Fear's Anger: Virginia Woolf's Psychology and Deliberative Democracy

Abstract

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf implicitly addresses the necessary conditions for equal participation in deliberative democracy. Woolf's analysis indicates that proponents of deliberative democracy must be attentive to the angry, unconscious resistance that is part of reasoning in a deliberative system—especially when political deliberation results in a challenge to a person's identity. Woolf's solution for women writers, the material security represented by a room of one's own, can be applied to the larger problem of political deliberation as well. This leads to an expansion of the conception of substantive equality required for a deliberative democracy. Further, Woolf's insight challenges deliberative democrats to de-center capitalist economic relations. As a way of protecting the individual from the psychological dynamic Woolf describes in A Room of One's Own, deliberative democrats should advocate a non-competitive economic space for those threatened by the powerful psychological reactions to deliberation.

Absentmindedly doodling in her notebook while doing research in the British Museum, the narrator of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own discovers she has drawn the face of Professor von X, and it is quite an angry face. The drawing maddens its creator. Why, she fumes, should “a man with all this power” be angry?1 Given the orientation of society to male needs and the pervasive disdain for women, should not this professor be anything but angry? Ruminating on this question, Woolf's heroine speculates that the professor's anger masks a deep-seated fear of losing his sense of superiority over women. Psychologically, so much of the professor's well-being rests upon this feeling of superiority that any intimation of its falsity scares him more than his conscious thought process is willing to bear. Thus, his fear manifests itself through anger at those whom he perceives to be threatening him. Woolf finds protection from this anger to be critical for women writers; hence, the need for a room of one's own.

While Woolf explicitly applies her argument for material security to women writers in A Room of One's Own, similar arguments can inform attempts to theorize what conditions are necessary for deliberative democracy. Among proponents of deliberative democracy, there is a debate over what level of equality is necessary for deliberation to be effective and democratic. Some think it sufficient to establish proper procedures for deliberation and insure equal opportunities to participate in those procedures. Most deliberative democrats, though, argue in favor of a more substantive standard of equality. These theorists maintain that a certain level of material security is required to make deliberation meaningful.

In this article, I use an analysis of two of Virginia Woolf's essays to expand our notion of substantive equality and to further justify its importance for deliberative democracy. The same logic that led Woolf to advocate material security for women writers needs to be applied to the larger problem of political deliberation as well. Some of the most important issues we deliberate can challenge a person's identity. As Woolf illustrated, arguments that challenge a person's identity can be threatening and lead to an angry response—akin to that of Professor von X's. Deliberative democrats must acknowledge this angry, unconscious resistance that the reasoning process can entail and find ways to accommodate it. For deliberation to be effective, I argue, participants must have more than equal opportunities to participate and more than sufficient resources to participate. They must have as much psychological autonomy as possible. To achieve that, our understanding of substantive equality needs to be extended to include conditions in which those whose psychological autonomy is threatened by the prospect of material want have an economic refuge.

While material security does not ensure complete psychological autonomy, that security enhances the likelihood of independence of mind. Those in less powerful positions, like Woolf's women writers, need to be able to dissent without fear of losing their livelihood. Those in powerful positions may also need the psychological reassurance that material security offers in order to relinquish their privilege. Substantive equality must refer not only to sufficient resources for participation, but also to sufficient confidence that those resources are secure.

Achieving this expanded conception of substantive equality, I argue, requires policies that enhance non-competitive economic relations. These policies need not directly confront capitalist arrangements, but they should provide alternative spaces for work aimed at a decent life but not profit-making. I suggest that a kind of parallel economy as an approach to economic reform would neither encroach upon freedom of economic action nor privilege markets as the only system that offers freedom. These alternative economic spaces would not replace capitalist economic arrangements so much as exist alongside of them, providing enclaves, somewhat akin to the political enclaves Jane Mansbridge supports, that would offer social activists economic protection from fear's anger and ensure all citizens access to a safer space for working through identity reconstructions.

Deliberative Democracy

Most proponents of deliberative democracy argue that some level of equality is a required pre-condition for deliberation to be both effective and democratic. Claims regarding what qualifies as sufficient equality, though, run from minimal procedural equality, such as universal voting rights, to substantive equality, such as enough access to material goods and education that one can participate equally in the deliberative process. On the procedural end of the spectrum, James Fishkin argues that political equality means “the institutionalization of a system which grants equal consideration to everyone's preferences and which grants everyone appropriately equal opportunities to formulate preferences on the issues under consideration.”2 John Dryzek, while agreeing that redistribution of material resources would benefit deliberative democracy, thinks it is neither a requirement nor a fruitful area of activism, arguing that “if we regard effective redistribution as a necessary prerequisite for deliberation we may be in for a long wait, given growing material inequality within many developed societies, and growing transnational inequality.”3 However, proceduralists are in the minority among deliberative democrats. The majority of proponents of deliberative democracy argue that not only political equality but also some level of substantive equality is a requirement for deliberative democracy.4

Substantive equality arguments claim that along with important procedural safeguards, minimum levels of social and economic equality are also necessary to ensure equality of participation. A substantive equality approach is important, in part, because it better accommodates a broader conception of where deliberation takes place. Seyla Benhabib describes modern democracies as necessarily privileging “a plurality of modes of association in which all affected can have the right to articulate their point of view.”5 She continues:

These can range from political parties, to citizens' initiatives, to social movements, to voluntary associations, to consciousness-raising groups, and the like. It is through the interlocking net of these multiple forms of associations, networks, and organization that an anonymous “public conversation” results. It is central to the model of deliberative democracy that it privileges such a public sphere of mutually interlocking and overlapping networks and associations of deliberation, contestation, and argumentation. 6

To participate effectively in these varied settings, one needs more than formal equality of access. One needs resources that provide sufficient time, know-how, and status. Substantive equality arguments advocate fair distribution of these kinds of resources.

