Democracy, Market and Strategy

Democracy, market and strategy

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Fábio Wanderley Reis I will approach the task of trying to contribute to our seminar in somewhat roundabout way, by presenting some ideas that result from the work I have been doing in the last several years. This will allow me to shift rather naturally, I think, to the discussion of some issues that seem to be central to our theme and that have been touched upon in the documents we have recently exchanged, including those papers or thinkpieces prepared for our conference that I could get hold of up to the moment of this writing. 1 My starting point, insofar as the problems at stake here are ooncerned, was an interest in political authoritarianism, particularly Brazilian authoritarianism. In trying to understand the problems related to political authoritarianism, I became convinced that it is impossible adequately to account for them if we keep too close to the events and give up the aim of achieving a more ambitious theory of change with explanatory power. In the sphere of studies somehow cormected to Latin America, at least two tendencies would seem to run counter to the aim of building such a theory. One is the tendency, which became fashionable among Latin American social scientits (especially those of a Marxist persuasion), to look at Latin American countries and experiences as “peculiar” in a way that invalidated any attempt at analytically relating them to other countries and experiences – particularly the West European models of the so called modernization theory. This tendency, whieh is associated with a certain urgency for “relevance”, resulted in a premature and sterile “contextualization”, and ultimately in an anti-theoretical bias. The other tendency, not unrelated to the first one, has to do with the fluctuation of attractive themes in the eyes of specialists aacording to the fluid circunstances of socio-political life in the region. The latest manifestation of such a tendency can perhaps be seen in the somewhat hasty attempts to grasp and model “the demise of authoritarian regimes” under circunstances in which we have hardly started to cope with “the breakdown of democratic regimes”.1 I do not intend to deny, of course, the potential interest and importance of such attempts; but I do think that one
Prepared for presentation at the seminar on “Issues on Democracy and Democratization: North and South”, Hellen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame, November 14-16, 1983.
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of the crucial conditions for them te be fruitful is that we do not lose sight of the fluidity itself of the general socio-political environment and process in which that seeming “demise” is taking place – and that, all to the contrary, we make of that overall process, with its characteristic fluidity, a theme of explicit concern, trying to grasp the logic at play in it.2 The upshot of all this, it will perhaps be clear, is that we cannot avoid dealing with the problem of the direction of change, in opposition to the irrationalism linked to the anti-evolutionist fad of present day social sciences.3 Of course, there are some quite complicated sides to this problem, above all the one of the extent to which it would be possible meaningfully to address it in a “descriptive” or empirical way and of how such an undertaking would relate to prescriptive, normative or practical concerns. Without getting into the many intricacies of the theme, let me just say at this point that I believe a certain admittedly normative model of an alternative or “anticipated” state to be forcefully derivable from the very definition of the basic concerns of political science – or from the very definition of politics. That would imply that the definition of the subjectmatter of political science itself necessarily involves a critical posture. Of course, this is the point dealt with in my initial memo in terms of the practically problematical character of power relations insofar as they are of concern to our discipline, of the at least potential autonomy of participants in such relations and of the implied requirement that the interests of different participants do count at least potentially so that a political relationship can be seen as such.
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The latter expression is, of course, the title of the well known book edited by Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan a few years ago (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). The former is borrowed from the title of a lecture given by Philippe Schmitter at the Inter-University Centre, Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, on March 31, 1983. It goes without saying that it is not my intention to take Schmitter’s work as an example of the negative features associated with the tendency in question. 2 In what follows, I will leave entirely aside the theme of “authoritarianism” itself, among other reasons because it was the chief concern of a paper I addressed to our study group three years ago, in which I tried to argue for the relevance of some of the general points to be presented below for the diagnosis of authoritarian regimes: “Authoritarianism and Political Development: Proposal of Some Leads for the Study Group on ‘Representatian and Repression’”, ms., 1980. 3 A particularly instructive illustration of the drawbacks of this dominant antievolutionism and of the the culs-de-sac to which it leads is to be found in Perry Anderson’s Lineages of the Abolutist State (London: Verso Editions, 1979). An otherwise brilliant work of scholarship, this book is nonetheless hampered by the need to pay tribute – in a quite inconsistent way, as it turns out – to anti-evolutionism and related fashions. A discussion can be found in Fabio W. Reis, “Change, Rationality and Politics,” presented at the international conference on “Political Science in the Eighties”, held at the Instituto de Estudos Econômicos, Sociais e Políticos de São Paulo (IDESP), São Paulo, November 3-6, 1981. 2

As was also pointed out in my memo, this can be translated into the notion that a certain basic conception of democracy is inherent in the very definition of politics and of political ecience – that democracy, therefore, is not only a practical desideratum, but also an important analytical tool. This suggestion, as also indicated, is taken to an extreme point in a tradition of thought that has Hannah Arendt as an exponential contemporary representative. In Arendt’s thought, power is actually excluded from the sphere of politics, which is seen, following Aristotle, as the sphere of communication among equals. What is involved here, of course, is a certain idealization of the Athenian agora, to which is linked the idea of power as a pre-condition of politics in connection with the fact that it is the subjection of others in the private sphere (the oikos) that allows the private “monarchs” or “tyrants” to gather as equals in the public space and to devote themselves to public affairs.4 The attractive element contained in the insight that builds equality into the very definition of political life seems quite clear. It leads to the idea (taken afterwords by Habermas) that the genuine democratic ideal is, at the limit, the ideal of free debate and persuasion based on the strength of arguments, whose only legitimate outcome would be unanimous agreement. Thus, in contrast to what is suggested by James Fishkin in “More Democracy?” (where unanimity is placed at the same level of majority rule as just another example of different conceptions of democracy),5 the principle would be unequivocally given by free and unanimous agreement, and only the impossibility of relying strictly on this principle for practical deliberation would justify the search for operational ways of translating it. Two such ways are majority rule (where emphasis is laid, from the point of view of the principle, on turning unanimity into something capable of degrees and looking, so to speak, for “more unanimity”) and the rule based on the assumption that better arguments can be presumed to come from some especially qualified people (which is applied in all cases in which authority is presumed to be based on competence, and would have its clearest realization in the figure of the philosopher-king). However that may be, something else is clear: the way in which the egalitarian insight is opposed to the view that has been incorporated into contemporary political analysis to the point of being perhaps its most trivial assumption, namely, the “realistic” view of power, domination, interest struggle and open or potential violence as basic
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See Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Viking Press, 1968) and especially The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958). 5 Cf. James Fishkin, “More Democracy?”, London Review of Books, June 17-30, 1982, p. 6. 3

oharacteristics of politics. Besides figuring in every textbook, this view was also formulated in a quite sharp way in such classics as Carl Schmitt, for instance, to whom, as is well known, the question of friend and foe is central to politics, and the eventuality of an open struggle or fight is a presupposition always present in it.6 We have then the problem of reconciling the attractive egalitarian insight (that can be shown to be somehow contained even in the current textbook definition of politics) with the clear plausibility of the “realistic” conceptions. The extent to which this reconciliation imposes itself can be further appreciated when we realize that Arendt herself, for all her emphasis on the equality and free communication proper to the public space, cannot escape important contradictions. Thus, violence is seen by her as characteristic of the relations between human beings and nature (through the activities of labor and work), whereas politics, as the realm of communication among equals, would have in speech its characteristic tool. But then politics is described as corresponding to the sphere of action (as opposed to labor and work); and if the very word seems te resound with associations that are not germane to the idea of free communication among equals, Arendt herself is explicit in distinguishing the sphere of action and politics not only by free speech in the agora, but also by the “great deeds” accomplished – in war! It thus happens that Athenian political education, Arendt tells us, includes training not only in rhetoric or the art of sppech, but also in the military arts.7 And, of course, the deliberations in the agora itself often result (as in the case of ostracism) in decisions which amount to cutting communication off and resorting to coercion among citizens. We thus have foe and friend, potential or actual violence versus speech and communication – or, to phrase the basic antinomy in terms more suitable to some suggestions to be made below, interests versus solidarity. This antinomy can be seen to present important points of contact with problems that tend to emerge in conneetion with seemingly more “fundamental” problems, namely, those of competing approaches to the problems of a “general” sociological theory. It recognizably underlies, for instance, the point of departure of Talcott Parsons’s theory, in which utilitarianism (in the sense of the axiomatics of calculating agents in search of their own interests) is opposed to the cohesive role of values. In the Marxist fieid, it is also present, though often not clearly perceived or affirmed, in the tension or dialectic hetween the particular and the universal to be found either in the process of class formation (the transition from the “class in itself” marked by divergent subjective interests to the “class for
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Carl Schmitt, Le Categorie del Politico (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1972). See Human Condition, op. cit., pp. 25-7. 4

itself” capable of collective action) or in the problematical balance between the analytic emphasis on interest and conflict, on the one hand, and the normative stress on a rational and harnonious society to be built after the revolution, on the other. At any rate, some conceivable outcomes of the play of the mechanisms involved in that basic antinomy are the following: (1) War, conceivably the celebrated war of all against everyone. (2) The “organic” society, in which solidarity or cohesion would somehow be enforced. We are reminded here of Plato, at least as read by Karl Popper.8 This case would also correspond to the “cybernetic” society that concerns Jürgen Habermas in several of his works,9 and probably also to a society in which – to take some themes stressed in the two memos by Alessandro Pizzorno that were distributed to participants in our conference – surveillance and administrative control were taken to extreme forms. (3) Finally, a third possibility is precisely “pure speech”, or the misconceived idealization of the Athenian agora stressed above. 2 There is, however, an alternative to those three conceptions of the possible outcome of the play of interests and solidarity, one which, moreover, turns out to provide a synthesis of these two concepts.10 I refer to the old idea of the market, which, while unequivocally being the site where everyone seeks the realization of interests, is nonetheless distinguished by the fact that this search is there undertaken under conditions that presuppose the underlying operation of a principle of solidarity and the adherence to effective rules which mitigate the search for interests. That, of course, is the idea behind Weber’s view of the market as lying between and somehow synthesizing the concepts of “community” and “society”. Now, what I have in mind here is a condition with regard to which: (a) We would be recovering the egalitarian ingredients of the notion of market in its most abstract and “depurated” form. Of course, a whole lot
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957). 9 See, for instance, Jürgen Habermas, “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’”, in J. Habermas, Toward a Rational Society (London: Heinemann, 1971). 10 Note that in the three outcomes indicated above, whereas case no. 3 clearly corresponds to the predominance of solidarity and case no. 1 to the predominance of interests, case no. 2 involves a kind of false synthesis between the two, that would be obtained through coercion in either open or subtle forms.
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of predominantly negative associations presently hang from the notion of market, chiefly as a consequence of its role as a crucial economic category and of its thus being at the center of some of the harshest ideological disputes of our time. I would invite you, however, to try and put aside the sense in which the concept is usually taken in such disputes, and to take it in the sense in which (l) it stresses the ideas of contract and free deliberation in transactions and is opposed to such ideas as status and domination; and (2) an oligopolistic market would not be a market. Taken in this sense, which is of course akin to the idea of a perfectly competitive market (where even information would be shared in an egalitarian way), I propose that the notion of market is actuafly logically incompatible with the very idea of a capitalist society, for its realization would of course require strctural and institutional guarantees for it to preserve its egalitarian character, including in a salient way the elimination of social classes however defined. It also follows that, contrary to the usual assumption of an opposition between organizational complexity, “étatization” and “bureaucratization”, on the one hand, and operation of the rnarket, on the other (an assumption that is clearly sound in the terms in which it is usually made), bureaucratization and institutional expansion of the state, rather than being in themselves obstacles to the market, might be seen rather as requisites for its full operation – provided, of course, that the mechanisms and procedures making up the state apparatus ensure at once that this apparatus itself be completely open and “porous”. (b) It would be possible and meaningful to speak of a “political rnarket”, and not only in the metaphorical sense in which this phrase is sometimes used by political scientists to refer to what is usually also called the “political arena”. For what would be at stake in building and maintaining a society distinguished by the above traits would be much more, of course, than merely a question of conventionally so called “economic interchanges”. This proposition is connected, in my view, with revisions to be made in some of the most favored ways of understanding and conceptualizing the relationships between different “spheres” of social reality (to which are pertinent the brief suggestions contained in my previous memo on the confusions regarding the problem of the “autonomy of the political”), and so also the relationships between the various social sciences. Without getting here into the detailed discussion that the theme certainly deserves, let me stress in passing the idea that, just as there is no reason for restricting the notion of interest to an “economic” sphere narowly defined, so there is no reason for restricting the notion of market, as the locus of the play of interests, to that sphere.11 I submit, rather, that
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Actually, looked at from a certain point of view, what is being suggested is a rather old point of convergence in the literature of the social sciences. For some examples 6

