Whenever anyone starts wringing their hands about political disillusionment, it’s not long before someone raises the prospect of changes to ‘the system’ – proportional representation, electronic voting, an elected second chamber, or some such. It’s as if democracy were a machine, and its problems solved simply by replacing outdated components.
To be sure, the constitution faces serious challenges – almost every imaginable outcome to the general election on 7 May poses serious questions about the technical operation of first-past-the-post electoral system and the outcomes which it delivers under multi-party conditions. Many of these anxieties rest on assumptions about what a good system should do, namely to manifest the collected and clear will of the people – but what if that will simply does not exist?
According to Luke Bretherton in his new book Resurrecting Democracy, what’s wrong with democracy is little to do with systems, and everything to do with our underlying assumptions about power, sovereignty and citizenship. For instance, we tend to see the sovereignty – in our case, the sovereignty of the people – as single, indivisible, and transcendent (enhancing, perhaps, a sense of crisis when elections in whatever system create no clear outcome?). Such a vision is intolerant of other sources of authority, not least the church, which are forced into the private realm. Nevertheless, these assumptions are the bedrock, for Bretherton, of the ‘contractarian’ political theories of Hobbes, Rousseau and Hegel. Where what matters is your consent to be governed and the state’s ability to protect you, and absent a fuller politics of virtue, relationships and the good, a democracy – the rule of people – becomes an exercise in aggregating the interests of a mass of individuals. This leaves no space at all for the lived reality of human existence where we work out and experience ‘the good’ collectively and relationally – as members of families, congregations, and workplaces. There are, Bretherton concedes, a series of historical exceptions to his theoretical development (labour movements on both sides of the Atlantic, civic republicanism, non-statist strands of socialism), but they are that – exceptions.
What could breathe life into the dry bones which we call politics? No constitutional tinkering for Bretherton – but a ‘consociational democracy’. Here, sovereignty isn’t single and indivisible, but complicated, mediated and distributed amongst a range of institutions that may or may not look ‘political’ in the conventional sense. In such institutions – church, chapel, mosque, union – people learn the art of governing and being governed. It’s there, rather than at the ballot box, that they first become citizens. If we were to begin in these places, changing how we think about and do politics, could democracy be more than five year cycles of powerless frustration punctuated by grudging voting.
Importantly, Bretherton does not start with the theory but with practice. The first and largest part of his book is devoted to an in-depth ethnographic exploration of Broad Based Community Organising (BBCO), a kind of community activism developed in the 1930s by Saul Alinsky in the Back of the Yards neighbourhood in Chicago. Alinsky sought to school the ‘have-nots’ in practices by which they could build the power they needed to defend their interests against the ‘haves’, in a context where representative democracy offered no meaningful hope. Though he was an agnostic Jew, community organising was adopted by many churches and other faith communities. Famously, Barak Obama spent a three year’s working as a community organiser.
For Bretherton, BBCO is a living, breathing example of consociational democracy, where institutions organise together to discern and realise the common good, using a variety of tactics to cajole and embarrass decision makers to recognise their demands. Here in the UK, BBCO organisation Citizens UK have been a growing force, campaigning effectively on the living wage, credit caps and child detention in immigration centres.
This book is no arms-length description, but a product of Bretherton’s full immersion in community organising networks over a number of years. Anyone who simply wants to understand community organising would be well advised to follow Bretherton’s rich description. It doesn’t shrink from the tensions that BBCO creates, indeed thrives upon, or the ways in which it can sometimes be counterintuitive for Christians, with its emphasis on power and conflict. For Alinsky, as Bretherton observes, the route to any negotiating table worth sitting at is conflict, and the obsession with consensus – of which Christian political engagement is sometimes guilty – is often just a way of ensuring the status quo is left untouched.
The book’s account of BBCO is theological in several ways, identifying and unpacking the dialogue that Alinsky himself shared with theologians such as Jacque Maritain, recognising that the majority of organisations involved in BBCO are religious congregations and that BBCO often seems like a complete blurring of piety and politics. Bretherton also argues that the misconstrual of political sovereignty rests – quoting Derida – on “some unavowed theologeme”. More simply, our assumptions about political sovereignty reflect assumptions about the sovereignty and nature of God.
This is a very rich book, a work of theology and political theory, but also ethnography, which together casts light on the failures and frustrations of liberal democracy. You could well feel in completing it that Bretherton hasn’t even mentioned, never mind answered, some of the most pressing questions facing our democracy in this election year. In fact, he has done something far more interesting, which is to re-frame those questions entirely. It’s not ‘systems’ that are wrong, but our deep-running and assumptions about what politics is. Unless we start asking the right questions then, to paraphrase RH Tawney, we could spend a lot of time tidying the room but opening no windows to the soul.
Paul Bickley
A version of this review was published in Third Way magazine.
Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship and the Politics of a Common Life (2015) is published by Cambridge University Press.
Image by Gary Knight from flickr.com under the Creative Commons Licence
