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Abstract: In the present article an analysis is developed, approached from the political philosophy, on
the conception the Italian philosopher Norberto Bobbio (1909-2004) outlined about two of the most
important political traditions produced by the western culture and which are, without a doubt, pillars
upon which modernity has been built: democracy and liberalism. From this perspective approaching
and encounter points are identified, the same as the tensions that energize the relationship between
democracy and liberalism as well as some contradictions that spur Bobbio’s thought.
Key words: Democracy, liberalism, political liberalism, liberal State, liberal democracy.
Resumen: En el presente artículo se desarrolla un análisis, abordado desde la filosofía política, en
torno a la concepción que el filósofo italiano Norberto Bobbio (1909-2004) planteara acerca de dos
de las más importantes tradiciones políticas que ha producido la cultura occidental, y que son, sin
duda alguna, pilares sobre los que se ha edificado la modernidad: la democracia y el liberalismo. Desde
esta perspectiva se identifican aproximaciones y puntos de encuentro, lo mismo que las tensiones que
dinamizan la relación entre democracia y liberalismo, así como algunas contradicciones que permean
el pensamiento de Bobbio.
Palabras clave: democracia, liberalismo, liberalismo político, Estado liberal, democracia liberal.
ISSN 1405-1435, UAEMex, num. 48, September - December 2008, pp. 19-38
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Introduction1
When we refer to the relationship between liberalism and democracy we
commonly suppose or suspect that both political categories are close to each
other, either because they are too familiar to us or because, in other words,
they are very common. The intertwinement that we suppose between them
is nourished, obviously, by any discursive and ideological charge that, in the
daily life acts, is spread having as source different origins (mass media, political
speeches, demonstrations, et cetera). Don’t we even mention a democratic-
liberal Weltanschauung? Don’t we even refer nowadays to a liberal democracy
that not only stands triumphantly, but which is also pompously said to be
healthy?
Obviously, one thing is to take for granted that this relationship between
liberalism and democracy exists, and another one, as it corresponds to the
intellectual work that the political philosopher has to perform, is to demonstrate
and clarify its meaning, to clarify at which historical moment and how the
fusion took place, which divisions can be determined, what tensions arise,
which bridges or ideological rapprochements ease establishing a conciliation
that we could call effective, as well as which conditions of the political
environment in the society encourage controversy. It is necessary to tackle
these and other concerns given their significance and complexity. The analysis
and reflection on these two political practices around which the current social
and economic life revolve becomes a more important situation after the fall
of the real socialism that left liberal democracy without its natural antagonist.
After all, such task involves the knowledge aspect, both in the ethical
imperative that encourages us to continue speaking about things that have
already been said, a part of it which is to assume detachments or controversies
with ideas or points of view that are not shared, and with regard to the
expectations that arise based on what is expected to be said. To take part in
the theoretical debate as well as in the production of knowledge, whichever
1
The present article is part of the research project the author develops inside Culture and
Politics Group (Grupo Cultura y Política), which he belongs to. Said group is ascribed to the
department of Philosophy of Universidad del Cauca and is recognized by Colciencias in
Category B.
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Luis Antonio Córdoba Gómez, Liberalism and democracy
from Norberto Bobbio’s perspective
the topic is, does not set us in the position of neutral or dispassionate subjects,
but in the position of individuals who cannot establish radical detachments
to the concerns that the political flux poses, an issue of utmost importance
if we bear in mind the future of our societies.
For instance, when we have the belief that we have just spoken little a
about a specific problem, that we have barely taken charge of it, not only
can we cast doubt on the roles that have been performed, but we shall also
understand that to undertake a task of conceptual clarification (extremely
necessary) is, at the same time, big and challenging. But if we consider the
opposite situation, that is, when we suppose we talk about something with
great intensity, we don’t infer that there is more clarity or that the doubts
had been cancelled once and forever. On the contrary, the invitation to
the philosophical debate, as open and lasting attitude, leads us to continue
asking questions, to continue persisting in finding new ways to comprehend,
to continue looking for new alternatives of interpretation, because political
philosophy definitely cannot be understood as a reason clause.
In any case, a debate about liberalism and democracy cannot be considered
settled. This fact brings us face to face contemporarily with the presence of
two political traditions that despite tending to be universalized,2 as in the
economic field capitalism globalizes, and nevertheless (that is, despite its
almost unquestionable supremacy) its achievement stops being exempt of
risks, difficulties and incoherences. As an example of this we could mention
that democracy, understood as a way of intervention in the decisions of the
society according to equity and participation principles, is being undermined
by neoconservative and neoliberal tendencies in our countries. Tendencies
that not only put on the same level the political struggle for power and the
economic logic of the market and the individual calculation (MacPherson,
2005), they have also launched the preventive politics of the government of
the elites.3
2
This universalization would be equivalent to the expansive waver of the democracy that
Huntington explains (1994).
