| Chapter 1: | The Domestic Analogy |
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As I see it, however, there is a risk connected with this change of perspective: when scholars focus their efforts on combating obvious defects in the current world order, they tend to neglect the ultimate aim of global democracy. What democracy means in such a context becomes more and more vague, and it becomes less and less clear why it ought to be instituted at a global level. Peace is an important goal, as are international justice and environmental sustainability and many other positive values. But what about global democracy? What does it really entail, and why should it be a goal?
When reviewing these theories of pragmatism, I am inevitably reminded of another discourse from forty years ago, when a similar revision of democratic theory was all the rage. The waves lapping European shores from behavioral sciences in the United States brought a message that citizens were not as active, informed, or rational as the philosophers of the Enlightenment had assumed. Yet democracy was working well enough. The conclusion widely drawn was that democratic theory had to be revisited. Democracy’s distinctive feature, according to this understanding, was the existence of a plurality of elites who competed with one another for popular favor. Among the people, however, apathy was tolerable. Indeed, a certain apathy could even help sustain democracy—by counteracting extremism and polarization, with all the threats to democracy that these entail.10
However, in order to evaluate the prospects for instituting democracy, whether at the level of the nation-state or at that of the planet, more is required than simply a “realistic” diagnosis of the present predicament. The current situation must also be related to the ideal one. Or as E. H. Carr put it in an engaging analysis of the crisis-ridden years between the wars:
The impossibility of being a consistent and thorough-going realist is one of the most certain and most curious lessons of political science. Consistent realism excludes four things which appear to be essential ingredients of all effective political thinking: a