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If we could define democracy in a way that is as close to "true" for all of humanity, what would this mean for this world?
Democracy has no definition. It is a Wittgensteinian word-game and borders on the tautological. We have well over 60 different conceptions of democracy: those found in history, those found at present, and those we are thinking about (ideal models, proposals for reform) that may come about at some future time.
As David Held has argued, we as humans are always seeing but a small portion of information and we have to make do with what we have. But given that democracy is so very important to most in the world, how then can we be in a situation where it is not robustly defined?
I have been taking all of these different conceptions of democracy and asking them the same question: what do you have in common? I am doing this in the hope of piecing together the whole of what might in the future turn out to be a post-universalistic conception of democracy: something devoid of one particular power (i.e. a Eurocentric history or 'Chinese' history, etc).
I am very curious to know what you would think would happen in this world if we achieved a "democratic" definition of democracy that all of humanity could agree on: what would change?
Chad Bruner
Jean-Paul Gagnon
Thank you kindly for your response. The kind of definition that I am seeking is the precondition for the growth of all of our present or pre-existing democratic typologies. It is not about defining what democracy is for the world: that, in effect, would be a rather undemocratic move (n'est-ce pas?). Perhaps in 500 years or so (give or take, haha) we might converge on something global, but that I think is, as you said, unpredictable. We'll just have to wait and see what happens.
What I'm on about is an attempt to reverse-engineer the complex distortions that are normatively and analytically attributed to both democratic governance and government. By deploying a cosmopolitan methodology and taking a post-universalistic ontology, I am trying to do this with as wide a number of human histories as possible. That reverse engineering is based predominantly in chaos theory's unique position of building one (among many I presume) whole from fragmented pieces. Kind of like making a vase out of a huge variety of mosaic pieces.
Maybe something like this could allow us to improve our democratic systems in a very basic way? Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated!
Simon Pratt
In other words, a necessary precondition of a real universal definition for democracy is a universal definition of free will and of social good.
As a counterfactual this is so remote in possibility as to be a waste of time as a guide for normative political theory, though I'm sure as sociological or historical investigation, your research would be fascinating.