3
Antonio Ocaña (1991: 39) speaks about the democradura to make reference precisely to the
configuration of the democracy as the government of elites.
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have. While the first stands in the lands of the restoration of the sense of
individual independence, the second makes it from egalitarianism.
Based on this, Bobbio considers that the ancient understood (and lived)
liberty as direct participation of the citizens in public affairs and in the
distribution of power, which would give rise (in practice) to the obedience
and subordination of the individual to the political community (that is, the
negation of the liberty by handing it over). In contrast to them, what the
moderns did was exactly the opposite: the final end is the defense of the
individual liberty, as guarantee of the private life, which corresponds, also,
to the adoption of ways of life framed in broader territorial contexts. In this
respect Bobbio refers to that which Constant expressed and says:
As a thoroughgoing liberal, Constant held that these two aims were mutually
incompatible. Where everyone participates directly in collective decisions, the
individual ends up being subordinated to the authority of the whole, and loses his
liberty as a private person; and it is private liberty which citizen today demands
of public power (Bobbio, 1993: 7).*
So that liberalism, in general sense, emerges then as a philosophy of
change, as a kind of thought that causes (or fosters) transformations and that
adopts progressive positions that are able to break all the factors that tend
to paralyze the thought and the society (progress ideology). But in a more
specific sense, that is, more political, liberalism will become a philosophy on
the individual (as subject), and human liberty (as principle) an institutional
philosophy on the form of the State. For Bobbio this is a shape that is
symbolized in the regulation of the exercise of the power, in the subordination
of the public powers to the controls (limits) established and defined in the
written norms.
So that when Bobbio mentions the liberal State he refers to a doctrinal
point of view, according to which power, understood in neutral sense, that
is, independently from who exercises it, has to be limited (in its use and
functions).4 In these terms, the identification of the liberal State as limited
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from Norberto Bobbio’s perspective
State is materialized in the State of Law (or constitutional State), which is ruled by
the laws, by the supremacy of the norms with higher rank (the fundamental
laws) created by men and that are contained in the political Constitutions
(according to a positivization that is extensive to the natural rights);
[…] ‘liberalism’ denotes a particular conception of the state, in which the state
is conceived as having limited powers and functions, and thus as differing
from both the absolute state and from what is nowadays called the social state
(Bobbio, 1993: 7).
Liberalism refers us to limits both in the power and in the functions of the state.
In respect of the limits of power one speaks currently of the rights-based, while
the term minimal state is used in reference to the limit on function. Even though
liberalism conceives the State as both lawful and minimal, one can have rights-
based, non-minimalist states (as with the social state today), and also minimalist
states which are not rights-based (as in the case of Hobbes’s Leviathan, in the
economic sphere: a state which is at one and at the same time absolute in the
fullest sense of the term, and liberal in its economics (Bobbio, 1993: 11).
As it can be seen in the exposition of these comparisons, the liberal State,
as an ordainment that accepts constitutional pluralism (which results in the
division of powers and their limitation by means of the law) in order not to
conceal freedom and individual rights (and therefore, emancipation), which
liberal society considers significant, becomes a minimal State. According to
Bobbio, this minimal State is the opposite of a maximal State, that is, the
Absolutist State, and by extension to the totalitarisms and to the State of
social intervention.5
Nevertheless, one must observe that said categorization of a minimal
State used by Bobbio responds in fact to the historical emergence of the
classic liberal State (leave to do, leave to pass: laissez faire, laissez passer) that,
in the interests of the defense of the economic freedom, will welcome the
5
For the classic liberals (and today for the neoliberals) the aspiration of the State of well-being
of controlling the whole society, through the enlargement of its intervention capacity, hand
in hand with high doses of dirigisme and paternalism, not only is to the detriment of the
freedom, but it becomes the cause of the social problems and in a source of ingovernance
of the democracy itself.
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6
These are assumptions of the economic liberalism, with which the productive processes, trade,
generation of wealth and, therefore, the well-being and the prosperity of the societies
are conceived. The starting point consists in sustaining that what drives individuals is not
the solidarity desire, but, on the contrary, egoism, the satisfaction of the needs and most
immediate and close desires (the private interest, the search for wealth). For Adam Smith,
his greatest exponent, no matter how these tendencies are constituted into natural laws
(while they are decided freely by men, in their ways of behaving and thinking) they do not
need the intervention of a regulating power (that of the State).
