This article had been planned before winter vacation, but in a moment of inattention it has dragged on until now. Let me finish a section first:
I previously posted a status update, and although it seemed to get stuck on follow5 for quite a while, it finally synced successfully: “In my view, democracy is neither universal suffrage nor some kind of equality. Democracy is Article 35 of the Constitution. Freedom of speech and freedom of association. That is the core of democracy. Electoral systems and distributive systems are separate issues. Democracy is a matter of power, not of rights.”
There were a few replies on the school intranet, but considering that this is a long story and full of sensitive words, I won’t respond directly. Instead, I’ll write another entry to explain it a little.
Like science, democracy is a “big word,” carrying too many meanings. Both its advocates and its critics often load this word with many beautiful or sinister connotations: freedom, equality, fraternity, science, progress, rationality… all seem to be part of democracy.
Indeed, these ideas are intertwined, and it is hard to isolate any one of them and make a demand on its own. But after all, they are different concepts. Although the problem of democracy is entangled with the problem of equality, to say that equality is part of democracy, or even its basis or condition, is another matter entirely.
What prompted me to write about this was that I happened to see an article by Wang Hui being reposted at the time, in which he mentioned:
“Around the issue of democracy, there exist different theories and practices. Careful theorists of democracy therefore also emphasize that what they are discussing is a certain democratic practice and democratic theory. Yet in the contemporary context, when people speak of democracy, it roughly includes two different aspects: democracy as a political system and democracy as a social form. The former includes universal suffrage, the protection of individual rights, freedom of speech, pluralism, and so on, while the core of the latter is equality, mainly embodied in social security, the opening of public goods to all members of society, redistribution, and so forth. The combination of these two is what is called social democracy. When analyzing these two forms of democracy, the French political theorist Pierre Rosanvallon said that in the French Revolution and the American Revolution, these two aspects of democracy were completely overlapping, because at that time the concept of equality did not involve redistribution, but only the nature of human social relations—whether they were equal or hierarchical. The politics of equality in that era was directly embodied in breaking all kinds of statuses and hierarchies, forming a democratic social model through the relationship between state and citizen.”
The distinction here between “democracy as a political system” and “democracy as a social form” is still quite good. But to explain the so-called “democracy as a social form” as “equality” is something I find hard to accept.
In my view, of course, there is a certain intrinsic connection between democracy and equality. But this connection may not be as profound as the bond between “democracy and science.” After all, they are two different concepts.
The original meaning of democracy is “rule by the people,” meaning the self-government of the populace. In that sense, it is actually closer to the concept of “freedom” (self-discipline) in some respects. The concept of equality, by contrast, refers to denying differences in rank between people, emphasizing that each citizen has, in principle, the same status and identity. Clearly, they are talking about two different things.
That said, equality can indeed, in many contexts, lead to democracy, because if the relation of “rule” is a relation of inequality, then denying inequality between people means denying the qualification of some people to rule over others. The result can only be that people rule themselves and engage in self-government.
But even here, the connection from “equality” to “democracy” is not absolute. An equal system of rule can still be realized in non-democratic ways. For example, the first approach is to posit a supreme non-human being, say God. We say that all are equal before God, but people do not need to rule themselves, do not need self-discipline; they still simply submit to an external force, except that the source of this force is not a king as a human being, but God as a non-human being.
Besides God, one can also find other more concrete non-human things to do the ruling. For example, dogma or law. If we were to formulate a set of strict and precise rules of conduct, compelling each person to obey these rules completely equally and act accordingly, then “equality” would be there, but there would still be no self-government of the people. Theocracy or technological (machine) rule is not democracy; even if it is a republican system that “governs for the people,” it is still not a democratic society that is “ruled by the people.”
I mentioned long ago that the replacement of “freedom” by “equality” is the common crux of the predicament of modern science and modern democracy. There I already gave a basic explanation of the distinction between freedom and equality, though democracy and freedom are not the same thing either. Still, let me quote it below:
“The idea of ‘freedom’ is anti-authoritarian and anti-utilitarian—I speak my own mind, and you speak your own mind; that already counts as freedom. There is no need for some other authority or some concrete thing to confer freedom upon us; if that were the case, then none of us would be free. But ‘equality’ or ‘equal rights’ is different: whether the ‘rights’ or ‘power’ of you and me are equal always requires appealing to some public authority or standard to decide, and at the very least, ‘equality’ does not exclude a third party. If both you and I depend on some other as authority, then even if we depend on the same authority, we are both ‘unfree’; yet if we depend on the same authority, then we can say that we are ‘equal.’ This is the most important difference between ‘freedom’ and ‘equality.’”
Of course, people’s public life always requires appropriate laws or norms to constrain or measure it, and laws often ought to uphold equality among people. But the problem lies precisely in this: how do laws come into being? How is the authority or legitimacy of law supported?
In fact, democracy refers to power rather than rights. Rights are conferred by law, whereas power is not contained within the promise of law. Power is first and foremost a force, an ability, a possibility. Law and administration can limit and extend power, but the formulation of law and the functioning of administration are themselves the result of power. Law should be generated democratically, rather than democracy being guaranteed by law.
The main embodiment of democracy is even less so-called social welfare. Put differently, democracy and livelihood are two different things; otherwise the so-called “Three Principles of the People” might as well be called the “Two Principles of the People.” Livelihood, like equality, in some circumstances does not coincide with the demand of democracy.
To give an example: a child lives very comfortably under the care of his parents, with nothing to worry about in terms of food or clothing, wanting for nothing. That is “livelihood,” but it is not “democracy.” Even if the parents are utterly selfless, thinking of nothing but the child, working tirelessly and taking meticulous care of him, raising the child plump and healthy, there is still not the slightest trace of democracy.
And the child may say: I’ve grown up, I want independence, I can take care of myself and don’t need you to meddle any further—you and my parents compete for the right to manage me. After throwing off his parents’ all-pervasive supervision, the child who gains freedom may no longer be able to have nothing to worry about in terms of food or clothing; all the original “guarantees” are gone, his living conditions may decline, and he has sacrificed “livelihood” in exchange for “democracy.”
It is obvious that the system most capable of guaranteeing livelihood is enlightened despotism, whereas democracy merely avoids the worst-case scenario. But even if democracy cannot exchange for the best livelihood, one can imagine that some “foolish children” would still prefer democracy, just as a child whose mind has awakened would rather suffer and labor on his own, and would rather make everything into a tangled mess, just to get as far away as possible from parental supervision and manage himself.
Democracy is neither equal rights nor sufficient entitlements. There is no need to make the issue too complicated from the very start. Although concepts such as rights, entitlements, power, equality, livelihood, and democracy will indeed become entangled with one another, to get to the root of it, the meaning of democracy is very simple: it means being governed by the people.
If the people govern or rule, then what is the object of that governance or rule? Of course, it is still the people. But exactly which people govern which people, and in what way? Here there may be different organizational structures. Yet the fundamental point that remains unchanged is this: the people must first be the subject, that is, it must be the people who rule.
What is called people governing people, in abstract terms, has one extreme model in which the singular people governs itself, each person governing himself; another extreme model is that the singular but capitalized People, as a whole, governs itself. But both of these are only abstract situations and do not have practical significance. Democracy, as a structure of “power,” is first and foremost concrete, actual force, not an abstract idea. Even though we can speak of abstract equality, of equality “in principle,” when negotiating certain issues—for instance, when making laws—we may invoke the principle of equality in the abstract sense, and abstract principles may function as actual forces. Yet “democracy” is not such a principle. It is not at all the abstract principle on which we rely when establishing rules or negotiating problems, but rather concerns our ability to participate in the activity of “establishing” or “negotiating” itself. Democracy means that the people possess the capacity to participate in governance.
The “capacity” here refers to a real possibility, something that is not necessarily already realized, but also not merely a “theoretical” possibility. This may sound a bit subtle, but an example makes it easy to explain: suppose I say that I have the ability to lift this stone. What I mean is not that I must currently be lifting it, or that I once lifted it, but neither do I mean that I could lift it after another three or five years of training. Rather, I mean: “I can now, right now in reality, lift this stone.” So when we speak of the capacity of democracy, we do not mean that everyone is currently engaged in self-government, nor do we mean that someone may achieve self-government after long effort (for example, by passing the imperial examinations). Rather, we mean that everyone in reality possesses the possibility of self-government.
This real force—of course, capacity is not only a matter of whether it exists or not, but also of degree and nature—is what we mean by “democracy as a social form.” When we say that a society has a democratic form, that means that in this society the people generally possess the capacity for self-government. And “democracy as a political system” concerns whether the mechanisms of governance and the policies and laws are maintaining the force of democracy rather than suppressing it.
Thus, if we want to discuss what kind of system is conducive to maintaining democracy, we must first clarify how this force is possible in the first place.
As we said, the self-government of the people as a singular entity (whether the capitalized whole or the lowercase individual) is only an abstract model, not a real force. In the political sense, the basic context of governance is the mutual interaction of plural “people.” It is precisely in people’s interactions that real political power can be discussed. In interactions, the people’s power is always realized in units of plural, concrete people—neither “my” self-government nor “the person’s” self-government, but the self-government of “these people” and “those people.”
Of course, my argument here is overly abbreviated, and I will discuss the relevant issues in detail another time. For now I will state my conclusion directly: the core of democracy as a social form is “association.” That is the key word in Article 35 of the Constitution. Of course, the other three terms—freedom of speech, demonstration, and so on—are similar as well. They all mean that the populace, as plural, real “these” and “those,” can display and exercise their power in political activity in the principal ways.
March 2, 2011
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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