№ 3 - 2001
Shapiro I.
Rethinking Democratic Theory in the Face of Contemporary Politics

A well-known American political scientist assesses the state of Western, mainly American, political science insofar as democratic theory is concerned. Within the whole body of the existing theoretical concepts, he distinguishes, on the one hand, normative theories investigating democracy integrally as system of government called upon to justify expectations that people pin on it and clearing up, while being about it, the factors determining the extent of justifiability of the expectations themselves; and, on the other, explanatory theories accounting for real dynamics of the existing concrete democratic systems. In this first part of the article (the rest three parts to be published in the forthcoming issues), reflecting on the difficulties faced by modern democratic theory, the author differentiates, firstly, theoretical difficulties as such (i.e. those deriving from the contradictions of political reality itself and, accordingly, the contradictory character of its claims to the democratic system of government); and, secondly, difficulties of a subjective kind which result, e.g., from a discrepancy between the said two streams of political science literature, from their lack of awareness of each other. Another, and no less important mode of delimitation of the analyzed extensive theoretical material is the distinction, within it, on the one hand, of a rousseauist tradition identifying democracy’s aim with search for the common good (or, as modern idiom puts it, with arriving at functions of social welfare) and, on the other, of a tradition that sees this aim in securing legitimate management of power relations. Giving on the whole his own preference to the latter approach, the author discloses its inseparable essential problemic connection with Schumpeterian (put forward by the Austrian political scientist J.Schumpeter) competitive democracy conception that in principle removes many traditional puzzling problems of democratic theory. The parts of the article, to be yet published, deal with questions pertaining to mechanisms of the promotion of democracy, conditions of its durability, problems of avoiding perverse consequences of democratic procedure, and the correcting function of the second-guessing institutions (first of all, courts).