the most fruitful way of thinking of the notion of interest involves a conception in which it is demonstrably linked, through relationships of implication, with those of strategy and power taken in a broad and abstract way and quite independently of the specific content of the goals that may happen to be the objects of conflict or cooperation – religious, material or “economic”, “politico”-institutional, of class, race, ethnicity, generation or what not. In other words, politics is pervasive – having to do with the “social basis” of conflicts of whatever nature, as well as the actual or potential foci of solidarity and agglutination that corresponds to them, just as it has to do with their organizational translation at the institutional level.12 (c) It would be possible to sustain that the dialectics between interest and solidarity would, so to speak, be pushed to its logical limits. As I proposed some years ago on the basis of ideas taken from a 1966 article by Alessandro Pizzorno, interest, in the sense of the word with which I am concerned, means nothing else than oneself’s own aims or objectives, “self” referring here to either individual or collective actors. By contrast, solidarity means the sharing of objectives or interests.13 Of course, a
among contemporary authors, besides Talcott Parsons and his “pattern-variables,” take Bert F. Hoselitz emphasis on individualism and the elimination of ascription as general sotial processes in connection with increasing division of labor in Sociological Aspects of Economic Growty (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960); or Barrington Moore’s emphasis on the extension of market relations, with its consequences for the very foundations of social life, as a crucial characteristic of the process of modernization (together with the creation of strong central governments) in Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Becon Press, 1966). Quite recently, and in a formulatian more sharply relevant to my general point, Mancur Olson has written with regard to racial discrimination in South Africa: “The employer who discriminates against workers of a despised group has higher labor costs (...). Similarly, the worker who does not accept the best job irrespective of the group affiliation of the employer essentially is taking a cut in pay. A similar logic applies to individual social interactions of other kinds. The fact that individuals find discrimination costly means that, if individuais are free to undertake whatever transactions they prefer, there will be a constraint on the extent of discrimination.” (The Rise and Decline of Nations [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982], p. 164; first emphasis mine). This book, by the way, is full of suggestions of interest to some central aspects of our general theme, such as pluralism and its seeming tendency to develop into “corporate pluralism.” 12 These ideas are expanded in some of my previous works: “Change, Rationality and Politics”, op. cit.; “Strategy, Institutions and the Autonomy of the Political”, presented at the Rio de Janeiro World Congress of IPSA, August 9-14, 1982; and especially Política e Racionalidade: Problemas de Teoria e Método de uma Sociologia Crítica da Política (Belo Horizonte: Edições da Revista Brasileira de Estudos Políticos, forthcoming). 13 Fábio W. Reis, “Solidariedade, Interesses e Desenvolvimento Político,” in J. Balan (ed.), Centro e Periferia no Desenvolvimento Brasileiro (São Paulo: DIFEL, 1974). Pizzorno’s article is “Introduzione allo Studio della Partecipazione Politica”, Quaderni 7

problem of crucial importance is involved in the scope or range of this sharing, which, seen from another angle, turns out to be precisely the problem of the actual definition of the relevant actors as being either individuals or collectivities of a more or less encompassirg character (or, of course, both). There are many twists here that would deserve a long discussion. But the central idea I want to push forward at this point is the one that the conception of the political market such as proposed would imply, for its full realization, that the dialectics between the emergence and definition of interests and the corresponding constitution of forms of solidarity (of collective identities of different kinds, with, of course, its complex connections to the problem of individual identities) should resolve itself in a condition in which we would have the greatest possible expansion of a basic form of solidarity and its corresponding criteria of equality, so that the play of interests, in a way that is oly seemingly paradoxical, might approach to the utmost degree – through the greatest possible loosening of competing internal solidarities – the limit in which we would have the competition between strictly individual objectives. In this condition, relevant collective objectives or interests would have to do only with voluntary groups or coalitions of a shifting and unstable nature. 3 Now, what is the point of all this? Actually, I think there are several points. Let me rernark initially that what is being suggested – particularly in item c above – may perhaps be brought into a (in a way...) more familiar terrain if we think of Jürgen Habermas’s conception of individuation, which turns out to correspond to individual emancipation and autonomy under conditions in which communícation is not blocked or distorted, but
di Sociologia, 15, 3-4 (July-December, 1966), where he proposes that the interest of an actor means “the action through which he distinguishes himself from other actors, with a view of becoming better off in his relative position in comparison to them. (...) For this action to be possible it is necessary that its results be measurable – that is, liable to being evaluated in terms of better or worse, of more or less – and that the measuring criterion be common to the actor and to those in whose regard he intends to enhance bis position. (...) Therefore, a system of interests contains a system of common evaluations which serves a plurality of actors...” – that is to say, it requires a system of solidarity, even if the objectives shared in such a system have to do only with the conditions allowing the actors to enter the game of comparative advantages. On the other hand, however, the creation of a system of solidarity takes place by reference to the values of a system of interests, by means of the process of affirmation of “equality areas”. In effect, “those who participate in a solidary collectivity place themselves, while members of such a collectivity, as equal with regard to the values of a certain system of interests”. In other words, a system of solidarity is built up through the negation, even if in a minimal area, of the inequalities of a given system of interests. See pp. 252-53 and 256. 8

enhanced.14 Or one might think of Marx in The German Ideo1ogy, where an at once solidary and individualistic utopia appears with clarity, particularly in the well known passage where communist society is vividly described as permitting individuals to do whatever they feel like doing and to act out their individualities in an actually even capricious way, without any non-voluntary element (any element of ascription, to use a category that emerges as particularly suggestive by contrast to the idea of a market in operation) ever restraining his or her choices.15 Note that the condition thus described amounts to laying squarely on the shoulders of individuals as such the decision as to what to make of themselves – that is, ultimately, of defining their basic identity itself. For, since their decision as to what they should do when they see fit is subject to no social constraint at all concerning what they are going to be, they cannot but be “the authors of themselves”, to use a phrase reminiscent of Hannah Arendt. We are thus confronted with an expansion of the sphere of free deliberation and will into the very level of defining one’s identity, which, of course, is an important insight to be kept in mind in a context in which autonomy is a crucial concern.16 Moreover, note also that such a condition can hardly be thought of as involving the mere administration of things, as the phrase

