← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · OlafLynckner
Thread ID: 11097 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2003-11-16
2003-11-16 02:13 | User Profile
I translated this from Italian so at times you will see words I could not figure out. Still, it's pretty good material so I hope some thinking happens.
J. Cohen, J. Rogers, ET al., Association and Democracy., (and by And Olin Wright), London-New York, Towards, 1995, pp. 267.
The collection is marked it of written on the associative democracy, published edited by Erik Olin Wright. This model of democracy also is known like "consociative democracy ", second the expression coined from Lijphart that of was one of the founders (cfr. J. Lijphart, 1959). Tests of authors can be found to you that they have given fundamental contributions to this theory, like Philippe C. Schmitter ( The Irony of Modern Democracy and the Viability of Efforts to Reform its Practice , pp. 167-83), Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers ( Secondary Associations and Democratic Governance , pp. 7-98; Solidarity, Democracy, Association , pp. 236-67). The interest that moves these students is the substitution of the model neoclassic democratic (based entire on the conception of political representation ) with a corporative theory of the democracy, which would have to be able to explain in better way the operation of the complex societies, and to interpret of better the demands. A such theory (but to approximately forty years from its birth can be considered like a true and own effective shape of democracy), has had between its merits that one to have known problematic the relationship between democratic institutions and the structure of the society, one gap never overwhelmed from the bloomed liberal democratic theory in the first half of our century. In fact, this last one had not been pushed beyond a pure occasional reflection on the structures of the smaller associations, and, if we make exception from the work of Knows you Roman, it was remained tied mostly to the analysis of the shapes hierarchically subordinate of the political ordering (in particular way the state ), remaining faithful to the print conferred from Hans Kelsen to the theory contemporary democratic.
In this volume they are faced in locked way, with a good level of theoretical deepening, and with thematic lucidity, the main topics that constitute the bench marks of the associative democracy. The curatore has not omitted to illustrate the problematics of the issues, not lacking in dialectic an inner one, as it appears from the contributions of Wolfgang Streeck ( Inclusion and Secession: Question on the Boundaries of Associative Democracy , pp. 184-92), and of Ellen M. Immergut ( An Institutional Associative Critique of Democracy , pp. 201-6). To this purpose it goes put in relief the fact that to sure formulate a descriptive theory not deemed from the necessity of having itself to confront with a canon normative, likely to transpire from the strongly predictive value that Cohen and Rogers have made with their impressive contribution. On this point, the general principle remains in any case valid according to which to illustrate the processes of operation of a social phenomenon is not equivalent to sanction of immediately neither the conformity to the theoretical premises from which was party, neither the practical legitimate. In our case, the problem of the corporative representation, than in some social models has replaced nearly integrally the instruments of political representation, cannot be eluded through the simple acknowledgment that draft of one praxis by now consolidated, asking the political theory to abdicate in favour of conceptual instruments of other nature.
To the contrary, from the closely descriptive point of view us it seems that after the happened one of these ideas in the years it passes to you, they are committees to stasis rising , when the social changes of the contemporary world become adaptable to logical less and less of corporative type (tasks only to the two depositors of the economic increase and social mobility). For this reason, the relationship between political representation and representation of interests appear needy of one new definition, of sure in direction of a freeing of the systems of representation from corporative ties you. This truth appears clearly when all the students place the problem of a adaptability of the model to the new requirements of the contemporary world. To confirm this last position the fact that joins, if through the corporative shape the Socialism becomes an utopia possible, as Olin Wright writes, in the same way, to lead back political logic to that one of a cetuale status diverges considerably from the society model that the modern democracy has meant to look on to in the course of its history. That democracy, is one perspective difficultly dissociabile from the idea of one political soggettivitÃÂ , historically identified much more in the demand than title for the rights that in the exercise of shapes, solo in part democratics, of social status. 1 Nico De Federicis (from Bollettino telematico di filosofia politica)