Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson: Democracy and Disagreement. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Jürgen Habermas: Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. William Rehg translation. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996.
Modern liberalism comes to sight as a critique of the ‘old regime’ of throne and altar. Such philosophers as Locke and Montesquieu view monarchist state-building—’theorized’ (as academics now like to say) in England by Hobbes and Filmer, in France by Bodin and Bossuet—as an actual or potential threat to the natural rights of life and liberty. Liberalism undertakes to establish regimes conducing to civil and international peace in a Europe prone to factionalism and warfare. In this project, modern liberalism has in large measure succeeded in the sense that liberal-democratic (more precisely commercial-republican) regimes, once established, do in fact avoid wars with one another.
From the beginning, liberalism has been attacked on two fronts. Christians have suspected liberalism of atheism, of leaving no place, or only a subordinate, private place, for spiritual concerns that should be paramount in the mind of every person. The largely forgotten polemical exchanges between Locke and a number of English divines–exchanges marked by Locke’s seemingly endless repertoire of evasion and his opponents’ mounting frustration and asperity—exemplify this tension. Many not-so-Christian thinkers have felt something of the same annoyance, and the list of them is long, including Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. They may not care much for spirituality, but spiritedness, high-heartedness, those aspects of the human soul not satisfied by the peaceful exchange of goods and service—these they do esteem, and they rebuke liberalism for its studied neglect of them (even when, as does Marx, they reject the very notion of the human soul). For its non-religious critics, liberalism is just too damned peaceful; it borders on complacency.
“Deliberative democracy” is another episode in this long-running drama of liberalism and its critics’ discontents. Unlike many of their predecessors, deliberative-democratic theorists take great care not to undermine democratic institutions; indeed, they seek to strengthen them, to make them more democratic without dissolving them into some form of libertarian political minimalism.
At least since James Madison, liberalism has allocated considerable public space for interest groups. In Democracy and Disagreement, Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson object to the degree to which interest-group bargaining has taken over the public sphere. Connected to this decidedly unspirited development is the concomitant takeover of public decision-making by courts. Interest-group bargaining and courtroom argument both push ordinary citizens to one side, making them feel like guests in their own house. Popular sovereignty itself risks atrophy.
A merely spirited/contentious public discourse will not do, however. To avoid a public sphere dominated by angry wrangling, Gutmann and Thompson propose terms of the regulation of “public reason” based on what amounts to a tacit social contract: Each participant in shall make claims on terms acceptable in principle by the other citizen-participants in public discourse. So, for example, if as a Hindu one deplores the consumption of meat, I must refrain from arguing for the relevant sumptuary laws on terms acceptable only to my fellow Hindus—the spiritual need to escape the Wheel, the reincarnative benefits accruing to asceticism, etc. Rather, one must appeal to principles held by all or at least almost all of my fellow citizens, most of whom (in most countries) are not Hindus. Therefore, I might argue that meat-eating is a health hazard comparable to air pollution; that meat-eating causes air pollution by increasing the population of cattle, which generate environmentally-dangerous bovine emissions. And so on. I am still free to urge my fellow citizens to convert to Hinduism, but not as part of the debate on public policy. In ordinary political life, this way of arguing does in fact frequently prevail, anyway; Gutmann and Thompson would elevate it to a rule.
Discourse guided by this rule serves reciprocity in two ways. First, it is reasonable in the sense that it appeals to the rules of logic and of evidence familiar in Western societies for centuries. Those rules are available to any person of ordinary intelligence; practically speaking, they exclude very few citizens. Second, the rule of “public reason” excludes appeal to any authority, religious or otherwise, whose conclusions are, in the authors’ term, “impervious” to the rules of logic and of evidence. This reciprocity is extended as far as possible to include and empower ordinary citizens. In their striking phrase, reciprocity exemplifies “civic magnanimity”; that is to say, Aristotle’s great-souled or magnanimous man, dismissed by Bertrand Russell as undemocratic, can return in a democratic form as a male or female citizen whose mind and heart are large enough to respect, speak, and listen to all his/her co-participants in civic life.
