Social complexity and strong democracy

The pluralistic liberal paradigm of democracy has shown its inability to guarantee economic prosperity and political stability and, as a consequence, has become increasingly vulnerable. Within political theory, democratic criticism of liberalism has mainly proceeded along two paths. On the one hand, communitarians have challenged liberal atomism and sought to rehabilitate the community as the focus for social life and human personality. On the other hand, ‘strong’ democrats have rejected the political division of labour characteristic of liberalism and sought to revive the ideal of participatory democracy. There are many points of contact between these two strands of thought—indeed some influential writers have explicitly subscribed to both—and radical communitarianism has had an important influence in practical politics over the past 15 years. However their fundamental theoretical assumptions clash, in particular because strong democracy has an implicit bias towards social uniformity that contradicts the essential premise of communitarianism. The most straightforward way out of this problem is multiculturalism, i.e. the conception of society as a liberal federation of strong communities. How much scope this leaves for true democracy is however unclear.