In Interactive Democracy Carol Gould integrates previous work into a coherent theory of global democracy, human rights, and justice. The book is an insightful contribution to the global-justice literature and should be read together with the touchstone texts of global justice.
According to Gould, global justice is made possible through solidarity and democratic decision-making among those engaged in activity in common. Each of us is engaged in multiple such common activities. Thus democracy is interactive within and among spheres of common activity. Three regulative ideals define Gould's interactive democracy: the view that human rights require “equal positive (effective) freedom,” the view that human life is essenitally relational, and the view that if those who share in a common activity participate democratically in decision-making about that activity, the activity will be accountable to them. Gould defends each of these on its normative merits. She also gives them an ontological status and associates these regulative ideals with practices that imperfectly approximate them in contemporary global politics.
Through cross-sphere dynamics, interactive democracy is generalizable without being culturally imperialist. The book addresses cultural difference by treating global justice as general and concrete in a manner not unlike Seyla Benhabib (Praxis International 5, no. 4 [1986]: 402–24). To illustrate general yet culturally sensitive dimensions of interactive democracy, Gould raises interesting questions about the roles of culture, humor, labor networks, and the internet in global justice through interactive democracy.
Her institutional proposals focus on three commitments: (1) human rights require equal effective freedom; (2) those engaged in a common activity should have a say in decisions regarding it; (3) transnational, but not necessarily global, human-rights institutions should be the arbiters of the meaning of equal effective freedom and democracy within common activities so that they can be sensitive to cultural and other contextual differences while upholding the concrete and general commitments of global justice to human rights and democracy. Overlapping, transnational social networks and common activities create a global context of interactive democracy. Gould offers a form of grounded normative theory in that her normative vision is “already recognized” (23) in imperfect forms within some present practices and institutions. For Gould, interactive democracy partly describes the present world of transnational social networks, internet-facilitated deliberative forums, multinational corporations, and regional rights-frameworks. Interactive democracy also describes a more just world in which these are more democratic and regional human-rights institutions are more robust.
Theoretically, Gould situates her arguments within a distributive-justice paradigm. Although she defines her view in contradistinction to some of its authors in the global-justice context, the distributive framing itself is not the subject of her criticism, and yet certain aspects of her argument fit uncomfortably in this framing. For example, her emphasis on the interpretation of human rights entailing democracy and equal effective freedom and the relational ontology foundational to these views (“agency-in-relations,” 52) is inconsistent with treating rights as “claims on each other” (44). Rights claims may be assertions within existing political frameworks and in this limited context solidarity may be necessary for recognizing rights claims on each other, as Gould notes, but this is an inherently conservative use of rights. Solidarity is also a cause and consequence of making rights claims with each other (see Karen Zivi, Making Rights Claims [Oxford University Press, 2012]). Rights claims with others are more critically attempts to transform political frameworks (see Cristina Beltran, The Trouble with Unity [Oxford University Press, 2010]). Such transformation is an essential part of developing and practicing equal effective freedom and not well supported by the theoretical framing of rights as claims on each other.
Gould's theory raises interesting questions about the appropriate methodology for empirical normative theorizing. For example, what if Gould and workers have differing views about the appropriate sites for asserting rights, building solidarity, and accountable decision-making? As Gould recognizes, social and economic rights are essential human rights. Many social and economic rights of workers are violated by their employers in their places of employment. Gould's solution is to democratize the workplace. Although workers have a long history of transnational solidarity across firms, industries, and countries, these networks are not part of her empirical basis for transnational solidarity. Instead, she uses the World Social Forum (which is part movement and part site for movements) and Women Living Under Muslim Laws as transnational social movements and models for developing global solidarity. Similarly, although industrial workers, garment workers, self-employed workers, and domestic workers use the International Labor Organization (ILO) and domestic courts as sites of institutionalization of human-rights protection, Gould holds up the UN and regional human-rights institutions as model institutional sites of human-rights protections. In practice, workers choose multiple sites of decision-making such as shareholder meetings, their governments and their domestic courts, and the ILO in which to insert their voices into decision making (see Susan Kang, Human Rights and Labor Solidarity [University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012]). In practice, they treat their workplaces as sites of making rights claims with each other. Gould proposes alternative sites for building solidarity, asserting democratic participation, and making rights claims.
This example leads me to offer two methodological addenda. First, a dialectic method (5) should be informed by those engaged in the struggles relevant to the normative theory; in the case of justice in the global political economy, the strategies and realms of worker activism are essential parts of those empirical resources. Second, the normative theory has methodological implications, that is, the decision-making criteria of interactive democracy suggest that the institutional proposals should reflect engagement with those most affected, some of whom should be workers. These methodological addenda are normatively essential to realizing the regulative ideals of equal effective freedom, relationality, and democratic accountability. The methodological implication of a dialectic method cannot be an expectation of a theorist's direct participation in labor's deliberative forums, but it should mean direct engagement with the ideas and activism of labor activists and workers. Zivi and Beltran, in works mentioned above, offer examples of how to do this.
Interactive Democracy should be read within the growing canon of global-justice scholarship. As theorists of global justice struggle to be relevant to struggles against injustice, Interactive Democracy should also be read alongside a growing cadre of scholars who are engaging in an interactive political theory.
