Review: [untitled] Author(s): Gordon Fellman Source: Theory and Society, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Jul., 1982), pp.

558-563 Published by: Springer Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/657109 Accessed: 21/09/2010 16:28
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558 impressive achievement. Despite the problem of generalizability, which limits our ability to compare Menocchio to this contemporaries and truly assess the depth of this autonomous current of popular oppositional consciousness, we can learn a great deal from this strange and forceful sixteenth-century miller, and from the sympathetic account of his life by this twentieth-century Italian historian. Michael S. Kimmel Rutgers University Beyond Adversary Democracy, by Jane J. Mansbridge (New York: Basic Books, 1980). This book should be read because the issues it treats should be pondered, and it treats them suggestively enough to give the reader pause. The author calls for polities to recognize the virtues of making decisions in both the adversary mode and the consensus mode and to use each where appropriate. Mansbridge attributes the relative failure of late sixties efforts to achieve consensual democracy in food coops, law communes, women's centers, free schools, hot line organizations, and the like, to a too-rigid commitment to consensus as a decision-making principle. She argues at the same time that adversary modes of decision making are cursed with too-rigid convictions of the inevitability of irreducible conflicts of interests among members of a polity. The discussion proceeds partly theoretically but largely by two case studies, one of a small town in Vermont, "Selby," in its town meeting setting, and the other, "Helpline," an urban counterculture crisis agency. In both places, the author conducted interviews, administered a questionnaire, and sat in as a nonparticipant observer at meetings where decisions were made. In Selby, Mansbridge finds potential for consensual political processes. Residents of this town of 350 share desires for technically correct decisions (e.g., where to locate the town garage), most know each other face-to-face, and each could perhaps imagine adopting the good of the whole as her/his own. Yet consensus is hamstrung by real conflicts of interest between low taxpayers and high taxpayers, residents of Selby and those beyond its borders who nonetheless take part in town meetings, young and old, and oldtimers vs. educated, articulate newcomers who settled in Selby as an attractive, rural town. At issue is whether school transportation costs should be paid directly by parents or whether they should come from general revenues, and whether low-income housing should be zoned out of town. The Selby case highlights desires for consensus and actual moments of it but also makes clear that many citizens feel intimidated, to the point of not speaking in town meetings or, for the majority, not even attending. Ably locating and using the limited historical evidence available, Mansbridge examines the classic image of town meeting and lays to rest folklore rumors of whole hearted participation by virtually all voters. The evidence is impressive and persuasive. But Mansbridge does not simply deplore apathy in the polity. Asking whether every citizen is fit to participate politically, she presents a single mother of low education who feels no political power and does not take part in town

559 meetings, even when her interests are at stake. Ill-informed but holding opinions, the woman is the kind of citizen whose apathy theorists like Almond and Verba, Dahl, Banfield, Wilson, Parsons, and others have celebrated as functional for democracy. Mansbridge seems of two minds about the whole thing and does not examine the larger dimensions of that woman's ignorance and feelings of ineffectiveness, but does think she should exercise her democratic rights in town politics. With potential for both consensus and for conflict, Selby seems to hedge matters by subduing potential head-on encounters and working out either a fake consensus or an amicable adversary outcome. Some citizens seem to have settled things beforehand and work during meetings for the appearance of reason and harmony. Neither immediate conflicts nor underlying class tensions surface for inspection or argument. Oddly, Mansbridge identified real conflicts of interest but chose not to pursue them in her interviews. We learn much about Selby town meetings. Old-timers, people living within town lines, the old and the wealthy are better represented than others. Older women not only defer to their spouses' opinions, but deflect attention from their own views, when questioned on them, to those of their husbands. As might be expected, some people dominate town meeting discussions. The author seems to admire the tendencies toward consensus and the spirit of cooperation that many people appear to bring to town meetings. She regrets, though, nonparticipation and the frequent denial of real differences of interest. However thoughtfully she presents Selby, Mansbridge's energies and heart are not there but in the Helpline case. Helpline is not a town; it is a workplace, and its product is counseling. Formed in the countercultural heat of the late sixties, Helpline operates in six administrative sections: the Switchboard (emergency hot line for drug calls, suicide calls, and information); the Shelter (temporary haven for runaways); the Emergency Van (medical vehicle staffed for 24-hour service by paramedics and counselors); the Center for Community Counseling (resource bureau for communes); the Farm (place for retreats and community weekends); and Administrative Backup (fund-raising, legal services, publicity, and administration for the five other units). Helpline's members, young, were "educated, practical, and communicated well with one another. They were committed to democratic ideals and could afford to sacrifice other values to attain those ideals." Most but not all were of that white upper-middle-class population that had the time, family backing, and energy to work outside the conventional occupation system, at least for a while. The staff was small enough in size (41 paid employees in 1973, the time of the study) to allow strong bonds of friendship to develop among its members. They were bound by their common work and by a shared commitment to consensus in decision making. This sounds like the paradigmatic counterculture consensual community. And how did it fare? As Mansbridge reports it, when real conflicts arose at Helpline, they tended to be papered over. A financial crisis, for example, meant necessarily cutting back some units. Interests collided, and only the most

