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because they peddle 'difficult' or 'subversive' subject matter. Through public
education and their considerable regulatory powers, national governments
(and many sub-national state bodies) have the ability to alter the diet of
information, knowledge and experience that ordinary people are offered. To
take a telling example, this is why many civil society groups have pressed
their national governments very hard for permissive 'freedom of informa-
tion' legislation. It's also why some insist that the arts and libraries should
be publicly funded because leaving them to the market, it's argued, will
necessarily limit the number and range of people who can benefit from
exposure to them.
EPISTEMIC DEPENDENCE AND SEMIOTIC DEMOCRACY
The three options just discussed are all crucial ones for societies that claim -
or aim - to be democratic in character. The word 'democracy', in sim-
ple terms, means government by and for the people: that is, 'rule by the
populace over itself
...
' (Howard, 2011: 8). More formally, it's a mode of
government in which 'the exercise of power passes through institutionalized
mediums of public deliberation, giving publicly agreed norms a practical
efficacy over the actions of
...
[citizens]' (Barnett, 2004: 185-8). Discus-
sion, deliberation and disagreement lead to decisions and actions that are
accepted by all - though often unhappily - because they arise from a broadly
inclusive and consensual political process. We often think of democracy as
one of several possible political systems and, as with other political systems,
equate it with such things as referenda, parliaments, election campaigns
and equal voting rights among citizens. However, while it's true that any
democratic polity (should) permit(s) all capable adult members the right
to nominate - and remove - their political representatives, democracy is
(or ought to be) much
more
than a set of formal political arrangements. As
many political theorists have pointed out, this is true in three senses.
First, for citizens to hold their nominated political leaders properly to
account, they need to have had the education, training and experience nec-
essary to create confident and critical individuals (see the first option in
the previous section). This education, training and experience is achieved
almost entirely
outside
the formal political system in the domains of school,
university, the news and educational sections of the media, churches, the
family, civil society groups and so on. These domains include and sustain,
but also go beyond, what's usually called the
public sphere
.Thisisthe
virtual arena in which citizens discuss matters of common concern (see
Box 3.4)
. Second, citizens need to have the time to think and act politi-
cally. In her classic book
The human condition
, philosopher Hannah Arendt
(1958) worried that modern democracies were increasingly unable to release
people from the duties of home and the workplace. Relatedly, the journalist-
author John Kampfner (2008) suggests that modern Westerners have traded
