the promise(s) of deliberative democracy

THE PROMISE(S) OF DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY DARRIN HICKS

This essay explicates the promise that deliberative democracy, because deliberation generates more inclusive, just, and reasoned public policies, is a sufficient and superior account of democratic legitimacy. This essay also reviews the critiques engendered by social, cultural, and discursive plurality, critiques threatening to render deliberative democracy’s promise(s) infelicitous, and suggests some avenues for reconfiguring public delieration in light of these challenges. lmost half a decade ago, Karl Wallace argued that the fundamental business of rhetoric “is inseparable from the proper function of a political society.”1 Wallace understood the intimate relationship between rhetoric and politics to entail two charges: first, the theoretical and critical task of rhetoric is to formulate the “major premises of argument peculiar to a free and democratic society.” Rhetorical theory was responsible for disclosing the ideals, values, methods, and procedures animating the public use of reason within democratic debate and discussion. Rhetorical pedagogy was responsible to a second charge: Teachers of speech were to inculcate future citizens with the moral and ethical virtues to fully and equally participate in democratic deliberation. For Wallace, it was the terms of interest-group pluralism and Cold War liberalism that constituted these major premises. These terms gave to rhetoric a very specific duty—to speak effectiveness to the truth embedded in the “values and methods of democratic process” and to demonstrate the superiority of these “values and methods” over and against Fascist and Communist doctrine. While the theoretical and pedagogical charges of rhetoric formulated by Wallace remain salient, his vision of liberal democracy and the terms of argument peculiar to it have since been challenged and are currently being revised. Several conditions, including an increased awareness of the demands of cultural diversity, an understanding of the irreducibility of moral conflict, the linguistic turn in the human and social sciences, the concomitant reconceptualization of social order into discursive terms, and the recent formulation of citizenship and civic virtue as communicative

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Darrin Hicks is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Denver in Denver, Colorado. © Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 5, No. 2, 2002, pp. 223-260 ISSN 1094-8392

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RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

competence, to name but a few, have engendered a wholesale “critique of the standard practices of liberal democracy.”2 This critique has resulted in the translation of the “values and methods” of political liberalism into the idiom of deliberative democracy. Speech is no longer understood as simply the transmission of information, or even as the means for giving effectiveness to truth, but as the medium within which the ethical self-government of autonomous individuals can be articulated with the imperatives of democratic governance. It is precisely this effort to govern through the calculated reshaping of speech performance and the regulation of discursive space that defines the “values and methods” of deliberative democracy. In this essay, following Wallace’s directive, I want to formulate and test the “major premises of argument peculiar to” deliberative democracy. These premises are manifest in the hopes people have for deliberation, and are revealed in three promises underwriting all deliberative theories of democracy. First, the promise of inclusion: public deliberation, because it facilitates the participation of all those governed by collective decisions in the making of those decisions, leads to reasoned agreement among citizens on the merits of legislation and, therefore, is recognized by citizens as the basis of democratic legitimacy. Second, the promise of equality: public deliberation, because it gives equal consideration to all views and affords all persons the equal opportunity of political influence, is capable of transforming both the content of citizens’ preferences and their political conduct so they are compatible with the demands of justice. And, third, the promise of reason: because citizens agree to justify their political proposals on the basis of public reasons and, moreover, because they agree to propose and abide by the terms of fair cooperation—to be politically reasonable—they will accept the results of public deliberation as binding and agree to abide by those results even at the costs of their own interests. These are substantial promises to make on behalf of public deliberation. In what follows, I will set out each of these promises and review the challenges engendered by social, cultural, and discursive plurality, challenges that threaten to render them infelicitous even as they suggest some ways that deliberative democrats may be able to make good on these promises.

THE PROMISE

OF INCLUSION

The legitimacy of a democratic system of governance rests on its commitment to public justification: social and political policies, because they involve the exercise of power, should be justified by reasons that could be accepted by all those affected. The first part of this commitment—that public officials should justify social and political policies to citizens with good reasons—is a noncontroversial conviction of most democrats and certainly of all rhetorical scholars. The stipulation that all stakeholders should accept these reasons is relatively controversial; given the radical pluralism that marks contemporary life, it may even be an impossible demand. Due

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to the diversity of values, the limits of human judgment, and the presence of competing needs and desires that result from the free use of reason within a democratic public culture, it appears practically impossible, and maybe politically undesirable, to forge a rational consensus regarding a conception of the good and the public policies it would imply. Moreover, using political power to enact and enforce laws that do not recognize the rational basis of (and thereby repress the diverse conceptions of) the dominant conception of the good is unjust. This makes for a dilemma: public officials have an obligation to offer good reasons for the exercise of social and political power, but, given the fact of reasonable pluralism, the resources for inventing those reasons seem to be lacking.3 Deliberative democrats address this dilemma, the demand for democratic legitimacy, by modifying the first part of its formulation—by shifting the locus of justification for applications of social and political power from public officials to the stakeholders themselves; this strategy renders the reasons used to justify those policies consistent with the conceptions of the good held by stakeholders, making it more likely that they will accept the policy as justified. Empirical evidence demonstrates that stakeholders who have adequate pre-decisional voice; participate in open, credible, and collaborative processes; and are able to revise any decisions resulting in inefficiency or injustice will endorse policies ensuing from this process even at the cost of their own interests.4 But, participation itself does not constitute legitimacy, for broad participation cannot ensure that both the process and outcomes of deliberation are truly inclusive, just, or reasonable. Rather, the invention, formulation, evaluation, and revision of law and social policy must also be the product of a rigorous process of public debate and discussion in which citizens, considered as moral and political equals, move beyond mere self-interest and reflect on the common good. Thus they agree to phrase all of their claims and objections in terms of public reasons, reasons that can be understood and accepted by all present. The legitimacy of laws and social policies, and hence the basis of assent and obligation, emerges from a process of collective reasoned reflection by political equals, rather than from the will of the majority or the preferences of elites. When deliberation fulfills its promise, it is because stakeholders transform their interests by hearing the ways in which the problem being addressed and the proposed solution affect others, by recognizing how their interests contribute to others’ misery, and by realizing how reformulating those interests is a precondition for collaborating on an effective solution. When public deliberation unfolds in this manner, rather than by simply formulating compromises among stakeholders that leave their interests unchanged, it functions as an especially attractive remedy for the shortfalls of representative politics. Moreover, when public deliberation includes the voices and views of those political communities and ethnocultural groups traditionally excluded from decision-making contexts, Jorge Valadez argues, it contributes to the legitimacy of a multicultural

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state, a state that demonstrates its commitment to political equality and, thereby, regains the support of alienated minorities who feel that their needs and desires are insufficiently addressed by dominant political institutions.5 As Seyla Benhabib puts it, legitimacy in complex democratic societies must be thought to result from the “free and unconstrained deliberation of all about matters of common concern.”6 Iris Marion Young concurs: “The normative legitimacy of a democratic decision depends upon the degree to which those affected by it have been included in the decisionmaking processes and have had the opportunity to influence the outcomes.”7 Deliberative democracy justifies a much stronger ideal of inclusion than is typical of representative theories of democracy. In fact, all deliberative democrats hold that an adequate ideal of inclusion entails that all persons are deemed capable of making informed and insightful judgments on moral and political matters, and thus all must be allowed to take part in deliberations. In those deliberations, all should have the equal chance to express their wishes, desires, and feelings; all should have an equal chance to introduce, question, and counter any and all arguments; and all must have an equal chance to call attention to power relationships that might constrain the free articulation of their assertions and questions. Furthermore, no person can be prevented from full participation by internal or external coercion. This expansive account of inclusion, for deliberative democrats, defines the principle of equal respect and, therefore, is a non-negotiable condition of democratic legitimacy. The force of this principle comes alive as a practical necessity when we think of how difficult it would be to offer a good, and more importantly, a public reason (one acceptable to all participants, including the person[s] you are saying should be excluded) why to exclude some individual or group affected by a law or social policy from the decision-making process. I can only think of two candidates: first, that stakeholders are simply too uninformed, insufficiently educated, or too apathetic to warrant inclusion, or secondly, that the numbers full participation would entail may outstrip the carrying capacity of current (or even imaginable) political institutions. The first proposed reason—what Robert Dahl terms the argument for guardianship—is clearly antidemocratic.8 If citizens are too apathetic, they will simply selfselect out of the process, a far cry from prima facie exclusion. The claim that some political issues are simply too complex or the polity too ignorant or prejudiced for public debate to be either rational or informed not only discounts the intelligence of most citizens, but operates with the unfounded assumption that citizens cannot discern the public issues (say, of just distribution, equal opportunity, and norms of ethical conduct) from the technical issues at stake. Nor does this objection recognize that it is precisely the interface between private, public, and technical knowledge that is the content of many cases of public deliberation and community collaboration.9 Even if advocates of such a “realist” position were correct about the dispositions and abilities of the public, the appropriate response, from a pragmatic


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standpoint, would be to provide incentives for participation, access to information, and any necessary education and training. Democratic legitimacy purchased through public deliberation and community collaboration, as government officers, public health professionals, and philanthropic trusts are coming to see, is more efficient in the long run than either elite-driven decision-making models or traditional patron-client relationships.10 The second reason, the scale of the deliberating body, is more compelling. Meaningful participation in collective decision making by more than a fraction of those affected by the decision is inconceivable given the practical constraints of time and institutional capacity. As Michael Walzer has put it, “deliberation is not an activity for the demos . . . 100 million of them, or even 1 million of them, 100,000 can’t plausibly reason together.”11 James Fishkin points out that the demand of full inclusion creates a dilemma between choosing to favor inclusion or informed deliberation. On the one hand, the more people that are included with full and equal speaking rights, the less influence anyone has, and, therefore, the less incentive anyone has to participate in an informed manner. The result is less informed and rigorous public debate and dialogue. On the other hand, if we want to increase the quality of deliberation, it seems that we must limit the number of participants, so they have more influence and hence more incentive to be informed and to listen to other points of view. This choice, however, purchases informed deliberation at the cost of equality and legitimacy.12 Public deliberation as a method for achieving democratic legitimacy, it seems, is a practical impossibility. Fishkin’s response is the deliberative opinion poll. In his poll, a representative sample of citizens are brought together,13 agree to a set of topics to reflect upon, receive information on those issues, and then discuss them with one another before a national television audience. Fishkin argues that his deliberative poll would correct the tendency of current polling practices to aggregate unreflective sentiment and would serve an advisory function for political candidates, perhaps making campaigns more reflective and less reactionary, as well as serve an educative function for the participants. Fishkin has already conducted two successful deliberative polls, one in Britain and one in the United States before the 1996 presidential primary. I have no doubts that the deliberative opinion poll is an advance over all existing polling methods; I am also confident that those participating in the poll accrued many of the benefits extolled by proponents of public deliberation.14 I am less confident that the deliberative opinion poll is an adequate response to the problems size creates for democratic legitimacy. The chances of being selected to participate in the poll are too small, the experience of watching it on television seems too remote, and the steps between gathering information and justifying your positions to others are too many for it to adequately address the demands of democratic legitimacy. John Dryzek, who believes Fishkin’s project to be the best of the available responses to problems of size, argues that a better way to proceed is to detach the

