In his article Democracy Without the Citizen, excerpted from the text titled The Presence of the Past, author Sheldon Wolin offers a critique of the non-participatory politics of the modern American 'megastate'. He comments on the lack of acuity in both current and historic perceptions of power in the United States, and details the historic background of the American public's confusion about the behavior entailed in the practice of citizenship. Wolin mentions a possible solution to the lack of understanding about the role played by the citizen in the state when he suggests the integration of the two differing conceptions of citizenship - the republican and the democratic ideals - and proposes the conscious increase of participation and discussion by the public in the political arena. However, Wolin's description of possible remedial measures is brief. In contrast, Jonathan Schell in his introduction to the compilation of Adam Michnik's essays, Letters from Prison, offers a poignant example of the effectiveness of measures similar to Wolin's brief suggestions. In Schell's hands, the radical Polish opposition group Solidarity offers an inspiring example to those members of the American public who agree with Wolin's critique of megastate politics and wish to implement his ideas for increased democratic participation in the political realm.

      In Democracy Without the Citizen, Wolin claims that the Constitution of the United States originally assumed that the government - the elected representative of the people - would have a monopoly on political power, but that in the modern nation this assumption no longer holds true. Wolin states that the forms of power generated in the U.S. today far exceed those comprehended by the Constitution; he describes the progression from the Constitutional conception of power to a conception of potentially unlimited power. This progression is illustrated by the transition of the governmental capacity to wage war in times of necessity to the capacity to maintain the nation in a state of continuous expectation of hostility.
      Wolin states that "the original constitution embodied two competing notions of power." (p.141) The first of these aimed to limit as much as possible the centralized might of a governing body distanced from citizens' local democratic fora. This ideal sought a government whose power which was clearly and literally delineated by the Constitution. The second notion of power argued that the U.S. needed "a strong central power, a national government that could act assertively and decisively." (p.141) This type of government, claimed its proponents, needed to be relatively independent of the states - and thus of their participatory local politics - and needed to possess the ability to wage war and to maintain armed forces. Both concepts of power agree, for example, that the Constitution authorizes Congress to declare war. However, the authority necessary to back up a declaration of war potentially encompasses a vastly wider scope than the mere pronunciation of hostilities. Under the first concept of power, the central government would not be responsible for mobilizing (and thereby controlling) all the resources of a nation at war; under the second, such control could conceivably be allocated to the government. Says Wolin, "Thus, the nature of war, rather than the nature of the Constitution, initially defined the magnitude of power which government could justifiably claim." (p.141)
      Sheldon Wolin calls the philosophy behind the recent burgeoning of governmental power the "megastate". He claims that the American megastate is based on military imperialism overseas and on the weighty American economic presence in the world market. The megastate, argues Wolin, is continuously seeking to overcome the limitations placed on its power and to bypass previous legal constraints. Two instruments by which Sheldon Wolin's megastate maintains control of its population are its bureaucracy and its media. An intrenched bureaucracy operates most smoothly in (and therefore seeks to create) a uniform society possessing immense markets of consumers with homogeneous opinions and tastes. The mass media trivializes political events, encouraging passivity and complaisance in the public. It neglects to convey the history, depth of meaning, or future ramifications of an event. Both the bureaucratic morass and the opiate of mass media serve to ensure that the megastate does not offer intellectual challenge to and therefore remains unchallenged by its citizenry.
      Under the modern American megastate, the Constitutional understanding of power and the very ideals of democratic participatory citizenship are rendered anachronistic. A megastate fosters dependency and passivity in its citizens: Americans are not educated to think critically about governmental policy or to expect engagement in politics. As a result, Americans do not recognize the burgeoning of state power which is taking place around them. The solution which author Sheldon Wolin offers to the emergence of the megastate is that Americans must educate themselves about the meaning of citizenship.