Substantive equality arguments can be grouped into two sets. One set can be understood as the equal access approach. Theorists of equal access share the desire to ensure that, for participants in deliberative democracies, “the existing distribution of power and resources does not shape their chances to contribute to deliberation, nor does that distribution play an authoritative role in their deliberation.”7 Among these advocates of substantive equality, some argue in favor of providing a certain minimum level of resources to all.8 Others contend that a better measure of equality starts from the concept of “capabilities.”9 As Bohman explains, even a basic set of economic resources may not be sufficient to provide “equality of effective social freedom.”10 He argues that equal access programs are necessary, but that in deliberation political equality requires one's arguments be given the same respect as the arguments of others. Thus, ensuring the “capability” to participate may require more than economic resources. But common to all equal access arguments is the idea that a certain set of basic conditions must be met for all citizens to ensure that each citizen will be able to participate equally in the procedures set up to enable deliberation.

These arguments are supplemented by a second kind of justification for substantive equality, that of reciprocity. Gutmann and Thompson's argument for reciprocity does not displace equal access arguments as justification of substantive equality. Gutmann and Thompson argue that equal access conditions are also necessary for citizens to show reciprocity.

For example, we argue that laws or policies that deprive individuals of the basic opportunities necessary for making choices among good lives cannot be mutually justified as a principle of reciprocity requires. The basic opportunities typically include adequate health care, education, security, work, and income, and are necessary for living a decent life and having the ability to make choices among good lives.11

The concept of reciprocity enlarges the equal access arguments to include a moral element of mutual respect. For Gutmann and Thompson, reciprocity “holds that citizens owe one another justifications for the mutually binding laws and public policies they collectively enact.”12 Equal access conditions both express the “mutual respect” that is “at the core of reciprocity and deliberation in a democracy” and allow for the practice of reciprocity.13 Gutmann and Thompson are, therefore, adding another layer of justification for a basic level of material security. In addition, reciprocity expresses something about the kinds of arguments one should make in a deliberative setting and the reason for providing those arguments. Reciprocity should be understood as a regulatory principle which guides the thinking of citizens (and theorists) regarding “what justice requires in the case of particular laws in specific contexts.”14

Theorists have, then, developed solid arguments for establishing a certain level of substantive equality as a requirement for deliberative democracy. However, these arguments have relied too heavily on a particular conception of reasoned debate. They have not sufficiently accounted for the psychological processes which make dispassionate arguments and mutual respect difficult to maintain. Amelie Rorty has argued that “[on] an unreconstructed strict interpretation of rationality, very little mental and psychological activity is rational as such. On a generous reconstructive interpretation, little is not.”15 If we define deliberation strictly, in other words, much of our theoretical debate about deliberative democracy is not relevant to our everyday lives. If we define deliberation generously, though, we must account for a much broader range of psychological activity than we usually do. Cheryl Hall makes this case in her article on the place of passion in deliberation. “Deliberation is not and cannot be a purely rational enterprise,” she writes.16 We must “recognize that deliberation is a process that inherently involves passion as well as reason.”17 Hall argues that passions are inextricably linked with values: “passion is the affective manifestation of value.”18 Thus, only by heeding our passions can we “evaluate the potential consequences of [our] choices in accordance with [our] values.”19

In the following section, I argue that we must pay attention to our fears as well as our passions. Fear is a powerful shaper of our thoughts and behaviors. Fears are harder to acknowledge, though, and we often channel our fears into other forms of reacting. What Hall says about passion is true for fear as well: “The problem with most theories of deliberative democracy is not that passion is absent but that its presence is unacknowledged.”20 Hall quotes Jane Mansbridge's explanation for this: “many democratic theorists, perhaps influenced by the enduring coding of ‘emotion as female’ and ‘reason as male,’ think of deliberation only as ‘reasoned deliberation,’ making its emotional components illegitimate or leaving them unexplored.”21 Only by acknowledging and exploring those emotional components of rational deliberation, though, can we develop conditions that will allow for effective and democratic deliberation. To that end, I turn to Woolf's discussion of the anger that can derive from fear.

Fear's Anger

Returning to the scene in the British Museum that Woolf describes in A Room of One's Own, we find the narrator staring at the face of Professor von X that she has drawn on her paper. The professor's anger not only miffs the narrator but also surprises her. Why was this professor angry with women? Could something other than anger be the root of the professor's contorted face? “Possibly when the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority.”22 The professor's unconscious fear that he is not superior, the narrator realizes, is the key to solving the puzzle. The mere task of living, the narrator recognizes, is “arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle”; fragile as we are, life requires “gigantic courage and strength.”23 The confidence that men derive from feeling superior to women must be an invaluable assistance in the endeavor. “Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”24 Living amongst so many funhouse-mirrors may create an “illusion” in men, but it is an illusion that has enabled them to achieve remarkable things through time—overcoming fears of inadequacy to craft a whole civilization.