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idea of legitimacy from a head count of reflectively consenting individuals and, in its place, ground legitimacy in the resonance of decisions with the prevailing range of political discourses circulating in a popularly controlled public sphere.15 This way entails reconceptualizing the entities that populate the political world: replacing individuals with discourses and rescuing political agency from an individualistic ontology that defines it in terms of the intentional actions of rational persons. Instead, legitimacy is located in the capacity to underwrite or destabilize collective outcomes, an account that captures the original meaning of the concept but in a way that allows for the multidimensionality of political subjectivity. Democratic legitimacy, or in Dryzek’s terms “discursive legitimacy,” is achieved “when a collective decision is consistent with the constellation of discourses present in the public sphere, in the degree to which this constellation is subject to the reflective control of competent actors.”16 In other words, when a deliberative body attempts to justify a collectively binding decision, it is obliged to demonstrate that this decision is responsive to the extant range of opinions on the issue. For instance, a piece of environmental legislation would be regarded as legitimate inasmuch as it was shown to be responsive to the various discourses animating the rhetoric of environmental protection (as with the range of discourses spanning free market to radical green perspectives, or the pluralist, communitarian, and managerial languages identified by Williams and Matheny).17 Dryzek is not proposing that policymakers must discover some unifying moral principle to justify social policy, but they do have the obligation to present a set of reasons that take into account the myriad contesting discourses constituting public opinion—finding ways of converging competing perspectives when possible and refuting unreasonable claims when necessary. Discursive legitimacy, then, does not have to assume some impossibly large body of citizens deliberating in a single forum face to face. Individuals do not have to pass judgment on every collective decision to which they are subject. They may, however, participate in the legitimization of social policy by engaging in the formation and contest of discourses whenever they desire. For many citizens this participation will be deliberation within the neighborhood groups, ethnic clubs, and community coalitions that address the concerns of daily life. Others will join the ranks of social movements and political networks working to shape public policy by engaging in the contest to formulate the terms of our practical and passionate attachments. There will inevitably be times when these two groups converge: when citizens understand the relationship between their communal life and the concerns of others, or when they see that it is the contest to define the limits to possible forms of human association that sets the stage for the political dramas playing out in their backyards. What is crucial, then, for attaining discursive legitimacy is that these avenues of political participation are inclusive, that the constellation of discourse is itself open to “dispersed and communicatively competent popular control,” and that there is a dynamic relationship between civil society and governing agencies.18 Ideally there is


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a mutually constitutive, dialectical relationship between governmental agencies responsible for creating and enforcing law and social policy, and the relatively informal and fluid networks of opinion circulating within the public sphere. The basis of democratic legitimacy can be found, not in some imaginary constitutional convention where millions of citizens deliberate together, nor in a deliberative opinion poll, but in the character of the reasons justifying those laws and policies and the dynamics of the relationship between the state and civil society. Dryzek’s model is a novel response to the problems of size; it does not matter how many individuals participate in the contestation of discourses at any particular time, nor does it require that any individuals be excluded on the basis of intelligence or the limits of deliberative institutions. What does matter is that there is a relatively unimpeded circulation of contesting discourses and that they each are reflected upon and responded to in the justification of collective decisions. Though this too seems like an impossible order, Dryzek claims that the experience of political networks, such as the environmental justice movement, provides some evidence that such freedom and responsiveness is indeed possible.19 I find this a compelling account of how to secure democratic legitimacy in large complex societies. There are, however, two concerns: first, everything seems to depend on the proviso that the constellation of discourses is subject to democratic control. Given the consolidation of media outlets and the tendency for radical dissent to be ignored or co-opted, is this a hopelessly counterfactual condition? How are we to ensure that the prevailing configuration of public opinions are adequately representative of a full range of competing discourses; in other words, how do we ensure that minority discourses have a somewhat equal standing in the collective decision-making process? A second, and related, concern is that the idea of “responsiveness” seems undertheorized in this account. How do decision makers demonstrate that they have accounted for and fairly considered all, or even most, of the discourses circulating around any complex public issue? Deliberators, it appears, must invent meta-discursive methods of analysis to understand and configure the array of competing discourses into some sort of wide reflective equilibrium (which sounds like all deliberators must become discourse analysts and rhetorical critics) and then must justify collective decisions with public reasons. These are not fatal omissions, but they do point out that this account of legitimacy, as any must, depends on the promise of political equality and the ideal of public reason.

THE PROMISE

OF

EQUALITY

Democracy, in principle, refers to the promise that those who call upon the law and those whom the law calls upon are also its authors. Democracy, in practice, refers to a particular institutional arrangement for making binding political decisions. Given the heterogeneity of “the people,” an institutional arrangement generating binding

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decisions is democratic if it is constituted by free and open participation of all (or at least sufficient representation of those affected by the decision) and if, from the perspective of the participants, the outcomes of this process are not known in advance. In other words, the results of this decision-making process are not predetermined by the material interests, social status, cultural attachments, or ethical commitments ascribed to participants, but rather depend on the claims and conduct of participants in the decision-making process itself (a process open to the possibility that participants may very well make avowals of those interests, attachments, and commitments in such a way that they become relevant factors). I reviewed the first of these conditions of democratic legitimacy as the requirement of inclusivity. The second of these conditions—that outcomes are not determined ex ante—refers to the necessity of political equality for deliberative accounts of legitimacy.20 An account of political equality appropriate for deliberative institutions holds that citizens and their views receive equal consideration in collective decision-making forums. Equal consideration is defined here in communicative terms: all persons and their views (Dryzek would say discourses) deserve an effective hearing, meaning that all deliberators should presume that each stakeholder is making a unique, valued, and legitimate claim upon the time and resources of the collective and, therefore, is deserving of a full hearing of any and all opinions, objections, and requests.21 This does not mean that all opinions will be relevant, informed, insightful, or actionable, but that judgment should always be situational and not attached to any particular person or group before they speak. The failure to grant this presumption displays a lack of respect, and indeed even a sort of contempt, for persons and groups who have a legitimate right to have their views fully and equally considered.22 Along with the means to evoke an effective hearing, a communicatively inspired account of political equality entails that all have an equal opportunity to exercise political influence. Influence is more than impact: impact is the effect a person or group can have on their own, for instance with their vote or by forming a voting bloc; influence, on the other hand, is the difference a person or group makes by persuading others to believe and act as they do.23 In competitive situations, especially in contexts marked by systemic inequality such as elections and markets, the massive accumulation of resources often renders impact into influence. Yet, the distinction is intuitive and essential if deliberative democracy is to maintain its distinctiveness from accounts of fair aggregation. Ideally all participants possess sufficient resources to feel that they have an equal opportunity to make the decisive argument or objection, one able to either underwrite or destabilize collective outcomes. All stakeholders should feel that they possess the means for turning the right to speak into the ability to exercise political agency. Thus, equality of political influence carries with it a seemingly paradoxical promise: all have the equal opportunity to exercise a disproportionate influence over the decision-making process, to be the one to say just the right thing that turns everything around, to make the contribu-


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tion that causes a shift in collective judgment and thereby opens up an entire range of possibilities heretofore unimagined. Three sorts of goods are required for political equality: access, resources, and capabilities. Ideally all should have access to deliberative forums at both the agendasetting and policy-making stages. This would require access to the full range of information necessary for citizens to adequately understand how their own needs and preferences are shaped by and contribute to the social projects and problems requiring collective action. Citizens would then need access to the full range of data used by public officials to construct social problems, which would, in turn, require access to the available research on the full range of possible solutions and the opportunity to independently evaluate those research findings. However, access, regardless of how extensive, is meaningless without the material and cognitive resources needed to turn that information into usable evidence and the communicative capabilities to make that evidence the basis for a persuasive argument. The pervasive inequality of resources, such as time, money, and expertise, significantly distorts the deliberative process. Pervasive differences in socioeconomic power, for instance, provide dominant groups with inestimable advantages in the deliberative process. Low levels of education, lack of access to information technologies, and the sorts of grueling work schedules that make some stakeholders constantly choose between political participation and contact with friends and family, make it virtually impossible for disenfranchised groups to defend their interests and voice their concerns in public deliberation.24 Persistent discrimination may also limit effective participation, by leading members of historically oppressed groups to limit what they think they deserve and hence what they desire.25 The result is a vicious circle of impoverished self-worth, diminishing achievement, dampened desire, and a well-earned cynicism toward the prospects of receiving justice through political action. Yet even if these resource inequalities are somehow erased, say through a massive redistribution of wealth and an equally massive educational initiative designed to minimize the deleterious effects of systemic prejudice, those stakeholders unable to marshal the cognitive and communicative capabilities necessary to formulate persuasive claims and cogent objections will remain ineffective and thus locked out of full and equal participation. Some persons are more likely to be persuasive than others by virtue of being better educated and more eloquent. Deliberators, if they are to enjoy equal rights of participation, must not only be granted access to important information and possess relative equality of resources; they must also be relatively equal in the capabilities needed to have their claims acknowledged and taken seriously (for example, possessing a disposition conducive to group discussion). Equality of political influence, thus, depends on the equal distribution of the capability to reason effectively and to speak eloquently. What exactly are these capabilities required for political sustenance and how would we measure them in such a way that we might determine if they were equally

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held by all? The National Council of Social Studies suggests that the skills needed for civic competence in a multicultural democracy include the ability to analyze the role of dissent and other actions to influence and change public policy, practice forms of civic discourse consistent with the ideals of citizens in a democratic republic, analyze public policies and issues from the perspective of formal and informal political participants, evaluate how public policy and citizen behaviors model or violate ideals of a democratic republican form of government, and participate in activities to strengthen the common good of all citizens. If we translate these skills into a set of argumentative and communicative competencies, we come up with a list that includes: the ability for stakeholders to effectively analyze problematic situations, evaluate complex and competing evidence, marshal the reasons necessary to formulate one’s needs and desires into a cogent and persuasive argument, listen critically to others’ points of view, anticipate and refute objections, and possess the proficiency of political judgment required to synthesize one’s position with those offered by other stakeholders in a manner that addresses the root of the problem or dispute without requiring an undue sacrifice of either party’s convictions. But these competencies are still not enough. No deliberative design will work unless stakeholders have what Frans van Eemeren calls a discussion-minded attitude, Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson term civic magnanimity, or Richard Bernstein describes as the ethos of democratic debate.26 The demands of democratic ethos entail yet another list: participants should afford a special respect to minority views that are often ignored in traditional political outlets, adjust to their interlocutor’s frame of reference to establish an identification of common interests, restrain the impulse to become defensive when their positions and the ideals they are founded upon are questioned, maintain an openness to criticism and the demand for justification, and, perhaps most importantly, temper intelligence with humility and feel comfortable with letting others have the last word. James Bohman argues that these skills, competencies, and dispositions are a prerequisite for effective social freedom. Conversely, the lack of these skills and competencies often results in the inability of participants to gain an effective hearing and to exercise any reasonable degree of political agency. Those citizens, Bohman says, are forced to live below the political poverty line.27 From this vantage point, most U.S. citizens would suggest that they are living in the Third World. Much of the inequality of communicative power is the direct result of a lack of educational opportunities, a condition that demands that we reassess and redesign our educational system. Yet, the lack of education cannot explain all, and maybe not even most, of the inequality of communicative power. Some persons—particularly minorities and women—as we all know, are simply less likely to evoke an effective hearing, even if and when they state their claims within the dictates of social convention and reason. This is in large part due to the devaluing of certain forms of articulation, body comportment, and inference, a problem that I will address momentarily. Yet at times


