The Philosophic Origins of Deliberative Ideals

Deliberative democracy is a relatively recent development in democratic theory. But the theorists and practitioners of deliberative democracy often reach far back for philosophical and theoretic resources to develop the core ideas. This chapter traces some of those sources and ideas. As deliberative democracy is itself a somewhat contested theory, the chapter does not present a linear story of intellectual heritage. Instead it draws on a variety of sometimes disparate sources to identify different ideals that become stressed in different versions of deliberation and deliberative democracy. The philosophic sources canvased include Aristotle, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, John Dewey and American Pragmatism, John Rawls, and Jürgen Habermas. The chapter pays special attention to the way different philosophical sources speak to the balance between the epistemic and normative claims of deliberative democracy.