Deliberative Democracy without Deliberation

Whilst deliberation has become a popular concept and practice in a range of areas, this paper retraces deliberative democracy as first and foremost a theory of legitimacy. Key to deliberative legitimacy in the Habermasian tradition, I argue, is not actually the practice of deliberation as such, but a society’s being oriented towards it as a normative ideal. This exposes a recurrent criticism deliberative democracy receives from agonistic democrats and democratic practitioners as a huge strawman: Taking deliberative democracy seriously as a legitimacy norm does then not actually imply any need for ‘perfect’ deliberation as purely rational and consensus-driven procedure. Rather, if what matters is people’s continued orientation towards the deliberative ideal, such a supposedly perfect situation would even be counter-productive, for it would threaten to close down the very process that matters most. More than the accomplishment of perfect deliberation in the ‘textbook’ sense, what nurtures an ongoing orientation towards deliberative democracy is precisely the occurrence of imperfect or partial instances of deliberation; for it is deliberative contestation that not just uncovers instances of illegitimacy in the first place, but therein also what fosters legitimacy as an unceasing norm precisely by ascertaining its deficiency in any one moment. This perspective suggests new insights into the normative concept of legitimacy as such. Legitimacy only matters as a norm through the effect it has on those oriented towards it; yet such an orientation hinges on people’s reckoning with potential illegitimacy, motivating them to engage in the (imperfectly deliberative) practices that expose and contest it. Hence, legitimacy becomes effective not from being realised as such, but by being perpetually approached, whereas its being seen as fully accomplished would imply its ceasing as a norm. This means deliberative democracy as a theory of legitimacy is best realised in a situation where there is no deliberation (in the perfect sense) at all, but individuals recognize just enough of a potential deliberativeness in the (inevitably) partially deliberative instances of politics so as to retain a belief in its possibility, and hence in its normative value as an ideal to aspire to. In practice, deliberative democrats therefore have no need to aim for, or even orchestrate, deliberation in its alleged ‘textbook’ sense, but must first and foremost acknowledge the centrality of critical contestation in both the practice and the ongoing theoretical development of deliberative democracy.