Radical Models of DD: Digitising and Networking for Demarchy

Radical conceptions of deliberative democracy (RDDs) arise from the efforts of a variegated set of progressive individual thinkers and schools of thought keen to overcome the theory and practice of liberal democracy. Starting from different theoretical standpoints, they end up advocating a form of democratic governance which, according to them, can move beyond the theoretical and political restraints imposed by liberal thought and regimes. Since the liberal tradition is in reality a collection of political positions and practices with some family resemblance (Palumbo, Liberalism. In R. Axmann (Ed.), Understanding democratic politics (pp. 231–240), Sage, 2003), such an approach replicates this pluralistic structure at both theoretical and practical levels. The individuals and groups populating this area of our Cartesian space are therefore a multifarious population aspiring to define the character of a progressive community with a distinctive set of ideas and practical solutions. In pursuing this end, they are strongly committed to supplying conceptual innovations and institutional solutions that can help develop such an aspirational polity in real life. For reasons that will be made clear in the course of my discussion, I shall refer to the latter as a ‘demarchy’. The aim of this chapter is to identify the main contributors to this project, and the analytical elements supporting demarchy as an ideal-type of polity. In doing this, I will stress the differences that, at an analytical level, set RDDs apart from other progressive political visions, above all participatory democracy, with which it is often confused. Once the analytical framework supporting demarchy is spelled out, I shall critically consider its main building blocks, so as to identify the weak points of this project. The author with whom I will mostly be concerned is the Australian philosopher John Burnheim (Is democracy possible? Sydney University Press, 1985/2006; The demarchy manifesto. Sydney University Press, 2016), who is not only one of the earliest explorers, but remains up to now the best representative example of this radical way of thinking. Other more contemporary authors (e.g. Castells, Coleman, Dahlberg, and Smith) will be discussed here only to appraise whether they supply analytical resources that could overcome the limitations affecting Burnheim’s pioneering endeavour.