For quite a long time, there was little controversy in the literature about what should be understood by the concept of deliberation: that all citizens affected by a decision are able to present their arguments in a free and unconstrained way; that arguments are justified in an elaborate and rational manner, and are framed in terms of the common good; that all arguments are treated with respect; that actors are truthful in what they say; and that decisions are made in the public eye, and at the end of the decision process the force of the better argument prevails, leading to consensus.
Yet recent years have seen increasing controversy about the exact definition of deliberation. Can personal stories also be used to justify an argument? Do self-interests have a place in deliberation? Are there arguments that are not acceptable? Is truthfulness always an absolute necessity? Is it better if some sequences of a decision process take place behind closed doors? Is it still deliberative if no consensus is achieved?
The two books under review greatly increase the controversies about what is meant by deliberation. Christian F. Rostbøll looks at deliberation from the perspective of critical theory, claiming in a provocative way that sometimes deliberation has the task of disrupting a consensus based on false consciousness. Equally provocative, Sharon R. Krause, starting from David Hume with his concept of moral sentiment, claims that there is more passion in the deliberative model than is commonly acknowledged. These provocations are welcome and will lead to an even livelier debate among deliberative scholars. For scholars like myself, who look at deliberation mainly from an empirical side, it becomes increasingly difficult to come up with a single measurement of the level of deliberation. This is not necessarily a problem; we simply will have different empirical research agendas, depending on how we define deliberation.
Empirical studies of what actually happens when politicians or ordinary citizens come together to discuss political issues have demonstrated that deliberation is not a unidimensional but a multidimensional phenomenon. Actors who are good at justifying their arguments, for example, do not always show respect for the arguments of others. And those who refer consistently to the common good are themselves not always willing to yield to the force of the better argument. Empirical studies also have revealed that deliberation has a dynamic aspect in the sense that during a decision process, the importance of deliberation may very well vary from sequence to sequence. The books of Krause and Rostbøll make it even more problematic to delimit the concept of deliberation. This, of course, is not speaking against these two important books. But they make us all the more aware that deliberation should not be considered a static and unidimensional phenomenon. We can no longer simply ask whether deliberation is a good thing or not, since the answer depends very much on what we mean by deliberation and where we locate it. Those who criticize, for example, the model of Jürgen Habermas cannot raise the same criticism against the models of Krause and Rostbøll, and vice versa. I consider this development refreshing for the future of debate on the merits of deliberation.
In Deliberative Freedom, Rostbøll reminds Habermas of his roots in the Frankfurt School of critical theory with its focus on freedom as emancipation, and he complains that Habermas and most other deliberative theorists now neglect this dimension of freedom. The main concern of Rostbøll is that often there is hidden domination in deliberation: “Much political domination is exercised not by directly denying the protection of expressed interests of the oppressed but by manipulating the way in which the latter interpret their interests…. Issues such as self-deception, adaptive preference formation, manipulation, ideological domination, and the like may all be contributing factors to the way in which people understand what is good for them” (pp. 42, 156; emphasis in original). As examples of such domination, Rostbøll mentions workers under capitalism, women in patriarchal societies, and minority cultures. He sees the danger of deliberation leading to false consensus, neglecting such domination. For Rostbøll, it is precisely the task of deliberation to bring to light hidden domination. The core of deliberation must be “a concern with the possibility of criticizing ideologies, biases, conventions, and the like…. [I]f agreement is the product of ideological domination, then the aim of deliberation is to show that the agreement is only apparent, or that it is not the product of free deliberation…. [A] common misunderstanding of deliberative democracy is that it sees any agreement reached on the basis of talk as good. But clearly language is not only a medium of reaching free agreement; it can also be used as means of domination, exclusion, and social power” (pp. 25, 148, 149). Rostbøll is not in principle against consensus, but agreement must be based on personal autonomy, which means “to be continually open to learning, to revise one's views in light of new evidence” (p. 87).
