Warren Magnusson and the Hope of Democracy
Martin Horak (University of Western Ontario)
In the ten years since Warren Magnusson published his last book, Western liberal democracies have come to a dangerous inflection point. Their institutional foundations, whose robustness most of us have long taken for granted, seem weak and brittle in the face of a rising tide of authoritarian populism. As the unwritten conventions that underpin representative democracy crumble, elections, legislatures, and legal institutions are being repurposed with shocking speed and effectiveness to serve the objectives of illiberal demagogues and ambitious plutocrats.
How we got to this point is the subject of much research and debate. It is increasingly clear, though, that the long run of democratic stability in the West that followed the cataclysm of World War II was made possible by an exceptional confluence of world-historical conditions. Continuous economic growth – fueled by technological innovation, ever-increasing natural resource use, and the exploitation of labor and resources in a colonized and post-colonial Global South – stabilized and legitimized democratic institutions by ensuring that governments could facilitate profits for capital while also ensuring steadily rising quality of life for most citizens. And until the 1990s, the Soviet bloc served as a foil, a "constitutive other” that further bolstered broad public support for liberal democratic regimes.
The unraveling of this post-war equilibrium has been several decades in the making. In the 1980s, globalization and deregulation decreased the capacity of governments to respond to the needs of their populations, even as income disparities grew. Since the turn of the millennium, the threat of climate change has increasingly called into question the sustainability of the continuous-growth model. At the same time, the rise of the politics of group identity, along with increasing social diversity and inequality in Western countries, have splintered domestic political landscapes. These transformations have in turn fueled public disaffection with liberal democratic institutions and have laid the groundwork for the rise of a technologically turbocharged illiberalism facilitated by the algorithmic fracturing of political discourse and exploited and amplified by unscrupulous political elites. As their legitimacy erodes, liberal democratic institutions risk becoming empty shells, forms devoid of their intended content.
Faced with this reality, how should political scientists and other scholars respond? Most of us believe that some form of democratic practice offers the best hope for just and sustainable governance in our world, but as state-centered liberal democracy destabilizes, what is to be done? Can social trust in liberal democratic institutions be revived? Should that even be a goal? How might the foundations of democratic practice be rebuilt in a world beset by crises and complex challenges?
In response to such questions, Warren Magnusson’s work offers an idea that is both simple and radical: Look beyond the state. For Magnusson, the idea that the state is the guarantor of political order and the primary site for democratic practice is misguided. It reflects what he called, in his 2011 book Politics of Urbanism, the “dream of sovereignty” – the belief that we can somehow become masters of our own collective destiny if we consolidate our efforts to govern ourselves in a single, overarching authority.
The dream of sovereignty, Magnusson argues, has blinded both political theorists and empirical political scientists to the actual foundations of political order, which rest on the human capacity for self-government. According to Magnusson, this capacity is most richly realized in urban settings, where the confluence of geographical proximity and social diversity poses problems of coexistence and collective goods provision that can only be addressed if people govern themselves – that is, if they behave in ways that recognize that their well-being is contingent on their interdependence with diverse others.
This notion of self-government is the foundation for Magnusson’s deeply hopeful vision of the sources of political order and, by extension, democratic practice. The complex problems that arise in urban settings challenge people to continuously develop their capacities for individual and collective self-government. The result, Magnusson says, is the spontaneous bottom-up production of social order.
“To the extent that people learn to live with people who are not of their own family, clan, tribe, village, religion, culture, or nation,” Magnusson wrote in Politics of Urbanism, “it is through the everyday negotiations of life: the ones that enable people who are otherwise strangers to live beside one another as neighbors, to pass each other peacefully on the street, work together, do business with one another, or even come together in joint projects for mutual benefit” (2011, 118-19). These local, daily interactions are not only what ground democracy – they are democracy.
Much like his account of social order, Magnusson’s understanding of democracy directs our attention beyond the state. Democracy, Magnusson writes, “is an idea of equality, a denial of the relevance of any of the familiar hierarchies – not only of race, class, and gender, but of intelligence, experience, and sensitivity – for the problem of self-government, understood not just as a question of individual freedom as modern liberals imagine it, but as a question about our lives together, how we are to manage them collectively.” Democracy thus emerges out of the ongoing practice of self-government at all scales. “To be a democrat in the fullest sense is to believe … that we can work out institutions and practices that enable us to live freely and responsibly under conditions that we decide together, with no person or group of people having any special privilege” (Magnusson 2015, 157).
For Magnusson, then, the state is but one of many spaces for politics, one of multiple sites of self-government, some institutionalized, others not. State-centered democratic politics is part of a much broader set of practices through which the norms and capacities that sustain democracy are developed and enacted. There is something of a Tocquevillian strain to Magnusson’s writing, with its insistence on the importance of local self-government. Unlike Tocqueville, however, Magnusson does not view local self-government as a training ground for representative democracy. Rather, it is a constitutive element of democracy itself, since democracy inheres in, and emerges out of, the interaction of many practices of government and self-government across multiple scales and domains of social life.
Warren Magnusson was no utopian anarchist. He acknowledged that state structures are needed to maintain macro-level social order in contemporary societies. But the democratic potential of the state, its ability to act as a venue for large-scale collective self-government, depends on the character of the many self-governing practices that permeate the society from which it arises. “Sovereignty may secure civilized life,” Magnusson wrote, “but it does not create it” (Magnusson 2011, 18). As we struggle for a way forward among nightmare visions of sovereignty peddled by authoritarian demagogues, Magnusson’s work offers us an encouraging message: Self-government is a deeply embedded human capacity. If we want to build a just and inclusive future, we must wake up from the dream of sovereignty and nurture the democratic impulse wherever it emerges in our lives with each other.
References
Magnusson, Warren. 2011. Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City. New York: Routledge.
Magnusson, Warren. 2015. Local Self-Government and the Right to the City. Montréal, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Martin Horak is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Western Ontario.