Introduction

Since the revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a steadily increasing number of social phenomena have been justified as being democratic.  Forms of democratic legitimation range from "people's democracies" to "liberal democracies," even though the former term is patently redundant and the latter exposes what has been, at least historically, a contradiction.  Democratic claims cover a wide range of institutional practices: market economies are justified in terms of consumer sovereignty, the culture industry in terms of the democratization of culture, and corporatist forms in terms of democratic pluralism.  Yet it is not at all clear that such legitimations, claims, and practices have very much to do with normative democratic principles as they have been formulated in classical and modern political theory.  In the present issue of Social Research we hope to bring some enlightenment to this rather confusing state of affairs.

In our own supposedly democratic century, democratic theory and the theory of democracy have not been on the level of the earlier contributions of philosophers and social theorists which were made in periods in which "democracy" was often a derogatory term and at best a distant hope.  We are still living off Rousseau's depiction of direct democracy, Mill's arguments for representative democracy, Tocqueville's defense of a plurality of democracies, and Marx's critique of formal democracy.  More recent innovations in this respect tend to be normatively problematic.  In a very real sense the Weberian, Schumpeterian, and Luhmannian analyses of leadership and elite democracy are rather transparent legitimations of states of affairs in the political West that are obviously not democratic in the light of the classics mentioned.  That this is also the case of the "new" forms of "people's democracy" in Eastern European societies has been repeatedly documented not only by scholars and critics but also by collective political resistance, most recently and fundamentally by the Solidarity movement in Poland.  And whereas the early philosophical pluralists (Laski, Cole, Lindsay, et al.) were consistent followers of the Tocquevillian inspiration, the pluralism of academic social science from Bentley to the present derives its conception of political bargaining from the capitalist market rather than the parliament, and suppresses the exclusion rules that screen out most potential constituencies in our supposedly democratic political and intellectual marketplaces.  These latter theorists never even see the need to pretend that the internal structure of pressure groups is, or should be, democratic.

To be sure, critical social science from the various tendencies of the Frankfurt School to the several approaches represented in this issue has continued from the 1930s to the present to analyze and criticize authoritarian political and social practices hiding behind "democracy," from the culture industry to corporatism.  Remarkably enough, however, for the older tradition of critical social theory, utopia was a society without legal and political institutions.  Democracy of any kind played little role in the early Lukacs's, Gramsci's, Horkheimer's, Adorno's or even Marcuse's conceptions of emancipation.  In an almost complementary fashion, later versions of critical theory, while generally making up for this ethical deficit in the works of their elders, seemed to share their aversion to articulating the meaning of democratic possibilities beyond the present.  In Habermas's work these are articulated only at the highest levels of abstraction; in the works of Claus Offe, until very recently, the incognito of democratic theory has been ever more pronounced.  And while the philosophies of Arendt, Castoriadis, Lefort, and Wollin each in its own way restores the normative meaning of democracy, these contributions have hardly taken into account the complexities of contemporary institutionalization as revealed by social science.  Democratic theory in the normative sense and empirical analytical theory of democracy proceed without any awareness of each other today, with a consequent opening of an immense gap between these approaches which mistakenly consider one another as fluffy dreaming and as technocratic backsliding, respectively.

The situation is especially serious because contemporary social movements in East and West have once again put democracy or democratization on their banners.  There can be no doubt about the sincerity of the Polish democratic movement to gradually democratize all spheres of life, or that of the Western feminist, peace, and ecology movements and various citizen initiatives to democratize spheres that have been assigned variously to the preserves of traditional, military, or technocratic legitimacy.  In East and West the project of taking democracy beyond the place where Marx has indicated it cannot go without total revolution--that is, the factory door--has been repeatedly revived.  And yet, in spite of the efforts of theorists such as Kuron, Michnik, Gorz, and Touraine, to mention only a few in the East and West, these movements have adopted neither adequate strategies required for democratization nor coherent views of what would constitute a truly significant normative gain in democracy.  Their utilization of expert opinion represents the present maturity of modern movements, capable of thematizing their own self-limitation, but as long as the experts themselves oscillate between strategic minimalism supposedly imposed by the requirements of a truly scientific procedure and romantic visions of total democratization and total rupture, their advice cannot be adequate to the theoretical needs of activists in social movements.

