The Public and the Private in Aristotle’s Political Philosophy (original) (raw)

in recent social and political theory. These are deployed to attack, on the one hand, empirical political science and, on the other hand, normative theory with universalist aspirations, such as that found in the work of Rawls. Zolo argues that the complexity of modern societies and the resulting fragmentation of standards of truth doom both of these enterprises. Instead, we should begin with a view of politics as achieving "the selective regulation of social risks." We accede to political authority because this serves to reduce the uncertainties of social life, which, in the contemporary world, always tend to increase. This leads to a view of democracy that we might call neo-Schumpeterian. Zolo wholeheartedly endorses Schumpeter's famous attack on "the classical doctrine of democracy" but then goes on to argue that Schumpeter's own elite-competition model has been overtaken by recent developments. Parties no longer genuinely compete to attract the popular vote: instead, they collude with each other and establish client relationships with groups outside the political sphere. The electorate no longer possess even that minimum level of political rationality needed to make the competitive model work. Their political experience is constructed for them by the mass media, which is most effective when not engaged in overt propaganda. The resulting system, Zolo argues, no longer deserves to be called a representative democracy: "liberal oligarchy" would be more accurate. Having delivered this indictment, Zolo's book comes to a sudden halt. He is hardly enchanted by the system he has described, but he appears to lack the resources to propose an alternative. Yet this disability is self-inflicted. He has ruled out, on epistemological grounds, empirical evidence that might, for instance, challenge his account of the effects of the mass media. And his attack on normative theory overlooks the fact that the systems he is describing are held together, in part at least, by the democratic principles espoused by their members, politicians, and voters alike. (One of the less helpful of Zolo's borrowings is a form of functionalism that seeks to explain the workings of the political system without reference to the aims and intentions of the actors themselves.) That is why Rawls's ambition to defend a normative theory by reference to the shared public culture of liberal democracies is not absurd. One might say that Zolo, having written his Prince, ought now to attempt his Discourses. Yet this is a challenging book for those inclined toward the radical democratic view taken up by most of the contributors to Mouffe's collection. Zolo lays his finger on the central difficulty: "What this radical-democratic vision appears to me to lack most of all is a perception of the variety, particularism and mutual incompatibility of social expectations in non-elementary societies. It fails to consider the structurally scarce nature both of social resources and of the instruments of power responsible for the allocation of politically distributable resources" (p. 70). In other words, some, at least, of the conflicts thrown up by a fragmented society are zero-sum; and simply to encourage higher levels of political participation by hitherto excluded or passive groups does nothing to resolve this problem. The challenge for would-be radical democrats is to show how it is possible both to respect the separate identities of the many groups that emerge in such a society and, at the same time, to arrive at collective decisions that are recognized as legitimate by all these