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Besides “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’”, op. cit., see also Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), especially chapters 2, 3 and 4. 15 It is instructive to look at the passage in question of The German Ideology such as it is rendered by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition: according to her, “In the communist or socialist society, all professions would become ‘hobbies’, as it were: there would be no painters, but only people who, among other things, spend their time also paiting; people, that is, who do this today and that tomorrow, who hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, devote themselves to raising cattle in the evening, write critique after dinner, as they see fit, without ever becoming hunters, fishermen, shepherds or critics” (op. cit., p. 118, fn 65; this is certainly not an exact rendering of Arendt’s – or Marx’s – words, since it is translated back into English from my own Portuguese translation of the passaqe in a previous work). The passage is evaluated by Arendt in a quite negative way, for she argues that it shows “socialized men” using their freedom to devote themselves to strictly private and essentially “worldless” activities (hence the connection with hobbies). What she misses, in my view, is the link between the stable exercise of a profession, required by the division of labor, and the maintenance of ascription, and consequently of domination. The idea of a society free of classes and of stable and systematic forms of domination by some people over others would certainly require, at the limit, the eliminatian of the element of ascription contained in the division of labor, however utopian this may turn out to be. 16 “I believe that the idea behind the Kantian idea of freedom is that man should somehow be able to choose himself; to be free not only in the weak sense of acting according to consistent preferences, of whichever level, but also in the stronger sense of having chosen these preferences.” Cf. Jon Elster, Logic and Society (New York: Wiley, 1978), p. 162. 9

taken by Engels from Saint-Simon has it. Rather, politics is, of necessity, well and alive in it. Thus, I contend that the idea of a “political market” provides an abstract “solution’ to the problem of the direction of change that seems adequate for several reasons: (1) It addresses itself straight to the problem of the relationships between interests and solidarity, concerning which I think it is reasonable to expect agreement in that it involves the basic analytical problem of political science (or of the social sciences, for that matter). (2) It does so by obtaining a convergence between two perspectives in political analysis that seem not only both plausible and attractive from different viewpoints, but also, at first sight, at odds with each other. (3) It provides a synthesis of the notions of interests and solidarity which, being analytically compelling, at once grasps some seemingly unavoidable normative ingredients of the great and multifarious tradition of thought of which “democracy” came to be the chief, though polemic, offspring – and the conception of a political market turns out to be not only an analytical tool (in the sense of a standard or ideal type), but also the model of a democratic society when the requirements of the latter are thoroughly thought through. (4) Finally, the recovery of this normative dimension is achieved in such a way as to avoid the utopian elimination of politics either in an alledgedly organic society (which cannot but result in a disguise for totalitarianism), or in an idyllic one of pure speakers who could not, as it turns out, act at all if they were not to betray the standards of their society – and it thus preserves what can also be seen as a “realistic” element. But the perspective from which emerges the theoretical conception of the political market has significant ramifications also at the epistemological level, where that conception acquires, I think, quite solid grounds. I mentioned above Jürgen Habermas’s notion of “individuation” to indicate a certain affinity between this notion (which Habermas links with the idea of rationalization within the sphere of “interaction’, as opposed to “work”, and with the conception of an “anticipated state” of emancipation) and the one of the political market. I am not going to reproduce here even the summary presentation of Habermas’s ideas that I made in my previous memo. But I do think it will be quite helpful with regard to some of the central points I am trying to make to state as briefly
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as possible some of the main criticisms that his ideas seem to me to deserve and the consequences stemming from these criticisms. I apologize for doing so by following quite closely, at times, the wording of a few passages of another paper of mine that some of you may have already read.17 The point is to show what appears to my judgement as the unquestionable failure of Habermas in his central epistemological efforts, that is, his attempt neatly to distinguish between the contexts of work and interaction and thus to establish the grounds for the distinction between different types of rationality or knowledge. This failure can be shown by resorting to two related lines of argument. The first one concerns the decades-long researches of Jean Piaget and his associates in the field of the socio-psychology of intelligence and their consequences for Habermas’s theses. For they show as one of their crucial conclusions the twofold character of logic – the instrument and criterion par excellence, in Habermas, of the technical rationality and interest and of the empirical-analytic sciences. Thus, logic is, on the one hand, the transposition into a virtual or symbolic level of operations that are originally concrete operations, and it therefore necessarily preserves its operational and instrumental characteristic. On the other hand, however, it is intrinsincally constituted and even defined by elements of a social and communicative nature that belong in the intersubjective context of interaction – to put it shortly, the equality, reciprocity and equilibrium of intellectual interchange. Such elements – while permitting one to look at logic as the “morals of thought”, in Piaget’s not at all metaphoric expression – correspond in a very strict way to the model of “competent communication” that Habermas links to the emancipatory interest and visualizes in the “ideal speech-situation”, distinguished by being free of distortions arising from domination, ideology and neurosis. To provide just a brief indication of the way in which this correspondence affirms itself, let us recall Piaget’s findings with regard to the “vection” that leads from heteronomy to autonomy and from egocentrism to reciprocity and solidarity in the psychogenetic development of intellectual and moral norms. Indeed, according to Piaget, this development starts from initial atages in which the child is “centered” upon itself even while capable of engaging in interindividual exchanges, a condition called “egocentrism” by Piaget and briefly defined at one point as “a relative indifferentiation between one’s own point of view and those of other people”.18 There is an intimate relationship between the egocentric character of the interindividual exchanges of such early phases, on the one
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“Change, Rationality and Politics”, op. cit. 11

hand, and the figurative and intuitive – hence, pre-operational –character of the forms of thought that are proper to them, particularly to the period stretching from the appearance of language to 7-8 years of age. Moreover, these egocentric forms of thought are complementary with regard to heteronomy and to the imitation of adults – not only does the child oscillate between egocentrism and imitation, but also both egocentrism and imitation result from the indifferentiation between self and others.19 By contrast, the development of operational thought and of logic, with its characteristic of being free of contradiction and reversible and of leading to the conservation of sets, takes place in close reltionship with advances in the process of socialization and with the growing ability, on the part of the individual, to cooperate with others, to understand the relationships of reciprocity, and to coordinate – actually or virtually – a plurality of points of view. In this process, the acquisition of the sense of self and the achievement of the conditions needed for autonomy on one’s part are just one face of the coin, the other face being the increasing capacity to recognize the autonomy of others.20 The second of the two lines of argument mentioned above has to do with the extremely ambiguous position occupied, in Habermas’s thought, by the category of strategic action, which, in its relationships with both the contexts of work and interaction, has implications that are far from being adequately dealt with by Habermas. Thus, strategic action clearly plays an intermediate role between work and interaction, for, being instrumental anti “purposive-rational” action (work), it is also unequivocally interaction and communication. Indeed, the very idea of strategic action concerns the fact that it is that form of instrumental action (oriented toward criteria of efficacy, of means-ends relationships) which takes place in a social context. Habermas’s difficulties on this point (to which are related some notorious and untenable contortions on the relevance of “reflexive theories”, such as Marxism and psychoanalysis, regarding the conditions of the political struggle),21 show up very clearly in the oscillations and even contradictions to be found in different passages of several of his works. Thus, in “Technology and Soience as Ideology’’, we see strategic action assimilated to instrumental action or work; in Theory and Practice, in turn,
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Jean Piaget, “As Operações Lógicas e a Vida Social,” in J. Piaget, Estudos Sociológicos (Rio De Janeiro: Forense, 1973), p. 179. 19 Ibid., p. 188. 20 Ibid., especially p. 181, for the intellectual aspects of the problem. For the moral aspects, see “As Relações entre a Moral e o Direito”, in Piaget, op. cit., especially pp. 227-28. 21 See the introduction to the 1971 German edition of Theory and Practice. At the moment I can only refer to the French version of that work: Jürgen Habermas, Théorie et pratique (Paris: Payot, 1975), volume I, pp. 64-67. 12