Critics of deliberative democracy have argued in several ways. Some take a Realpolitik view: Politics is a matter of power, not chatter. A revolution is not a garden party; nor is a party caucus or a session of Congress. Even a garden party isn’t a garden party, but a space for contending ambitions and passions, however trivial. This objection, which in its best form is as old as Socrates’ strictures against sophists and rhetoricians, need not seriously injure the Gutmann/Thompson argument, which could easily incorporate the role of ‘power’ in political life without giving ground on the need to wield power reasonably.
More radically, some critics challenge the notion of reasonableness itself. What is ‘reasonable’? Is it not usually a narrow notion of what makes sense to the one who calls himself reasonable? Further, what’s so great about being reasonable, assuming that one could be? Should a Christian want to be reasonable, or to be saved? If a Christian says that it is reasonable to want to be saved from the eternal consequences of sin, and the only way to be saved is to accept Jesus Christ as one’s personal savior, is that not reasonable? It may be that the one thing most needful to any rational person is something supposedly “impervious” to “public reason.” If so, what good is “public reason”?
To this, deliberative democrats might reply: Public reason is good only for those tasks governments should undertake, as representatives of the (diverse) public: building and policing highways, collecting trash, providing for the common (physical) defense of the community, and so on. This would be to fall back to modern liberalism and its concept of the minimal state. Alternatively, deliberative democrats could say that anti-deliberative, or anti-rationalist democrats cannot defend democracy itself, except by sheer assertion. Why should a politics of sheer self-assertion satisfy itself within the tidy confines of democracy?
If seen as a complement to other normal political activities such as decision, command, and coercion, deliberative democracy as conceived by Gutmann and Thompson might strengthen democratic-republican practices to some degree. However, there is some danger that it might end in recapitulating the Stephen Douglas argument for popular sovereignty. Although Gutman and Thompson would recoil in horror from this suggestion, how would they meet Douglas’s argument, that one should not care whether slavery is voted up or down, so long as ‘everybody’—in Douglas’s day, white male citizens, in our day, non-jailed adult citizens—gets the chance to debate and to vote? Lincoln’s opposing argument, based on the natural-rights-based syllogism of the Declaration of Independence, attempts to mark off certain things from public interference, regardless of the size and passion of that ‘public.’ Whether natural rights can withstand philosophic scrutiny is of course a long argument, but, given the racial history of this and nearly every other country, natural rights enjoy a certain perennial saliency, whatever philosophers may say about them.
Jürgen Habermas advances a much more theoretically elaborate account of deliberative democracy. The “public reason” of the American theorists becomes “communicative action,” animated by “procedural reason,” but it is equally an attempt to solve the problem of how to organize politically the multiple, conflicting ‘worldviews’ found in modern, pluralist democracies, without imposing yet another ‘metaphysical’ system à la Kant or Hegel. In Habermas’s opinion, “if philosophy simply keeps its concepts clear it can uncover a surprising degree at a metalevel,” anyway, without Hegel’s all-synthesizing teleological dialect (xxxix). this will be true not only despite of but because there is no “higher” or “deeper reality to which we could appeal” than our own “linguistically structured forms of life” (xli). Nor does this linguistic web imply conservativism by reinforcing a sort of neo-Burkean ‘cultural’ politics; revolutionary politics can occur without the appeal to Hegelian or Marxist dialectic or to the older foundation of natural right, and, moreover, it can avoid the worst coercions of tyrants Left and Right by appealing to reasonable consensus. Epistemologically and even politically, the philosophy of Charles Pierce replaces those of Plato and Hegel. Perhaps most interestingly, it does so without entirely abandoning an appeal to nature. To speak at all requires certain “idealizations,” such as the use of words themselves (whose meanings must be held in common if they are to work at all), and also the connection of utterances “with context-transcending validity claims” (4). This is not the strong “transcendental necessity” of natural law, nor is it the argument of Aristotle, which links the use of human language to an account of the telos of human nature. Rather, “a set of unavoidable idealizations forms the counterfactual basis of an actual practice of reaching understanding, a practice that can critically turn against its own results and thus transcend itself” (4) (emphasis in original).