The narrator's doodle was not an ill-informed drawing. Professor von X was a composite of the pile of male authors, all pontificating on women, through whom she had been wading. Woolf's narrator, having wearied of reading these “learned men,” had “lumped them together” in her sketch just as she had lumped their works into the imaginary tome The Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex.25 The protection of the psyche that resulted from the professor's resistance took myriad forms in this scholarly work: “it showed itself in satire, in sentiment, in curiosity, in reprobation.”26 The terms are significant since they show how diligently the professor worked to maintain the appearance of disinterest. “When men become angry and indignant, they are godlike, imitating Jehovah,” writes Jane Marcus.27 Woolf leaves no doubt, though, of the violence behind these restrained manifestations of fear. The professor's “expression suggested that he was labouring under some emotion that made him jab his pen on the paper as if he were killing some noxious insect as he wrote, but even when he had killed it that did not satisfy him; he must go on killing it; and even so, some cause for anger and irritation remained.”28 That the professor could not defend his resistance with the kind of reasonable arguments for which professors are celebrated would only serve to increase his anger.

Although Professor von X captured the fear of centuries of male writers, Woolf detected a significant increase in the anger of 19th-century male writers. The growing presence of women novelists and the burgeoning suffrage movement represented more pronounced threats to the male illusion of superiority. The corresponding reaction in male egos followed. Within novels authored by men in the 19th century, one sees the shadow of the letter “I” blocking the page.29 As the male writer feels his comfortable perch starting to wobble, he protests “against the equality of the other sex by asserting his own superiority.”30

In the same passage, Woolf hints at the connection between writing and politics. “For one can hardly fail to be impressed in Rome by the sense of unmitigated masculinity,” she writes, “and whatever the value of unmitigated masculinity upon the state, one may question the effect of it upon the art of poetry.”31 Here, Woolf is coy when she leaves unevaluated the effect of “unmitigated masculinity” upon the state. Although she admired the achievements of civilization, Woolf also argued—however gently in A Room of One's Own—that the resulting society and its governing institutions were just as fragile as the deluded male psyche that they reflected.

Her style turns more emphatic, though, in Three Guineas. In this critique of governance, Woolf examines the role of masculinity in politics, blaming the First World War and the imminent Second World War on masculine psychology. She argues that women must not support a political economic system so dependent upon the need to dominate. Writing to a man who has solicited donations in the name of pursuing peace, Woolf derides him for thinking that only Hitler and the fascists are the cause of the war. She argues that Hitler's dictatorship is the impulse of patriarchy on a grander scale. Many years earlier, Woolf writes, “feminists” were “fighting the tyranny of the patriarchal state as you are fighting the tyranny of the Fascist state.”32 They were, she adds, “fighting the same enemy that you are fighting and for the same reasons.”33 The war, though it appeared to be waged against England, was really an extension of the political economic system England shared with the rest of Europe. “Therefore if you insist upon fighting to protect me, or ‘our’ country, let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share; but not to gratify my instincts, or to protect myself or my country.”34 Fearful of losing privileges and status tied to the dominance of their sex, the men Woolf addresses have constructed a set of “rational” arguments to justify their going to war and their soliciting support for the effort. Woolf unmasks these arguments as pretenses and argues that a rational argument would acknowledge the real motivations for prosecuting this war.

The power of unconscious resistance that Woolf discerns poses a problem for advocates of deliberation. According to her analysis, the deliberative process cannot be separated out from unconscious psychological forces that resist reasonable argument. In Three Guineas, Woolf is writing to the paradigmatic rational thinker, a wealthy gentleman, yet she must scold the reader of her letter into being sober and rational. In A Room of One's Own, Professor von X hears suffragette arguments and witnesses countless acts each day revealing the fallacy of his superiority over women. Yet his need to resist those arguments only increases. Even where resistance to these arguments is not in the professor's economic self-interest—where resistance is not a matter of maintaining a position of wealth or power—the argument still lacks the force necessary to break down psychologically powerful notions of sex. Indeed, the better those arguments, the more likely it becomes that reasonable deliberation will founder on psychological need.

Thus, the prospect of changing one's identity is frightening and the process of achieving that change is difficult. Professor von X was terrified by the threat of losing the psychological prop provided to him by women. Though he might have been able to see the logic and appreciate the evidence of the reasons provided by advocates of equal rights, his emotional response was to protect the psychological identity that he had established. The more compelling the evidence, the more threatened the ego. The basic psychological concept at play here is cognitive dissonance.35 Confronted with a set of ideas (among other possible stimuli) that appear valid but challenge his beliefs or attitudes, Professor von X is most likely going to experience anxiety about the dissonance. One approach to resolving this dissonance would be to change his original set of beliefs or attitudes. Another way, though, is to justify those beliefs or attitudes. Political psychologists have expanded on this theory in recent decades, tying it to group identity and, more recently, to an attachment to the status quo generally. Social identity theory makes the case that people categorize themselves and others into groups and wish to see their group as better than others.36 The emerging “system justification” theory amends and extends that theory. Jost et al. argue “that there is a general (but not insurmountable) system justification motive to defend and justify the status quo and to bolster the legitimacy of the existing social order.”37 These theories emphasize that rational deliberation does not simply involve a logical assessment of arguments and a weighing of outcomes. Rational deliberation also includes fighting through powerful countervailing motivations when the ideas under deliberation challenge the superiority of one's group or question the privileges that the status quo affords certain people.

