ISSN 1393-614X Minerva
- An Internet Journal of Philosophy Vol. 11 2007
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|
Public Deliberation
as Separate or Embedded: Deweyan Democracy and Its Relation to Political
Liberalism Ulf Zackariasson |
Abstract
This paper explores two different strategies that may be useful to give
substance to Deweyan democracy’s claim that in order for democratic
associations to develop into communities, citizens need to learn how to conduct
inquiry in a social setting. The two strategies reflect a principal division
among views of public deliberation. The first strategy, the separation
strategy, closely resembles Rawls’ political liberalism by advocating the
development of a separate sphere of public deliberation, guided by factual and
normative assumptions that we need not accept anywhere outside that sphere.
Comprehensive doctrines are to be held outside of public deliberation, a move
which makes possible a rather straightforward application of Dewey’s
theory of inquiry. The second strategy, the embeddedness strategy, stresses the
fact that public deliberation is inevitably embedded in broader spheres of
social life, and that the development towards community must be piecemeal, and
go hand in hand with developments in social life as a whole. I argue that there
are weighty reasons for doubting the feasibility of the separation strategy,
and I also argue that these reasons are relevant for our evaluation of all
versions of the separation strategy, including political liberalism. I conclude
that one of Deweyan democracy’s most important assets, which deserves
further examination, is its insight that reflection on public deliberation
needs to take its embedded character into account.
Most
liberal political philosophers share an interest in the form and quality of
public deliberation, that is, the practice wherein citizens discuss and
regulate their common affairs. The interest is understandable, since it is
widely held that a well-functioning public deliberation is both an
indispensable element of just societies, and also necessary if a democratic
order is going to remain stable over time.[1] There is, however,
less agreement on what, exactly, it is that characterizes well-functioning
public deliberation, or how to achieve it.
One of the contributors to this discussion is John Dewey, and the
reception of his contributions, most clearly stated in The Public and Its
Problems, has been rather mixed. While some philosophers have been
attracted to the claim that the democratic process can become the clearest
possible expression of intelligent social cooperation through a parallel
between public deliberation and Dewey’s theory of inquiry, it has also
been pointed out that considered as a model of public deliberation, Deweyan
democracy, as I shall henceforth call it, is both vague and unrealistic. It
appears to presuppose a scenario where citizens share a substantial conception
of what the good society is like.[2] The result has been
a general uncertainty about the value of Deweyan democracy, and a tendency to avoid
appeal to the idea of inquiry even among those sympathetic to Dewey’s
thinking. (e.g. Stout, 2004)
Although I do not believe that appeal to inquiry is crucial to make use
of central Deweyan insights, I fear that we may be throwing out the baby with
the bath-water if we dismiss the parallel to inquiry right away, and for the
sake of this paper, I will more or less equate Deweyan democracy with the
parallel between inquiry and public deliberation. I wish to look closer at two
different strategies we may use to revitalize Deweyan democracy so that it
becomes capable of meeting the objections mentioned above. The first develops
Deweyan democracy in a direction similar to John Rawls’ political
liberalism. In his later writings, mainly Political Liberalism and
“The Idea of Public Reason Revisited”, Rawls emphasizes the political
character of his version of the social contract, where public deliberation
should be considered a separate sphere guided by factual assumptions and
normative principles that citizens need not accept anywhere outside that
sphere. To embrace such a separation strategy may certainly look
tempting to a Deweyan democrat: not only would it add substance to the Deweyan
approach; it might also offer the kind of shared perspectives that citizens
seem to lack.
The second strategy, which I shall label the embeddedness strategy,
emphasizes the extent to which public deliberation hangs together with other
spheres of human life, and argues that public deliberation can only improve in
a piecemeal fashion, and only in conjunction with broader developments towards
democracy in other spheres of human life. It is in relation to this piecemeal
development that the theory of inquiry can offer fruitful impulses.
The central question here is: which of these strategies should we prefer,
and why? Since I believe that Deweyan democracy contains insights that have
appeal far beyond the rank and file of pragmatic political philosophers, the
“we” I talk about is not simply other Deweyan democrats, but also
political philosophers of other persuasions. This is because the question of
whether to consider public deliberation a separate sphere, or as embedded in
larger spheres of social life, is a central question in political philosophy,
as is obvious from e.g. the extensive debate over the viability of Rawls’
political liberalism.
A brief outline of the paper is as follows: I start with an overview of
Deweyan democracy, with emphasis on its parallel between public deliberation
and inquiry, and why the parallel looks problematic. Since my points do not
presuppose any novel or controversial reading of Dewey, I will not spend much
time on interpreting his writings here. I will simply concentrate on what I
take to be Dewey’s main idea with regard to public deliberation, viz.
that it ought to function along the lines suggested by the method of inquiry.
