Democracy in progress: History, paradox, and constitutional struggle

This dissertation explores the relationship between democracy and historical change. Democracy is often treated as an ideal end-point toward which history ought to progress. But the idea of progress as the march of reason in history sits uneasily with the democratic demand that the people freely make the laws for themselves. And yet if we abandon altogether the possibility of evaluating historical change, then citizens are left with no defensible basis for judging which social or political reforms would make their societies more or less democratic. This dissertation thus argues for radically reconceiving the notion of "progress" in a critical and Socratic way that severs its dependence on historical teleology.I argue that progress can be understood as a contingent and contextual process of comparative evaluation: we need not know what a perfect democracy looks like, or the final end toward which history must lead, in order to compare two different visions of democracy here and now to determine which of them is more defensible than the other. As in a court of law, we do not need access to ultimate truth ex ante to decide on which side a stronger case has been made. In part one I argue that this view does better than contemporary deliberative or agonistic theories in addressing the issue of historical change. I also offer a case study of nineteenth-century France, based on a year of archival research at the Bibliotheque Nationale, which highlights the dangers of teleology for democracy. In part two, I closely examine Plato's Socratic dialogues and Kant's moral works to argue for a rigorously antifoundationalist defense of democratic principles. In part three I develop my positive alternative in detail. I provide a way of thinking about how disputes over what ought to count as "progress" may themselves be democratically adjudicated, by adapting the idea of Socratic method to the conditions of democratic politics. And I present a comparative study of fifty democratic constitutions to argue that an attention to social and historical factors is deeply embedded in contemporary democratic practice.