Rendering Citizens Legitimate Synergies of Deliberative Talk and Agonistic Respect

Democratic theory is acutely concerned with how democracy can render the execution of legitimate political decisions. In deliberation, we claim to have unearthed a more egalitarian, inclusive and epistemically superior mode of doing so. But in the context of populism, polarisation and the fragmentation of the public sphere, it feels like less and less often that citizens recognise each other as legitimate participants in the same democratic conversation. In light of this, this paper seeks to answer a different question: how are citizens rendered legitimate in the eyes of each other? To say that democracy should render citizens, as well as decisions, legitimate is tantamount to claiming that democratic institutions must be sustainable: democratic innovations must not only produce good decision making, but reproduce their own normative foundations – a sense of citizenship, mutual respect, and voluntary adherence to vital democratic norms. Agonistic theory takes this ambition to heart, prizing the maintenance of inclusive, mutually respectful relations between political adversaries as the fundamental purpose of democracy. However, whilst agonistic theory speaks straight to the question of the political moment, it is currently light on practical solutions. Conversely, deliberative theory is awash with democratic innovations, but they are oriented to a slightly different purpose. If agonists are asking the right question, why is deliberation still important? Firstly, this paper demonstrates that to deliberate with someone with whom you profoundly disagree, conceptually requires that one adopts exactly the kind of inclusive, pluralising disposition to which agonists aspire. By the same token, political talk undertaken with this deliberative attitude is the very behaviour that sustains agonistic relational equality. In this sense, deliberative theory stuffs its most valuable conceptual asset – the mutually recognised legitimacy of citizens – away in its theoretical assumptions. This paper seeks to extract these assumptions, conceptualise them as a deliberative attitude, and instead make them the very subject of deliberative research.