Nadia Urbinati

Procedural Democracy, the Bulwark of Equal Liberty

This essay reclaims a political proceduralist vision of democracy as the best normative defense of democracy in contemporary politics. We distinguish this vision from three main approaches that are representative in the current academic debate: the epistemic conception of democracy as a process of truth seeking; the populist defense of democracy as a mobilizing politics that defies procedures; and the classical minimalist or Schumpeterian definition of democracy as a competitive method for selecting leaders.

Competing for Liberty: The Republican Critique of Democracy

Freedom as non-domination has acquired a leading status in political science. As a consequence of its success, neo-roman republicanism also has achieved great prominence as the political tradition that delivered it. Yet despite the fact that liberty in the Roman mode was forged not only in direct confrontation with monarchy but against democracy as well, the relationship of republicanism to democracy is the great absentee in the contemporary debate on non-domination. This article brings that relationship back into view in both historical and conceptual terms. It illustrates the misrepresentations of democracy in the Roman tradition and shows how these undergirded the theory of liberty as non-domination as a counter to political equality as a claim to taking part in imperium. In so doing it brings to the fore the “liberty side” of democratic citizenship as the equal rights of all citizens to exercise their political rights, in direct or indirect form.

Condorcet’s Democratic Theory of Representative Government

The basic theoretical premise of this article is that representation does not necessarily imply a break with democratic principles. Its goal is to challenge the traditional liberal-elitist approach to representative government according to which this system is a mixed regime that is not identifiable with democracy since its main institution, election, is a mechanism that is inherently aristocratic, although it can be implemented in a democratic way. I question this powerful argument by questioning its main assumption: the idea that representative government, since its 18th-century inception, has had a linear and univocal history which was essentially undemocratic.I go back to the age of the French Revolution and analyse Condorcet’s plan of constitution in order to prove my case. Condorcet devised institutional mechanisms and procedures that were able to make representative government democratic by overcoming the polarization between representation and participation and making them related forms of political action constituting the continuum of decision-making and opinion formation in modern democratic society.

The Historian and the Ideologist

The three volumes of Visions of Politics are the documents of an intellectual epoch, written by one of its leading figures. They offer an extraordinarily vibrant picture of the longue durée effects of the innovating spirit of the 1960s in history, philosophy, and the social sciences in English-speaking universities as well as in Europe. Quentin Skinner’s project and that of the Cambridge School he helped to establish can be seen as an attempt to disprove Peter Laslett’s 1956 diagnosis of the death of political philosophy, “a British variant of the ‘end of ideology’ thesis” as Kari Palonen writes in his monograph on Quentin Skinner (p. 12). The analysis of political languages and ideologies has been the distinctive mark of Skinner’s project of freeing historical understanding from antihistorical parochialisms. His main concern has been the study of linguistic conventions and conceptual distinctions in the work of both minor and major authors. The most important theoretical context for what Palonen calls the “Skinnerian revolution” is the British tradition of the philosophy of language. There, conceptual analysis is an instrument of communication, a means to solve or create disagreements, to shape traditions of meaning or break them down, to, finally, inaugurate “shifting vocabularies.” Whether in Cambridge or in Oxford, the renaissance of political philosophy in England after World War II began from within the framework of linguistic analysis, both when it took the form of clarification of the evaluative meaning of political concepts, as in the case of Brian Barry (Political Argument, 1965), and when it sought