Next, I present the separation strategy, and its consequences for Deweyan
democracy, before I go on to present the embeddedness strategy, and show how it
is different from the separation strategy. Finally, I argue that the
embeddedness strategy has significant advantages. Not only does it appear to be
more feasible than the separation strategy, it also puts us in a position to
present an original critique of political liberalism and other models of public
deliberation that operate with a separation between public deliberation and
other spheres of social life, a result that thus has relevance far beyond the
confines of Deweyan democracy.
Dewey
wrote The Public and Its Problems at a time when urbanization, social
stratification and modern communications had made old-fashioned community
structures obsolete. How may the democratic order benefit from this new
situation, so that a new and larger type of community may take shape? This is
one of the major questions of Deweyan democracy, and Dewey seeks to answer it
through a pragmatic analysis of the public of democratic societies as maximally
inclusive associations, where a particular form of interaction transforms the
associations into communities. This is the type of interaction typical
of a community of inquirers.
Human thought and action is always situated within modes of associated
life, that is, shared practices which regulate interaction in countless
ways. (Dewey 1927, 23ff.) However,
people soon realize that certain modes of associated life “have extensive
and enduring consequences which involve others beyond those directly engaged in
them”, consequences that create a practical need for collectively
coordinated responses, controlled and directed by associations. (Dewey
1927, 27) Associations, in turn, have other “extensive and enduring
consequences” that trigger the formation of yet other associations, and
so on. This process, which should not be understood as a description of actual
historical events, culminates in the formation of the most inclusive
association practically possible, which, in a nation-state, includes more or
less all the people living within its boundaries.[3] Dewey labels this
association The Public. (Dewey 1927, 35) The Public forms, in due time,
a state to represent it, and the state is given authority to regulate certain
aspects of associated life, but not others. Public deliberation, broadly
conceived, is The Public’s method of regulating its common affairs.
When each member (henceforth “citizen”) of The Public has
equal formal influence over common affairs, they live in what Dewey labels a political
democracy. Political democracy is a necessary, but not sufficient,
condition for transforming The Public into a community. In Dewey’s
own words: “association itself is physical and organic, while communal
life is moral, that is, emotionally, intellectually, consciously
sustained.” (Dewey 1927, 151) We are “born organic beings
associated with others, but we are not born members of a community.” (Dewey 1927, 154) So, what more is required,
and how may it be achieved?
Here, Dewey stresses the importance of access to accurate information
about social states of affairs, and thus the importance of social scientific
research, but even more, he emphasizes the need to improve “the methods
and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion”. (Dewey 1927, 208)
While the first is a question of developing the social sciences, the question
of how to improve deliberation itself is even more central; it is the
problem of The Public. (Dewey 1927, 208) Both accurate information and improved
exchange between citizens are necessary conditions for intelligent public
deliberation, which, in turn, is central for the realization of a community,
where citizens experience public deliberation to be maximally effective in
yielding fruitful solutions to the problems of The Public, solutions which
benefit the community, and hence its members. Decisions will be considered
legitimate to the extent that deliberation was intelligently conducted, and the
experience of legitimacy generates a willingness to participate and to comply
with the decisions made.
Dewey’s proposal is that to make public deliberation more
intelligent, citizens need to learn from successful problem solving in science
and everyday life. In short, they need to learn how to inquire in the context
of public deliberation. The improved quality of the deliberative process, as
well as of the decisions made, breed a commitment to the continued existence of
this public community of inquirers. Hence Dewey observes:
Whenever there is conjoint activity whose
consequences are appreciated as good by all singular persons who take part in
it, and where the realization of the good is such as to effect an energetic
desire and effort to sustain it in being just because it is a good shared by
all, there is in so far a community. The clear consciousness of a communal
life, in all its implications, constitutes the idea of democracy. (Dewey 1927,
149)
It is worth noticing that “democracy” has a broader meaning
here than simply “equal formal influence”, and the
“more”, at least the part that I will concentrate on, concerns the
interaction typical within a community of inquirers. From Dewey’s point
of view, critical thinking is not simply a means to an end, but it is at the
same time the fullest expression of human potential.
However, the parallel between public deliberation and inquiry is not
without its problems. Inquiry, as presented by Dewey in Logic: The Theory of
Inquiry, is the intelligent restoration of equilibrium with the environment
through a series of stages. First, the identification of a problem through a
specification of the course of events which failed to bring about the expected
(and desired) results; second, the development of different suggestions as to
how the problem(s) identified in stage one might be resolved; third, the
selection of one of the suggestions, which is then put to the test. As soon as
the community of inquirers finds a satisfactory solution, inquiry comes to an
end, and the community of inquirers dissolves. If the solution was
unsuccessful, the community may, depending on the circumstances, select another
solution, or choose to institute another inquiry informed by the shortcomings
of the previous inquiry. (Dewey 1986, 108ff.)
