Re: Amartya Sen: democracy is not "Western"

[Doyle Saylor <doylesaylor@xxxxxxx>]

Greetings Economists,
It's highly useful to tear down the whole hoodoo about 'Western
Democracy'.   What the word refers to is 'talk' in the 'public'.

On the other hand is this really about individual rights?  Aren't those
rights ignorant of class distinctions present in the system?  When one
shrinks down to what individuals talk about we miss all the manifold
social structure?

Democracy is really a question about how talk between people or the
systemic structure of communications works.  Were we as the Liberal
Statists saw things to see 'Democracy' as say speaking French then we
lose a major sense of what 'language' is about.  That is groups of
people accumulate a system of experience with a self made set of tools
in some specific geographic location.  We miss the difficulty of going
from one language to another, that is the process of learning.  For
Democracy means conversation it does not include the special look at
the properties of conversation, it does not define the physicality of
conversation, it simply implies all the different voices accumulated
into a whole.

To see this wholly as individual rights prepares us to think every
contingency is defined as to what happens to an individual which
experience tells us is much more dependent upon how the group
experience comes about.
thanks,
Doyle

On Apr 1, 2006, at 8:01 PM, ravi wrote:

> A while ago I posted bits from Sen's "The Argumentative Indian" which
> address this idea that Democracy or Liberalism are Western notions.
> Joanna was kind enough to forward the quotes to LBO for me (I was
> motivated to compile the Sen quotes by the frequent +ve references on
> LBO to "Western" democracy/liberalism).