there is the acknowledgment of the presence of communicative elements in it, but that acknowledgement is made within a framework of denunciation of the recourse to the idea of strategy as corresponding to a design of technical rationalization and ultimately of cybernetic control of society; finally, in Logic of the Social Sciences (which is not, of course, the last of the three works as to chronological order of appearance) we can find the emphatic affirmation, against “positivism”, of the communicational character displayed even by strategic action.22 The conclusion to be extracted seems to me simple and straightforward: we have but one concept of rationality, and it has always ultimately to do with relationships between ends and means. In other words, the notion of rationality has inescapably an operational character, always involving the idea of an action guided by considerations of efficacy, that is to say, the idea of a subject who sets up goals for his own behavior and seeks to realize them by means of the “manipulation” of the conditions of his environment. And this applies just as well to the “practical” field of interaction as to the “technical” field of work: not only is interaction (as shown by Piaget’s findings) the ultimate and inevitable context of rational behavior, even when the latter exerts itself over “nature”, but also there is no reason not to see communication itself as a goal-oriented behavior, concerning which, therefore, there is equally a problem of efficacy. This problem – of ensuring effective and unembarassed, pure or competent communication, as the very suggestive phrase of Habermas’s himself has it – is precisely the one to be solved in the “ideal speech-situation” freed of all the barriers originating from power situations under different forms. 4 Some relevant theoretical-methodological consequences of all this can be formulated around three points. The first one has to do with the conception of politics achieved (or corroborated) through this critique. Habermas’s distinction between work and interaction has one of its important grounds in the idea that work or instrurnental action concerns the relations of men (the acting subjects) with nature (the objects, in a strict sense), whereas interaction concerns the relations between subjects as such. Now, the above propositions allow us to see that the decisive question for socio-political analysis lies in the fact that men themselves appear as objects or “nature” to other men from the point
22

See Jürgen Habermas, “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’”, op. cit., pp. 91-92; Théorie et pratique, op. cit., volume II, p. 104; and Logica delle Scienze Sociali (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1970, pp. 85-86. 13

of view of at least some of their goals or purposes in any particular moment – and the notion of strategic action or interaction involves precisely the idea that one of the conditions for achieving efficacy (for strategic action is instrumental action) is that each participant be able to put himself on the other’s shoes and to recognize the other as an autonomous subject, as well as to look at himself as a possible object of manipulation on the part of the other. Put differently, if we lay aside material objects proper, the basic question turns around the fact that that which is end or means, or which is to be taken as object or subject, or partly as object and subject, is not socially defined but as a provisional result of a concrete and complex process of interaction – which, at any given moment, involves both live and reified work, tradition, fight and strategy, and also communication in Habermas’s sense. It should be emphasized, however, that there is a clear sense in which politics is fundamentally strategy: that is so not only as far as strict self-affirmation is concerned (whether in situations of open struggle or of regulated or mitigated strategic interaction, as in “normal” day-to-day politics and in conditions approaching the “ideal” characteristics of the political market), but also in the very production of solidarity or of collective identities capable of being politically consequential – for the latter always involves mobilizational and organizational imperatives, and so also power and strategy. The second and closely related point concerns the possibility of adequately dealing with the crucial problem of the collective subject and of the intentionality or purposefulness of action as collective action. This derives directly from the intermediate and decisive role of strategic interaction, and can be stated by saying that the problem of the constitution of collective subjects turns around, first, the operation of general sociological conditions that somehow determine (or make more or less probable) with whom a certain individual subject is going to identify or to “communicate” and toward whom will he act “instrumentally” (not without acknowledging, of course, that variations take place here according to several circumstances or aspects of the goals or intentions of the subject); and second, the interference of deliberate and strategic action itself with the operation of such general sociological conditions. A further point that may deserve stressing is that, insofar as the question of a conscious participation in the socio-political process on the part of any individual or collective subject is posed, the problem to which this subject will be faced as such is a problem liable to being quite properly described as a problem of strategic decision: it would translate itself in terms of how (given certain biographical and historical conditons that were largely imposed upon him and concur to define his identity and a corresponding ideal of autonomy) to establish goals for his own actions in the situation in which he is bound to
14

live, a decision that includes as a relevant aspect the one of defining both his partners or friends and his opponents or enemies – that is to say, those together with whom he will seek to exert power (act effectively) over the environment, including nature, and those over whom he will seek to exert power, somehow assimilating them to “nature”. The third point, very briefly stated, concerns the possibility of speaking of chains of ends and means, and of dealing with the problem of rationalization, in an evolutionary perspective, in these terms. Take, for instance, the critique of technocracy undertaken by Habermas, which is clearly related to his efforts at replacing ends-and-means rationality by something else. If we think in terms of chains of ends and means, we can see that the assumption that that replacement is needed for the critique of technocracy is wrong, for it is always possible to criticize whatever ends (regarding which “technical” or means-related expertise is alledgedly necessary) by reference to other and presumably more important ends. 5 I would now like to consider some aspects of the problem of autonomy, which took a rather large part of my previous memo. From that I will move to issues that are not only salient in the recent work of some of the colleagues participating in this conference, but also, for that very reason, more or less obvious subjects to be discussed in it. Let me start by point out two different senses in which the notion of autonomy can be taken. First, the sense in which I used the term in my memo, where it was linked to the notion of identity seen as conditioned, to a large extent, by those elemente of society which share a “given” and “opaque” character. What is at stake here, in other words, is a certain idea of a rather spontaneous and “deep” (if I may resort again to that word, with which I seem to have got stuck in my memo) affirmation of self. Second, the sense in which “autonomy’ is often used by Robert Dahl in his recent Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy, where it becomes possible to speak of autonomy with respect to something (a certain sphere of action or of interests) and of the range of one’s autonomy in a certain relationship as consisting of all the categories of actions not under the control of someone else.23 Dahl’s conception leads one to think of dimensions of autonomy, and is directly connected to the problems of the organizational aspect of pluralism (to organizational pluralism), with which he is chiefly concerned. The interesting question in this context is, of course, what is the
23