Applied to the public sphere, this very brief sketch implies: search for
shared problems, use the most intelligent means available (including the most
accurate information) to resolve them in a satisfactory manner, and treat one
another as inquirers throughout the process, that is, present arguments for
your standpoints, listen to and argue against dissenting views, and so on.
However, once inquiry is transferred to the public sphere, things get more
complicated. Here, we already have a fixed community of inquirers, viz. The
Public, which indicates that the analogy to a community of inquirers may be
weaker than Dewey assumes. (cf. Smiley 1999, 642) And, even worse, why assume
that all citizens comprising The Public will agree on what is problematic and
what is not, and what requires collective action, and what does not? Eric
MacGilvray claims that Deweyan democracy overlooks a crucial problem: how to
ever be in a position to formulate shared problems that allow inquiry to get
off the ground. How, asks MacGilvray, “can ‘inquiry’, however
definite and particular, help us find ‘solutions’ to social
problems where there is disagreement as to which public ends should be
pursued?” (MacGilvray 2004, 169) In democratic states that respect basic
freedoms of thought and expression, we will always find rather different views
about what should be done, and why. And yet, inquiry is apparently designed for
cases where citizens (the community) share a clear conception of what is
problematic, and what constitutes a satisfactory solution. In a pluralistic
society, a model of public deliberation which presupposes such shared standards
of successfulness will either not work, or only work by ignoring and/or
breeding hostility to dissenters. (MacGilvray 2004, 171ff) Neither alternative
is attractive.
It is at this point the separation strategy presents itself as a
potential remedy. No one has argued more elaborately for the separation of
public deliberation from other spheres of social life than John Rawls, so I
will look to his works for a version of this strategy. In his later writings,
Rawls is careful to stress the political character of his model of
public deliberation. (Rawls 1996, xlf.) To say that it is political, is to say
that it is designed specifically for public deliberation, so citizens need not
accept the same framework in other spheres of life. Hence, public deliberation
can be considered a separate sphere, functioning independently of other parts
of citizens’ and society’s, life.
Rawls’ main concern in Political Liberalism is how a democratic
society can remain stable over time, despite the fact that its citizens embrace
substantially different conceptions of what is good and valuable. (Rawls 1996,
5) In Rawls’ terms, they adhere to different comprehensive doctrines
– general and comprehensive religious or
secular conceptions of what is of value in life. (Rawls 1996, 13) Adherents of
different comprehensive doctrines typically have difficulties both in reaching
agreement and in conducting fruitful discussions. Therefore, Rawls introduces public
reason, a freestanding form of reasoning designed for use in the public
sphere. Whenever important political questions are at stake, citizens should
leave their respective comprehensive doctrines behind, and deliberate within
its bounds. Public reason consists, according to Rawls, of well-established
knowledge and insights attained in common sense and science (controversial and
disputed results left aside), and the two principles of justice that Rawls
claims citizens situated behind a veil of ignorance would choose as normative
guidelines for the basic structure of society. (Rawls 1996, 224f.) The first
principle is, in Rawls’ own words: “Each person is to have an equal
right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible
with a similar system of liberty for all”, and the second states that:
“Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are
… to the benefit of the least advantaged … [and] attached to
offices and positions open to all”. (Rawls
1999, 266) The principles are lexically ordered, so that the first principle
has priority in cases where they seem to conflict. When deliberating on matters
of public concern, citizens thus address one another with arguments and norms
that all citizens can accept as deliverances of their shared human reason, and
that serves everybody’s interests as citizens. Outside public
deliberation, citizens should be free to develop their own conceptions of good
and right, and live by them as they see fit. (Rawls 1996, 30ff., xlvii)
What looks promising here is the way public reason apparently removes the
sources of disagreement between citizens, and offers the kind of shared
perspective, and hence shared standards of successfulness, that the Deweyan
Public seemed impotent to attain. So, by separating public deliberation from
other spheres of social life, including comprehensive doctrines, the basic
Deweyan appeal to inquiry may be rescued: The Public is capable of
instituting and conducting inquiry, as long as it respects the normative and
factual framework set by public reason. This significantly reduces the risk of
disagreement over which ends The Public should pursue.
It looks,
then, as if the separation strategy offers just the kind of shared perspective
that Deweyan democracy sorely needs. Nevertheless, I will try to show that this
strategy is problematic, and that these problems motivate a search for
alternatives. Before I look closer at the embeddedness strategy, I want to
introduce a couple of distinctions that will help me clarify my points and
their relevance.
