POLITICAL THEORY / December 1998Honneth / DEMOCRACY AS REFLEXIVE COOPERATION

DEMOCRACY AS REFLEXIVE COOPERATION

John Dewey and the Theory of Democracy Today

AXEL HONNETHJohann Wolfgang Goethe University

NOT LEAST AS A RESULT of the temporal coincidence of the fall ofthe Soviet empire and the Western debate on communitarianism, efforts toelucidate the normative foundations of democracy have increased worldwidein recent years. However, wherever an attempt was made to link up with thetradition of radical democracy—as demarcated from the liberal understand-ing of politics—the discussion quickly got on the confrontational track ofrepublicanism versus proceduralism.1 Today, these key terms ordinarily des-ignate two normative models of democracy whose common goal it is to givedemocratic will formation a greater role than is usual in political liberalism.Instead of limiting the participatory activity of citizens to the function of peri-odically legitimating the state’s exercise of power, their activity is to be a per-manent matter embodied in the democratic public sphere and should beunderstood as the source of all political decision-making processes.2

For all the common ground in their critique of liberalism, differencesnonetheless exist between the two models. These follow from the differentways in which the principle of the democratic public sphere is normativelyjustified in each case. Whereas republicanism takes its orientation fromantiquity’s ideal of a citizenry for whose members the intersubjective nego-tiation of common affairs has become an essential part of their lives, proce-duralism insists that what is needed to reactivate the process of democraticwill formation is not citizens’virtues but simply morally justified procedures.In the former, the democratic public sphere is thus regarded as the medium ofa self-governing political community; in the latter, it is regarded as the proce-dure with whose help society attempts to solve political problems rationallyin a legitimate manner.3

AUTHOR’S NOTE: For critical remarks, useful advice, and helpful comments, I would like tothank Peter Niesen and, as always, Hans Joas.

POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 26 No. 6, December 1998 763-783© 1998 Sage Publications, Inc.

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As Jürgen Habermas has made clear, this central difference in the conceptof the political public sphere is accompanied by further differences concern-ing the relation between the state and law.4 The tradition of republicanismassumes there is a solidary citizenry that is in a position to organize societyitself through processes of communicative consultation and negotiation;therefore, state politics itself can be grasped here only as the implementationof publicly negotiated programs. The government and the parliament are nolonger autonomous institutions of the state subject to specific guidelines, butthe institutional spearhead of the progressively rejuvenating communicationprocess that has its real center in the citizens’ democratic public sphere.5 Bycontrast, according to the proceduralist conception, state institutions have toform a legally bound but independent subsystem because the widely branch-ing communication structures of the public sphere do not at all possess thekind of political power by which universally binding decisions can be made.Rather, here, in preparliamentary space, public opinion is to be formedthrough the exchange of arguments and convictions. Public opinion pro-grams decision-making in those institutions of the state administration thaton the strength of democratic procedures have to guarantee the social presup-positions for the continued existence of the democratic public sphere.6

Despite their fragmentary quality, these references also indicate the nec-essary difference between the two approaches in their respective conceptionsof law. Political republicanism has by nature a certain tendency to understandlegal norms as the social instrument through which the political communityattempts to preserve its own identity. According to the proceduralist convic-tion, basic rights represent a kind of guarantee for the continued existence ofthe interplay of the democratic public sphere and political administration.For the former, law is the crystallized expression of the particular self-understanding of a solidary citizenry; for the latter, it represents state-sanctioned but morally legitimated precautionary measures to protect thedemocratic procedure in its entire complexity.7

Now, this plump contrast of two models of radical democracy has domi-nated the political-philosophical discussion in recent years, but for all itsfruitfulness, it has also had a negative effect: It frequently appears that thesetwo concepts exhaust the spectrum of alternatives that present themselvestoday in the attempt to renew and expand democratic principles. However,more than merely two radically democratic alternatives to political liberalismcan be found, as I would like to show by reconstructing John Dewey’s theoryof democracy.8 My claim that it is Dewey who presents a third path mayappear surprising. Dewey is claimed by both sides as a theoretical

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predecessor. It is not difficult for political republicanism to refer to elementsof Dewey’s theory of democracy because it is similarly based on the idea ofan integration of all citizens in a self-organizing community.9 Nor does theproceduralist theory of democracy have any difficulties in relying on Dewey,for his emphasis on rational procedures of problem-solving is far more exten-sive than in other models of the political public sphere.10 Accordingly, myclaim that Dewey’s theory of democracy contains a third alternative to the lib-eral understanding of politics must demonstrate the inappropriateness of theother two claims. I will show indirectly that each touches only one of the twosides of Dewey’s theory. They thus miss Dewey’s synthesis into a single con-ception, which constitutes the real point of his position. Of course, to be ableto understand how Dewey simultaneously conceives of reflexive proceduresand political community and how he combines the idea of democratic delib-eration with the notion of community ends, I will need first to elucidate thepremise that sharply distinguishes his from others’ versions of a theory ofdemocracy. In his endeavor to justify principles of an expanded democracy,Dewey, in contrast to republicanism and to democratic proceduralism, takeshis orientation not from the model of communicative consultation but fromthe model of social cooperation. In brief: because Dewey wishes to under-stand democracy as a reflexive form of community cooperation, he is able tobring together the two opposing positions of current democratic theory.

In part I, I present the theory of democracy of the early Dewey, in whichthe idea of proceeding from the sphere of social cooperation is already begin-ning to become evident. However, while still depending largely on Hegeland, in surprising concordance, with the early Marx, the idea of democraticself-administration here is so immediately derived from the premise of acooperative division of labor that the central sphere of politically establishingcommunicative freedom is strangely excluded. In part II, I would like to showhow Dewey, in the wake of his epistemological studies, gradually arrives atthe proceduralist conception of the democratic public sphere that can befound in a more mature form in his bookThe Public and Its Problems. Whatis primarily of interest today in this mature model is the fact that the proce-dures of democratic will formation are grasped as the rational means withwhich a cooperatively integrated society attempts to solve its own problems.Finally, in part III, by elaborating the internal connection between coopera-tion and democracy, I can introduce Dewey’s conception into the currentdebate. I would therefore like to conclude by showing that Dewey’s maturemodel of democracy represents not just an alternative but is superior to theapproaches predominating today.

