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A Democracy of Appropriation
the future course of intergenerational relations) in a neutral setting free from partisan influence. Participants in these conferences might be asked to agree on a framework and a method for enlarging the sphere of public debate, with a national commission being set up to act on their recommendations—thus extending to so-called transversal questions what the National Commission for Public Debate in France attempts to do with regard to environmental policy as well as city planning and land use, the government having first been invited to publicly take a posi tion on the findings of the relevant study groups. Again, it goes without saying that this is only one suggestion for how such a system might work. For when it comes to improving relations between the governed and their governors today, everything remains to be invented. I should make it clear, too, that the imperatives of legibility, respon sibility, and responsiveness both amplify and revitalize the old notion of a mandate. T oday the social appropriation of power can be achieved by other means than the submission of the governing to the w ill of the people that a mandate was supposed to mechanically accomplish (and, of course, never did). The constraints of justification and the unimpeded circulation of information combine to oblige public officials to deliberate in closer consultation with members of society, who in turn feel they are in a stronger position when they are better equipped to understand what is going on around them and able to express their personal expe rience in a meaningful way. The feeling of being deprived of a voice, of being an exile in one’s own land, derives from the ignorance that comes of being kept in the dark. A government that is forced to operate more openly and to provide a clearer and more detailed account of its actions, by contrast, loses its haughtiness. The more transparent it is, the less ar rogant it is. What is more, citizens who feel they are no longer cut off from the flow of information and knowledge now stand in a new and more productive relationship to t hose who govern. They have obtained power for themselves, not by “taking” it or “seizing” it or “controlling” it, but by redefining it and making it function differently than it had in the past. What is at work in a democracy of interaction is a new pol itical economy of social expression—what in English is called “empowerment.” One of the first to have thought of democracy in these terms was Émile Durkheim. He started out from two observations. First, that a merely arithmetic conception of democracy is entirely inadequate, because in the absence of unani mous elections it is inevitable that some