First, a distinction between two types of feasibility. A model of public
deliberation can be considered feasible in (at least) two senses. First, feasible
as implemented: this is when a model of public deliberation, once it has
been implemented, functions in such a way that it sustains itself, for instance
by generating the required commitment among citizens. My use of the term
‘implemented’ is not intended to signal that it is necessarily
implemented from above; it is only meant to indicate that citizens as a matter
of fact accept and use this model to regulate the way they conduct public
deliberation. This is the type of feasibility Rawls is mainly concerned with in
Political Liberalism. Besides that, a model of public deliberation can
also be considered feasible as a guiding ideal; that is, feasible in the
sense that although it may not actually ever come about, or even present a very
detailed picture of how it would function if it were implemented, it offers
fruitful advice with regard to how public deliberation in present-day societies
may be improved (though what ‘improved’ means depends on your
perspective, a point captured by my next distinction).
Second, a distinction between internal and external judgments
of feasibility. Judgments of feasibility —
in both the above-mentioned senses — can be made either from assumptions and values accepted within the model
of public deliberation itself (which constitutes an internal judgment of
feasibility) or from the standpoint of some other set of assumptions and values
(which constitutes an external judgment).
The distinction between internal and external judgments of feasibility serves
the function of drawing attention to two different ways in which we can make
judgments of feasibility and present them to others. For instance, a Deweyan
democrat facing the choice between the separation and the embeddedness strategy
can appeal to values and assumptions central to Deweyan democracy (that is,
internal,) to justify her choice. She may also appeal to assumptions and values
that are relatively more widespread, and make an external judgment of
feasibility, which potentially makes it more relevant for those who do not
share central assumptions of Deweyan democracy.[4]
The distinction between internal and external judgments of feasibility is
certainly not watertight. And I am not claiming that it is impossible to
present substantial criticism of a model of public deliberation from an
external perspective, criticism that may bring about significant revisions. It
is, however, important to note that the kind of reasons, and the way you
formulate them, differ in the two types of judgments, and that both are
relevant in their own way for political philosophy. For my purposes, the
difference is mainly relevant to distinguish between reasons for a Deweyan
democrat to embrace the embeddedness strategy and reject the separation
strategy, and reasons for political philosophers more generally to do the same.
Let me now sketch the alternative strategy that I, somewhat tentatively,
have labelled the embeddedness strategy. It is based on two important insights.
First, that inquiry — especially inquiry in a public setting,
concerned with public problems — is inevitably social in character, both in the sense that in inquiries,
we participate alongside others, whose views are significant for the ongoing
inquiry, and in the sense that any results have consequences that extend beyond
the first-person perspective. In a political democracy, anyone has the power to
influence social life in a number of ways, like by forming associations that
work to promote particular goals. Hence, the standpoints of other citizens are
almost inevitably relevant, and dissatisfaction with the current state of
affairs is itself a problem for The Public. If not dealt with, it is likely to
lead to unforeseeable and perhaps harmful consequences for social life, and The
Public itself. Neglect of dissent and pluralism is thus likely to prove
counterproductive – even
from the perspective of a majority.
Second, that the critique of Deweyan democracy presented earlier
presupposes too simple a view of what it is to solve complex problems. In the
simple cases, like when you fail to open a door, the problem is defined through
a very specific conception of what a satisfactory resolution would be like.
Here, the preferences/expectations that led you to institute inquiry in the
first place specify in detail what a satisfactory solution to the problem must
be like – it must be one where you manage to open the
door. But many problems in most spheres of human life are not quite like that,
and there is every reason to suppose that this goes for problems in the public
sphere as well. So instead of operating with a fixed conception of which
end-result inquiry must obtain, we should acknowledge that what we are prepared
to consider a satisfactory solution is, to a significant extent, dependent on
what inquiry itself indicates can realistically be achieved in the present
situation. As a consequence, the preferences/expectations that caused us to
institute a problem in the first place are not sacrosanct, but may be revised in
the course of inquiry, for instance through confrontation with the standpoints
and perspectives of other inquirers.
