1. The Roberta Kevelson Seminar on Law & Semiotics
Legal Semiotics and Legal Practice
March 1, 2012
Pennsylvania State University
Dickinson School of Law
Carlisle, PA
• Legal Semiotics and Political Practice and the
Semiotics of a One-Party System: Free Will in Single
and Multi-Party Democracies
» Larry Catá Backer W. Richard and Mary Eshelman Faculty
Scholar & Professor of Law, Professor of International Affairs
2012-13 Chair University Faculty Senate Pennsylvania State
University

2. The Question
• It is common in the West to criticize single party states for
political false consciousness
• Single Party states are said to betray the democratic ideal in
fact even as they purport to embrace it in form
• So in its essence, the question of the legitimacy of
democracy is grounded in the possibility of a political
consciousness that provides a particular expression of free
will, principally through voting and engagement.
• But is it possible to exercise free will?
•
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3. Expression of Will
• Two Choices →
• contribute will to group
• not contribute will to group
• False Free Will
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4. Self-Critique
• - but isn’t the choice to join or not join or change
groups the essence of free will? And the essence of
democracy?
•
• - difference between discretion-within-constraints
as willed act and freedom of will
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5. Replication and Naturalization
• - politics, economics, law, philosophy, theology, science, sport
• - The error of theory, then, especially political theory, is one of
confusing individual will with the manifestation of will in the social
context filtered through the constraints of the received structures
within which reality is understood and actions interpreted and
channeled.
– Two Points
• This is not a reference to the general will or social contract of Rousseau and other
Enlightenment figures, or to its transposition as Soviet doctrine of the state apparatus and
the dictatorship of the proletariat
• The reality that individual will is constrained does not suggest that the constraining
elements can be used instrumentally.
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6. Consequences: Voting
• - Voting or elections, then, are exercises of collective discipline that
reinforces the relationship of the individual to the group
• - Voters do not exercise free will so much as choice within the
normative constraints of the group will
• - Voting is a physical manifestation of individual adherence to the
collective (as a performative or an expression (performed through
physical acts that are signs of will interpreted in relation to the
constraining parameters of acceptable choice) of allegiance to another
(which can be compatible or incompatible with the group to which
allegiance was formally owed – a revaluation of all values.
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7. Disillusionment
• Voting in political elections is more popular than ever and a number of
regimes that have failed to conform to poplar assumptions about voting,
have fallen in 2011 and 2012, including those of Arab/Berber North
Africa and along the Saudi periphery. Let's consider briefly why that
might be.
– 1. Voting is a social act and an act of social discipline.
– 2. Social Discipline Through Voting Manages Violence.
– 3. Voting Serves as a Measure of Governmental Legitimacy and Affirmation of Mass
Democracy Grundnorm as a Basis of Political Organization
– 4. Voting serves as a method of popular organization to support or undermine the
state apparatus.
– 5. The semiosis of voting.
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8. Voting and Democratic Consciousness
• The semiosis of voting also can be understood as a proxy for
the social construction of politics and its organization within
states. Consider the consequences for an understanding of
democracy
– Democracy might be understood as the manifestation of a
cultivation of the opposite of free will – it is the substitution of
individual manifestation of group will for what is impossible—an
expression of unconstrained individual will
– democracy can also be understood as the interpretive expression of
that complicity between the individual and group will manifested in
individual performance that in the aggregate reifies an otherwise
abstracted group
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9. Realignment
• Once this is understood, the long advocated
foundational distinctions between single party ad
multi-party democracies fall away.
• - Differences
• - grounded in technique
• - scope of group
• - social relations (political vs.
administrative apparatus)
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10. Multi-Party Democracy
• more factions and greater choice to avoid tyranny
• -externalization of faction with social control
• -each faction is legitimated only to the extent it
remains true to the governing ideology articulated
in the Constitution and through the courts.
• -The Tea Party and the Republican Party
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11. Single Party Democracy
• less faction and no choice to avoid tyranny
• -internalization of faction and social control
• -each faction is legitimated to the extent that it
remains true to the governing ideology articulated
through the foundational ideological basis of the
legitimacy of the party (Marxist Leninist theory in
China)
• -Intra-Party Democracy and the State
• -Bo Xilai and Xi Jingping
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12. Conclusion
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