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Autonomy and the Democratic Principle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Rodger Beehler
Rodger Beehler*
Affiliation:
University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, CanadaV8W 2Y2
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Extract

In their important book On Democracy Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers represent a person’s claim to individual autonomy as proceeding from his or her claim to free and equal participation in the democratic order exercising sovereignty. I argue in what follows for the reverse position: that the claim to autonomy is the more primary claim, from which derives the claim to equal membership in the democratic order.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 19 , Issue 4 , December 1989 , pp. 575 - 581
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1989

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Footnotes

*

I wish to thank Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers for clarification of a feature of their argument. The penultimate paragraph of this essay is indebted to them.

References

1 Cohen, Joshua and Rogers, Joel On Democracy (New York: Penguin Books 1983) 151Google Scholar. All page numbers in brackets refer to this book.

2 For a detailed discussion see my ‘Rousseau’s Republic,’ in preparation. Regarding my addition of ‘autonomous’ to Rousseau’s ‘remains as free as before,’ briefly: ’each one, while uniting with all, nevertheless obeys only himself (The Social Contract, Book I, Chapter VI, my emphasis). The condition aimed at is one of self-rule. But self-rule is the essence of autonomy, as the Greek roots of the word declare.

3 See their discussion of the democratic requirement of workplace democracy, which concludes: ‘The defense of workplace democracy provided [and required) by the democratic conception no more rests upon its being the most materially productive form of social order than the familiar defenses of capitalism as preferable to slavery depend for their force on judgments about the relative productivity of wage labor and slave labor’ (164).

4 In the next two sentences I draw on a communication from Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers. Any error in representing their procedure is mine. (See also 147-8 of On Democracy.)

5 Quotations from Rousseau are from Donald A. Cress’s translation of The Social Contract, the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, and the Discourse on Political Economy (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company 1983) at 24, 176. By ‘men’ Rousseau literally means males. (For the case establishing this see, for example, Susan Moller Okin’s chapters on Rousseau in her Women in Western Political Thought [Princeton: Princeton University Press 1979].) His doing so is strong evidence of the stupifying inertia of assumptions about gender: that the eighteenth century’s most insightful theorist of the interaction of ‘human nature’ and social environment could not think his way outside them.