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I

The core of all radical democratic objections leveled against liberalism’sunderstanding of democracy has referred to its negative, individualist con-ception of personal freedom.11 Whether in Marx and the socialist tradition orin Tocqueville’s heirs and the adherents of republicanism, the central argu-ment has always been that in the liberal understanding of the formation of thedemocratic, political will could be reduced to the function of periodicallylegitimating state action. Here the subject is understood as previously fur-nished with a certain amount of individual freedom; and if the personalautonomy of the individual is understood as independent of the processes ofsocial integration, this entails the following normative conclusion: Thepolitical activity of citizens must consist primarily in the regular control of astate apparatus whose essential task must, for its part, be the protection oftheir individual liberties. In contrast to this reductionist understanding ofdemocratic participation, the various traditions that have developed as alter-natives to liberalism in the past 200 years begin with a different, a communi-cative, concept of human freedom. From the evidence that the individual’sfreedom is dependent upon communicative relations, these traditions haveinferred an expanded understanding of democratic will formation. Eachindividual citizen is now understood as attaining personal autonomy only inassociation with all others. Thus, the participation of all citizens in politicaldecision-making is not merely the means by which each individual cansecure her personal freedom for herself alone; rather, what it articulates is thefact that it is only in the medium of an interaction free from domination thateach individual’s freedom is to be attained and protected.

In such a counterprogram, a detailed answer to the question of how themechanism of democratic will formation is constituted depends entirely onthe specific character of the concept of communicative freedom employed. Inthe two drafts of democracy we have so far gotten as alternatives to liberal-ism, the communicative freedom of human beings is grasped in the samemanner, namely, according to the model of intersubjective speech. In bothHannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas, the idea of democratic will formationoriginates in the notion that the single individual can attain freedom only inthat public realm constituted by reaching agreement in language.12 However,even at this early point, where it is just a matter of the underlying concept ofcommunicative freedom, Dewey’s theory of democracy already differs fromthe two approaches mentioned. If Dewey shares with Arendt and Habermasthe intention of criticizing the individualist understanding of freedom, thenhe sees the incarnation of all communicative freedom not as intersubjectivespeech but as the communal (gemeinschaftlich) employment of individual

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forces to cope with a problem. By proceeding from such an idea of volun-tary cooperation, Dewey—obligated here more to Marx than to Toc-queville—attempts to draft an alternative to the liberal comprehension ofdemocracy.

Already in “The Ethics of Democracy”13—the very first essay in whichDewey dealt with the question of the theory of democracy—he outlinesbriefly the internal connection between cooperation, freedom, and democ-racy. The problem he takes up deals with the tendency of the then contempo-rary social philosophy to see in democracy just a mere organizational form ofstate government. What then remains from democratic ideals, according toDewey, is just majority rule, understood as a “numerical” directive for theprocedure according to which the members of the institutions of representa-tion are elected. In just a few pages, Dewey first does away with the centralpremise of this instrumentalist concept of democracy. He makes clear that toreduce the idea of democratic will formation to the numerical principle ofmajority rule means assuming society to be an unorganized mass of isolatedindividuals whose ends are so incongruous with one another that the inten-tion or opinion held by the majority must be discovered arithmetically.14 Tothis extent, the quantitative model of democracy shares with the classicaltheories of contract the notion that, prior to the formation of the state, indi-viduals exist without any communicative relationship in total isolation. Onlyif unorganized or ruptured sociality is taken as the starting point can one con-sider this concept of democracy as the solution to the problem of social order(much as Hobbes has done). To present such a connection means, in Dewey’sview, proving that democracy may not be understood instrumentally as anumerical principle for the formation of state order. For him it is too unrealis-tic, too much a mere fiction, to believe that social life unfolds without anyassociation between the individuals prior to the formation of a political unit.15

Thus, in the second part of his essay, Dewey turns the question around toexplore the understanding of democracy that necessarily emerges on the con-dition of an antecedent intersubjectivity of social life.

As in all his early writings, the concept of society by which Dewey letshimself be guided in this draft of an alternative theory of democracy is stillheavily influenced by Hegel. Hence, the intersubjectivity within whoseframework social life has always unfolded is presented according to themodel of a “social organism” in which each individual contributes to thereproduction of the whole through her own activity.16 The first fact character-istic of every kind of sociality is the existence of cooperation. Howeverunguided or contingent, individuals do relate to one another by pursuing, onthe basis of a division of labor, activities that together contribute to the main-tenance of society. Given such a model of social life, for Dewey both personal

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autonomy and political government have to be conceived of as related to oneanother, for the reality of social cooperation consists in a type of jointlyshared good, whereby individual freedom and state politics have to be con-ceived of as its opposite embodiments. Because each member of society con-tributes, on the basis of a division of labor, through her own activities to themaintenance of society, she represents a “vital embodiment”17 of the ends ofsociety. For that reason, she is entitled not just to a part of the freedom madesocially possible; rather, as an individual she always possesses the entire sov-ereignty through which all jointly as a people become the sovereign bearer ofpower. It is not without pride that Dewey declares that this notion of anembodiment of popular sovereignty in each individual citizen represents thecentral contribution made by the American revolution to the history of politi-cal ideas: “And this is the theory, often crudely expressed, but none the lesstrue in substance, that every citizen is a sovereign, the American theory, adoctrine which in grandeur has but one equal in history, and that its fellow,namely, that every man is a priest of God.”18

Having appropriated the Christian heritage in this almost Marxist man-ner—according to which each citizen is completely sovereign as an individ-ual because she serves, on the basis of a division of labor, the commongood—Dewey can understand the state as the opposite pole of the relationoutlined. Because a “common will” is articulated always more or less con-sciously in the mere fact of social cooperation, the state apparatus has to bedetermined as the political, executing institution of this will.19 That is why thegovernment is to be conceived of not as a separate sphere to which public rep-resentatives are delegated under the application of the majority rule but onlyas a “living expression” of the combined effort to help implement the coop-eratively pursued ends more effectively, that is, by concentrating reflexiveforces. Here, Dewey takes the organism analogy even further by designatingthe government apparatus as the “eye” of the political community: “The eyeis the body organized for seeing, and just so government is the state organizedfor declaring and executing its judgments. Government is to the state whatlanguage is to thought; it not only communicates the purposes of the state, butin so doing gives them for the first time articulation and generality.”20

