Democracy and instrumentalism

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of state socialism, among other factors, has led to a renewed interest in a certain conception of democracy as a fundamental organising principle for political debate and decision-ma king. Yet there are good reasons to suppose that the concept of democracy i s severely limited in the role it can play here. This article examines some of these limits. In the first section we summarise a number of arguments f rom the 'revivalist' democratic literature and the conception of democracy presented within it. In doing so, we identify a conception of democracy-a c onception we refer to generically as 'the democratic ideal'-that is defined both in relation to certain structural features and also in terms of a set of progressivist and socially ameliorative ends to which that ideal is see n as being especially conducive. In this reason our interest is not in any one version of the democratic ideal-although we do take many contemporary f orms of the ideal in question to combine two central strands-as in the prom otion of that ideal as instrumental in furthering certain economic and soci al ends. In the second section we call this ideal into question through a d iscussion of some of the problems associated with democratic forms of gover nance. We conclude with a discussion of the way in which the appeal to the democratic ideal in political debate and decision-making may actually depen d on ignoring or suppressing the very politics that it aims to address.