Session 6b: Deliberative Democracy I

1st Global Conference

Friday 30th April – Sunday 2nd May 2010
Prague, Czech Republic

Cultivating Autonomy: A Perfectionist Justification of Deliberative Democracy
Stephen Elstub
University of the West of Scotland

The paper argues that autonomy is the normative core of democracy, because there is an intrinsic link between them, as they are both essentially based upon the idea of self-government. The case is made that autonomy is desirable because it is an intrinsic good for its own sake, as it is constitutive of agency, and we deeply value efficacy and having a causal impact on the world. Although there are other goods, their maximum value can only be achieved if autonomously chosen. Other values are then only contingently related to democracy, where as autonomy can only be secured by democracy.

For the last twenty years, discussions, definitions and justifications of democracy have been dominated by theories of deliberative democracy. Two of the most prominent justifications of deliberative democracy, and democracy per se, have been the proceduralist and prudential justifications. These are opposed over the desirability of neutrality and perfectionism. The proceduralist justification favours complete pluralism in terms of values as it is based on an established liberal premise that the state should be neutral towards conceptions of the good life. Prudentialism, in contrast, is based on the established liberal premise that the state should promote autonomy. Inevitably, such a justification of deliberative democracy is guilty of perfectionism. The arguments here are therefore perfectionist, but only mildly so, as it is a procedural view of autonomy that is favoured, with the formation process, and not the content, of preferences determining autonomy. This paper presents a defence of the prudential justification arguing that such perfectionism is only mild and offers the only chance to save the neutralistic intensions of the proceduralist justification of deliberative democracy from complete relativism.

Three reasons are then considered as to why deliberative democracy can cultivate autonomy. The first is that it encourages participants to make their reasoning public, which encourages these preferences to be public and also launders purely self-interested preferences. The second and third arguments are based upon the claim that in a deliberative situation people communicate through language. This means that at any point there are speakers and listeners involved. It is contended that deliberative democracy enhances hearer autonomy by increasing the availability of information, so the rational external requirements of autonomy are improved. Speaker autonomy is enhanced because the ideal of deliberative democracy ensures all opinions are included and heard by all. When aggregation does take place this also means that choices are determined by citizens themselves and, furthermore, are based upon the reflective preferences of citizens.

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Critical Notes on Habermas’s Theory of the Public Sphere
Simon Susen
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Newcastle University

The main purpose of this paper is to examine Habermas’s account of the transformation of the public sphere in modern society.  In the light of Habermas’s socio-historical analysis, the transformation of the public sphere in the eighteenth and nineteenth century cannot be dissociated from the rise of the modern era.  This paper seeks to demonstrate that, although Habermas’s account succeeds in providing us with useful insights into the structural transformation of the public sphere in early modern society, it fails to offer a differentiated approach to the structural transformation of public spheres in late modern society.  The gradual differentiation of late modern social life manifests itself in the proliferation of multiple public spheres, and hence a critical theory of public normativity needs to face up to the challenges posed by the material and ideological complexity of late modernity in order to account for the polycentric nature of advanced societies.

The paper is divided into three sections.  The first section briefly elucidates the sociological meaning of the public-private dichotomy.  Given that the distinction between ‘the public’ and ‘the private’ is of central importance in social and political life, it is worth shedding light on its overall normative significance.  The second section scrutinises the key features of Habermas’s theory of the public sphere, offering some critical reflections on (i) the concept of the public sphere, (ii) the normative specificity of the bourgeois public sphere, and (iii) the structural transformation of the public sphere in modern society.  The third section explores some of the most substantial shortcomings of Habermas’s theory of the public sphere, notably its inability to explain the historical emergence and normative significance of pluralised public spheres in advanced societies.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)