Radical Democracy (C. Douglas Lummis)

Central questions about the meaning of democracy come down to the locus of power on one hand and the manner in which the discourse of governance of civil society will be conducted. To the question of power, Lummis says that democracy means "that the people rule. To do so, the people must form itself into a body by which power can in principle be held" (21). This implies a participatory experience of civil society, and that is where the manner of civil-society discourse enters the picture. Citing Thomas Paine's Common Sense as a straightforward description of the meaning he would assign to democracy, Lummis says that "the project of thought itself must be carried forward at the level of common sense, in the language of common sense" (21). The language of "moral discourse, choice, and action" is at the core of meaning. At the core of action is the original meaning of democracy--demos for the people and kratia for power. Howev

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t the primary goal of revolutionary action but rather a platform in which constituents of freedom are elaborated. Thus, Lummis refers to the "radical image of civil society" in which people's movements take the "self-limiting" form of "networks of small organizations, each focusing on a particular set of issues rather than aiming to take over state power" (31). Almost immediately, of course, Lummis cautions against limiting issue-advocacy too much, so that the received wisdom of (say) capitalistic forms, traditions, and standards of social organization do new skew political action away from fundamental reforms or make the institutions of government unresponsive to thoughtful (i.e., not merely anarchic) political activism and opposition. Put differently, if the state with a central government at its head is to be retained, certainly the government institutions should be representative. At the same time we can imagine a civil-society movement acting to reduce state power radically, demilitarizing it and denuclearizing it, deliminating functions that have been made redundant by the autonomous organization of the civil society itself, reforming or establishing new government institutions appropriate to the new situation (37). The one
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Approximate Word count = 1993
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)