Now, Dewey is aware that up to this point in his argument he has onlygiven a slightly different version of Plato or Aristotle. The classical politicalphilosophers also conceived of the relation between individual freedom andpolitical community as an organic interaction, in the sense that the singleindividual, by developing the appropriate virtues, experiences her freedom inthe realization of a common good, which in turn is just an expression of theendeavors of all individuals—endeavors, that is, that are coordinated on thebasis of a division of labor. To that extent, Dewey concedes, antiquity’s ideal

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of aristocracy does not essentially differ in substance from the democraticideal. In both ideals, citizens are said to attain freedom through self-realization in conformity with the ethical ends that together constitute theethical life (Sittlichkeit) of the polity.21 Hence, any difference between thetwo ideals must consist not in the ends but in the means of the political consti-tution: Whereas the aristocratic ideal believes only a small group of very tal-ented individuals are capable of ethically appropriate self-realization, suchthat the majority of the population has to be urged paternalistically by theelite to conduct a virtuous life, the democratic ideal is confident that everysingle member of society can, of her own free will, perfect herself in thedesired direction of the good that is pursued on the basis of a division of labor.If, in the former, the communal virtues are imposed through persuasion orforce from above, as it were, on the uneducated citizen, then in the latter, indemocracy, there persists a reciprocal confidence that, in an unconstraineddevelopment of personality, each individual can find her appropriate functionwithin society’s complex of cooperation. Dewey calls this confidence in thecapability of all members of a society to constitute a community the “indi-vidualism” of democracy:

Democracy differs as to its means. This universal, this law, this unity of purpose, this ful-filling of function in devotion to the interests of the social organism, is not to be put into aman from without. It must begin in the man himself, however much the good and the wiseof society contribute. Personal responsibility, individual initiation, these are the notes ofdemocracy. . . . There is an individualism in democracy which there is not in aristoc-racy; but it is an ethical, not a numerical individualism; it is an individualism of free-dom, of responsibility, of initiative to and for the ethical ideal, not an individualism oflawlessness.22

This latter notion of a democratic individualism indicates in a sufficientlyclear manner how the young John Dewey visualized the internal connectionbetween cooperation, freedom, and democracy. He perceives the existence ofa social division of labor as evidence for the fact that the individual owes herpersonal freedom solely to communication with the other members of a soci-ety. Freedom for Dewey is primarily the positive experience of unconstrainedself-realization that teaches the individual to discover in herself those talentsand capabilities through which she can in the end contribute, on the basis of adivision of labor, to the maintenance of the social whole.23 If this natural-likeprocess of a communal employment of individual forces on the part of allsociety’s members is raised to consciousness and viewed as a cooperativeproject, then that ideal evolves that bears the name “democracy”: It is the freeassociation of all citizens for the purpose of realizing, on the basis of a divi-sion of labor, the ends shared by them; in so doing, society’s members expect

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of each other that they perfect their own capabilities precisely in the directionthat serves the common good. It is easy for Dewey at the end of his essay torediscover in this notion of democracy as an ethical ideal the three guidingprinciples of freedom, equality, and fraternity, which had become the norma-tive embodiment of the French Revolution: a democratic constitution presup-poses individual freedom in the sense of an unconstrained personality devel-opment that, on the condition of institutionalized equality of opportunity,allows all members of society to develop the capabilities and strengths thatenable them in association with all others to contribute fraternally, or better,solidarily, to the pursuit of jointly shared ends.24

II

It is easy to recognize in this condensed synopsis what the weaknesses ofthe young Dewey’s conception of democracy necessarily are. If Dewey hadleft his model of cooperative democracy in the theoretical state describedabove, it would be difficult to see why his reflections ought to be understoodas an alternative to or even as a competitor of conceptions of democracy cur-rent today. By proceeding from the social division of labor, Dewey doesindeed draw attention to a prepolitical dimension of social communicationthat is not as such sufficiently taken into consideration by republicanism orthe proceduralist theory of democracy today. However, the way heallows—in accordance with his organism analogy—democratic self-administration to emerge directly from voluntary cooperation resembles thedemocracy ideal of the young Marx to such a degree that he must inadver-tently share all of its weaknesses too. The great insight that the cooperativeprocessing of nature can represent—under certain, normatively constitutedconditions—a primary form of communicative freedom was what inspiredMarx to the idea of understanding a true democracy as nothing but the freeassociation of producers; and in his model too, such a prepolitical institutionof direct, cooperative self-administration would only be possible because theself-realization of people goes automatically, as it were, in a direction thatmotivates them to develop socially useful capabilities.25 All of these honor-able illusions, which basically owe their existence to a synthesis of Aristotleand Rousseau, return in an almost unchanged form in the young Dewey. Theyinduce him to switch from the level of social cooperation to the sphere of col-lective self-administration in such a direct way that he is forced to occlude

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completely the problem of a political institutionalization of communicativefreedom. However, vis-à-vis such a model of democracy, which knows nei-ther elementary forms of a separation of powers nor intermediary associa-tions in the political public sphere, the two concepts of radical democracydiscussed today have a clear advantage. Because they proceed from an ideaof communicative freedom according to which individual autonomy isbond to intersubjectively reaching agreement in the public realm, they begin—already at the level of basic concepts, as it were—with the social mechanismon which democratic will formation as a normative principle is based. Thus,what first appeared as an advantage of Dewey’s theory of democracy—namely, that its starting point in the social division of labor included alreadyin the premises demands for an economic democracy—appears at this pointto be an all too evident weakness of his whole approach.26

Now, John Dewey, always open to new insights and eager to learn, did notleave his theory of democracy in the embryonic form he gave it in his earlyHegelian period. Though the idea that individual freedom depends primarilyon self-realization in a division of labor understood as cooperation is retainedin the later phase, this notion is now pursued on the basis of a theory of actionsuch that an independent concept of the public sphere begins to becomeapparent. In the almost fifty years that lie between his early theory of democ-racy and the publication ofThe Public and Its Problems,27 there is a wholeseries of intermediate stages that together further clarify his maturingconception.