Political Representation as a Democratic Process

In what follows I inquire into the conditions that make representation democratic, or a mode of political participation that can activate a variety of forms of citizen control and oversight. I make three main claims: that representation belongs to the history and practice of democratization; that different theories of representation are possible depending on the relationship between political institutions and social configurations; and that this relationship calls attention to the role of ideology and partisanship in politics, an aspect that contemporary political theory fails to appreciate with its deep-rooted rationalist approach to democratic deliberation. In order to give the reader the sense of my theoretical approach to political representation in democratic society, I will dedicate some introductory reflection to outlining the broader project to which this article belongs.2 The line of argument that unifies my broader project and that constitutes the context of what follows is that representative democracy is an original form of government that is not identical with electoral democracy. This thesis questions the assumptions about immediacy and existential presence that underwrite the idea that direct democracy is the more democratic political form and representation an expedient or second best. Building upon a critical reading of the seminal work of Hanna Pitkin and Bernard Manin, I argue that political representation is a circular process connecting state and society (that is to say an expression of citizenship in its comprehensive sense). As such, representative democracy is neither aristocratic in

Global Democracy: A Symposium on a New Political Hope

The idea that the values and norms of democracy can also be applied to global politics is increasingly debated in academe. The six authors participating in this symposium are all advocates of global democracy, but there are significant differences in the way they envision its implementation. Some of the contributors discuss if and how substantial changes undertaken by states, mostly in their foreign policies, may also generate positive consequences in global politics. Other contributors address the nature of the international arena and the possible reforms it should undergo starting with the reform of international organizations. The debate combines theoretical aspects with normative proposals that could also be advanced in the political arena and offers a wide range of perspectives on the attempts to achieve a more democratic global political community.

On liberal revolution

A collection of writings by one of Italys most important radical liberals, Piero Gobetti (1901-1926). In 35 thought-provoking essays, Gobetti proposes a challenging notion of liberalism as a revolutionary theory of both the individual and social and political movements.

Roundtable on Epistemic Democracy and its Critics

On September 3, 2015, the Political Epistemology/Ideas, Knowledge, and Politics section of the American Political Science Association sponsored a roundtable on epistemic democracy as part of the APSA’s annual meetings. Chairing the roundtable was Daniel Viehoff, Department of Philosophy, University of Sheffield. The other participants were Jack Knight, Department of Political Science and the Law School, Duke University; Hélène Landemore, Department of Political Science, Yale University; and Nadia Urbinati, Department of Political Science, Columbia University. We thank the participants for permission to republish their remarks, which they edited for clarity after the fact.

Republicanism: Democratic or Popular?

What can contemporary representative democracies learn from Roman and Florentine models of popular government? Is a representative and constitutional democracy able to amend its chronic elitism by devising institutions that give ordinary citizens as “groups” the power to judge and punish “suspect elites” by taking away from them the privilege of being exclusively under the judgment of “their official peers and adversaries in government”?1 These are the questions that drive John McCormick’s Machiavellian Democracy, which reinterprets Niccolo Machiavelli’s republicanism and proposes institutional innovations that would recover contemporary democracy from its oligarchic decline. The link between these two tasks consists in a radical critique of the neo-Roman model of republicanism as it was put forth by the Cambridge School. McCormick questions the identity of republicanism for the sake of realigning it with what, according to him, has been its central question since antiquity: how the common people can counter, limit, and punish domination or arbitrary interference by power holders, not simply how to counter it. McCormick does not think that the existing constitutional provisions and institutional checks and balances are effective because they were created precisely in order to contain the democratic element. In short, if we want to recover our republics from their oligarchic decline we should first look back to ancient and early modern republics and properly understand their character, both their senatorial and oligarchic component and their democratic and popular one.

Republicanism after the French Revolution: The Case of Sismonde de Sismondi

Sismonde de Sismondi was perhaps the most prominent promoter of a republican theory of liberty and the government after the collapse of eighteenth-century republicanism with the Terror. In revisiting Sismondis ideas this article shows how the French Revolution and the advent of capitalism changed the nature of republicanism without obliterating it. Contra contemporary neo-roman republicanism, we can see through Sismondi that it was not the priority of individual interests and liberty that troubled modern republicans the most. What challenged it was instead the growth of a society that praised political equality and legitimacy by electoral consent and made virtue and honor negligible. Sismondi thought that, if not tamed, the democratic transformation of society would threaten liberty, individual as well as political.