Abstract

The nineteen-nineties saw the so-called “deliberative turn in democracy”, which was taken up by a large number of democracy theorists. This paper sets out: 1) to analyse why this turn took place; 2) to classify the different proposals of deliberative democracy into two models (D1 and D2), in view of their epistemological effectiveness (model D1 assumes the pattern of Rawls’ political liberalism, and model D2, Habermas’ Theory of Discourse); 3) to display the superiority of D2 over D1; 4) to point out certain shortcomings in Habermas’ deliberative-discursive politics and to propose a model of democracy which will enable these to be improved on, to be known as “communicative democracy”.