Thus, in his psychological studies, which claim a large portion of his intel-lectual energies in the first quarter of the new century, he attempts to justify—for the first time explicitly—a tacitly Hegelian thesis on which his originalideal of democracy is based. He had assumed rather optimistically thathuman self-realization would strive by itself and without external constraintor influence in a direction that leads in the end to the voluntary acceptance ofsocial obligations. In this view, if all members of society could actualize theirown developmental potential on the basis of equal opportunity, they wouldwant of their own free will to become good cooperative partners in the socialdivision of labor. However, once Dewey overcomes his initial Hegelism, hehas to realize that this thesis presupposes an untenable teleology of humannature. For that reason, he now endeavors in his various studies in psychologyto work out the social mechanism that could explain, without metaphysicalborrowings, the social compatibility of human self-realization.28 This newsolution can be understood in terms of an intersubjectivist theory of humansocialization: From their completely open drives, which at first consist ofnothing other than a multitude of undirected and thus formable impulses,

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human beings can develop only those capabilities and needs as stable habitsof action that have met with the approval and esteem of their particular refer-ence group; the satisfaction that a subject has in realizing certain actionimpulses increases to the degree to which it can be sure of the recognition ofits partners in interaction. Insofar as every member of society always belongsto various reference groups, the superimposed layers of expectations see to itthat, in the course of the development of a personality, only socially usefulhabits of action are formed.29Dewey does not relinquish this model of humanself-realization for the rest of his life. It also shapes the ideal of democracy inthe book on the public. It assumes the function of bringing out the connectionbetween the individual development of personality and a democratic com-munity, which is presented as a relation of free exchange between cooperat-ing groups:

A member of a robber band may express his powers in a way consonant with belonging tothat group and be directed by the interest common to its members. But he does so only atthe cost of repression of those of his potentialities that can be realized only through mem-bership in other groups. The robber band cannot interact flexibly with other groups; it canact only through isolating itself. It must prevent the operation of all interests save thosewhich circumscribe it in its separateness. But a good citizen finds his conduct as a mem-ber of a political group enriching and enriched by his participation in family life, indus-try, scientific and artistic associations. There is a free give-and-take: fullness of inte-grated personality is therefore possible of achievement, since the pulls and responses ofdifferent groups reenforce one another and their values accord.30

If these reflections on the mutual dependence of self-realization and ademocratic life form can be understood as the outcome of his years of studyof human personality development, during the same period but in a seconddiscipline Dewey attained a further clarification of the premises of hisdemocracy theory. As a supplement to his psychological studies, Dewey wasalso concerned with questions of the logic of scientific research. Here, he pro-ceeded from the pragmatist thesis that we have to be able to grasp every kindof scientific practice as a methodologically organized extension of thoseintellectual activities with which we, in our everyday action, attempt to inves-tigate and solve the problem causing a disruption. Guided by the example ofexperimental research in the natural sciences, Dewey could quickly recog-nize that the chances of finding clever solutions to problems rose with thequality of the cooperation on the part of researchers involved; the more theparticipating scientists could introduce, without constraint, their ownhypotheses, beliefs, or intuitions into the investigation process, the more bal-anced, comprehensive, and thus intelligent would be the hypothesis theyjointly formed in the end.31 It is this conclusion that Dewey began gradually to

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transfer over to social learning processes as a whole. In social cooperation—he could correspondingly soon claim—the intelligence of the solution toemerging problems increases to the degree to which all those involved could,without constraint and with equal rights, exchange information and intro-duce reflections. Thus, in the end, from his research in the logic of sci-ence, Dewey developed an epistemological argument that proposed regard-ing democracy as a condition for increasing the rationality of solutions tosocial problems: Without democratic procedures, which guarantee all mem-bers of society something like communication free from domination, socialchallenges would not be resolved in intelligent ways. In this sense, Deweycould ultimately claim inThe Public and Its Problemsthat democracy repre-sents the political form of organization in which human intelligenceachieves complete development; for it is only where methods of publiclydebating individual convictions have assumed institutional form that, insocial life, the communicative character of rational problem solving can beset free in the same manner as this is done in the natural sciences by experi-mental research in laboratories: “The retort only brings out the point: the dif-ference made by different objects to think of and by different meanings in cir-culation, a more intelligent state of social affairs, one more informed withknowledge, one more directed by intelligence, would not improve originalendowments one whit, but it would raise the level upon which the intelligenceof all operates.”32

In contrast to his original, organism-theoretic notion of democracy, thisargument opened a path for Dewey that allowed him to see for the first timethe rational value of democratic procedures. It was now possible for him togrant to procedures of unconstrained opinion and will formation a muchgreater role in a true democracy. A new problem arose, however: how mightthis insight into the procedural character of democracy be reconciled with thepreviously presented claim that individual self-realization was only possiblein a community of cooperation? In what way was the epistemological focuson democratic procedures to be harmonized with the notion of a jointlyshared idea of the good, of a democratic value community? The introductionof the concept of the public, which Dewey carries out in his bookThe Publicand Its Problems, represents an initial, hesitant, but still today an eminentlychallenging response to this problem. Before returning to the question of theextent to which Dewey’s theory of democracy contains a superior alternativeto the two approaches of a radical democracy discussed today, I would like tosketch broadly the arguments in the study.