See Robert Dahl, Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 20-21. 15

relationship between the two sets of themes, the one of the “deep” sense of autonomy and the one of pluralism as a set of institutional and organizational arrangements. It seems clear to me, to begin with, that this question is immediately related to the problem of the dialectics between “the institutional as context” and “the institutional as object” that I dealt with in my memo, but I think that it blends here with another problem that has already been touched above. Thus, the elements of opacity in social life that are stressed by the idea of the institutional as context are clearly the most relevant ones with regard to the “given” elements of identity and to autonomy in the “deep” sense of the word. Now, if we consider the problem from the point of view of the actual or potential participation of individuals in collective entities of whatever nature, those “opaque” identity-defining elements have to do mostly with the non-voluntary and ascriptive participation in collectivities of a certain kind, that is, those “multi-functional” collectivities like social classes, ethnic groups, territorial and (quite often) religious collectivities. These collectivities have in common the fact that they tend to correspond (if not to the “overall” territorial collectivity itself, such as the nation-state) to “micro-worlds” or subcultures in which the individual is usually immersed in an encompassing and complex way, by contrast to the segmental – and voluntary – forms of participation that are characteristic of the “functional” associations of organizational pluralism. And an important observation is that the very sense of personal worth or dignity is often deeply affected by this immersion and by the way in which one’s multi-functional collectivity relates to others and to the overall territorial collectivity in which they may happen to be inserted – with the consequence that it would be utterly improper to deal with the theme of democracy at all without clearly addressing this problem. The issues related with Blacks and other minorities in the United States are, of course, an adequate example. Now, the point I want to make is that, if autonomy in the “deep” sense of self-affirmation is indispensable, organizational pluralism is important precisely to the extent that it is associated with institutional guarantees that the former will not be systematically blocked or hindered – it will be hindered only insofar as this turns out to be necessary for preserving the basic autonomy of all. To give this idea a somewhat stronger formulation, organizational pluralism is important to the extent that it is the result of the actual operation of such institutional guarantees. That, I think, is the point of the idea of pluralism as a sort of operational “translation” of the... “deeper” ideals of freedom and democracy

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But a very important point seems to me to follow, and the problem of race relations in the United states provides a suitable way to approach it. Of course, by comparison with a situation of open racial disrimination and oppresion of Blacks by Whites, one cannot but evaluate in a positive way the situation in which Black people, by affirming themselves as such, by mobilizing and organizing, and so on, turn out to be capable of coexisting as Blacks on an equal footing with white people. But there seems to be no doubt that what one should expect from the full operation of the pluralistic principle as a translation of the ideals of freedom and democracy is not a sort of egalitarian confrontation of “powers” built on ascriptive criteria such as race (a segregated society might conceivably be the best way to achieve this), but rather the elimination of all such criteria as relevant factors capable of conditioning social intercourse in whatever way. In other words, the linkages between individual identity and social identity of whatever kind, with their necessary appeal to some element of ascription (which of course is also present, perhaps to a different degree, in the case of identities resulting from the division of labor in society), are a hindrance to full democracy – except insofar as they may be a necessary step in the process of seeking the eliminaton of all such linkages themselves and the fullest possible affirmation of – ultimately – individual choice. Pluralism, that is, through its emphasis on voluntary and segmental participation in ever-changing groups and shifting coalitions, tends toward the political market and Marx’s utopia in The German Ideology – or else it denies itself. To be sure, there is always the play between the two levels of the institutional, whence an ambiguous result seems to derive for the appreciation of both the limits and promise of political action. Thus, if the latter frequently aims at producing results at the level of the institutional context (to change or preserve that context), it cannot but unfold itself in the realm of the institutional as object, by creating organizations, procedures, mechanisms – which, in turn, cannot escape, even for the sake of efficacy, the constraints imposed by its own (institutionalized, that is, “opaque” and resilient) context. We are thus reminded of the problematical character of advancing toward the full pluralistic ideal through the process just mentioned, however logically compelling the connections between the ideal and some embryonic traits or values of our current political world – or some sectors of it. On the other hand, given the necessary interplay between the two faces of the institutional, and the fact that we cannot expect to abolish the historical and tendentially opaque dimension of society, let us also keep in mind that institutional construction, and so also organization and perhaps increasingly complex organization, would always be needed even in the “ideal” condition – which corroborates the somewhat

17

unorthodox prescription regarding the interplay of market and state presented above. The last remarks on the inevitability of organization, as well as the theme itself of pluralism, bring us naturally to such problems as corporatism, which has received much attention lately and is elaborately introduced in our conference through Philippe Schmitter’s paper, and surveillance and administrative control, with which Alessandro Pizzorno is particularly concerned. As to corporatism, two points seem to me worth spelling out here. The first one is the question of what it is that, from the analytical point of view, the concept of corporatism such as recently used actually brings to political analysis – oher than “merely” pointing toward a certain empirical development in which interests that could manage to get organized “autonomously” (along the lines of the pluralist model) at a certain point tend to become rather encompassing and rigid in their organizational format, as well as somehow to articulate with the state itself (I will leave aside the case that Schmitter has called “state corporatism”, which I think might be dealt with in connection with a more “conventional” approach to authoritarianism). Now, I do not mean to suggest that this is not an important subject of study in itself, which of course it is. But there has clearly been a tendency to stretch the concept of corporatism too thin and make it into a sort of new “methodological” discovery, which I think is one of the reasons for the corporatism fad. To my judgement, this is but another instance of the rather widespread tendency on the part of social scientists to transform substantive findings or observations (which in principle could be only the object of some form of diagnosis by resorting to the proper analytic tools) into methodological “postures”. So, by contrast to a civil-society or interest-representation “methodological” principle alledgedly proper to certain advanced capitalist countries of the West, some were used to thinking of Latin American countries in terms of the operation of an “étatist” principle; now, all of a sudden, there is the finding that the latter principle is also in operation in the former countries: how come? A “methodological” revolution is needed... Instead of this confusing state of affairs, I propose that we try to face in a more lucid way the complicated problem involved here, which seems to me to hinge on the interconnection of two sets of questions: (a) The one of analytical models versus “substantive” conceptions on the role of the state and its relations with “society” (the quotation marks are meant to account for the fact that, of course, the state is part of society, which can be an important consideration in this context). A recent example of the lack of clarity in this regard we have with Eric A. Nordlinger’s On the Autonomy of the Democratic State, where, in spite of interesting and rewarding
18