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even assimilation into dominant modes of self-presentation is not enough to avoid the ingrained prejudices that result in having one’s claims disregarded. “Although deliberators will always choose to disregard some arguments, when this disregard is systematically associated with the arguments made by those we already know to be systematically disadvantaged, we should,” Lynn Sanders argues, “at least reevaluate our assumptions about deliberation’s democratic potential.”28 The problem, as all persons who have found themselves in positions of relative powerlessness in public meetings know (especially those systematically discriminated against on the basis of race, ethnicity, and/or gender), is that there is a significant difference between having the requisite communicative and cognitive skills for political influence and possessing the authority to have your claims taken seriously. The central problem facing deliberative democrats, Sanders avers, “is how more of the people who routinely speak less—who, through various mechanisms or accidents of birth and fortune, are least expressive in and most alienated from conventional American [sic] politics—might take part and be heard and how those who typically dominate might be made to attend to the views of others.”29 Two promising responses to this problem, I believe, can be found in Jorge Valadez’s doctrine of epistemological egalitarianism and Iris Marion Young’s call for communicative democracy. If reasoned public deliberation capable of securing democratic legitimacy is a priority, and the possession of a minimum threshold of cognitive and communicative capability is a necessary condition for political equality and hence of legitimacy within a deliberative democracy, then the reforms necessary to ensure that all citizens can participate in an equal fashion (especially those members of ethnocultural groups historically excluded from the political process) should be a political mandate backed by the force of law, as Jorge Valadez contends.30 Epistemological egalitarianism is Valadez’s attempt to specify a political principle and legal doctrine capable of underwriting legislation and public policy reform.31 As I read the doctrine, it sets the stage for formulating a civil rights statute that would command the sweep of congressional and juridical authority to protect the rights of equal access, distribute the resources, and educate for the capabilities needed for deliberative equality. Such a statute would go beyond the “naked framework”32 of previous civil rights legislation by considerably expanding the scope of public accommodation and justifying the expenditure of state funds to remedy the most deleterious effects of communicative inequality on political participation. Second-generation civil rights statutes, like the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), recognize the considerable differences between formal and real equality: formal equality does not constitute real equality when the persons treated the same are different by virtue of history, physiology, or the way they have been treated.33 With few exceptions, civil rights legislation aims for formal equality: identical treatment of persons who are considered identical but for race, gender, sexual preference, or some other characteristic listed under Title VII.

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Second-generation civil rights statutes are different. While they demand formal equality—for instance, all persons who but for a particular disability are otherwise qualified for employment should be treated in the same way as any able-bodied applicant—these statutes go further and require the “reasonable accommodation” of those subject to systemic discrimination. Thus, by requiring, and in some cases providing for, the means to accommodate difference in a manner that ensures that all have equal opportunity, they constitute a significant step toward enabling citizens to achieve meaningful equality (inasmuch as any law can) and, in turn, are building blocks for a public culture that nurtures the full participation of all in the economic and political community. If epistemological egalitarianism were ever to be more than a counterfactual ideal and to become a civil right of the equal opportunity of political influence, legislators, judges, and political advocates could invoke the doctrine to support public policies and laws designed to remedy each of the conditions of deliberative inequality. Social movements might use the doctrine as a tool to significantly broaden access to the means of political influence. They could, for instance, invoke the doctrine to challenge the standard practices of regulatory notice, proposed rulemaking, and public comment as insufficiently deliberative and seek to have them replaced with more collaborative processes of public involvement, such as negotiated rulemaking, that give concerned citizens and coalitions a seat at the table during the initial stages of deliberation where problems are defined and agendas set. The doctrine also provides political and legal justification for redistributing material and cognitive resources as needed to guarantee the equal opportunity to exercise political influence. While the doctrine would not likely justify a large-scale redistribution of wealth, it does support what Gutmann and Thompson call the basic opportunity principle—a standard for distributing health care, education, security, income, and work in such a manner that all citizens have the legitimate opportunity to enjoy a decent life—as a necessary condition of political equality.34 Beyond calls for revising welfare and workfare legislation, epistemological egalitarianism would focus attention on the conditions contributing to the relative deficiencies in political motivation and call on advocates and educators to generate strategies for achieving motivational parity. Systemic inequality, as I argued above, generates a vicious cycle of exclusion that drains the motivation for the most disadvantaged to participate in public deliberation or community collaboration. Thus, even if we were to equalize material resources, it may very well be the case that the effects of long-term discrimination have such a dehumanizing effect that additional remedies will have to be found to ensure political equality. One such remedy is state funding for civic associations that promote mutual assistance, further the pursuit of community objectives, and cultivate civic and political skills.35 Civic organizations such as community centers, day-care facilities, nursing homes, homeless shelters, neighborhood groups, and ethnic associations provide a powerful tool of civic


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revival and a necessary foothold for political participation. State support for civic organizations, in the form of help with operational expenses, costs incurred by publicity campaigns, and wage support so these associations could enjoy the benefits of full-time, relatively stable staff, would go far in reducing the inequalities in resources and influences that exist amongst civic associations, thus promoting a greater range of political positions contending for influence. Here, Valadez’s proposal goes a step further than the capability model of political equality advocated by Bohman. Finally, epistemological egalitarianism could energize educational reform in the direction of a greater commitment to multicultural and rhetorical pedagogy. The cognitive and rhetorical capabilities listed above in many important ways depend on stakeholders having substantial familiarity with other cultural groups so as to understand the basis of both their own and others’ historical experiences, present needs, and affective orientations. Such familiarity can come in small part through deliberating with members of other cultural groups, as long as the forms of communication do not preclude their effective voice. But such contact is too infrequent and short to fully develop the intellectual and affective dimensions of empathy required for members of dominant cultures to be sympathetic to proposals that address the needs of marginalized groups; participation must be buttressed by innovative multicultural educational practices to be effective. A commitment to deliberative equality also stresses the importance of rhetorical education as a form of cultural policy and political education. That is, “when we educate for rhetorical and argumentative competence we do nothing less than constitute—which is to say provide, nurture and discipline for—the reflexive, self-correcting agents able to create and sustain deliberative democracy.”36 The most attractive feature of epistemological egalitarianism, when read as a call for civil rights legislation, is that it is one of the few discussions of deliberative equality that bridges the gap between affirming the right to deliberate and suggesting a means for citizens to obtain the material, cognitive, and communicative resources necessary to cash in that right.37 If we use the success and shortcomings of the Americans with Disabilities Act as a model, it seems that epistemological egalitarianism could be an effective means for broadening access to deliberative forums and securing resources for civic associations as a means of restoring political motivation. Such measures are necessary for exposing forms of exclusion and providing means of increasing participation. However, unless the forms of internal domination that accompany the devaluing of certain forms of speech, body comportment, and inference are directly addressed, the adoption of such legislation would still leave deliberators open to a sort of sub rosa discrimination. Iris Marion Young claims that the valorization of deliberation over other discursive forms such as storytelling, rhetoric, and greeting works as a form of cultural imperialism, silencing minority voices by discounting the modes of self-presentation

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of groups whose views have already been systematically disregarded in public forums.38 Young suggests that deliberative democrats who define public deliberation solely in terms of the exchange of reasons—such as Seyla Benhabib, Joshua Cohen, and Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson—fail to recognize the importance of nondiscursive forms of expression such as art, dance, poetry, sex, songs, and humor often used in political dissent. Nondiscursive arguments are often the most effective means to exploit the gap between what public actors imagine is possible and what they are told is natural, and thus can serve as an inventional resource in the design of alternative models of human association and in the formation of public vocabularies used to contest the terms that define the parameters of our practical and passionate attachments.39 Narrow definitions of deliberation are, therefore, unable to account for the ways that political actors engage social controversy as the means for remaking social conventions and re-imagining norms of communicative action, the very essence of radical democratic action.40 I find Robert Reed’s investigation of the counterrevolutionary effects of formal rules of debate in Portuguese municipal assemblies potent evidence for Young’s claim that forcing participants to adopt alien forms of speech in deliberative forums can have antidemocratic effects.41 In 1976, two years after Portuguese military officers overthrew Antonio Salazar’s six-year corporatist regime in a bloodless coup, the Portuguese people ratified a revolutionary constitution that established a democratic government comprised of a system of municipal assemblies. “In these assemblies, people of all walks were to meet as equals to discuss and resolve local issues.”42 To fulfill the revolution’s promise, the new assemblies had to make decisions based on a fair hearing of members’ opinions. To organize discussion and to adjudicate conflicts of opinion the assembly adopted Robert’s Rules of Order. The adoption of Robert’s Rules, however, created a division within the assembly. On the one hand, there were members who were comfortable using Robert’s Rules and were adept at manipulating them to their advantage. These members were referred to as “politicos” (real politicians). On the other hand, some were extremely uncomfortable using Robert’s Rules. These members, referred to as “officeholders,” refused to conduct their discussion according to the formal rules and generally remained silent during assembly meetings. Reed found that the distinction between “politicos” and “officeholders” cut across class, cultural, and political lines. The cleavage between members was, instead, primarily constituted by the desire to use and the capacity to manipulate formal rules of deliberation. Though Robert’s Rules are designed to ensure that all members have an opportunity to engage in a fair and efficient form of political debate, they set an “admission price” that is much costlier to some members than others. Reed argues that the reason that “officeholders” did not comply with Robert’s Rules is that these formal conventions struck them as a “strange, confusing, and very artificial way of organizing debate.”43 Reed elaborates:


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The problem Robert’s Rules pose for officeholders is that the Rules conflict with common rhetoric. Common rhetoric is the quotidian persuasive style used during informal debates in Belmonte’s streets and cafes. This is the style that officeholders believe should apply to any public discussion of differences. Officeholders see no reason why common rhetoric should not also apply to the Assembly. Thus the right to speak in the Assembly would not demand learning a new way of speaking. . . . The dilemma for officeholders is acute. To them the Assembly is an arena of political debate in which they, as average people, can now participate. Yet they cannot bring their rhetorical skills perfected in Belmonte’s streets to its Assembly. Instead they must learn a rhetoric which is foreign to their experience and contrary to their understanding of the situation. Faced with this constraint, officeholders give up trying to participate in Assembly debate. Robert’s Rules thus divides the Assembly into those who speak, politicos, and those who don’t, officeholders. This division abrogates the promised aim of the postrevolutionary Assembly and invites Belmonte’s residents to make uncomfortable comparisons to the past.44

