Democratic Procedures and Liberal Consensus

By George Klosko

Oxford University Press 2000, £27.50

‘The argument of this study,’ Klosko writes in its concluding pages, ‘is

that the principles of liberal consensus are the best possible that could be

justified to a large majority of liberal citizens’ (p. 242). Such an argument

will be familiar to defenders of Rawlsian ‘political’ liberalism who see the

task facing liberalism as that of securing a consensus on political principles

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in the face of abiding and significant differences on all other fundamental

matters. The consensus which Klosko believes the ‘best possible’ will,

however, be uncongenial to Rawlsians because, although liberal, it is considerably

less robustly and substantively liberal than they would favour. It

is, in essence, an agreement on basic rights and democratic proceduralism

but without agreement on strong individual rights and strongly egalitarian

principles of distributive justice.

Klosko’s argument for the ‘best possible’ consensus is in part normative

but in greater part empirical. If, as he says, the point is to defend principles

that people can accept then it is essential to find out what they actually

do believe. In consequence, he appeals to the evidence supplied by surveys,

polls, and so on. Such evidence should not be accepted wholesale nor

uncritically, and Klosko does not do so. But the originality and attraction

of his study is that it is a work of normative political philosophy solidly

rooted in empirically well established facts about the beliefs and values of

actually existing citizens.

To assess his argument it is necessary to be clear about why he thinks

that the ‘best possible’ principles of his liberal political consensus are both

the ‘best possible’ and the ‘best possible’. They are the best principles

because they are liberal. The key liberal political principle is that of legitimacy.

This prescribes that ‘political principles should be able to be justified

to each citizen, at the bar of his or her own reason’ (p. 19). Such a principle

is defended by liberals from Locke to Rawls.

Klosko, on a number of occasions, characterizes the principle as making

political agreement morally necessary. Such agreement is also a practical

necessity for reasons of ‘stability’. This talk of two reasons for political

agreement does somewhat obscure the fact that there is agreement in two

different senses. There is practical stability if there is agreement between

citizens. Where there is little or nothing to dispute there is no occasion for

nor disposition to conflict. However there is legitimacy if and when the

principles governing the terms of social and political co-operation are

agreed to by each and every citizen; there is agreement between the citizens

only in that each—‘at the bar of his or her reason’—gives his or her consent

to these terms. Practical agreement within a form of government

could of course be secured in ways that would be sufficient to render any

agreement to such a government invalid—by, for instance, indoctrination

or coercion. This suffices to show that it is the moral agreement of the citizens,

severally, to political principles that is crucial. It is not, in short, consensus

as such, but what it is that brings it about that there is consensus—

the unforced and informed agreement of each to some set of principles—

which matters.

Moreover, as Klosko notes, justification is ‘bound up with and entailed

by central liberal values’ (p. 9). Chief amongst these is that persons must

be treated with respect, and, Klokso further argues, ‘human rights are

closely bound up with requirements to treat people with appropriate

respect’ (p. 11). This is largely uncontentious though critics of rights

might still argue that it is not inconceivable that a society which did not

accord its members rights could nevertheless satisfy the liberal principle of

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legitimacy, that is be governed by rules justifiable to each citizen at the bar

of his or her reason.

More crucially for the book’s argument Klosko clearly has, and endorses,

an ideal of liberal principles which are more robust and substantive

than those which can be the subject of a ‘best possible’ liberal consensus.

Such principles would comprise a strong conception of rights and strong-ly

egalitarian principles of justice. A strong conception of rights proscribes

the trading off of rights for other values (p. 58); the weakly egalitarian

principles of justice currently favoured by the ‘dominant ideology’ give

pride of place to equality of opportunity and distribution in accordance

with merit (Chapter 6). Agreement on the basic need for rights and justice

are rooted in fundamental liberal commitments shared by all. But Klosko

concedes that there are different possible interpretations of what that basic

need means. His own preferred understanding—a strong conception of

rights and strongly egalitarian principles of justice—is but one interpretation

contested by others.

Klosko criticizes Rawls for claiming to find an idealized, deep-lying,

intuitive agreement on substantive liberal political principles within the

public culture of a democratic society (Chapter 7). Rather, Klosko argues,

we should aim first at minimally defined, uncontroversial principles on

which all can agree. ‘Once we have determined the range of principles that

can be justified to liberal citizens we can move on to argue for preferred

conceptions of individual rights, democratic procedures and distributive

justice, although … proponents of different comprehensive views will

argue for different conceptions of these values’ (p. 190). Everything, in

short, comes down to the play of views and forces within simple agreed

democratic procedures. Klosko may hope that things move in the right

direction but he cannot claim that the conceptions he favours are entailed

of necessity by the basic liberal commitments all endorse, and ‘[w]ithout

being able to invoke a strongly liberal conception of rights, liberal consensus

is open to decisions that strong liberals could find difficut to accept (p.

