Group Representation, Freedom, and Democracy: Comments on Lawrence Hamilton’s Model of Popular Sovereignty

Abstract

Lawrence Hamilton’s discussion of popular sovereignty stresses the importance of group representation while rejecting the theory of deliberative democracy. I argue that, by downplaying the presence in public political discourse of rational argument orientated towards consensus on truth, Hamilton ends up offering an account of political representation which is both theoretically unsatisfactory and unfaithful to real politics. Hamilton’s model of popular sovereignty and his institutional recommendations can be strengthened once key insights of deliberative democracy theory are taken on board.

ORCID

George Hull http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0539-7508

Notes

1 For example, he writes that ‘freedom as power takes seriously the ineradicable fact of class conflict, power and partisan interests’ (Hamilton 2014b: 129). See also Hamilton (2003a: 14).

2 For example, he writes that we must ‘remain realistic and sanguine about the need for partisan institutions, conflicting groups and interests, and the kinds of antagonistic politics that follow’ (Hamilton 2014b: 200). See also Hamilton (2003a: 14).

3 For example, he criticises Philip Pettit’s version of republicanism for remaining ‘resolutely blind to some of the realities of representation and how they, by their very nature, undermine the possibility of direct control and influence and make the notion of individualised control a bit like building castles in the sky’ (Hamilton 2014b: 126).

4 For example, he accuses Cohen and Arato’s deliberative democracy theory of creating ‘an illusory ‘sphere’ of freedom and rights that supports the hegemonic ideology of the liberal state’ (Hamilton 2003b: 75).

5 Page numbers, except when otherwise specified, refer to Hamilton (2014b).

6 Similarly, in Are South Africans Free? Hamilton writes that

my freedom is relative to my power to: (a) get what I want, to act or be as I would choose in the absence of either internal or external obstacles or both; (b) determine the government of my political association; (c) develop and exercise my powers and capacities self-reflectively within and against existing norms, expectations and power relations; and (d) determine my social and economic environment via meaningful control over my economic and political representatives. (2014a: 2–3)

7 In Are South Africans Free?, by contrast, Hamilton identifies four types of domination:

Existing power relations can: (a) mislead me in my attempts to identify my needs, for example, patriarchal institutions and norms; (b) ensure that I do not have the means or voice to express my needs, for example, apartheid South Africa; (c) disable meaningful evaluation of needs, for example, unregulated liberal capitalism; and (d) constrain the capacity to meet needs, for example, the corrupt and distorted patronage politics of post-apartheid South Africa. (Hamilton 2014a: 28)

8 The ‘“gap” between the rulers and the ruled is itself filled by groups and their representatives, and so it is in this gap that the degree of a group’s freedom is played out’ (Hamilton 2014a: 74).

9 See particularly Nehamas (2010) and Williams (2002: 191–8).

10 See, for example, Hamilton (2014b: 144) and Hamilton (2014a: 72). In The Political Philosophy of Needs Hamilton gives an account of something’s being ‘in an individual’s interest’ in terms of ‘needs’ (2003a: 88).

11 See particularly his early essay ‘“Civil Society”: Critique and Alternative’ (Hamilton 2003b). See also Hamilton (2003a, 2014a, 2014b).

12 Habermas writes of ‘[t]he political interests and values that stand in conflict with each other without prospects of consensus’ between which ‘compromises’ can be reached through ‘[a] legitimate kind of bargaining’ (1994: 5).

13 The apt phrase is taken from Henry Richardson (2002: 130).

14 See Hamilton (2003b: 77) for discussion of how being ‘oppressed in terms of needs’ can involve ‘misinterpret[ing] … agency needs’. See Hamilton (2003a: 121) for discussion of societal institutions’ potential ability to ‘distort the evaluation of true interests by creating or reinforcing substitute gratification, the possibility effect, or the endowment effect’.

15 See also Hamilton (2014a: 130).

16 Suppose voters are choosing between policies P₁ and P₂. Forty per cent of voters believe P₁ to be in their own best interests; 60% of voters believe P₂ to be in their own best interests. Twenty per cent of voters believe P₁ to be the most just policy; 80% of voters believe P₂ to be the most just policy. There is no correlation between the former split of beliefs among the electorate and the latter split; people on both sides of the latter split are evenly spread among people on both sides of the former split. Now suppose those who believe P₁ to be in their own best interests vote for the policy which they think is in their own best interests, while those who believe P₂ to be in their best interests vote for the policy they think is most just. On these assumptions, 52% of voters will vote for P₁, even though a minority of voters believe P₁ to be in their best interests and a minority of voters believe P₁ to be the most just policy. (This is adapted from Wolff 1994: 194.)

17 The phrase is from Jürgen Habermas, who writes: ‘Set communicatively aflow, sovereignty makes itself felt in the power of public discourses’ (1997: 59).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

George Hull

George Hull is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Cape Town. He received a PhD from University College London in 2012 and is the editor of The Equal Society: Essays on Equality in Theory and Practice (Lexington Books, 2015). E-mail: [email protected]