When combined, these points indicate that inquiry in the public sphere
need not presuppose a shared conception of the good society, or something
similar. Instead, inquiry is more directed towards discussion of how situations
should be understood and dealt with – which way of seeing
things that should guide The Public’s measures. (cf. MacGilvray 2004) So
what inquiry does presuppose is that The Public is actually in control
— directly or indirectly — of the development of society, so that
sooner or later, deliberation on common affairs is brought before The Public,
and that it has a decisive influence on public affairs. As long as this is the case,
then it is in everybody’s interest that public deliberation functions as
well as possible, that it is not taken over by bureaucrats and experts, and also that there is no widespread
resentment, or disregard for the results of public deliberation. (Dewey 1927,
207) These assumptions can, at least to a significant extent, be justified
pragmatically: given the nature of the association The Public, it is inevitable
that the standpoints and perspectives of other citizens set limits to what we
can count as realistic and satisfactory solutions to the problems that The
Public encounters. The “conjoint activities whose consequences are
appreciated as good” that Dewey talks of in the passage quoted above, can
thus be understood to refer to the process of inquiry as the investigation of
what can realistically be achieved in the social setting where public
deliberation inevitably is set, rather than referring to the realization of any
shared substantial conception of the good life, or the good society. The mistake
of the critique is then to assume that inquiry must apply directly to the
resolution of social problems if it is to be of any use in the public sphere.
Ironically, it is the fixed character of The Public — i.e. the
fact that The Public does not come into existence as a community of inquirers
only when facing a specific problem — that makes possible this response
to the critique of Deweyan democracy presented above.
The embeddedness strategy thus helps us appreciate the complex nature of
inquiry, particularly in the public sphere, and the limited prospects for a straightforward
application of the method of inquiry. Citizens come to public deliberation with
different views and ideals they wish to see realized, and that means that the
relevant task of inquiry is not so much to find the best way to resolve a
concrete problem, but rather to find ways in which to define and understand
problems, and exchange meanings about these different ways. Admittedly, this
presupposes some kind of democratic attitude, where we take the views of other
citizens seriously, but again, this is at least to a significant extent a
consequence of the fixed nature of The Public as a community of inquirers where
we cannot ignore dissent if we want to find satisfactory solutions.[5]
Within a version of inquiry suitable for public deliberation, it would
hence be natural to discuss the goals as much, or even more, than the means
to achieve the goals (though neither can be completely ignored). These goals
are, no doubt, often related to the different conceptions of society and of
human flourishing that citizens embrace (their comprehensive doctrines,
to use Rawls’ terminology), and this means that unlike the separation
strategy, the embeddedness strategy considers citizens’ comprehensive
doctrines as indispensable elements of public deliberation. Needless to say,
the goal of such inquiries cannot be to achieve consensus about which goals to
pursue, but rather to find working compromises with regard to concrete problems
within the public sphere, compromises where we learn to accept — and
perhaps even appreciate — the insights of perspectives that we do not
share. (Dryzek 2004, 74)
For the embeddedness strategy, one of the central questions thus becomes:
how is it possible to create conditions where public deliberation contains
genuine exchange, and not simply dogmatic assertions made from within different
comprehensive doctrines? Dewey frequently claimed that a central problem of the
modern era is that while we have significantly improved our modes of thinking
in fields such as medicine, technology and science, we still operate with
ancient ontological categories whenever we discuss value judgments. (Dewey 1984, 210) He also attempted to supply
alternatives that enable us to understand comprehensive doctrines less like
fixed systems of thought and more like dynamic and evolving conceptions of
human flourishing. (See Dewey 1934, Zackariasson 2002, 121ff.) I do not have
the time to evaluate Dewey’s proposals here, and it is important to note
that any improvement of public deliberation must, to a significant extent, grow
out of the practice of public deliberation itself, just as was the case with the
improvements in medicine and science to which Dewey refers. No abstract account
of inquiry, or of the nature of comprehensive doctrines, can thus revolutionize
public deliberation all by itself, but should rather be seen as a provider of
impulses and analytical tools that may help us develop elements that are
already present in the practice of public deliberation itself.
So far, we have thus encountered two alternative strategies to develop
Deweyan democracy. In the remainder of this paper, I shall try to show why we
should prefer the embeddedness strategy, despite the fact that it is vaguer,
and seems to offer less straightforward guidance, than the separation strategy.
Axel Honneth concludes his sympathetic study of Dewey’s political philosophy
with the observation that although the appeal to inquiry may appear
unrealistic, we should modify that judgment by taking into consideration that
Dewey refused to see public deliberation as an insulated sphere. Instead, he
sketched his views on public deliberation well aware that they require a more
thoroughgoing democratization of society —
which here is closely related to the development of habits of critical thought — to become possible. (Honneth 1998, 779f.)
The important point is that once you insulate public deliberation in the way
that Rawls recommends, you may, at the same time, slow down a process of a more
comprehensive democratization, a democratization that may be essential for the
long-term stability of public deliberation itself. This raises questions about
whether political liberalism really is feasible as implemented, because you may
certainly wonder whether citizens will ever become attached to a way of
reasoning that may be very distant from how they reason in other significant spheres
of life, which seems to be what Rawls asks of them.
