Abstract

This paper is on the meaning of egalitarian relationships within democratic spaces. My central thesis is that an adequate conception of democracy for a plural and culturally diverse society like the United States, a conception that seeks to locate political power in its citizens equally, must provide conditions for all its citizens to be seen and heard by one another. ;I propose that we rethink the way we understand egalitarian relationships and suggest that the notion of human visibility is more critical for designing democratic institutions than are principles of organizing equal participation. I question the assumption that stable democratic relationships are established by either the development of civic virtues or by the regulation of citizen participation in public activities. ;By distinguishing between conditions of public order and conditions of public visibility, I argue that the problem of democratic stability is not simply a problem of organizing citizens in symmetrical relationships but is first and foremost a problem of public visibility and perception. Through the use of a metaphor of theatrical architecture, I suggest that, when designing democratic institutions, theorists need to pay more attention to how humans appear to one another before they concern themselves with how to regulate human appearances within those institutions. ;This paper is more of an exploratory work than analytical. My argument is to defend a certain way of looking at democratic arrangements; namely, as spatial, but spatial in a special way, with the spatial conditions of visibility and human perception. To show that this approach has some pedigree, I present and compare the conceptions of democratic relationships developed by John Rawls and Hannah Arendt, how they view the problems of stability and democratic participation and how they approach the issues of human visibility and public order. ;Through further use of the theatrical metaphor, I then explore what those conditions of visibility and perception might look like for democratic egalitarian spaces that are designed to be open, inclusive, and contain a diversity of people.