratic country, the economic order would be understood as
instrumental not merely to the production and distribution of goods but to a
much larger range of values including democratic values”.
Advanced industrial societies today. by the
procedure of democratic politics, have put the issues of welfare and equality
on the defensive. The conservative counter-revolution in these societies led by
protagonists such as Mr. Ronald Reagan and Mrs. Margaret thatcher have led a
political revolt against the welfare state, on the ‘round of its inefficiency
and its negative impact on the entrepreneurial floor of society. In the
political theatre of democratic, societies, the welfare class has become a ‘disposable
subject of political representation and an indispensable subject for political dispensable”.
But in the meantime, in a country such as the United States, not only has the
gap between the rich and the poor widened ‘but even the middle class has fallen
into poverty as a consequence of economic restructuring and de-industrialization.
Thus, people indeed 1’ social support in advanced industrial societies are not
only the people who are the vagabonds but also the middle class who are now “falling
from grace”. In this context, democracy as a political process cannot absolve
itself of the responsibility of enhancing what Mr. Amartya Seen calls the
“functioning and capability” of individuals.
Democracy is not, strictly speaking, confined to
the political dominate but it ought to pervade all spheres of society. A
society consists of several institutions -- family, school, firm, university,
the press, etc. It may very well be that while a society’s polity may be
governed by the formal procedure of democracy, its institutions may function in
a very non-democratic manner, as these violently trample upon the dignity of its
individual members.
Consider for instance, Taylors as an institution
of supervision and management in the workplace. This institution is based upon
a taken-for-granted division between conception and execution and has created a
caste system in the modern workplace between the workers and the managers. But
the new technologies. Which structure the workplace today; require a different
kind of work organization where workers and the managers have to be partners of
innovation and competitive performance?
Similar is the predicament in the case of an
institution like family. As women and children are taking their rights with
pleasure and dignity, there is the challenge of giving an alternative institutional
design to family which will fulfill the needs of a democratic personal order.
The question here is not only democratizing intimate relations, but also
relaxing that the infrastructure of person a life is the foundation of a
democratic social order, the. Challenge now is to realize that intimacy is
democracy.
But democratization of intimate relations requires
a different striving, other than the one with which democracy has so far been familiar,
namely the one of distribution of power But the challenge before democracy,
when we go out of the political system and enter the life world, is to participate
in a new enfranchisement where the conflict is not only between different
social groups but also between different kinds of desire -- conflict between
want an individual perceives as a more desirable desire and a less desirable
desire in one’s life. But a resolution of the conflict of desire cannot be
solved in the ballot box, but in the reflective self of a person. It requires a
distinction between attention and distraction in one’s life.
In fact, as Robert Bell ash and his colleagues
argue in their provocative book. The Good Society that only as a moral quest
democracy can revitalize itself today, since it has taken itself to blind alley
in the subsystems of money and power. As a moral quest. Democracy is a mode of
paying attention to the needs of others and the aspiration of the self.
The limits of politics as seizure of power, and
the need for a moral revitalization of the actors and institutions, is nowhere
more prominent that in the case of the professional order of contemporary
societies. The rise of complex system, as a consequence of revolution in
science and technologies, have made professionals with expert knowledge,
important in the functioning and governing of society. But the increasing
significance of professionals in contemporary societies is not being
accompanied by an institutional effort to arouse the moral consciousness in
them, not to use their knowledge for enhancing power over those who do not know
and make themselves servants of the “common good”.
The distortion that professionalism introduces in the.
Work of democratic pilot. where policy elites are outside the effective control
by the demons”. Can be solved b power politics alone, and it requires a moral revitalization
of the self and the public sphere.
In our age of democracy, nations are heralding
democracy at the very moment in which changes in the international order are
compromising the possibility of an independent democratic nation state. Many of
the problems that individuals within a polity are faced with, today. Be, it
ecological disaster, terrorism, pollution or continued pulverization defy
solution at the nation-state level,’ since those problems neither arise their
nor are they confined t it, but the solution that democracy offers to day to
the problems of global contingencies to the citizens, is, to say the least,
outmoded and ineffective.
The challenges for transformation at the current
euphoric moment of democratic transition is to move from democracy in the
national state to democracy in the transnational sphere. But such a move
requires a reflective moral self which is aware of the limits of nationalism,
and the need for a transnational consciousness as the actor of politics and the
protagonist of democracy.