The most significant weakness of the democracy theory found in Dewey’searly work proved to be the absence of a political dimension to

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communicative freedom. Like Marx, Dewey also moved from cooperativeself-realization to collective self-administration so directly that in the endthere was no place at all for any discursive, procedural exercise of individualfreedom in joint will formation. Dewey redresses this deficiency already inthe first step of his study on the public by attempting to reconstruct—whileproceeding from social cooperation and on the basis of action theory—thestate as a sphere of joint problem solving. In terms of a history of theory, theargument fulfills the function of fending off metaphysical and teleologicalnotions of the state; systematically, however, it provides Dewey with theopportunity to introduce the public as a discursive medium of cooperativeproblem solving under democratic conditions. The basic idea is very simple,even if the action-theoretic implementation might surprise us today: Socialaction unfolds in forms of interaction whose consequences in the simple caseaffect only those immediately involved; but as soon as those not involved seethemselves affected by the consequences of such interaction, there emergesfrom their perspective the need for joint control of the corresponding actionseither by their cessation or by their promotion. This articulation of thedemand for joint problem-solving already constitutes for Dewey that whichhe will henceforth call “public”: The term “public” is attributed to that sphereof social action that a social group can successfully prove to be in need of gen-eral regulation because encroaching consequences are being generated; and,accordingly, a “public” consists of the circle of citizens who, on the basis of ajointly experienced concern, share the conviction that they have to turn to therest of society for the purposes of administratively controlling the relevantinteraction.33

Of course, this proposed determination of the concept in turn raises aseries of problems that Dewey cannot always satisfactorily solve in his text.There is thus above all the question of what is to be understood by those “indi-rect consequences of transactions” that can “affect” those beyond the circleof the immediately involved, especially whether this comprises only thoseconsequences that are objective, interpretation-independent, or also thoseconsequences that are relative to certain interpretations or moral sensibilities.However, irrespective of these internal problems, which Dewey would havehad to resolve probably in favor of the second alternative, the great accom-plishment of his approach here consists in the proposal to assume a proce-duralist differentiation between “private” and “public” instead of an essen-tialist distinction: “namely, that the line between private and public is to bedrawn on the basis of the extent and scope of the consequences of acts whichare so important as to need control.”34 Now, it is not difficult to see how thisaction-theoretic concept of the “public” gives rise to a notion of the state that,in the sense of experimental problem solving, is tailored to the steering needs

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of a cooperating society: From the perspective of the interacting members ofsociety, the various state institutions perform the task of ensuring the generalregulation of indirect consequences of action, a regulation called for in vari-ous public spheres by those indirectly affected; that is why the state has to beregarded, as Dewey says, as a “secondary form of association” with whichconnected publics attempt to solve rationally encroaching problems of thecoordination of social action. Conversely, the state so conceived has, vis-à-viscooperating society as the sovereign, the function of securing (with the helpof legal norms) the social conditions under which all citizens can articulatetheir interests without constraint and with equal opportunity. State institu-tions, whose officials are “officers of the public,” have to enable, Dewey says,all members of society “to count with reasonable certainty upon what otherswill do”; they create “respect for others and for one’s self.”35

Up to this point, Dewey has primarily stated what role he wants to givepolitics or political action in reference to the cooperating society. The politi-cal sphere is not—as Hannah Arendt and, to a lesser degree, Habermasbelieve—the place for a communicative exercise of freedom but the cognitivemedium with whose help society attempts, experimentally, to explore,process, and solve its own problems with the coordination of social action.Because the rationality of such problem solutions increases to the degree towhich all those affected are equally included in the “research process,” it isbeyond question for Dewey that the political self-steering of society has to bedemocratically organized; the more actively, the more sensitively the con-nected publics react to social problems, the more rational the experimentalprocess with which the state can reach universally approved problem solu-tions. But how, for Dewey, does the transition to the necessity of democraticethical life, of a cooperating community, follow from this epistemologicaljustification of democratic procedures? Here again, his answer is very sim-ple, even if the solution might be surprising in view of the current discussionon democracy.

The diagnosis of the times that forms the starting point of Dewey’s studyis—as is generally known—the observation that, as a result of industrializa-tion, growth of complexity, and individualization, modern societies findthemselves in a state of disintegration that makes ideas of a participation ofall citizens in democratic public spheres appear illusionary. That is why hetakes seriously the reservations of the political thinkers of his time who, inview of the differentiation of expert knowledge, can only regard the idea ofdemocratic self-administration as a pure fiction. If all citizens are to take theirorientation from democratic procedures of political problem solving, it isbeyond question for Dewey that a form of prepolitical association must bepresupposed, such as those that originally existed only in the small, easily

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observed communities of American townships: Society’s members musthave been able to see in advance that, through their cooperative actions, theyare pursuing a common goal, in order then to be able to understand the estab-lishment of democratic institutions of self-organization as the means for apolitical solution to their problems of social coordination. To that extent,Dewey concedes dispassionately, the “great society” must first be trans-formed into a “great community” before democratic procedures can be com-prehended generally as a function of cooperative problem solving. There-fore, under the conditions of complex industrialized societies, the revival ofdemocratic publics presupposes a reintegration of society that can only con-sist in the development of a common consciousness for the prepolitical asso-ciation of all citizens.

After all we have so far discovered about Dewey’s political-philosophicaldevelopment, it is now no longer difficult to identify the mechanism in whichhe attempts to anchor such a prepolitical ethical life of democratic society:Like Durkheim in his book on the social division of labor,36 Dewey alsoassumes that only a fair and just form of a division of labor can give each indi-vidual member of society a consciousness of cooperatively contributing withall others to the realization of common goals. It is only the experience of par-ticipating, by means of an individual contribution, in the particular tasks of agroup that can convince the single individual of the necessity of a democraticpublic: “In a search for the conditions under which the inchoate public nowextant may function democratically, we may proceed from a statement of thenature of the democratic idea in its generic social sense. From the standpointof the individual, it consists in having a responsible share according to capac-ity in forming and directing the activities of the groups to which one belongsand in participating according to need in the values which the groups sustain.From the standpoint of the groups, it demands liberation of the potentialitiesof members of a group in harmony with the interests and goods which arecommon.”37

Taking one’s orientation from democratic procedures presupposes a formof democratic ethical life anchored not in political virtues but in the con-sciousness of social cooperation. In this sense, Dewey can claim that in theend the three guiding maxims of the French Revolution normatively expressideals, which, through democratic and fair forms of the division of labor, arelocated in a prepolitical association:

In its just connection with communal experience, fraternity is another name for the con-sciously appreciated goods which accrue from an association in which all share, andwhich give direction to the conduct of each. Liberty is that secure release and fulfillmentof personal potentialities which take place only in rich and manifold association with

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others: the power to be an individualized self making a distinctive contribution andenjoying in its own way the fruits of association. Equality denotes the unhampered sharewhich each individual member of the community has in the consequences of associatedaction. It is equitable because it is measured only by need and capacity to utilize, not byextraneous factors which deprive one in order that another may take and have.38