The introduction of formal procedural constraints into public debate in the Portuguese assemblies thwarted the people’s desire that all members have an equal voice. Thus while the assembly members may have been equally elected, the imposition of Robert’s Rules insures that they are not all equally effective. In this sense, we can say the introduction of a deliberative model of democracy, albeit in a very particular form, was counterrevolutionary. One could object to this line of argument by claiming that the example of the Portuguese assembly is stilted because it involves the adoption of a highly standardized, very formalistic model of parliamentary procedure. Yet, it was not anything inherent to Robert’s Rules that led officeholders to reject them. Robert’s Rules is emblematic of an even deeper division among the members of the assembly. The fundamental disagreement concerns the role of the assembly, the cultural identities of officeholders and politicos, and the nature of public and intercultural debate in the assembly. Robert’s Rules are not inherently discriminatory. If all parties agree to their use and have equal adeptness, skill, and knowledge about their use, they can be applied in a fair and neutral manner. Officeholders rejected Robert’s Rules because they were forced to abandon the ways of speaking that constituted their political and cultural identities. The result, as we have seen here, and which I have seen in several other settings, is the withdrawal from and the delegitimization of public deliberation. Some deliberative democrats, as Reed’s and Young’s respective arguments point out, mistakenly conceptualize discourse as a relatively stable, univocal phenomenon, ignoring the fact that modes of communication are irreducibly plural. Conversation, debate, discussion, narrative, and poetic speech are not simply different forms of expression, but rather each of these genres of communication is

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constituted by different norms, functions, and effects. Furthermore, each genre activates a different moral and political universe establishing distinctive rights, obligations, and orientations to the other. For instance, think of the many functions that the question can have and how the form, function, and effects of the question are shaped by the trajectory of the speech genre in which it is embedded. It makes all of the difference in the world if a question is part of a cross-examination, narrative, casual conversation among friends, visa application, inquisition, doctoral examination, police interrogation, or public deliberation. Each of these speech genres depends on questions to do its work, but each assigns radically different roles, rights, responsibilities, and strategies to their speakers. To unproblematically assume that the question functions innocently in deliberation—working only to clarify parties’ positions—is to turn a blind eye to the experience of having a discussion turn into an interrogation, a trial into an inquisition, or worse. Given the irreducible plurality of religious, philosophical, political, and moral views animating contemporary societies, it is not surprising that many political philosophers would theorize discourse monologically. Discourse, for contemporary political philosophy (especially those theorists inspired by Rawls and Habermas) functions as the Archimedean point by which the other forms of plurality can be reconciled. That is, for discourse to serve as the foundation of a democratic theory that fully accepts the “fact of reasonable pluralism” and views its mission as devising a scheme by which these diverse views can be reconciled without coercion, discourse itself must be conceptualized as a stable, unitary phenomenon. Most rhetorical theorists, I assume, recognize this as a misleading premise: parties in real political disputes, we know, operate with a number of co-present and even inconsistent orientations to public discussion. The commitment to politeness norms, for instance, works in tandem with the rational presupposition of unforced consensus. In real talk, we juggle the need to make decisions based on the force of the better argument with the need to forge social cooperation by holding our tongues. Just how we juggle these sometimes conflicting interests is what makes real talk so much more complex than any theoretical system of designed speech. By reducing the complexity of actual communicative action to a relatively univocal model of critical discussion and by ignoring the plurality of discursive forms co-present in any attempt to mediate differences of principle, these deliberative models simply displace the forms of coercion they set out to eliminate. Iris Marion Young’s call to expand the parameters of democratic theory to account for the political functions of both deliberative and evocative speech corrects this mistake. Because of the historical connotations of deliberativeness—such as the privileging of a formalist model of argumentation, a dispassionate demeanor that rejects the place of emotion in decision making, and an ordered and civil procession of temperate speakers that stamps out some of the unruly and uncivil forms of expression essential for political dissent—Young suggests the adoption of the


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phrase “communicative democracy” in place of “deliberative democracy” to denote the acceptance of a more open model of political communication.45 A model of communicative democracy begins with the recognition that deliberation involves much more than the resolution of moral disagreement. When political communities deliberate, they most often work to invent solutions to persistent, and often mundane, problems. Political communities also use public deliberation to forge visions of collective life and to formulate strategic plans to translate those visions into practice. Joint problem solving, community visioning, strategic planning, and conflict resolution are distinct activities with each operating from distinct communicative logics; further, any single deliberative episode is often constituted by a combination of these activities. A skilled facilitator understands how to steer participants through these different activities and when to invoke one of them, for instance collective visioning, to bridge an impasse reached in another, say conflict resolution. An adequate model of deliberation must be flexible enough to accommodate all of these activities and the different modes of communication required by each. A model of communicative democracy, concomitantly, endorses the inclusion of a plurality of speaking styles—most notably personal greetings, biographical narratives, and emotional appeals—capable of connecting the experiences and needs of community members to the nature of the problem and the differences generating conflict. Narratives, greetings, and emotional appeals foster the commitment to collaboration necessary for joint decision making by reminding stakeholders of their common experiences and causes, and in those instances where commonalities are in short supply, these evocative modes of address may supply the materials for constructing mutual concern and responsibility. Neither of these expansions of the parameters of deliberative democracy—the inclusion of multiple, overlapping orientations to collective decision making and the inclusion of evocative modes of address—should be taken as displacing the central role of argument in public deliberation. Young, contrary to what some of her critics claim, recognizes that when decisions must be made and competing interests are involved, it is necessary to engage in the offering of arguments and counterarguments for policy alternatives, and that the force of the better argument should be the decisive factor in choosing between competing alternatives.46 But she does recognize that narrowly drawn models of deliberation fail to account for the ways that the situations requiring collective action come into being. They also discount how the range of intelligible and acceptable alternatives is itself constituted in and through rhetoric. And, they ignore the fact that the ability to assess all of the evidence depends on the ability to feel the force of claims beyond one’s own experience. Hence, they fail to account for the conditions of possibility for effective argument. An inclusive model of political communication can, however, account for the ways that disagreeing parties come to recognize each other as deserving mutual respect and account for the means by which political arguments come to

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move audiences to act, something that narrowly drawn models can only stipulate. The primary question is, as John Forester has put it, not whether deliberation is argumentative or dialogical (it is both simultaneously), but whether it is transformative: “In their ritualized interactions, participants come to see each other in new ways; problems can be redefined and reformulated; opportunities can be clarified; priorities can be reordered individually and collectively. The process of deliberation and participation, then, is better seen not only as argumentative or dialogical in terms of who knows what, not only allocative, in terms of who gets what, but as transformative too, in terms of who comes to create new relationships and act on new commitments in actual practice.”47 Perhaps the most persuasive reason to endorse a deliberative account of democracy is its promise to marshal power in the service of justice: by adopting public deliberation as the primary means of collective choice, and by accepting the force of the better argument as the criteria for choosing policy alternatives, those in power would be stripped of the coercive means to maintain their privilege and would be forced to assent to the demands to afford a minimal threshold of political equality to all. But, if deliberation is narrowly defined in terms of a dispassionate, disembodied, formalistic mode of argumentation that requires stakeholders to negate the modes of expression that constitute the very forms of life they assert and hope to protect in deliberative forums, argumentation itself becomes an instrument of domination and public deliberation an arena of intimidation that minority groups would be better off rejecting. The expansion of deliberation to include all legitimate forms of political expression and the reconfiguration of argument to include affective as well as logical features, however, resuscitates the promise of deliberative democracy to generate laws that, because they are the product of a just process, carry the legitimate authority to force those in power to broaden access, redistribute resources, increase the capabilities of all citizens and, thus, provide the tools for fighting inequality.

THE PROMISE

OF

REASON

Having reviewed the requirements of deliberative freedom (defined as the right of all citizens—in both a formal and substantive way and without any stipulation that they abide by a particular comprehensive moral, religious, and cultural doctrine as a condition of citizenship—to make any and all decisions that govern them) and the requirements of deliberative justice (understood as the recognition of all citizens as deserving equal consideration and the commitment to provide the resources and train for the capacities to exercise political influence), I want to conclude this review by setting out the ideal of political justification underwriting deliberative democracy. Though it might seem intuitive that I would have started by describing the model of reason-giving that differentiates all accounts of deliberative democracy


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from their aggregative and liberal counterparts, it is necessary for me to conclude with such a description because the requirements of inclusion and equality, along with an acceptance of reasonable pluralism as a fact of political life, sets considerable background constraints on what constitutes an adequate account of political justification for a deliberative democracy. “For if one accepts the democratic process, agreeing that adults are, more or less without exception, to have access to it,” Joshua Cohen argues, “then one cannot accept as a reason within that process that some are worth less than others or that the interests of one group are to count for less than those of others.”48 Forcing an individual or group to abide by laws or to enroll in social policies that betray their ethical commitments is in essence to tell them that their visions of the good and the life-plans that vision engenders count for less, that the reasons they give to justify their convictions do not matter. In order to treat citizens as free and equal, then, one must support political proposals with reasons that all can, at least in principle, endorse. At the core of any account of deliberative democracy is a commitment to public reason: that legitimate decisions will be supported by reasons that all governed by those decisions can accept without having to negate their deeply held beliefs and values, or at least by reasons they cannot reasonably reject, because such rejection would entail forcing others to sacrifice their convictions.49 The ideal of public reason is foundational to a deliberative account of democratic legitimacy because it provides the basis on which those who disagree can continue to cooperate and still devise fair and legitimate laws together. Hence, for deliberative democrats, the legitimacy of any political proposal is in large part determined by whether and how far it is justified by public reasons. The idea of public reason is one of the most widely discussed in contemporary political philosophy, and almost all of that discussion has focused on the account of public reason set out in John Rawls’s Political Liberalism.50 Deliberative democrats invoke Rawls’s account of the ideal of public reason to regulate the form and content of public deliberation and the character of public deliberators: it is the cornerstone of Gutmann and Thompson’s principle of reciprocity,51 it animates James Bohman’s dialogical model of deliberation,52 it is the basis of Joshua Cohen’s account of the ideal deliberative procedure,53 and even those theories designed especially to address the problems of deliberating in multicultural contexts, such as those proposed by Monique Deveaux54 and Jorge Valadez,55 begin with Rawls’s formulation. Hence, my review of the role of argumentation in public deliberation proceeds from Rawls’s formulation of the ideal of public reason and how it shapes the form and trajectory of political justification in a pluralist democracy. The ideal of public reason does not refer to the heightened reasoning powers of the Leviathan. Public reason refers to the common—koinoi—reason, understood as a means of formulating plans, putting ends in order, and making decisions accordingly, of the public in its capacity as citizens constituting a polity. Rawls, working

