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Is Wiredu’s consensus democracy what Habermas’s discourse principle looks like in a council?

Kwame Asante Fellow
· 5 replies
Power & the stateAfrican & AfricanaContinentalCritical theoryIris Marion YoungJürgen Habermas#consensus-democracy#deliberation#discourse-ethics#non-party-polity
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This term I have been reading Wiredu's essays on consensus alongside Habermas with a few older students, and they keep asking a question I want to put to a wider group.

Wiredu argued that traditional Ashanti politics, at least at the level of councils of elders and chiefs, worked by consensus rather than majority rule, and he proposed a "non-party polity" for modern African states built on that principle: representatives chosen without parties, deliberating until agreement. His essays on this are collected in Cultural Universals and Particulars (1996).

Habermas's discourse principle says that the only valid norms are those that could meet with the agreement of everyone affected, as participants in rational discourse.

On the surface they look like cousins: both put agreement among all concerned at the centre of legitimacy.

But I see differences. Wiredu's consensus is practical: agreement on what to do, not necessarily on what is true. A minority can accept a decision without agreeing it was right, because its view was heard and weighed. Habermas's principle is an idealising test; he never expected actual parliaments to reach it, and in practice his democracy runs on majority votes informed by public discussion.

So: are these the same idea at different levels, or genuinely different ideas that happen to share a word? And which is more realistic?

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5 answers

  1. Johanna Reinhardt

    Fellow

    Different ideas, I think, at least as Habermas developed them. In Between Facts and Norms (1992) he is quite clear that real democratic institutions decide by majority and compromise. Discourse feeds the process through the public sphere, but it doesn't end disagreement; it legitimates the procedure by which disagreement is settled. Wiredu wants the deliberating body itself to reach agreement on action. That's much more demanding of actual people and much less demanding of their theoretical convictions. Habermas idealises the conditions; Wiredu idealises the outcome.

  2. Thandeka Mokoena

    Fellow

    Young's critique of deliberative democracy applies to both. In real deliberation, she argued, some people are excluded even when they are in the room, because the accepted style of speaking (calm, argumentative, dispassionate) favours some groups over others. A consensus process can be worse, not better: the pressure to agree falls hardest on those already least heard. Anyone who has sat in a long community meeting where everyone "agrees" at midnight will know what I mean.

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    1. Kwame Asante

      Fellow

      Thandeka, that is close to the main criticism Wiredu received. Emmanuel Eze, for example, asked whether traditional consensus was as consensual as Wiredu described, and whether dissenters were simply worn down. I think Wiredu would answer that the alternative, permanent minorities in a party system, is worse in societies divided by ethnicity. But I'm not sure that answers the worry about the room.

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  3. Dana Whitfield

    Fellow

    A community organizer's footnote: consensus processes are exhausting, and the people with time to sit through them are not a random sample. Retirees and people with flexible jobs win by endurance. Majority vote at least lets a nurse on night shift have the same say as someone who can stay till midnight. I love the ideal of reaching agreement, but I've learned to ask who's not in the meeting.

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  4. Akosua Mensah

    Fellow

    I farm near Kumasi, and in my village the council does talk until agreement, sometimes for days. My son sent me this thread. What the essays may miss is that a great deal of the agreement is made before the meeting, in quiet visits between families, and that the chief's spokesman, the okyeame, shapes how things are said so nobody is shamed. It is not Habermas's ideal speech. It is careful work so that people can live together afterwards. Dana is right that it takes time. We have more of it in the dry season.