What this begins to resemble is a supersophicated Lockeanism, i.e., a linguistic form of the labor theory of value whereby the tension between ‘facts’ and ‘values’ or “facticity” and “validity” “must be marked off by the participants’ own efforts” (17) (emphasis added), as they engage in discourse as speakers and listeners in the public sphere. This collective linguistic work generates the “binding energies of language”—that is, authority, the combination of power and justice ‘authored’ by the political community. At the same time, the authority so generated isn’t ‘authoritarian’; no public case is ever closed in a public sphere founded upon discursiveness. Habermas would thus meet a major objection to the Enlightenment project: that rigorous reasoning and the rhetorical need for democratic consent is a circle that can never be squared, that Enlightenment rationalism must perforce degenerate into just another myth, just another throne and altar to which and on which sacrifices must ever be made.
Impracticable, you say? Fortunately, the “lifeworld” of any society provides “the backing of a massive background consensus” (22) that makes coherent “communicative action” feasible and stable; that is, supersophisticated Lockeanism eschews as naïve the tabula rasa of real Lockeanism, along with its contemporary moral-political analogue, the “original position” posited by John Rawls. With the pragmatists, Habermas would turn liberalism on its head, putting discourse first and ‘founding’ (whether epistemological or political) last. “Reason is embodied solely in the formal-pragmatic conditions that facilitate deliberative politics, so that we need not confront reason as an alien authority residing somewhere beyond political communication” (285). Habermas hopes finally to redeem the Enlightenment project of fusing rationality and practical action or power. To do so, he jettisons the various epistemological foundations of Enlightenment philosophy and the opposing foundations of post-Enlightenment historicism.
Habermas meets the criticism that discourse theory is mere chatter, incapable of facing up to the fact of coercion in politics, by distinguishing morality from law. Free moral discourse and coercive law must “interpenetrate” in order to “develop into a system of rights” (128). While this does meet the Realpolitik objection, it is open to another, namely, logical circularity: “When citizens interpret the system of rights in a manner congruent with their situation, they merely explicate the performative meaning of precisely the enterprise they took up as soon as they to decided to legitimately regulate their common life through positive law” (129). But if “democracy” is the standing assumption behind all “discourse,” will it not be vulnerable precisely to its deadliest enemies, who reject the “underlying consensus” itself? Is not the apparently dialogical, pluralistic universe of communicative action not monological at the start, a refusal to ascend from the cave of democratic conventions—a refusal that, not so paradoxically, leaves that cave vulnerable to intruders from the outside?
What Habermas needs is an argument which squarely confronts the fact not only of competing groups within democracies but of competing regimes in international politics. The vindication of human discourse can lead to the vindication of human rights only through this ‘state of nature.’ That this need not mean a return to modern liberalism may be seen by recalling Aristotle’s acknowledgment of the fact of human speech, the plurality of human regimes, and the distinction between the reciprocity of political rule and the denial of reciprocity seen in tyranny.
Modern liberalism is vulnerable to the epistemological critiques of Habermas and many others. The attempt to overcome religious conventionalism led to such mistaken moves as the Cartesian ego and the Lockean tabula; the quest for the discovery of human nature introspectively left philosophers in a reductionist dilemma. Hegel’s attempt to escape that dilemma by means of synthesizing dialectic made matters worse by firing ‘totalizing’ ambitions. The Socratic approach, starting with ‘discourse’ no less than does Habermas but employing dialectic rather than introspection to get at nature, is likely to produce better results, especially since Socrates, like Aristotle, does not hesitate to address the regime question.
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