Classes that address gender issues frequently produce examples of the resistance that accompanies deliberation. Studies of the dynamics in the classroom indicate that men often exhibit hostile and angry reactions to material that challenges their privileged position.38 One scholar writes, for example, that “many young white males display the most amazing anger at the seemingly obvious connotation of the label mankind.”39 A challenge to that label appears as a “threat to the security of their civilization.”40 Likewise, research into the classroom environment demonstrates this dynamic to be common for racial identities too. White students, for example, who have lived in a racist society their whole lives “and who acknowledge that they have at the beginning of class” are shocked when confronted with the depth of racism around them. They find it especially difficult to accept their own role in the perpetuation of racism. As they are made aware of their “advantage because of being White” students usually experience “guilt, shame, and sometimes anger at the recognition.”41 They also, with enough guidance, sometimes break through to what Janet Helms describes as “autonomy.”42 In the “Autonomy stage,”

The person no longer feels a need to oppress, idealize, or denigrate people on the basis of group membership characteristics such as race because race no longer symbolizes threat to him or her. Since he or she no longer reacts out of rigid world views, it is possible for him or her to abandon cultural and institutional racism as well as personal racism.43

However, as Beverly Tatum notes, reaching that latter stage of development “will not necessarily occur for each student within the course of a semester (or even four years of college).”44

Economic Conditions for Effective Deliberation

The likelihood of resistance to arguments which have implications regarding a person's identity has ramifications for deliberation. Those who feel threatened by certain claims may try to fight back. Though this may be done with rational argument, it is more likely to come out in other forms. Susan Bordo demonstrates, for example, that as women emerge into the public sphere—first in the late 19th century and again in the second half of the 20th century—a reaction to their emergence follows. Marketing campaigns for a fashion industry that defines the proper body size for women, for example, reduce the amount of physical space women are supposed to take up. “What was considered an ideal body in 1960 is currently defined as ‘full figure’, requiring special fashion accommodations.”45 Likewise, advertisers increasingly portray women as voracious, dangerous eaters: “Anxiety over women's uncontrollable hungers appears to peak as well, during periods when women are becoming independent and are asserting themselves politically and socially.”46 Although the women's movements of these eras succeeded in making their arguments to open up opportunities that had previously been denied them, reactions to those arguments and their success have played out in other spheres and reflect the fear, harbored by many members of society, of these new gender roles.

The significance of this hurdle for deliberative democrats has not been sufficiently addressed yet. Critics of deliberative democracy have already noted numerous other important limitations of deliberation and have advocated procedures that would counter the dismissal of arguments that do not fit a particular standard of deliberation. Arguing that current deliberative norms exclude people with certain cultural backgrounds and deliberative styles, Lynn Sanders has suggested that before deliberation can become our model of decision-making, testimony must be given a more prominent role in what would normally be deliberative settings.47 Iris Marion Young, arguing in the same vein, encourages an expansion of the concept of deliberation (such that she renames it communicative democracy) to include greetings, rhetoric, and storytelling.48

Proponents of deliberative democracy have sought to address some barriers to equal participation within various institutions or arenas where deliberation would ideally take place. For example, John Ferejohn reviews voting rules that lead representative bodies to be more deliberative. Secret ballots allow dissenters to withhold their arguments until votes are tallied without fear of scrutiny. Since, in an open voting system, one will have to go on record anyway as dissenting, open voting proves to be a spur to voicing one's dissent earlier. That, in turn, allows deliberation of that view.49 Likewise, Benjamin Barber, discussing his proposal for national referenda, says that “dangers of plebiscitary abuses of the referendum would be diminished” with provision of proper access to information, the limiting of interest group spending, and the organization of forums for discussion.50

Proponents and critics alike, though, lack proposals for structures to address the ramifications of psychological resistance to threatening arguments—resistance that is part of the deliberative process. The resistance to identity-threatening ideas, and to the social change those ideas might generate, makes the process of deliberating social changes extremely challenging. Even substantive equality arguments, which have come the closest to advocating the kinds of conditions that are necessary to account for the psychological resistance that is a part of the deliberative process, do not take that process sufficiently into account. For example, welfare style plans for economic redistribution offer more resources to those who are at a disadvantage in terms of their political participation. However, the stigma attached to those who are recipients is something which psychological resistance can latch onto. For the person whose sense of superiority is threatened by the implication that economic inequalities are unjustified, directing anger at the stigmatized group provides an outlet for the unconscious fear. This both threatens those who are members of the stigmatized group and reduces the threatened person's incentive to work through the psychological upheaval.

Woolf understood the level of resistance that the prospect of social change would engender, so her suggestions for how to counter that resistance are especially germane for deliberative democrats today. Indeed, as Woolf worked her way to solutions to the problem of masculine domination, she realized that she had internalized some of the same resistance to change that Professor von X had. As Woolf's narrator in A Room of One's Own doodled Professor von X, she was provoked to anger by “the professor's statement about the mental, moral and physical inferiority of women.”51 The narrator calls her own anger “foolish” but forgives herself for it:

It is only human nature, I reflected, and began drawing cart-wheels and circles over the angry professor's face till he looked like a burning bush or a flaming comet—anyhow, an apparition without human semblance or significance.52

She forgives herself because she has been so radically shaped by the society that casts her as a mirror. In this passage, “I reflected” has two meanings. In fulfilling her gender role, the narrator reflected men back at themselves (at twice their natural size). However, she also reflected men in that her psyche resembled theirs. She had internalized a great many of the masculine values. As Jane Marcus says, “It is interesting that Woolf characterizes women's protection as liberation from the ego. For the ego is the enemy; even in herself, where she fought fiercely to control it, she saw the ego as male, aggressive, and domineering.”53

Woolf's continued efforts to revise her relationship to men (and to her own internalized “aggressive” and “domineering” ego) are apparent in the narrator's “cart-wheels and circles.” As God sent a message to Moses with a “burning bush” that was not consumed by the flame, Woolf sends a message to her readers by having the narrator scribble over her professor until he is not recognizable. Through the burning bush, God tells Moses to lead his people to the Land of Milk and Honey. Woolf's equivalent is a land in which men do not need to diminish women in order to feel themselves human. The narrator's new drawing recasts what it means to be human in terms so different that men—as men currently are—will not be recognizable as human; they will “be without human semblance.” What it means to be a man will necessarily be transformed so that being a man does not depend upon a woman's care-taking or upon a superior status. Until that transformation takes place, men will have no “significance” for Woolf's understanding of herself. Or so Woolf envisioned.