díscussions, there seems to be no awareness even that this might be a problem deserving attention.24 (b) The one of looking for “sociological laws” versus the aim of resorting to a strategic approach (an issue that, in my view, also can have much to do with the proposed distinction between the institutional as context and as object). The “solution” to the problem seems to me to lie in the general direction of trying to clarify the way in which sociological laws themselves (and so properly causal relations) emerge, so to speak, from the very interplay of strategies.25 The second point has to do with the issues that (neo-)corporatism brings up from the point of view of a normative theory of democracy. The basic reason for the concern with corporatism from this point of view involves, of course, the assumption that we would have less democracy under corporatist conditions than under “normal” pluralist ones, and that the state and the private “corporatized” interests tend to escape from the control by citizens and further to control themselves the lives of citizens to the extent that significant decisions come to be made through corporatist mechanisms. I think it is important to have in mind in this regard that the problem should not be looked at from the standpoint of what often seems to turn out to be an anti-organizational presumption. To begin with, both private organizations and the state can in principle be democratic even under circumstances in which they are organizationally strong and in which we may have the “corporatist” articulation between the two spheres. Besides, insofar as organizational structures built up in both spheres come to affirm and consolidate themselves as organizations, or to gain in organizational strength, it seems only natural that they also come to establish links among themselves – in a way, this is only part of the very process of succeeding as organizations. The real problems, then, seem to me to lie basically in two aspects of the situation, namely, the fact that corporatist arrangernents and processes of decision tend to become less visible to the public and the one that they also tend to result in organizational monopolies that affect negatively the chances for certain intereste and views of actually being represented or expressed. For both these problems, I think, the solutions are bo be found in more organization rather than less, that is to say, in the search for regulations and institutional mechanisms of various different sorts that block or counterbalance those negative consequences. Since this “recommendation” is not based on an
24

Eric A. Nordlinger, On the Autonomy of the Democratic State (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). 25 Jon Elster is perhaps the author who most contributed in this area. Besides Logic and Society, op. cit., see also his Ulysses and the Sirens (London: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Also of great interest is Raymond Boudon, Effets pervers et ordre social (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1977). 19

anti-organizational presumption, it should not be read, of course, in a way that would turn it into a weapon to be used precisely against those interest foci that are “structurally” in greater need of the organizational tool: I have in mind workers’ interests as opposed to businesses’ interests, according to the “two logics” discussed by Claus Offe in a well known paper.26 It is interesting to notice, at any rate, as pointed out by Schmitter, that precisely those countries that seem most to deserve the corporatist label have been the ones to experiment with “a wide range of institutional innovations that have extended the equal rights of individual citizens in their direct interaction with public officials and partisan representatives: referenda, proportional representation, ombudsman systems, subsidies for political parties and citizen groups, elections to workers councils, public disclosure law, decentralized administration, protection of personal data, profit sharing arrangements and so forth”.27 And, one might add, they are largely also the ones where the so called “new social movements” have been flourishing – perhaps in part as a response to corporatism itself, but also undeniably as a result of the fact that it is institutionally possible for new social movements to flourish and become effective (probably to a large extent by gradually finding their way into the institutional sphere...). As to surveillance, the connection between the problems to be found here and the ones of corporatism and pluralism seems inevitable, despite Pizzorno’s urge that we both deal with surveillance and leave corporatism aside. For it seems quite clear that the question of a state capable of exercising surveillance and unduely inflated administrative controls is just the other face of the coin with respect to the question of the conditions needed to assure the operation of pluralistic principles – of which corporatism (or “corporate pluralism”, as some, including Dahl, have called it) is, as we have just argued, but an outgrowth or perversion. The point is, among other related things, how to have autonomous associations, which of course could not prosper in presence of a state apparatus in possession of instruments of surveillance and control. Two further suggestions can be made here en passant. The first is that Pizzorno’s emphasis on the potential for surveillance and control contained in technological developments plays down what there may be in such developments that goes in the opposite direction, a point that is brought up, for instance, in James Fishkin’s article mentioned above, where the possibility is indicated that technological innovations might make some forms of direct democracy more practical. The second suggestion turns around the question of to what extent there
26

Claus Offe and Helmut Wiesenthal, “Two Logics of Collective Action: Theoretical Notes on Social Class and Organizational Form”, in Maurice Zeitlin (ed.), Political Power and Social Theory (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1980). 27 Philippe Schmitter, “Democratic Theory and Neo-Corporatist Practice,” ms., p. 52. 20

may not be also, in Pizzorno’s perspective, a certain underestimation of the role that traditional liberal-democratic mechanisms themselves can be made to play in counterbalancing the dangers he points to. Beside the institutional innovations mentioned by Schmitter with regard to corporatism, which of course are relevant also here, I would like to bring the example of the debate held in the United States, a few years ago, on the development of biotechnology or genetic engineering. This is an area that seems both to involve great risks from the point of view of problems of control and to be loaded with issues that some people might want to handle over to expert deliberation. Nonetheless, it was made, through the initiative of concerned citizens and authorities in various spheres, the object of a lively debate that did give way to legislative action – even though I am not prepared to argue that the measures taken were an adequate response to all the risks involved. Of course, these brief comments on the problem of surveillance and control, as well as the discussions of my previous memo that may also be pertinent to it, are not meant to oppose Pizzorno’s suggestion for our group to address the problem, with which I am in agreement. My point is rather to try and help sharpen the focus of our efforts by stressing again the seeming difficulties of the anti-organizational presumption mentioned above, which I do think to make itself present also in some of Pizzorno’s formulations with regard to this problem. 6 1 would not like to close these notes without trying to state my own position concerning a problem that is the object of an explicit challenge to our group raised by Pizzorno’s last memo, beside being also the theme of a published article by him that was distributed among the participants in this conference.28 I refer to the need for appraising the “rational choice” approach (to pick one of its various names). From what I have said in favor of instrumental rationality both here and in my previous memo it is perhaps clear that I am in favor of the approach, since the latter has in an unequivocally instrumental conception of rationality one of its basic tenets. The problem, I think, is how to resort to the analytical tools and the substantive insights provided by the approach without falling prey to some mistakes to be repeatedly found among some of its practitioners, even the most distinguished ones. Specifically, it seems undeniable that the recourse to rationality has been frequently thought to imply a psychological assumption that has egoism as the basic if not exclusive motivation for human action, with the consequence that an extreme anti-sociological attitude has been made the (unacceptable) counterpoint of the healthy
28

