In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Wonderful World of Deliberative Democracy
  • Andrew Shankman (bio)
Sandra M. Gustafson. Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. x + 271 pp. Notes and index. $45.00 (cloth); $36.00 (e-book).

Imagining Deliberative Democracy provides a timely discussion of both contemporary political theory and the early republic as “deliberation began to be imagined as a democratic form of republican self-governance and a defining characteristic of American civil society” between about 1815 and 1840 (p. 40). The book ranges beyond the early republic because Sandra Gustafson uses the past to speak directly to our present. She quotes President Obama urgently and reverently and places him within a “tradition [that] emphasize[s] the political power of language and advance[s] a commitment to dialogue and persuasion as the means to resolve conflicts and forge a progressive consensus”(p. 220). Gustafson hopes to help foster that consensus.

Gustafson must discuss contemporary theoretical constructions of deliberative democracy because she argues that certain figures of the early republic were the forebears of contemporary deliberative democrats and so were crucial figures of early American democracy, though of the specifically deliberative variety. President Obama, as Gustafson points out, believes “that the Constitution was designed to force us into a conversation, a ‘deliberative democracy’ in which all citizens are required to engage in a process of testing their ideas against an external reality, persuading others of their point of view, and building shifting alliances and consent” (p. 3). Gustafson quotes the President again, treating religious divisions, to convey what the deliberative conversation looks like: “democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason” (p. 218).

Gustafson draws on Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson to show how scholars imagine deliberative democracy. Deliberative democracy is possible, they explain, with “free and equal citizens (and their representatives) [who] justify decisions in a process in which they give one another reasons that are mutually acceptable and generally accessible, with the aim of reaching conclusions [End Page 408] that are binding in the present for all citizens but open to challenge in the future.” Deliberative democracy works with people “who are morally committed, self-reflective about their commitments, discerning of the difference between respectable and merely tolerable differences of opinion and open to the possibility of changing their minds or modifying their positions.” “Acknowledging that the attributes that they identify with civic integrity do not develop spontaneously,” writes Gustafson, “Gutmann and Thompson suggest that these traits should be learned and valued” (pp. 35, 37).

That’s a good suggestion and I endorse it unreservedly. Deliberative democrats are thoroughly convincing when they insist that, if the irrational become rational, the unreasonable reasonable, the intolerant tolerant, the unfeeling sensitive, the suspicious trusting, and the selfish generous, our politics will be vastly improved. At least as presented by Gustafson, who has every reason to make the best case for it she can, deliberative democracy appears to be little more than a series of run-on sentences of earnest and inarguable (but also obvious and banal) platitudes. It strikes me that, in a nation with such a destructive concentration of wealth and power, idealizing a deliberative process peopled by secure, equal, and reasonable participants should come well after a very angry confrontation that, necessarily, will not produce consensus.

Deliberative democracy does not apologize for the status quo. But it does demand an essential acceptance of society as it is found and a protracted process of negotiation, in the real world usually with antagonists who show little interest in deliberating towards any consensus, let alone a progressive one, as the condition for—at best—incremental improvement. Deliberative democracy embodies the values of upper–middle-class liberals: the politics of the tenured, secure, vested, and educated—the comfortable citizen with a social conscience. This politics suits my condition and intellectual abilities perfectly. But it is self-serving to present a politics that fits my elite academic culture absolutely as a virtuous crusade that will serve the multiplying desperate who have little or no security, education, or confidence to use words and...

pdf

Share