Introduction: Pragmatism and Deliberative Politics

In the past decade, democratic theory has taken an unmistakable turn toward deliberative models of democratic legitimacy and practice. This deliberative turn is in part due to the frustrations that emerged out of the disputes concerning liberalism often misleadingly characterized as the "liberal-communitarian debate." ¹ Recall that the communitarian critique proposed that liberal political philosophy rested upon a viciously atomistic view of the individual and consequently could not countenance an adequately robust vision of democratic citizenship. That is, the critics of liberalism maintained that liberal politics could not eschew what Jane Mansbridge fittingly characterized as "adversary democracy" (Mansbridge, 1983). Explaining this style of democratic politics, Jürgen Habermas writes:

According to the "liberal" or Lockean view, the democratic process accomplishes the task of programming the government in the interest of society where the government is represented as an apparatus of public administration, and society as a market-structured network of interactions among private persons. (Habermas 1996, 21)

Habermas states that, according to the liberal view of democracy, political rights "such as voting rights and free speech" serve the purpose of providing citizens "the opportunity to assert their private interests in such a way that . . . these interests are finally aggregated into a political will that makes an impact on the administration" (22). ²

The communitarian case was bolstered by the growing concern over dwindling civic association and participation that received its most popular expression in Robert Putnam's article "Bowling Alone" (1995) and related work. ³ Michael Sandel succinctly captured the sting of the critique, writing that liberalism "cannot secure the liberty it promises," because it "cannot inspire the sense of community and civic engagement that liberty requires" (Sandel 1996, 6). What liberals needed was a way to reunite the atomic individuals that resided at the basis of their theory, to socialize the essentially asocial. Despite heroic attempts to meet the challenge, the prospects for liberalism seemed bleak.

Liberals defended themselves mostly by way of counterattack. The liberal critique of communitarianism took a Millian tack and raised concerns of community tyranny, conformity, and intolerance. In light of the communitarian call for a politics of settled identities and social allegiances, a community of shared values, and a morally non-neutral state, Stephen Holmes made the following observation:

[Communitarians] rhapsodize about neighborhoods, churches, school boards, and so forth; they never provide sufficient detail about the national political institutions they favor to allow us to compare the advantages and disadvantages of illiberal community with the vices and virtues of liberal society as we know. . . . Does moral revulsion at "radical separation" among citizens require making divorce and emigration illegal? What does a commitment to "solidarity" or "consensus" imply about the authority of majorities over dissident minorities? (Holmes 1993, 178)

Sandel's reply to this kind of criticism that "intolerance flourishes most where forms of life are dislocated, roots unsettled, and traditions undone" (Sandel 1984, 27) was correctly taken as inadequate. Communitarians needed to devise a way in which essentially social and "encumbered" selves could adopt a self-critical stance that could weed out and correct the oppressive, intolerant, and homogenizing tendencies of community without evoking liberal notions of civil liberties and individual rights. In other words, they needed a conception of community that was at once binding and plastic, a politics that was both formative and fluid. Again, the prospects seemed bleak.

Enter the deliberative turn. That the literature on democratic deliberation admits of great crossover between otherwise divided theorists marks a decisive improvement over the liberal-communitarian impasse it displaced. It is my contention, however, that each camp has seized upon the idea of public deliberation, or, more generally, of deliberative democracy, as a reparative measure. Accordingly, deliberativism has yet to transform political theory; the fundamental liberal-communitarian problematic remains.

To see this, consider first the host of deliberative proposals associated with John Rawls's political liberalism. Central to liberal deliberativism is the "ideal of democratic citizenship" (Rawls 1996, 217) in...