We cannot claim that the contributors to this issue of Social Research, individually or together, have already satisfied the stringent demands articulated here.  Yet each in his own way begins to do a part of the job ahead.  In his study, Claus Offe raises the all-important question of majority rule, which in light of contemporary social movements can no longer automatically legitimate processes of decision-making in the field between modern states and modern societies.  Offe examines in particular the alternative democratic claims of central legislatures and localities; and the paradoxes of the dogmatic stress on majority rule in relation to the multiplicity of forms of conflict in contemporary societies.  Peter Murphy takes up the question of the normative foundations of democratic theory, and reconstructs on the basis of a thorough examination of both contemporary debates in ethics and historical problems of moral development the contribution of Jurgen Habermas to a communicative ethics.  Arthur Jacobson confronts the old issue of the philosophical pluralists from Gierke and Maitland to Laski concerning the devolution of state sovereignty to social groups, and argues with admirable precision that the Anglo-American law of associations implies a type of assumption of public powers by private entities that perforce displaces the issue of democratization from the state to society.  Manfred Stanley shows how democratic deliberation can pose normative alternatives to the institutional principles of therapy, technology, and consumerism.  Civic rhetoric and the public, in the classical sense, he maintains, can provide a grounded alternative to the instrumental rationality of existing institutional practices.  Philippe Schmitter investigates the consequence for democratic theory and practice of the new corporatism and traces not only the most likely evolution of "democratic" theory as a form of justification of existing structures of power but also seeks to identify the agents and processes that might contribute to the democratization of both corporatist arrangements and of parts of social reality outside these.  Finally, Jose Casanova, strongly influenced both by contemporary versions of communicative ethics and by a social-science literature on the problems of the transition from authoritarian to democratic forms of rule, traces one such transition in a case study of recent Spanish development.  In the process he throws a good deal of light on the relationship between technocratic and administrative rationalization and political modernization in the sense of democratization.  While Schmitter's and Offe's studies are of great relevance to the study of the social and intellectual dynamics of contemporary formal democracies, Casanova's points to some rather general problems faced by those seeking to introduce even formal democracy under authoritarian regimes.

Many topics planned for this issue regrettably are not explored because of problems of time and space.  We requested contributions on "planning, market and workers' control," for example, as well as on "democracy, mass society and mass culture."  Though the contributions of Schmitter and Stanley respectively shed light on these problems, clearly the renewed interest in democracy requires more critical inquiry than is presented here.

In the early days of the University in Exile of the New School for Social Research (presently the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science) democracy was the central problem area, both scholarly and political.  In the shadow of Nazi Germany, the exiles met at their General Seminar in 1935-36 to explore relevant themes.  Their primary concerns were indicated by the title of the publication of their results, Political and Economic Democracy (edited by Max Ascoli and Fritz Lehman; New York, W. W. Norton, 1937).  Almost fifty years later our volume presents a shift of concern toward the relationship between the democratic state and democratic society.  This shift is embedded in a set of problems which have emerged from the struggles for democracy and democratization in present-day Western and Eastern Europe, the United States, and Latin America.  There is a genuine change in contemporary emphasis from the 1930s but also from the 1960s.  We do not pretend that we safely turn to new areas because the earlier problems have been solved.  On the contrary, all the previous questions remain open and unanswered, to be addressed by informed theorists and citizens.

Emil Oestereicher died in his sleep in the early morning hours of October 15, 1983, at the age of 47.  He was one of those people whose lives have the character of legend--not only because of his living experience but because he was a man of deceptive surfaces and profound paradoxes.  Emil attracted people because each saw in him some aspect of his own humanity and because of his universal sympathies and his empathy.  If he wasn't quite capable of saying that Bela Kun was an essentially good human being (in that Hungarian-American accent of his and with that twinkling eye) who had had a bad mother, he was capable of forgiving his enemies with a shrug and a smile.  In the end, he had no enemies.  Hundreds of people appeared at his funeral, somber, some in tears, all remembering what so many had taken for granted--his resilience, his profane attitude toward all forms of domination, legitimate or otherwise.

To give a coherent, not merely a chronological, account of Emil's life is perhaps impossible.  Like the primitive image of the Trickster, he had enormous energy and many selves.  He was a Good Soldier Schweik of an academic--discharging his duties with unassailable regularity while dismantling in the classroom the structures of oppression.

For Emil, born on March 4, 1936, to a middle-class Jewish family in Budapest, had grown up in a kind of agony.  His father was executed by the Nazis, and his own life--along with those of a great many other helpless people--had been saved when he was three years old by a group of nuns in a conventual hospital.  When the Nazis came, machine-gunning the refugees at random, he was the lone survivor, having, ironically enough, been thrust into a safe place by a German officer.  Emil's irony, in maturity, ran deep.

During the war, he lost grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.  There is, of course, much more to be said about how he managed to survive with his mother during those years--how after the defeat of the Nazis and under the shadow of Soviet imperialism he joined a group of socialists trying to break out of the country and go to Israel, and how in 1956, in the face of yet another massacre, he finally managed to get a ticket from Austria to the United States.

His beloved son, Carl, tells a story about the formation of his father's views while still a child, which those of us who knew Emil to one degree or another can fully understand: "... in a theater of dwarfs in Budapest that his mother used to take him to, on one occasion all the midgets came out on stage waving red flags and singing communist songs and throwing propaganda pamphlets into the crowd--my father was only a child then but he found it extremely funny."  And, one might add, Emil always had the courage never to stop laughing at the morbid absurdities of the modern world.

He experienced immigrant hard times in the United States.  He worked in a lamp factory and attended the University of Illinois from 1957 to 1968, building on a bachelor's degree in history and politics to the master's and doctorate in sociology.  Because of his obstreperous and obvious brilliance, about which many stories are told, he was awarded fellowships and scholarships, along with predoctoral instructorships, making it feasible for him to finish his studies.  By the time he received his Ph.D. in 1968, he had become a mordant and astonishingly well-informed critic of Western  civilization, and a skeptic concerning human motives and possibilities in the mass.

But when it came to personal behavior, he was gentle and loving.  Women appreciated his smiling unforced manner--and in this respect, he reminded one of Blake's angel.  One could trust Emil with the most devastating confidences and never receive a harsh word in return.  Yet this paradoxical Trickster of a man, whose heart had been broken, was also capable of a certain cynicism.  This was one of the prices he paid for accommodation to a world he despised and for which he had little hope.

Yet he also put his nimble and sophisticated mind to creative and intellectual use.  He wrote a number of essays--one of which was published in this journal--reflecting as much about his capacity to fit into the academic picture as it did about his understanding of the subject involved.  That is to say, Emil knew how to compromise but, unlike so many academics, he never deceived himself about what he was doing.  His forte was continental critical sociology with a strong Marxist-humanist flavor.  Thus, as he interpreted it, the New School, that house of exiles, was precisely to his taste.

Unfortunately, his brilliant career as a teacher in the Graduate Faculty from 1969 to 1974 did not result (through no fault of his) in a tenured position.  Although he went on to tenure and a chairmanship at Richmond College of the City University of New York, the New School remained his intellectual home.  From 1974 to the present, he taught as an adjunct in the sociology department of the New School, attracting large numbers of students. 

His Buddha-like smile and his explosive energy remained almost as familiar after he became an adjunct (while retaining his professorship at CUNY) as it had been during his years as a regular faculty member.  His lecturing remained as powerful as ever.  He was a masterful rhetorician finding his way skillfully through a rich texture of free associations.  He electrified students.  If he was tired, his voice would rise to a high and constant pitch that could be heard through the walls of adjoining classrooms.  Yet he never took himself seriously--and remained humble in the company of those he respected.  He respected very few intellectuals, and most of those were among his prized ancestors--Marx, Lukacs, Piaget.

After a broken marriage which grieved him more than he ever admitted, and despite his involvement with Harrington's socialist party, his great passion was reserved for his son, Carl.  If one were to make the effort to sum up Emil's short life, one would have to focus on his relationship to Carl and his concern for his son's well-being both now and in the future.  This in itself was a startling contradiction to his apparent skepticism.

The devotion of this presumably secular man was complete--in this mobile society, not a sufficient trait but a necessary one and very rare.  When I think of Emil with his great knowledge and indomitable honor, I think of him as a child in Budapest--to which he periodically returned in later life to visit a brother, his one surviving relative.