      In his article Democracy Without the Citizen, Sheldon Wolin provides a historical explanation of the contradictions inherent in the American concept of citizenship. The centralized authority derived from the second concept of power, discussed above, required citizens who were willing to accept a distant relationship to the authority of the state. This development necessitated the rejection of the ideal of the citizen as a vocal and participatory member of the political decision-making process which had been promoted by the first notion of power. The American concept of citizenship is thus historically a self-contradictory notion. The legacy of the dichotomy between carefully limited governmental power and authoritative, far-reaching power is the dichotomy between the vocal, participatory citizen and the citizen who votes but is otherwise silent. This contradiction has bequeathed to the nation a "conception of citizenship which is divided within itself and, for that reason, unable to evolve in ways that would meet the challenge of modern power." (p.141)
      Wolin explains that analysis of this fundamental dichotomy as the contradiction between "the republican or representative conception of the citizen as an occasional participant through the single act of voting , on the one hand, and the democratic one, which conceived citizenship as direct participation in self-government, on the other" (p.142) offers too simplistic a description. He notes that the republican model of citizenship is dangerous in that it accepts passivity and distance between the public and the political power which governs it. "Its ideal", he says, "is a politics of management, not a politics of citizens." (p.142) However, the existence of a megastate renders the alternate model of citizenship - the democratic conception - impractical. Wolin suggests as a compromise that individuals continue to fulfill the republican role but make a conscious effort to reject the passivity which it encourages. The public should demand the preservation of a forum for political discussion as well as increased debate on issues currently being addressed by the government.

      In his introduction to Adam Michnik's Letters From Prison, author Jonathan Schell introduces an inspiring example of the practice of participatory politics by the citizens of Poland despite the resistance of their totalitarian government to such participation.
      The impulse for the Polish resistance to the nation's totalitarian communist regime was provided by the independent trade-union federation called Solidarity. The movement was characterized by its use of purely non-violent tactics and its policies promoting openness, truthfulness, trust, and the autonomy of individual activists. Its goal was to reconstruct society within the context of the governing body - to build a democratic socialism - rather than to overthrow the state. Solidarity sought to address the public directly rather than to seek a futile dialogue with the state, and to promote social action and associations which would be independent of the government.
      Instead of adhering to "the belief that the government, by holding a monopoly of the instruments of force, also monopolized political power", the Solidarity movement sought to develop "the belief that there were sources of power elsewhere, in public opinion." (p.129) In Democracy Without the Citizen Sheldon Wolin echoes this statement that new forms of power are appearing as he points out that the power present within the U.S today is both different from and far exceeds that acknowledged and assigned by the Constitution. However, Wolin views the loss of control of power by the elected representative government of the United States as a negative occurrence, whereas Schell indicates that the loss of monopoly on power by a totalitarian government is a positive occurrence. Schell points out that the sources of developing authority can originate within the public itself, thereby serving to increase its influence with respect to the government. "A surprising discovery was made by the opposition - the discovery that merely by fearlessly carrying on the business of daily life it grew powerful. But the power gained was not power that had been wielded by others and had now been wrested from them; it was new power, which had been created where there had been none before. The program, then, was not to sieze political power from the state but to build up the society." (p.131)
      "In a totalitarian regime every aspect of collective existence is supposed to originate with the government and be under its management... Precisely because totalitarian governments politicize daily life, daily life becomes a vast terrain on which totalitarianism can be opposed." (p.129) Schell suggests a source of potentially vast authority within the social sphere created by the lives and actions of Polish citizens. It is within this sphere of personal and social life that Wolin, too, urges citizens of the United States to begin their efforts at reform. Wolin suggests that in order to reclaim participatory politics in the U.S., citizens should make a conscious effort to reject the political passivity which the entrenched bureaucracy and mass media of the 'megastate' encourage. The public must create a forum for political discussion, and utilize this space for increased debate on issues currently being addressed by the government.

      The discussion of sociopolitical activity by Jonathan Schell in his introduction to Adam Michnik's Letters From Prison centers around the deliberate undermining of and resistance to a totalitarian regime. Sheldon Wolin, in contrast, urges in Democracy Without the Citizen merely the reclamation of participatory citizenship in an originally responsive and democratic government now slipping towards megalomania and bureaucratic insensibility. Wolin is wary of sources of power currently developing outside of government control, and argues that such reservoirs of power may escape regulation by the electorate which has historically shaped the U.S. government. Schell, however, points out that these sources of power may in fact originate in the citizens themselves and be successfully used by them in order to force a totalitarian regime to recognize their participation in the process of governing. Despite these differences in context, authors Schell and Wolin make similar suggestions about how dynamic political participation can be, and has been, achieved by citizens. Both authors argue for the deliberate creation of fora for public discussion of political issues and the conscious use of the social sphere as an arena for political action.

Bibliography:

(Both texts are from a Politics reader, published by the UCSC Copy Center, Fall 2000)
Democracy Without the Citizen.
From The Presence of the Past, author Sheldon Wolin, published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.
Introduction to Adam Michnik's Letters from Prison
Authored by Jonathan Schell, published by University of California at Berkeley.