This collection of 11 essays from various international and American social scientists, plus an introduction by the editors, is meant to be an update of Frank Fischer and John Forester’s paradigm-breaking 1993 book The Argumentative Turn. That earlier work, which corresponded to the rise of the deliberative democracy literature in political theory, marked a break from what the editors call the then “dominant empirical analytical approach to problem solving” toward “one including the study of language and argumentation as essential dimensions of theory and analysis in policy-making and planning” (p. 1). The promise of The Argumentative Turn was to seek an alternative, “post-positivist” (i.e., post–rational choice theory and narrowly technocratic cost–benefit analysis) research program that would more adequately tackle the value-laden, contextual, intersubjective, and discursive nature of policy analysis.

This second book, which updates that research program, offers a snapshot of the field 20 years later and promotes the further advance of the argumentative direction in policy studies. As such, the volume offers a rich and diverse array of contributions, including essays on deliberative democracy (John Dryzek and Carolyn M. Hendriks), collaborative planning (Patsy Healy), discursive institutionalism (Vivien Schmidt), feminist frame analysis (Mary Hawkesworth), the Internet as a new space for policy deliberation (Stephen Coleman), the role of images and new media in policy analysis (Leonie Sandercock and Giovanni Attili), the rhetoric of stem cell policy in the United States (Herbert Gottweis), the semiotics of welfare reform (Sanford F. Schram), a comparison between Michel Foucault’s and Jürgen Habermas’s respective brands of discursive politics (Hubertus Buchstein and Dirk Jörke), poststructuralist critical policy analysis (David Howarth and Steven Griggs), and transformative learning as policy learning (Frank Fischer and Alan Mandell). The whole is framed by an extended introduction, in which the editors emphasize the urgency of an argumentative approach to contemporary “wicked” political problems (e.g., global issues such as financial crises, environmental crises, etc.) and offer helpful distinctions among the various concepts used by the contributors—discourse, deliberation, storytelling, narrative, rhetoric, and so on—which justify gathering them under what they admit is the rather broad umbrella of the “argumentative” approach.

The volume’s strength is obviously in this diversity, which exposes the reader to the many perspectives of a movement that seems to have grown particularly influential over the last 20 years. Among various highlights one finds Dryzek and Hendriks’s masterful analysis of society as a “deliberative system” in which thoughtful design can shape the effectiveness of various forums and loci of deliberation. Coleman’s essay brilliantly demonstrates how the Internet reconfigures ways of defining policy problems and reshapes our understanding of “public opinion” as complex and polyphonic by seamlessly and effectively moving between concrete empirical examples and theoretical generalizations. Hawkesworth offers a provocative feminist take on development policies, which, she argues, end up reproducing the gender, class, race, and other hierarchy and power dynamics they were meant to fight in the first place (the further claim that they do so deliberately is, in my view, less compellingly argued). Sandercock and Attili introduce a refreshing perspective on the power of images, in the form of a first-person report of their experience making a documentary on the question of what turns strangers into neighbors in multicultural Montreal. Most of the remaining essays equally repay close scrutiny.

The downside of the volume’s diversity is, perhaps unavoidably, an overall lack of homogeneity and coherence among the contributions, which to the reader often seem tied together more by a vague thematic connection or “family resemblance” to the concepts of “argumentation” or “discourse” than by any specific theoretical core. As the editors acknowledge, after 20 years, “[t]he range of contributions [to the argumentative turn] now stretches from Frankfurt-style critical theory and Foucauldian poststructuralism to a Bourdieu-influenced emphasis on institutional practices and a neo-Gramscian study of hegemonic discourse” (p. 8). This problem of homogeneity and coherence is a rather common one for edited volumes, and the editors meritoriously strive in their introduction to bridge the various vocabulary and methodology gaps. (Their attempt, however, will not quite solve the problem for readers who, like me, are not fluent in the subdisciplinary jargons favored by some contributions.) One is nonetheless left with the suspicion that the contributions are united more by what they reject—neopositivism, neoliberalism, rational choice theory, and so on—than by what they positively embrace, aside from a loose commitment to the importance of language and communication. Symptomatic is the fact that some conceptual frameworks seem almost contradictory. For example, Schram, following Jacques Lacan, defines discourse as “the unsaid more than the said” (p. 236). It is hard to reconcile that definition, which leads the author to focus on the subconscious underpinnings of expressed arguments and preferences, with other contributors’ more classically rational and methodologically individualist analyses.

An excellent essay by Buchstein and Jörke on the comparative thought of Foucault and Habermas—two of the main father figures of the argumentative turn—illuminated for me this tension at the heart of the volume. The authors argue that Foucault, whose denunciation of all social and political relationships as suffused with power initially failed to provide normative criteria by which to distinguish between power and domination, ultimately moved toward the recognition that even as power relationships can never be fully eradicated from human relations, democratic politics can produce more legitimate forms of power. Meanwhile, Habermas’s early critical and deconstructive stance (of technocracy and scientism, essentially) is shown to have evolved in the last decade in a more constructive and, specifically, epistemic direction, providing among other things precisely the kind of normative benchmark— conceptualized as the outcome of an ideal deliberation among free and equal individuals—that allows for distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate political outcomes. The fact that, from the Foucauldian perspective, an ideal speech situation devoid of power relations remains an unachievable utopia does not mean that the Habermasian ideal is not useful in assessing and analyzing actual policies. The authors thus convincingly suggest that a reconciliation between the two authors’ perspectives is ultimately possible.

It is this kind of reconciliation that the volume could have usefully attempted between, on the one hand, the critical task of situating, deconstructing, disrupting, and denouncing various hegemonies of power ignored by mainstream policy analysis and, on the other, the more constructive ambition of offering actual tools for policy analysis and planning. When it comes to deriving general principles, many of the essays fall back onto the cautious but frustrating stance of emphasizing the profoundly relative, contextual, nontechnical nature of the examined solutions. My own epistemic inclinations would have preferred for the volume to lean less toward the early Foucault and more toward the late Habermas. Most contributions could have tried harder, for example, to offer clear, concrete alternatives to the mainstream operational framework of policy analysis; or—why not—to imagine fixing the latter so as to render it more “discursive” and “argumentative” in ways that preserve its empirical, data-driven operationality. Nothing in the volume seems to suggest that this approach is unfeasible, yet it is hardly explored at all, or at least not explicitly so. If the editors are right, as they surely are, that mainstream policy analysis is far from satisfactory—if, in general, the critical tenor of most of the volume is quite well taken—what makes the argumentative turn a workable alternative rather than just a turn away from something? And where is this turn supposed to take us in the end?

To be fair, many of the contributions hint in a plausible and familiar direction: deliberative, participatory democracy. Deliberative democracy—presented by the editors as a subset of the argumentative turn—has, after 20 years of its own evolution, reached a stage at which basic normative principles and definitions have been more or less settled (the concept of legitimacy, deliberation, the role of consensus, and so on), a clear research agenda has been generated, and many empirical questions have been successfully addressed. Deliberative democracy thus offers a rich theoretical basis for specific policy analysis and recommendations, some of which are currently implemented at the level of cities, nations, global institutions like the World Bank, and beyond (in the vein of participatory budgeting, deliberative polls, citizens’ assemblies, citizens’ juries, e-consultations and the like). It would have been nice to find out more clearly how the argumentative turn as a whole takes us beyond the deliberative democracy subfield and distinctively translates into specific, effective policy tools.