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Living with Conflict: Representation in the Theory of Adversary Democracy

All the authors in this symposium except George Kateb base their work on an unexamined assumption. They assume that the interests' of the citizens in the polity conflict. Because of this assumption, Still, Rogowski, and Morone and Marmor all try to devise ways of ordering the political battlefield so that the interests of all citizens will be protected equally. In this regard, these essays, with their concern for political equality, resemble other contemporary writing on representation. The contemporary normative theory of democracy is almost entirely an "adversary" theory, based on the assumption of conflicting interests among the citizens and conceived largely as a means of handling that conflict. The assumption of inescapable conflict has not always been so universally adopted. In the early seventeenth century, both citizens and their representatives believed that a nation-state could make most decisions on the basis of a common good. Such a conviction, for example, allowed the English Parliament to decide most issues by consensus.2 The conviction has since eroded. Democratic institutions now not only accept conflict, but presuppose it as their raison d'e'tre. Parties, once the bane of democracy, are now its mainstay; majority rule, once an incomplete substitute for full consensus, is now almost synonymous with democracy itself. When interests conflict, a procedure like majority rule that gives each citizen one vote derives its compelling force from the conclusion that conflict precludes a common or agreed-upon moral standard that otherwise could legitimate weighing different citizens' interests unequally. In a simple 'Hobbesian world of individuals pursuing their own interests, no one individual's interest has more worth than any other's. Equality then becomes the residual norm to which a polity resorts in the absence of other accepted standards for unequal weighting. In the face of conflict, adversary theory takes a stance close to individualist moral relativism: