Radical Democrats offers a new perspective on the American democratic tradition by examining the idea of ‘democracy' as it has been developed, debated, and deployed by radical political activists in recent American political history. Focusing on three crucial moments - the progressive era, the civil rights era, and the era of anti-globalization protest - the project aims to develop an innovative account of how the theory and practice of democracy has been understood by its most committed proponents.
Radical Democrats seeks to provide a new perspective on the democratic tradition in American political thought. Focusing on the three moments when the meaning of ‘democracy’ has been most thoroughly debated in the recent history of the United States - the progressive era, the civil rights era, and the era of anti-globalization protest - the project aims to recover a tradition of thinking about democracy that has been largely overlooked in literatures on political theory and American political development. This tradition celebrates neither the limited government characteristic of American liberalism nor the civil, polite forms of public engagement often associated with American republicanism. Rather, it is a tradition that understands democratic politics as constituted by continual contestation, as a political form that demands that citizens engage in direct action, protest and dramatic forms of political dissent. In seeking to retrieve this tradition, and to subject its normative claims to searching critical scrutiny, this project examines a series of activist movements, and the intellectuals that supported them, asking both how they conceived of democracy as an abstract ideal and how they related their own strategies of protest to their underlying conceptual commitments. The overall goal is to produce a monograph, entitled 'Democracy's Demands: Deliberation and the American Radical Tradition', which will aim to reorientate academic understanding of the ways in which American political thinkers have approached democracy, as an ideal and as a practice, in the last one hundred years.
Research for this project will draw on a relatively small range of organizations
and their leading spokespeople, chosen on the basis of their conscious, continual
and insightful discussions concerning democracy and its demands. These will
include the thinkers active in the progressive era Committee of the Forty
Eight, in the civil rights era Congress for Racial Equality, and in Indymedia
anti-globalization campaigns of the late 1990s. Their work will be accessed
primarily through organizational archives located in Berkeley, Columbia,
Cornell, Minnesota and New York Universities: archives which contain collections
which concern progressive political action in the progressive era (especially
the holdings of the Labor relations archive in Cornell and the social welfare
archive at Minnesota), the civil rights era (especially the student activist
collections in Columbia and the papers of ‘new left’ activists
and organizations in the Tamiment collection at New York University), and
the last decade of the twentieth century (especially the papers and publications
of environmental and other ‘anti-globalization’ activists to
be found in Berkeley.) This archival material will be supplemented by contemporary
published sources, especially from organizations and individuals found frequently
commenting upon the democratic status of protesting organizations, including
the main progressive political periodicals published throughout the whole
period, The Nation and The New Republic.
All of these sources will be analyzed conceptually and institutionally, drawing
on and further developing methods initially employed in my first book, Progressives,
Pluralists and the Problems of the State (Oxford: OUP, 2002). In the conceptual
analysis, attention will be primarily be given not, as usual, to these protesting
movements’ substantive goals, but rather to the ways in which they
sought to explain and defend their political strategies of protest and direct
action internally and to the outside world. Conceptual analysis will include
investigations into the movements’ views on the place of leadership
in democracy, the relationship of internal movement democracy to external
movement goals, and the role of new technologies in mobilizing citizens and
pursuing political agendas. These questions will not be studied in analytical
abstraction. Instead, each of the movements’ conceptions of the nature
of democratic politics will be carefully contextualized within the frame
of the institutions of American democracy, with particular attention being
given to the particular dynamics of contemporary institutional dilemmas as
they appeared to them and their critics. In total, this new series of combined
conceptual and institutional inquires will lead to a full and detailed picture
of these movements’ understandings of the boundaries of democratic
political action in an advanced but imperfect democratic order.
Over the course of the next two years, the Radical Democrats project will result
in three papers to be submitted to refereed journals, one on each of the eras
and their movements. It will also provide the basis for a one-day conference
to be held in Oxford’s Centre for Political Ideologies on the place of
protest in recent democratic political thought. The primary aim, however, is
to produce a monograph for a leading academic press, to be completed at the
beginning of the academic year 2007-08. This monograph will examine each movement,
conceptually and institutionally, but it will also investigate the continuities
and changes within this democratic tradition in the United States across the
twentieth century. Such a study should appear particularly apposite at a time
when tensions concerning the acceptability or otherwise of radical forms of
political protest appear particularly acute in American politics and academic
political theory. Radical Democrats aims to enable participants on both sides
of that debate to situate contemporary ideals in a new, expanded, account of
the American democratic political tradition.