The Ideal of Deliberative Democracy The Discursive Dilemma The Relevance of the Dilemma for Deliberative Democracy The Resolution in Republican Theory This Resolution and Other Arguments for the Ideal Notes.

This essay investigates questions about the relationship between language, speech, and democratic institutions by bringing into conversation Hannah Arendt's and Pierre Bourdieu's distinctive views of the politics of language and speech. First, I explicate Arendt's account of the connection between speech, action, and identity disclosure, as well as its role in her broad conception of political institutions. Next, I complicate this outlook by examining Bourdieu's political sociology of language, focusing on the ways that linguistic competences valorized in particular institutional settings (...) operate as mechanisms of silencing, domination, and exclusion. Finally, I bring these approaches together by investigating political events—AIDS activism in the United States during the 1980s and early 1990s—that raise critical issues regarding the politics of language and speech within a specific institutional setting. By reading Arendt and Bourdieu together in the context of these events, one can develop a defensible account of the politics of speech in democratic theory and practice. (shrink)

What is the general will? In this essay, I propose a simple and straightforward answer. Rousseau’s general will, I shall argue, is the totality of unrescinded decisions made by a community—that is, of an association of individuals contractually constituted as a “moral and collective body”—when its deliberation is subject to certain constraints.

Recent democratic theorists have drawn on the work of the late Pierre Bourdieu to make the case that patterned inequalities in the social capacity to engage in deliberation can undermine deliberative theory’s democratic promise. They have proposed a range of deliberative democratic responses to the problem of cultural inequality, from enabling the marginalised to adopt the communicative dispositions of the dominant, to broadening the standards that define legitimate deliberation, to strengthening deliberative counter‐publics. The author interprets Bourdieu’s theory of the linguistic (...) habitus to prompt an even more radical critique of deliberative democracy than these theorists acknowledge, one to which the proposed solutions fail adequately to respond. Her argument suggests that empirical work on deliberative democracy should expand to address specifically the problems of cultural inequality that Bourdieu’s work highlights. (shrink)

n his Lectures on the Histmy 0f Philosophy Hegel credits Rousseau with an cpoch-making innovation in the realm 0f practical philosophy, an innovation said to consist in thc fact that Rousseau is thc first thinker t0 recognize "the free will" as thc fundamental principle 0f political philosophy} Since Hcgcl’s 0wn practical philosophy is explicitly grounded in an account 0f thc will and its freedom, Hcgcl’s assertion is clearly intended as an acknowledgment 0f his deep indebtedness t0 R0usscau’s social and political (...) thought. What is not s0 clear, however, is how this indebtedness is t0 bc understood: What precisely docs it mean t0 say that the political theories 0f Hegel and Rousseau share the same first principlc? In this paper I intend t0 follow up 0n this interpretive suggestion 0f Hcgcl’s by claborating, much more explicitly than he himself docs, thc sense in which R0usscau’s political thought is founded 011 thc principle 0f the "frcc wiil." While accomplishing this task will put us in a better position t0 clarify thc obscurc philosophical strategy behind Hcgcl’s 0wn social theory, my primary interest here is t0 illuminate thc foundations 0f R0usscau’s political thought, especially its account 0f the connection between freedom and the general will. I argue that it is necessary t0 distinguish two ways in which Rousseau takes the general will t0 secure, or realize, thc freedom of individual citizens, namely, by functioning as an embodiment as well as a precondition of such freedom. Understanding both 0f these points will lead us t0 scc: that R0usscau’s thought rests 0n two distinct, though not incompatible, accounts 0f how citizens whose actions are constrained by thc general will are in fact subject 0nly to their 0wn wills and therefore free in their 0bcdience to thc general will. As we shall scc, these two accounts arc implicitly based upon distinct conceptions 0f political freedom. (shrink)