560 strained, drawn-out, agonized process allowed most staff people to keep their eyes on the larger organization's needs rather than those of their own subunit. That, though, was not the half of it. Not everyone of the 41 staff members participated equally in discussions. Three Blacks and three working-class members (one Black was also working class) did not feel themselves fully comfortable with the majority white, college-educated, middle-class folks. Middle-class Blacks participated as fully as middle-class whites but did not feel full trust of their colleagues. Men seemed to enjoy administration better than did women. Some men (and fewer women) enjoyed power positions more than did others. Too late, Mansbridge realized she had neglected to interview the three Black people about the race issue at Helpline. It cannot have been insignificant. One Black man, for example, objecting to the majority ethos at Helpline, said he was "not into the counterculture. I mean, I have a culture." In various ways, the other Black members shared that feeling of distance from the majority. We do not learn whether racism was felt in any way. The three working-class members spoke less than others attended meetings less, were perceived as less powerful by the middle-class majority, and felt less satisfied with decisions. They considered themselves, apparently accurately, less advantaged in regard to verbal skills, and of less confidence than the majority members. They drew away from the general meetings and closer to their individual units. But they did not complain about their relative political powerlessness at Helpline. Perhaps like the near-majority of Americans who do not vote in presidential elections, the working-class members of Helpline saw themselves as choosing to exert less power in central decisions. All members spend an average of seven hours a week in meetings. We know by now that intensive work of the Helpline sort has a high burnout rate, and sure enough, of those 41 at Helpline in 1973, only 6 were still there four years later. And of course that kind of organization and its idealism, while not altogether disappeared by now, are not very common any more either. How come? Mansbridge recognizes that the question of participation has something to do with the nature of power in its relationship to individual lives. In what I think is the most fascinating part of the book, however brief, she examines Helpline staffers who score high in peers' judgments of powerranking. Without examination, Mansbridge observes that in interviews 63% of high scorers in power-ranking by peers spontaneously mentioned their parents, whereas only 9% of the others did. Those who said they like power (not always those seen by others as exercising it) mention their parents, and those not saying they like power do not mention parents. These are startling, unexpected findings. And here is another: Mansbridge categorizes staff members who exercise power into groupings of the power hungry, the ambivalent, and the facilitators. Members of the first two groups are distinguished from the third by their greater display of emotion in interviews, greater number of spontaneous exclamations, and greater use of "I". Further, those who enjoy exercising power were less likely than others to consider "equality of political power in

561 internal decisions" a crucial value for Helpline organization, even though overall, 89% of the staff members thought that such equality of power was "very crucial" or "fairly crucial" to making Helpline what they wanted it to be. These findings suggest social psychological dimensions of power behavior that such theorists as Robert Lane and Harold Lasswell have explored and that Mansbridge seems to find uninteresting or not worth the bother. Why do people concerned with power show more feeling and use the pronoun "I" oftener than those less concerned with power? What kinds of self-concepts do power-seekers tend to have, and why? What does the exercise of power do for them? If power-users refer spontaneously to their parents, in contexts where they have not been asked about parents, and people less concerned with power do not, what is going on? Despite enticing, suggestive leads such as these, Mansbridge limits her considerations to political terms. The book is best summarized thus: "The key to meeting a polity's real needs is to choose the means most appropriate to the chosen end." She observes that underlying assumptions of the adversary mode of decision making threaten unity in the polity. What Mansbridge calls our attention to so powerfully is the fatalistic assumption in adversary politics that both winning and minimizing conflict are the fundamental goals of a political proceeding. Outcome, rather than process, is all. And outcome at best means compromise. Mansbridge avoids the considerable literature on positive functions of social conflict, but she transcends the equilibrium assumptions of both that literature and that of traditional theorists of conflict of interest in advocating respect and personal growth as political goals equal in importance to protection of interests. If the goal of a polity were to be promotion of equal respect, then equal political power in every decision is less crucial than is a condition of members sharing experiences and coming to know each other on more than one functional level. Emphasis on consensus helps maintain solidarity and also helps protect each individual member against others when members' interests really do conflict. Mansbridge reconceives consensual decision making as "unitary democracy" and clearly favors it over adversary decision making, wherever it seems possible to implement it. Her ultimate call is for a mixture of the two primary modes she identifies, but she offers no examples of how and why an organization or community might actually mix those modes. In a brief aside, she also makes a case for "consociational democracy," whereby major interest groups agree on proportional distribution of goods and services. In the Netherlands, for example, government subsidies of social work, adult education, sport, libraries, youth work, and civil service appointments are apportioned to Roman Catholics, Calvinists, and secularists. How or why such a system might be adaptable to American conditions, Mansbridge does not offer. The book certainly provokes thinking about consensus and conflict and is commendable for this reason. But it suffers from a number of disturbing limits. Not only does it ignore its own social psychological proto-findings, it also is strangely limited methodologically. Mansbridge ably combines historical research with nonparticipant fieldwork, questionnaires, and interviews, but her field observations often lack the illuminating apercus that emerge from fieldwork more

