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The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 18.1 (2004) 23-43



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Realizing Deliberative Democracy as a Mode of Inquiry:
Pragmatism, Social Facts, and Normative Theory

James Bohman
Saint Louis University


When compared to alternative theories of democracy, deliberative democracy demands much of its citizens and thereby raises the standard of political legitimacy. There are many versions of deliberative democracy, with some more liberal and oriented to the institutions of the constitutional state and others more participatory and oriented to affording citizens more direct opportunities to influence decisions. All share the common demand that democracy is the rule by citizens of their common affairs through the public use of reason. Deliberative democracy, broadly defined, is thus any one of a family of views according to which the public deliberation of free and equal citizens is the core of legitimate political decision making and self-government. Behind this fundamental agreement, each of the terms of this definition is hotly debated among deliberative democrats, who have put forth a variety of conceptions of the deliberative process and its normative constraints. Various institutional and noninstitutional locations for deliberation have been proposed and debated, as well as various attempts to determine the conditions of feasibility for deliberative democracy. 1

Any ideal that raises the standard of legitimacy in an era of pluralism, complexity, and globalization is certainly more open to skepticism than its more minimalist competitors. Some argue that the ideal of deliberation is by nature elitist and exclusionary, in that it seems to leave out relevant power differences and pervasive asymmetries of race, gender, and class. 2 Others see it as based upon an inadequate conception of politics, reducing democracy to seminar discussion, or see it as so infeasible and idealized as to be unrealizable and unable to guide reform. 3 More sympathetic critics have raised serious internal difficulties, including the need for fundamental revisions in order for the ideal to be practicable. 4 One such difficulty suggests a dilemma at the very heart of any attempt to institutionalize deliberation: either deliberation is confined to the institutions of liberal democracy and thus inherits all their problems of legitimacy; or it proposes its own institutions and decision-making procedures, at the [End Page 23] cost of making its own democratic legitimacy infeasible. Consider the problem of who deliberates. While including everyone makes the ideal impractical, limiting participation and opportunities for influence makes it potentially elitist. In the first case, the critic can show that under actual institutional conditions the space for deliberation is rather small. In the second case, the gap between actual empirical conditions and the rationalist ideal of inclusive deliberation seems too large.

While some of these criticisms have already been accepted and incorporated into deliberative theories, the discussion of objections raised by many of these critics has lacked any clear sense of what constitutes a decisive criticism in the first place, much less one that is fatal to deliberative theory rather than to democracy as such. The purpose of this paper is to show that any assessment of the prospects for realizing deliberative democracy hinges, perhaps surprisingly, on the philosophy of social science; that is, on how empirical and descriptive statements that have a social scientific status can both inform and be a basis for criticism of normative political theory. While many critics of deliberative democracy reject it on normative grounds, the most skeptical criticisms of deliberative democracy are practical and deny its realizability in any form. In order to assess these criticisms, it is necessary to clarify the status of empirical or factual claims in arguments for or against a normative political theory. The history of the social sciences from Weber to Luhmann shows that skepticism about the realizability of democracy in general trades on the idea that there is only one form of social facts. One of the great achievements of pragmatism is to show that this is not the only or even the most significant use of "social facts" in critical, normative theories of democracy.

Guided by a pragmatic conception of social inquiry...

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