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May 24, 2010
The reigning paradigm in political science in the 1970s--1980s was a form of liberal democracy that assumed conflict among the citizens and prescribed handling those conflicts by apportioning power equally among the citizens in a vote or in the pluralist contest of interests. The emphasis was on bargaining and negotiation, to voting, and to the use of power.
It was then replaced by “deliberative democracy,” that is based on dialogue, mutual justification and persuasion. In On Revolution Hannah Arendt describes the process as follows:
Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate.... The same is not true for questions of interest and welfare, which can be ascertained objectively, and where the need for action and decision arises out of the various conflicts among interest groups. Through pressure groups, lobbies and other devices, the voters can indeed influence the actions of their representatives with respect to interest, that is, they can force their representatives to execute their wishes at the expense of the wishes and interests of other groups of voters. In all these instances the voter acts out of concern with his private life and well-being, and the residue of power he still holds in his hands resembles rather the reckless coercion with which a blackmailer forces his victim into obedience than the power that arises out of joint action and joint deliberation
In On Revolution Hannah Arendt was trying to settle accounts with both the liberal-democratic and Marxist traditions; that is, with the two dominant traditions of modern political thought which, in one way or another, can be traced back to the Enlightenment.
Her basic thesis is that both liberal democrats and Marxists have misunderstood the drama of modern revolutions because they have not understood that what was actually revolutionary about these revolutions was their attempt to create a constitutio libertatis - a repeatedly frustrated attempt to establish a political space of public freedom in which people, as free and equal citizens, would take their common concerns into their own hands.
Both the liberals and the Marxists harbored a conception of the political according to which the final goal of politics was something beyond politics - whether this be the unconstrained pursuit of private happiness, the realization of social justice, or the free association of producers in a classless society.
Against liberals, Arendt disputes the claim that these revolutions were primarily concerned with the establishment of a limited government that would make space for individual liberty beyond the reach of the state. Against Marxist interpretations of the French Revolution, she disputes the claim that it was driven by the “social question,” a popular attempt to overcome poverty and exclusion by the many against the few who monopolized wealth in the ancien regime.
Rather, Arendt claims, what distinguishes these modern revolutions is that they exhibit (albeit fleetingly) the exercise of fundamental political capacities – that of individuals acting together, on the basis of their mutually agreed common purposes, in order to establish a tangible public space of freedom. It is in this instauration, the attempt to establish a public and institutional space of civic freedom and participation, that marks out these revolutionary moments as exemplars of politics qua action.
This understanding of deliberation was subsequently modified and expanded. Participants in deliberation advance “considerations” that others “can accept” -- that are “compelling” and “persuasive” to others and that “can be justified to people who reasonably disagree with them” . Disagreement, conflict, arguing, and the confrontation of reasons pro and con emerged more clearly at the core of deliberation.
This is a classic understanding of deliberation. It holds that democratic deliberation is necessarily interactive and collective; that deliberation in public has social features that tend to promote the common good; and deliberation allows creative solutions and the transformation of preferences.
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