562 broadly conceived. She recorded what happened at meetings, but she did not pursue the also fruitful avenue of just hanging around, informally chatting with everyone, overhearing chance and choice remarks. The materials of the book virtually ache for comparison, cross-cultural and otherwise. Traditional Indian villages, Israeli kibbutzim, Quaker meetings, and many other settings have been explored in terms of conflict and consensus; light could be shed, from those experiences and analyses of them, onto Mansbridge's issues. If unitary democracy is so attractive, why does it seem to fail, even in a period of ideological fervor such as that in the United States barely a decade ago? Mansbridge notes in passing that efforts at unitary democracy seem to lose their glamor (and thus, by implication, their force) after a year or two. A remarkable observation implying that consensus is a romance, a balloon that cannot hold its air for long. The fuller implication is that the idea of unitary democracy is based on wishes not corresponding to reality. After all, adversary democracy is an ideal, too, to some people; why have efforts to sustain it not failed after one or two years? Are there dark truths about what is possible lurking here? Or is something missing from the analysis? A clue lies in a metaphor Mansbridge likes. She compares monarchy to the authoritarian family and democracy with friendship. Citing Aristotle, she claims that friendship is equality and suggests that this is what unitary democracy could and should be. The implication is that friendship is love and concern for others, a perfect model for a noble democracy. But friendship is also exasperation and scorn. That love and hate are often joined may be a cliche, but what does that tell us about the metaphor of friendship for unitary democracy? It tells us, I think, that friendship is an apt metaphor for adversary democracy too, and that a society with partisan politics and also Friends' meetings is a society with room to play out all the possibilities of friendship including the less happy ones. The friendship metaphor seems thus too large to be useful, unless one seriously considers how it is that the adversary aspect of friendship appears more solidly and comfortably in our political institutions than the consensual parts. Mansbridge bypasses this crucial consideration by calling for decentralization in the polity as the structural basis for fostering consensus. Mansbridge suggests that unitary democracy (consensus) would most likely be effective at the workplace and the neighborhood, yet she does not examine how current relations of production and ownership of residence make it unlikely that such democracy could be implemented at all, let alone become viable. We know, from the recent work of Karl Frieden, for example, that workplace democracy of a vaguely unitary sort is possible, but we also know there are enormously powerful forces that prevent its flowering and that often even succeed in thwarting its limited appearances in our society. Mansbridge grants that a "less competitive economy can vastly increase the average worker's experience of common interest with others," but goes no further toward identifying limits on democratic innovations, given current property structure in American society. One has to ask what is the point of

563 promoting consensus in a context the basic structure of which appears in nearly every way to foredoom it to failure. What Mansbridge allows us to do, all the same, is to consider that under cooperative economic institutions, however they might come about, we would need to alert ourselves to dimensions of decision making that would promote consensus. Decentralization of political arenas would maximize chances for face-to-face relationships, one necessary prerequisite for enacting values of unitary democracy: individual respect, individual growth, and cooperation as a desirable end in itself. It is this emphasis rather than the call for combining adversary and unitary modes of decision making, that gives power to Mansbridge's critique of adversary democracy. Gordon Fellman Brandeis University Knowledge, Ideology and the Politics of Schooling: Towards a Marxist Analysis of Education, by Rachel Sharp (London: Henley, and Boston: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1980). The relationship between theoretical and practical ideologies is, according to Rachel Sharp, "obviously an ongoing dialectical relationship... which cannot be discussed in any detail here." Yet, her book unintentionally brings that relationship to our particular attention. While sociologists continue to avoid theorizing education socially, a passionate social theoretical interest has developed among educationists. In a professional reversal of traditional activities, sociologists are incorporated within the educational apparatus that requires social science legitimation of its management procedures, while educationists shop social theory for abstract interpretations that contravene the insights of their own practical knowledge of schooling. Sociologists retool as clinicians and mechanics of the failing apparatus and educationists flee the schools in pursuit of theory. The customary separation of theory and practice is buttressed by this odd social division of incompetence. One result is that there is little good social, theoretical analysis of schooling built upon an empirical base and undertaken from a critical point of interest. Under such conditions of intellectual anarchy among social analysts of education, speculation becomes the scientific order of the day. Craft standards go by the boards in favor of faster turn-around times and bigger professional payoffs. The star system thrives. Second-string players rush about trying to pick up hot leads. Outsiders to this netherland between education and sociology do not know how passionate is the quest for the true theoretical word in these territories. Sharp complains: "No satisfactory theory of the route to true knowledge has been offered" (93). When Marxists begin to separate the development of knowledge from the course of practical social life and when that separation occurs at a site such as education, in which there is still a liberally legitimated potential to develop the capacity for conscious action, then there is little occasion for radical rejoicing. Compare Sharp's complaint with Marx's Second Thesis on Feuerbach: