1

RATIONALITY, SOCIOLOGY AND THE CONSOLIDATION OF DEMOCRACY

Fbio Wanderley Reis

Prepared for the conference on Micro-foundations of Democracy, Chicago, April 29-May 1, 1988

I) Introduction. II) Some basic epistemological problems. III) Norms, autonomy and the dialectic of the institutional. IV) Rationality as related to identity and autonomy. V) Democratic consolidation as "character planning". VI) Przeworski, self-enforcement and institutions. VII) Contractarian democracy and the dual autonomy of political institutions. VIII) What to do and incrementalism: 1. From a constitution to a better one. 2. The military: rules for the real game? 3. Corporatism and the state. IX) Conclusion: democratic consolidation and rational choice.

I - Introduction In presenting the game of the Prisoners' Dilemma, writers sometimes refer to the establishment of a pact as something that would radically alter the situation and allow participants to avoid the dilemma. The impossibility for the prisoners to communicate with each other is then seen as a defining characteristic of the game: otherwise, it is thought, they would establish a pact to cooperate and the dilemma would vanish.i That is clearly a wrong assumption. Under the general postulates of calculating agents guided by selfinterested motivation, the establishment of a pact would represent but an additional reason for each of them to act egoistically and play safe. For prisoner A would then be led to evaluate the situation as involving a greater probability that prisoner B would be willing to behave as a "sucker" -- or that B would look at A herself as a likely sucker. This, of course, is the difficulty associated with the much debated Hobbesian theory of political obligation: whereas claiming to ground his theory on considerations of a purely "prudential" or self-interested sort, Hobbes is faced with the dilemma of collective action when trying to link the transition from the state of nature to civil society with the setting up of a pact. So, he is rather inconsistently led to resort to a law of nature to the effect that pacta sunt servanda. Self-interest only does not seem to lead to viable or real pacts, and Hobbes' recourse to coercion by the Leviathan might perhaps be seen as an equivocal -- and still inconsistent -- expression of this dilemma. I think this is the central issue in evaluating the prospects of the rational choice approach in connection with the empirical problems of transitions to democracy in such contexts as present-day Latin America and of the role to be played in them by pacts of any sort. There is more to it, however: that issue turns out to express the central difficulties, and perhaps the limits, of the rational choice approach as such in the field of social sciences. Thus, the two "sides" of the problematic to which we are invited by Adam Przeworski -- the "substantive" side of specific questions of political theory and research and the
See, for instance, Anatol Rapoport, Fights, Games and Debates, Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 1961, pp. 173-4 and 180.
i

epistemological one -- seem to be quite strongly entangled with each other. A suggestive illustration of the difficulties of the epistemological bet of the rational choice approach, in a context that is directly relevant to our substantive concerns, can be found in the discussion of Mancur Olson's last book recently made by Jon Elster, one of the leading champions of rational choice.ii Olson is concerned with "coalitions", which bear an obvious affinity to "pacts". Elster draws attention to the articulation attempted by Olson between the analytic focus presented in his classic on The Logic of Collective Action and some new propositions on the question of the determinants of successful collective action in society as a whole. Such new propositions, in Elster's reading, amount to affirming the importance of a stochastic process whose operation, combined with those mechanisms emphasized in The Logic, leads Olson to his basic conclusion, stated by Elster as follows: "stable societies will accumulate special interest groups, converging toward a somewhat biased sub-set of the whole population of potential interest groups".iii A few pages below, toward the end of his article, Elster then goes on to say that "it would be good if Olson would try to provide us with a glimpse inside the black box where coalition formation takes place, instead of resting the theory on a stochastic process that has little explanatory power".iv Now, as acknowledged by Elster, Olson repeatedly claims to be resorting, at what one might call the "micro" level, to the argument introduced in The Logic, where Olson would certainly sustain that there is a theory of coalition formation -- the by-product theory of collective action. Moreover, it seems hard to deny that the latter gives expression to the fundamental assumptions of the rational choice approach, and this theory, or some variation thereof, should probably be seen as the theory by someone inspired by such assumptions. One is thus led to ask what it is that Elster's recommendation to look inside the black box of coalition formation actually amounts to. I think
i ii

Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1982. Elster's discussion is contained in "The Contradictions of Modern Societies", Government and Opposition, 19, 3, Summer of 1984, 304-311.
i iii i iv

Ibid., pp. 304-5. Ibid., p. 311.

that it boils down to recommending a conventionally "sociological" or "sociopsychological" approach, instead of a rational choice one. For rational choice, based as it is on the assumption of rationality and on a correspondingly rather schematic psychology, would seem to be necessarily "external" to any "black box" that a descriptively richer approach might try to reach. Of course, there is room for questions concerning the transition from the assumptions of rationality and perhaps self-interested motivation at the micro level to the aggregate effects, at the macro level, of micro-behaviors fitting such assumptions. But it is hard to see in what sense Olson's stochastic process, especially if coupled with the mechanisms pointed out by the by-product theory, might be said to be more mysterious than the perversions and contradictions in the relations between the micro and macro levels that lie at the very core of theoretical efforts guided by the rational choice approach. There seems indeed to be a black box here -- but the decisive question is whether it can be openned up with the resources available within the strict confines of the rational choice approach. II - Some basic epistemological problems The basic and most general assumptions of the rational choice approach refer to intentionality or goal-seeking and rationality. The corresponding model of explanation is perhaps put in a nutshell by the idea of someone who says "I want it and I am going to get it". Besides the obvious element of volition and a corresponding element of determination or commitment, the model includes also the element of a concern with effectiveness, which implies cognition and the search for a lucid diagnosis of the situation where action is supposedly to take place. Quite clearly, the more informed, deliberate and lucid the behavior or action, the more the characteristics of this model of explanation are realized. The motivation for resorting to such assumptions is often described in the rational choice literature in terms of seeking to provide the "microfoundations of macro-phenomena", which naturally brings forth the problem of alternative ways of analytically structuring the object of study of the social sciences. One of these ways is, of course, the traditional opposition between "infra-structure" and "super-structure". The usual form of understanding this

distinction tends to link different kinds of action to each level or dimension, so that the infra-structure would be the sphere of "material" or "economic" action (of "work"), whereas the super-structure would be the sphere of an assorted set of other types of action (those having to do with ideas, values or beliefs of a more "lofty" nature, with religion, law, "culture" and so on). Whatever the interest that some similarly founded distinction may possibly have from certain points of view, there are, of course, many confusing twists associated with it. In one case, "real actions", seen as infra-structure, are opposed to the super-structure of ideas, values or beliefs as such -- as if one might have action of any sort without the presence of the latter elements. Another way of looking at the same dichotomy, in which there occurs to some extent a reversal of the previous way of looking at the relationships between action and structure, is the one appearing in the probably dominant "determinist" perspective in Marxist disputes on determinism versus voluntarism: here, the "objectified" social context of action gets precedence over action itself and explains it. In any case, having in mind the twists of the opposition between infra-structure and super-structure, it would seem at least as legitimate to speak of the "macro-foundations of micro-behavior" as of the "micro-foundations of macro-phenomena" of the rational choice motto. Of course, the central issue involved is the problem of the direction of "causality", of where to look for the crucial "factors" or to which area or dimension of social reality to grant some sort of causal privilege. But the relationships between the analytical effort at establishing "causality", on the one hand, and, on the other, the distinction between "action" and "structure" (the latter seen as something like an "objective" focus of causation) seem rather more difficult to straighten than suggested by any prompt reading of such dichotomies. It is certainly possible to argue, as does Elster, for a distinction in which the level of intentional behavior is opposed to the level of (objective) causality -- in turn divided by Elster into "sub-intentional causality" and "supra-intentional causality".v But I think that, properly understood, the assumption of intentionality and rationality necessarily leads, of itself, to the establishment of an indelible linkage between those different aspects, seen either as "dimensions" of social reality or "causal mechanisms".
v

See Jon Elster, "Causality and Intentionality: Three Models of Man", appendix 2 to chapter 5 of Logic and Society, New York, John Wiley & Sons, 1978.

There is clearly a sense in which action or agency "causes" social structure, just as there is an equally clear sense in which action is shaped and conditioned (and thus, at least in a flexible sense of the word, "caused") by its context. Just as action produces structure ("congeals", as it were, into structure), so structure (as the context of action) "rationalizes" action and makes it intelligible as such. For structure is, in its connnection to the mechanisms linked to both sub-intentional and supra-intentional causality, an indispensable reference in the characterization of the effectiveness and rationality itself of action. This may look trivial in a certain reading, but I believe it actually has important ramifications. Thus, much of the dispute between rational choice and "conventional" ("sociological") approaches can be seen to amount to a confrontation between two kinds of "ontological" models of social reality which distinguish themselves from each other according to the status ascribed to the "context" of action, particularly all that which can make the context a sociologically interesting one -- and, it should be added, all that in which a sociologically interesting context concurs to define the subjects of action themselves. But I think we are not going to make real progress at the epistemological level unless there is a clear understanding that the authentic problems which present themselves at this level are not reducible to the question of resorting to the appropriate ontological model. What seems to me to be the really important epistemological problem can be introduced by reference to the work of Jean Piaget, although Piaget himself was led, I think, to some important mistakes in connection with it. As is well known, Piaget applies Ferdinand de Saussure's distinction between the "diachronic" and the "synchronic" to the problem of sociological explanation.vi The diachronic dimension is linked by him with problems of genesis and causality, whereas the synchronic dimension has to do with a-temporal and necessary relations of logical implication. However, an important ambiguity introduces itself in the use he makes of this distinction with regard to sociological thought. On the one hand, sociology (as the science of society, by contrast with the "exact" and natural sciences) is seen as a discipline in which
v vi

Jean Piaget, "La Pense Sociologique", in Introduction l'pistemologie Gntique, Paris, Presses Univesitaires de France, 1950, t. III.

this dualism acquires a special relevance for two related reasons, where we find a certain articulation between substantive and methodological aspects which reproduces the contrast between ontology and epistemology just mentioned. First, because of the content of sociological thought, which must direct itself to aspects of social reality having to do both with effective actions and with such phenomena as norms, values and signs -- some would say, with "infra-structure" and "super-structure". Second, because of its formal structure, which is presented as "more causal" insofar as it refers to effective actions where social facts come from and as more "implicative" in the sphere of norms, values and signs. As a consequence, Piaget goes on to say, sociology "oscillates" between causality and implication, and the "passage from the causal to the implicative" is linked to the "difficulties inherent in sociological explanations".vii Now, the ambiguity derives from the fact that the sphere of relations of implication or of logic, according to the conclusions of the life-long work of Piaget himself and his associates, is nothing but the transposition, into a virtual or symbolic level, of operations which are initially concrete operations, or real actions -- a trait that concerns the "operational" character of knowledge in general, and of logic in particular, pointed out by Piaget's sociopsychology of intelligence and "genetic epistemology". Thus, it is certainly adequate to say, in light of Piaget's assumptions and findings themselves, that the challenge or goal for any sort of explanation or of knowledge is precisely the "passage from the causal to the implicative", and sociology is not at all peculiar in this regard. How is this "passage" achieved? This is the crucial question, and Piaget's work contains a clear and persuasive answer to it: we are at the level of the implicative, or at the "operational" level, when the knowing subject is able to "manipulate" objects of whatever nature in such a way as to assure some sort of reversibility in the manipulations -- or "operations" -- involved. The point at which Piaget gets confused is that, contrary to what he suggests in the texts cited above, there is no reason to sustain that there should be some change in this basic criterion according to the nature of objects -- in particular,
v vii

Cf. Jean Piaget, "A Explicao em Sociologia", in Estudos Sociolgicos, Rio de Janeiro, Forense, 1973, pp. 49-52.

according to their seemingly more or less "temporal", genetic or diachronic character : the criterion applies whether we are dealing with material objects proper or with physical or other events of any kind, including historical events and so also "effective" or "real" actions by human agents. Actually, the point of the idea of the transposition of real actions into a virtual or symbolic level (which Piaget uses to define logic itself) is that the inherent temporality of real events and objects, and hence their permanent changes of state, may be replaced by a-temporal ("synchronic" is not quite an adequate label) traits and relations stemming directly from such manipulations -- and this is what "reversibility" is all about, having to do with the construction of the permanent object which, precisely, can somehow be manipulated or operated with. As Piaget writes in connection with the crucial logical and mathematical concept of "group", "the reversibility characteristic of the group supposes the notion of object, and vice-versa": exemplifying with the rudimentary group mechanisms of the sensory-motor level, "to meet an object again is to face the possibility of a return (through displacement, whether of the object or of the body itself): the object is nothing but the invariant element due to the reversible composition of the group".viii In any case, a special and important angle of the problem is that the implicative or logical has to do with the real or virtual actions of the knowing subject herself, and not with any properties of the objects or things upon which these actions are executed. Here is a synthetic formulation of this aspect given by Piaget himself propos of the concept of group: "...the group concept is obtained (...) by a mode of thought characteristic of modern mathematics and logic -- 'reflective abstraction' -which does not derive properties from things, but from our ways of acting on things, the operations we perform on them; perhaps, rather, from the various fundamental ways of coordinating such acts or operations -- 'uniting', 'ordering', 'placing in one-to-one correspondence', and so on".ix Now, the scientific method consists in the application of logic (so, of the special type of abstraction referring to our own operations) to the specific case of our "manipulation" of the "things" of a certain kind (field of knowledge). The nomological aspect of science is, of course, linked directly to
v viii

i ix

Cf. Jean Piaget, Psicologa de la Inteligencia, Buenos Aires, Psique, 1960, p. 152. Jean Piaget, Structuralism, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971, p. 19.

this: it has to do with the possibility of reproducing a certain event or association of events, and of thus eliminating, at the limit, whatever there may be of fortuitous (emergent, "temporal", diachronic) in the corresponding occurrence. And the possibility of intersubjective control of the results achieved in scientific work are also dependent on its nomological character thus understood -- and so on the possibility of reproducible, and somehow "atemporal" or "reversible", manipulation. In turn, resorting to the scientific method in the specific realm of social affairs means applying logic (again, that type of abstraction referring to our own actions or operations) to our "manipulation" of a "thing" which happens to be our actions themselves. We can thus have, in this case, a double reflectiveness: we manipulate and construct theories, and occasionally reflect on such manipulations and construct methods and approaches, seeking to explain the actions of people -- which inevitably include as a crucial component the nexus that acting people themselves attribute to their behavior. And the "nexus" of our explanations not only has directly to do with the nexus such as seen by the agents themselves, but also will only satisfy as such insofar as our manipulations turn out to reveal that there is regularity or lawfulness in the occurrence of the latter nexus. I think all this has clear consequences for the dispute between rational choice and conventional "sociology". I will leave aside the question of the possibility of actual "manipulation" in the sphere of society, which may be taken here as a merely technical question whose solution can be seen to range from the production of quantitative and perhaps strictly reproducible observations to some sort of "counterfactual" historiographical work, for instance. More important from the point of view of the present discussion, however, are a couple of other points. The first one concerns directly the problem of nomology, whose interest can be appreciated if we consider the odd symmetry of a charge made by the two sides of the current dispute against each other, which appears, for instance, in two recent papers by Barry Hindess and Adam Przeworski. So, Hindess accuses rational choice models of adhering to a postulate of "homogeneity", as a consequence of which "stylised forms of rational

calculation are uniquely defined for all actors within each category of actors recognised in the model" -- all voters, all parties, all entrepreneurs --, which would imply "structural determinism".x Przeworski, in turn, accuses functionalists (and functionalist marxists) of viewing "all individual behavior as an act of execution of the internalized society, with the implication that all persons exposed to the same norms and values should behave in the same manner". Specifically, marxists "were satisfied with the intuitive belief that people act out their class positions", and thought, anyway, that "what was important about history happened at the level of forces, structures, collectivities, and constraints, not individuals".xi Looked at in the perspective I am trying to sketch, this symmetrical interchange of charges can be seen as an equivocal expression of fundamental problems and reduced in its import. The "regularities" that we have to resort to in the social sciences are necessarily referred to the behavior of actors within environments (the latter including, of course, aspects which are material, social, socio-psychological etc.). In principle, it is possible to start, in our analytical "manipulations" in search of the sources of regularity in actions, either from the characteristics of environments which somehow constrain the actors or from the characteristics of actors themselves. But in any case reference to the other pole is inevitable, and there will always be restrictive and "homogenizing" assumptions at any given analytic level. The constraints of an assumedly homogeneous environment can operate differently upon different individuals (for instance, certain norms are more fully internalized by some individuals than by others) -- and the scientific problem will consist largely in establishing categories of individuals upon which such differential operation occurs (for instance, more or less rational individuals, or individuals more or less capable of autonomously processing relevant information of various sorts so as to decide which principle of action to adopt). Conversely, individuals assumed to be, say, homogenously rational will act differently according to differences in the environments -- and the scientific problem will then consist in establishing categories of environments that account for such
x

Barry Hindess, "Rational Choice Theory and the Analysis of Political Action", Economy and Society, 13, 33, 255-77, quotations from pp. 263 and 267.
x xi

Adam Przeworski, "Marxism and Rational Choice", Politics & Society, 14, 4, 1985, 379-409, quotations from p. 382.

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differential behavior. Note, moreover, that this homogenizing procedure is, in either case, a necessary step in the effort at recovering the nexus of behavior -in the eyes of the agent and, consequently, also for the analyst. It is thus possible to argue that full explanation would require a rather circular appeal back and forth between action and context, or between "micro" and "macro". This much was recently argued in a convincing way by Raymond Boudon, despite some confusions and unsustainable positions with regard to what Boudon sees as the "nomological prejudice".xii But there is more to all this. Consider again Piaget's distinction between the genetic or diachronic and the implicative or synchronic. It seems clear that, although the implicative (or logic itself) has its ultimate bases on "real actions", it actually concerns action conceived in a certain way, which allows for reversibility and requires the idea of the stable object liable to manipulation, by contrast with changes of state and "some sort of Heraclitean flux", to use another phrase by Piaget.xiii Of course, there is no reason for "action" to be necessarily conceived in these terms: it may equally be thought of as corresponding to impulse, irruption and emergence, or as having to do with the spontaneity and fortuitousness that somehow belong to the level of the genetic or diachronic. But it seems undeniable that the ideal of scientific knowledge is inevitably related to logic and to the implicative and is thus opposed, in this sense, to Piaget's "genetic". The latter, in the last analysis, is nothing but the flux to be somehow suspended and manipulated in scientific explanation. There is no "genetic explanation" unless genesis itself is transformed into "implication" through such manipulation -- whence the consequence that "historical explanation" is real explanation only if it is actually sociological (or, in any case, implicative and nomological) explanation. And the sociological explanation with which Piaget is concerned does not "oscillate" between causality and implication any more than any other case of explanation (actually, no explanation does). Of course, there is the possibility of conceiving of a sort of "objective causality" akin to the idea of the genetic as opposed to the implicative, just as we can think of action as
x xii

Raymond Boudon, La Place du Dsordre, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1984, especially chapters 2 and 3.
x xiii

Piaget, Structuralism, op. cit., p. 20.

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irreversible flux -- and the traditional confusions on the relationships of "causation" and "induction" (or, in a way, of "nexus" and "regularity") in scientific explanation are obviously related to this.xiv But such ontological conceptions do not represent anything but a certain way of stating the initial problem or challenge that scientific work has to face up to: the problem of how to account (implicatively...) for the "causalities", "geneses" or spontaneous actions in question.xv And the opposition between intentionality and causality in the field of social sciences loses much of its sharpness: the point is how to treat even intentionality in terms of implication and nomology (so, how to treat it "causally", as Hempel would rightly say, for there is no way to deal analytically with causality without implication and nomology) -and the idea of action as rational action seems an indispensable requisite for that. One of the consequences of the above for the dispute between rational choice and "sociology" seems clearly favorable to rational choice in some of its more orthodox versions: there is, of course, no point in seeking to recover the emergent and irreversible aspect of concrete action as such -- and the affinity of the "operational" character of the logical content of scientific method to rationality makes the assumption of rationality with regard to the acting object of the social sciences only natural and, in my view, impossible to avoid. But a decisive counterpoint to this can be formulated in a few related
x xiv

This point suggests the convenience of a distinction between two senses in which the idea of an explanatory "nexus" can be taken: first, the notion of nexus as some sort of "mechanism" which can actually be manipulated or shown at work; second, the notion of nexus as irreversible flux or "causation", more clearly linked to Piaget's "genetic" or "diachronic". Of course, many interesting and even crucial socio-scientific problems emerge in connection with the latter sense, and I actually think it is important to recover the notion of nexus as causation and resist the irrationalist ingredient of the fad which is prone to denounce such sins as "evolutionism" and "linear conceptions": in many cases, explanation requires that we be able precisely to point to the "linearity" (or logic...) that a process does exhibit. But the indispensable qualification is that for such explanation to be satisfactory as such, it cannot fail to be nomological and implicative -- even if only "counterfactually" so, that is, by means of the artificial "production" of a plurality of instances to be "observed" or through the virtual or imaginary "manipulation" of a given instance. Some elaboration of these ideas in connection with such issues as Popper's anti-historicism and Perry Anderson's theses on the "unique" concatenation of feudalism and the classical universe in the production of capitalism can be found in Fbio W. Reis, "Change, Rationality, and Politics", Kellogg Institute, Working Paper # 10, January 1984.
x xv

I am thus certainly in agreement with Adam Przeworski ("Micro-foundations of Pacts in Latin America", manuscript, March 1987, p. 2) in that we need "formalisms", and I don't see any reason why such formalisms should be negatively described as "empty".

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propositions. First, if we are to adopt a schematic "operational" concept of action in terms of rationality, an obvious form of "manipulating" action is the manipulation of the context or environment of action; therefore, renouncing, in the name of rationality, the aim of directly recovering action as ebullience and spontaneity is not tantamount to giving up the aim of recovering the richness and complexity of the context of action. For action will be all the more rational according to the degree of sophistication of its cognitive dimension, that is, of the amount of information processed with regard to both its "objective" environment and the subjectivity of the agents themselves. Correspondingly, methodological or analytical "manipulation" in connection with the idea of rationality gets interesting (and, one must presume, rewarding) in the social sciences as we go on to manipulate increasingly complex aspects of the interlocking of actor and environment in rational action. For, stripped of such complexities, it is possible to see that the model of "rational" action turns out to be necessary for the study of behavior in general, and actually to exhibit a better fit to the case of animal behavior than to the case of human and social behavior. This view certainly applies to the basic and rather tautological conception of rationality in which it is equated with goal-seeking behavior per se, which includes just a bare minimum of cognition to be found, one might argue, in (animal) life itself. To sum up, then, there certainly is a sense in which, in accordance with the more orthodox postulates of rational choice, action, or intentional behavior oriented toward effectiveness and necessarily including a cognitive or information-processing dimension (that is, rational behavior), is an unavoidable assumption of any consequential attempt at explanation in the social sciences -- and can thus be said to provide a "foundation" for whatever is "structural" (in the sense of supra-intentional objectification) in society. But I don't think it is possible legitimately to derive therefrom the aim of inventing society from scratch starting from merely calculating individuals, of deducing the former from the latter. For action is itself necessarily contextualized (just as actors and their goals or preferences are socially conformed to a large extent); hence, the evaluation of action from the point of view of effectiveness and rationality involves an inevitable reference to the situation or environment where it takes place (and the proper definition of the situation includes certain crucial traits of the subjectivity of actors). And just as action can be more or

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less rational according to the volume of information regarding its situation that is processed by the acting subject, so the evaluation of its rationality will be more or less adequate according to the richness and sophistication of the information concerning the situation of action that is available to the analyst. Now, it seems clear, in my view, that the requirements thus established for proper explanation cannot be met by the rational choice approach in what it has of distinctive, and the resources of "conventional" socio-scientific disciplines are no doubt needed for a proper handling of the social context of rational action -- and so for the proper handling of rational action or of rationality as such. Moreover, I think this can be seen to involve, from a somewhat different point of view, a more sober and adequate appreciation of what to expect of social science. Just as physics does not explain matter itself and biology does not explain life as such, so the aim of social science is not -contrary to the apparent assumptions of many rational choice theorists -- to explain society as such. There is thus no need to adopt the "state of nature" ontological postulates to which "methodological individualism" is frequently equated, at least implicitly, in the relevant literature. The recipe would consist rather in coupling the recourse to the indispensable analytic equipment provided by the assumptions of intentionality and rationality with an "ontology" that is social from the beginning and admits of all sociological and socio-psychological elements which orthodox rational choice theorists want to abstract from: norms, institutions of various sorts in different stages of the process of consolidating as such, interpersonal and intergenerational loyalty or solidarity and thus groups of various kinds, interlocking of the definition of personal identities with the variegated processes of constitution of collective identities which also succeed or fail in different degrees, and so on.xvi III - Norms, autonomy and the dialectic of the institutional With the aim of trying to clarify my position on some basic epistemological problems, I have so far restricted myself largely to a certain
x xvi

These views are elaborated in Fbio W. Reis, Poltica e Racionalidade: Problemas de Teoria e Mtodo de uma Sociologia "Crtica" da Poltica, Belo Horizonte, Edies RBEP, 1984; see also my "Change, Rationality, and Politics", op. cit. Przeworski ("Marxism and Rational Choice", op. cit.) is also critical of the "ontological" postulates of rational choice.

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contrast between actor and environment. However, if we move to the substantive political dimension of our theme, we have to consider the problems deriving from the fact that there is a plurality of actors, and we are led to strategic interaction. Here, intentionality and goal-seeking behavior are perhaps properly described as assuming the form of the pursuit of interests, if we agree to apply this word, taking a suggestion from Jurgen Habermas, to some form of affirmation of self in the interaction with others, and so to relations involving confrontation and actual or potential conflict.xvii Now, pacts have to do with the aim of regulating just this kind of interaction, of mitigating its potentially belligerent content. This can only be accomplished by means of giving strategic interaction some sort of institutional translation or expression. An important part of the orthodox conception of what to expect of rational choice with regard to this problem amounts to going straight back to the point of view of some classic contract theories: how would it be possible to ground in considerations of a strictly "prudential" or self-interested nature on the part of rational agents the establishment and enduring effectiveness of "pacts", "constitutions" or whichever social and political institutions that may represent a solution to the problem. The difficulties involved begin to appear when we pay attention to the double-faced feature of the institutional dimension of social life, which reveals itself in the deep ambivalence that marks the notion of the institutional and the words corresponding to it in the literature of the social sciences. Whereas "institutional" or "institutionalized" points, on the one hand, to the "artificial" aspect or level of social reality, which is seen as liable to deliberate manipulation and "institution-building" (and is sometimes despicably referred to as the "merely institutional" for being seen, in connection with its artificiality, as somehow less "real" or important), the very same words are also used, on the other hand, to indicate those traits of social life which are akin to Durkheim's idea of contrainte sociale, that is to say, which have to do with society in its "objective" and "opaque" character, appearing as readymade and externally coercive in the eyes of individuals or even of any single
x xvii

See, for instance, Jurgen Habermas, Thorie et Pratique, Paris, Payot, 1975, vol. II, pp. 104-5.

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generation. In other words: the very notion of the institutional expresses again the ambivalences of the relationships between "infra-structure" and "superstructure", and we have the institutional both as a context of action and as an object of action. But perhaps the crucially challenging aspect, from a practical point of view, lies precisely in the dialectic between those two features of the institutional: indeed, the "objects" of "institutional" manipulation (a rule, a procedure, a constitution) only deserve "properly" to be designated as institutions when they come to exhibit the consistency, objectivity and coerciveness of the institutional as context. Otherwise, they are actually nothing but "artificial" and more or less irrelevant products of largely futile exercises. Of course, time is a crucial element of these relationships, for the transformation of artificial creations into actual institutions requires a sort of "maturation" which cannot take place without the transcourse of time. But note above all that political action, if understood as constructive action by contrast with the mere clash of interests, is of necessity deeply imbedded in this dialectic: inevitably unfolding itself on the level of the institutional as object and -- like any human action -- in the present, it necessarily involves an inherently precarious bet regarding the future and the "context-impregnation" of real institutions. Now, the sphere of efforts directed at institution-building, or of political action in its constructive form, appears in a certain light as being also the sphere par excellence of the deliberate and intentional in politics -- certainly more so than routine strategic action, for it implies acting upon the context of strategic action itself. It then turns out to be, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, a sphere to which unquestionably belongs that which tends to be described in terms of micro-behavior in the rational choice literature. Although we have been considering some fluidities in the posture which links the micro-macro opposition to epistemological "foundations", the idea of institution-building behavior as "micro-foundation" may seem particularly odd, if looked at from the ("substantive") point of view of political theory. Nonetheless, I think this is the central issue: how helpful are the assumptions characteristic of the rational choice approach when the questions posed necessarily involve not only a widened time perspective, but also some "contents" which, being associated with the transcourse of time, are deeply

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impregnated with sociological and socio-psychological ingredients proper to the institutional as context. One particularly important issue in connection with the theme of institutions concerns the normative ingredient inherent to them, which introduces several rather embroilled queries from the point of view of the contribution of rational choice to the understanding of our substantive problems. Of course, the idea of the institutional as object points above all to the attempt at creating norms, whereas that of the institutional as context points to norms which actually "layed roots" in society and became effective as such. Now, there is a disturbing feature to norms, which is clearly related to the dialectic of the institutional that I have just described. On the one hand, norms are certainly an important factor of objective "causation" in society. This is the aspect lying behind the fact that "norm-oriented behavior" tends to be opposed to rational behavior in the current confrontation of approaches in the social sciences. In terms of Elster's distinction between the levels of intentionality and of two kinds of causality, it is probably appropriate to say, by reference to this aspect, that norms are a salient element of the level of supra-intentional causality, beside those elements concerning the aggregate effects of behavior in a more direct way. An important question in this regard, which is no doubt far from being settled, is the one of the extent to which it would be necessary to suppose the presence of a stochastic element in the establishment and operation of the normative dimension of society. It is interesting to observe, for instance, that Piaget, in his above mentioned texts devoted to the problem of sociological explanation within the framework of a contrast between the causal or genetic and the implicative, attributes to norms an ambiguous or intermediate status: they are described by him as partaking of the realm of "regulations", which are distinguished precisely by the presence of a probabilistic ingredient, as opposed to the more neatly causal realm of "rhythms", on one side, and the wholly implicative one of "groups", on the other.xviii Of course, insofar as pacts or coalitions are understood as
x xviii

Cf. Piaget, "A Explicao em Sociologia", op. cit., pp. 41 ff. and especially 60 ff. It is worthwhile to observe in this connection that, in a recent attempt to study the emergence and stability of norms from the point of view of the theory of games, Robert Axelrod recognizes the "inherently probabilistic" nature of the approach, whence derive problems in using mathematics and the necessity to resort to computer simulation techniques. See Robert Axelrod, "An Evolutionary Approach to Norms", American Political Science Review, 80, 4, December 1986, 1095-1111,

17

necessarily involving norms, the proper clarification of such issues would have consequences for the problem of the role of assumptions regarding the operation of stochastic processes in the explanation of coalition formation -the problem on which we have previously seen Elster in disagreement with Olson. On the other hand, however, norms are undeniably part of the intentional, and turn out to fulfill a rather important and special role as an element of intentionality. Let me insist a little with Piaget, who does not fail to draw attention to the fact that, beside being "regulations", norms pertain also to the level of the implicative: they are quite obviously a possible object of relations of implication, of which we have the most accomplished manifestation with the formalization that characterizes the field of law.xix Clearly related to this implicative character through its relevance for the hierarchization of chains of ends and means and of principles of action, there is the fact that norms are indispensable for autonomy -- and autonomy, of course, is intentionality led to its fullest fruition. A certain ambiguity introduces itself at this point, which has to do with a duality of meanings of the notion of autonomy itself. First, "autonomy" can mean a sort of spontaneous affirmation of self. In this sense, it suggests such ideas as that of a "strong personality" or "strong character", according to which one is supposed to act out in an unreflected way one's feelings, impulses or motives of whatever kind. The second meaning is rather that of self-control, where the chief component is precisely the element of reflectiveness and cognitive awareness with regard to one's motives or goals and their relationship to other and perhaps more important objectives one may adhere to -- that is, the idea of being, ultimately, the author of one's norms, which is contained in the etymology itself of the word "autonomy". From a point of view akin to ethics and political philosophy, it seems quite likely that we would have agreement on the need to achieve some sort of balance between these two senses of autonomy: they would be made to appear
especially p. 1098.
xix

Piaget, "A Explicao em Sociologia", op. cit., pp. 60 ff.

18

as "dimensions" of a proper concept of autonomy, where both aspects would combine in appropriate measures as requisites of real autonomy -- the one of motivated (and in the limit impulsive and perhaps "blind") intentionality and the one of self-cognition and control. My point here, however, is that these complexities of the concept of autonomy are politically relevant, even crucial -- and that they result in a decisive challenge for the use to be made of the concept of rationality and so for rational choice as applied to substantive political problems like the ones we are concerned with. Actually, I think the rational choice approach faces a dilemma: either it sticks to a rather impoverished way of using the concept of rationality, in which case it will have in this concept a useful analytic instrument for certain kinds of problems (and I don't mean to suggest that these are only unimportant or uninteresting problems); or else it seeks to do full justice to the above complexities in their relationships to the notion of rationality (which, after all, is the ultimate foundation of the approach) -- but this is probably equivalent to openning a Pandora's box in which the specificity of the approach ends up by dilluting itself.xx Let me hurry to add that I don't mean by that to get back to the attempt to distinguish between a "formal" and a "substantive" concept of rationality and to affirm the need to resort to a supposedly "substantive" rationality instead of the formal one of rational choice. Actually, I am persuaded that this distinction cannot be sustained in a consistent way, and that the only notion of rationality available is a "formal" one, if we understand by that the instrumental relationships between ends and means. Since my previous references to the problem of rationality were directed solely at some epistemological consequences of a basic contrast between actor and environment, it may be well to take a detour to substantiate this position and to consider some of the complexities in which the notion of rationality gets involved in relation with the ideas just stressed.
Przeworski ("Rational Choice and Marxism", op. cit., p. 387), stressing the methodological intentions of rational choice, comments that "Elster's carefully measured assessment of human rationality in Ulysses and the Sirens (...) may be subversive of the project of methodological individualism" for its concern with descriptive realism and the obstacles that existing irrationalities may represent for an approach based on the assumption of rationality. Note, however, that I am not talking about irrationality, but rather about a fully consequent adherence to the idea of rationality in all its complexity.
xx

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IV - Rationality as related to identity and autonomy The starting point is the acknowledgement that rationality is necessarily an attribute of an action -- or, by extension, of the subject who acts, insofar as it can be assumed that her actions will be rational: if there is no action, there is also no problem of rationality. This attribute has to do above all with the effectiveness of the action in the pursuit of its ends, which is directly linked to controlling and processing relevant information. There is, then, both an active and a cognitive component in rationality, and it is meaningless, from this point of view, to speak of the rationality of "intentions", "goals" or "preferences" as such -- which is the usual claim or concern of the proposal of a "substantive" notion of rationality. Of course, it will always be possible to speak of degrees of rationality according to the volume of information processed, and at the limit of poor or inadequate information-processing we may have cases of incompatible intentions.xxi But as long as we stick to the level of intentions understood as mere wishes or desires, there is nothing properly irrational in entertaining incompatible intentions: it is only at the level of actual behavior supposedly guided by really incompatible or contradictory intentions that we would have irrationality -- and at this level, I sustain, a problem of information would be fatally involved in such irrationality. On the other hand, the idea of degrees of rationality in connection with the volume of information does not detract from the "active" ingredient of rationality, or from the link between rationality and the effectiveness of an intentional action in search of its goals. For it is through the increased probability of effectiveness that increased information-processing comes to mean increased rationality. Even omniscience would not be equivalent to absolute rationality if the omniscient being did not have designs to be realized -- and a world created by an omniscient and perhaps almighty but purposeless or futile god would be just as absurd as any. Now, knowing or the search for knowledge can itself be seen as a type of action whose goal is to acquire or increase information. Its effectiveness will be associated with the creation by the agent(s) of the conditions leading to that goal, whence the requirement of openness, "decentration", willingness to
x xxi

Jon Elster speaks of "irrational" intentions in this context in Explaining Technical Change, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 20.

20

communicate and interchange and to let presumed information be intersubjectively controlled as a condition of its "objectivity". We are here in the realm of that type of action that Jurgen Habermas would call "communicative action"xxii -- but it is crucial not to forget or minimize that it has its own instrumentalness. Perhaps more proficuous is to realize that we are here, in terms of the work of Jean Piaget, in the sphere in which the instrumental or "operational" character which is inherent to knowledge necessarily mingles with its social character -- not in the sense of the "sociocentrism" of ideologies, but, on the contrary, in the sense of the "decentered" character of objective knowledge which implies the recognition of the autonomy and plurality of points of view.xxiii Moreover, from the standpoint of the political ramifications of the theme of rationality, it is important to observe here the tense way in which this aspect connects itself to the strategic character of political interactions: though the idea of a plurality of actors and points of view is a crucial element both in the case of knowledge-oriented interaction and of strategic interaction, in one case we have a purpose or "instrumentality" that realizes itself by means of communication between autonomous subjects, whereas the other case is distinguished by the prevalence of a purpose of self-affirmation and of reciprocal instrumentalization on the part of agents. In any case, by contrast with the quest for knowledge, other types of action, though requiring information-processing as a condition of effectiveness, as does any action, require also some degree of closure, decision, firmness or pre-commitment, which is tantamount to saying that the ends or goals of the action have to be established in a sufficiently clear and consistent way, or else there cannot be goal-seeking at all. That means that the processing of information in such cases has to refer not only to the immediate environment as such, but also to the acting subject herself, her goals or preferences and their consistency through time, the relatinships between longrun and short-run goals, the costs for the possibility of effectiveness in the pursuit of a certain goal that may ensue from delaying the corresponding
x xxii

See Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume One, Boston, Beacon Press, 1984.
x xxiii

See, for instance, Piaget, "La Pense Sociologique", op. cit.

21

action and keeping "open" and "decentered" in the interest of increasing relevant information, and so on. An important upshot of this line of reasoning concerns the relationships between intellectual openness and the idea of character or identity. On the one hand, the latter clearly implies a central element of closure and commitment,xxiv of faithfulness to certain guiding objectives that are somehow authentically one's own, which means above all that they have an affinity to features of one's personality that lay roots in one's deep past and memory and are as such largely given to or even (socially) imposed upon oneself. And it is crucial to remark that the presence of this element of commitment and closure not only does not in itself imply irrationality, but must rather be seen as a condition of rationality for certain important aspects.xxv But, on the other hand, for that to be true it is also necessary that an element of enlightened will and deliberation come to assert itself in the very process of being faithful to oneself; the issue of authenticity has itself to be decided in a reflective manner, and there must be the ability to learn about oneself (and occasionally the disposition to change oneself) if authentic self-affirmation is not to be made equivalent to the blind behavior of an authomaton, but rather to be seen
x xxiv

Cf. Nietzsche's aphorism in Beyond Good and Evil: "Once the decision has been made, close your ear even to the best argument: sign of a strong character. Thus an occasional will to stupidity." Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, New York, Vintage Books, 1966, p. 84.
x xxv

A case of great interest in this regard is that of actions of the Ulysses-and-the-sirens kind discussed extensively by Elster (Jon Elster, Ulysses and the Sirens, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1979, especially chapter 2). Elster deals with this kind of action in terms of "imperfect rationality", which is linked by him to Ulysses' predicament of "being weak and knowing it" and to the assumption that it implies not being fully rational (p. 36). Besides being inconsistent with Elster's own treatment of "perfect rationality" in connection with the idea of a "globally maximizing machine" and of the capacity to relate with the future and the possible (of which Ulysses' behavior is clearly an example), this posture by Elster leads to a conception of rationality (of "perfect rationality") that seems unacceptable to me. Thus, a divine agent that supposedly did not have to face some kind of weakness, say, an all-powerful god with designs to be fulfilled, would not be exposed to a problem of having to deal with scarcity of some sort or of having to struggle to be effective in acting -- that is to say, would not have a problem of rationality at all. In my view, Elster's position involves a confusion between the level of the "energetics" of action (the strength or weakness of its motivation) and the level of the "economy" of action (the aspect of effectiveness in the relationships between ends and means): rationality is concerned with the latter, though the motivational aspect is part of the data to be taken into account in evaluating the economy of action. In any case, an extremely weak agent who acted on perfect information concerning the conditions of action, including the general context or environment of action and the weakness of the agent herself, would be acting in a perfectly rational way if she processed the available information and other resources to achieve her ends.

22

as actually autonomous and rational action. In other words, there must be the possibility of choosing oneself, even though the existence of restrictions on this possibility is part of the idea of character or identity.xxvi To sum up, the issue of rationality is built upon the tension contained in the notion of informed action. Acting implies closure, commitment, clear and consistent (persistent) goals; getting and processing information implies openness, availability, detachment. And some problems of relevance to our general queries seem to turn around the dialectic between "self-centering" and "decentering" which is implicit in that notion -- and in the corresponding idea of autonomy. V - Democratic consolidation as "character planning" Let us begin with the observation that any agent whose point of view one may wish to adopt may be looked at either (a) in terms of a more or less short-sighted pursuit of interests such as defined by the situation treated as given, and so in terms of taking the preferences themselves of the agent as given; or (b) in terms that involve reflectiveness, self-questioning or questioning of one's identity, "decentering" with regard to the agent's (whether individual or collective) insertion in some encompassing social environment
x xxvi

A couple of other positions sustained by Elster deserve to be considered briefly in this context. I refer to his views (Jon Elster, Sour Grapes, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1985) on the relationships between preferences and beliefs (or the aspects I have been referring to in terms of volition/intentionality and cognition) in connection with rationality and autonomy. Elster speaks of "judgement" with regard to the rationality of beliefs, seen as a matter of appropriate information or evidence, and speaks of "autonomy" with regard to the rationality of preferences -- tentatively described, though Elster is little affirmative on the theme of autonomy, as a matter of deliberate choice, acquisition or modification of desires (pp. 15 ff., 21). Without intending to deny the complexity of the subject, on which Elster's discussion has rich insights to offer, I suggest that the most important aspects of the general problem of rationality have to do with the links between preferences and beliefs in behavior, or between intentionality and cognition -- and so between the elements that Elster's analysis tends to separate. To rephrase some statements of the text, I would say that rationality has to do both with the active ingredient of cognition and the cognitive ingredient of action -- and "active" and "action", given their intentional character, are inseparable from the element of volition and desire. It is quite clear, for instance, that the deliberate choice, acquisition or modification of desires or preferences involves a "reflective" and cognitive requirement, and it is thus impossible to speak of autonomy in the terms of the definition proposed by Elster himself (in which it is supposedly linked to preferences as opposed to beliefs) without taking information and beliefs -- judgement -- into account. On the other hand (though it may seem at first sight more disputable), a Piagetian perspective would certainly warrant the converse: there is no judgement -- no real knowledge -- without the capacity to act autonomously.

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(and so with regard to whatever the latter may ascribe to the agent), and so on. In the latter case, therefore, we are considering the possibility of preference formation or transformation, and ultimately of what has been dealt with in terms of "character-building" or "character-planning". As indicated above with regard to the dialectic between the identitydefining (and so largely "ascribed") and the cognitive (and decentered) requirements of autonomy, the task involved in dealing with characterplanning -- in correspondence with the idea that it takes a superior degree of rationality than routine goal-seeking or interest-seeking behavior -- is a quite complex one even if we stick to the case of an individual actor facing a "parametrically" defined environment. What is to be said of a case in which the definition itself of the character-planning actor is problematic -- and in which this very "actor" is constituted through the communicative and strategic interaction of a multiplicity of other actors that are not only individual but also collective, engaged themselves in a process of selfdefinition through communication and strategy? However appalling, this question seems to me to be inevitable in the context of our problems. For the objective of establishing and eventually consolidating democracy in a given country, insofar as it is actually an objective of at least some relevant political actors, involves at least a "dimension" which is "reflective" in nature and does correspond to the problem of character planning. There is no need to resort, in diametrical opposition to the principles of "methodological individualism", to the view of the country as such as a real soal-searching actor. But the efforts explicitly directed at organizational and institution-building aims are, after all, supposedly an important component of the process which takes place in the countries we are concerned with, or else our own thematization of the consolidation of democracy is entirely futile. And part of the job of such institution-building efforts is precisely the one of assuring that the at least potential focus of collective identity which corresponds to the country comes to operate to some degree as an effective focus of collective identity for decisive numbers of the people involved -- and that, consequently, supposedly collective objectives compatible with the continuous operation of democracy and corresponding to the encompassing level of the country as such may

24

become attainable. That much was actually achieved in some stable democratic countries of today. The task of solving the "constitutional problem" so defined is obviously exposed to the previously described dialectic of the institutional and to the corresponding paradoxes at the socio-psychological level -- in short, how to create or produce (in an inevitably artificial and deliberate way) a tradition (in which artificialism and deliberation will become unecessary, for whatever comes to be prescribed by the tradition will be rendered spontaneous); in other words, how to use reflectiveness to obtain spontaneity.xxvii In this aspect, the paradox is aggravated by the fact that this production of a tradition, to the extent that the constitutional undertaking involves a purpose of changing a previous state of affairs, will have to affirm itself against traditions already at work; it is thus not only a question of producing spontaneity, but of producing a new spontaneity against an old one. But this aspect articulates itself in an important way with another paradox having to do with the strategic dimension of the problem. For if we assume (as I think we must) that the problematic situation in which the constitutional design emerges and which is prone to authoritarian "solutions" is itself an expression of power relations in society, then the effective establishment of a democratic constitution involves some sort of change also in the structure of power. Of course, it is possible and important to link the two features of the situation thus described, which would lead us to the theme of the ideological aspect of power relations and to look at prevailing traditions in this light.xxviii In any case, the paradoxical character of
x xxvii

See Karl Popper, "Towards a Rational Theory of Tradition", in Conjectures and Refutations, New York, Harper & and Row, 1965. See also Elster, Ulysses and the Sirens, op. cit., pp. 150 ff.
x xxviii

It is interesting to consider some of these paradoxes also from the point of view of the doctrinary requirements of the democratic ideal, which, of course, are not irrelevant from the point of view of the problems of achieving and consolidating democracy. So, one important trait of democracy is to assure the autonomy of -- ultimately -- individual citizens. But, if we are to have democracy, autonomy should definitely not be understood here as the mere "spontaneous affirmation of self", but rather as incorporating a crucial element of self-control. (In this sense, democracy obviously involves the organization of political interaction and the creation of certainty with regard to the operation of restraints on its strategic ingredient -- a definition which, of course, is quite compatible with Przeworski's emphasis ["Ama a Incerteza e Sers Democrtico", Novos Estudos Cebrap, 9, July 1984, 36-46] on the uncertainty element of democracy, since it incorporates the continuous, albeit restrained and "democratic", operation of strategy itself.) Now, autonomy as self-control includes the requisite of being able to "decenter" and detach oneself from the spontaneous and naive immersion in society (from "ascription"), whereas the institutionalization of democracy involves the effective operation of social norms that curtail autonomy as self-affirmation, which implies that

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the whole problem might be described by resorting to Buchanan and Tullock's distinction between the "constitutional" level of basic rules of the game and the "operational" level of day-to-day socio-political interactionxxix : the drama consists in that the constitutional problem itself cannot be solved but through the vicissitudes of "operational" politics where a "constitution", in a sociologically dense (though perhaps juridically unacceptable) sense of the word, is always already in force. Of course, the overall dilemma contained in the situation faced by the supposedly "transitional" countries clearly involves many traits of the general dilemma of collective action. However, there are also specificities in this situation which make it differ significantly from the abstract definition of the dilemma in such works as Olson's classic. Such specificities have to do precisely with the foci of reflectiveness, so to speak, which are present in it -or with the actors that can actually be seen as at least in part sensitive to the character-planning and institution-building objectives. After all, in contrast to the Olsonian state-of-nature paradigm, in the case of the countries in question there already exist states which are at least formally committed to the constitutional task, and which are effectively so committed as far as some of the people involved in the complex state apparatuses are concerned. And sometimes there are even such actors as constituent assemblies. Hence, the idea that the constitutional problem must itself be solved at the operational level, important as I think it is, should be understood, in accordance with something suggested above, as pointing to institution- or constitution-building actions as being themselves "micro" (so, as proper objects to be dealt with by rational choice even on a strict definition) and as having necessarily to deal with other micro-behaviors and decisions which are always in process. It should not, however, be taken to mean that such actions are just irrelevant -or that the institutional equipment which makes up the dreams of those committed to democracy in our countries should necessarily be thought of as having to emerge as a mere "by-product". In other words, there is no reason to suppose that the difficult character-planning and preferences-transforming job that these countries have to face, with its stringent demands in connection
somehow they become "spontaneous" parts of "selves" to be affirmed...
x xxix

James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy, Ann Arbor, Mich., The University of Michigan Press, 1967.

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with the concern with effectiveness and hence with a higher-order rationality capable of permitting awareness, on the part of at least some actors, of the complex strategic dimension itself of the problem, would best be served by resorting only to short-sighted strategic rationality, however crucially important the proper consideration of the interests served by the latter may be. Nonetheless, much of what would seem characteristic of rational choice approaches to the problem looks rather like a sort of mechanic transposition of the abstract dilemma of collective action and of the "by-product" solution given to it by Olson. To be sure, the state and certain interest groups of major importance, such as workers and capitalists, are supposed to exist and to be capable of concerted action. But the problem tends to be defined exclusively in terms of the standard by-product trick of how to achieve coordinated (institutional or constitutional) results at the encompassing collective level through the mere play of the particularistic and short-sighted interests of such actors. In a way, the question might be said to be the one of how to build institutions without really trying -- or, if I am allowed a somewhat abusive recourse to some usual "hand" metaphors, how to use the invisible hand in order to obtain the ostensive hand of effective democratic institutions to replace permanently the iron hand of authoritarianism (with its propensity to act sometimes rather like a malicious hiding hand)... Let me add at once that the adequate alternative to what there is of unsatisfactory in this approach to the problem does not seem to me to lie in either of two other conceivable ways of dealing with it. First, as I think will be quite clear below, the point of this objection to the mere "by-product" conception of democracy-building is not to oppose to it some idealized and wholly "dialogical" or communicative legislative effort guided by a superior rationality, or even to sustain that something akin to this has an important, though not exclusive, role to play in a successful process of consolidation of democracy. Actually, instead of anything that idyllic, I am quite pessimistic about the chances that the countries of Latin America which concern us here may achieve, in the foreseeable future, a condition that might be properly considered as consolidated democracy, whatever the way to get there. Second, I don't think there is much to be gained by looking at the problem in terms of a sort of "constitutional strategic interaction" (as opposed to "operational

27

strategic interaction"), where we would be dealing with the confrontation between explicit constitutional or all-embracing projects for or against democracy on the part of a plurality of actors of various natures. Even if we admit that constitutional projects thus understood make up a real feature of the situation (that is precisely what I claim with regard to the relevance of the element of reflectiveness and character-planning), a few facts make it hard to sustain the analytic effectiveness of modelling it as something like a "supergame" of strategy. On the one hand, if the problem is thought of as properly a confrontation between democratic and anti-democratic or authoritarian forces, I fear that the attempt to deal "strategically" with it leads to perhaps inevitably trivial propositions the usefulness of which seems highly doubtful.xxx But there is also a clear lack of realism in the supergame model thought of in these terms. For most people simply are not aware of being part of any such game. And even those interests that people may be aware of (in different degrees according to country and social sector) and which may be supposed to have consequences for what is actually at stake at the "constitutional" level in the sociologically "dense" sense pointed out above (say, those interests involved in relations between workers and capitalists) are far from being unequivocally linked with democracy versus authoritarianism -- or from being perceived as such. VI - Przeworski, self-enforcement and institutions I shall indicate shortly what seems to me to follow from all these nuances. But let me turn first to an attempt to illustrate some of the difficulties of the "standard" rational choice approach to the problem. I will
x xxx

This has been a point of dispute in some informal interchanges between Guillermo O'Donnell and myself in the course of our recent collaboration. I think my skeptical position in this regard gains support from the fact that the triviality mentioned in the text appears in an otherwise very interesting and rich paper by O'Donnell when he tries to characterize in general terms the strategic problem faced by the several actors in the post-authoritarian political process: democratic actors must "neutralize unconditionally authoritarian actors, either isolating them politically (...) or (chiefly in the case of the armed forces) promoting attitudes and dispositions less incompatible with democracy", and so on. See Guillermo O'Donnell,"Os Atores do Pacto Democratizante: Reflexes sobre a Transio Brasileira", in Jos Augusto G. Albuquerque and Eunice R. Durham (eds.), A Transio Poltica: Necessidade e Limites da Negociao, So Paulo, Universidade de So Paulo, 1987, pp. 418 ff. and especially p. 421; this is a preliminary version of Guillermo O'Donnell, "Transies, Continuidades e Alguns Paradoxos", to appear in Fbio W. Reis and Guillermo O'Donnell (eds.), A Democracia no Brasil: Dilemas e Perspectivas, So Paulo, Editora Vrtice, in print.

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take a couple of texts by Adam Przeworski, who distinguishes himself for his involvement and competence in both our methodological and substantive concerns.xxxi Let us consider Przeworski's technical formulation of the problem of social pacts. A central notion is the one of self-enforcing solutions to strategic situations, which correspond to states of affairs "from which no one wants to depart when taking into consideration the eventual retaliation by others". These solutions are self-enforcing because "as long as the conditions remain the same no one would want to or dare to do anything else": so, they are based, so to speak, on strictly "particularistic" definitions of interests. Przeworski's discussion supposes three actors (workers, firms and the state), and the states of affairs corresponding to self-enforcing solutions are seen as being either open conflict (where workers revolutionize, firms disinvest and the state represses) or compromise (where workers offer wage restraint, firms invest and the state provides supportive economic policy). Self-enforcing solutions "may or may not be efficient in the Pareto sense but there is nothing in principle that would guarantee that they would be efficient". In contrast to the self-enforcing solution, Przeworski introduces the notion of a bargain, which is "by definition efficient but not self-enforcing: each of the actors could be better off pushing its interests further". Thus, in the case of bargains there is clearly a tension between what I have just called "particularistic" interests, on the one hand, and, on the other, the "universalistic" interest to be secured through the bargain. Bargains, therefore, "require enforcement mechanisms to hold" -- that is to say, they require an institutional apparatus, ultimately the state. From all that Przeworski extracts three things. First, an interpretation of conditions necessary for the consolidation of democracy, which are either (a) a self-enforcing compromise through the independent interaction of social forces or (b) the establishment of a bargain (a "'pact' in the literal sense of the word") with the knowledge that it would be enforced by the state. Second, a diagnosis of the Latin American problematic, where: (1) economic conditions
x xxxi

Adam Przeworski, "Micro-foundations of Pacts in Latin America", op. cit.; and Adam Przeworski, "Capitalismo, Democracia, Pactos", in Albuquerque and Durham (eds.), A Transio Poltica, op. cit. Of course, many other works by Przeworski are also relevant.

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make a self-enforcing compromise unfeasible; and (2) a bargain is unfeasible because political institutions are incapable of providing the necessary enforcement. Third, a formulation of the available alternatives: (1) selfenforcing open conflict, (2) a tug-of-war situation, or (3) a self-enforcing institutional solution, or "institutional compromise". Of course, only the last alternative would be a real solution to the problematic situation.xxxii Now, note that the possibility of a self-enforcing compromise is excluded with regard to current economic interests, whereas it is affirmed to exist with regard to the setting up of institutions -- whose lack or weakness makes a bargain unfeasible. Thus, according to Przeworski, a compromise guided by self-interested considerations is impossible at the ("operational") level of economic interactions, but feasible at the ("constitutional") level of institution-making (where the compromise is supposed to provide a framework for, most importantly, just such economic interactions). Przeworski is explicit and quite emphatic in affirming that "the 'pacto fundacional', the 'constitution' in the generic sense of the term, must be a selfenforcing solution".xxxiii Since a self-enforcing operational compromise is not viable and since we don't have the institutions to enforce a bargain, so let us create, by means of a self-enforcing constitutional compromise, those institutions needed to enforce bargains. I think this is clearly paradoxical. It amounts, in my view, to supposing that, in the problematic situation described, people are capable of acting collectively (converging toward a compromise), on the basis of a rational consideration of particularistic interests, with regard to precisely those aspects of the situation where the chain of ends and means to be dealt with is more complex and so the volume of information to be processed is greater -- in other words, where a greater degree of rationality is needed. There is, I think, only one alternative way to interpret the proposal: the idea that, precisely because the issues are supposedly more complex and "clouded" at the constitutional level, people in a difficult and problematic situation might be led to agree because they don't see clearly the consequences of their decisions.
x xxxii

x xxxiii

Przeworski, "Micro-foundations", pp. 6, 7 and 8. Ibid., p. 8.

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But this, of course, is in turn squarely inconsistent with the assumption of rationality which is supposed to guide the rational choice approach. Besides, there is an important element of circularity in Przeworski's propositions. For the definition of a self-enforcing solution refers to certain conditions, whose existence results in that no one has an incentive to adopt a different strategy than the one corresponding to that particular solution. Now, we are told to look for a self-enforcing institutional solution for the problem of democracy. But the conditions needed to make the democratic institutional compromise a self-enforcing one include themselves certain appropriate institutional arrangements.xxxiv If the very definition of the fundamental problem involves such a circularity, it is no wonder that, in spite of the obvious richness and importance of Przeworski's analysis in many works, with regard to aspects that would seem more specific one is often left with the impression, in reading him, that the decisive questions are being begged.xxxv In general, it seems to me that the major contribution of analyses like the ones undertaken by Przeworski in these and several other recent works lies
x xxxiv

See Prezeworski, "Capitalismo, Democracia, Pactos", op. cit. p. 461. After introducing a set of categories quite parallel to the ones occurring in the paper on "Micro-foundations" and reproduced above, Przeworski states his "central thesis": "The coexistence between capitalism and democracy in the advanced capitalist countries is not based upon pacts resulting from joint choices of strategy and made compelling because someone else enforces them, but is based rather on solutions deriving from autonomous choices of strategy and which are self-enforcing under the prevailing institutional arrangements. The economic, electoral and institutional conditions prevailing in these countries generate a spontaneous compromise which favors the coexistence between capitalism and democracy."(My italics.)
x xxxv

A few examples. With regard to the conditions of class compromise, we are told that "political conditions play an important role in creating confidence in the future on the part of workers and capitalists, and under democracy the workers can use those conditions in their own favor" (ibid., p. 471); but how to create political conditions that create confidence? With regard to the specific type of class compromise corresponding to corporatist concertation, which supposedly can be instrumental for democratic stability, we are reminded of the literature which shows that parties favorable to the workers must be in power for long and uninterrupted periods of time so that unions come to be willing to enter the corporatist bargain (ibid., pp. 472-3); but how do you get to a situation where a workers' party can not only achieve power but also remain there and act as an effective power-holder without arising fear and reactions from conservative forces? With regard to the transactions between capitalists and wage-earners, we are told that neither category will be willing to sacrifice present consumption if the strength of institutions is not enough to prevent the other side from using circumstancial advantages to get hold of a larger share of the benefits whose existence is made possible by that sacrifice (ibid., p. 475); but how do you build strong institutions?

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in the precision and clarification they bring to the discussion of issues relating to the working of the articulation between democracy and capitalism under mature or stable conditions, that is, in the case of advanced capitalist countries. Another way of phrasing this might be to say that they help clarify the problems concerning the working of "social pacts" (that is, those pacts having to do with socio-economic policy and involving such central actors as the state, organised workers and organised capitalists) under conditions in which the "constitutional pact" has somehow been settled. But the problem posed in connection with the effective introduction and eventual consolidation of democracy is the constitutional problem itself, or the problem of effectively instituting the constitutional pact. The unavoidable questions in this regard are: How do you get there? What would someone have to do so as to make the constitutional pact viable, or to create conditions that may allow the political process eventually to be channelled through actually operative democratic institutions? For such questions, I would say, the recommendation of looking for self-enforcing institutional pacts is not enough. Of course, a preliminary aspect of the problem thus posed is the previously discussed one of who, after all, would this "someone" be. Quite clearly, this turns out to involve the question of the "reflective" dimension of a constitutional project, and correspondingly the question of the actors capable of reflectiveness in the "transitional" situation. Admittedly, the concrete definition of such actors, or their actual emergence as such in the sociopolitical process, is something quite problematic -- and this is a decisive part of the problematic character of the general situation. But note that the same problem is also present in the type of analysis exemplified by Przeworski's works, which do not stress the problem of the "reflective" dimension of the actual social definition and behavior of the collective actors involved in "social pacts" -- not to speak of who is going properly to institute or "sponsor" any pact, which leads again to the institutional requirements of even "selfenforcing" pacts. But there is another particular -- and singularly important -- aspect to the problem of collective actors when considered from the standpoint of the constitutional problem. I have in mind the role played by the military corporation as a very special actor in the "transitional" situation, by contrast

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with their irrelevance in the case of the democratic countries of advanced capitalism. Indeed, the centrality of the role of the military in "transitional" countries might be seen as nearly equivalent to the very definition of the constitutional problem. For it is the lack or weakness of democratic institutions which, by making of the political arena the stage in which every social "force" pushes its own interests with the aid of whatever tools it may have at hand, leads to the predominance of the military given the peculiarity of the tools controlled by them -- the instruments of physical coercion. This, of course, is the classical definition of "praetorianism" proposed by Huntington and others.xxxvi And I think this notion is quite appropriately introduced here, for it seems to me to grasp a crucial trait of the dilemma faced by "transitional" countries which connects itself directly to Przeworski's propositions. Indeed, it reminds us that there is no reason to assume that a process of transition is actually taking place. This is so precisely because of the dilemma of pulling oneself by one's hairs involved in having to build institutions in a condition in which the spontaneous play of interests (or the operation of self-enforcing mechanisms) tends to result rather in a sort of lasting marshy situation, where tug-of-war is not one specific outcome: it is rather an enduring trait of the situation which helps to define it and which includes at its extremes the threat or actuality of open conflicts and the overt authoritarian control of political life by the military. Furthermore, however one may wish to analyse the political performance of the military from the standpoint of the class structure of the countries in question, they tend to be the single collective actor (perhaps together with the Church) best to justifify, in general, the presumption of having the organizational capacity to act "reflectively" (and effectively) in search of goals defined in connection with a comprehensive diagnosis, however biased, of the situation and of their specific role in it. If one considers the prospects of actual transition to a consolidated democracy from the point of view of the military corporation seen as such a decisive actor, what does the presumption of the need for a self-enforcing institutional compromise leads to? How would it contemplate the interests of this particular actor? VII - Contractarian democracy and the dual autonomy of political
Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1968, chapter 4.
xxxvi

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institutions There is a doctrinary point in Przeworski statements in the paper on "Micro-foundations" which provides a suitable way to shift to the presentation of my own perspective on such problems. The point is rather puzzling, for it reveals a radical and utopian element which does not blend well with the patent realism of Przeworski's analysis of related problems in other texts. I am referring to the definition of democracy provided by him: "the quintessence of democracy is that there is no one to enforce it",xxxvii to which he links the idea that an institutional or constitutional pact cannot be a bargain and must be a self-enforcing solution. This definition of democracy is indeed wholly consistent with the view of the democratic compromise as self-enforcing: in a "real" constitutional (democratic) pact, anyone whose interest is not contemplated should be able to veto it. But note how this view of a real democracy is rather a view of the "ideal" democracy, how it fits the contractarian model of an original (out of the state of nature) and unanimous pact among agents supposed to be rational. Whatever the importance of analytically resorting to some such radical conception of democracy for theoretical purposes, emphasizing it does not seem helpful for the purpose of analysing the possible transition to a realistically achievable democracy (a "poliarchy") within severely limiting constraints. Now, Przeworski himself has been championing, in the company of writers like Claus Offe and Volker Ronge, a quite "realistic" conception of the nature of the democratic compromise in the case of capitalist countries, where democracy appears as a form of political organization which is inevitably biased in favor of capital, given the structural dependence of state and society on capital that is characteristic of capitalism as such.xxxviii One crucial consequence or aspect of such a compromise is that social conflicts are mitigated, so that, most importantly, workers accept private property and control by the capitalists over investment decisions, whereas capitalits accept democracy and the ensuing social policies favorable to the workers on the part
x xxxvii x xxxviii

Przeworski, "Micro-foundations", p. 8.

Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1985; Claus Offe and Volker Ronge, "Theses on the Theory of the State", New German Critique, 6, 1975, 137-48.

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of the state. The democratic pact, therefore, involves in an important way the creation of an element of certainty to compensate for the uncertainties inherent in day-to-day socio-political interaction. But in the text under examination Przeworski goes on rather to associate with the above radical view of the "pacto fundacional" a few propositions stressing just the uncertain and conflictful features of democracy, to which he opposes the search for "el consenso democrtico", denounced as betraying "a non-democratic intellectual legacy".xxxix The outlook I propose as more adequate would certainly involve supporting the realistic Przeworski against the utopian or radical one. From this point of view, it is possible to agree with Przeworski's denunciation of a "non-democratic intellectual legacy"; but, instead of being just a manifestation of intellectual bias, this legacy is rather perceived as referring to an "objective" aspect of the problem to be faced. A useful way to state this problem in its doctrinary aspect is to resort to some of the many shades and confusions associated with the idea of the autonomy of the state or, more broadly, of political institutions.xl The above "utopian" side of Przeworski's thought is clearly leaned toward the position that the state should not be autonomous, for state autonomy can be seen as opposed to "popular sovereignty".xli But it is undeniable that part of the defining characteristics of democracy express rather the idea that the state must be autonomous, so that it cannot be made into the mere instrument of this or that socio-economic interest -- or at least so that, even if it is by and large an instrument of certain social categories, it is not too sensitive, in fulfilling this role, to the vicissitudes of the day-to-day play of interests (this is what Huntington calls "the autonomy of the political system" and sees as the crucial result of a successful process of political institutionalization) and can thus assure the orderly processing of some degree of uncertainty.xlii
x xxxix

x xl

Przeworski, "Micro-foundations", p. 8.

For a discussion of such confusions, see Fbio W. Reis, "Strategy, Institutions and the Autonomy of the Political", Kellogg Institute, Working Paper # 3, December 1983.
x xli

The problem is elaborated in these terms in another recent article by Adam Przeworski and Michael Wallerstein: "Popular Sovereignty, State Autonomy, and Private Property", Archives Europennes de Sociologie, XXIII, 2, 1986, 215-259.
xlii

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Obviously, there are different conceptions of the state at play here (the state as either itself a focus or agent of tyranny, or an instrument of some "societal" agents to exert power over others, or an instrument of all), which are connected to different conceptions of the polity or of society as such (for instance, society as a homogeneous "public" versus society as a structure of private power relations, chiefly class relations). And the central challenge concerning democracy has to do with the interconnections of the questions posed by such different conceptions. In any case, one question which is certainly decisive for our problems refers to the relationships between the idea of autonomy of the state or of political institutions, on the one hand, and the distinction between the "operational" and the "constitutional" levels of political life, on the other. Huntington's notion of the "autonomy of the political arena" and Przeworski's democratic "uncertainty" both refer to a requirement of autonomy with regard to the play of interests at the operational level. But what is to be said of autonomy with regard to the constitutional level? Clearly, the answer is that there should be no such autonomy if the democratic compromise is to become possible under capitalism -- and it is obvious that this prescription of non-autonomy is quite different from the one attributed above to the "utopian" Przeworski, for here I have in mind an egalitarian structure of societal power relations and not a homogenous public thought of as sovereign. The problematic and unstable character of the situation faced by our "transitional" countries can be described as having ultimately to do precisely with the risks that it contains (or is perceived by relevant political forces as containing) that there might be successful attempts at organizing the state in an autonomous way with regard to the social structure of power relations, that is to say, in a way that might turn out to be hostile to the prevailing structure, or in which the state might be used against it. This, of course, is precisely what is involved in the recognition of the structural dependence of state and society upon capital and its relationship to the democratic compromise. In other words, it is certainly correct to say that a
See, for instance, Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, op. cit., pp. 20-21. The obvious point of contact between this idea and Przeworski's emphasis on uncertainty as an element of democracy makes it quite clear that Przeworski himself proposes, either explicitly or implicitly, more than one way of dealing with the question of autonomy of the state.

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major component of the constitutional problem is the problem of how to neutralize the risk of revolution. Of course, one might also correctly say that the constitutional problem is described just as well as being the problem of how to make the revolution and organize the post-revolutionary society -- and this shift of points of view is a welcome reminder that the problem of democracy can also be discussed, of course, under conditions other than capitalism. But there seems to be no doubt that the current concern with the problem of consolidating democracy in the countries of Latin America now emerging from authoritarian regimes is definitely conditioned by the acknowledgement that the range of options actually open for an eventual "solution" to the basic problem of strategic interaction thus pointed out does not include the suppression of capitalism, and proper discussion of that problem thus requires looking at things with a special sensitivity toward the severe constraints of the prevailing situation -- or, if I dare say so, from a rather conservative point of view. In other words, we shall either have capitalism with democracy or capitalism without democracy -- and the "solution" to the problem of democracy seems to require above all that the problems of capitalism be solved, and that the latter be made to flourish and mature.xliii VIII - What to do and incrementalism My own view of our substantive problems of democratic consolidation, as well as the methodological recommendations that seem to me to converge with this view as regards the issue of rational choice, can now be stated. The fundamental orientation is provided by the idea that we face a task of institutional construction which can only have some hope of succeeding if it shows the sensitivity just mentioned -- which means that the question of what can actually be done under the adverse conditions is absolutely central and has to be kept before our eyes. Looked at from the standpoint of the classical discussion on the "social conditions of democracy", this orientation leads to a couple of crucial ideas which might perhaps be stated as follows. First, there is
x xliii

Actually, stable democratic compromises are clearly rather exceptional, and there certainly is room for a theoretical presumption that, if you have capitalism, you will probably have political authoritarianism, whatever is the case for non-capitalist systems. This presumption, which has obvious and important antecedents in the social science literature, is of course wholly compatible with the theory of the structural dependence of state and society on capital under capitalism.

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no reason to suppose that the perspective of "the social conditions of political democracy" points to a better way to answer the question of what is to be done than the alternative perspective of "the political conditions of social democracy" -- or the political conditions of political democracy itself. For what is needed is in any case political action, and the alternative of revolutionary political action is blocked. Second, this orientation implies the recognition that, if there are conditions to be attended to in the process of building authentic democracies in our countries, they are first and foremost those conditions which actually characterize our countries -- socially and politically. This brings about, I think, the acknowledgement that the task of democratic institutional construction would have to be guided by an incrementalist perspective marked by the concern to act on those aspects of the general context that seem liable to effective manipulation at the level of our "institutional as object" without precipitating authoritarian reactions from conservative forces and with some prospects of gradually helping to change the present context in a direction favorable to democracy. Of course, there is no reason for the logic of this realist and incrementalist perspective to stop at the recognition of the need to live with capitalism if we are to have democracy. Having in mind particularly the case of Brazil, I shall take a few points which illustrate the ramification of this logic into the area of related themes I have been discussing in some recent works. 1. From a constitution to a better one The overall feeling which distinguishes the outlook proposed here, with its combination of the reference to the need for action aimed at innovative institution-building and intense awareness of the resilience of the context to be transformed, can perhaps best be seen in the evaluation to be made, in my view, of what to expect of an "actor" like the Brazilian constituent assembly itself. From a certain standpoint, it can quite obviously be taken as a privileged focus of "reflectiveness" and of deliberate and intentional efforts at institution-building in the current Brazilian situation. From another point of view, however, the fact that the Brazilians are now involved with a constituent assembly can be seen as itself a symptom of fundamental

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embarassments rather than as a reason for great hopes that the corresponding problems will actually be solved. In other words: Brazil is clearly not living the "foundational moment" that the end of twenty one years of political authoritarianism led some people to assume and that the summoning of a constituent assembly is supposed to have crownned. From the point of view of the social structure of power relations, the conditions which led to the l964 crisis and its authoritarian outcome (conditions brought about by the penetration of capitalism and the processes of industrialization and urbanization, the increasing popular participation in the political process and the ensuing tensions) are very much the same. If anything, the "constitutional problem", seen as the latent confrontation resulting from such processes, was aggravated due to the operation of the authoritarian regime itself and its success in sponsoring the rapid transformation of Brazilian economic and occupational structure -- as a consequence of which the country now has, for instance, a significant unionist movement with claims to autonomy and more difficult to manipulate and control than was the case previously to 1964. The military corporation, in turn, came out of the authoritarian regime (the end of which, I am persuaded, was largely a concession from the military, determined above all by the threats to their internal cohesion produced by the protracted control over the life of the country) intact in its organizational structure, maintaining a diffuse penetration of the state machine and firm in its adherence to the ideas associated with the 1964 intervention. It is thus no wonder that the functioning of the constituent assembly came soon to be seen as itself a source of strain. In any case, there certainly are no good reasons in favor of the expectation that the constitution about to be finished come to "lay roots" and last: this is in all probability not a constitution for the next centuries, but, with luck, for the next couple of decades or so. Under such conditions, what would be the proper posture to adopt from the point of view of democratic consolidation? I think it would clearly be to demythicize the work of constitutional elaboration and try to give to it a deliberate instrumental and experimental character based on a realistic diagnosis of the situation. Instead of an ideal projection for the millenium, the aim would be to make of the new constitution a legal instrument capable of justifying the hope that the country will not have to start from the same point in the constituent assembly to be summoned twenty years from now. And the

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curious thing is that the relationships between such basic perspectives and the need or even the possibility of being bold and creative as a legislator are far from being what they might seem at first glance: if you are a deputy to a constituent assembly and have to keep your eyes on the millenium, you are very much in the situation of an end-of-the-world version of the Prisoners' Dilemma, and there is no alternative to sticking to the straight affirmation of the interests that you represent or of the ideals that you stand for. By contrast, the task of preparing a constitution for the next twenty years or so, which is in any case probably soon to be replaced by a new one, somehow "structures" the future and puts you in front of a more complex chain of ends and means -where you are not only allowed, but required to be more flexible so as to make of the result of your immediate efforts a possible instrument for longterm goals. The latter is certainly not the perspective of the deputies to the present Brazilian constituent assembly, in whose attitude there is by far the predominance of the "self-centered" and somewhat blind affirmation of interests and ideals over the cognitive "decentration" required and made possible by this stepwise orientation. However, this stepwise and more decentered perspective is no doubt possible in principle -- and people may learn. Actually, we Latin-Americans seem to have learned a good deal, under the recent authoritarian regimes, about the importance of political democracy. Perhaps the deputies to the next Brazilian constituent assembly, together with many of those whom they will be representing, will have a different perspective... 2. The military: rules for the real game? The problem of the political role of the military can be taken briefly as a second illustration of the general logic I am proposing, with the advantage that it permits also a direct and dramatic illustration of realistic and stepwise constitution-making. In Brazil, along the whole republican period since the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when we had several constitutions, the role of the military has been constitutionally defined as that of neutral and professional guardians of the laws of the country and its national sovereignty. Of course, this is patently a legal fiction without any correspondence to the

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fact of the crucial importance that the military have had throughout, and still have, as a political actor. Nonetheless, the present constituent assembly poses the problem largely in the same terms, and the debates which take place there on the issue of the military can be appropriately summed up as turning around the question of whether or not to forbid military coups. If it comes down to that, I am personally in favor that coups be explicitly forbidden in the most severe way (and I even admit that this may have some effect on the willingness of the military to coup)... But I also think that, since it is clearly not possible, under the present circumstances, really to break the autonomous political power of the military, the legal fiction of their political irrelevance should be abandoned and we should try to do something legally that might be expected to be of greater consequence. Now, beyond the factors of a "structural" nature that are probably linked to military interventions in Brazilian political life, there are also at play socio-psychological factors which are probably susceptible to being changed by means of institutional measures. Having that in mind, the problem of the military might be considered by reference to the following objectives: (1) to eliminate the present isolation of the military corporation with regard to society as a whole, promoting opportunities for the military to get together institutionally with the representatives of various foci of interests and opinions; (2) to help create a tradition of civic conviviality, maybe gradually neutralizing the paranoia or "insurgency complex" that has long characterized the political outlook of the military; and (3) hopefully to neutralize, at the end of such a "re-socialization" effort, the very disposition to act as an autonomous political power on the part of the military. Such a perspective amounts ultimately to looking for some form of mitigated institutional incorporation of the actual power of the military that might perhaps result in somehow making explicit the rules of the real game of which they are a part -- and doing that as much as possible in terms capable of claiming their consequent acquiescence. Of course, since the point is not to assure constitutional backing for permanent military tutelage, time limits and mechanisms for revision of such legal dispositions should be considered. In any case, I think this proposal adds up concretely to experimenting with some kind of corporate representation of the military within the executive and perhaps even the legislative branchs of government -- and at least a precarious

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support for the bet contained in it can be found in the experience of observing, during the 1964 regime, previous "hardliners" among military leaders act with moderation and equilibrium once they were nominated judges in the military courts.

3. Corporatism and the state Another point, which can be referred in some crucial aspects to the question of corporatism, is more far-reaching analytically than the previous one. It actually deals with the broad problem of state-building or -rebuilding in connection with democracy, and, if properly pursued (which it is impossible to do here), would lead us into some much needed revisions of many confusions which seem to me to creep over such themes as traditions of "stateness" or "statelessness", which tend to be directly linked to either authoritarian or democratic propensities. Questions such as the ones of state autonomy and of political institutions seen as a result either of self-enforcing pacts or of other sorts of arrangements are also of interest here. In any case, corporatism in Brazil has always been linked with a "statist" and hence authoritarian tradition and invariably denounced as something to be suppressed for the sake of democracy. Beside being seen as nothing but an expression of the authoritarian character of Brazilian political life since remote times, in its current features Brazilian corporatism is described as the direct consequence of the manipulative designs of Vargas' dictatorial Estado Novo. Certainly for that reason, even the current vogue of stressing the need for a "social pact" is not phrased in terms of corporatism (the phrase "corporatist concertation", for instance, does not appear in current Brazilian political lexicon). Now, some sort of social pact seems indeed necessary, in line with some of the main concerns elaborated on by Przeworski in his "Micro-foundations of Pacts in Latin America". Granted that, a few questions emerge rather naturally: What are the relations between, on the one hand, the search for social pacts in the interest of democratic consolidation in a country like Brazil and, on the other, the fact that the country has a tradition of presence or

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initiative on the part of the state and, more specifically, a corporatist tradition? Are these relations necessarily negative, even if we admit the connections between corporatism and political authoritarianism in the past? Or is there the possibility that corporatism itself, as well as the large Brazilian state, may somehow be made instrumental to the establishment of effective social pacts and eventually to democracy? My point, in accordance with the incrementalist perspective proposed above, is that we definitely have to explore the latter possibility. Indeed, the powerful Brazilian state is here to stay -- and probably to expand, as it did enormously even during the authoritarian 1964 regime, the rhetoric of economic liberalism of the latter notwithstanding. Moreover, as is characteristic of capitalism itself, and certainly more so of relatively immature forms of capitalism as we have in Brazil, this huge state is naturally prone to corporatist articulation with entrepreneurial interests in the informal "bureaucratic rings" of Cardoso's diagnosis, which is an obvious expression of its affinity with and ultimate dependence on capital and an additional factor of its conservative bias to be compensated for, if at all possible. Furthermore, under the general social conditions prevailing in Brazil, the prospects of autonomous organization of the "popular sectors" taking place in such a way as to make large segments of them capable of acting effectively in the promotion of their interests (an action which, even if successful at the mobilizational level, could not afford to ignore the state, given its very weight) are dim indeed. If, on top of all that, we consider the irony contained in the path followed by several of the most stable capitalist democracies, where the supposedly autonomous and pluralist initial mobilization of the workers ended up in the corporatist (or "neo-corporatist") structures of today -- how then can someone insist that the path to be taken in Brazil in securing weight to popular interests must go through something like the dismantling or curtailment of the state, or distancing popular interests from it, and through the difficult and unlikely efforts at autonomous popular organization?xliv
I think Philippe Schmitter's distinction between "state corporatism" and "societal corporatism" ("Still the Century of Corporatism?", in Fredrick B. Pike and Thomas Stritch, eds., The New Corporatism, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1974) is largely irrelevant to the substance of my argument. Actually, despite its importance in originating the vast recent literature on corporatism, I think Schmitter's article is inconsistent as far as that distinction is concerned, and that the latter turned out to add to the confusions prevailing with regard to corporatism. Thus,
xliv

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For my part, I suggest that the most proficuous way to deal with the issues that normally turn around the notion of corporatism is to adhere in a consequent manner to the definition of the latter as having to do, in general, with the articulation between state and society -- particularly functional interest groups in society. In itself, such an articulation does not have to be seen as implying either authoritarianism or democracy: it can just as well be conceived as leading either to control of interest groups by the state or to greater sensitivity of the state toward interest groups (and so to control of the former by the latter). A step forward is taken when we realize that whenever we have corporatism (or even, perhaps, in any society in which we do have both a state and interest groups) we will probably have a certain degree of both components of this two-way flow. The next step is the realization that there is another two-way flow, this time between "corporatism" thus understood and "democracy": if, on the one hand, the degree to which the state prevails over "society" (interest groups) or vice-versa depends on the extent to which democratic mechanisms are consecrated in the political system as a whole, on the other hand the articulation and communication between state and "society" is itself part of the definition of democracy. We are again, as seems clear, involved with the seemingly contradictory demands that the state both be autonomous and not be autonomous -- and nothing much seems to be added or taken away by the consideration of corporatism as such. However, if the context in which one has to act and try to build democracy includes to begin with as a paramount feature a state which is already huge, socio-economically active and greatly biased in its relationships
whereas the general definition of corporatism provided by Schmitter refers to a system of interest representation in which the state articulates itself with units which are "organized into a limited number of singular, compulsory, noncompetitive, hierarchically ordered and functionally differentiated categories" and "granted a deliberate representational monopoly" (pp. 93-2), the distinction between state and societal corporatism does not refer to the structural elements of this definition, but rather to (1) the origins of each type or the process through which it gets established (pp. 103 and 106, for instance) or (2) the more or less authoritarian characteristics of the political system as a whole in which each type is found "imbedded" or with which it is "associated" (p. 105) -- despite the fact that Schmitter himself denounces in the literature on corporatism the tendency to "submerge it into some wider political configuration such as 'the organic state' or 'the authoritarian regime'" (p. 91). Of course, this fusion between "corporatism" and "authoritarianism", which Schmitter criticizes but inadvertently shares, prejudges the answer to some important questions, like the ones I raise in the text.