Rawls is certainly not unaware of this problem, and in response to it, he
provides a sketch of an overlapping consensus that may develop over time
among citizens, where everybody, regardless of which comprehensive doctrine
they embrace, agree that public reason should be used within public
deliberation. (Rawls 1996, xxxixff.) Originally, this may come about as a modus
vivendi, where no one wishes to comply with the dictates of someone
else’s comprehensive doctrine, but gradually, as public reason shows its
worth, the initially grudging acceptance of the modus vivendi may
change, so that the conviction that use of public reason is the appropriate way
to deal with public affairs, becomes an established part of the comprehensive
doctrines themselves. (Rawls 1996, xlii)
This makes political liberalism more stable than any contingent balance of
power, because it would remain in sway even if society changes in such a way
that the balance of power is upset.
The problem with this response — and the separation
strategy in general — is
that, since Rawls remains agnostic about how comprehensive doctrines function,
and clearly states that they are unaffected by public reason (except for the
way in which acceptance of public reason becomes part of the comprehensive
doctrine itself), he cannot supply any “guarantee”[6] that even
if an overlapping consensus is ever reached, it will remain in sway.
Comprehensive doctrines may develop over time in directions where they at some
point come to reject public reason, which would cause the overlapping consensus
to collapse. The point is that there is nothing in political liberalism itself
that gives us any reason to believe that this will not happen.[7]
From a Deweyan perspective, this weakness stems at least in part from the
strict exclusion of comprehensive doctrines from public deliberation, which is
one of the spaces where they may actually become engaged in serious exchange
with other perspectives, and where a genuine appreciation of other
comprehensive doctrines may begin to develop, an appreciation that may be
significantly more conducive to stability than public reason is. Most of the
time, the question of the role of comprehensive doctrines has concerned itself
with whether citizens have a moral right to “use” their
comprehensive doctrines in public deliberation or not. Then, you overlook the
fact that “using” your comprehensive doctrine in public deliberation
does something to that comprehensive doctrine, whether you will or not – at least in a society with an ongoing public debate. There is no lack of
historical examples of religiously based movements that have undergone
significant changes in the confrontation with practical tasks and problems of a
political nature, either within or outside public deliberation. It would be
naïve to think that this has no repercussions for the comprehensive doctrines
themselves. The Deweyan approach urges us to pay attention to such changes, and
ask whether they may be a beneficial element in a more substantial
democratization process that is needed to secure a long-term improvement of
public deliberation.
My critique of the separation strategy has both an internal and an
external character. Internally, from a Deweyan perspective, the separation
strategy is problematic because it threatens to slow down a more comprehensive
democratization of society by severing the links between public deliberation
and other spheres of social life, including comprehensive doctrines. This is
certainly problematic given Dewey’s frequent stress on the importance of
a “critical furthering of culture” and comprehensive
democratization. (Dewey 1958, 37) But even if you do not accept that “internal”
reason for rejecting the separation strategy, there is a more accessible — external — reason
for rejecting the separation strategy, and thus also political liberalism. If
comprehensive doctrines are actually separated from the public sphere, we have
little reason to expect that an overlapping consensus will remain stable
regardless of how citizens’ comprehensive doctrines develop over time.
Political liberalism thus fails to deliver what it promises.
This critique, regardless of whether we formulate it in internal or
external terms, indicates that it is unlikely that the separation strategy is
capable of providing a model of public deliberation that is feasible either as
implemented or as guiding. As implemented, it offers no good reason to think
that an overlapping consensus is more stable than a contingent balance of
power, as long as comprehensive doctrines can continue to develop in more or
less any direction; as guiding, it faces the problems of causing resentment,
and the problem that the approach lacks overall feasibility. Regardless of
which of these types of feasibility we give priority to, the separation
strategy thus looks problematic.
This critique stands, I would say, regardless of whether there are any
viable alternatives to the separation strategy or not. Nevertheless, for the
sake of Deweyan democracy, it might be interesting to turn attention to the
embeddedness strategy and raise the question about its feasibility. Does
it actually fare any better than the separation strategy, and if not, where
does that leave Deweyan democracy?
There are two important points to note before you set out to answer this
question. First of all, it is not possible to simply connect the embeddedness
strategy to an already existing model of public deliberation as was possible
with the separation strategy – or so I shall assume.
Second, since the embeddedness strategy by its very nature connects public deliberation
to other spheres of social life, including comprehensive doctrines, this also
means that the embeddedness strategy will present a more probing, less
clear-cut model of public deliberation. This is not to say that the
embeddedness strategy has nothing enlightening to say about public
deliberation, but it does indicate that its contributions will be of a more
tentative and contextual nature than those of the separation strategy.
