Abstract

How can democracy persist among people who have little in common with one another? This longstanding question in democratic theory has increased relevance for recent debates over the preconditions for political unity in diverse societies. Liberals, for example, argue that a shared set of procedures and principles is sufficient to hold together diverse individuals. Critics of liberalism, by contrast, contend that citizens must further share a patriotic attachment to the community in order to feel the solidarity and mutual concern necessary to democracy. I argue that both kinds of argument overemphasize what citizens must share, and occlude consideration of how the sharing necessary to democracy takes place. I develop an account of the activity of sharing by turning to the theories of communication and expression in the works of Hannah Arendt and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and by analyzing conflicts over the Charlottetown Accord in Canada and the publication of The Satanic Verses in Britain. ;At the level of political theory, I advocate a methodological shift from this object-orientation to what we share, toward an activity-orientation to how we share. I argue that what we share is often indeterminate, and is therefore the subject of disagreement rather than concord. Furthermore, we do not need to share any common object: sharing is best understood as a dialogical activity that derives its coherence from the participation of diverse interlocutors. I explore the consequences of the indeterminate and dialogical character of sharing for group identity, collective agency, and mutual respect in the context of feminist and multicultural theory. Yet at the level of political action, a seamless re-orientation to activity is neither possible nor desirable. Both object- and activity-orientations enable certain kinds of first-person experiences that are invaluable for democratic politics. Sharing democracy in conditions of diversity, I conclude, depends not on what we share, but on whether as political agents we can successfully negotiate and sustain a tension between the two orientations to politics that diverse democracy requires: the object-orientation that enables the assertion of commonality and the search for agreement, and the activity-orientation that enables awareness of otherness and celebration of ongoing contestation