A Study Of Barber’s Strong Democratic Theory

Benjamin Barber is kind of the representative of the Western Participatory Democracy in the contemporary society,who has deeply analyzed the logical structure of Liberal Representative Democracy and criticized it as Weak Democracy of ‘animal management’.Barber reveals that the Liberal Representative Democracy has Newtonian political view,Cartesian epistemology and utilitarian psychology,resulting in three characteristics of Anarchism,Realism and Minarchism,and finally shows its pathological manifestations leading to Extreme Individualism,Totalitarianism and Skepticism.As a matter of the fact,Barber revises Weak Democracy with the logic of pragmatist philosophy and dialectic thought,in order to find a stronger democratic model to build the construction of the Strong Democracy,namely ‘Participatory Democracy’.Barber proposed a politics in the mode of participation,and found that citizenship,public good and community are interdependent parts of Strong Democracy.Therefore,Barber presented a politics as a way of life through the participation of citizens.Through reading his article,we can get three criteria for Barber’s judgments of Strong Democracy: whether it is conducive to promote citizen participation,whether it is conducive to promote public good and whether it is conducive to shape Democratic Community.Strong democracy considers itself as a complement to Liberal Representative Democracy,demonstrating its limitations.It is mainly reflected that the political preconceptual introduced by the Strong Democracy is doubtful.In the other hand Strong Democracy itself is easy to fall into the trap of relativism.Last not least,it has many deficiencies in practice.However,the theory of Strong Democracy finds the important role of participation in fostering democracy and the politics in the process,which inspires the practice of citizens’ participation in politics in contemporary society and makes contributions to construct an independent democratic politics.