I have already distinguished between two different ways in which a model
of public deliberation can be considered feasible –
as implemented and as guiding. For Rawls, feasibility as implemented appears to
be the central virtue of any model of public deliberation, while he pays
significantly less attention to how it may be achieved. However, from the
embeddedness strategy’s point of view, it will seem natural to turn
attention more to feasibility as guiding (although not ignoring feasibility as
implemented entirely), since there will be such a significant gap between
public deliberation as it stands presently, and how it ideally should function.
Although this gap may be equally large — or even larger — within
the separation strategy, there is nevertheless a significant difference between
the two strategies, in that the separation strategy offers a relatively
concrete and fast “cure”, in which we learn to separate public
deliberation from other spheres of social life, while the embeddedness strategy
must take recourse to a number of small steps to present a realistic account of
how public deliberation may improve.
So, if we start from the present standing of public deliberation, in
which direction would the Deweyan democrat recommend us to look if we are
serious about improving public deliberation? One opportunity is, of course, to
explore the affinities between Deweyan democracy and certain versions of
deliberative democracy, where comprehensive doctrines are integrated into the
deliberative process, and see whether the theory of inquiry has important
insights to offer deliberative democracy.[8] While this certainly
looks interesting, I think that there are other opportunities that deserve
attention. One, which should become increasingly important as citizens
communicate less and less face to face and more and more via web logs, chat
rooms, and other written media, is to look closer at communication and debate
conducted via texts, to see how it may be possible to conduct a fruitful debate
where comprehensive doctrines are an integrated element of the discussion.
Here, it may be interesting to see, for instance, whether the theory of inquiry
can help us identify positive tendencies and deepen our understanding of how
and why they function, as well as how to develop them. In short, we need to look
at fruitful use of comprehensive doctrines in public deliberation to learn more
about fruitful use of comprehensive doctrines in public deliberation!
The point of looking closer at concrete examples of contributions to
public deliberation is that rather than inventing new practices of public
deliberation from scratch, we may be able to find fruitful tendencies already
at work, tendencies that may be encouraged and strengthened through a deepened
theoretical understanding of how and why they work. This is a logical approach
given the orientation of the embeddedness strategy. Furthermore, since public
deliberation has been going on for centuries, literary speaking, it would be
strange indeed to claim that it has failed to make any progress. Here is where the
theory of inquiry may function as an important provider of analytical tools,
rather than as a blueprint to which public deliberation must conform.
Someone may object that I have criticized the separation strategy for
something that the embeddedness strategy is equally unable to supply – that is, an overall feasible model of public deliberation. Admittedly,
the sketch of the embeddedness strategy is vague, and needs development. But
that is different from saying that it lacks feasibility. It is rather that
emphasis is moved to whether models of public deliberation are feasible as
guiding or not, simply because this is the most relevant question if you
consider public deliberation as embedded in wider spheres of social life. This
means asking new kinds of questions. The usefulness of the parallel between
inquiry and public deliberation is thus not primarily determined by whether the
end-product is feasible, but rather whether the theory of inquiry may be a
useful tool in attempts to improve the current standing of public deliberation
or not. Here, a lot of work remains, but it is certainly too early to give up
this approach before it has been tried out.
My
conclusion in this paper is that there are good reasons for resisting the
temptation to develop Deweyan democracy in the direction suggested by the
separation strategy, where it comes to resemble Rawls’ political
liberalism. Instead, I have argued, Deweyan democracy, understood along the
lines of the embeddedness strategy, actually gives us conceptual resources to
articulate what is problematic with separation strategies: that if
comprehensive doctrines are withdrawn from public deliberation, they are also
withdrawn from a more general process of democratization that may be necessary
if public deliberation is to remain stable over time. The critique of the
separation strategy can be formulated in an internal fashion, thus presupposing
the values and assumptions central to Deweyan democracy, but it can also be
formulated in a more external fashion, where it appeals to more generally
accepted assumptions and values about public deliberation. As such, my results
have implications that are relevant outside the more limited context of Deweyan
democracy.
Adopting the embeddedness strategy has the consequence of turning focus
away from feasibility as implemented and more towards feasibility as guiding.
Here, the potential contribution of the theory of inquiry might be to help us
trace and develop fruitful tendencies in concrete public deliberation, rather
than present us with an end-product that may or may not be attainable in a
distant future — although reflections on feasibility as
implemented can never be completely ignored.