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from Kant’s discussion of free public reason, formulates public reason as the governing standard of political discussion in a liberal democracy: Great values fall under the idea of free public reason and are expressed in the guidelines for public inquiry and in the steps taken to secure that such inquiry is free and public, as well as informed and reasonable. These values include not only the appropriate use of the fundamental concepts of judgment, inference, and evidence, but also the virtues of reasonableness and fair-mindedness as shown to the adherence to the criteria and procedures of common sense knowledge, and to the methods and conclusions of science when not controversial, as well as respect for the precepts governing reasonable political discussion.56

Rawls’s formulation expresses two related requirements, one concerning the guidelines of public inquiry and the other setting out the virtues guiding political judgment. First, the ideal of public reason sets a threshold on what counts as evidence for moral claims and what sorts of moral claims can justify political proposals. Since public debates often turn on contested empirical claims speculating the causes of social ills and the predicted consequences of social remedies, the ideal of public reason holds that citizens and officials should base their claims on publicly available evidence—that is, evidence that is both accessible and ascertainable by other concerned citizens. Moral claims do not have to be completely verifiable, public reason does not demand the standards of scientific proof, but they should not contradict the claims supported by the best available evidence. When moral claims do not rest on empirical evidence they should at least be plausible. The arguments supporting public policies should not require citizens to ignore their experience or reject their beliefs unless they are supported by the most reliable and widely accepted methods of inquiry. To ask less would be to “impose a requirement on other citizens to adopt one’s sectarian way of life as a condition of gaining access to the moral understanding that is essential to judging the validity of one’s moral claims.”57 Second, and more importantly, the ideal establishes the meaning of political reasonableness. To be politically reasonable means citizens are willing to collaborate with others in proposing fair terms of social cooperation and have the commitment to act on these terms, even if doing so means that they must accept less than what was hoped for. As politically reasonable persons, they will think it unreasonable to use political power, if they have it, to repress any conception of the good and the life-plans it generates that differs from their own, unless it can be demonstrated that it entails the degradation of others, and in that case they will use political power to contain only those aspects of the others’ actions that result in degradation, making no provisions that that person must convert to a belief system they deem rational to be included as full and equal members of the political community.58


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Rawls contrasts public reason with the nonpublic reasons used by churches, trade unions, neighborhood associations, and other institutions constituting civil society. Nonpublic reasoning might include premises about the authority of sacred texts and might appeal to the interpretive authority of particular individuals. Public reason also contrasts with the technical and instrumental reasoning of corporations, scientific communities, and bureaucratic organizations, which are typically directed toward particular members and concerned with the truth of some proposition or efficacy of some program. The distinction between public and nonpublic reason does not entail a division between the public and private, for there is no such thing as a private reason. Rather the distinction goes to the subject of public reason (constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice) and to its scope of applicability (a polity marked by an irreducible plurality of citizens considered as free and equal, not the members of some community or association).59 Of course, citizens draw their political convictions from their religious beliefs, community membership, occupational identities, and other nonpublic commitments. Yet, given the irreducible plurality of doctrines that define our moral, religious, philosophical, and political convictions, citizens have a duty of civility—the obligation that they, as well as public officials, explain how the principles and policies underwriting collectively binding decisions can be supported by the values of public reason.60 The duty of civility and standards of public reason do not apply to personal deliberations or those of voluntary associations. Nor does the ideal require that citizens use only public reasons to justify their proposals; as long as the reasons supplied by citizens’ comprehensive doctrines are combined with, or joint interaction gives rise to, public reasons, the ideal does not limit their admissibility. But the ideal of public reason and duty of civility does hold for political advocacy in public forums and for how citizens vote in public elections when fundamental processes of government (for example, the powers of the legislature, the scope of majority rule) or basic liberties (for example, suffrage, freedom of thought and expression, and the protections of the law) are at stake. Perhaps the central, and ironically the most controversial, consequence of the ideal of public reason is that it jettisons truth and all other forms of epistemic seriousness (that is, any substantive criteria of rational warrant, such as coherence, cogency, and plausibility) as the standards of evaluating the legitimacy and justice of applications of social and political power. Political reasonableness becomes an independent and freestanding and non-epistemic standard of validity for political argument. This does not entail rejecting epistemic standards for evaluating the purpose, design, responsiveness, feasibility, costs, and projected benefits of social and political policies; all of these questions require rational inquiry and justification. Yet, the reasons justifying the costs and benefits of a particular policy can’t tell us whether the policy was legitimately arrived at and whether its results will be just. Even if we were certain that a social and political policy was based on a true doctrine, and we in turn offered a well-formed set of arguments setting out in exquisite detail the relationship

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between the proposed policy and the truth of the doctrine supporting it, that justification would not be compelling in a political sense. Rather, that policy would have to be justified on the basis of public reasons; reasons that appeal to—and, more accurately, call into being—a shared political conception of justice. A political conception of justice is not derived from any particular comprehensive doctrine of the good, although it certainly should be consistent with most comprehensive doctrines. Instead, it is founded on the conviction that all citizens have the right to demand that political institutions, and the policies that emanate from them, be accountable in both design and practice to the demands of freedom and equality. Hence, the way to construct legitimate laws in the face of radical plurality, then, is to allow the critical ideal of political reasonableness to guide the invention of public reasons justifying a particular social and political policy, and to use it as a standard of political critique to expose those policies that controvert the freedom and/or equality (understanding that disagreements over the meaning and scope of these terms form the substance of political debates). The ideal of public reason, therefore, constitutes a critical standard of reasonableness that participants invoke to regulate their own and others’ argumentative conduct in two ways. First, it regulates the production of arguments by serving as a standard for self-evaluation. Citizens can use the ideal as a guide for determining which of their arguments are acceptable for public discussion. Second, the ideal of public reason regulates the evaluation of argumentation by serving as a standard for political criticism. One can criticize others’ arguments on the grounds that, by resting on premises and modes of reasoning that cannot be warranted by the standards of public reason, they transgress the limits of civility. This second role, while not necessarily assuming nor justifying enforcement by the coercive use of institutional power, does not rule out the use of social pressure to encourage compliance with the standards of public reason.61 Any policy supported by arguments that degrade the arguments of others, regardless of how popular the policy, is unreasonable and can be pointed out as such. This separates the political ideal from any simple notion of liberal neutrality. While the ideal of political reasonableness may dictate that the state remain impartial to competing conceptions of the good, it also demands that the state protect, and provide for, the conditions of equal respect, and the minimum psychic and material conditions necessary to live according to that ideal. By offering acceptable reasons and voicing disapproval of those reasons that transgress the limits of civility, citizens can use the ideal of public reason as a method of holding the state and other governing agencies accountable for providing those conditions. Finally, the ideal of public reason not only regulates disagreement; it may also motivate citizens to adopt a public-spirited perspective and a sense of collective responsibility. Joshua Cohen argues that the requirement to justify proposals with public reasons shapes the preferences of citizens in two ways. First, the practice of providing arguments for one’s preferences will cultivate a commitment to the


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deliberative resolution of important public matters; when deliberation is carried out in an inclusive forum that puts a premium on public reason, the quality of decisions will improve, and the laws and policies that result will be both more rational and reasonable. Secondly, once citizens recognize that they are unable to provide public reasons for their convictions (or that their convictions trade on the devaluing of others’ views), they will be more likely to alter those preferences so as to make them more consistent with the needs of all.62 Pure self-interest may give way to a concern for the common good. Prejudices thrive on the sorts of mutual isolation pictured by strategic models of political interaction, but they are difficult to sustain when subject to the light of public reason. Because public reasoning requires citizens to reflect on the consequences and assumptions of their own beliefs and values relative to other citizens, and then insists that citizens articulate the public basis of those assumptions, public deliberation cultivates the very virtues of political reasonableness the ideal of public reason requires. In other words, public deliberation governed by the ideals of public reason becomes a form of democratic paideia.63 I now want to discuss two objections to the ideal of public reason and two possible responses. The first objection claims that the ideal of public reason, because it sets such strict evidentiary requirements for public justification, creates translation problems for cultural minorities. James Bohman’s dialogical model of public deliberation is designed to answer this very problem. The second objection reveals the limits of such a dialogical model, since philosophers such as Iris Young and Chantal Mouffe charge that dialogic models of deliberation, and the modes of political reasonableness they endorse, may be used by powerful agents to quell political dissent. I conclude with a discussion of Yameng Liu’s model of cross-arguing, a model that refutes any facile opposition between cooperation and agonistic debate. The first charge leveled at the ideal of public reason is that it is not neutral, but biased in favor of the status quo by virtue of restricting the admission and influence of alternative epistemologies, in particular those underwriting the political claims of cultural minorities. As strongly as I endorse the notion of public reason, Rawls’s formulation does not sufficiently address cultural difference, and it fails to recognize the transformative role that oppositional argument plays in democratic politics. Public reason, as characterized by Dryzek, “is singular and universal: its terms are identical for all, and all individuals who exercise it will reach the same conclusions.”64 Public reason requires a world of shared premises, but the ideal, as expressed by Rawls, does not account for how those premises come to be shared in the face of radical plurality. It seems that Rawls, and I would add Gutmann and Thompson here, resolves this problem by stipulation rather than argument. Yet not all individuals or groups reason in the same fashion or from the same epistemological foundations, and no amount of definitional fiat will change that fact. Moreover, the political claims of minority cultures are typically formulated in and through these alternative epistemological and ontological frameworks.

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Jorge Valadez argues that there are three kinds of differences in these conceptual frameworks that make the demands of public reason difficult, if not impossible, for minority cultures to satisfy without considerable loss: “Those dealing with the fundamental claims concerning the nature of reality, those dealing with normative principles and practices, and those concerning epistemic principles used to generate and validate factual and normative claims.”65 Thus, the very methods used to gather information about the world and to determine if knowledge claims are true and false may differ considerably. The problem is clear, since political arguments made by all citizens would require the appropriate use of the fundamental concepts of judgment, inference, and evidence . . . the virtues of reasonableness and fair-mindedness as shown to the adherence to the criteria and procedures of common sense knowledge, and . . . the methods and conclusions of science when not controversial.66

This requirement places considerably higher demands on some citizens than on others. To satisfy the demands of public reason, then, requires that members of minority cultures, working from alternative conceptual frameworks, either refrain from basing their political claims upon their beliefs and values or that they translate those feeling, faiths, and traditions into the dominant idiom. Given this choice it seems that members of minority cultures will either refuse to participate in deliberation, which is typically the case now, or they will attempt to translate their political claims, and more than likely find themselves on the losing side in public deliberation, which, in turn, will erode their confidence in the legitimacy of the resultant decisions and further erode their willingness to cooperate in making and abiding by those decisions. What needs to be shown, to reclaim the ideal of public reason as an inclusive and just principle in light of this charge, is that this translation process does not unduly strip minorities’ political claims of their force—a justification, needless to say, that has not been forthcoming. Rather, the typical liberal response, inspired by Rawls’s account of political liberalism, begins with an assurance that minority cultures have the right to live according to their own ideals and to base any and all community decisions on their local traditions as long as those decisions do not result in actions interfering with others’ freedom. In fact, the liberal will reply, the claims for the recognition of cultural traditions and for the protected space to live according to those traditions are perfectly intelligible within the dictates of public reason; they are the demands for self-development and self-determination that are at the core of any liberal democratic polity. Thus, these claims are easily translated into public reasons. To demand more than the opportunity to exercise these rights, to demand that one’s beliefs and values be seen as a legitimate basis for collectively binding public policy, is to “impose a requirement on other citizens to adopt one’s sectarian