III

Among the theories of democracy attempting to overcome—in the senseof a further democratization—the liberal understanding of politics, Dewey’smature conception represents Marx’s legacy, without taking over his mis-takes. Dewey sees the presupposition for a revitalization of democratic pub-lics located in the prepolitical sphere of the social division of labor, which hasto be regulated in such a fair and just manner that each member of society canunderstand herself as an active participant in a cooperative enterprise. With-out such a consciousness of shared responsibility and cooperation, Deweycorrectly assumes, the individual will never manage to see in democratic pro-cedures the means for joint problem-solving. To that extent, democratic pro-cedures of will formation and the just organization of the division of laborrefer to one another: Only a form of the division of labor that grants eachmember of society, according to autonomously discovered abilities and tal-ents, a fair chance to assume socially desirable occupations allows that con-sciousness of communal cooperation to emerge. Only thus will democraticprocedures necessarily have a value as the best instrument for rationally solv-ing jointly shared problems. To elaborate this insight of Dewey’s conceptionof democracy in a little greater detail, let us now return, in a comparativemode, to the two normative models presented at the beginning as contempo-rary alternatives to political liberalism. As we have seen, Dewey shares withrepublicanism and with proceduralism the critique of the liberal understand-ing of democracy. However, he proceeds from a model of communicativefreedom that enables the development of a stronger, more demanding con-cept of democratic will formation. But Dewey’s notion of how individualfreedom springs from communication is gleaned not from intersubjectivespeech but from communal cooperation. As a consequence, this differenceleads to a very different theory of democracy, one that has two advantagesover republicanism and two over the proceduralist theory of democracy.

In the tradition of republicanism, citizens are expected to develop politicalvirtues, which are said to represent an essential presupposition for participa-tion in the intersubjective practice of opinion and will formation; for it is onlythe extent to which political participation itself has become a central part of

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the lives of all society’s members that the democratic public sphere can main-tain itself as an end for itself. Such a strong ethicization of politics, scarcelycompatible with the actual value pluralism of modern societies, could not befurther from the mature Dewey. At this point in his book on the public, hewrites, polemically, as if to avert a cultural critique of consumerism in Han-nah Arendt’s sense: “Man is a consuming and sportive animal as well as apolitical one.”39 Dewey can make this statement so nonchalantly because inhis view the realization of the type of community necessary for a dynamicdemocracy must unfold not within the political sphere but prepoliticallywithin structures of a division of labor experienced as cooperation. And here,within networks of groups and associations that relate to one another alongthe lines of a division of labor, the factual pluralism of value orientations isnaturally of functional advantage because it sees to the development of anabundance of completely different interests and abilities. For his idea of acooperative community, however, Dewey has to be able to presuppose—at asecond, higher level—an individual orientation toward a jointly shared good;but this can be understood as that end to which each individual must be able torelate in the sense of a higher-order value, if this individual is to understandher activity as a contribution to a cooperative process.40

Dewey goes beyond the strict limits set to republicanism to arrive at a pro-cedural model of the democratic public sphere. Whereas, for instance, withHannah Arendt, it is never entirely clear according to what standard the insti-tutional form of intersubjective opinion formation is to be gauged as it is nei-ther a means nor an instrument but an end in itself, with Dewey, the answer isevident: Because the democratic public sphere constitutes the mediumthrough which society attempts to process and solve its problems, its estab-lishment and composition depend completely upon criteria of rational prob-lem solving. Indeed, Dewey goes so far as to conceive of the process of publicwill formation as a large-scale experimental process in which, according tothe criteria of the rationality of past decisions, we continually decide anewhow state institutions are to be specifically organized and how they are torelate to one another in terms of their jurisdiction.41 With such a rationality-theoretic determination of democratic procedures, Dewey undoubtedlydraws near to the model of democracy that Habermas has developed in theform of a discourse theory in recent years; but again, Dewey’s model differsfrom that one in two respects, both of which I can only interpret as advantagesof his approach.

Habermas also allows democracy to begin at that point where HannahArendt locates its legitimate place; namely, at the threshold where—beyondthe realm of social labor—the domain of an intersubjective practice com-mences through which citizens have to discuss and regulate publicly their

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common affairs. Within this politically constituted public sphere, democraticprocedures see to it that each individual can make use of her legally guaran-teed autonomy by participating with all others and with equal rights in jointwill formation. Thus, in contrast to Hannah Arendt’s model, the prepoliticalrelations of socioeconomic inequality are taken systematically into consid-eration, because in liberal democratic constitutions, there is supposed to be anormative principle that gives marginalized or repressed groups the chanceof a legally legitimated struggle against all forms of social disadvantage.42

Nonetheless, the perspective from which the “social question” becomes anormative reference problem in Habermas’s theory of democracy is of a kindcompletely different from that of Dewey’s conception. Because of the func-tional conditions of democratic publics, and altogether independently of thestate of recognition struggles, Dewey has to regard the establishment of just,cooperative forms of the division of labor as a normative requirement that isin principle valid and thus an internal component of every genuine idea ofdemocracy. Habermas, however, cannot allow the demand for social equalityconceptual priority over the principle of democratic will formation; he has tomake it dependent upon the contingent state of politically articulated goals.43

Because of this one-sided restriction of democracy to the political sphere,however, one loses sight of the fact that a democratic public sphere can func-tion only on the tacit premise of an inclusion of all members of society in thesocial reproduction process. The idea of the democratic public sphere livesoff social presuppositions that can be secured only outside this idea itself; itmust expect each citizen to share so much common ground with all othersthat at least an interest can emerge in involving oneself actively in politicalaffairs. However, such a degree of common ground can evolve only where, inthe prepolitical domain, it has already been possible to experience communi-cative relatedness; and this vacant spot in a politically one-sided theory ofdemocracy is filled, in my view, by Dewey’s idea of social cooperation, thatis, of a division of labor under conditions of justice.