Rostbøll presents the perspective of critical theory on deliberation in a well-written, systematic, and, above all, forceful way. His book is a challenge to deliberative scholars to reflect more carefully on the role of consensus in the deliberative model. The challenge is particularly great for scholars like myself who do empirical studies on deliberation. We identify the existence of the force of the better argument if actors change their position and acknowledge that arguments of other actors have convinced them to do so. Rostbøll objects to this way of measuring the force of the better argument, arguing that actors may change their position against their true interests. But how can we establish what true interests are? I agree with Rostbøll that this can be done from the perspective of critical theory, and I encourage him to develop an empirical research program to distinguish between true and false interests. In the meantime, some of us will continue to base our research on what actors actually say about their interests, although we are not blind to where these interests come from.
Sharon R. Krause's stimulating and carefully developed book, Civil Passions, challenges mainstream deliberative scholarship from quite a different side. Starting from David Hume, Krause asserts that mainstream deliberative research puts too much emphasis on rationality, and that more attention should be given to sentiment and passion. She argues: “Deliberation, as Hume conceives it, is not devoid of intellect, but it involves more than merely intellect. The process of practical reasoning is a holistic one, in which cognition and affect are deeply entwined” (p. 103). From this Humean position, Krause criticizes, in particular, John Rawls and Habermas for being insufficiently aware that all reasons have an affective element as well: “To have a conception of the good therefore is to have an affective attachment to it or a desire to realize it; when we are rational, we are also desiring”(p. 30). According to Krause, Rawls and Habermas include much more affect in their concept of rationality than they are willing to acknowledge. To demonstrate that pure rationality is impossible, Krause refers to neuroscience and approvingly quotes Antonio Damasio, whose research suggests that “the cool strategy advocated by Kant, among others, has far more to do with the way patients with prefrontal damage go about deciding than with how normals usually operate” (p. 54).
Krause does not necessarily advocate more passion in politics, since she is well aware that uncontrolled passion may have devastating consequences. Her point is, rather, that we should treat passion as part of deliberation so long as it has a moral dimension: “Expressions of sentiment can contribute in valuable ways to public deliberation even when they do not take an explicit argumentative form” (p. 118). She sees a great range of emotional expressions with the potential of having a moral dimension: “By allowing informal, symbolic, and testimonial types of deliberative expressions, [the deliberative-system approach] can enrich citizens' reflection on public issues and thereby improve public deliberation. Such expressions are also tremendously important for the cultivation of moral sentiment” (p. 122). Krause, however, is aware that she runs into the problem of concept stretching in including too many emotions in the concept of deliberation: “To be sure, it is important to distinguish between deliberative and nondeliberative forms of expression. Not every expression is deliberative, and we risk losing the clarifying power of analysis if we define the category too broadly” (p. 119). To count as deliberative for Krause, emotional acts must “represent (a) efforts to change the minds and hearts of the public, (b) on some matter of law or policy, and (c) with a view to justice” (p. 119). This delimitation between deliberative and nondeliberative emotional acts makes sense, but as an empirical scholar I would be interested in learning more about how she would put this delimitation into operational terms to do empirical work.
Krause summarizes her overall position in the following way: “Our minds are changed when our hearts are engaged…. [W]e cannot be the passionless, disengaged deliberators that we think we ought to be, even when we succeed in deliberating impartially. If this book advances our basic understanding of ourselves, our reflective passions, and our deliberative practices, it will have fulfilled its ambition. What it suggests is that any policy initiatives undertaken on behalf of impartial justice should aim not for the transcendence but for the civilizing of passions in public life” (pp. 125, 203).
Both Rostbøll and Krause have written excellent books on theories of deliberation. What is missing in both books is a linkage to empirical work on deliberation, to what actually happens when ordinary citizens and also politicians come together to discuss political issues. To what extent are they guided by civil passions in the sense of Krause, and do they break up false consensus in the sense of Rostbøll? As theorists, of course, they are not required to do this empirical work themselves, although there are more and more deliberative theorists who launch themselves in a fruitful way into empirical investigations. The important point that I wish to stress is that we need an interplay between normative theories of deliberation and corresponding empirical studies. Indeed, the influence ought to go in both directions, with empirical research testing hypotheses formulated by theorists and theorists benefiting in their work from empirical investigations. (Such interplay is postulated in a symposium entitled “Toward More Realistic Models of Deliberative Democracy” in Journal of Political Philosophy 18 [March 2010]: 32–122.) As scholars of deliberation move this research agenda forward, they can be grateful to Krause and Røstboll for bringing to the fore just how multidimensional deliberative democracy really is.