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way of life as a condition of gaining access to the moral understanding that is essential to judging the validity of one’s moral claims.”67 The liberal points out that it is this imposition, the attempt to claim that one’s right to self-development and selfdetermination entails that others live according to one’s own vision of the good, that the ideal of public reason is designed to preclude. This response mistakenly assumes, however, that the justice claims of ethnic, cultural, and religious communities arise simply because of the “inadequate application of ideal liberal principles and practices, which, if realized, would secure justice for all citizens regardless of their social and cultural attachment.”68 While some justice claims can be responded to by expanding the scope of constitutional protections, others demand their revision and reconfiguration. Why should we assume that members of cultural minority groups readily separate their moral and religious views from their understandings of justice? The history of democratic social movements certainly seems to suggest otherwise. The alternative conceptual frameworks animating the traditions and practices of cultural minorities certainly include ecological, political, moral, psychological, and economic views on “constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice.”69 And, further, the “political conception of justice” set out by Rawls is itself underwritten by a set of culturally and historically specific epistemological and ontological assumptions.70 Thus, a minority political advocate might respond to her liberal interlocutor that she does not wish to impose her views on anyone else, but instead wants to make a political claim that has a reasonable chance of influencing, and perhaps even leading to the revision of, the basic set of terms constituting our received ideals of justice and governance. A sort of challenge, she might note, that must come from outside the orthodox paradigms of thought and certainly from outside the established guidelines of inquiry. She does not want to force her fellow citizens to substitute her vision for their own, but believes that her story, her reasons, might be reason enough for them to rewrite their vision, that her particular claim might be enough to reconfigure what counts as the common good. Of course, she knows, there are no guarantees that her views will persuade her fellow citizens to revise their conceptions of justice; nor does she think mechanisms should be put in place that would demand that they do so. Yet, if the promises of deliberation are true, that it generates more reflective, more tolerant, and more critical listeners, then it certainly seems as though public deliberation is her best shot. If, however, the ideal of public reason forces her to refrain from invoking her feelings, faiths, and traditions to support her political proposals or to translate them in such a way that they are indistinguishable from the dominant public idiom, doesn’t it cancel out the very promise of deliberation? It seems that the ideal of public reason erases the crucial distinction between imposition and influence. Rawls apparently does not trust citizens with the capacity to decide for themselves what constitutes a political conception of justice. At least he does not trust citizens with the rhetorical tools that might lead them to revise

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and expand it, since he fears that demagogues will control those resources. So he and his followers formulate an ideal of public reason that builds in so much presumption for the status quo that it forecloses radical reform. Robert Ivie and Iris Marion Young have made effective cases that such accounts of deliberative democracy have at best an ambivalent relationship to rhetoric and at worst a fearful contempt for it.71 This critique of Rawls certainly lends support to their claim, yet I would extend their critique to the unproductive tension between the ideal of public reason and the requirements of political equality. If, as I argued above, an adequate account of deliberative equality entails that all citizens have an equal opportunity to exercise political agency (understood as the ability to support or destabilize collective outcomes), then the ideal of public reason—because it imposes translation requirements that strip some citizens of the means for change and because it weights presumption against radical change—may in fact limit political equality. It seems that the ideal of public reason cashes out equality as assimilation. An adequate response to this critique would begin by acknowledging and accounting for the model of translation implicit in the ideal of public reason. In its Rawlsian guise, the ideal relies on an “extractionist” model of translation. In extractionist models, following S. Lily Mendoza, For any meaningful transaction to occur, it becomes incumbent upon the Receptor to master the Communicator’s frame of reference and become proficient in its linguistic and epistemic requirements in order to meet the latter on that prescribed/privileged ground. Here the Communicator exerts minimal effort in understanding the other, leaving the burden of clarity and adequate interpretation/expression mainly on the target Receptor.72

In terms of public reason, it is clearly incumbent upon citizens to demonstrate that they are justifying their political proposals with public reasons and, further, that they are obligated to make sure that the terms used to formulate those reasons are the self-same for all. This is a “psychologically violent model of communication”73 that, as I argued above, ultimately results in a cycle of withdrawal and delegitimization. If we want to reclaim the ideal of public reason, I contend that we should replace this extractionist model with, again following Mendoza, a dynamic equivalence model that begins with a context-sensitive analysis of both the communicators’ and receptors’ respective conceptual frameworks and uses this analysis to search for a functional equivalence between terms and images emanating from those frameworks. A critical component of the “dynamic equivalence” model is a commitment to a “starting-point plus model of communication.”74 In terms of political advocacy, this is, Mendoza explains,


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an approach that makes evaluative and interpretive judgments not on the basis of where someone or something is positionally located at any given point in time, but on whether one is moving toward or away from an identified purpose or objective. In other words, in terms of a starting point, distance from the goal is nowhere here considered nearly as important as which direction the movement is ultimately heading.75

This model has several implications for revising the ideal of public reason. First, we should conceive of public reason as an interactional process rather than as the mode of solitary reflection and judgment that is implicit in Rawls’s formulation. Following from the first revision, all stakeholders should have a mutual responsibility to ask for and perform, if possible, such a dynamic translation of all claims into public reasons rather than forcing only those who live outside the dominant culture to do so. Moreover, public reasons themselves should be understood as emerging from the process of deliberation and not as preformulated entities vying for supremacy. And, finally, political claims should be judged as to whether they are moving toward the articulation of a shared political conception of justice, or some component thereof, and not as to how they express some extant ideal. This last revision would make it possible to retain the ideal’s normative power because it could be used to distinguish between those proposals that are moving in the direction of a shared political conception of justice, or component thereof, that expands democratic franchise and equal opportunity for all—perhaps including all sentient creatures—and those that move against that vision and articulate a future where some are worth less than others, say, those who are not saved. The recognition that democratic societies are constituted by multiple, diverse, and sometimes competing methods of political justification and by the concomitant need to see public reason as an emergent property of communicative interaction is the impetus for James Bohman’s dialogical model of public deliberation. Bohman argues contra Rawls that the only way to adequately deal with the deep doctrinal conflicts brought on by cultural pluralism is to reject any criteria that stipulate that legitimate decisions must be underwritten by a rational consensus—that is, to abandon the requirement that citizens must always provide each other mutually compelling reasons. The ideal of public reason, Bohman notes, is an inadequate standard for public deliberation because it fails to recognize that the plurality of conceptual frameworks circulating within democratic public cultures carry with them an equally diverse constellation of modes of political reasonableness. Those conceptual frameworks engender alternative perspectives not only on justice and governance but also on ways to resolve political disputes. Here, Bohman goes further than any other deliberative theorist in describing the challenges presented by cultural pluralism in constructing a model of public deliberation. In place of the ideal of public reason, Bohman suggests that we understand public deliberation as “a dialogical process of exchanging reasons for the purpose of

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resolving problematic situations that cannot be settled without interpersonal coordination and cooperation.”76 Such a dialogical approach holds that the existence of an impartial standpoint leading to the generation of universally accepted reasons is an illusion. In democratic politics, any and all decisions are only provisionally justified; no citizen can claim to have found the set of reasons that will convince all others once and for all. Most of the time citizens are simply looking to establish a set of provisional assumptions, assumptions that may be held by the participants for a variety of conflicting and even contradictory reasons yet one sufficient for a temporary convergence they can use to forge ongoing working relationships. Public deliberation is successful, then, inasmuch as the reasons it produces are sufficient to motivate continued cooperation; that is, when participants believe that “they have contributed to and influenced the outcome even when they disagree with it.”77 Bohman suggests that if a series of dialogic mechanisms—articulating previously latent beliefs, sharing personal experiences, applying norms to specific cases, developing more inclusive and sophisticated accounts of ideals, and taking alternative perspectives—are built into public deliberation, then they will result in moral compromises between rival visions of the good and the establishment of collaborative arrangements designed to address ongoing social problems. And, over time, these compromises and collaborative arrangements may transform the diverse moral points of view of the deliberative body (in a fashion similar to what Gadamer calls a fusion of horizons) into a new moral framework, or, in Rawls’s terms, a shared political conception of justice, capable of disclosing the communal resources available for political transformation, the resources needed for and capable of addressing the sorts of complex social problems threatening the integrity of democratic institutions. Bohman’s dialogical model of public deliberation is certainly the most sophisticated of any within the literature on deliberative democracy. It directly addresses many of the problems posed by translation. By lessening the epistemic standards of public reason, recontextualizing deliberation as a problem-solving discourse rather than an adversarial contest, and proposing a set of dialogical mechanisms that encourage citizens to forge collaborative arrangements, Bohman reconfigures public deliberation as a space for civic cooperation and moral transformation. But I am afraid that his solution, while an ingenious response to the problems of translation, leaves deliberative democracy especially vulnerable to the second critique of public reason: deliberation, because it defines reasonableness in terms of dialogic civility and social cooperation, is a method by which powerful agents quell political dissent. Those convinced that the present moment is marked by structural inequalities resulting in significant injustices and pervasive social ills—and that, moreover, existing political institutions and their operating procedures are designed to legitimize greed, hypocrisy, and exploitation—will be reluctant to work within those institutions and through their procedures.


