Howard Burton - Democracy: Clarifying the Muddle: A Conversation With John Dunn

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Ideas Roadshow conversations present a wealth of candid insights from some of the worlds leading experts, generated through a focused yet informal setting. They are explicitly designed to give non-specialists a uniquely accessible window into frontline research and scholarship that wouldnt otherwise be encountered through standard lectures and textbooks.

Over 100 Ideas Roadshow conversations have been held since our debut in 2012, covering a wide array of topics across the arts and sciences.

See www.ideas-on-film.com/ideasroadshow for a full listing.

Copyright 2013, 2020 Open Agenda Publishing. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-77170-041-2

Edited with an introduction by Howard Burton.

All Ideas Roadshow Conversations use Canadian spelling.

Contents

A Note on the Text

Introduction

The Conversation

I. Illusions and Confusions

II. Historical Examinations

III. Thinking Deeper

IV. Trust and Belief

V. China

VI. India

VII. Power to the People

VIII. Towards Progress

IX. Professional Indulgence

Continuing the Conversation

A Note on the Text

The contents of this book are based upon a filmed conversation between Howard Burton and John Dunn in Cambridge, England, on January 14, 2013.

John Dunn is Emeritus Professor of Political Theory at Kings College, Cambridge, and Visiting Professor in the Graduate School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Chiba University, Japan.

Howard Burton is the creator and host of Ideas Roadshow and was Founding Executive Director of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Introduction

Democratic Daze

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

-H.L. Mencken

Democracy confuses me. It always has.

Pericles spoke about it in emphatically glowingly terms: much more than just a particular form of rule, to him it was nothing less than a triumphant demonstration of Athenian moral superiority.

Then, for more than two millennia, it largely disappeared off the face of the earth, universally regarded by virtually all sophisticated political figures (very much including, as it happens, the vast majority of the Founding Fathers of the United States) as utopian, unrealizable and downright dangerousa recipe for the worst sort of government possible: populist, short-termist and deeply irrational.

Then, against all odds, democracy suddenly became the only game in town, nothing less than the hallmark of a civilized society, even invoked as a cause worth going to war for to defend or promote.

But what does it mean, exactly?

Not, surely, that governments must act according to the rule of law. Or even, for that matter, to determine what those laws must be. For those things, logically, are quite unconnected to what democracy properly is.

One could certainly imagine, for example, a monarchy embracing a Universal Declaration of Human Rights (as sometimes occurs) or a democracy egregiously violating it (as often occurs).

And, just as surely, the message is hardly that all citizens of democracies will regularly have a role to play in the affairs of the state. That sort of democracy hasnt really existed since Alexander the Great put an end to it in ancient Athens.

Like most people reading this, I grew up in a representative democracywhich simply meant that once every four or five years or so I had the privilege of trudging down to the local polling booth to tick off a particular box on a piece of paper that, when combined with those of my fellow box-tickers, produced a political result that was swiftly interpreted by a bevy of vigorous spin-doctors as some sort of clear mandate for whatever the winner judged most convenient.

I was never asked to make a judgment on any particular economic policy. I never weighed in on the merits of any social program. Indeed, Ive never voted on any piece of legislation whatsoever. The sum total of my democratic responsibilities lay in ticking off a box a few times per decade.

Quite frankly its pretty hard for me to regard any of this as a great cause for pride or celebration. Our form of democracy seems to work, more or less, or at least not often result in a complete disaster, which often amounts to the same thing for the great majority of us who dont spend too much time delving deeply into the nuances of political theory and governance.

But for those who are so inclined, there is clearly a great deal more to say. Take John Dunn. A deeply incisive and wide-ranging scholar, John has written widely on revolution, regime collapse and reconstruction and the history of political thought.

Most recently, however, hes been diligently investigating the history, current development and future of democracy, penning such works as Setting the People Free: The Story of Democracy and Breaking Democracys Spell in an effort to not only rigorously describe how we got to our present state, but also to explode the many hyperbolic distortions and false claims that still so often accompany the word democracy in the public consciousness.

And while his cool, objective analysis is inevitably portrayed by his critics as that of a stuffy, reactionary elitist, the truth is very different indeed. Consistently concerned with how to achieve genuine political and social progress, he is neither pro nor anti democracy, butmuch more importantlysimply a deeply knowledgeable scholar who dares to take a critical scalpel to our current political systems and carefully point out when the many often hyperinflated declarations we are bombarded with are simply false.

Of course, sometimes theyre true. One principal achievement of the Indian experience of democracy, he told me, was the weakening of a repressive caste structure through the advent of its democratic practices.

That is a very considerable achievement politically, and I think that it is owed to democracy. It isnt owed just to the idea of democracy, but its owed to the extent to which the idea of democracy has been realized, at least through the electoral structure in India.

After all John insists, the object of the game isnt about categorization systems or who gets the credit. Its simply about results.

The point of political institutions isnt to look good; the point of political institutions is to have good consequences.

And the best way to create good consequences, according to John, is to genuinely increase our political understanding so that we can begin to change our societies for the better.

If you dont understand politics, you cant have any coherent conception of how the immense damage that human beings have done to the planet on which they live can be brought under even minimal control within the foreseeable future. And if it isnt brought under control, then there almost certainly wont be good human lives in a few hundred years; there just wont be able to be.

That should certainly get the attention of anyone who thought that this was just some abstruse, academic discussion. Political understanding hits us where we live. But how do we actually go about developing it?

Well, an obvious place to turn to would be experts in the discipline of political science. After all, offering well-informed judgments on politics should presumably be their day job.

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