Woolf sought the psychological autonomy to achieve this vision, and she argued that security from economic manipulation was an essential condition for psychological autonomy. When women fight political battles from a position of economic vulnerability, the psychological resistance men throw up causes great damage. Citing the political struggles that women had been waging for years, Woolf writes, “a battle that forces youth to spend its strength haggling in committee rooms, soliciting favours, assuming a mask of reverence to cloak its ridicule, inflicts wounds upon the human spirit which no surgery can heal.” She goes on: “Even the battle of equal pay for equal work is not without its timeshed, its spiritshed, as you yourself, were you not unaccountably reticent on certain matters, might agree.”54 But men are reticent and, in spite of her indications here, Woolf can account for that.

To recover from the wounds suffered in activism and to develop a recognition of oneself that moves beyond the terms of the group that dominates, one needs more than political rights. Having received both the vote and an inheritance at roughly the same time, Woolf's narrator in A Room of One's Own states, “the money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important.”55 One needs to be able to develop views without the coercion of need. Psychological autonomy can only come within such a context. “For to help women to earn their livings in the professions is to help them to possess that weapon of independent opinion which is still their most powerful weapon.”56 Only women earning their livings can “have a mind of their own and a will of their own.”57

In a sense, even though much of A Room of One's Own can be described in today's language as an argument for recognition, what Woolf really sought was an economic space where women could go unrecognized as long as recognition meant subordination. Her worry was that recognition would come but on terms set by those who fear recognizing women. An episode in Woolf's life that helped spur Woolf's writing of Three Guineas illustrates this idea. E.M. Forster, who apparently had intended to proffer Woolf's name for the London Library Committee, related to her the committee's reaction to appointing, for just the second time, a woman member.

His colleagues had observed: “Yes, yes—there was Mrs Greene. And Sir Leslie Stephen [Woolf's father] said, ‘never again. She was so troublesome.’” Morgan had responded: “Haven't ladies improved?” But his fellow committee members were all quite determined, as he informed Virginia: “ ‘No, no, no, ladies are quite impossible.’ They wouldn't hear of it.”58

Woolf was outraged by the committee's (and, of course, her father's) treatment of women. The shabby treatment was not the only source of her anger, though. She was appalled even by the prospect of being on the Library Committee. As one of her biographers writes, “Virginia did not wish to be the exception to the male rules.”59 The committee's reaction only confirmed that a token is all she would have been. Soon afterwards, she refused Ramsey McDonald's offer “to submit her name for inclusion in the King's Birthday Honours as a member of the Order of Companions of Honour.”60

A space unrecognized by a political economic system steeped in subordination was, for Woolf, more valuable than supplemental political rights or token status. Just as Woolf, throughout her life, “sought ‘protection’ from living women as well as from historical mothers” a protection that provided some “relief from anxiety” about her battles “against the fathers,” so activists today—or any person wanting to forego values of domination—need protection.61 Material security does not provide all of the protection necessary, but it provides some measure of autonomy.

A Parallel Economy

Jane Mansbridge has already developed a theory of what she calls “protected enclaves.”62 In this addition to theories of deliberative democracy, Mansbridge explains that an essential understanding for advocates of deliberative democracy is that consensus is never final and, thus, that the legitimacy that proponents hope deliberative democracy will furnish is always partial. Because of this, participants in the deliberative process need places to which they can retreat when they lose. In these institutional spaces—spaces such as “Interest groups, political parties, and social movements, as well as churches, workplaces, ad hoc political collectives, and consciousness-raising groups”—these participants can re-group, find new strategies, hone better arguments, and provide support for like-minded people.63 “Enclaves” are an important addition to deliberative democracy, and, consistent with Woolf's arguments, the conception should be broadened to include economic enclaves—spaces where people can participate in economic activity predicated on security and simplicity rather than risk and wealth.

When arguing for material security, Woolf's goal is not a simple redistribution of wealth or equal access to the economic system. Instead, Woolf wants a space not only economically secure but also outside the mainstream political economic system, for great wealth (like great poverty) “produces, as we have daily and abundant proof, the crippled in body, the feeble in mind.”64 Women need to earn their own livings, but they need to do that in a particular context. Woolf warns women against exchanging their position from that of “being the victims of the patriarchal system” to that of “being the champions of the capitalist system.”65 Putting conditions on earning a living, Woolf urges women to “refuse to be separated from poverty, chastity, derision and freedom from unreal loyalties.”66

By poverty is meant enough money to live upon. That is, you must earn enough to be independent of any other human being and to buy that modicum of health, leisure, knowledge and so on that is needed for the full development of body and mind. But no more. Not a penny more.67

This passage anticipates substantive equality arguments made by deliberative democrats; however, by adding “Not a penny more,” Woolf argues for something more than equal access or even reciprocity. She argues that maintaining one's autonomy requires independence from an economic system that fosters dominance. “Chastity,” in this passage from Three Guineas, refers to not selling one's intellect, for “if it was wrong to sell the body for money it is much more wrong to sell the mind for money, since the mind, people say, is nobler than the body.”68 Calling money “the most powerful of all seducers,” Woolf argues that for social change to come about, women must stake out an economic space that is independent of the capitalist system.69 I argue that we need a similar space today. Women and men, people of all races, ethnicities, creeds, and sexualities, and anyone concerned with creating a more just society need to stake out a parallel economy, not to displace but to exist alongside mainstream, competitive, capitalist economic relations. When providing a guinea to the society seeking to advance women's presence in the professions, Woolf writes, as one of the conditions for the guinea, that the society must do “all in your power” to “insist that any woman who enters any profession shall in no way hinder any other human being, whether man or woman, white or black, provided that he or she is qualified to enter that profession, from entering it; but shall do all in her power to help them.”70 Her insistence upon the vow to keep to a simple income also reflects this non-competitive approach.