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Dialogue, civility, teamwork, and collaboration are the current buzzwords of industry. These processes have been co-opted by powerful governing agents to describe their working procedures for managing disagreement and resolving problems, procedures designed to reproduce institutional power and to manage radical challenges to that power. In fact, those in power have always been quick to invite dissenters to engage in dialogue and to sit down and help them define and resolve “problematic situations.” But this invitation comes with considerable costs. Once engaged in dialogue, the norms of decorum and the demands of social cooperation make it difficult to make radical critiques of current arrangements, to ascribe blame, and to point out complicity; each of these moves threatens the faces of other participants, whose identities are constituted by their commitment to these procedural norms and their positions of social power. As a result, it becomes almost impossible to forge the kinds of trust and mutual respect necessary for collaboration. These sorts of oppositional arguments often result in political advocates being branded as unreasonable, selfish, narcissistic, and uncollaborative and, thus, as no longer deserving of an effective hearing. Furthermore, once advocates sit down to deliberate with governing agents they will find themselves constantly being chided for failing to recognize the limits of what is possible due to limited funds, an overworked staff, ingrained prejudices, bureaucratic red tape, and so forth. They will be told that the world of real politics, as opposed to the theoretical discussions imagined by radical social theorists (and deliberative democrats too), necessitates bargains and compromises. Of course this is true, but to what extent? It is certainly reasonable for political advocates to assume that many of the limits imposed on their political imaginations are the product of false necessities and the naturalization of contingent circumstances in the service of reproducing the status quo. How are advocates to tell, when inside of a deliberative model like Bohman’s, which trades the normative force of public reason for the dialogical civility necessary to forge social cooperation, when it is truly reasonable to limit their demands or when, instead, they are selling themselves and their causes short? Bohman, I think, and Gutmann and Thompson, I am sure, would reply that the recursive nature of deliberation is sufficient to prevent this sort of distortion.78 Deliberative norms are only provisionally justified. Any procedural norm, regardless of its original intent, if applied in a formalistic and rigid manner, will result in antidemocratic consequences. Thus, if those norms can be shown to reproduce social hierarchy and prevent political transformation they should be recalled and revised. I think this is an intelligent response, and I have made it on several occasions. However, I now think that the norm of revision is too facile to completely answer this objection. It simply fails to acknowledge how difficult it is for participants, especially in contexts of unequal social power, to challenge procedural norms from within a deliberative process. That is, when one attempts to challenge the communicative and epistemic norms regulating a deliberative process, she or he

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necessarily steps outside of that process, for at least a moment, to launch the challenge. At the very least, they must make meta-discursive moves that result in stopping the process long enough for participants to reflect on their own and others’ conduct and to revise that conduct if necessary. So, when participants actually engage in such meta-discursive behavior, especially in contexts marked by inequality, they are often seen as “outsiders” and other participants, again because their identities are intimately tied to those norms and the social positions those norms afford. The result, needless to say, is not typically increased social cooperation or the sorts of moral transformation envisioned by deliberative theorists like Bohman and Gutmann and Thompson. The norm of revision assumes too much and too little: when it comes to the possibility of launching challenges to the oppressive uses of dialogue, it assumes too much; when it comes to accounting for how those in positions of power are constituted in and through these communicative norms, it assumes too little. Given their conviction that “existing social and economic structures have set unacceptable constraints on the terms of deliberation and its agenda,”79 and the difficulty of challenging these constraints from within deliberative processes, radical political advocates’ distrust of public deliberation—especially those models that privilege dialogue over oppositional argument as a means for redressing systemic injustices—is not irrational or unreasonable. To the contrary, for the political activist, as Iris Marion Young notes, those citizens concerned with social justice should remain “at least partially outside, protesting the process, agenda, and outcome of these proceedings and demonstrating against the underlying relations of privilege and disadvantage that condition them. They should aim to speak on behalf of those de facto excluded and attempt to use tactics such as strikes, boycotts, and disruptive demonstrations to pressure these bodies to act in ways that respond to the needs and interests of those effectively excluded.”80 Public deliberation in this dialogic mode, regardless of how formally inclusive, constrains the range of reasons and forms of political contest too severely to be the primary weapon against injustice. It is this inability to recognize the ineradicability of political conflict as the condition of possibility for a democratic politics that, for Chantal Mouffe, renders deliberative democracy, at least in its current guises, potentially dangerous.81 Mouffe suggests that the ideal of public reason, and its formulation of political reasonableness, may constitute a strategy for excluding those it deems unreasonable, including those radical dissidents who insist on challenging the neo-corporatist hegemony of social democracy and neo-liberalism through non-deliberative protest.82 The ideal of public reason sets out clear and strict criteria for determining if a person is politically reasonable, and, hence, to be counted in the legitimation pool. That is, those who accept the burdens of judgment (the obligation to base one’s arguments on common sense and noncontroversial evidence) and who are willing to propose and abide by the fair terms of cooperation, understood here as


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the demands of dialogic civility, must consent, at least hypothetically, to any and all laws that govern their conduct. On the other hand, since they reject the ideal of public reason, politically unreasonable persons—those rejecting the burdens of judgment and the obligation to propose and abide by the fair terms of cooperation (either by choice or because they do not possess the requisite competencies to choose)—fall outside of the legitimation pool and thus can be subject to coercive state power without their consent. By drawing a border between deliberation and antagonism, and, thereby, between reasonable and unreasonable citizens, the ideal of public reason actually justifies the use of coercive methods for containing political dissent. Gutmann and Thompson’s distinction between deliberative and nondeliberative disagreement is a prime example of this strategy: “a deliberative perspective does not address people who reject the aim of finding fair terms for social cooperation; it cannot reach those who refuse to press their public claims in terms accessible to their fellow citizens.”83 While we can understand, and can even sympathize with the urge to dismiss those few who fail to show their fellow citizens a minimal level of respect and care, to exclude such individuals from the legitimation pool, Mouffe suggests, may entail dangerous consequences. Those dismissed from the legitimation pool will more than likely find alternative spaces and modes of political identification such as radical religious fundamentalism, proto-fascist enclaves, and militias, to name a few.84 It does not seem likely that those persons deeply committed to a religious, cultural, or political belief deemed too “unreasonable” for public discussion will refrain from trying to persuade others of the rightness of their position. Deliberative democrats falsely presuppose that most radical political factions value social peace and order above their deep doctrinal commitments. It seems more likely that groups who find their justifications systematically excluded from public debates will either coalesce into separatist movements or will find ways, such as terrorism or threats of nonparticipation, to force their opinions onto the public agenda. As Stephen Holmes argues, “the strategy of avoidance can exacerbate pent-up social tensions, eventually engendering terrorism or a revolutionary explosion by denying legitimate expression to deeply felt beliefs.”85 The alternative, Mouffe suggests, is an “agonistic pluralism” that recognizes the irreducible role of oppositional argument in democratic politics. From this perspective, the aim of democratic politics is to “transform antagonism to agonism.” This project “requires providing channels through which collective passions will be given ways to express themselves over issues which, while allowing enough possibility for identification, will not construct the opponent as an enemy but as an adversary. An important difference with the model of deliberative democracy is that for agonistic pluralism, the prime task of democratic politics is not to eliminate passions from the sphere of the public in order to render a rational consensus possible, but to mobilize those passions towards democratic designs.”86 Though Mouffe presents agonistic

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pluralism as an alternative to deliberative democracy, I do not think her distinction necessarily requires us to make that choice. Public deliberation, if conceived with all of the complexity inherent in our actual talk rather than as theoretically designed speech, can accommodate both dialogue and oppositional argument. The challenge is to discover models of deliberative engagement that do not require that citizens discount their passions, cultural knowledge, and deeply held convictions. I am sure that no one theory or model is sufficient for this task, but I would like to close this review, which has already gone on far too long, with a brief discussion of a model of argumentative engagement that I think is capable of generating the sort of moral transformations in citizens’ preferences that makes Bohman’s dialogical model attractive within an agonistic space that “mobilizes” the passions and convictions of adversaries as an inventional resource for “democratic designs.” The very possibility of argumentation, it seems, trades upon the existence of some substantively constituted common ground, even if merely an agreement on the procedural norms regulating critical discussion. As we have seen throughout this review, however, the possibility of such a rational consensus on either substantive or procedural grounds remains a problematic, if not an impossible, assumption. So, Yameng Liu argues, the field of argumentation studies in particular and the rhetorical discipline in general have shied away from developing normative theoretical models of argumentation between culturally heterogonous and ideologically incompatible agents.87 Yet cross-cultural argumentation between ideologically opposed agents does occur and it is not always futile. By looking toward these encounters, in particular the debate between the East and West over human rights, Liu finds that argument across cultural and ideological divides does not necessarily require the preexistence of common ground; rather, the methods and norms of what he terms “cross-arguing,” which unlike dialogical models presupposes an adversarial and even a mutually hostile relationship amongst members, constitutes the grounds necessary for continued negotiation and the construction of new conceptual frameworks. Specifically, Liu found that in the debates over human rights, non-Western advocates became adroit at using the terms and methods of Western discourse. They became experts at formulating their positions within Western conceptual frames and, moreover, were able to exploit the internal contradictions of Western human rights discourses as a means of both showing how their positions were warranted within the Western tradition and how U.S. domestic policy could be consistently critiqued with its own conceptual tools. Non-Western advocates found that [b]y strategically aligning themselves with some Western positions and perspectives against others, they would be able to blur the line between Self and Other, or between the protagonist and the antagonist in a cross-communal debate, making it more complicated and difficult for their opponents to maintain their focus on the target of their criticism or to sustain their argumentative offensive.88


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Consistently faced with this tactic, Western diplomats and critics found themselves in a strategically awkward position. They could either refuse to engage their nonWestern interlocutors—a tactic used by some public commentators like William Safire—or they could respond in kind by justifying Western positions on human rights in non-Western terms, a tactic endorsed by William Alford, Daniel Bell, and Amartya Sen.89 Thus, Western advocates too were able to find counter-traditions within non-Western discourses to justify liberal values and to show the long history of internal debate and division constituting non-Western discourses too often unproblematically assumed to be monolithic. Liu suggests that a novel mode of cross-cultural and cross-ideological argument emerges from this encounter: Rather than trying in vain to meet in a neutral battleground for a direct argumentative confrontation before a common audience, the two opposing parties in this paradigm would venture in the others’ territory and seek to win the battle by provoking a civil war behind the opponents’ line. In other words, the two contending sides would each try to justify its position in the other party’s terms, and to turn the inter-communal issue that divides them into an intra-communal conflict between two factions of the opponent’s side. The mutual infiltration, appropriation, and persuasion such a mode entails allow cross-cultural interlocutors to bypass the necessary lack of substantive common ground that would otherwise prevent them from engaging each other. They prevent them from bogging down in a deadlock over whose justificatory system to apply. They, moreover, guarantee that arguments framed in two radically different languages are not just intelligible, but meaningful and persuasive, to their respectively targeted audiences.90

Cross-arguing, because it reveals the multivocal and contradictory nature of each party’s traditions of political justification—and I am tempted to add each society’s political conception of justice—and calls on each party to “intervene in the domestic affairs of the other,” contributes to a process where the borders between self and other, internal and external, and us and them are increasingly blurred. Cross-arguing thus leads to “a reconfiguration of the internal forces and interests constitutive of the addressee’s domestic cultural formation in response to, or in reaction against, the interests and desires that inform the addresser’s arguments, causing the formation to become a little more other-oriented or a little less self-contained each time such a reconfiguration occurs.”91 In other words, cross-arguing makes it increasingly difficult to sustain an image of the other as the enemy; instead, we see the other as an adversary to be competed with, but not destroyed.92 Further, this competitive desire will engender the need to understand what was once seen as alien and to reconstruct argumentation as a contest in which each side attempts to create an ever-wider frame of reference, a more inclusive conceptual scheme, so that they can be the ones to define the terms of the emergent context of mutual rights

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and obligations. Yet because cross-arguing is a game without end every configuration or scheme will be sure to be contested and revised. I see in cross-arguing one way of reformulating public reason as an interactive and emergent ideal to be built by participants in deliberative forums. It has the unique advantage of not presupposing a counterfactual set of ethical dispositions that, as we have seen, may be used to turn political reasonableness into a method for silencing radical dissent. Nor does it trade the normative force of the ideal in for moral compromises, though it too is capable of engendering the invention of collaborative arrangements for addressing ongoing social problems. Cross-arguing, as a model of democratic disagreement, highlights the transformative potential of public debate and deliberation. It is precisely the transformative potential immanent in political controversy, the potential to make incommensurability the engine of innovation, and the potential for agonistic debate to transform self-interested participants into public-spirited actors that makes it so valuable for theories of deliberative democracy. This acknowledgment does not, however, mean that in the end we are left with a choice between argument and dialogue, between endorsing a rowdy rhetoric and dispassionate deliberation. We should avoid the trap of positing some transcendent, universal powers to communication, where any model of dialogue, debate, or deliberation is thought to be adequate for all communities and all projects. Public deliberation, in its actual uses, is constituted by a plurality of modes of communication and reason. It takes immense skill to know when to initiate dialogue or when to engage in argument, and it takes considerable insight to know what should count as an authoritative reason to act. But I remain convinced that ordinary political actors possess both the skill and insight to construct and ratify the laws that bind them together. And, if some don’t, then we, especially those of us that teach and write about communicative action, are mutually obligated to construct the spaces where those skills can be acquired and to design deliberative forums conducive to the communicative and reasoning styles of all. Whether any of these proposals reviewed here can make good on their promises remains to be seen. All I have been able to do is to show that it is indeed possible, but, as we all know, showing that something is possible is far from redeeming a promise. I remain encouraged, however, that deliberation can make good by the fact that the seeds of revision and reform exist in the mundane forms of talk and practical reason animating communal life, and, therefore, the principles of justice and procedures of adjudication can always be remade and reimagined in and through rhetorical action.

