Liberalism and Democracy

"My final choice is Norberto Bobbio’s The Future of Democracy . I have to say, I hesitated a bit about it. It’s a good book, but perhaps not a great book like the others. Bobbio wrote it in the 1970s. It reflects the sense at that time that there was a crisis of democracy. A number of Western philosophers embarked upon similar projects. Another example from this period is Habermas’s book on the Legitimation Crisis . What I like about Bobbio’s book is that he tried to reconcile liberalism with socialism. He was a socialist, not a Marxist or a communist. But he was also deeply committed to liberty. There was a tradition in Italy in the 20th century of people like him and he was probably the greatest representative of that tradition of “liberal socialism”, as they called it. He says he didn’t see a contradiction between liberty and equality, one of the themes that a lot of people in political theory were focussing on in those days. He says liberty has three dimensions. You need to have liberty within a certain private sphere – liberty of conscience, of religion, and liberty to pursue your own interests. That’s the first dimension. In order to possess this, you also need juridical equality, because you can’t be free in the private sphere unless the law treats you equally and treats different beliefs equally. The second dimension of liberty, which is crucial, is political liberty. You need to be able to participate in the shaping of the public sphere. And to participate in that you also need to be equal, in a political sense, to others. So both private liberty and political liberty are already premised on some measure of equality. The third dimension of liberty is socio-economic equality. For all the great values that the post-war constitutions—like the Italian one of 1948—enshrined, to be meaningful, for them to really allow people to flourish, it is necessary to include basic socio-economic guarantees. And these socio-economic guarantees require a degree of socio-economic equality. For Bobbio, then, liberty and equality go hand-in-hand together, and so do liberty and democracy, by the way. He did not accept the idea that some liberals have had about there being a tension between liberty and democracy. Modern-day liberalism cannot avoid – he thought – being both democratic and social-democratic. I think a programme that is very strongly redistributionist will inevitably clash with liberty. And I don’t think Bobbio was necessarily advocating that. He was advocating something that was closer to ensuring that every individual enjoys socio-economic conditions that gives him or her access to the constitutional goods. That will mean the basic socio-economic conditions, including education, health or sanitation. You need those basic conditions, which will involve some redistribution. But because people will flourish more if you start off by making people more equal, the sort of inequality that will result from differences in talent or differences in chance will not be as extreme as the kind of inequality we just seem to accept, because we don’t do enough to address the inequality of conditions, which is the main obstacle for people to achieve more. He was writing mainly after the Second World War . He was born before the First World War. Like Gramsci, he was also part of the Turin scene during the fascist period and ended up in prison in the 1930s. His lawyer suggested he should write a letter to Mussolini asking to be released, which he did, and it did get him released. But then he was arrested again during the Second World War. The other quite distinctive theme in Bobbio’s writings on these topics is what he calls the ‘invisibility of power’. In the book on the future of democracy he says there are a number of promises that democracy has failed to deliver. And the one he keeps coming back to is power remaining invisible. One of democracy’s promises was that power would become transparent, visible. The reason why that matters so much is because democracy in its original and ancient formulation is direct democracy. It is about people actually deciding in popular assemblies. Democracy can’t function like that now. It has to be representative democracy, it has to be procedural and mediated. But this is a compromise between the ideal of direct democracy and the reality making it impossible in the present time. But people will become very quickly apathetic and disenchanted with this imperfect way of achieving democracy, unless power is absolutely visible and transparent. The ruled need to be able to see through the rulers for representative democracy to maintain its credibility and appeal. Completely visible, transparent power is a utopia, but there are various things that can be done and some of them have indeed been done—for instance around the right to access to information. It’s essential there is a sense of how decision-making really happens because the moment people think, ‘I vote, but the real way in which decisions are taken is something I’ll never find out’ democracy begins to die. That was Bobbio’s real concern. You don’t want people to develop this sense of fatalism – which, again, may be more of an Italian problem – towards democratic decision-making. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Interestingly, what Bobbio also says is that one of the reasons why power is so cynical so often—in the Machiavellian sense of dissimulation and pretending you’re doing one thing, but actually doing the other—has to do with international relations. He says international law helps not only promote peace, which is a common value that we should promote, but it can also strengthen democracy because it removes one of the main justifications, i.e. raisons d’état , that power normally uses to be secretive. In a world where all rulers are visible, transparent and democratic, there is no need for so much secrecy. Bobbio sees international law, and a world where international relations are subject to the rule of law, as achieving not only the goal of international peace, but also that of entrenching and strengthening democratic rule at the national level. I think it is. My day job these days is mainly practising at the bar. I started off as an academic in international law, public law to a lesser extent, and legal and political philosophy. Now I’m only part-time in academia. Most of my day is spent writing legal briefs and developing legal arguments. But I find that all of these philosophers, perhaps with the exception of Vico, have some relevance to the work that I do. They are in the background in various ways. In litigation there will be cases that engage first principles more than others, but the most interesting cases will very often take you back to first principles. For example, a case like the first Gina Miller case , where I was part of the counsel team for the government, is a case that takes you back to first principles. There was a first case brought by Gina Miller to review the decision of the government to implement the result of the referendum on leaving the European Union without a Parliamentary vote. Her argument—which prevailed in the end—in the Supreme Court and in the Divisional Court before the Supreme Court, was that Parliament had to legislate to start the process of Brexit before the government could take matters further. I think it had to do with that, yes – the transparency of power. I think it had to do with the accessibility of law as well: the idea that the law isn’t just something that is imposed on people, but is something that a citizen, any individual, can resort to in order to challenge one of the biggest decisions that the government is taking. There is a very strong sense of equality before the law in a country, in a legal system, that accepts this principle as part of ordinary democratic life. Regardless of the outcome, just the principle that you can challenge a decision and take it to a court that has to apply the law is quite extraordinary. We now take it for granted, but the history of political institutions suggests it is something we should never take for granted."