On Zolo's Democracy and Complexity
With high praise, Richard Bellamy (UCL) alerted me to Danilo Zolo’s (1992) Democracy and Complexity: A Realistic approach (Polity, translated by David McKie). Zolo (1936 - 2018) was previously unfamiliar to me, and I couldn’t find much on him in English despite the authorship of multiple books. Once I started reading Zolo I quickly grasped why Bellamy thought I would be receptive to Zolo’s argument.
Regular readers will have noticed that I have increasingly embraced a number of interlocking positions that I tend to describe as ‘Platonic skepticism’ about the public sphere. I hold a liberal version of this view, but I first encountered it in Plato and Arendt (neither usefully described as a liberal). This kind of skepticism treats public life as a reign of opinion. By contrast, the production of public truth is costly and slow (and socially fragile) and limited to a small number of institutions: science, the courts, and public agencies.
That the public sphere is the reign of opinion is the effect not just of strategic agents who benefit from opinion and the speed of decision-making relative to the cost of truth production, but also the effect of the division of labor and social complexity. In a differentiated society, social life is not easily legible in the best of times. But due to the need for (to borrow a term from Elijah Millgram) hyper-specialization it also becomes increasingly difficult. Anyone with genuine expertise in some area will have encountered the public bullshit produced by quality journalists, consultants, civil servants, and editorialists in that area.
Zolo’s own version of the position I have presented in the previous paragraph is especially focused on the effects of the growth of electronic and information technologies as a “powerful accelerator” in the “growth of social complexity.” (p. 12) Our experience of our social and natural environment is mediated by these technologies and, thereby, produce complexity. I associate this view with Lippmann, who is duly cited by Zolo. And Zolo goes on to emphasize that in “societies of advanced technological development” there is a tendency in them “for the level of environmental dangers, and consequent social alarm, to increase.” (p. 42) The governance and effects of social and material technologies become, through various feedback loops, themselves the source of social danger.
As an aside, Zolo’s argument is presented in what we might call a ‘modernist guise.’ He focuses on the growth of information technology, and one might easily infer that what he is describing is a distinctively post-modern ailment. This sense is heightened by his reliance on what he calls a ‘reflexive’ epistemology. As very regular readers know, I myself understood Platonic skepticism in public life in modernist guise, too. But now I would argue (and have argued here) that it is endemic to political life in complex societies.* What is worth reflecting on (some other time) why we must think that modernity is distinctive politically and so end up steering the ship of state without any compass.
Before I continue, I don’t mean to suggest that Zolo is uncritical about the modernist guise. He is quite explicit that he thinks the tendency to associate representative democracy with the Greek polis or republican Rome is unhelpful (p. 77ff.) This he treats as aristocratic nostalgia in the generation of Arendt, Habermas, and Leo Strauss (p. 73), who he clearly thinks should have known better writing as they did after Weber and Schumpeter. For Zolo representation (whose roots he traces to middle-ages) has the function to secure “certain agents to a general and autonomous political function,” (p. 80) as state functionaries. (p. 86)+
Okay, so much for set up.
The view presented thus far has non-trivial implications for political theory not the least political theories of democracies. And what makes Zolo especially gripping is that he is attentive to the hyper-normative tradition of political philosophy that one may associate with Rawls; to the more realist traditions since Weber and Schumpeter; as well as to the tradition (associated with Dahl and Sartori) that presents itself as empirical theory.
Zolo’s classification is indebted to Schumpeter. Echoing Schumpeter, Zolo identifies a “classical doctrine” of democracy. While correcting Schumpeter, Zolo recognizes “two strands” in it: “the participative and the representative.” (p. 65) However, he immediate notes that the “classical theory of political representation [is] a simple variant of [the classical] theory of participation.” (p. 66) That is, “democracy, insofar as it is the direct or indirect expression of the ‘popular will’, is in fact the realization of the ‘'common good.’ For by definition, the ‘common good’ and the will of the demos come to the same thing.” (p. 66)
The purest expression of this position can be found in Rousseau, but in its Utopian branch leads to Marx (and Marxisms) (p. 66-8). And in its liberal branches to Rawls and Habermas (p. 70).
The core of Zolo’s criticism is worth quoting in full:
What this radical-democratic vision appears to me to lack most of all is a perception of the variety, particularism and mutual incompatibility of social expectations in non-elementary societies. It fails to consider the structurally scarce nature both of social resources and of the instruments of power responsible for the allocation of politically distributable resources. Social resources—security, ownership, prestige, money, power, time, information, etc. — are structurally scarce because they cannot satisfy corresponding expectations in absolute terms, according to cardinal values, but only in terms relative to the context of conditions appropriate to other agents or social groups. There is no stage therefore at which demand for a social benefit can be considered to have been met in full. (p. 70)
The point here is not ought implies can (although it is surely presupposed). Rather, the classical doctrine is on its own terms itself a kind of structural recipe for political frustration in reality. In addition, “in conditions of intensified social complexity…it also deeply counter-productive.” (p. 71) Enough said.