As J.K. Gibson-Graham explains, economic spaces that could form the basis of Woolf's vision already exist, but they are hidden by a discourse that portrays capitalist economic relations as monolithic.71 Various elements of our economy are already non-capitalist and some of these are non-competitive as well. What Williams et al. describe as the “social economy” refers to work done that is “based on not-for-profit principles in the sense that the initiative does not seek to expropriate a profit from its operations” and “is conducted by such initiatives [that] include economic activities that seek to fulfill people's needs and wants through the production and/or distribution of goods and services.”72 What distinguishes the social economy from “more informal kinship, neighbourhood and community networks” is “a form of association that provides an organizational framework for the pursuit of collective self-help activities.”73 One example of this kind of association is a Local Exchange and Trading Scheme (LETS). In these associations, members trade goods and services with one another using a unit of exchange of their own creation.74 Back-to-the-land movements have also emerged in the United States with varying degrees of intensity since the 1960s. In a study of people involved in these movements, Jeffrey Jacobs described the desire of many of them to live simpler lives and, if possible, to subsist off of the land.75 Community supported agriculture (CSA) refers to a movement which combines this renewed interest in having a closer connection to the land with an organizational structure that fits Williams' description of a social economy. In a CSA, farmers and consumers in close proximity form a cooperative arrangement. Members share the risks that come with food production while consuming food that is fresher and more reliably safe than most food available through the mainstream markets.76 Similarly, new wave cooperatives which sprang up in the 1960s and 1970s continue to provide alternative markets for food and other products. Members in these cooperatives usually share governance and workloads, purchase products from the actual producers as much as possible, and operate on a non-profit basis.77

Few of these examples are viable as complete alternatives to the mainstream economy. Most rely at least somewhat on the income that some members earn through mainstream capitalist economic relations. Leyshon et al. explain that “all economic geographies must (always) be constrained by the requirements of materially effective circuits of consumption, exchange and production. This is simply because if economies are not capable of consuming, exchanging and producing use values, they are incapable of sustaining the means of social reproduction and so are doomed to fail.”78 While failure may not always result (the CSA movement has grown steadily for years), it is true that a social economy that is not independent of the mainstream economy is vulnerable to that mainstream economy—and therefore so are the participants in the social economy.

These alternatives, however, are the seeds of a non-competitive alternative economy. Understanding these various projects as part of a latent parallel economy could help to create the political will to abolish barriers to more independence for these projects and to providing them support. For instance, revising our conception of taxation along these principles could mean that producers not using someone else's labor would not be subject to income taxes and property taxes. Those not seeking great profit but producing only for themselves or for cooperatives would not have the burden of taxes to manage. Many other changes in economic policy would be necessary to transform these alternative economic models into something extensive enough and stable enough to provide participants economic security. However, the political projects necessary to bring about those changes are not as large as overturning capitalism.

Economic enclaves would not work exactly the same way as political enclaves. Political enclaves offer spaces where all participants in democratic arguments can re-group. Economic enclaves would be less likely to figure into as many people's lives directly the way political enclaves would. Some members of society would take advantage of a parallel economy, finding the kind of independence that this parallel economy would provide liberating. More importantly, if these alternative economic models were supported and expanded,79 they could become alternatives to which those engaged in democratic arguments could turn if the political position they staked out prompted a backlash. The existence of this parallel economy would provide valuable reassurance to anyone—even those initially maintaining their place in the mainstream economy—that one's minimal economic security could not be jeopardized permanently due to one's political activity. Knowing that one could participate in a parallel economy as a safety valve would enable people to promote political arguments which challenged the status quo—including privileges associated with certain identities.

This safer economic alternative has another benefit related to the psychological dynamic described by Woolf. Just as those challenging identities (or the privileges associated with them) may need a parallel economy to feel secure enough to develop their political argument, so too those challenged may benefit from a parallel economy. If part of the fear associated with a challenge to one's identity is the fear of losing one's economic privilege, the existence of an alternative economic model which—though lacking avenues to great wealth—minimizes risk may provide a measure of psychological autonomy for those whose identities are associated with privilege.

Conclusion

The protection of economic security cannot address all threats to one's psychological autonomy. An internalized perception of inferiority—the kind Jane Marcus describes Woolf battling—is just one example of a vulnerability not wholly addressed by feeling economically secure. Psychologically, individuals are continuously negotiating, with varying degrees of success, with a range of influences—especially early influences—to assert and maintain their psychological autonomy. Not all these psychological threats or hurdles are subject to political action within the framework of an open and democratic society. Individuals must work out their views on their own—battling internalized threats to psychological autonomy as best they can. However, the social and economic conditions in which individuals undertake these psychological tasks, conditions that are susceptible to political action, contribute to the likelihood of an individual's success in achieving autonomy. Virginia Woolf's work helps us see that a secure economic situation is one essential element of conditions conducive to the psychological autonomy that facilitates effective deliberation. Just as political battles are never complete, as Mansbridge points out, and we therefore need political enclaves, so too psychological processes are never complete. The process of deliberation includes the turbulence of psychological processes which respond to new—and especially to threatening—ideas with resistance and even anger. This can be the case even when deliberation eventually leads to a changed set of beliefs or attitudes (or to a clearer understanding of one's original views).