This should not be taken to mean that the separation strategy is devoid
of important insights. One such insight that Deweyan democracy needs to take to
heart is that if a significant majority of citizens embrace the same
comprehensive doctrine, the effect may be that the interest for serious
discussion is lacking. Hence, the already existing positive tendencies that the
theory of inquiry could help us detect and develop may be rare, as long as
there is no genuine need to take dissenting views seriously. It would be naïve
to think that public deliberation will always fix itself, if given enough time.
It is partially therefore reflection on e.g. the prospects of drawing on the
theory of inquiry to improve public deliberation is important.[9]
Bernstein, Richard (1987) “One
Step Forward, Two Steps Backward: Richard Rorty on Liberal Democracy and
Philosophy” Political Theory
15, 538-563.
Bohman, James (1996) Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity,
and Democracy (
Caspary, William (2000) Dewey on Democracy (
Dewey, John (1927) The Public and Its Problems (
Dewey, John (1934) A Common Faith (
Dewey, John (1958) [1925] Experience and Nature (
Dewey, John (1984) The Quest for Certainty John Dewey: The
Later Works 1925-1953 vol. 4: 1929 (
Dewey, John (1986) Logic: The Theory of Inquiry John Dewey:
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Dryzek, John (2004)
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Guinlock, James (1978)
“Dewey’s Theory of Moral Deliberation” Ethics 88, 218-228.
Putnam, Hilary (1995) “A
Reconsideration of Deweyan Democracy” in Renewing Philosophy (
MacGilvray, Eric (2004) Reconstructing Public Reason (
Rawls, John (1996) [1993] Political Liberalism Paperback edition (
Rawls, John (1999) [1971] A Theory of Justice. Revised Edition
(Oxford: Oxford University Press).
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Ryan, Alan (1997) John Dewey and the High Tide of American
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[1] At
least if society is going to remain stable for what John Rawls calls "the
right reasons", by which he means that stability should not be upheld
through, for example, a balance of power between competing religious traditions
with roughly equal influence, or some similar arrangement. Stability must also
be such as to secure and generate important political goods, like (in Rawls'
case) civic friendship and mutual trust. (Rawls 1996, li, 163)
[2] Thinkers
sympathetic to some of the central ideas of Dewey's political philosophical
thinking include Putnam (1995), Guinlock (1978), Bernstein (1987), Ryan (1997),
Savage (2002) and Caspary (2000).
[3] Of
course, there is nothing about this analysis that limits it to nation-states,
should new types of publics come into existence.
[4] There
is a further aspect to the distinction between internal and external judgments
of feasibility: the judgment whether a model of public deliberation is feasible
or not is not simply something we could try out via an experiment. It also
involves giving assent to the type of society that would be the result
of implementing the model of public deliberation, or use it as a guiding ideal.
This means that there are normative aspects to any judgment of feasibility.
With regard to this, external judgments can be considered the judgments that
depend on relatively widely accepted normative assumptions about good models of
public deliberation, while internal judgments appeal more directly to normative
assumptions specific for a particular thinker, "school" or
"perspective".
[5] Hence
a Deweyan understanding of 'community' is different from Rawls, who understands
a community as a group of citizens "united in affirming the same
comprehensive doctrine." (Rawls 1996, 146)
[6] I do
not think that Rawls must present any absolute guarantee that an overlapping
consensus will remain stable no matter what. As Richard Rorty frequently
claims, the idea that philosophy should seek to provide guarantees, or
absolute certainty, is itself rather dubious. (e.g. Rorty 1982) When I speak of
'guarantee' here, I mean something that makes it likely that an overlapping
consensus will remain stable over time by virtue of being an overlapping
consensus. This is what Rawls does not supply us with.
[7] Rawls
distinguishes between reasonable and unreasonable comprehensive doctrines,
where one part of what it is for a comprehensive doctrine to be reasonable is
that it "does not reject the essentials of a democratic regime."
(Rawls 1996, xviii) But surely, a comprehensive doctrine can meet that
condition and, at the same time, reject political liberalism, which hardly
belongs to the essentials of a democratic regime. The distinction between
reasonable and unreasonable comprehensive doctrines does not, then, enable Rawls
to give a satisfactory answer to the critique I have presented here.
[8] See, for instance, Bohman (1996) and even more the articles of the
special edition of Journal of Speculative Philosophy on pragmatism and deliberative
democracy (vol. 18, no. 1, 2004).
[9] Many of the central ideas in this paper began to take form during a stay
at the Social Values Research Centre at the Philosophy Department,
Copyright © 2007 Minerva
All rights are reserved, but
fair and good faith use with full attribution may be made of this work for
educational or scholarly purposes.
Dr. Ulf Zackariasson
teaches philosophy at Agder University, Kristiansand, Norway.
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