The Journal of Speculative Philosophy

Theories of deliberative democracy offer a vision of political decision making in which citizens are able to consider relevant matters from multiple points of view, critically converse with one another about options before them, and seek to enlarge their understandings of whatever matters are under scrutiny. These decisions are intended to be procedurally fair and, in the case of epistemic theories of deliberative democracy, to meet with widespread and uncoerced agreement precisely because they are improved in their epistemic quality.¹ Under the best of circumstances, deliberation converges on the best available ideas on offer: on a presumably correct political decision.

This description has—and rightly should have—a mildly Kantian ring to it. And though we are not likely to be at all surprised that a number of deliberativists have taken inspiration from such Kant-inspired classical pragmatists as Peirce and Mead (as well as, to be sure, from the “Hegelian” Dewey), the broadly Kantian legacy of deliberative democracy would seem to be directly at odds with James’s philosophical temperament and his more sentimentalist approach to moral and political theorizing. As a result, one may not be able to help but wonder whether my intended aim within this article—to examine the extent to which deliberativists can benefit from drawing explicitly on James’s thought—amounts to the fruitless task of fitting a square peg into a round hole. The main challenge before me is to demonstrate that this is not so, and I proceed in two stages.

I begin by briefly laying out what I take to be the three core components of the general conception of deliberative democracy that has recently gained considerable traction among pragmatists. Although each component may appear prima facie to be objectionable to James, I argue that this is not so. We need not exclude his thought on these grounds from having something of value to offer deliberativists—especially those of a pragmatist stripe.

But that his thought is compatible with this pragmatist conception of deliberative democracy does not yet demonstrate that turning to it can prove beneficial in this regard. This is the subject of the second part of the essay. I contend that [End Page 259] James offers two tangible contributions to deliberativists. First, he reveals just how important it is for citizens to develop what he refers to as “responsive sensibilities” to the blindnesses they maintain that inhibit truly hearing others on their own terms. Second, his thought ably supports a recent move by a number of deliberativists to widen how we conceive of political argumentation in order to respond to the objection that deliberative democracy ultimately proves to be exclusionary.