sábado, 9 de julio de 2011

La radicalización del experimentalismo democrático




"The existing social world, with its structure of stronger and weaker interests, will work to reproduce itself. It will find an ally in prestigious superstitions, such as the beliefs that the market order has a single natural and necessary institutional form or that the different countries of the world converge, by evolutionary decantation, to a single set of best practices and arrangements. This struggle for self-reproduction will limit the chances for experimental innovation in the development of new market organization and new comparative advantage. The present, acting through the logic of established interests and the tools of power at their disposal, will hold the future ransom.
There are, in the end, only two directions in which this dependence of the future on the present -- the path dependency of social experience -- can be weakened. One is to create a hard power that seeks to lift itself over the particular interests of society. The other is to radicalize democratic experimentalism in culture as well as in politics. The first direction hits against intractable limits. No such hard power can be sustained that fails to have real ties to the real interests of society or that forgets to subordinate its experiments in policy to its stake in self-preservation.
The second direction has no limits in principle. However, it has neither a self-evident institutional content nor a foreordained social constituency. Like the concept of a market economy, the idea of democracy lacks any natural and necessary institutional form. Moreover, the radicalization of democracy is feasible only if it is shown to offer a combination of powerful interests a way to achieve what the established order denies them. The content has to be supplied by a political imagination working with the institutional materials at hand. The constituency has to be produced together with the program."

RMU

miércoles, 6 de julio de 2011