Reifying democracy: post-colonial perspectives on decentralized self-governance

The paper furthers the study of participation, reconsidering the theoretical and empirical relationship between federalism and democracy. It sheds light over the intersections between federal theory and radical democracy, as well as with participatory and deliberative democracy theories. The analysis is grounded in a reconstruction of the intellectual journey of the federal idea, with a focus on its inextricable relationship with democracy. I draws on the understandings of federalism as “comprehensive” organizational model that applies to both the political and socioeconomic spheres. The paper follows the ramifications of such interpretations of federalism, shedding light over its implications vis-à-vis contemporary democratic theory. The paper introduces the notion of libertarian federalism, a non-hierarchical, bottom-up understanding of federalism, based on decentralized self-governance and -management and embodied by citizens’ councils and workers' councils. Most often conceptualized as council democracy, such tendencies were embodied, to different extent, by the 1871 Paris Commune and in 20th-century council movement (particularly in Germany, Italy, Russia, and Hungary). It reconnects to the recent scholarly debate animated by James Muldoon, Shmuel Lederman, Benjamin A. Popp-Madsen, and Dario Azzelini, who examine councilism within the framework of participatory and deliberative democracy theories. The paper thus revolves towards council democracy today. Given the forerunning role of South America in the field of democratic innovations, it brings up the contributions of 20th century Brazilian social scientists Alberto Guerreiro Ramos, Fernando P. Motta, and Maurício Tragtenberg, and present days’ scholars José Herinque Faria, Fernando G. Tenório, and Ana Paula P. de Paula. Their critical approaches to organizational studies are the interpretative key to learn how council-based participatory mechanisms have been integrated into local governance structures in Brazil. Also, they provided innovative analytical tools and conceptual categories to address the concrete articulations of democratic governance and participation. This study has multiple objectives: (a) reconsidering the meaning and scope of participation, as one of the main paradigms within democracy theory; (b) untangling the participation-representation dichotomy; (c) reconnecting council democracy and participatory and deliberative democracy theories. The paper advances a fresh theoretical approach to the study of participation, providing new insights over its reification in the context of democracy crisis, based on lesser-known postcolonial and critical perspectives on State-society and productive relations.