If Deliberation Is Everything, Maybe It’s Nothing

The original deliberative democratic ideal, in both its liberal Rawlsian and critical theoretic Habermasian forms, was one of a cooperative quest for a rationally motivated consensus based on the respectful exchange of reasons among free and equal participants. Subsequent work by deliberative democrats has stretched the concept far beyond that—to what often looks more like a fractious struggle to strike a deal underwritten more by pragmatism than reason among people who are not particularly free or equal in their power and influence. Those stretches are motivated by a desire to make the model either more deliberative or more democratic or moral realistic—or sometimes, in the best-case scenario, all three at once. A deliberative systems approach enables all three to be achieved, some at one place in the system and others at other places.