Introduction

Democracy is sometimes defined as a form of collective self-government. For example, according to John Dunn (1993: vi): ‘In a democracy, the people … its human members, decide what is to be done, and in so deciding they take their destiny firmly into their own hands. The power and appeal of democracy comes from the idea of autonomy – of choosing freely for oneself.’ An alternative definition of democracy is that democracy is responsive rule, which means that in a democracy there is, or should be, a correspondence between acts of governance and the wishes, with respect to those acts, of the persons who are affected (May 1978). Many people think that these definitions are equivalent (e.g., Lauth 2011: 63). In this chapter, I argue that they are not equivalent. While democracy as self-government requires responsiveness, maximally responsive rule does not maximise self-government; it actually precludes self-government.

In the first parts of this chapter, I introduce the idea of self-government as a general ability to make and follow plans and commitments. I discuss the related – and as I argue, partly competing – idea of responsive rule. Then, largely following Philip Pettit's path-breaking studies (preceded, however, by Heckscher 1892), I present the central problem of failures of collective self-government. Finally, I link these issues to the main topic of this book. A maximally responsive rule does not only slavishly reflect the myopic tendencies of the electorate; it may actually be more short-sighted than individual voters. Moreover, ‘responsive rule’ is as such an ambiguous and underspecified idea. It is not possible to be responsive to all preferences, not even to all majority preferences. By contrast, the idea of democratic self-government conceptually requires future orientation and long-term planning.

Will and its Weaknesses

When do we say that a being is able to govern itself? To be self-governing a being must, at least, possess the abilities to fix its own aims, form coherent plans about how to reach these aims, and execute the plans it has made. As Michael Bratman (e.g., 2009, 2012) explains in his seminal articles, self-government requires that we are able to make and follow structured plans of action.