24 SOCIAL SCIENTIST must make sense to the people, be transparent to them. This issue, I shall show, points in the direction of common meanings. The second way to common meanings can be found by following a dispute between contemporary liberals and the so called communitarians. Communitarians argue that liberal politics based on principles of right and justice fails to adequately take into account the social background within which these principles make sense. This leads to problems of legitimacy which can only be solved by a politics committed to sustaining this background. This social back-ground, it turns out, is at least partly constituted by common meanings. Finally, examining an issue in democratic theory places us in the midst of common meanings. Critics of representative democracy, inspired by Rousseauesque republicanism, contend that social democracy differs from the former in the quality of decisions it enables. Such definitions must betaken collectively or at the very least easily obtain collective consent. But this is not possible unless people develop civic virtue, unless they see themselves as members of a community. A community, so the argument goes, is essentially madj& up of common meanings. It follows that only decisions taken in the light of or against the background of common meanings differentiate socialist from liberal democracies. Each of these issuer deserves a more detailed treatment. The first argument goes somewhat like this. A socialist society implies people's self-organisation in all aspects of social life. For example in production, it implies workers' control over resource allocation and investment decisions, their own management of the actual process of production. Democratisation in this context means that workers direct themselves at work, take decisions on their own and this requires that economic power be passed to workers' councils. It is then contended that such self-management by workers is not possible unless their attitude to social organisation is radically altered and the institutions in which such organisation is realised become part of their daily lives. Perhaps this requires that social organisation be radically simplified and at least part of this process of simplication involves making them more transparent. Decisions can be made only when one knows both what they are about and the institutional context within which they emerge. How might one take an economic decision without fully knowing aspects of the economy and its relation to other sectors? In much of socialist literature, to understand one's society, to have more knowledge of it is to have more data, facts, information. In most modern societies, both capitalist and socialist, such information and data is with technocrats, and bureaucrats, with the political elite. Democratisation consists then in the demand that there be transfer of information and technical know-how from specialists to all the people. As Castoriadis once put it the data must be reduced to their bare essentials so that people can decide with full knowledge of the relevant facts3. The problem of democracy lies then in this simple