What has just been said also suggests the possible response to a furtherproblem in Habermasian discourse theory of democracy. As has been fre-quently remarked in recent years, Habermas also has to be able to assumemore than just the establishment of democratic procedures for the success ofdemocratic will formation. For citizens to have motives and interests to par-ticipate in public opinion and will formation, they have to have made demo-cratic procedures as such a normative element of their daily habits.44 Butbecause Habermas is afraid that such an idea of democratic ethical life couldlead him onto the track of an ethical understanding of politics, he shifts theproblems emerging here into the domain of sociological functionalism:Instead of conceptualizing the habitualized attitudes of the democratic

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citizen as political virtues in the sense that they constitute the normative epit-ome of a desirable culture of democracy, he attempts to grasp them as featuresof a political culture whose “accommodating quality” (Entgegenkommen)we have to be able to expect sociologically due to functional requirements.45

In respect of this problem too, it seems to me that Dewey’s theory of democ-racy contains an answer that opens a third avenue between the false options ofan overethicized republicanism and an empty proceduralism; namely, tograsp democratic ethical life as the outcome of the experience that all mem-bers of society could have if they related to one another cooperatively througha just organizing of the division of labor.

Of course, in the present situation in which we in the highly developedcountries can see the end of work society coming gradually, such an idea canno longer simply assume the form of a normatively inspired restructuring ofthe capitalist labor market; rather, one is to think of the project of a far-reaching, radical redefinition of what in future has to count as a cooperativecontribution to social reproduction in the sense that every adult member ofsociety again gets the chance to participate in cooperation based on a divisionof labor. From the perspective of this outcome, it is not difficult to see why thedemocracy model of the mature Dewey can be considered a serious alterna-tive in the current debate: because—to put it in a nutshell—this modelregards the normative idea of democracy not only as a political, but first andforemost as a social ideal.46

Translated by John M. M. Farrell

NOTES

1. With this characterization of the situation, I am linking up, to a certain extent, withHabermas’s diagnosis, in which liberalism and republicanism are presented as the two prevail-ing paradigms in a theory of the democratic constitutional state today (Jürgen Habermas,Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans.William Rehg [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996], chap. 6, esp. pp. 267-86). If we add to thesetwo alternatives the procedural concept of democracy developed by Habermas, there follows theconception I assumed of two radically democratic approaches that are today attempting fromcontrary standpoints to defend a normatively more substantive idea of democratic will formationvis-à-vis the liberal understanding of politics. Such standardized concepts—liberalism, republi-canism, proceduralism—are always in danger of oversimplifying; we can easily lose sight ofthose differentiations and restrictions with which the various positions attempt to demobilizeprecipitous stereotypes. Moreover, the difficulty in ascribing consciously stylized positions tospecific authors is made especially clear by Ingeborg Maus’s original approach. By proceedinghere from a normative concept of subjective rights, which are understood in the liberal sense ofnegative freedom (staatsabwehrend), she develops an idea of radical democratic participation

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that does indeed share with republicanism emphatic consideration of direct participation butdoes not, however, wish to couple this with ethical expectations concerning individual willing-ness to participate (see, for instance, Ingeborg Maus, “Naturrecht, Menschenrecht und politischeGerechtigkeit,”Dialektik1 [1994]: 9-18; “Freiheitsrechte und Volkssouveränität,”Rechtstheo-rie 26.4 [1995]: 507-62). The model of democracy I develop with the help of Dewey’s matureconception does of course include an indirect critique of the position defended by IngeborgMaus.

2. When speaking in what follows of the “proceduralist” model of democracy, I am ofcourse referring primarily to the concept developed by Habermas,Between Facts and Norms;but see also, by way of a continuation, Seyla Benhabib, “Toward a Deliberative Model of Demo-cratic Legitimacy,” inDemocracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political,ed. S. Benhabib (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 67-94. When speaking inwhat follows of the “republican” model of democracy, I have in mind, of course, primarily themodel developed indirectly by Hannah Arendt,On Revolution(New York: Penguin, 1973); as akind of continuation, see also Michael Sandel,Liberalism and the Limits of Justice(Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1982). That I do not present the theory of “civil society” here as anindependent approach among models of radical democracy is due to the fact that, in my view, itsrepresentatives are notorious for their oscillating between proceduralism and republicanism; onthis, see the allusions in Axel Honneth, “Fragen der Zivilgesellschaft,” inDesintegration:Bruchstücke einer soziologischen Zeitdiagnose(Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994), 80-9.

3. On these differences, see Seyla Benhabib, “Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, theLiberal Tradition, and Jürgen Habermas,” inHabermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Cal-houn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 73-98.

4. Habermas,Between Facts and Norms.5. Rainer Forst,Kontexte der Gerechtigkeit: Politische Philosophie jenseits von Liberalis-

mus und Kommunitarismus(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), chap. III.2.6. Habermas,Between Facts and Norms, 287-328.7. On these differences, see Forst,Kontexte der Gerechtigkeit, chap. II.3.8. On the biographical, historical, and theoretical context, see the two new standard works:

Robert B. Westbrook,John Dewey and American Democracy(Ithaca, NY: Cornell UniversityPress, 1991); Steven C. Rockefeller,John Dewey, Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism(New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).

9. See, for instance, the reflections in Alan Ryan,John Dewey and the High Tide of Ameri-can Liberalism(New York: Norton, 1995), 358-9.

10. See, for instance, the different references to Dewey in Habermas,Between Facts andNorms, 171, 304.

11. On this contrasting of individualist and communicative models of personal freedom, seeAlbrecht Wellmer, “Models of Freedom in the Modern World,” inHermeneutics and CriticalTheory in Ethics and Politics, ed. Michael Kelly (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 227-52.

12. See Hannah Arendt, “What Is Freedom?” inBetween Past and Future(New York: Pen-guin, 1977), 173-96;The Human Condition(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), esp.chaps. II and V; Jürgen Habermas, “Popular Sovereignty as Procedure,” inBetween Facts andNorms, appendix I, pp. 463-90;Between Facts and Norms, chap. 3.

13. John Dewey, “The Ethics of Democracy,” inThe Early Works of John Dewey, 1882-1898,vol. 1, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 227-49. Ifnot otherwise stated, I shall cite Dewey in the notes that follow according to the collected workspublished in Carbondale and shall use the following abbreviations:EW for The Early Works,1882-1898; MW for The Middle Works, 1899-1924; andLW for The Later Works, 1925-1953.

