古典民主意蕴的新探究

民主在西方其实并非毫无争议的“正统”。无论是直接民主还是代议制民主都曾受到广泛批评，既有来自哲人的内在批评，比如民主带来人类鄙俗化，也有来自社会科学家的外部批评，如民主必然缺乏效率。许多人认为现代政治的成功靠的其实不是民主，而是法治或共和乃至市场经济。不过，试图为民主特别是古代民主辩护的学者依然不时出现，他们努力另辟蹊径，寻找令人信服的论证，回答这些批评，从内在和外在的各种角度发掘古代民主实践和理念资源的现代意义，提出了诸如民主的“表演-施为”模型、“知识经济”效率模式、“观看型民主”模型、“哲人公民”模型等。这些尝试相当有新意，有助于对民主理论及历史乃至一般政治思想史和价值论的深入思考。

New Approaches to the Study of Classical Democracy

Democracy in the West is far from the incontrovertible ″orthodoxy.″ Rather, both participatory democracy and representative democracy have been criticized by philosophers for bringing about vulgar personality and social scientists for lacking of efficiency. Many believe that the success of the West comes not from democracy, but from the rule of law and other things such as market economy. However, proponents of democracy, especially of classic democracy, stand up from time to time. In answering the criticisms, they have developed various interesting approaches and new arguments, which help to discover the significance of classical democracy for today's theory and praxis. These new models of democracy, such as ″performance,″ ″knowledge economy,″ ″democracy as watching,″ and ″philosopher citizen,″ have deepened our understanding of democracy, political theory and human values.  First, the model of ″performance politics,″ started by Arendt, still attracts the attention of political theorists. One of its new forms is Farenga's theory of performance as democratic citizenship. Taking performance as the best unified perspective, he stresses its meaning as illocutionary act. Through different kinds of speeches, citizens can carry out three kinds of selves: communitarian self, individualist ego and deliberative self. A good citizen must know all of them and switch back and forth smoothly among them. To use ″knowledge economy″ as a model to explain the success of the Athenian democracy is an ingenious idea posed by Ober. To him, the institutions such as the council of the 500, the assembly and the jury can be seen as means for collecting information dispersed among the masses for efficient use. The numerous public monuments, buildings and theaters can serve the formation of common beliefs. Finally, codification and rule following in Athens makes the citizens a learning group. All these contribute to the surprising high performance of classical democracy in Athens. Green does not think that the vocal model of democracy works. He proposes a visual model instead and argues that democracy can be done by watching the leader's performance in accordance with the principle of candor. If scholars all above have tried to revive the importance of classical democracy, cautious people like Villa have pointed out the potential danger of this communitarian zeal. A new type of philosopher-citizenship, based on Socratic praxis, will check the uncritical obedience. For Socratic philosophy can be seen as saying that ″unexamined citizen life is not worth living.″ Such a philosophical mentality will help sustain the health of democracy. Put together, these efforts of justifying democracy from different angles have touched upon its inner values and outer benefits. The internal justification may be more significant, given that we are facing the new trend of ″naturalism″ and functionalism supported by neuroscience, new evolutionism, gene-biology and strong AI. Moreover, some scholars have tried to prove that the inner goods of democracy can bring about external flourishing. If this argument turns out to be sound, it will have profound implications for philosophy of history, for it confirms the belief that goods can bring forth goods, rather than evils bringing forth goods, as both Adam Smith and Hegel have shown.