7
He accepts the antagonism between the individual and society as something that not only is
necessary but favorable, as long as it inspires competence and in the sense of the emulation,
just as economic liberalism states. When applied to the political sphere it stimulates the
political pluralism, understood both in the sense of the presence of the variety of organized
political groups, that contend for power, as the existence of a variety of points of view and
opinions that encourage the public controversy and the collective debate.
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the end are in charge of showing the contradictions into which democracy
has fallen (the so called broken promises).
We shall remember that Rousseau (1993), for instance, is suspicious of
the representativeness of the democracy as materialization of that which can
be called true democracy. In his opinion, the sense of the liberty is distorted
when popular sovereignty ends up delegated in the elected, in order for
them to decide for the people. To that respect he will answer saying that
direct democracy, so praised by the Genevan philosopher, is non-viable
and unfeasible (unreal); while, by contrast, the strength of representative
democracy lies in the judgment capacity that the elected have:
Representative democracy was fostered also by the conviction that the citizen’s
elected representatives would be better able to judge the common interest than
the citizens themselves, whose vision would be too narrowly focused on their
particular interests (Bobbio, 1993: 36).
Despite the preached wisdom of the representatives, insofar as virtue
that is attributed to them, unlike the primary concerns that supposedly
characterize the masses, that does not free them from committing lack of
political responsibility with the elector, nor inoculate them towards the fact
that those representatives before being obligated to the nation as a matter of
fact choose to establish strictly particular covenants and compromises. Neither
is the representative democracy unaware of phenomena such as that in which
decisions are focused in organizations, elites or in transnational corporations,
just as it happens nowadays under the neoliberal model, which is unaware of
the indifference of the citizen, of the corruption of the political customs,
of the presence of uninformed and non-politically educated citizens, of the
formation of several circles of power,8 et cetera.
We can’t forget that in the base of the articulation operated between
liberalism and democracy lies the contradiction (and, therefore, the problem
of complementarity) between the individual and the social, which reflects the
8
The allusion to the fact that democracy has not represented previously a unique center of
power (a centripetal society), but that it has given place to a plurality of powers (a centrifugal
or polycentric society as Bobbio calls it), is called by Dahl (1993) as the formation of a
poliarchy.
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9
Italian philosopher and jurist (1909-2004) that since his youth took part in the antifascist
resistance, initially as member of the Justice and Liberty (Giustizia e Liberta) movement,
lead by brothers Nello and Carlo Roselli, and later in the National Committee for the
Liberation of Papua, as a consequence he was arrested two times. He was professor in the
Camerino, Siena, Papua and Turin universities. He joined the last one in 1948, heading the
Philosophy of Right chair, once the Action Party was dissolved and from which he was a
member since its creation in 1943. In 1984 he was appointed life senator by Alessandro Perini.
According to José María Gonzáles García, in Norberto Bobbio one can observer three
stages: in the first one he will highlight the differences between the Western democracies
and the socialism established in the old USSR; in the second, the debate is focused in the
debate with Marxism; in the third one (from the 80’s), the reflection will have to do with
modern democracy.
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from Norberto Bobbio’s perspective
liberty, not because they did not represent the ideological strength of human
emancipation, but because it implied the emancipation of some men (the
bourgeoisie) to the detriment of the negation of the liberty of other (the
proletariat). Neither Marx believed in the neutrality assumption of the
liberal State and its unbiased capacity to referee in the society, according to
which all citizens are treated equally. So that, as Bobbio reaffirms, liberal
democracy supposes a consensus on the political order, it ruins (eliminates)
the antagonism, the conflict and the constraint that are natural to power, the
political hegemony and domination.
It shall be highlighted that the defense of the demo-liberal institutions
supposed by Bobbio has an Anglo-Saxon longing. Regarding the emphasis
set in the conception of man and social life, the Italian thinker is supporter of
making them gravitate in the pragmatics (the offered results and advantages)
for the individual rights, the political pluralism, the universalization of the
suffrage, the constitutionalization of the State, among other referents. Some
of them exude in Hobbes’s works (1996) or in those of Locke (1973). To
drink in the fountains of classic liberalism allows Bobbio to make a political
displacement (from initial left positions to a latter centrism) and to state a
conciliation with the original Marxism under the form of the liberal-socialism.
