December 2, 2004
The turn to deliberative democracy makes sense in the light of these examples of the political intimidation of public debate on matters of public importance.
Deliberative democracy highlights the way that democratic legitimacy depends on the ability or opportunity to participate in the effective deliberation on the part of those citizens subject to collective decisions. To participate in deliberation means argument, rhetoric, humor, emotion testimony, story telling or gossip. It implies an emphasis on a strong critical theory of communication, an oppositional civil society and a public sphere as sources of democratic critique and renewal. Deliberative democracy implies changing views and opinions, reasoned agreement through deliberation and and a critical voice.
This is a different conception of democracy to that of rational choice theory, which treats democracy as the strategic pursuit of goals and interests on the part of individuals and other actors. Democratic politics is seen as a contest in which individual actors compete for advantage.
I am going to put the conflict between deliberative democracy and ratinal cholice theory (politics as economics) to one side as my interest is in the way that deliberative democracy is embodied in the everyday work of the Australian or American Senate.
Saying this places me at odds with Hannah Arendt and Jurgen Habermas.They retrieve a deliberative rationality from the reasonable public discourse embodied in Aristotle's phronesis and praxis in the classical polis and rework in opposition to a hegemonic instrumental rationality in modernity.
Arendt's duality is in terms of politics (free relaxed discourse of elite individuals about matters of principle, liberty, particpation etc) and the social, which the world of inequality, crime, poverty, work .unemployment and environmental problems that is dealt with by the expert instrumental rationality of bureaucrats and administrators.
Habermas' duality is the lifeworld of social interaction where individuals construct and interpret their identity of themselves, morality, asethetics and common culture. This is constrated to the system, which is the world of state and economy ruled by instrumental rationality, cost efficiency and technical manipulation.
Arendt locates deliberation in politics not in the social, whilst Habermas locates deliberation (communicative rationality) in the lifeworld not the system and he seeks to defend the lifewold against further colonization from the system. By saying that deliberation (deliberative democracy) operates within the Senate, I am locating it within the world of instrumental rationality.
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Gary,
It is not correct to align Habermas' notion of system to instrumental rationality. System is rather the domain where action mediation is through anonymous media (through money in the domain of capitalist economy and through power in the domain of modern administration), from behind the back of actors, so to speak.
Senate is not the example of anonymous power mediation (bureaucracy and executives or more obvious examples). Senate would probably be regarded as the place of deliberation by Habermas rather than the domain of instrumental rationality or system.