Hazel Henderson, "Perfecting Democracy's Tools"

Questions for Making Connections Within the Reading:

1. In direct democracies like the ancient city-state of Athens and the cantons of the Swiss Confederation, ordinary people can vote directly on the laws that they themselves propose. In a representative system like ours in the United States, democracy is indirect: the people elect representatives and these representatives actually make the laws ordinary citizens must obey. What groups in America might be expected to oppose Henderson's call to make the American system more directly democratic?

2. According to Henderson, what role do "elites" play in American politics? Are they necessary and beneficial in some ways? What problems do they pose for a democracy like the one we have in the United States? Does Henderson foresee the disappearance of elites, or will the changes she proposes simply produce elites of a new kind?

3. Henderson puts great faith in communications technology. Why has this technology so far failed to produce a greater degree of public participation in American political life? Do we really need new technology to bring about the changes she envisions? Is a greater degree of citizen participation simply a matter of political will--of the citizens themselves deciding to make it happen? Or has the size and complexity of the United States made direct democracy impossible until now?

Questions for Writing:

1. In what ways are political problems actually technological problems? Why is it that we tend to separate politics from technology, economics, and culture? Does democracy become impossible in the absence of certain technological, economic, and cultural conditions? What changes in our economic system, or in our system of values, might endanger the survival of democracy?

2. Is it possible that the information society might actually undermine our democratic traditions? How might that happen? Is Henderson overly optimistic about the liberating potential of the new technologies? Who controls those technologies? Will the people in control of them be willing to redistribute their own authority, power, and wealth?

Questions for Making Connections Between Readings:

1. Henderson is a political theorist, that is, someone who formulates new paradigms for conceptualizing the life of our times; however, theoretical reflection and its real-world implementation are often quite distinct. In what ways does Henry Petroski's practical perspective in the selections drawn from To Engineer Is Human complicate Henderson's ideas about the role that technology might play in transforming democracy? Is structural failure a necessary part of the democratic process? Can the kind of participatory democracy Henderson envisions be realized if structural failure is inevitable?

2. Do ordinary citizens possess the know-how required to function in the kind of democracy Henderson is calling for? If technological advances require new ways of reading, writing, and thinking, as Mitchell Stephens argues in "Thinking 'Above the Stream,'" do these new literacies help serve to advance the cause of participatory democracy, or do these new literacies further exclude ordinary citizens from civic participation?

More Henderson assignments . . . .