But behind this conciliatory position, what Bobbio really does is to warn
about the dangers of the extrapolations, the radicalisms and the political
overflows that derive from the practical application of the Marxist principles
such as that of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as for the fact that it would
configure a power without limits, located on the sidelines of regulation. It
would also suppose a questioning of the opening sense that Machiavelli gave
to politics (as for pure passion, pure personalized power game according to
the usage of techniques for its conquest or preservation), which allows Bobbio
to set politics in the field of its relationship with the State.
It is certain that the proposed conciliation (the liberal-socialism), which
is not exempt from contradictions, despite the fact that it works better in
the theoretical plane than in the practical, has the virtue of proposing a
line of analysis that tries to escape from the interpretative logics of the
political tensions, seen as irreconcilable given the unavoidable antagonism
that motivates them, which would seem that set us in the way of a certain
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political idealism. In the same way, it make us ask ourselves if in the direct
politics that articulation he proposes is directed in the sense of the recovery
of the social democracy or if, in future terms, it would be related more with
the possibility of considering an advanced socialism (renewed), built with
the political significance that not only comes from the working class but in
general from the excluded and subordinated, and who nowadays, in Latin
America, seem to show signs in the political experiences of Hugo Chávez,
Lula da Silva and Evo Morales.
It is necessary to make several clarifications on the last aspect. The first
is that I refer to a socialism of new lineage, insofar as it is a distinction label, as
a political experience that, from being or becoming real, would differentiate
itself, at least in the scale of time, from vivid socialism, for instance, in the
countries of the Iron Curtain. The second is that I refer to a probability, that
is, to something that cannot be understood as an accomplished fact or better
said, in the best of the circumstances, as something that would appear to be
a consolidation process, in a manner of speaking.
The third is that speaking on a new socialism would imply to refer to a
tendency and/or political alternative that certainly leaves room for, in the
broad sense, although also diffuse, the mobilization of imaginaries and
representations, where it is possible to think the realization of justice and the
redistribution of wealth, as well as reconcile what historically seems to have
become an irresolute tension: the individual freedom and the collectivism,
the private interest and the general interest. This babbling tendency would
be framed, apart from that, within the conflicts, the contradictions, the
ambiguities and the features that make Latin American societies more dynamic.
The fourth is that despite the responses to the several questions and
expectations that one bears considering the possibility of a new socialism in the
future, they correspond more to the scrutiny of history, we see ourselves in the
need of turning to the previous political experiences that the Western world
has seen, and which nourish the disenchantment with modernity. It is from
its political pedagogy that certain mistrust and suspicion derives with regard
to the new political promises made from other shores, in which reconciliation
is stated as that which up to the current moment turned irreconcilable.
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from Norberto Bobbio’s perspective
In fact, fears and challenges, both theoretical and practical, come to the
fore. Just consider how the exacerbation of the political empowerment of
the masses, nourished by a rampant populism and in significant doses of
authoritarianism and power concentration, could imply leaps and abstractions
with regard to the democratic constitutional order and, therefore, of their
values and principles, just as the liberal theory has postulated. These threats
come either from several sides, beyond the location of forces and actors in
the political spectrum that is, both from left and right.
Now then, after these clarifications, we shall say that a part of the questions
that arise have to do with the reading that can be done on the implications
around the Bobbio’s conception on the logic of the dominant power, that
is, with regard to their justifications and legitimacy. Is his point of view, his
criticism, conservative? Is it a reflection of a political stance that, in the
defense of the status quo, aims at perceiving the consequences derived from
the political decadence of the liberal institutionality, when it shows to be deaf
and reluctant to listen to the social outcry of change?
Does Bobbio reflect a kind of moral conscience that calls for a containment
of the change, to the alert, to the prevention of dangers related to the political
excesses and incompetence that are attributed to the masses, when they extol
the democratic egalitarism? Or, on the contrary, it is a brilliant invitation to
think in the political transformation of the democratic societies, from the
primate of the moderate and gradual change instead of the revolution? Is
it a call to settle the debt that democracy has with society, that is, to achieve
what up to now is a non-fulfillment history or, on the contrary, what is aimed
is to think in what democracy should provide?
We can also ask if the analysis that deals with the proceduralism of the
representative democracy, as one of the outstanding notes in the minimal
definition of democracy that Bobbio suggests (and for which it is more
important to analyze who holds the domination instead of who exercises it,
with which legal tools it is made), introduces an important note, and distinctive,
in reference to the conception of power. And if the answer is negative, then
is it that we assume that the issue is a whim introduced for the delight of
academic and intellectual agents?
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Bibliography
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from Norberto Bobbio’s perspective
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