233).

That much is honest. It would have probably been even more honest to

drop the honorific adjective ‘strong’ (and its pejorative contrary ‘weak’).

Klosko’s own commitments amount to but one contested construal of the

liberal consensus with which he must enter the democratic battle in order

to secure support but with no greater guarantee of success or better assurance

of ultimate liberal provenance than other interpretations. Ye t ,

throughout, Klosko cannot help characterising his own ‘strong’ views as

the evidently most favoured interpretation of liberalism. But, if there is an

argument to these views from the basic liberal commitments (such as,

respect for persons), it is not to be found in this book.

Why are the principles of the liberal consensus the ‘best possible’?

Klosko follows Rawls in believing that pluralism— a diversity within liberal

societies of moral, religious, and philosophical views—is significant

and ineradicable. In contradistinction to Rawls, as already mentioned, such

a pluralism extends to the political in that there is widespread disagreement

amongst the citizens of liberal societies about how to understand the

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basic general principles of rights, democracy and justice. Such political

pluralism is well attested to by the impressive array of empirical findings

Klosko musters. Most will find this evidence discomfiting if not entirely

surprising. Large numbers of people who profess their support for democratic

principles and for the protection of individual rights would be pre-pared

to abridge the liberties of unpopular minority groups. Many are

intolerant in the sense of being unsympathetic to the canons of public rea-son

and open minded inquiry which, it is conventionally believed, must

animate democracies.

Nevertheless Klosko insists that there is agreement on democratic procedures

and a general willingness to see the outcomes of such procedures

as fair. Klosko thus endorses ‘procedural’ as opposed to ‘substantive’ liberalism,

that is a liberalism exhaustively defined by its prescription of certain

agreed basic democratic procedures and its acknowledgement that any

more substantive commitments cannot secure the acceptance of a stable,

enduring consensus. He shares this view, which has much to commend it,

with Kurt Baier who speaks of a mere ‘constitutional consensus’, and per-haps

also, though in a less straightforward fashion, with Stuart

Hampshire’s recent Justice is Conflict (1999).

Klosko does not believe that the democratic process is itself transformative

in such a manner as would secure eventual consensus on substantive

justice—as the theorists of deliberative democracy such as Habermas

would argue. Nor is he prepared to exclude as ‘unreasonable’—on epistemological

rather than political grounds—some comprehensive views, and

thereby make a more substantive consensus more likely, as Joshua Cohen

and Gerald Gaus would argue.

What he also refuses to countenance is the use of education, general and

civic, to play a transformative role. The argument here is less developed.

What the evidence shows is that there is a clear direct connection between

education and tolerance (pp. 46–7, 50, 64–50) just as there is a clear inverse

relationship between tolerance and religion (Chapter 4). But although he

believes thus that ‘education presents the greatest hope for increased political

tolerance and so general agreement on democratic rights into the

future’ (p. 114), Klosko also believes that an education in civic, non-religious

beliefs and values may be claimed as an abrogation of a parent’s or

community’s right to practise the religion of its choice (pp. 104 and 113–4).

It may be but the claim here is not undisputed, and, given its acknowledged

importance, Klosko might have devoted more space to a proper

critical consideration of it.

In his ‘Conclusion’ Klosko represents the problem he is addressing in

terms of a graph (pp. 237–8). On one axis is the ‘liberal content’ of the

principles to which there is general agreement; on another axis is the percentage

of the population accepting these principles. The area captured by

lines running to the appropriate points on the two different axes represents

the ‘best possible conensus’ that can be achieved. The intended idea is

clear enough. But it is strange to see the numerical size of the support for

some principles described as a ‘value’ which must be traded off against the

value of the principles found acceptable. This is in part because of the

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ambiguity in the term ‘agreement’ noted earlier. It is also because the mere

fact of support for some principles lacks evaluative force without further

epistemic qualifications about the source of such support, qualifications

Klosko is unwilling to make to any great degree. This is perhaps just to say

that Klosko’s refreshing attention to what is ‘possible’ is at the expense of

a more considered examination of what is ‘best’. Nevertheless this study

overall sets a fine example of how normative political theory might in particular,

and must in general, engage with the messy facts of the real world,

a world whose citizens are not the ideal deliberators nor completely reasonable

individuals an idealized liberalism would wish them to be.

David Archard