Deliberative democrats must work for economic arrangements which reflect this more complicated understanding of the process of deliberation. Weaving together and promoting the expansion of alternative economic spaces that already exist has the potential to create a set of non-competitive economic relations that run parallel to our mainstream economic relations. This parallel economy could provide an economic refuge for people whose psychological autonomy would be bolstered either by participation in a non-competitive economy or by the knowledge of its availability. Alternative economic spaces have met with substantial success despite their having to work within a system that neither values nor supports them. This suggests that sufficient desire to participate in a parallel economy exists to maintain it. Achieving a viable parallel economy would provide, like a room of one's own for women writers, a space that would promote the independence of mind that is essential to a deliberative democracy.

Notes

¹ Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1929), p. 36.

^*I would like to thank Cecilia Beach, Don Herzog, Kerry Kautzman, Rex Olson, Andrea Parada, Jeff Sluyter-Beltrao, and Vicky Westacott for comments on drafts of this article or discussions that shaped the ideas expressed here. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for New Political Science for their very helpful comments.

² James Fishkin, Democracy and Deliberation: New Directions for Democratic Reform (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 30–31.

³ John Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 172.

⁴ For examples of proponents of deliberative democracy advocating substantive democracy, see Seyla Benhabib, “Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy,” in Seyla Benhabib (ed.), Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); James Bohman, “Deliberative Democracy and Effective Social Freedom: Capabilities, Resources, and Opportunities,” in James Bohman and William Rehg (eds), Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); Joshua Cohen, “Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy,” in Seyla Benhabib (ed.), Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Joshua Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” in James Bohman and William Rehg (eds), Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); Jack Knight and James Johnson, “What Sort of Political Equality Does Deliberative Democracy Require?,” in James Bohman and William Rehg (eds), Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); Iris Marion Young, “Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy,” in Seyla Benhabib (ed.), Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

⁶ Benhabib, op. cit., pp. 73–74.

⁵ Benhabib, op. cit., p. 73.

⁷ Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” op. cit., p. 74.

⁸ Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” op. cit., p. 74; John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

⁹ Amartya Sen, Inequality Re-examined (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Bohman, op. cit.; Knight and Johnson, op. cit.

¹⁰ Bohman, op. cit., p. 322.

¹¹ Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, “Deliberative Democracy Beyond Process,” in James Fishkin and Peter Laslett (eds), Debating Deliberative Democracy (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), p. 42.

¹² Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, “Deliberative Democracy Beyond Process,” in James Fishkin and Peter Laslett (eds), Debating Deliberative Democracy (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), p. 33.

¹³ Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 79.

¹⁴ Gutmann and Thompson, “Deliberative Democracy Beyond Process,” op. cit., p. 34.

¹⁵ Amelie Rorty, “Varieties of Rationality, Varieties of Emotion,” Social Science Information 24:2 (1985), p. 352.

¹⁶ Cheryl Hall, “Recognizing the Passion in Deliberation: Toward a More Democratic Theory of Deliberative Democracy,” Hypatia 22:4 (2007), p. 82.

¹⁷ Cheryl Hall, “Recognizing the Passion in Deliberation: Toward a More Democratic Theory of Deliberative Democracy,” Hypatia 22:4 (2007)

¹⁸ Cheryl Hall, “Recognizing the Passion in Deliberation: Toward a More Democratic Theory of Deliberative Democracy,” Hypatia 22:4 (2007), p. 91.

¹⁹ Cheryl Hall, “Recognizing the Passion in Deliberation: Toward a More Democratic Theory of Deliberative Democracy,” Hypatia 22:4 (2007)

²⁰ Cheryl Hall, “Recognizing the Passion in Deliberation: Toward a More Democratic Theory of Deliberative Democracy,” Hypatia 22:4 (2007), p. 92.

²¹ Jane Mansbridge, “Reconstructing Democracy,” in Nancy J. Hirschmann and Christine Di Stefano (eds), Revisioning the Political: Feminist Reconstructions of Traditional Concepts in Western Political Theory (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), p. 125, quoted in Cheryl Hall, “Recognizing the Passion in Deliberation: Toward a More Democratic Theory of Deliberative Democracy,” Hypatia 22:4 (2007).

²² Woolf, op. cit., pp. 36–37.

²³ Woolf, op. cit., p. 37.

²⁴ Woolf, op. cit., p. 38.

²⁵ Woolf, op. cit., pp. 35 and 33.

²⁶ Woolf, op. cit., p. 34.

²⁷ Jane Marcus, Art and Anger (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1988), p. 122.

²⁸ Woolf, A Room of One's Own, op. cit., p. 33.

²⁹ Woolf, A Room of One's Own, op. cit., p. 99.

³⁰ Woolf, A Room of One's Own, op. cit., p. 101.

³¹ Woolf, A Room of One's Own, op. cit., pp. 102–103.

³² Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1938), p. 102.

³³ Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1938)

³⁴ Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1938), p. 108.

³⁵ Festinger, L., A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957).

³⁶ Henri Tajfel and John C. Turner, “The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behavior,” in Stephen Worchel and William G. Austin (eds), Psychology of Intergroup Relations (Chicago, IL: Nelson-Hall, 1986).

³⁷ John T. Jost, Mahzarin R. Banaji, and Brian A. Nosek, “A Decade of System Justification Theory: Accumulated Evidence of Conscious and Unconscious Bolstering of the Status Quo,” Political Psychology 25:6 (1994).

⁴³ J. E. Helms, Black and White Racial Identity: Theory, Research, and Practice (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990), pp. 62–66.