14. Ibid., 229 ff.

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15. Ibid., 231.16. On the theoretical context, see the excellent presentation in Westbrook,John Dewey and

American Democracy, part 1, chap. 2; see also Ryan,John Dewey and the High Tide, chap. 3.17. John Dewey, “The Ethics of Democracy,” 237.18. Ibid.19. Ibid., 239.20. Ibid., 238.21. Ibid., 240-1.22. Ibid., 243-4.23. Corresponding to this element of the early theory of democracy is the positive concept of

freedom that Dewey attempted to develop simultaneously as an ideal of self-realization in hisethics, which was influenced by T. H. Green: John Dewey, “Outline of a Critical Theory of Eth-ics” [1891], in EW, vol. 3, pp. 239-388; on this, see Jennifer Welchman,Dewey’s EthicalThought(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), esp. chaps. 1 and 3; Axel Honneth,“Between Proceduralism and Teleology: An Unresolved Conflict in The Moral Theory of JohnDewey,” forthcoming.

24. Dewey, “The Ethics of Democracy,” 244 ff.25. On the ideal of democracy of the young Marx, see the critical account in Ernst Michael

Lange, “Verein freier Menschen, Demokratie, Kommunismus,” inEthik und Marx: Moralkritikund normative Grundlagen der Marxschen Theorie(Königstein im Taunus: Hain, 1986), 102-24; a very convincing critique of Marx’s concept of democracy as a whole is given by Rolf Zim-mermann,Utopie—Ratinalität—Politik. Zu Kritik, Rekonstruktion und Systematik einer emanzi-patorischen Gesellschaftstheorie bei Marx und Habermas(Freiburg: Albert, 1985), part 1.

26. On this deficiency of Dewey’s early theory of democracy, see, for instance, Ryan,JohnDewey and the High Tide, chap. 3.

27. John Dewey,The Public and Its Problems[1927], inLW, vol. 2, pp. 235-372; here, how-ever, I shall cite the following edition: John Dewey,The Public and Its Problems: An Essay inPolitical Inquiry (Chicago: Gateway Books, 1946).

28. Here I am thinking primarily of John Dewey,Human Nature and Conduct[1922], inMW,vol. 14, above all parts III and IV; but see also John Dewey,Democracy and Education[1916], inMW, vol. 9.

29. See Dewey,Human Nature and Conduct, part IV (Conclusion); see also J. E. Tiles,Dewey(London: Routledge, 1988), 210 ff.

30. Dewey,The Public and Its Problems, 147-8.31. See, for instance, John Dewey,How We Think[1910], inMW, vol. 6; “Philosophy and

Democracy,” inMW, vol. 11, pp. 41-53.32. Dewey,The Public and Its Problems, 210. Following these Deweyan reflections, Hilary

Putnam has even developed an “epistemological justification of democracy”; see “A Reconsid-eration of Deweyan Democracy,” inRenewing Philosophy(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-sity Press, 1992), 180-200.

33. For further elaboration, see Hans Joas, “Die politische Idee des amerikanischen Pragma-tismus,” inPipers Handbuch der Politischen Ideen, vol. 5 (Munich: Piper, 1987), 611-20; RainerSchmalz-Bruns,Reflexive Demokratie: Die demokratische Transformation moderner Politik(Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1995), 214 ff.

34. Dewey,The Public and Its Problems, 15.35. Ibid., 72.36. Emile Durkheim,The Division of Labor in Society, intro. Lewis A. Coser, trans. W. D.

Halls (New York: Free Press, 1984), esp. Book III. The evident proximity of Dewey to Durkheimon this point has—to my knowledge—been scarcely considered in the secondary literature so

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far. Durkheim is not mentioned at all by Westbrook; Rockefeller refers only to his book onreligious forms; the occasional references in Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide(for instance,pp. 112, 359), are a commendable exception. On the internal difficulties of Durkheim’s norma-tive approach in his book on the division of labor, which are also of interest in respect to Dewey’ssolution, see C. Sirrianni, “Justice and the Division of Labour: A Reconsideration of Durkheim’sDivision of Labour in Society,”Sociological Review17 (1984): 449-70.

37. Dewey,The Public and Its Problems, 147. This argument again makes particularly clearthe proximity to Durkheim’s concept of professional groups as intermediary associations; onDurkheim’s concept, seeThe Division of Labor in Society, preface to the second edition, xxxi-lix.

38. Dewey,The Public and Its Problems, 150.39. Ibid., 139.40. A helpful analysis of the normative presuppositions of cooperative activities is provided

by Michael E. Bratman, “Shared Cooperative Activity,”The Philosophical Review101.2 (1992):327-41.

41. Dewey,The Public and Its Problems, 73-4.42. See Habermas,Between Facts and Norms, chaps. 3, 4, and 9; “Struggles for Recognition

in the Democratic Constitutional State,” trans. S. W. Nicholsen, inMulticulturalism: Examiningthe Politics of Recognition, ed. A. Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994),107-48.

43. See Habermas,Between Facts and Norms, chap. 9.2.44. See, for instance, Albrecht Wellmer, “Bedingungen einer demokratischen Kultur,” in

Endspiele: Die unversöhnliche Moderne(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), 54-80; RichardBernstein, “The Retrieval of the Democratic Ethos,”Cardozo Law Review17.4/5 (1996): 1127-46.

45. Habermas,Between Facts and Norms, chap. 7; see also “Reply,”Cardozo Law Review17(1996): 1477-1558.

46. I see tendencies to revive such a “social” idea of radical democracy today in JoshuaCohen and Joel Rogers “Secondary Associations and Democratic Governance”Politics & Soci-ety20.4 (1992): 393-472.

Axel Honneth, born 1949 in Essen (Germany), studied philosophy, sociology and Ger-man literature in Bonn, Bochum, and Berlin; today he is professor for social philosophyat the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main. His main publications areSocial Action and Human Nature(Cambridge University Press, 1988);Critique ofPower(MIT Press, 1990);The Struggle for Recognition(Polity Press, 1994);The Frag-mented World of the Social, Essays in Social and Political Philosophy(State Universityof New York Press, 1995).

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