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with interest groups (besides firmly entrenched and unsusceptible to being revolutionarily overthrown), the task of building democracy then inevitably goes through appropriately building corporatism, that is, seeking to articulate state to "society" in a richer and more complex way. And I propose that in Brazil we not only, in this sense, lack corporatism, but also are largely compelled to resort to the "shortcut" of trying to build both corporatism and democracy (something like the "corporate pluralism" that Dahls considers to be the seemingly inevitable future short of political authoritarianism)xlv with the materials available from the statist and authoritarian tradition and by resorting to the state itself. Among other things, the challenge is to assure adequate functional representation for workers' interests and try to formalize and make more transparent the whole process of corporatist representation. Since this text is already too long, I will not elaborate this any further.xlvi Instead, let me just register a couple of brief points. First, the idea of a corporatist structure where various important functional interests receive adequate representation fits nicely, to speak la Parsons, the need to deal with another unpleasant fact of Brazilian political life which has also been a constant theme of the political sociology of Brazil and which would certainly deserve to be taken by itself in this small exercise in political realism: our so called "amorphous" and catch-all parties, abhorred by those who are attached to the model of "ideological" politics. What I want to propose in this regard is simply that we might perhaps see in a more positive light the possible contribution of "non-ideological" catch-all parties to democracy (or democratic consolidation) in a country like Brazil if they operate side by side with a corporatist structure in which the specific interests of organized workers are represented.xlvii Provided that they have an overall popular orientation (and the general characteristics of the larger part of the Brazilian
x xlv x xlvi

Robert A. Dahl, Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1982, p. 80.

A more extended discussion can be found in Fbio W. Reis, "Consolidao Democrtica e Construo do Estado", in Reis and O'Donnell (eds.), A Democracia no Brasil, op. cit.
x xlvii

Of course, this proposition has important points of contact with Przeworski and Sprague's findings, with regard to Western Europe, on the trade-off between the class-based appeal of workers' parties and their electoral penetration and the relations of this trade-off with the strength of corporatist representation through unions. See Adam Przeworski and John Sprague, "Party Strategy, Class Organization, and Individual Voting", chapter 3 of Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy, op. cit.

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electorate are such as to require this for a party to be able to claim electoral hegemony or even viability -- just as they forbid rigid ideological postures if these objectives are to be achieved), the flexibility of parties of such a nature may even turn out to represent a welcome correction to the distorted effects at the level of functional representation of interests to be expected from the heterogeneity of the Brazilian "popular sectors" as regards mobilizational and organizational capacity.xlviii The second point refers to the contribution that a proper "corporatization" of state-society relations in Brazil might bring to the adoption of effective welfare policies (in substitution for the tragic caricature of the welfare state that the country now has). Of course, it is hard to imagine that the civil and political dimensions of democratic citizenship might lay roots in a country like Brazil if -- subverting the order described by T. H. Marshall in his classic essay on citizenship -- the social elements of citizenship are not introduced to a significant extent so as to neutralize the staggering deprivation of much of the population. And it is equally difficult to see how this might be achieved if not through the state... IX - Conclusion: democratic consolidation and rational choice So, at least as far as conditions approach those which seem to me to characterize the Brazilian case, my general outlook on the question of the consolidation of democracy is rather pessimistic. The hopes contained in it refer to a process of institution- or state-building and -rebuilding which is inevitably precarious: it necessarily unfolds over a long and uncertain period of time, for the passing of time is a necessary ingredient of the very process of institutionalization, with its dialectic of artificiality and "contextimpregnation"; the actors of different scales involved in it are not only multiple and strategically oriented and constituted, but also placed at different stages as regards the definition and maturing of collective and individual identities, as well as differently capable of dealing in an autonomous and cognitively sophisticated way with the tensions between both long-run and short-run and self-centered and decentered perspectives -- not to speak of the
x xlviii

These problems are discussed at greater length in Fbio W. Reis, "Partidos, Ideologia e Consolidao Democrtica", in Reis and O'Donnell (eds.), A Democracia no Brasil, op. cit.

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complex relationships between these elements which are supposed by the doctrinary requirements themselves of democracy; it supposes a process of convergent learning on the part of these multiple actors... Given such complexities, the presumption must be that, even if successful in the long run, the process of making and consolidating democracy will probably go through severe setbacks which are likely to include the reintroduction of authoritarian political regimes. As we approach the end of these notes provided with a diagnosis of this sort, the obvious question is how does it relate to rational choice and its prospects as an analytic instrument for dealing with democratic consolidation. A preliminary observation of interest regards the affinity with the rational choice perspective exhibited by the "strategic" concern with what to do. Despite its necessary sensivity toward the dialectic of the institutional (or rather, because of it), the outlook brought about by this concern is clearly opposed, at a certain level, to the excessive emphasis on "cultural" factors often found in discussions of democracy and the prospects of democratic consolidation. From this point of view, cultural elements are of relevance as long as they are part of the "givens" of the situation to be acted upon in the most effective way possible. This has a "consequentialist" effect on how to approach the study and eventual diagnosis of concrete historical situations which seems healthier than a certain moralist -- and paralysing -- ingredient frequently present in the contrast between abstract models of political life or of any of its multiple aspects. Another issue is that, of course, the eventual effectiveness of a supposed process of democratic consolidation is something which has to do with the behavior or action of the actors themselves involved in the process. The above diagnosis and prognosis involve an analytic posture or bet regarding the likely outcome of such action and imply propositions about both the situation and its perception by the actors which should be liable to some sort of verification other than just waiting for things to happen -- above all if, given the nature of the problem, the option of waiting for things to happen is not really, alas!, open to us. Of course, the question of evidence concerning processes is a quite complicated one for the social sciences as such, regardless of the specific approach favored. But is the rational choice approach entitled

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to any special claim in connection with the general problem, including its ramification with regard to evidence? I think the answer is in the negative. The very statement of the problem in all its complexity seems to me certainly to require abandoning the "standard" outlook of rational choice, in which there is a hidden or latent presumption to the effect that the analysts (the rational-choice oriented social scientists) "outsmart" the "rational" actor with whom they deal. The actor is caught in a situation involving a complex coordination problem (between different actors and everyone's actions in different moments) of which the analysts may perhaps have a sophisticated grasp; as to the actors themselves, however, the operative assumption is rather that they are condemned to being guided by a myopic consideration of interests -- and, even if they are granted an equally sophisticated grasp of the situation, the coordination problem is thought to make this of no avail to them. Whence the by-product or invisiblehand perspective. As we have seen, however apt a description this may be of an abstract original-contract situation (or of the situation of some real "latent" groups), the concrete historical situation faced by the "transitional" countries which concern us is different in important respects, for it includes as relevant aspects certain coordinating actors (who even have already, in some cases, the capacity to coerce, which, of course, is part of the problem) and foci of convergence and reflectiveness. Certainly the analytical rendering of the problem posed by the situation thus defined does not require abandoning the notion of rationality itself: on the contrary, the enhanced complexity of the situation includes actors and actions that are by definition sensitive to or oriented toward long-run and collectively encompassing objectives (and which are thus expressly faced with the need for increased rationality) side by side with short-sightedly "interested" ones. But there is a loop at this point which brings forth an additional complication. To wit, the effectiveness (or rationality) of the actions oriented toward the long-run goal of consolidating democracy is itself dependent upon our reflective actors' taking due account of many short-sighted (and even of some long-run oriented) other actions -- this, of course, is precisely what my incrementalist recommendation amounts to. Again, this new step in the description of our convoluted problem does not lead to the requirement of

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abandoning the idea of rationality for its analytical rendering, but rather to a still stronger commitment to rationality. But the question is: are we still within the confines of the rational choice approach when (instead of having to deal with irrationality, as is the claim of some usual criticisms to rational choice) we have to deal both with thorough rationality of a reflective and characterplanning nature and with a complex "sociological" context which sets the traditional and normative stage, so to speak, not only for this reflective effort, but also for the definition of the interests and objectives to be sought in the multiplicity of myopic "interested" actions? I don't think that rational choice alone can do the job implied in such a definition of the problem. But that does not deny, of course, that there probably is an important role to be played by it in clarifying problems at several levels. The usefulness of such works as the ones dealing with the operational level of social pacts and with their relevance to the constitutional level seems clear enough. And I think there should be a favorable presumption concerning the possibility of proficuous applications of the rational choice approach in a similar way to the more complex forms of strategic interaction -- and so perhaps also more complex forms of articulation between the operational and constitutional levels -- we have in our "transitional" situation as a consequence of aspects like the important role played by such actors as the military and the strategic complications involved in the sometimes incipient process of formation of other collective actors. One important aspect which seems in need of clarification is the one of the extent to which it may be necessary to go beyond the play between institutional pacts, on the one hand, and strictly "material" or "economic" interests, on the other. As previously suggested, I don't think that the option of viewing our problem in terms of a supergame played between alternative constitutional projects is a useful one, for it seems to lack realism and inevitably to lead to triviality. So, part of the problem seems to be how to define in a sufficiently complex way the "operational" interests which articulate themselves with the prospects that different constitutional arrangements may come to prevail and endure: for instance, besides "constitutional" preoccupations themselves and the desire for proper pay, are there any actual motivations on the part of the military that should be included in the attempt formally to grasp our complex strategic game? Would the suggestion presented above of an institutionally conducted

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"re-socialization" of the military point to aspects relevant to this question? In any case, the formal clarification of the constitutional problem such as it appears in the very perspective of a supposedly reflective or "constitutional" actor is, quite obviously, another aspect concerning which one should expect the rational choice approach to try its resources. This is related to the privilege granted above to the question of what to do, and it probably leads to a focus akin to the one usually associated with policy analysis, where the point of view of a "global" actor (the supposedly impartial and sympathetic state) is adopted in dealing with problems defined in terms of global maximization, even if they involve aspects of strategic interaction. Inherent in such a perspective there would be some sort of organic utilitarianism, by contrast to the contractarianism adopted by Przeworski with his radical definition of democracy. I think this is not only inevitable if we speak of building constitutional democracy in a historical context; it is probably also necessary so as to incorporate to our analyses the "consequentialism" of which I think my incrementalist recommendation is an example. I can't see how an analysis aimed at the diagnosis of a given situation and at orienting efforts toward its amelioration might not be consequentialist. Which is far from meaning that my crude guesses are all we need.