³⁸ One of many examples of this scholarship is Michelle Webber, “‘Don't Be So Feminist’: Exploring Student Resistance to Feminist Approaches in a Canadian University,” Women's Studies International Forum 28:2–3 (2005).

³⁹ Carl Allsup, “What's All This White Male Bashing?” in Reneé J. Martin (ed.), Practicing What We Teach: Confronting Diversity in Teacher Education (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995), p. 88.

⁴⁰ Carl Allsup, “What's All This White Male Bashing?” in Reneé J. Martin (ed.), Practicing What We Teach: Confronting Diversity in Teacher Education (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), p. 88 Female professional golfer Annika Sorenstam's decision to accept an invitation to a male golf tour's tournament sparked a discussion in a gender politics class that provides another example of this process. Among some members of class, outrage at this woman desiring to play against men was matched only by their inability to explain their anger. The fear that she would do well manifest itself both as hope that she would fail disastrously and as real anger that she would dare think she could compete with men.

⁴¹ Beverly Daniel Tatum, “Talking about Race, Learning about Racism: The Application of Racial Identity Development Theory in the Classroom,” Harvard Educational Review 62:1 (1992), p. 13.

⁴² J. E. Helms, Black and White Racial Identity: Theory, Research, and Practice (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990), pp. 62–66.

⁴⁴ Tatum, op. cit., p. 18.

⁴⁵ Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 57.

⁴⁶ Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 161.

⁴⁷ Lynn Sanders, “Against Deliberation,” Political Theory 25:3 (1997).

⁴⁸ Young, op. cit.

⁴⁹ John Ferejohn, “Instituting Deliberative Democracy,” in Ian Shapiro and Stephen Macedo (eds), Designing Democratic Institutions (New York: New York University Press, 2000), pp. 94–96.

⁵⁰ Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 285–286.

⁵² Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, op. cit., p. 34

⁵¹ Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, op. cit., p. 34.

⁵³ Marcus, op. cit., p. 81.

⁵⁴ Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, op. cit., pp. 63–64 (my italics).

⁵⁵ Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, op. cit., p. 37.

⁵⁶ Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, op. cit., p. 58.

⁵⁷ Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, op. cit.

⁵⁸ James King, Virginia Woolf (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994), p. 521.

⁵⁹ James King, Virginia Woolf (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994), p. 522.

⁶⁰ James King, Virginia Woolf (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994)

⁶¹ Marcus, op. cit., p. 79.

⁶² Jane Mansbridge, “Using Power/Fighting Power: The Polity,” in Seyla Benhabib (ed.), Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 57.

⁶³ Jane Mansbridge, “Using Power/Fighting Power: The Polity,” in Seyla Benhabib (ed.), Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 57

⁶⁷ Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, op. cit.

⁶⁴ Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, op. cit., p. 69.

⁶⁵ Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, op. cit., p. 67.

⁶⁶ Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, op. cit., p. 80.

⁶⁸ Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, op. cit., p. 82.

⁶⁹ Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, op. cit.

⁷⁰ Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, op. cit., p. 66.

⁷¹ J. K. Gibson-Graham has done very interesting work on the many forms of economic activity that fall outside of the capitalist system—some intentionally so—and the problems with lumping all of that activity into one category of “capitalism.” See The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996) and A Postcapitalist Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

⁷² Colin C. Williams, Theresa Aldridge, and Jane Tooke, “Alternative Exchange Spaces,” in Andrew Leyshon, Roger Lee and Colin C. Williams (eds), Alternative Economic Spaces (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2003), pp. 153–154.

⁷³ Colin C. Williams, Theresa Aldridge, and Jane Tooke, “Alternative Exchange Spaces,” in Andrew Leyshon, Roger Lee and Colin C. Williams (eds), Alternative Economic Spaces (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2003), 154.

⁷⁴ Colin C. Williams, Theresa Aldridge, and Jane Tooke, “Alternative Exchange Spaces,” in Andrew Leyshon, Roger Lee and Colin C. Williams (eds), Alternative Economic Spaces (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2003)

⁷⁵ Jeffrey Jacob, “Alternative Lifestyle Spaces,” in Andrew Leyshon, Roger Lee, and Colin C. Williams (eds), Alternative Economic Spaces (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2003).

⁷⁶ Elizabeth Henderson and Robyn Van En, Sharing the Harvest: A Guide to Community Supported Agriculture (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 1999).

⁷⁷ See William Ronco, Food Co-ops: An Alternative to Shopping in Supermarkets (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974) and Maria McGrath, “‘That's Capitalism, Not a Co-op’: Countercultural Idealism and Business Realism in the 1970s US Food Co-ops,” Business and Economic History Online 2 (2004), < http://www.thebhc.org/publications/BEHonline/2004/McGrath.pdf> (accessed May 18, 2009).

⁷⁸ Andrew Leyshon, Roger Lee, and Colin C. Williams, “Introduction: Alternative Economic Geographies,” in Andrew Leyshon, Roger Lee, and Colin C. Williams (eds), Alternative Economic Spaces (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2003), p. 8.

⁷⁹ Here, expansion many not mean more people in a particular CSA or LETS; limited size is, in some cases, an important factor in the success of the organization. “Expanded” means creating more of these and linking them so they can provide mutual support. Daniel Zwerdling has suggested, for example, that food cooperatives could become more independent if they were to “form large networks that consolidate their wholesale orders, build more and larger warehouses, and create interstate trucking networks.” “The Uncertain Revival of Food Cooperatives,” in John Case and Rosemary C.R. Taylor (eds), Co-ops, Communes, and Collectives: Experiments in Social Change in the 1960s and 1970s (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), p. 107.