NOTES 1. Karl Wallace, “Rhetoric and Politics,” The Southern Speech Journal 20 (1955): 195–203 at 195. 2. James Bohman, “The Coming of Age of Deliberative Democracy,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 6 (1998): 400–425 at 400.


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3. I take this formulation from my “Reasonableness: Political not Epistemic” paper presented at the Alta Conference on Argumentation, Alta, Utah, August 2001. 4. See John Thibaut and Laurens Walker, Procedural Justice: A Psychological Account (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1975); Allan Lind and Tom Tyler, The Social Psychology of Procedural Justice (New York: Plenum, 1988); and George Klosko, Democratic Procedures and Liberal Consensus (Oxford U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2000). 5. See Jorge Valadez, Deliberative Democracy, Political Legitimacy, and Self-Determination in Multicultural Societies (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2001), 30–70. 6. Seyla Benhabib, “Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 67–94 at 68. 7. Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2000), 5–6. 8. Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and its Critics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), 65–82. 9. I take this from my own experience facilitating deliberations over public housing, domestic partner legislation, and public health initiatives. For more empirical support see David Chrislip and Carl Larson, Collaborative Leadership: How Citizens and Civic Leaders Can Make a Difference (San Francisco, Calif.: Josey-Bass Publishers, 1994). 10. See Carl Larson, Catherine Sweeny, Allison Christian, and Linda Olson, “Collaborative Leadership and Health: A Review of the Literature” (unpublished manuscript on file with the author); and Stephen Dempsey, Andrew Goetz, and Carl Larson, Metropolitan Planning Organizations: An Assessment of the Transportation Planning Process, A Report to Congress (Denver, Colo.: University of Denver Intermodal Transportation Institute, 2000). The results of this study may be found at . 11. Michael Walzer, “Deliberation and What Else?” in Deliberative Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement, ed. Stephen Macedo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 58–69 at 68. 12. See James S. Fishkin, Democracy and Deliberation: New Directions for Democratic Reform (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991); and James S. Fishkin, The Voice of People: Public Opinion and Democracy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995). 13. Fishkin proposes that the participants be given compensation for expenses and any time lost on the job in order to avoid the objection that only the leisured could participate. 14. Fishkin’s initial reporting of the results of the British experiment confirm this belief. See Fishkin, Voice of the People, 177–81. 15. John Dryzek, “Legitimation and Economy in Deliberative Democracy,” Political Theory 29 (2001): 651–69. 16. Dryzek, “Legitimation and Economy,” 660. 17. Bruce Williams and Albert Matheny, Democracy, Dialogue, and Environmental Disputes: The Contested Languages of Social Regulation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995). Williams and Matheny’s dialogical approach to environmental dispute resolution is consistent with Dryzek’s model of discursive legitimacy. 18. Dryzek, “Legitimation and Economy,” 662. 19. Dryzek, “Legitimacy and Economy,” 663-65. 20. I take this formulation of the relationship between political equality and democracy from Jack Knight and James Johnson, “What Sort of Equality Does Deliberative Democracy Require?” in Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, ed. James Bohman and William Rehg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 279–319.

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21. Fishkin, Democracy and Deliberation, 33. 22. For a discussion of civil inattention as a form of contempt see Thomas Christano, “The Significance of Public Deliberation,” in Deliberative Democracy, 243–78 at 252. 23. Knight and Johnson, “What Sort of Equality,” 280–81. 24. For a discussion of how these inequalities play out in multicultural politics see Valadez, Deliberative Democracy, 72–78. 25. This is called adaptive preference formation. See Jon Elster, Sour Grapes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 26. See Frans van Eemeren, “A World of Difference: The Rich State of Argumentation Theory,” Informal Logic 17 (1995): 144–58; Gutmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement, 82; and Richard Bernstein, “The Revival of Democratic Ethos,” Cardozo Law Review 17 (1996): 1127–45. 27. James Bohman, “Deliberative Democracy and Effective Social Freedom: Capabilities, Resources, and Opportunities,” in Deliberative Democracy, 321–48. 28. Lynn Sanders, “Against Deliberation,” Political Theory 25 (1997): 347–76 at 349. 29. Sanders, “Against Deliberation,” 352. 30. Valadez, Deliberative Democracy, 6–8. 31. This is my inference. Valadez never makes the connection, though it seems consistent with his descriptions of the doctrine. In what follows I sometimes extend the reach of Valadez’s arguments to support what I see as necessary social policies to make good on the doctrine’s promises. I believe each of these suggestions is supported by the arguments Valadez makes for epistemological egalitarianism. 32. Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 10. 33. See Robert L. Burgdorf, Jr., “The Americans with Disabilities Act: Analysis and Implications of a Second-Generation Civil Rights Statute,” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 26 (1991): 413–522. 34. Gutmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement, 273–306. 35. Valadez, Deliberative Democracy, 80–84. 36. For an extended discussion of argumentation pedagogy conceived as political education and cultural policy see Darrin Hicks and Lenore Langsdorf, “Regulating Disagreement, Constituting Participants: A Critique of Proceduralist Theories of Democracy,” Argumentation 13 (1999): 139–60 at 154. 37. Gutmann and Thompson also bridge this gap. See Gutmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement. 38. Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 36–77. 39. See Roberto Mangabeira Unger, False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 407–32. 40. See Kathryn Olson and G. Thomas Goodnight, “Entanglements of Consumption, Cruelty, Privacy, and Fashion: The Social Controversy over Fur,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (1994): 249–76. 41. Robert Reed, “Are Robert’s Rules of Order Counterrevolutionary? Rhetoric and the Reconstruction of Portuguese Politics,” Anthropological Quarterly 63 (1990): 134–44 at 134. 42. Reed, “Robert’s Rules,” 137. 43. Reed, “Robert’s Rules,” 137–38. 44. Reed, “Robert’s Rules,” 137–38.


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45. Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 40. 46. For charges that Young discounts the role of argument see Seyla Benhabib, “ Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy,” in Democracy and Difference, 67–94; and Valadez, Deliberative Democracy, 98–100. For her reply see Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 56–57. 47. John Forester, “Beyond Dialogue to Transformative Learning: How Deliberative Rituals Encourage Political Judgment in Community Planning Processes,” Pozna´n Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and Humanities 46 (1996): 295–333 at 323. 48. Joshua Cohen, “Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy,” in Deliberative Democracy, 407–38 at 415. 49. James Bohman makes this point in his survey of the growing concern with feasibility in theories of deliberative democracy. See James Bohman, “The Coming of Age of Deliberative Democracy,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 6 (1998): 400–425. 50. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 51. Gutmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement, 52–-95. 52. Bohman, Public Deliberation, 23–70. 53. Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy.” 54. Monique Deveaux, Cultural Pluralism and Dilemmas of Justice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). 55. Valadez, Deliberative Democracy. 56. John Rawls, “The Domain of the Political and Overlapping Consensus,” New York University Law Review 64 (1989): 233–55 at 244. 57. Gutmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement, 57. 58. I take this definition of political reasonableness, which is closely drawn from Rawls’s own, from Darrin Hicks, “Reasonableness: Political Not Epistemic,” paper presented at the Alta Conference on Argumentation, Alta, Utah, August 3–5, 2001. Also see Rawls, Political Liberalism, 48–54. 59. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 220–22. 60. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 48–54. 61. Here I am following Lawrence Solum, “Constructing an Ideal of Public Reason,” San Diego Law Review 30 (1993): 729–53 at 733. 62. Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” 76–77. 63. For a discussion of deliberation as democratic paideia see Hicks and Langsdorf, “Regulating Disagreement.” 64. Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond, 65. 65. Valadez, Deliberative Democracy, 58. 66. Rawls, “The Domain of the Political,” 242, 244. 67. Gutmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement, 57. 68. Deveaux, Cultural Pluralism, 186. 69. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 220. 70. Rawls does not deny this, but claims that these assumptions have become an irreducible part of a democratic public culture. Isn’t it more likely that a polity is comprised of several different and complex traditions articulated into a polyvalent public culture? 71. Robert Ivie, “Democratic Deliberation in a Rhetorical Republic,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 84 (1998): 491–506; and Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 63–70.

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72. S. Lily Mendoza, Between the Homeland and Diaspora: The Politics of Theorizing Filipino and Filipino American Identities: A Second Look at the Poststructuralism-Indigenization Debate (New York: Routledge, 2001), 22. 73. Mendoza, Between the Homeland and Diaspora, 23. 74. Mendoza, Between the Homeland and Diaspora, 23. 75. Mendoza, Between the Homeland and Diaspora, 23. 76. Bohman, Public Deliberation, 27. 77. Bohman, Public Deliberation, 33. 78. See Gutmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement, 346–61. 79. Iris Marion Young, “Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy,” Political Theory 29 (2001): 670–90 at 682. 80. Young, “Activist Challenges,” 680. 81. Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000), 80–107. 82. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 22–26. 83. Gutmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement, 55. 84. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 104. 85. Stephen Holmes, “Gag Rules or the Politics of Omission,” in Constitutionalism and Democracy: Studies in Rationality and Social Change, ed. Jon Elster and Richard Slagstad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 19–58 at 56. 86. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 103. 87. Yameng Liu, “Justifying My Position in Your Terms: Cross-Cultural Argumentation in a Globalized World,” Argumentation 13 (1999): 297–315. 88. Liu, “Justifying My Position,” 305. 89. Liu, “Justifying My Position,” 307–8. 90. Liu, “Justifying My Position,” 309. 91. Liu, “Justifying My Position,” 309. 92. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 102.