 |
| "Ja! Nein!" - Photo Credit: Alasdair Nicol (flickr) |
Democracy and Political Parties:
Relativism and Absolute Truth.
by Herman Dooyeweerd
(Extract from A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, Vol III pp 606-609. ‘Structures of Individuality of Temporal Human Society’)
See preceding extract HERE
A primordial question. Can a political party have a normative structural principle? The political contrast between the parties, and political relativism.
PART 1
Meanwhile, there is a primordial question to be answered before we engage in an investigation of the inner nature of the political party: Does not the latter imply a division of the State’s people into opposite factions? If so, how can such a party have a normative structural principle of a supra-arbitrary transcendental character?
This difficulty is indeed insoluble so long as the internal structural principle is not distinguished from the subjective purposes and factual behaviour of the actually existing parties.
In itself the rise of political parties is a manifestation of the interest and the feeling of responsibility of its founders and members with respect to State affairs.
In his famous work Modern Democracies, James Bryce has rightly observed that political parties, notwithstanding the justified complaints lodged against them in their factual appearance, are indispensable in any large and free country. No single representative government can do without them. They awaken and maintain the public spirit in the people and they bring about a necessary order in the chaos of the enormous mass of electors. Party discipline, though it should be bound to certain limits, has proved to be a remedy against political egoism and corruption.
We may add to Bryce’s observations that the divergence of opinion concerning the principles of policy of the State is a necessary result of the individualizing [differentiating, opening-up] process of human society, which proved to be implied in the process of disclosure of the latter. [See previous chapters of ‘A New Critique’]
There can be nothing wrong in such a divergence so long as it does not concern the supra-arbitrary fundamentals of the State and of the societal order in general.
Within this scope no single subjective political opinion of a party can as such lay claim to absolute validity. Therefore, a debate between different parties may contribute to a mutual correction and to finding a common basis of cooperation in practical questions of policy without eliminating the fundamental divergence of political viewpoints. This is the considerable value of the parliamentary debate in the framework of the modern parliamentary system.
But this state of affairs should not be interpreted in the sense of a universal axiological relativism, which Kelsen has ascribed to democracy as its ‘life- and world-view’, in contradistinction to autocracy which is supposed to be founded in the belief in an absolute verity (Vom Wesen und Wert der Demokratie,1920, Allgemeine Staatslehre, pp. 396 ff.).
The truth is that no single political total view is independent of a religious [ie ultimate, deeper-than-theoretical] basic motive, which rules both the practical ‘life- and world-view’ and the theoretical view of temporal reality. If indeed democracy -- or at least modern parliamentary democracy -- should be deemed to be incompatible with the belief in an absolute Truth, this would be tantamount to its inner dissolution as a political governmental system. For a consistent axiological relativism cannot allege a single ground for the maintenance of the State and the entire societal order, which impose themselves upon everybody, and are incompatible with anarchism as an axiological view. Such a relativism cannot provide any argument for the superiority of a democratic to an autocratic system of government. It cannot even account for the democratic majority principle.
If democracy should imply that, for lack of an absolute standard, no single political belief may lay claim to a higher legal appreciation than the others, it contradicts itself by attributing prevalence to the opinion of a parliamentary majority. For the principle of proportionality to which Kelsen appeals (Allgemeine Staatslehre, p. 370) is not warranted from a relativistic point of view.
And if the relativist should try to base the rule of majority upon the necessity of binding legal rules and decisions, we must observe that this very necessity is not to be justified from a relativistic standpoint.
PART 2
If, however, every theoretical and practical political conception concerning the State and the principles of a just government is in the last instance dependent on a 'religious' [ultimate, deeper-than-theoretical] basic motive which transcends any theoretical axiological relativism, no single political party can start from the latter. For this would be tantamount to a flat abandonment of its claim to superiority in comparison with other parties. Of course, this does not mean that a subjective political aim or program can as such lay claim to absolute validity. It only implies that without the belief in an absolute supra-theoretical Truth and in supra-arbitrary political norms any struggle between political parties becomes meaningless.
If, however, every theoretical and practical political conception concerning the State and the principles of a just government is in the last instance dependent on a 'religious' [ultimate, deeper-than-theoretical] basic motive which transcends any theoretical axiological relativism, no single political party can start from the latter. For this would be tantamount to a flat abandonment of its claim to superiority in comparison with other parties. Of course, this does not mean that a subjective political aim or program can as such lay claim to absolute validity. It only implies that without the belief in an absolute supra-theoretical Truth and in supra-arbitrary political norms any struggle between political parties becomes meaningless.
It is true that modern Historicism has to a high degree undermined the belief in eternal ideas or values and has even led to the fundamental crisis of Humanism amply described in the first volume of this work [A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, Vol I - DIRECT DOWNLOAD (608 page pdf)]. But we have shown that this Historicism itself did not originate in an independent theoretical thought, but much rather in the religious dialectic of the Humanist basic motive [Nature and Freedom].
Theoretically it may result in a complete relativism and nihilism, but practically it cannot maintain this relativism which even destroys its own foundation, viz. the absoluteness of the historical viewpoint as such.
A political party is concerned with practical policy though it cannot do without the aid of political theory. Therefore it cannot hold to an axiological relativism in the sense of Kelsen. It must appeal to a supra-relativistic starting-point in the central religious [ultimate 'ontic'] sphere of human existence, irrespective of the question as to whether or not it pretends to be neutral with regard to religion.
This has nothing to do with the untenable assumption that the factual grouping of a population into different political parties coincides with the differentiation into “religious groups”; this assumption is no better than the opposite supposition that party-grouping coincides with the occupational or class-differentiation.
Opposite political parties may start from the same religious basic motive and it may be that the same party embraces Christians and atheists. But this does not detract from the fact that the radical antithesis between the Biblical basic motive [ie ‘Creation, Fall, Redemption through Jesus Christ in communion with the Holy Spirit’] and the apostate religious [including atheistic] starting-points is of decisive importance to the ultimate division of the political views. For it rules the most fundamental divergence in the total view of human society and in the conception of the place of the State within the temporal societal order. It is only the influence of the dualistic scholastic [Thomistic-Catholic] motive of 'Nature and Grace' which may cause this fundamental line of division to be blurred.
From the above it should not be concluded that it is always and in every condition necessary to form separate Christian parties. It may be that this is factually impossible or undesirable, just as this may be the case with respect to the formation of Christian trade-unions or other Christian associations.
But it is certainly a serious misconception to suppose that the Christian religion has nothing to do with the formation of political parties, or that according to its inner nature a political party is sinful and lacks a structural principle in the temporal world-order. As to its supra-arbitrary inner nature a political party is no more sinful than the State or any other social relationship. It is only the human formative activity and its subjective purpose which can give the structural principle of this type of association a sinful direction.
