Beyond the Technocratic Disfiguration of Democracy? Philosophical Inquiry and Education for a ‘Thoughtful’ Participation

This paper takes its cue from Nadia Urbinati’s (2014) inquiry into the contemporary troubles of democracy which risks being “disfigured” by two different phenomena, at odds with other but convergent in their attack on democracy as “a government by means of opinion” (Ibid., pos. 49): “Political theorists have recently pointed to the appearance of two concurrent phenomena that provide reasons for concern: on the one hand, the privatization and power concentration in the sphere of political opinion formation, and on the other, the growth of demagogical and polarized forms of consensus that split the political arena in factional and inimical groups” (Ibid., pos. 81). In my contribution, I tackle the first phenomenon which is connected with a technocratic understanding of the management of public affairs. I will deal with this issue by re-investigating the 1920s polemics between Walter Lippmann (1922, 1927) and John Dewey (1927) about the “eclipse of the public”, the former being the representative of an elitist concept of democracy, in which the experts should elaborate possible plans of action on the basis of their expertise, de facto disregarding the people’s claims, while the latter countering this view through an appeal to a participatory democracy based upon shared inquiry. At the basis of their opposition – I argue – there was a different understanding of how thinking emerges and what the role of education is. Remarkably, in order to make their points both of them referred to Socrates and Plato as a source for their argument. In the wake of the reconstruction of this epoch-making debate, I will argue in favour of a Deweyan stance but I will complement it with significant insights coming from the Philosophy for Children tradition. Indeed, while substantially misplaced, Walter Lippmann’s reference to Socrates may be appropriated in a different perspective: Lippmann may be right in arguing against the “myth of the omnicompetent citizen” but he is wrong if this implies sidelining citizens’ claims. The challenge is how to establish a middle ground in which citizens may be able to somehow assess in a competent ways plans of action elaborated by the expert (without ceding to the sirens of demagogues). To achieve this goal strategic is the cultivation of abilities of complex thinking through philosophical inquiry (Lipman, 2003). By underestimating the educational value of philosophical inquiry, Dewey renounced an important tool to respond to Lippmann’s technocratic challenge. To put it in a nutshell, in my paper Matthew Lipman’s Socrates is played out against Walter Lippmann’s Socrates in order to strengthen Dewey’s understanding of participatory democracy. This should result in a philosophical-educational device that comes to terms to one of the main risks of disfiguration plaguing contemporary democracies according to Urbinati