Alessandro Pizzorno, “Sulla Razionalità della Scelta Democratica,” Stato e Mercato, n. 7, April 1983. 21

components of a methodological individualism. Despite some attempts to dissociate the notion of (instrumental) rationality itself from egoistical assumptions (Olson in The Logic of Collective Action would be an example, but it is possible to show that his basic postulate is still egoism rather than rationality, his explicit statements to the contrary notwithstanding),29 the paradigm of “public choice” theorists typically involves a view of society that dissolves the latter into a sort of “state of nature” where there are no institutions, history, intergenerational links, loyalty or solidarity, but only individuals capable of calculating in function of individual interests that interfere with one another – in short, the realm of pure strategy. By contrast, the challenge and the promise in the application of instrumental rationality to political affairs lies in grasping the way in which conscious decision-making and strategy (the sphere of properly political action) articulate themselves with the sociological and institutional “context” that is, of course, always present. Let me add that the effort in this direction seems to be necessary for avoiding an old threefold error in methodological debates in the social sciences: (a) the postulate of the isolated individual of the contractualist fiction; (b) the utilitarian postulate of the whole society as the collective unit or subject, which ends up in the “organic” or “cybernetic” model; (c) finally, the postulate of the automatic and unproblematic constitution of collective subjects of a “partial” nature, such as social classes, a postulate that is often resorted to in the work of many who precisely question its adoption for the case of society as a whole. If we turn directly to Pizzorno’s outlook in “Sulla Razionalità della Scelta Democratica”, it seems inadequate to me on two counts: first, there is appropriate emphasis on identity and its relevance to politics, but there is a lack of proper appreciation of the role of “ascribed” and “multifunctional” aspects of collective entities in conditioning identities – aspects which are, of course, the raw material to be worked out by means of strategic and instrumental action; on the other hand, there is emphasis on the “political” production of identities, but there seems to be no realization of the extent to which this should lead to ephasizing also strategy, instrumentality and... rational choice. By contrast, the perspective I propose above amounts, I think, to a synthesis between the “instrumental” and the “communicational” dimensions of social and political life (or between the “efficiente” and the “identificante” activities distinguished by Pizzorno)30 which flows quite naturally from the dialectics between interests and
29

See my “Solidariedade, Interesses e Desenvolvimento Político”, op. cit., and especially Política e Racionalidade, op. cit. 30 “Sulla Razionalità,” op. cit., p. 33. 22

solidarity that Pizzorno himself described in his above cited 1966 article, and of which the political market would represent the logical extreme.31 7 One last couple of remarks. They have to do with something that should certainly be welcome as an important concern in a conference on democracy that is not only international as to the background of participants and broadly conceived as to the framing of issues, but also held at this particular moment. I refer to the fact that the current international scene dramatizes the need for something of a “political market-like” approach to international affairs and for trying to advance toward a condition in which the conception of a political rnarket might be applied te the level of the planet itself. The harmful effects, from several and important points of view, of the tribe-like socio-psychological and ideological components of (ascribed, even if sometimes in a paradoxically artificial and manipulated way) “national identities” seem clear enough in a world of nuclear armaments, encompassing and interdependently woven economic-financial crisis and military self-righteous adventurerism. If the wish to supersede this state of affairs may seem unrealistic from a practical standpoint, there is no way of denying the urgency precisely of the practical
31

I think it may be of interest to state the way in which, in my view, the logical “model” thus produced differs from the work of public choice theorists itself. If we take Olson, for instance, the difference of my focus with regard to his could perhaps be said to be that, whereas Olson assumes isolated individuals in pursuit of their interests and looks for the conditions for them to act together (I am referring, of course, to The Logic of Collective Action), I assume the existence of several potential and actual foci of solidarity and interests and consider the problem of achieving that form of solidarity in which the confrontation of strictly individual interests may be approached. With regard to the status or usefulness of logical models in general, it may be well also briefly to register some comments by Adam Przeworski in a letter concerning the present conference. With regard to my criticisms of some of his formulations in “Material Interests, Class Compromise and the Transition to Socialism” (criticisms appearing in my intial memo) he argues: “My intention in the article you discuss was to identify the logical consequences of freeing people from toil. Hence my assertions were meant as analytical propositions concerning the implications of disalienated labor.” As should be obvious at this point, I am very much in agreement with resorting to this procedure. A further problem, which was the chief point of my critique and around which much of our discussion will probably have to turn, concerns the proper place to be made for the “sociological” as such in the work of analytical or logical “modelling” itself – a problem that relates in not very simple a way, I think, to the one of the normative versus the descriptive or empirical. At any rate, as far as the model proposed here is concerned, it seems to me that attention to both the sociological and the organizational/institutional requirements of solidarity (even under the form envisaged in the “ideal” political market) provides a way out of the most important difficulties at play. 23

problems that turn around it – and also no way of evading our responsibility, as social scientists, in looking for forms of general sociopolitical organization that may help to escape the halo of “naturalness” surrounding the current correspondence between socio-psychological mechanisms of collective identity, on the one hand, and organizational mechanisms styled after the nation-state, on the other. Besides, if realism is demanded, se be it. We know that everywhere the process of “national” integration seems to have been based (except where it responded to the vagaries of all-out colonialism) on the “realities” of economic and cultural hegemony exerted by a certain “core area” over the regions somehow adjacent to it.32 Would it be realistic enough if, when considering the prospects of some form of planetary organization, we started by assuming that certain empires are here te stay at least for a long while, that any more encompassing process of actual international integration would have to take them for granted and perhaps go through their consolidation at least as a preliminary step – and if we then started looking for conditions allowing for the democratization of the empires themselves in terms that might be compatible with preserving national or other collective identities already in existence? Apart from the countries of Eastern Europe (regarding which some hints in Andrew Arato’s paper seem clearly to justify similar queries), this is far from being an idle question for contemporary Latin American and Caribbean countries, for instance, entangled as they are in a web of political authoritarianism, deep socioeconomic crisis, the dream of realizing their own version of their United States or European models – and the harsh consequences stemming for them from the very success with which the United States managed to fuse national identity and a hugely powerful state that often responds only, not always in a very zealous way, to its own internal legality. To be sure, a new effective organizational level rising above the one of present day nation-states could not but be still farther removed from the possibility of actual participation on the part of ordinary citizens in general. I doubt, however, that any of us would be willing to argue that there is not a good bargain to be stricken here for those citizens themselves. At any rate, in the words of a deadly serious Brazilian humorist, livre pensar é só pensar.

32

See the work of Karl Deutsch and colaborators, for instance.

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