On Democratic Reason
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12635 |
| Date | 01 February 2019 |
| Published date | 01 February 2019 |
| Author | Ira Katznelson |
On Democratic Reason
Ira Katznelson
Columbia University
These reflections are stimulated by Helmut Anheier’s
thoughtful essay on the future of policy schools, a proposal
I cast as a call to renewed and effective democratic reason,
a quest based on his experiences heading the Hertie School,
an institution devoted to an independent and probing craft
of governance and to high-quality public argument that can
inform choices among policy alternatives.
The School’s and Helmut’s orientation is much like that
announced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the opening pages
of his Social Contract. Rousseau declared that ‘my purpose is
to consider if, in political society, there can be any legiti-
mate and sure principle of government, taking men as they
are and laws as they might be. In this inquiry,’he continued,
‘I shall try always to bring together what right permits with
what interest prescribes so that justice and utility are in no
way divided.’At our moment of turbulence and growing
uncertainty, it is impossible not to feel pressure to bolster
democracy and defend reason by seeking ‘to bring together
what right permits with what interest prescribes so that jus-
tice and utility are in no way divided.’
In these circumstances, Helmut recognizes that the intelli-
gence of democratic decision-making depends on the pursuit
of policy knowledge that is more than technical, policy knowl-
edge that can guide and guard liberal democracy. For this, we
continue to require what Alexis de Tocqueville famously
insisted we need: ‘a new political science ... for a world itself
quite new.’The democratization of society and politics, he
believed, had become irresistible. But key aspects of its future
nonetheless were unclear. Would democracy be embedded
within a liberal frame or would it induce new and more dan-
gerous forms of illiberal despotism?
Nearly two centuries later, we have learned painfully that
these are not mutually exclusive options. This puzzle must
be at the center of meaningful policy education. Its first
task, in my view, is to probe, with an institutional and con-
ceptual imagination, the central aspects of the liberal tradi-
tion that are indispensable to decent democracy, including
the strengths and vulnerabilities of the rule of law, individ-
ual rights and a free civil society. Such reason must navigate
boundaries dividing political theory from empirical studies,
all the while being mindful of historical and geographic vari-
ation and the need to answer the most urgent empirical
question posed by the social sciences: the ‘under what con-
ditions’question. Which circumstances, which institutions,
which ideas and which values are most likely to make the
constellation of law, consent, rights, representation, plural-
ism and toleration combine and succeed as foundations for
vibrant democratic politics?
Within the ambit of liberal democracy different visions of
a good politics and society vie with each other, each offer-
ing an account of desired connections across the spheres of
a differentiated world. Here is where the balance of market
and state is adjudicated. Here is where the kind of authority
and surveillance Michel Foucault called governmentality vies
with the mobilization of active citizens. Vibrant politics
within liberal democracies must debate just such fundamen-
tal questions. But what, we must ask as students of gover-
nance, are the conditions –human, institutional, ethical –
that can sustain such vibrancy?
This is no simple task. At the verges of liberal democracy
lie difficult questions where ugly possibilities loom. I am
thinking, in particular, about three enormously vexing mat-
ters –religion, membership and security. Separately and
together, these issues stalk and plague liberal democracy,
certainly German democracy and American democracy. We
badly require ideas grounded in democratic policy reason
that grapple with issues of belief, exclusion and exception
with rigor and imagination.
In early 1939, a terrible year w hen democracy seemed
unable to deal as effectively as the dictato rships with just
these matters, Ludwig Wittgenst ein lectured on the philo-
sophical foundations of mathe matics at the University of
Cambridge. Speaking about the f reedom to journey from
one logical and empirical world to ano ther, he observed
how mathematics offers the concei vable and the imagin-
able, but not the real. Yet even within ma thematics, he
argued, the prospects for imagi nation are inflected by
the real; conditions that adv ance the ability to discover
and invent, he wrote, ‘lie in the surroun ding circum-
stances.’
If such is the case for as abstruse and abstract a craft as
mathematics, how much more so for policy studies? As
A Response to ‘On the Future
of the Public Policy School’,
Helmut K. Anheier
*
*Anheier, H. K. (2019), ‘On the Future of the Public Policy School’,
Global Policy, 10 (1), pp. 75-83. First published online: 08 October
2018, https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12599
©2019 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2019) 10:1 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12635
Global Policy Volume 10 . Issue 1 . February 2019
86
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