The ‘neo-classical’ doctrine of democracy is associated with Schumpeter and Downs. In it “democracy [is] a procedural stratagem to provide for the fact that that within evolved and differentiated societies the people, although formally designated as the holder of political sovereignty, is not in fact able to exercise it.” (p. 82) Proceduralism is necessary, but not sufficient to entail the neo-classical doctrine; this also requires a competitive struggle by competing would-be-elites in elections (with very broad or nearly universal franchises). (p. 83) So, the neo-classical doctrine combines proceduralism with “competitive leadership.” (p. 84) The point of the vote is to provide a mechanism by which leadership is accepted not an adequate mechanism of representation of interests or identities.
What Zolo grasps about the neo-classical doctrine is that while it is clearly indebted to the elite school of Mosca, Michels, and Pareto (p. 85) — and finds its most eloquent defender in James Burnham (who Zolo clearly knows but only mentions in passing)— it need not end up embracing conservative first order politics (even if it is seen as conservative for those writing from ‘The Left.’) Rather, representation can serve a wide variety of values whatsoever. (p. 85)
Zolo’s own views are more sympathetic to the Left than my own are. But his criticism of neo-classical doctrines are all rooted in realism. (The book itself is peppered with references to Machiavelli.) A key strain of his criticisms of the neo-classical doctrine is that it usually actually presupposes a rather idealistic notion of competitive markets (p. 88). This seems to me correct but not devastating as criticism.**
But his criticism of the neo-classical doctrine of democracy is spot on in so far as the neo-classical doctrine presupposes that the competitive nature or the political “market’s rules” are respected by political elites and voters alike, and “play their parts within them.” (p. 87) But this cannot be assumed because it is well known that political elites have the capacity to violate the “rules of the game by operating forms of covert or fraudulent competition.” (p. 88)
That is, the neo-classical doctrine of democracy either presupposes the continued vitality of democratic norms that are themselves exogenous to the market process or it requires that the market processes in economics and politics always jointly produce a society capable and willing of resisting the concentration of political power and the destruction of political competition. Absent a political institution that is capable of enforcing anti-trust mechanisms in elite competition, this seems to require a kind of providential faith. Since actually existing liberal society always generate asymmetric profits or rents to concentrated few, this faith seems without solid foundation (see p. 178)
That’s all I wanted to digress on today.
But Zolo’s argument is more subtle. Zolo recognizes that in complex societies, there exists institutions that do not operate with the logic of “free pluralistic competition.” (p. 88) For, a “large part of political power is exercised within invisible circuits removed from any logic of the market.” (p. 88) As he describes, “this invisible area extends both to the public government of the economy and to the system of mass communication.” (p. 104)
In fact, in his account of this invisible power Zolo anticipates the diagnosis of contemporary American unitary executive theorists (who are indebted to the elite theorists, too), who discern in the workings of contemporary bureaucracy a kind of what I called (recall) ‘technocratic Hayekianism’ at the core of the state’s administrative power: the system evolves slowly as the executive branch aided by privileged corporate suppliers tackles new social problems or meets new political demands.
And as Zolo discerns (while criticizing Bobbio) immanent in technocratic Hayekianism is the permanent temptation or “increasing danger of being replaced by more efficient forms of the exercise of power, attractive as a result of their ability to ‘manage complexity’ with a more economical use of money, time and attention.” (p. 107; see also p. 129) While you read this the sales agents of artificial intelligence whisper in the ears of the educated and political classes, where they expect to produce “effective consensus,” (p 134) that social complexity is best managed by strong, centralized despotic power.
*Unsurprisingly, the category of ‘complex society’ is itself meant to capture that point.
+I am quoting Zolo partially out of context. In the material under discussion Zolo is summarizing features of Schumpeter’s (and his followers) views that he also rejects. But the way I read Zolo, he does not reject their realism rather he thinks they are not realist enough.
**Together with Nick Cowen and Aris Trantidis, I have a paper in press “Democracy as a Competitive Discovery Process” European Journal of Political Economy, that makes the same point. We were unfamiliar with Zolo, alas But unlike Zolo, we think the neo-classical doctrine can be defended even if one assumes that really existing economic and political markets are quite oligarchic in character.